Masked federal agents detained a Lynnwood tire shop worker after a customer approach, his fiancée says, as DHS vows illegal aliens remain fair game.
On Saturday, Oct. 17, Christopher Ruiz de Jesus was on the job at TOS Wheels and Tires in Lynnwood, Wash., when a man without a mask came to the counter and started asking about tires and a car.
FOX 13 Seattle reported that the 26-year-old employee then walked outside with the visitor and was quickly surrounded by masked federal agents in tactical gear and taken into custody. Federal officials have not explained the arrest.
His fiancée, Jade Gaspar, says the first man never came as a real customer. She says he used ordinary shop talk to draw Ruiz de Jesus outside before the other agents moved in.
Surveillance video from the shop captures the sequence: conversation at the counter, a request to step outside, the man appearing to put on a mask, and agents closing in. The video does not by itself prove the man’s identity or undercover role.
Gaspar told local reporters the man opened with the kind of questions any tire shop hears every day.
She said:
"What's the make and model of the car? What's the size tire? And he just played it like, 'Oh, he didn't know it's a new car. Can you come and like help me outside?'"
Ruiz de Jesus treated him like any other customer and walked out. Agents then took him into custody. Gaspar later described what she saw on the tape.
She said:
"You can see innocence in him, like just doing his job. He didn't know,"
After the detention, Ruiz de Jesus called her from the back of an immigration vehicle. That is when the reality hit at home.
Gaspar recalled:
"I was lost. I didn't know what to feel. My son just woke up, and I saw him, and he was like talking to me, and I was like, it's not real. It's not true. That's like a nightmare,"
Their son is nearly 2. She said he has been walking around calling for his dad. The couple’s lease ends at the end of the month. She is trying to find an attorney and cover rent while she seeks answers and a way to bring him home.
Gaspar also said Ruiz de Jesus has lived in the United States since he was about 5 years old and has no criminal history. Those claims come from her. Officials have not confirmed his immigration status, any warrant, or any charge in this case.
ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to questions about the Lynnwood arrest at the time of the local report. DHS did not answer whether agents posed as customers in this operation or spell out the legal basis for taking Ruiz de Jesus into custody.
Pressed more broadly on whether people without criminal records could still be detained, DHS gave a flat reply.
The department said:
"This is false. No one is off the table. We will continue to arrest any and all illegal aliens that come into our path."
DHS also said it would keep arresting and deporting people it describes as being in the country illegally. That posture matches a wider enforcement push in which ICE has moved against alleged gang members and other immigration targets in recent operations.
Workplace encounters and undercover approaches are not new tools in federal law enforcement. What is missing here is a case-specific briefing from ICE, CBP, or DHS on why this tire shop stop happened and how the first contact was authorized.
Local reporters asked whether federal agents are allowed to pose as customers during enforcement. No direct answer came back.
Arrests like the one in Lynnwood land in a country already split over immigration enforcement. In other cities, Democratic officials have tried to hem in federal operations, including efforts by New York Democrats to block ICE staging at private lots.
Party pressure has also spilled into policing fights after ICE actions, with socialists demanding punishment for local leaders who do not join the resistance.
Separately, federal officials have gone to court over election integrity and citizenship questions, including a Justice Department lawsuit targeting alleged noncitizens on California voter rolls. The common thread is simple: Washington is no longer treating immigration law as optional.
Gaspar wants the public to hear her family’s story. She has pointed supporters to a fundraising page and said she believes prayers will help bring Ruiz de Jesus home. She is entitled to seek counsel and to ask hard questions about process.
Taxpayers are entitled to something else: a government that enforces the statutes on the books. Long residence and a clean local record, if proven, can matter in immigration court. They do not revise the law by themselves.
Masked agents, a tire shop parking lot, and a fiancée left holding a toddler make for raw television. They do not answer the basic question DHS already addressed in plain language, illegal aliens are not off-limits when they cross paths with federal enforcement.
America either has immigration laws or it does not. Agents who still show up to enforce them are doing the job politicians too often duck.
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan told law students the court's conservative majority has damaged American democracy, a charge she leveled weeks before a hard-fought midterm battle for Congress.
Kagan, one of the high court's three liberals and an appointee of former President Barack Obama, spoke Tuesday to students at Catholic University's law school in Washington. She zeroed in on partisan gerrymandering, a recent Voting Rights Act ruling, and a campaign-finance decision from the court's 6-3 conservative majority.
Reuters reported that she cast those rulings as a threat to how American elections work, arguing the justices failed to grasp the political fallout of their own work.
Her timing was not subtle. The remarks came less than two weeks before the Nov. 3 elections that will decide control of the House and Senate, a point the Washington Examiner flagged in its coverage of the same speech.
President Donald Trump's Republican Party is fighting to keep Congress. Redistricting fights in large states are already reshaping the map. Kagan used that backdrop to blame the court for making a polarized country worse.
Partisan gerrymandering means redrawing district lines to favor one party's voters and candidates. Kagan did not pretend only one side does it.
She said the court's approach "created a race to the bottom" and that both parties are in it.
"both political parties have been engaged in a race to the bottom in terms of doing these partisan gerrymanders, effectively depriving masses of citizens of their rights to voting equality."
That admission matters. At Trump's urging, Republican-led Texas redrew its map last year to flip Democratic-held U.S. House seats. Democratic-led California then reconfigured its own map to target Republican-held seats.
Large states with plenty of Republican and Democratic voters, she warned, are being pushed toward one-party outcomes.
"In this election, and the next election, we are seeing large states with substantial numbers of people who vote for Republicans and who vote for Democrats, and the states are going to be tried to turn all red or all blue in a way that I think is very destructive to our democracy."
She also tied safer partisan seats to sharper politics. When the general election is locked in, the real fight moves to the primary.
