Politics

Video: Local Sheriffs Voice Frustration With ICE

Published

3 months ago

February 13, 2026

Video: Local Sheriffs Voice Frustration With ICE

On January 21, ICE agents in Portland, Maine, arrested Emanuel Landila, an asylum seeker from Angola, legally working as a corrections officer recruit. “Good afternoon.” Hours later, Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce publicly defended the officer in training, whom he’d vetted and hired a year ago. “In fact, he was squeaky clean. Squeaky clean.” Sheriff Joyce then delivered one of the most scathing critiques of ICE tactics by local police. “In the three minutes, they got out, they pulled a guy from the car, handcuffed him, put him in the car. They all took off, leaving his car with the windows down, the lights on, unsecure and unoccupied. Folks, that’s bush league policing.” “This guy, I knew, was not a criminal alien.” We caught up with Joyce in Washington, D.C., days after he criticized ICE operations in Maine. He’d come for the National Sheriffs Association annual conference. – “How are you?” – “Good day, Kevin Joyce.” And to share his concerns with lawmakers. “They came at him like storm troopers. The tactics. I called them bush league because it is. This is not professionalism, but it’s meeting a quota. And you can’t set quotas in law enforcement because bad things are going to happen.” To carry out mass deportations, ICE needs the cooperation of local law enforcement, mostly in the form of access to local jails. But sending thousands of masked ICE and Border Patrol agents into American cities has frayed those relations. At the gathering in D.C., hundreds of sheriffs from around the country came for trainings and meetings. “They haven’t stopped one million pounds of cocaine, enough to fill 24 or 42 dump trucks.” And to meet with government officials. Many called for better communication from ICE and more respect. “The communication is worst of the worst. We still can work together, but it takes cooperation. You simply just can’t come in our cities, overshadow us, and then expect us to respond to you.” “It creates a division within my own profession, and there’s a right way to do our job. And there’s also a wrong way to do the job. So what you’re seeing is this type of enforcement that is not making us safer. It’s dividing us.” Whether and how police cooperate with immigration enforcement has long been controversial, but especially now. “Give us access to the illegal alien public safety threat in the safety and security of a jail. Get these agreements in place. That means less agents on the street.” Over the past year, more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies have signed partnership agreements with ICE. Many hold jail inmates for ICE to pick up. “They’re already in custody. It keeps them from having to go out and arrest them in the field. They just come to our jail, pick them up, take them away.” An increasing number of states are barring or restricting some police from working with ICE. Other states have done the opposite and now require police to cooperate with ICE. “My personal opinion, I like it. We get rid of them. If we’re getting rid of the people that don’t need to be here, then it’s great.” “What was the longest that ICE held somebody at your jail?” “I want to say one was 100 days.” Many sheriffs rent out jail space for ICE detention as a way to bring in revenue. “They paid $150 per inmate, per day.” “And about how much did that come to a year?” “About $3 million. For 33 years, we’ve held ICE inmates at the Cumberland County jail. Two hours after my press conference, they pulled their 50 inmates.” In a statement to The Times, a D.H.S. spokesperson said ICE withdrew its detainees from the Cumberland County jail over the hire of illegal aliens and subpoenaed the Sheriff’s Office for its employment records. Joyce said he vetted Landila appropriately. After three weeks in detention, a federal judge ordered Landila released on bond. Sheriff Joyce is assessing whether his office can still employ him. “Kind of wanted to stop by and thank you for your efforts on the increase in immigration issues that we had a couple of weeks ago.” After the conference, Sheriff Joyce met with Maine lawmakers on Capitol Hill, where Democrats are threatening to block funding for D.H.S. if immigration agents are not held to higher policing standards. “So one of the reasons we’re holding up the Homeland Security bill is to talk about adding this kind of criteria that we expect of our own police officers: not wearing masks, requiring body cameras, having actual judicial warrants before they bust down the doors of your house or haul you off somewhere. So things that people have come to expect from law enforcement and that are critical to the ability for citizens to trust law enforcement.” “We have to go back to our cities with a message of things are going to get better by the summer. If we don’t, it’s going to be a long summer. What I worry about is law enforcement fighting with federal government.”

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Politics

Judge Again Delays Guantánamo’s First Death-Penalty Terror Trial

Published

8 hours ago

May 12, 2026

Press Room

Judge Again Delays Guantánamo’s First Death-Penalty Terror Trial

The military judge in the U.S.S. Cole bombing case on Monday reset the start of jury selection to Oct. 19, more than 26 years after the suicide bombing in a port in the Middle East killed 17 U.S. sailors and wounded dozens of others.

