Category: Wires

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said hundreds more federal agents will be deployed to Minnesota as federal and local officials on Sunday doubled down on their competing accounts of what led up to the killing of a U.S. citizen by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis last week, and who gets to investigate.

In an interview with Fox NewsBusiness’s Sunday Morning Futures, Noem said the administration will send more officers on Sunday and Monday.

“There’ll be hundreds more, in order to allow our ICE and our Border Patrol individuals that are working in Minneapolis to do so safely,” Noem said.

The increase in federal agent presence in Minnesota comes as protests continued throughout the weekend. Demonstrators gathered across the country Saturday to demonstrate against ICE and the killing of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three.

Trump officials remained adamant Sunday that Good was responsible for her own death, while Democrats insisted that an investigation including local law enforcement must be completed before drawing conclusions.

Federal agents in Minneapolis rammed the door of one home Sunday and pushed their way inside, part of what DHS has called its largest enforcement operation ever.

In a dramatic scene similar to those playing out across Minneapolis, agents captured a man in the home just minutes after pepper spraying protesters outside who had confronted the heavily-armed federal agents. Along the residential street, protesters honked car horns, banged on drums, and blew whistles in attempts to disrupt the operation.

But within minutes, the handcuffed man was led away and soon gone.

More than 2,000 immigration arrests have been made in Minnesota since the enforcement operation began at the beginning of December, said Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

Tensions over the facts of the fatal shooting of Good grew as the FBI, which has taken over the investigation, continued to block Minnesota officials from participating in the inquiry, forcing the local authorities to conduct their own review.

Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, Noem said that Good was to blame for the shooting, even though an official investigation into the shooting has not been completed, and as video evidence raised several questions about the administration’s assessment of what happened. About two hours after the shooting on Wednesday, Noem released a statement asserting that Good committed an act of “domestic terrorism,” and she accused Good of weaponizing her SUV by attempting to “run a law enforcement officer over.”

Almost immediately after the shooting, federal officials, including President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Noem, said the ICE officer fired in self-defense. Details of the killing, which was captured in videos widely disseminated online, dispute the administration’s view of the incident. Federal officials’ quick decision to blame Good for the shooting has drawn deep condemnation from Democrats nationwide and Minnesota leaders who’ve argued that federal authorities have not yet finalized a full review of the incident, and that they are blocking Minnesota officials from participating in the investigation.

Across interviews on Sunday, Noem repeated her accusations that Good used her Honda Pilot to attack the officer, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that “everything that I said has been proven to be factual.” When pressed by Tapper about video evidence showing that the ICE agent was able to move out of the vehicle’s way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the car as it veered past him, Noem said Good was “breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation.” Noem also mentioned that there is video — which Tapper said he had not yet seen — that shows “that this officer was hit by her vehicle.”

“These officers were doing their due diligence that their training had prepared them to do,” Noem said, insisting that she’s correct in labeling Good a “domestic terrorist” because she “weaponized her vehicle to conduct an act of violence against a law enforcement officer and the public.”

When Tapper once again pressed her on her decision to draw conclusions ahead of a full investigation, Noem said the administration “will continue to look at this individual and what her motivations were,” but claimed that Good had “harassed and impeded law enforcement operations.”

Good’s wife has said that Good had “stopped to support our neighbors” when she was fatally shot on the residential street. Good’s family members have said they do not believe she was tailing ICE officers. She had just dropped her son off at school before the shooting, they said. Her father, Tim Ganger, said in a brief interview Wednesday that she got “caught up in a bad situation.”

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News Sunday that he believes the officer thought his life was in danger and acted in response. Homan, however, urged Americans to wait for an investigation to play out before making more accusations.

“There’s a lot of things we don’t know,” Homan said. “You can’t compare this to murder. Murder requires malice and that is just dangerous to put that type of language out.”

Homan then accused Democratic leaders — including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who used an expletive when saying ICE should leave the city — of spreading “the hateful rhetoric [that] has caused a lot of this violence.”

Frey told NBC News’s Meet the Press that he does bear responsibility to “bring down the temperature” of the rhetoric.

“To those that are offended, I’m sorry I offended their delicate ears,” Frey said. “But as far as who inflamed the situation, you know, I dropped an f-bomb. And they killed somebody. I think the killing somebody is the inflammatory element here, not the f-bomb.”