"toward the extremes, because the only thing anybody has to worry about anymore is being primaried,"
And she added:
"It is making what I think is unfortunately a too polarized country even more so,"
Those lines treat map-drawing as a democracy emergency. They also sit next to her own acknowledgment that Democrats and Republicans both play the same game when they hold the pen. Readers following other map fights have already seen the court stay out of charged redistricting disputes, including when the Supreme Court refused again to restore Missouri's GOP-drawn congressional map.
Kagan pointed to two recent decisions as proof the majority is out of touch with political consequences.
In April, the court issued a Voting Rights Act ruling that Reuters described as gutting a pillar of the 1965 law, which was aimed at blocking racial discrimination in voting. After that decision, Republican-led states across the South moved fast on redistricting and sought to eliminate U.S. House districts where Black voters made up a majority or near-majority.
In June, the court struck down a cap on how much money parties can spend on campaigns with input from candidates. Kagan cast the majority as blind to the practical results.
"I think part of the reason why the court got it wrong was a lack of the appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences of their decisions,"
She went further on the system's health overall.
"I do think in all these areas the court has blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works and has created a democracy that doesn’t work as well as it should,"
On money in politics, she said the court still allows rules against direct quid pro quo corruption, money for favors, but misses broader openings for the same problem.
"The one place where the court has allowed campaign finance regulation to operate is to prevent quid pro quo corruption, kind of money for favors, and the court never seems to see the opportunities for doing exactly that,"
She closed that theme with a populist jab:
"I think you know the people of America look around this political system and think that all this money, chasing all these political candidates, is a nightmare, and they’re right,"
That is a familiar progressive complaint. It is also a complaint aimed at a court majority that has repeatedly treated political spending as tied to speech, not as a blank check for new limits whenever politicians dislike the scoreboard.
Kagan is not a bystander describing dry doctrine. She is a named critic of the conservative majority on the most political cases on the docket, maps, voting rules, and campaign cash, while her own side holds three seats on a nine-member court.
Other justices have pushed back hard when critics slap partisan labels on their work. Justice Alito called the MAGA activist label offensive and said he decides cases on the merits. Kagan's speech runs the other direction: it puts democracy itself in the dock and points at her colleagues.
The court does not draw Texas lines. Legislatures do. The court does not force Sacramento to answer Austin seat for seat. Parties do. When both sides race to lock in House districts, the honest description is hardball politics, not a one-sided judicial demolition of the republic.
Kagan's "race to the bottom" line undercuts the morality play. If Democrats and Republicans are both grinding maps for advantage, the crisis is not that the conservative majority refused to nationalize every redistricting fight. The crisis, on her own terms, is that politicians treat voters as raw material.
Her campaign-finance critique lands in the same place. Americans are weary of endless money in politics. They are also weary of speech rules written by the people who already hold power. Striking a party spending cap with candidate input is not the same thing as greenlighting bribery. Kagan's own words still place quid pro quo corruption in a separate category the court continues to police.
Republicans want to hold Congress in November. Democrats want it back. Texas moved first on a new map last year. California answered. Southern states moved after the April Voting Rights Act decision. That is the concrete sequence behind Kagan's warning about states tipping "all red or all blue."
It is also a sequence driven by governors, legislatures, and party lawyers, the elected and political actors who always owned district lines under the Constitution's basic design. Court majorities change when presidents appoint and the Senate confirms. The current 6-3 split did not appear from a void. It followed elections.
Kagan framed the majority as lacking "appropriate concern" for consequences. That charge is easy to make from the dissent's side of election law. It is harder to square with a system where map fights, voting rules, and money cases are endlessly relitigated by the same parties that lose under neutral principles and then call the result illegitimate.
The court remains in the middle of other charged fights as well, from emergency orders to merits cases. Readers tracking the bench have watched the emergency docket surge again during summer recess, and they can already see major arguments queued up, including a December case on whether the Second Amendment protects AR-15 ownership. Separate from Kagan's speech, the Trump administration is also at the court seeking to enforce the Pentagon's ban on transgender troops.
None of that requires justices to adopt a progressive theory of "democracy" that treats conservative statutory and constitutional rulings as inherently corrosive. Kagan is entitled to her view. Voters are entitled to notice when a liberal justice turns a law-school audience into a forum for attacking the majority's election cases on the eve of a national campaign.
She said the court has built a democracy that "doesn’t work as well as it should." What her examples actually show is a country where both parties gerrymander when they can, where redistricting accelerates after major voting rulings, and where campaign-money fights never end. Blaming the conservative majority for all of that is a political argument dressed up as institutional diagnosis.
When the left loses election-law fights at the Supreme Court, "democracy" suddenly needs saving, and the justices who disagree become the threat.
A stranger in a Joe Biden mask ate a banana through the mask on a Watauga doorbell camera, and police say bizarre behavior is not a crime.
The Nest camera at a home in Watauga, Texas, recorded the visit around 8:05 p.m. on Sunday, October 18.
An unknown individual walked up to the door carrying a banana. The person wore a mask resembling former President Joe Biden and a T-shirt that read "FREEDOM," ran fingers over the camera twice, ate the banana through the mask, and left.
FOX 4 News shared the doorbell video, provided courtesy of resident Jessica Mancia.
Watauga police reviewed the footage and searched the surrounding neighborhood. Officers could not find the individual. They determined no criminal offense had occurred and filed no charges.
The department also noted social media posts from other residents describing similar sightings, though no additional official reports came in.
Watauga Police Department addressed the episode directly.
"Although the individual's choice of attire and snack may have raised a few eyebrows, neither appears to have violated the law at this time."
Officers went further on the costume and the fruit.
"And while we can't explain the costume, the banana, or the apparent political identity crisis, we can confirm that being bizarre is not, in itself, a criminal offense."
They still urged residents to speak up when something feels off.
"The Watauga Police Department takes these types of reports seriously, however, and we encourage residents to continue reporting suspicious activity, even when the circumstances are a little bananas."
