A Guardian analysis of government records has found that the vast majority – 77% – of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal conviction, exposing a stark gap between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and reality.
Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) trotted out a phrase that his surrogates would come to use over and over again: “the worst of the worst.”
The term has become a shorthand justification for the administration’s unprecedented overhaul of immigration enforcement – a relentless campaign the administration claims is focused on arresting and deporting violent criminals.
However, a review of records obtained by the Guardian and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against DHS, raises questions about those claims.
Worst of the worst? Most US immigrants targeted for deportation in 2025 had no criminal charges, documents reveal
Georgia Is Letting a Railroad Seize Land a Black Family Has Owned For 100 Years
In 1850, Andrew Benjamin Tarbutton enslaved 25 people in central Georgia. A year later, he purchased more than a dozen additional people off the docks in Savannah and marched them toward his home, setting the foundation for his family’s generational wealth.
Four generations later, a railroad company owned by one of his descendants is using eminent domain to seize land of poor farmers, including descendants of enslaved people, not too far from where his family’s fortunes started.
In 2024, the Georgia Public Service Commission granted the Tarbutton-owned Sandersville Railroad Co. eminent domain authority, allowing it to seize private property for what they claim is a public use: to build a rail spur to haul gravel from a local quarry.
The landowners filed a petition for judicial review of the PSC’s decision in Fulton County Superior Court. That appeal has been moving through the courts for the past two years. In February 2025, the Fulton County Superior Court affirmed the PSC’s decision but kept a pause on construction in place while the case proceeded toward further review in the Georgia Court of Appeals.
UN Security Council members blast Israel’s West Bank plans on eve of Trump’s Board of Peace meeting
Members of the United Nations Security Council called Wednesday for the Gaza ceasefire deal to become permanent and blasted Israeli efforts to expand control in the West Bank as a threat to prospects of a two-state solution, coming on the eve of President Donald Trump’s first Board of Peace gathering to discuss the future of the Palestinian territories.
The high-level U.N. session in New York was originally scheduled for Thursday but was moved up after Trump announced the board’s meeting for the same day and it became clear that it would complicate travel plans for diplomats planning to attend both. It is a sign of the potential for overlapping and conflicting agendas between the United Nations’ most powerful body and Trump’s new initiative, whose broader ambitions to broker global conflicts have raised concerns in some countries that it may attempt to rival the U.N. Security Council.
Pakistan, the only country on the 15-member council that also accepted an invitation to join the Board of Peace, denounced Israel’s contentious West Bank settlement project during the meeting as “null and void” and said it constitutes a “clear violation of international law.”
Huckabee’s Israel land remarks condemned as ‘dangerous’ as controversy rumbles on
Arab and Islamic countries jointly condemned remarks by the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who suggested Israel had a biblical right to a vast swath of the Middle East.
Huckabee, a former Baptist minister and a fervent Israel supporter, was speaking on the podcast of Tucker Carlson.
In an episode released on Friday, Carlson pushed Huckabee on the meaning of a biblical verse sometimes interpreted as saying that Israel is entitled to the land between the Nile River in Egypt and the Euphrates in Syria and Iraq.
In response, Huckabee said: “It would be fine if they took it all.”
When pressed, however, he continued that Israel was “not asking to take all of that”, adding: “It was somewhat of a hyperbolic statement.”
The backlash widened sharply on Sunday as more than a dozen Arab and Islamic governments – alongside three major regional organisations – issued a joint statement denouncing the US diplomat’s comments as “dangerous and inflammatory”.
Israeli settlers kill 19-year-old Palestinian-American, officials and witnesses say
Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank shot and killed a Palestinian-American during an attack on a village, the Palestinian Health Ministry and a witness said Thursday.
Raed Abu Ali, a resident of Mukhmas, said a group of settlers came to the village Wednesday afternoon where they attacked a farmer, prompting clashes after residents intervened. Israeli forces later arrived, and during the violence armed settlers killed 19-year-old Nasrallah Abu Siyam and injured several others.
Abu Ali said that the army shot tear gas, sound grenades and live ammunition. Israel’s military acknowledged using what it called “riot dispersal methods” after receiving reports of Palestinians throwing rocks but denied that its forces fired during the clashes.
“When the settlers saw the army, they were encouraged and started shooting live bullets,” Abu Ali said. He added that they clubbed those injured with sticks after they had fallen to the ground.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed Abu Siyam’s death from critical wounds sustained Wednesday afternoon near the village east of Ramallah.
Banning Dissent and Criminalizing Palestine Activism
On Friday, the High Court in the United Kingdom ruled on Friday that the government’s ban on the pro-Palestine direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization was unlawful. The ruling marked a major legal victory for the group, which was founded in 2020 and campaigns against companies complicit in “the occupation, apartheid and genocide of Palestine,” with a focus on Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.
Huda Ammori, the 31-year old British-Palestinian co-founder of Palestine Action, spoke to Drop Site News’s Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous about the movement’s strategy, rooted in direct action to physically disrupt and dismantle the war machine that facilitates the genocide and occupation in Palestine.
Also on the livestream, Ryan Grim spoke with Carrie Prejean Boller on her ouster from Trump’s religious liberty commission.
“As a Palestinian, the best moment of my life was being on top of an Israeli weapons factory with a sledgehammer being able to destroy that site. And knowing, that just that by being there and causing damage, they would have to shut down. Not just while I was there, but for weeks after.”
ICE cannot re-detain Kilmar Ábrego García, judge rules
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cannot re-detain Kilmar Ábrego García because a 90-day detention period has expired and the government has no viable plan for deporting him, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
The Salvadorian national’s case has become a focal point in the immigration debate after he was mistakenly deported to his home country last year. Since his return, he has been fighting a second deportation to a series of African countries proposed by Department of Homeland Security officials.
The government “made one empty threat after another to remove him to countries in Africa with no real chance of success”, US district judge Paula Xinis, in Maryland, wrote in her Tuesday order. “From this, the court easily concludes that there is no ‘good reason to believe’ removal is likely in the reasonably foreseeable future.”
Ábrego García has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the US illegally as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge ruled that he could not be deported to El Salvador because he faced danger there from a gang that had threatened his family. By mistake, he was deported there anyway last year.
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