Congressman Joaquin Castro met with five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father at the Dilley detention center in Texas today.
In a post on social media, Castro shared a photograph of Liam resting in his father’s arms. Castro added that he told Liam “how much his family, his school, and our country loves him and is praying for him”.
Liam became a symbol of the wide reach of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in Minneapolis last week when he was detained on his way home from preschool. A photograph captured Liam in ICE custody while wearing a blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack.
Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of Liam’s school, said Liam and his father had been apprehended on their way home from school. An agent had taken Liam out of the car, led the boy to his front door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in, “in order to see if anyone else was home – essentially using a five-year-old as bait”, she said in a statement.
Key events
Robert Mackey
Donald Trump has announced the formation of a new National Fraud Enforcement division of the Justice Department, and has nominated a justice department official, Colin McDonald, to lead it as a new assistant attorney general, in a post on his social media platform.
Trump said he had created the division to “catch and stop FRAUDSTERS that have been STEALING from the American People” and said his administration had “uncovered Fraud schemes in States like Minnesota and California”, both states whose Democratic governors Trump has feuded with.
The nomination, for a new post that will require Senate confirmation, was previewed earlier this month by JD Vance, the vice-president, at a White House news conference. Vance’s announcement attracted attention at the time because he said that the new justice department division “will be run out of the White House under the supervision of me and the president of the United States”. Currently, fraud cases are handled by the justice department’s criminal division.
In that 8 January news conference, Vance boasted of what he called the success of the effort to crack down on benefit fraud in Minnesota and said “we also want to expand this.”
He added:
We know that the fraud isn’t just happening in Minneapolis. It’s also happening in states like Ohio. It’s happening in states like California. And so, what we’re doing, in order to help coordinate this remarkable interagency effort from the Trump administration but also to make sure that we prosecute the bad guys and do it as swiftly and efficiently as possible, is we are creating a new assistant attorney general position who will have nationwide jurisdiction over the issue of fraud.
Now, of course, that person’s efforts will start and focus primarily in Minnesota, but it is going to be a nationwide effort, because unfortunately the American people have been defrauded in a very nationwide way… We’ve never seen fraud like this in the history of our country…
We’re going to make the nomination hopefully in the next few days… But this is the person who is going to make sure that we stop defrauding the American people. Here’s one final thing I’ll say about this. I’ve heard a lot of people say that we need a special council to investigate fraud in the United States of America.
I actually agree and that’s what this position does. It has all the benefits, all the resources, all the authority of a special counsel, but with two crucial differences. Number one, it will be run out of the White House under the supervision of me and the president of the United States. And number two, it’s actually constitutionally legitimate.
As you guys may know, the special counsel statute has some major constitutional questions. When we get the bad guys, we want to make sure we get them permanently and they don’t have some legal technicality they can get out of which is why we set it up as an associate attorney general.
Shortly after she appeared alongside Donald Trump this afternoon, musician Nicki Minaj posted a photograph on social media of her new Trump Gold Card.
Launched in December, the program allows wealthy foreign individuals to buy a US “golden visa” for $1m.
An official government webpage promises US residency “in record time” with the new “Trump Gold Card” – once applicants have paid a $15,000 processing fee to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), passed a background check and paid up $1m.
We report more on the “gold card” here:
Shrai Popat
Joining Omar in Minneapolis today is Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. The Massachusetts representative repeated the ongoing calls for the impeachment of the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.
“We need to abolish ICE and dispense the systems of oppression that have gotten us to this point,” Presley said.
Shrai Popat
At the Karmel Mall of Somalia in Minneapolis, Representative Ilhan Omar addressed residents and the press a day after she was attacked at a town hall event.
In her opening remarks, the Democratic congresswoman didn’t reference the attack, but condemned the ongoing immigration surge in the Twin Cities.
“We know this not about public safety … It’s political retribution,” she said.
Omar also said the killings of two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were “entirely avoidable”.
“No immigration enforcement agent should ever be allowed to act as a judge, jury and executioner,” she added.
Shrai Popat
Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s “border czar”, is scheduled to hold a press conference in Minneapolis on Thursday, just two days after he arrived in the city and took over the federal immigration enforcement surge in the Twin Cities from Gregory Bovino.