The "FREEDOM" shirt referenced a slogan popularized by the late political commentator Charlie Kirk. No motive for the stop was stated, and the person in the mask remains unidentified.
Joe Biden continues to draw public attention long after leaving office, including through family health updates that keep his name in the headlines.
Interest in the former president also covers older controversies, such as audio recordings about classified documents that resurfaced in later coverage.
Campaign-era questions about fitness have lingered as well, including accounts of pressure over cognitive test results during the last race.
Even private deliberations from his White House years still surface, among them reports that he weighed a pardon decision in 2023.
None of that explains a banana, a mask, and a front-door stop in Tarrant County. It only shows how quickly a political face becomes ready-made costume material.
Watauga police kept the response proportional: check the video, walk the block, close the loop, and tell residents to keep calling when something looks wrong.
In a free country, looking ridiculous still is not a crime. Local cops handled that part without losing their sense of proportion.
Training Day actress Charlotte Ayanna is being held on $50,000 bail after prosecutors filed misdemeanor counts tied to battery, elder abuse, and kicking a deputy, a case she calls a false arrest.
Deputies responded to a welfare-check call on Oct. 8 and soon faced a far messier scene than a routine check. An alleged victim told them Ayanna had threatened his life, battered him, and spread cremated human remains inside a residence, the Daily Caller reported.
Authorities also claim she kicked a deputy while they investigated. She was arrested on suspicion of criminal threats, elder abuse, battery on a peace officer, and depositing human remains outside a cemetery.
Prosecutors later filed three misdemeanor counts on Monday: battery, elder or dependent adult abuse, and battery on a peace officer. She remains in custody on the $50,000 bail. The alleged victim’s identity has not been released, and key details of the encounter stay thin in public accounts.
Cases that mix entertainment names with domestic-style arrests are not new. Similar headlines have followed other industry figures, including coverage of Hayden Panettiere’s boyfriend and a prior domestic battery case.
Ayanna has not stayed quiet. She framed the whole episode as illegitimate from the start.
She said:
"It was an unfair illegal false arrest."
She also insisted officers never gave her the basic process she says she was owed.
She said:
"Not only was I never read my rights, including the Miranda rights, but I was never even interviewed to talk to,"
Those statements sit beside the charging decisions, not above them. Prosecutors still moved forward with the three misdemeanor counts after the welfare-check response and the deputy’s account of being kicked.
Hollywood-adjacent legal fights often turn on who gets believed first and what evidence survives. Other former young performers have taken their own grievances to court, as when former child star Raquel Lee sued Disney over alleged on-set abuse.
The most jarring allegation is the handling of cremated human remains inside a home. Spreading ashes outside a cemetery is not a casual property dispute. It is the kind of claim that forces police and prosecutors to treat a private residence as a crime scene, not a family argument.
Public reporting has not released lab confirmation, injury details, or a full charging packet. What is on record is the welfare-check call, the alleged victim’s account to deputies, the claimed kick during the investigation, the arrest suspicions, the three filed misdemeanors, and the bail.
Violent cases that end with human remains in the hands of investigators leave little room for spin, a reality underscored in reporting on the autopsy findings in opera singer Jubilant Sykes’ killing.
Ayanna’s screen credits include Training Day, Love the Hard Way, Kate and Leopold, and Spun. Fame does not rewrite the charging sheet. The same rule applies when lesser-known performers face serious police action, including when ICE arrested a former dance-show contestant with a violent record.
Deputies and domestic-abuse charges also collide in reverse, as when a Jefferson Parish deputy was fired and arrested on domestic abuse and DWI counts. The badge does not decide guilt. Neither does a movie credit. Evidence and process do.
Ayanna calls the arrest false and says her rights were skipped. Prosecutors filed battery, elder-abuse, and peace-officer battery counts anyway and set a $50,000 bail. The gap between her denial and the filed case is now the story the court has to sort out.
Celebrity status is not a shield, and a welfare check is not a free pass to threaten, strike, or scatter human remains. Equal rules mean equal accountability, credits or no credits.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is transferring $1 million from her New York campaign to Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, a move meant to help the Squad gain another hard-left ally.
Ocasio-Cortez appeared in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on Thursday and told supporters she would move the money herself. She framed the gift as proof she backs her words with cash, not just slogans.
Daily Mail reporting described the transfer as a direct boost for El-Sayed, a leftist Democrat running for the U.S. Senate against Republican Mike Rogers. Democrats need to flip four seats to take the Senate majority, and Michigan is one of the contests they are watching closely.
Ocasio-Cortez made the pledge plain on the stump.
"I will be transferring from our campaign in New York one million dollars to the state of Michigan to help support you all. So I’m not talking about it, I’m being about it,"
She tied the race to a larger project. If El-Sayed wins, she said, the left can win anywhere.
"If Abdul can win in Michigan, anybody can win anywhere,"
And she went further on health care and the map.
"We are going to break the electoral map everywhere, everywhere, because that is what it is going to take to guarantee health care to every American."
That is the pitch: pour New York campaign dollars into Michigan, brand it as solidarity, and treat a Senate win as a national template.
Ocasio-Cortez brought her DSA-linked brand of politics into the Upper Peninsula for the stop. She and El-Sayed had already shared a stage at a Detroit rally in July. The $1 million announcement was the latest step in that partnership.
She can afford the gift. The New York congresswoman has more than $17 million cash on hand and raised $23.5 million over the past year. El-Sayed has predicted the Michigan Senate race could draw roughly $200 million in total spending before it is done.
Polling averages show Rogers within the margin of error against El-Sayed. That tight race has pulled heavy Democratic names into the state. Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and former President Barack Obama have all been pressed into service to protect El-Sayed’s position.
Leaked audio from earlier this month captured Ocasio-Cortez talking about what an El-Sayed win would mean for the national conversation, the Squad, and even 2028. The message is not subtle. Progressive organizers want this seat as proof their wing can expand beyond safe coastal districts.