Col. Matthew Fitzgerald, an Army judge, said that government agencies were unlikely to process classified evidence in time for what was to be a June 1 start date for the national security trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

A Saudi citizen, Abd-al Rahim al-Nashiri is accused of orchestrating the attack on the U.S. Navy destroyer off Aden, Yemen, on Oct. 12, 2000 as an acolyte of Osama bin Laden. The death penalty case has been shadowed by the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of torture on the defendant.

Judges at the U.S. naval station in Cuba have set and then abandoned about 10 earlier trial start dates. Pretrial litigation has gone on so long, since Mr. Nashiri was charged in 2011, that three previous judges and all of the initial defense and prosecution lawyers retired from the case or left it for personal or professional reasons.

Mr. Nashiri was captured in Dubai in October 2002. First, he spent about 1,390 days in the custody of the C.I.A., which subjected him to waterboarding, forced nudity, extreme isolation, rectal and other forms of abuse, primarily in secret prisons in Afghanistan and Thailand, according to agency and Senate reports.

The Cole bombing, by two Al Qaeda recruits who blew themselves up on a small, explosives- laden skiff, was a precursor of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and Mr. Nashiri’s case is on track to become the first capital trial at Guantánamo Bay.

A judge in each case has ruled against the use of a defendant’s confessions because they were contaminated by their years in the C.I.A.’s brutal detention and interrogation program — out of reach of the courts, defense lawyers and International Red Cross.

The defendants were moved to Guantánamo in September 2006 and interrogated by federal agents to build cases against them without warnings against self-incrimination and the right to consult a lawyer.

The Cole trial is expected to last at least six months, and would start on Oct. 19 with the military shuttling 50 U.S. officers at a time there from a pool of 350 men and women to establish a jury of 12 with six alternate members. Guantánamo is so small, a 45-square-mile base with about 4,500 residents and limited guest quarters, that it would be logistically difficult to bring the entire pool down.

Last week, prosecutors in the Sept. 11 case asked a military judge to set deadlines for starting the four-man conspiracy trial in May 2027. Prosecutors had earlier proposed Jan. 11, 2027, but concluded it was not practical even before arguing for it to Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, their presiding judge.

Colonel Schrama said Monday that he would look at setting a trial schedule after he rules on some key pretrial evidentiary motions, probably over the summer, involving Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of being the mastermind of the plot, and two other defendants.

Both cases have dragged on so long in part because no court case in U.S. history has dealt with the volume of classified information involved in this case, which is guarding secret government activities and surveillance that started with the war against terrorism.

Some Navy shipmates who survived the Cole attack and the relatives of victims of both the Cole and Sept. 11 attacks have died waiting for the trials to begin. Family members have been traveling to the base since the arraignment in 2011 to watch pretrial proceedings.

Politics

Stacey Abrams hit with subpoena in alleged campaign finance violations saga: ‘No one is above the law’

Published

9 hours ago

May 12, 2026

Press Room

Stacey Abrams hit with subpoena in alleged campaign finance violations saga: ‘No one is above the law’

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FIRST ON FOX: The Georgia Senate is ramping up its investigation into alleged campaign finance violations tied to Stacey Abrams’ voter outreach group, with a top lawmaker vowing to “follow the facts wherever they lead” as subpoenas have been issued to Abrams and other key figures.

The Senate Special Committee on Investigations announced Monday that Abrams, along with New Georgia Project leaders Lauren Groh-Wargo and Nsé Ufot, must appear before lawmakers at the State Capitol at 10 a.m. on Friday.

“This committee has a responsibility to follow the facts wherever they lead,” said Republican state Sen. Greg Dolezal, the committee’s vice chairman. “Georgia law requires transparency and accountability in our elections.”

The subpoenas stem from findings by the Georgia State Ethics Commission that the New Georgia Project and its affiliated Action Fund violated campaign finance laws during the 2018 election cycle.

STACEY ABRAMS-FOUNDED VOTER ACTIVIST GROUP HIT WITH MASS LAYOFFS AFTER RECORD-BREAKING ETHICS FINE

Stacey Abrams, Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia, speaks to reporters at Georgia State University in Atlanta on Nov. 7, 2022. (Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)

The groups admitted to 16 violations earlier this year and agreed to pay a $300,000 fine, the largest campaign finance penalty in Georgia history.

New Georgia Project shut down and dissolved in 2025 following mounting financial and legal troubles.

The Republican lawmakers explain in the press release that the goal of the probe is to figure out who was involved in the decision-making behind the violations, along with specifics on how the funds were managed and who was aware of the activity.