He’s set to speak to reporters at 7am CT/8am ET.
Federal judge in Minnesota blocks Trump administration from arresting and detaining refugees living in the state
A federal judge in Minnesota has blocked the Trump administration from arresting and detaining the 5,600 refugees living in the state.
In a ruling issued today, US district judge John R Tunheim granted the Advocates for Human Rights, which represents midwesterners seeking asylum, a temporary restraining order blocking Operation Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening (“Operation Parris”). He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to release and return to Minnesota anyone already detained by the administration under the operation.
“The refugees impacted by this Order are carefully and thoroughly vetted individuals who have been invited into the United States because of persecution in the countries from which they have come. They are not committing crimes on our streets, nor did they illegally cross the border,” he wrote. “Refugees have a legal right to be in the United States, a right to work, a right to live peacefully – and importantly, a right not to be subjected to the terror of being arrested.”
An immigration judge has granted asylum to Chinese national Guan Heng, who secretly filmed human rights abuses at detention facilities in Xinjiang.
Guan, who applied for asylum after entering the United States in 2021, has been in custody since he was picked up during an immigration enforcement operation in August 2025. Despite the judge’s ruling, Guan will remain in custody while the Department of Homeland Security decides whether it will appeal the judge’s ruling, which it has 30 days to do.
The parents of Alexi Pretti have retained a former federal prosecutor who helped Minnesota’s attorney general convict police officer Derek Chauvin of murder after he kneeled on George Floyd’s neck, killing him.
Pretti’s family has retained Steve Schleicher, a partner at the Minneapolis firm Maslon. Schleicher served as a special prosecutor in the 2021 trial over Floyd’s murder. Schleicher has taken on the case pro bono, PBS News reports.
Earlier this month, the family of Renee Good, who was also killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, retained another lawyer involved in the George Floyd case – the Chicago-based firm Romanucci & Blandin, which represented Floyd’s family.
The No Kings Coalition has announced it will hold another mass mobilization event on 28 March, centered around a flagship event in the Twin Cities.
The coalition, which brought together millions of Americans to protest Donald Trump’s presidency in 2025, launched an “Eyes on ICE” training program earlier this week, to train Americans to safely document federal law enforcement.
“The events in the last few weeks in Minnesota make clear what is at stake in America today,” said the American Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten, one of the leaders of the coalition. “We have a leader who acts like an unbridled king, as opposed to a president who abides by a legal and moral responsibility to the people of our country. Americans are fighting back, peacefully, with signs, whistles and cameras – from thousands in the bitter cold in Minnesota to millions across the country last October. It’s clear that courageous, everyday citizens refuse to be intimidated by our government’s abuse of power.”
During a press conference this afternoon, congressman Joaquin Castro provided more details on his meeting with five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father.
“His father said that Liam has been very depressed since he’s been at Dilley. That he hasn’t been eating well,” Castro said. “His father said that Liam has been sleeping a lot. That he’s been asking about his family, his mom and his classmates.”
Castro added that Liam seemed lethargic during their 30-minute meeting in the Dilley detention center’s courtroom, where Liam rested in his father’s arms.
“I let him know that his school and his community, his family and our country love him and we’re praying for him,” Castro said. “Liam Ramos should be released immediately.”
Congressman Joaquin Castro met with five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father at the Dilley detention center in Texas today.
In a post on social media, Castro shared a photograph of Liam resting in his father’s arms. Castro added that he told Liam “how much his family, his school, and our country loves him and is praying for him”.
Liam became a symbol of the wide reach of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in Minneapolis last week when he was detained on his way home from preschool. A photograph captured Liam in ICE custody while wearing a blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack.
Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of Liam’s school, said Liam and his father had been apprehended on their way home from school. An agent had taken Liam out of the car, led the boy to his front door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in, “in order to see if anyone else was home – essentially using a five-year-old as bait”, she said in a statement.
Senator Jon Ossoff has denounced a search warrant that FBI agents executed at a Fulton county elections office near Atlanta today, saying the Trump administration is still seeking to prove that Donald Trump falsely won the state of Georgia in the 2020 election.