Readers tracking her rise will recognize the pattern. Ted Cruz has warned that Democrats keep handing more of their party to Ocasio-Cortez and figures like her. A seven-figure transfer to a Michigan progressive fits that same trajectory.
El-Sayed has campaigned with Hasan Piker, the 35-year-old leftist Twitch streamer who has interviewed or stumped for at least a dozen Democratic figures, including Ocasio-Cortez and El-Sayed. Piker’s record includes calling the United States the “top dog in terrorism” and worse than al Qaeda, and holding up communist China as an economic and political “model” for America.
Vice President JD Vance addressed that association after a September campaign rally in North Carolina. Speaking with the Daily Mail, he called Piker’s comments “completely insane” and drew a broader conclusion about the party.
"This is not a party that's actually about the American people anymore,"
Vance added that Democrats are now “dominated by and controlled by the far-left radical left.” That is the critique Republicans are pressing: when a Senate nominee shares stages and airtime with a streamer who praises China and slams the United States, the party’s center of gravity has shifted.
President Trump made the same point in blunter terms at a Nebraska rally a few weeks ago, labeling El-Sayed a “total communist.” He also criticized television outlets for soft interviews with the candidate and named Jessica Tarlov in the same breath.
El-Sayed has defended the company he keeps. He told supporters he has spoken with many Democrats and asked what it would mean if Michigan rejected the pundits who say a candidate like him cannot win.
"And what does it say about what America really wants, needs and deserves if our state bucks all of the pundits and all of the pontificators who think that this is not possible?"
He also said, simply, “I've talked to a lot of them.” The Daily Mail reached out to his campaign for further comment.
Inside progressive ranks, the Squad’s brand keeps drawing attention and friction. Fellow Squad members have created their own controversies, and donors and voters notice when the same ideological circle keeps expanding its reach.
Ocasio-Cortez presented the million-dollar move as practical help for Michigan organizers. She said she was transferring the funds “to the state of Michigan to help support you all.” The mechanism is a campaign-to-campaign style transfer from her New York operation into the Michigan fight. Whether the full sum has already cleared, or remains an announced commitment, was not detailed beyond her public pledge.
For conservatives watching the race, the stakes are straightforward. Rogers is running a competitive campaign. National Democrats are flooding the state with star power. And the progressive left is wiring large sums and national messaging into a Midwestern Senate contest that could help decide control of the chamber.
Ocasio-Cortez’s own standing with voters is not static. A New York Times poll recently found another high-profile New York progressive outpacing her in favorability among likely voters. That backdrop makes her decision to spend heavily on El-Sayed all the more revealing: she is investing political capital outward even as her brand faces fresh tests at home.
Her record already includes claims that have not held up under scrutiny. Earlier controversy over “modern-day lynchings” showed how quickly activist language can outrun the facts. Voters in Michigan now get to decide whether they want that same style of politics exported into a Senate seat.
El-Sayed’s priorities, as described in coverage of the race, sit firmly on the left. Ocasio-Cortez is betting that a win in Michigan would prove the model can travel. Republicans counter that the model is exactly the problem, radical streamers, open hostility to American institutions, and a party leadership that keeps accommodating it.
The Upper Peninsula stop put the choice in plain view. A New York progressive with tens of millions raised is wiring a million dollars to a Michigan ally while national Democrats scramble to hold the line and Republicans warn about who actually runs the party.
When the Squad drafts seven-figure checks to plant its politics in the Midwest, voters should take them at their word about the map they intend to break.
Pennsylvania socialist Democrat Chris Rabb says he opposes mass incarceration, except for locking up the “lawless MAGA thugs” he blames for wrecking lives and communities.
State Rep. Chris Rabb, a Democratic Socialists of America member now running for Congress, made the remarks this week on left-wing podcaster Wajahat Ali’s show. He cast himself as a “decarceration person” who sees America’s prison rates as morally wrong, then carved out a loud exception for political opponents.
Fox News Digital reported the comments and sought a response from Rabb’s campaign, which did not immediately reply. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly answered instead, accusing Trump-deranged Democrats of lobbing unhinged attacks and saying Rabb should seek help.
Rabb’s own words leave little room for spin. He first laid out the standard left-wing case against incarceration, then flipped it.
"I’m a decarceration person,"
he said, adding that a country with 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the people “put in cages” is “morally wrong” and “bad policy.” Then came the pivot.
"It’s also bad policy, but I will make an exception for all of those f****** who are lawless MAGA thugs, who have destroyed lives and communities. Lock all of those f****** up. I know that seems a little hypocritical of me being on the left and being anti-incarceration, but lock those f****** up."
He asked for forgiveness for what he called a possible “weakness,” insisted it was not vengefulness, and declared “right is right.” He also urged members of Congress to impeach and subpoena people he accused of “destroying what’s left of our fragile democracy.”
Rabb tried to frame the stance as fairness. He pointed to mothers jailed for changing school districts so their kids could get a better education, then said Jared Kushner “should be experiencing some jail time.”
"We should have a level playing field. If there are moms who are going to jail because they changed what school district they are so that their kids could get a better education, and they get locked up, you better believe a Jared Kushner should be experiencing some jail time. So, if that makes me a conservative, gosh, but we need to send a message."
The message is selective. Ordinary defendants stay under the decarceration banner. Political enemies get the cage. Rabb offered no specific charges, case numbers, or convictions for the “MAGA thugs” he wants locked up. The label did the work.
That pattern fits a wider socialist wave inside the Democratic Party that keeps producing primary wins and sharper rhetoric. Rabb was among several DSA members who won Democratic primaries this year.
Rabb is not the only DSA-aligned Democrat floating jail for opponents. Florida Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon, also tied to the DSA, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt she wanted Republican Sen. Ashley Moody “locked up and punished in jail for what she has done.”
