TV News LIES

The Department of Homeland Security on Friday eliminated numerous civil rights offices, ending oversight of its immigration policies and avenues for public complaints.

The department said it was conducting wide scale layoffs at DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which ensures the agency protects “individual liberty, fairness, and equality under the law” in its policies and actions.

DHS also fired staff for the offices of two major ombudsmen, which hear complaints and work to resolve disputes within the immigration system.

The Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman provides a platform for those to bring concerns about the immigration process, while the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman is a route for the public to flag issues about the problems facing those held in immigration detention.

The DHS confirmed the move, accusing both entities of obstructing the department’s mission.

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Elon Musk’s visit to the Pentagon on Friday will focus on the threat China presents to the region but won’t include classified war plans, according to an official with knowledge of the plans.

The meeting, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Indo-Pacific commander Adm. Sam Paparo — who will attend virtually from Hawaii — shows the extraordinary level of access Musk, a defense contractor with billions of dollars in government contracts, holds over the administration.

The New York Times initially reported Thursday night that the meeting would include classified plans. But the official said Friday that the conversation would focus exclusively on China as the United States’ primary military challenge. It also comes just two days before Hegseth is set to leave on a weeklong trip to Asia with stops in Japan, Philippines, Guam and Hawaii.

The official did not say whether Musk was originally going to receive a classified briefing.

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President Donald Trump’s executive order singling out transgender service members wasn’t a shock to Lt. Cmdr. Geirid Morgan and her family. Nor was the Pentagon’s accompanying policy to remove trans troops from the force, released about a month after Trump’s order.

“The first feelings I had really were just, concerned for my fellow transgender service members, concerned for their families, concerned for the service members that service under them,” she said.

Morgan has spent 14 years moving up the ranks in the U.S. Navy. Long-serving trans service members, like Morgan, are now plaintiffs in legal challenges against Trump’s ban. To the trans troops suing the government — among them, an Air Force staff sergeant with 16 years of service, a Navy commander with 19, an Army sergeant first class with 20 — the ban is poised not only to harm them, but also drain experience and expertise from the military.

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A Venezuelan soccer player who was in the U.S. awaiting a ruling on his asylum claim was deported to El Salvador under suspicion of being a member of a dangerous gang in what his attorney said was a misinterpretation of a tattoo.

Agents who detained Jerce Reyes Barrios, 36, last September said his tattoo was "proof of gang membership," his attorney Linette Tobin wrote in a sworn statement this week. But the tattoo – a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word "Dios," which means God in Spanish – was designed to look like the logo for Reyes Barrios' favorite soccer team, Real Madrid, Tobin said.

Reyes Barrios was apparently one of the over 200 Venezuelan migrants swept up in the Trump administration's deportations under the Alien Enemies Act in a deal with El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele to hold the detainees at a notorious prison there. The deportations have kicked off a legal back-and-forth between the administration and a federal judge, while the government has refused to make public any evidence that the Venezuelans are affiliated with Tren de Aragua.

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Local health officials said Israeli strikes killed at least 85 Palestinians across he Gaza Strip overnight and into Thursday, bringing the total to nearly 600 killed since Israel shattered a truce that had facilitated the release of more than two dozen hostages and brought relative calm since late January.

Hours later, Hamas fired three rockets at Israel without causing casualties, in the first such attack since Israel broke the ceasefire on Tuesday.

Zaher al-Waheidi, the head of the records department at the Gaza Health Ministry, said Israeli bombardments have killed at least 592 people in the past three days.

The Israeli military said it was again enforcing a blockade on northern Gaza, including Gaza City. Palestinians were not being ordered to leave northern Gaza but can no longer enter, the military said, and are only allowed to move south on foot using the coastal road. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had returned to what remains of their homes in the north during the ceasefire.re

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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s key peace demand that Western allies stop providing military aid and intelligence to Ukraine is quietly being ignored by the European Union.

As U.S.-led talks with Russia and Ukraine progress, without the Europeans at the table, the 27-nation bloc is pressing ahead with a steel “porcupine strategy” aimed at building the Ukrainian armed forces, and the country’s defense industry, into an even more formidable opponent.

At an EU summit on Thursday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that it’s “central” that Ukraine should remain an independent democratic nation that can continue its journey toward EU membership and “that it also has a strong army of its own after a peace agreement.”

“For us, it will be important to continue to support Ukraine significantly — as the European Union as a whole, as allies and friends and as individual countries,” Scholz told reporters in Brussels.

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