Frey also told NBC News that he believes there is now “deep mistrust” over what the results of an FBI investigation into the shooting will be given that federal officials are not allowing Minnesota authorities, including the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, to contribute to the review.

“What I was pushing back on from the very beginning was a narrative that had jumped to that conclusion right from the get-go,” he said. “When you’ve got a federal administration that is so quick to jump on a narrative as opposed to the truth, I think we all need to be speaking out.”

Sen. Tina Smith (D., Minn.) was more aggressive in her rebuke, accusing the Trump administration of running a “cover-up” of Good’s shooting by trying to shift the public narrative before facts could be learned by investigators.

“Hours after Renee Good was shot and killed by federal agents, [DHS Secretary] Kristi Noem was telling us what had happened,” Smith said in an interview with ABC’s This Week. “How can we trust the federal government to do an objective, unbiased investigation without prejudice when at the beginning of that investigation, they have already announced exactly what they think happened?”

Information from the Associated Press was used in this article.

The Department of Homeland Security has changed its account of an immigration enforcement-related shooting in Maryland that left two men injured on Christmas Eve, a move prompted by a local police account that contradicted the federal agency’s initial statement.

In the department’s announcement of the shooting on X, officials said officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were executing a “targeted immigration enforcement operation” in Glen Burnie when they approached a vehicle and told the driver, Tiago Alexandre Sousa-Martins, to turn off the engine. In the passenger seat of Sousa-Martins’ van, the department said, was Solomon Antonio Serrano-Esquivel.

Officers “defensively fired” their guns at the vehicle, striking Sousa-Martins after he allegedly refused to power off his van and attempted to flee, ramming it into “several ICE vehicles” before driving in the officers’ direction, DHS said in its initial account. In that account, Serrano-Esquivel suffered whiplash when Sousa-Martins’ van crashed between two buildings.

But the Anne Arundel County Police Department issued a statement Friday that offered a counter narrative. One of the men was an ICE detainee and already in the agency’s custody when the incident occurred, police said. The other was injured by gunfire “while operating a separate vehicle.”

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday about the discrepancy in accounts and the status of the two men’s injuries. In a statement provided to the Baltimore Sun, Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin confirmed Serrano-Esquivel was inside “one of the ICE vehicles that was rammed.”

In its initial account of the shooting, DHS said Sousa-Martins, a Portuguese national, had been living in the United States illegally on an expired visa that lapsed in 2009, according to a statement provided to the Washington Post in December. The statement also noted Serrano-Esquivel, who’s from El Salvador, was also in the country illegally.

Sousa-Martins is being held at a detention facility in Bowling Green, Va., according to ICE’s detainee locator website. No details were available for Serrano-Esquivel’s whereabouts and DHS did not immediately respond to questions about either man’s detention status.

The December incident is one of over a dozen ICE shootings during President Donald Trump’s second term, according to media reports and court records.

On Wednesday, Renée Good, 37, was fatally shot on a residential street in Minneapolis during an exchange with an ICE officer, sparking protests and scrutiny over ICE’s tactics. The following day, two people were shot and injured during a “targeted vehicle stop” in Portland, Ore., prompting an investigation from Oregon officials.

DHS has said ICE officers are facing a surge in threats and assaults, including with vehicles used as weapons, and blamed “sanctuary politicians and the media.” Officials have vowed to prosecute “rioters” and warned that demonstrations will not stop their immigration enforcement efforts.

Anne Arundel County police said in their statement on Friday that the Glen Burnie shooting is still under investigation, and that its officers do not enforce immigration law, work with ICE, or ask people about immigration status. At a December news conference, department spokesperson Justin Mulcahy said the FBI will investigate the alleged attempt to run over the federal agents and ICE would conduct an internal investigation through its Office of Professional Responsibility.

Two days after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was captured by U.S. Special Forces, a MAGA-friendly social media commentator who uses the name David Freeman shared news footage on X showing Venezuelans cheering and dancing on a South Florida street.

“Democrats are absolutely FURIOUS over the joy for what President Trump just accomplished,” the social media user wrote to his 1.6 million followers.

The same day, Maimunka News, an account that usually posts about the war in Ukraine, elevated a video report from the Kremlin-backed news outlet RT stressing that Venezuelans were demanding Maduro’s release.