Nixon first complained that ads accused her of wanting to abolish prisons and defund the police. Then she answered her own question.
"Why would I want to do that when I want her locked up and punished in jail for what she has done?"
When Hunt pressed her to clarify, Nixon said, “Basically, yes. Because of what she did, yes. I absolutely would want that to happen. Yes.” The interview did not spell out the concrete criminal acts she attributed to Moody.
Nixon’s rise itself tracked the same leftward current, including her primary win that ousted a more mainstream Democrat earlier in the cycle. The shared habit is plain: soft on crime in theory, hard on named conservatives in practice.
Rabb’s appearance fits a larger record. DSA-backed candidates keep advancing inside Democratic primaries while dodging basic questions about how public safety works without police or prisons. One recent DSA delegate sidestepped how rapists would face justice in that world. Voters notice the gap.
The same movement has already rattled sitting Democrats. A DSA-backed challenger ousted Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan, another marker of the socialist insurgency inside the party. Rhetoric about fragile democracy and selective handcuffs travels with those wins.
In New York, socialist activists have pressed elected officials from the left on policing fights, including demands that Mayor Mamdani fire the NYPD commissioner after an ICE-related shooting. The through-line is consistent pressure against ordinary enforcement paired with open appetite for punishing political targets.
Kelly’s White House response put the administration’s view in blunt terms. “Trump-deranged Democrats have no agenda except to lob unhinged attacks against the president and obstruct the agenda he was elected to implement,” she said. “This person is clearly disturbed and should seek help.”
Rabb’s campaign stayed silent after the outreach from Fox News Digital. The podcast clips remain the record. A candidate who calls incarceration morally wrong still wants an entire political movement caged, complete with the f-word and the thug label, while offering no bill of particulars beyond the politics he rejects.
When socialists preach empty prisons for everyone except their opponents, voters get the real platform in plain English.
Former Hollywood executive Mary Carole McDonnell is now on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fraudsters list after authorities say she took nearly $30 million from California banks and fled overseas.
The 75-year-old former CEO of Bellum Entertainment faces federal charges of bank fraud and aggravated identity theft tied to an alleged scheme in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. A federal arrest warrant has been outstanding since 2018, and she is believed to be living in Dubai.
Breitbart News reported that McDonnell fraudulently obtained millions from California banks and other financial institutions, then left the money unpaid while her production company collapsed. The FBI is offering a $150,000 reward for information that leads to her arrest and conviction.
Authorities say the case centers on fabricated claims of wealth and a paper trail that did not match reality. McDonnell allegedly posed as an heiress to the McDonnell aircraft family and used that false background to unlock large bank loans.
Bellum Entertainment, which produced true-crime and home makeover programming, shut down suddenly in 2017 after its payroll collapsed. Former employees later described a workplace where money never seemed to land where it was supposed to.
One former staffer told NBC News the routine near payday felt frantic.
"There would be a mad dash out the door to get them to the banks before the banks would close so you could cash them, because they would move money around."
The same employee said, “I had a lot of bounced checks.” Another ex-worker recalled constant excuses about banks, delayed funds, and new loans.
Between July 2017 and May 2018, authorities say McDonnell obtained $14.7 million from Banc of California even though she knew she was not entitled to the money. She has not repaid it and is accused of running similar plays against other institutions.
Those losses sit inside a broader allegation that she took nearly $30 million in all. The pattern mirrors other federal fraud cases that have drawn hard scrutiny in recent years, including a Hollywood financier indicted in an alleged $100 million Ponzi scheme.
The New York Post reported that McDonnell allegedly used fabricated documents and false claims of an $80 million trust to secure the Banc of California funds. A federal arrest warrant followed in December 2018.
She is known by several aliases, including Mary Carole Carroll, Mary Carol McDonnell, Mary Carroll McDonnell, Mary C. Carroll, and Mary Carroll McDonald. Investigators say the identity games helped her move money and stay ahead of the banks she was draining.
Actor and former show host Antonio Sabato Jr., who worked on a Bellum renovation series, said the plug got pulled with little warning. He told Fox News Digital he sensed trouble before the formal cancellation notice arrived.
"It felt weird... something’s going on. I just felt something was up. And then my producer called me and said that they pulled the plug."
Sabato added that he learned the fuller picture only when reporters reached him. The sudden end of the series left cast and crew holding the bag while the company’s leadership vanished from the picture.
Federal agents have chased similar disappearing acts before, as when they captured an alleged $32 million COVID fraud fugitive in Jamaica and brought him back to face charges.
Patrick Grandy, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, made clear the bureau is not treating the case as cold. He said agents are coordinating with partners overseas and still expect to bring McDonnell in.
"It’s just a matter of time before McDonnell is caught as we work with our international partners to locate her."
Grandy also pointed to the public reward and the value of ordinary tips.
"A generous reward is being offered in exchange for information leading to her apprehension and conviction, and a tip from the public might break the case."
The FBI is urging anyone with information to contact a local FBI office, the nearest American Embassy or Consulate, the tip line at 800-CALL-FBI, or the bureau’s online tips portal. Dubai remains the reported location of interest, though her exact whereabouts have not been confirmed in open reporting.
Cases like this keep landing on federal desks. Agents recently arrested a man who allegedly posed as a 49ers player to defraud 26 women, another reminder that identity games and borrowed credibility remain a favorite tool for thieves.
When a production company CEO can claim a fortune she does not have, walk off with eight-figure loans, and settle into life abroad for years, ordinary depositors and the institutions that hold their money pay the price. The warrant has sat since 2018. The company is gone. The payroll checks bounced. The alleged principal remains free.
Federal prosecutors have also pursued public officials who treated emergency funds as personal accounts, including a Lawrence mayor arrested on federal wire fraud charges over an alleged $1.5 million COVID loan scheme. Different settings, same basic failure: people who exploit trust and paperwork, then leave everyone else to clean up the mess.