WHITE HOUSE UNLEASHES ON STACEY ABRAMS IN LATEST CLASH OVER TRUMP’S ELECTION ORDER

“The people of Georgia deserve to know who was involved, what decisions were made and how millions of dollars flowed through organizations that admitted to violating our campaign finance laws,” Dolezal said.

Georgia’s Republican Lt. Gov. Burt Jones said in the release, “No one is above the law in Georgia.”

He added: “When organizations secretly spend millions to influence elections while evading disclosure requirements, it undermines confidence in our democratic process. The Senate will continue pursuing the truth and ensuring accountability, regardless of political party or influence.”

Former Georgia House Rep. Stacey Abrams attends the Fort Valley GOTV Community Fish Fry at the Agricultural Technology Conference Center in Fort Valley, Georgia, on Oct. 13, 2024. (Julia Beverly/Getty Images)

The lawmakers say that additional hearings and witness testimony are expected in the coming weeks.

“Today, the Georgia State Senate delivered a subpoena for me to testify in a partisan, performative hearing designed to intimidate and disarm voting rights advocates across Georgia and the nation,” Abrams wrote in a response to the subpoena posted on X. “Despite the hollow, cynical intent, I will indeed do so on a mutually agreeable date.”

“It is not lost on me that I am being summoned days after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted protections for minority voting power and after I testified against the unconscionable voter suppression process unfolding across several Southern states.”

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Abrams, the two-time Democratic gubernatorial nominee in battleground Georgia, ruled out another run for governor earlier this year, saying that instead she’ll focus on her work fighting what she warns is the nation’s move toward authoritarianism under President Trump.

Abrams, a former Democratic Party leader in the Georgia state legislature and a nationally known voting-rights advocate, narrowly lost to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial election. She lost her 2022 rematch with Kemp by nearly eight points.

Fox News Digital’s Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report

Andrew Mark Miller is a reporter at Fox News. Find him on Twitter @andymarkmiller and email tips to AndrewMark.Miller@Fox.com.

Politics

Oversight chair seeks information from OpenAI’s Sam Altman about potential financial conflicts

Published

10 hours ago

May 12, 2026

Press Room

Oversight chair seeks information from OpenAI’s Sam Altman about potential financial conflicts

WASHINGTON — The chair of the House Oversight Committee has sent a letter to OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman requesting information about potential conflicts of interest between Altman’s personal investments and his operation of the company.

The letter, sent Friday, comes amid a high-stakes legal battle currently playing out in an Oakland federal courtroom between onetime partners Altman and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who in 2015 co-founded the AI company best known for creating ChatGPT.

The company was first established solely as a nonprofit corporation and the letter sent to Altman by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chair of the Oversight committee, indicates that the committee is “investigating potential conflicts of interest involving capital from nonprofit corporations invested in startups and other for-profit companies.”

Comer has requested by May 22 a briefing from the company official responsible for oversight of potential conflicts involving company officers and directors, including Altman, as well as all documents related to conflict of interest policies and guidance for those executives.

While OpenAI was created as a nonprofit designed to responsibly harness the power of the emerging artificial intelligence technology, the company created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 and three years later released ChatGPT, which jumpstarted widespread adoption of the technology.

Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, left OpenAI’s board in 2018, one year before the creation of the for-profit arm. He is arguing that Altman and another co-founder, Greg Brockman, betrayed the original mission of the nonprofit organization, driven by their desire to “cash in” on the technology.

Musk added Microsoft, a significant investor in OpenAI, to the lawsuit in 2024. OpenAI is rumored to be gearing up to go public later this year or early next, and was recently valued at $852 billion.

Musk has said that he invested $38 million in the OpenAI nonprofit, but he does not stand to benefit from a potential OpenAI public offering.

He created a rival company, xAI, in 2023 that was later folded into his company SpaceX.

In the lawsuit, Musk is seeking $150 billion in damages, for Altman to be removed from the company and for the company to be fully returned to its nonprofit status.

Musk’s complaint also alleges that Altman engaged in self-dealing by directing OpenAI to pursue deals with companies in which he also held a personal stake, including nuclear fusion power company Helion.

Comer’s letter cites reporting that Altman’s pursuit of a Helion deal, which is still ongoing, would come at a lofty valuation of the power-company, boosting the company’s worth and the value of Altman’s investment.

Altman was briefly forced to step down from leadership of OpenAI in 2023 in part due to concerns about potential conflicts between his personal investments and his operation of the company, but was soon reinstated.

While the company’s board created an audit committee to investigate the potential conflicts of Altman and other officers, the findings were never disclosed.

Comer has requested that Altman turn over all documents and communication related to that audit committee.

Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.