Neither video was exclusive or particularly surprising. But both the accounts that promoted them were part of a covert Russian influence operation that has been saturating U.S.-focused information ecosystems with a chaotic stream of often contradictory narratives and conspiracy theories about Maduro’s capture using a network of social media accounts, influencers, and fake websites, according to research from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

“I call it the ‘throw spaghetti at the wall’ approach, where they test out various conspiracies … [and] promote contradictory narratives,” said Layla Mashkoor, deputy director of research for the Washington-based group, which linked the social media activity to a covert Russian network known as Storm-1516. “It’s really an approach that doesn’t necessarily seek to amplify a single, cohesive message, but rather just seeks to dilute the entire information environment to confuse individuals.”

The aim, she said, is “to create chaos that makes it difficult for the everyday person who might encounter this to then be able to discern what are they seeing that might be true.”

As they have done during many other high-profile and contentious news events, such as the 2024 U.S. presidential election campaign, Russia and China have launched influence operations to quickly capitalize on controversy — this time surrounding the U.S. operation to seize the Venezuelan president — by spreading conspiracy theories, inflammatory claims, manipulated media, or disingenuous content, researchers said. The campaigns about Venezuela illustrate how government actors seek to influence foreign political discourse online during high-pressure news events when authoritative information about what happened is still unfolding.

Beijing’s communication efforts have centered on showing how the United States acts unilaterally and in a disorderly way, the researchers found. China, whose officials condemned the U.S. strike on Venezuela and Maduro’s capture as violations of international law, sought to bolster its narrative that the United States is an unstable and unreliable player on the world stage, according to the research.

Beyond sowing uncertainty, the Russian influence operation seeks to dilute the narrative that it failed to protect one of its closest allies, a sensitive point following the downfall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in 2024, Mashkoor said.

“There’s a sort of fine line and fine balance where Russia is both trying to obscure the fact that it was unable to protect its ally by painting the U.S. as the unreliable ally,” Mashkoor said.

The Chinese and Russian campaigns represent a small sliver of the deluge of misinformation about Maduro’s capture that is swirling online. Social media posts falsely claiming to show the moment when Maduro was captured or that misidentify or conjure up protests for or against the U.S. operation continue to flood social media.

Propaganda and disinformation campaigns have become easier to produce and often harder to spot with the rise of artificial intelligence, which allows users to easily create fake articles and doctored or completely fake video or audio footage of events, and spread them on social media with a few clicks, researchers said.

But conspiracy spreaders are also relying on more traditional deception methods — such as using old video footage from other events and mischaracterizing the context — to take advantage of the heightened attention on the political events in Venezuela, said Tyler Williams, vice president of intelligence at the social network analysis firm Graphika.

For instance, a cluster of X users from countries including Yemen have repurposed footage of the anti-Trump No Kings protests from October to criticize U.S. intervention in Venezuela by alleging the videos showed Americans opposing Maduro’s capture. Some posts used footage that still featured the No Kings logo in the upper-left corner, while other posts carried footage with a different logo covering the original footage, according to Graphika.

“It’s a very messy information environment, and we haven’t seen kind of a coalescing of narratives between state actors and your usual online users,” Williams said. “I think it’s still early days, and it’s still quite a mess.”

The Russian-backed Storm-1516 campaign spread several other narratives on X including false conspiracy theories that the Rothschild family was involved in orchestrating the U.S. actions in Venezuela and that Maduro’s capture was a false flag operation rather than a genuine development, according to the Digital Forensic Research Lab. Another Russian operation, the Pravda Network, regurgitated talking points from Kremlin-affiliated sources about the developments in Venezuela on sites that mimic news sites that target U.S. audiences, the research found.

By contrast, China sought to mock President Donald Trump by mimicking his digital political style. Several inauthentic X accounts promoted a video produced by the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV that featured an AI-generated parody of a popular meme song that derides U.S. foreign military interventions. The original language video, which was initially posted on Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, features a dancing baldheaded eagle in a suit boasting about U.S. conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Venezuela leading to greater control of oil.

The video, which received more than 1.9 million likes in China, did not get much traction in English on X. But it did seem to demonstrate how China operatives were willing to shift their content strategy to match the political style of the moment in the United States, according to Mashkoor.

“It speaks to a larger cultural shift in how political dialogue reaches people online, and how it embraces online culture and digital native trends and tropes,” Mashkoor said. “We’re kind of in a new era of how states … try to communicate to each other and to domestic and foreign audiences.”