McDonnell’s placement on the Most Wanted Fraudsters list raises the profile of a long-running manhunt. It does not by itself close the gap between the alleged theft and accountability. That still depends on locating a 75-year-old fugitive who has had years to dig in overseas while California banks and former employees absorbed the damage.
Fraud thrives when paperwork is treated as theater and consequences arrive years late. The FBI is finally putting her name in lights. The banks already paid the bill.
Michelle Obama’s brother says no amount of national chaos would push her into a 2028 White House run, shutting down Democratic draft talk.
TMZ caught up with Craig Robinson at Los Angeles International Airport and put the question straight to him: how bad would things have to get before his sister felt she had to run for president? His answer was blunt. There is no such point, and nothing would shove her into the race.
Yahoo News carried the LAX exchange, which landed as another hard stop on the recurring rumor that the former first lady might rescue a restless Democratic field in 2028.
Robinson did not dodge the flattery. He said he thinks Michelle would make a great president. He also admitted the obvious bias that comes with being family. Then he drew the line that matters. She simply does not plan to run, and no amount of chaos in the world will change that.
That matches what Michelle Obama has said for years. She has repeatedly made plain she is not interested in elected office. She has also said she does not want her children pulled back into the kind of public scrutiny that comes with a national campaign.
Family pressure and public life have long shadowed the Obama household, including moments when Michelle Obama talked about telling her daughters no so they would learn how the real world works.
Robinson’s airport remarks close a door Democrats keep trying to reopen. Every cycle, parts of the left float a familiar name when the bench looks thin or the primary turns messy. The former first lady’s brand is strong with activists and donors. Her brother’s answer undercuts the fantasy that a crisis will finally draft her.
Robinson and his sister already share a public platform. They co-host the podcast “IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson.” At LAX, a photographer even asked him about a dream guest for the show. He declined to name one.
A podcast is not a presidential exploratory committee. The brother framed her choice as settled preference, not temporary hesitation. She is not waiting for the right poll or the right panic. She is not running.
That clarity collides with a party already jockeying for 2028. Early positioning has been loud, from shifting nomination odds to public sniping among surrogates. Coverage of how Ocasio-Cortez has surged in 2028 Democratic nomination odds shows how fast the field can re-sort when big names stay out.
Robinson’s comments also sit beside another Obama-world thread. Barack Obama has stepped back into party strategy fights, including efforts to push Democrats toward new midterm themes. Readers tracking that turn have seen how Obama has moved to steer Democrats toward AI as a midterm centerpiece while his wife stays off the ballot.
The photographer’s premise was revealing. It assumed conditions in the country might become so dire that Michelle Obama would feel obligated to enter. Robinson rejected the premise. Duty, in his telling, does not override her decision to stay private.
Protecting children from another round of national glare was part of the reason she has given before, and her brother circled back to it. That is a personal boundary with political consequences. Democrats who hoped a late Obama entry would paper over factional fights will have to look elsewhere.
Other political families face the same glare when spouses and relatives weigh how much of private life to surrender. Parallel coverage of how Usha Vance has embraced family life while keeping options open on 2028 underlines the tradeoffs without turning every relative into a candidate.
TMZ and the outlets repeating the clip closed with a joke that fans should not expect an Obama on the ballot for years, unless Malia Obama somehow runs in 2036. The punchline only works because the 2028 path for Michelle is shut.
Robinson’s LAX stop will not end every speculative column. It does raise the cost of pretending the former first lady is a silent backup plan. She has said she does not want the job. Her brother says no crisis flips that answer.
Meanwhile the actual 2028 contest is already producing bruises. Early travel, surrogate shots, and lane-clearing attempts show a nomination fight that will not wait for a mythical rescue. Recent reporting on a Newsom aide’s jab at Buttigieg over a South Carolina visit captured how quickly that infighting spills into public view.
Voters do not need another cycle of celebrity draft campaigns. They need candidates willing to put a record, a platform, and a name on the ballot without waiting for airport denial theater to clear the field.
Democrats can keep floating famous surnames. Craig Robinson just told them his sister is not coming to save the ticket.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council leaders struck a deal to ban Central Park horse carriages by 2028, drivers say the move will cost them their homes.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin have reached an agreement to phase out the horse-drawn carriage industry, with a hard end date of June 2028 if the council passes the bill. The plan would shut down a tourist fixture that has operated in the city for 168 years and leave carriage owners and drivers facing a scramble for work, housing, and any real compensation.
The revised legislation, called Romanch's Law, is set for a City Council vote on Oct. 22. It is named for 18-year-old Romanch Mahajan, who died in a carriage horse accident in Central Park in June. His family pressed for the measure after the crash, and Democratic leaders are now treating that tragedy as the final reason to kill the trade.
Mamdani, already a flashpoint for progressive power inside the party as Ted Cruz has warned about the left’s rising stars, framed the outcome as settled. On social media Tuesday night he wrote that the industry is finished and that his administration would protect workers, owners, and the horses.
"The horse carriage industry is coming to an end in New York City. Our administration will make sure workers and owners are protected and the horses are safe."
City Hall is selling the package as a “just transition.” The bill requires the Mamdani administration to draw up a plan to connect drivers with new economic opportunities and to find new homes for the horses. A City Hall spokesperson said officials had worked with the council, union partners, carriage drivers, animal-welfare groups, and community leaders to end horse-drawn carriages in Central Park “once and for all.”
Drivers who actually work the carriages are not celebrating. Christina Hansen of Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents the carriage drivers, warned that the bill will wreck households that carry mortgages, bills, and children. She said people will face eviction and lose their houses if the industry is wiped out.
CBS News New York reported her plea that council members remember they came to government to help people, not hurt them, and her vow that the industry will not surrender the fight.
"This bill will be devastating for carriage drivers and carriage owners. People will be evicted. People will lose their houses. They have mortgages and bills they need to pay. They have children."
Hansen also called the push unconstitutional and said drivers will go to court if the bill passes. She accused well-funded activists at New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Safe Streets, or NYCLASS, of trying to crush working people and insisted the union had not fought for years for horses and drivers only to watch government destroy their livelihoods.
TWU International’s John Samuelsen went further on the fine print. He said Speaker Menin’s bill offers no meaningful economic relief. Under the measure as he described it, the city would prepare a worker transition plan by April 2027, lean on weak tools like job fairs and job counseling, and only “consider” financial compensation for owners who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on city-issued medallions and the businesses built around them. Samuelsen labeled the whole episode reprehensible and disgraceful political opportunism.
That gap between soaring “just transition” language and job-fair relief is the core of the workers’ case. Progressive city leaders are ending a trade that still pays the rent, while the safety net they promise is mostly planning memos and counseling appointments years down the road.
Menin put the death of Romanch Mahajan at the center of the council’s case. She said the crash made clear that the status quo is no longer acceptable and that horse-drawn carriages, long part of city history, have become a growing public safety liability in an increasingly busy Central Park.
In remarks tied to the deal, the speaker said the council would vote on Romanch’s Law to protect New Yorkers, visitors, and the horses, and that the legislation would force the administration to connect workers with new opportunities. She argued the city can honor tradition while moving forward on safety, workers, and economic vitality.
"The tragic and preventable death of 18-year-old Romanch Mahajan made clear that the status quo is no longer acceptable. Horse-drawn carriages have long been part of New York City's history, but in an increasingly busy Central Park, this tradition has become a growing public safety liability."
Just the News reported the same safety-liability framing from Menin as Democratic leaders locked in the phase-out and prepared the October vote, with transition help for drivers and only consideration of compensation for owners, horses, equipment, and licenses.
Council Member Christopher Marte, the bill’s sponsor, called the result a win-win that would send animals to sanctuaries and protect workers through a transition plan. Council Member Harvey Epstein, who heads the council’s animal-welfare caucus, said New York is too busy to keep horses walking through its streets and that the city can no longer sustain the industry.
The Central Park Conservancy also supports the move. On the other side, NYCLASS executive director Edita Birnkrant said the long-overdue ban on what her group calls cruel and dangerous carriages will pass, credited years of advocacy, and thanked Mahajan’s family for turning grief into a push for change.
Mamdani’s team is not only ending carriages. The same mayor has faced socialist demands to fire his NYPD commissioner after an ICE-related shooting, a reminder that activist factions expect him to deliver on ideology across public safety and city rules.
The New York Post reported that Mamdani and Menin struck the deal to make horse-drawn carriages illegal beginning in June 2028, that the council vote is planned for Oct. 22, and that the Mamdani administration reviewed and approved the bill language. Spokesperson Sneha Choudhary repeated the “just transition” line about protecting workers while ending the carriages for good.
Fox News put the start date at June 1, 2028, if the council approves the measure, and underscored the same bind for workers: a city transition plan due by April 2027 without guaranteed financial compensation.
For carriage families, the sequence is blunt. A fatal accident in June became the moral hammer. A mayor and speaker cut a deal. A named bill heads to a floor vote. The industry that sold rides through Central Park for more than a century and a half gets a countdown clock, while owners who poured life savings into medallions are told the city might “consider” writing a check.
Democratic leaders casting this as compassion for horses and tourists still have to answer for the people who hold the reins today. Job fairs in 2027 do not pay a mortgage in 2026. Counseling does not replace a medallion business built over years. And a phase-out sold as inevitable looks different to a driver staring at eviction papers.
National Democrats already face hard questions when enforcement and accountability arrive from the other direction, including pressure on Senate Democrats after the House backed a new anti-fraud push. In New York, the same party brand is moving fast to retire a visible traditional trade on a progressive timeline.
Hansen’s warning stands as the clearest working-class rebuttal on record: city power is being used to end livelihoods first and sort out the human wreckage later. If the council votes yes on Oct. 22, the court fight she promised will test whether “just transition” is a plan or a slogan.
When city hall sides with activist groups and leaves medallion holders with job fairs and crossed fingers, working New Yorkers learn exactly where they rank in the progressive order of concerns.
Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed denied Muslim Brotherhood family ties on national TV, even as his half-sister once wrote the family had long been in the group.
Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed told NBC’s Meet the Press he had no family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Old social media posts from his half-sister say something else.
Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, wrote in 2012 and 2013 that their family “has long been MB,” that relatives had been jailed for membership, and that she was praying for family who backed the group in Egypt. Those posts resurfaced after El-Sayed’s on-air denials and now sit at the center of the Michigan Senate fight.
Breitbart News reported the contradiction and the wider record around the Democratic nominee, his mother’s past employment, and his Republican opponent’s response.
Voters do not need a seminar on Islamist networks to grasp the basic problem. A candidate gave a flat denial. Family writing from more than a decade ago undercuts it.
The Washington Free Beacon unearthed the half-sister’s messages and tied them to the shared maternal line. On June 24, 2012, days after Egypt elected Muslim Brotherhood figure Mohamed Morsi, Abdelhadi wrote that her family had long been part of the movement.
Attribution before the quote is required here. The Free Beacon published her words as follows:
"My family has long been MB"
She added more the next year. On July 3, 2013, she wrote that relatives had paid a price for belonging and that she wanted family supporters in Egypt to stay safe.
"I have had family jailed for being a part of it"
"Praying for all my family that supports the #MB in Egypt. Lie low, stay safe"
Those lines are not vague. They name the Muslim Brotherhood, claim long family association, and describe jail and political danger inside Egypt.
Fox News reported an additional 2012 post in which Abdelhadi described a conversation with their mother about Muslim Brotherhood activism during college in the early 1970s, writing that she had an “amazing talk” about that history and adding “#respect.” Another post said the family had “long been MB” while criticizing how the group handled politics.
Abdelhadi’s university profile lists interests in religion, gender, identity, and demography. It does not erase what she wrote when the Brotherhood held power in Egypt and when relatives, by her own account, faced prison.
El-Sayed faced the family-ties question on Sunday’s Meet the Press. He denied personal and family links to the Muslim Brotherhood when pressed by Kristen Welker.
Just the News noted he answered twice in one-word denials, with no follow-up questions on the air. The brevity is part of the story. National TV asked. He shut it down. The older posts remain.
The New York Post reported the same clash: on-air denial first, sister’s posts second, including the mother’s early-1970s activism at Alexandria University and the later prayer for Brotherhood supporters in Egypt. El-Sayed’s campaign has dismissed the scrutiny as a racist attack from the GOP side and claimed the allegations were already debunked.
Campaign spin does not revise a relative’s own sentences. “Long been MB” is not a pundit smear. It is family testimony from the period when the Brotherhood’s political project in Egypt was front-page news.
The episode fits a larger pattern of controversy around the nominee, including moments when El-Sayed faced sharp questions on Iran’s regime and struggled to give clear answers voters could trust.
Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers did not treat the interview as a misunderstanding. He posted the same day and said El-Sayed’s answer was false.
Rogers wrote:
"This morning, Abdul El-Sayed was asked about his family’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. And he denied it, an outright lie. The truth is, Abdul and his family have surrounded themselves with some of the most heinous organizations and anti-American actors in history. He is too extreme to get anywhere near the U.S. Senate."
That is the opposition case in one frame: denial on national television, family history in the record, and a warning about who belongs in the Senate.
A Thursday debate added another unresolved exchange. Breitbart’s coverage, carried in the same reporting chain, said El-Sayed failed to deny receiving money from terrorist groups when the issue came up against Rogers. Exact wording from the debate stage was not fully reproduced in the available accounts, but the non-denial itself became part of the campaign argument.
Money and networks already dog the race on other fronts. Reporting has shown El-Sayed collected large sums from CAIR-affiliated donors, which only heightens voter interest in who funds him and what movements sit nearby.
The Free Beacon reporting also runs through the candidates’ mother, identified as Fatten Elkomy. It states that El-Sayed’s familial ties to the Brotherhood run through her, and that she at one point worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency. That organization, the same reporting says, was later sanctioned for funding al-Qaeda.
Role titles, employment dates, and the full sanction file are thinner in the public roundup than the core claim. Even so, the sequence matters: sister posts about Brotherhood activism and membership, mother linked to a charity hit for terror finance, son denying family ties on Meet the Press.
In August, El-Sayed’s campaign confirmed he still complies with Sharia law in his personal life. Personal religious practice is not illegal and is not the same thing as a foreign Islamist network. Voters can separate private faith from political judgment. They can also ask why a candidate who advertises strict personal religious compliance goes opaque when the family record touches the Muslim Brotherhood.
In November, President Donald Trump issued an executive order designating certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists. The order focused on chapters in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt and described violence and destabilization that harm the region and U.S. interests.
The White House text states:
"The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, has developed into a transnational network with chapters across the Middle East and beyond. Relevant here, its chapters in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilization campaigns that harm their own regions, United States citizens, and United States interests."
It continues with post-October 7, 2023 examples, including the Lebanese chapter’s military wing joining rocket attacks with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian factions, an Egyptian Brotherhood leader calling for violent attacks on U.S. partners, and Jordanian Brotherhood leaders’ material support to Hamas’s militant wing.
That order does not invent the Brotherhood’s history. It codifies a security judgment about specific chapters. A Senate candidate who waves away family association while those chapters sit on a terror list is asking Michigan voters for a large trust deposit.
President Trump has already framed the Michigan choice in harsh national-security terms and branded El-Sayed a terrorist sympathizer while backing Rogers, locking the race into a clear contrast on extremism and allegiance.
Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer warned in September that the Muslim Brotherhood advances a long-term project he calls “civilizational jihad” in the West. His point was not abstract history. It was present-tense politics.
"They’ve been doing it in Europe, and they’ve been doing it in the United States. The Muslim Brotherhood is alive and active in America today electing politicians,"
Schweizer’s charge is a claim about method and goal. Pair it with a sister’s “long been MB” posts and a candidate’s flat TV denial, and the scrutiny notes itself.
Even some Democrats have tried to sound an alarm inside Michigan. One high-profile warning came when Karen Whitsett urged Black voters to reject El-Sayed and attacked the socialist wing around him, proof that the nominee’s liabilities are not a Republican-only invention.
Separate cultural fights keep attaching to the same ballot line, including arguments over radical streamers and whether figures such as the one in the debate over Hasan Piker’s effect on Democrats drag the party further from mainstream voters. The through-line is judgment.
Hard proof that El-Sayed himself held Muslim Brotherhood membership is not what the sister posts supply. They supply family association in her own words, maternal activism as she described it, relatives jailed for belonging, and public prayer for Brotherhood supporters in Egypt.
Hard proof of direct personal terror funding is likewise not spelled out in full primary documents inside this reporting package. What is on record is the debate non-denial on money from terrorist groups, the mother’s past link to a sanctioned charity, the CAIR-linked fundraising controversy in parallel coverage, and a presidential order treating key Brotherhood chapters as terror threats.
El-Sayed chose the simplest possible answer on Meet the Press. The family paper trail is not simple. Michigan is being asked to decide whether a one-word denial outranks a relative’s repeated, specific claims from the Brotherhood’s own political high-water mark in Egypt.
Lawful Muslims serve in public life across America without dragging a transnational Islamist movement into the frame. The issue here is credibility under pressure, comfort with hard questions, and whether a Senate hopeful levels with voters when the subject is a group whose chapters the White House has now designated for terror ties.
Senate seats are not participation trophies. When family posts say “long been MB” and the candidate says none of the above, voters are entitled to the full file, and to a higher standard than shrug-and-smear.