“After losing Georgia in 2020, Donald Trump demanded state officials ‘find’ votes to change the outcome, tried to use DOJ to overturn it, and spread conspiracy theories that led to the Jan 6 sacking of the US Capitol. I suspect today’s raid is a continuation of this sore loser’s crusade, despite repeated audits and independent reviews confirming that Donald Trump was indeed defeated,” Ossoff said. “From Minnesota to Georgia, on display to the whole world is a President spiraling out of control, wielding federal law enforcement as an unaccountable instrument of personal power and revenge.”
My colleagues Sam Levine and George Chidi reported earlier today on the FBI search warrant:
Donald Trump lost Georgia in the 2020 election, and his false claims about voter fraud in Fulton county, home to Atlanta, were central to his efforts to try to overturn the election. Trump and allies repeated false claims that election workers pulled ballots out of suitcases after counting had ended. Those claims were debunked and Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s lawyers, was ordered to pay two election workers $148.1m in damages as part of a defamation suit.
Trump allies have nonetheless continued claiming something was amiss in Fulton county. The justice department’s civil rights division filed a lawsuit against the county in December seeking to force officials to turn over ballots from the 2020 election.
Deployment of federal troops to US cities cost taxpayers $496m in six months
A new letter from the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Trump administration’s deployment of federal troops to six cities cost taxpayers $496m between June and December 2025.
Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, ranking member of the Senate budget committee, requested the estimate of costs to activate, deploy, and compensate national guard troops and marines sent to Los Angeles, Washington DC, Memphis, Portland, Chicago and New Orleans. Continuing those deployments would cost roughly $93m per month.
In a press release, Merkely’s office said: “Following Trump’s directive that national guard troops will stay in Washington DC for the remainder of 2026, CBO estimates this deployment alone will cost taxpayers upwards of $660m. If the administration continues the guard deployment to Memphis and the 200 Texas national guard troops remain active for all of 2026, as expected, and keeps personnel deployed to New Orleans for two additional months, that figure balloons to $1.1bn.”
An image of Donald Trump holding hands with musician Nicki Minaj earlier today shows the president using concealer to cover something on his hand.
Minaj made a short appearance alongside the president ealier, after the president announced “Trump Accounts”, individual investment accounts for US children that will take effect in July as part of Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
As my colleague Carter Sherman reported, Minaj’s “comments mostly focused on how people are ‘bullying’ Trump, with whom Minaj briefly held hands”.
A closeup photograph of the two, shows concealer on Trump’s hand. In recent months, frequent discoloration on the president’s hands has prompted concerns about Trump’s health. The White House has claimed that the bruises are from shaking too many hands.
Schumer calls for Noem and Miller to go and urges Trump to pull ICE out of Minnesota
Chuck Schumer also ramped up the pressure for DHS secretary Kristi Noem and top Trump aide Stephen Miller to go, as he repeated calls for the president to pull ICE agents out of Minnesota.
He wrote on X:
It’s outrageous that Kristi Noem still has a job in the administration after federal officers murdered two American citizens in just two weeks. Noem is incompetent and she must go. And her boss Stephen Miller must be removed as well.
In another post, the Senate minority leader urged Trump to follow through on his pledge to “de-escalate” in Minnesota. Schumer said:
President Trump said he wants to de-escalate things in Minneapolis, but he has taken zero meaningful action to make that happen. Yesterday, Border Patrol leadership told their agents that the operations are ‘expected to continue as planned.’ If Trump was serious, he would remove all of ICE from Minnesota now.
Schumer lays out Democrats’ demands to ‘rein in’ ICE as condition to avoid shutdown
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, has laid out Democratic demands for policy changes for ICE, as he pushed for DHS funding to be separated from the other funding bills ahead of a looming shutdown at the end of this week.
Let me be clear: Democrats stand ready today to pass the five bipartisan bills in the Senate, but the DHS bill needs serious work. It’s now on Leader [John] Thune to separate out the DHS bill, just as Speaker [Mike] Johnson did in the House, and start working with Democrats to rein in ice, imposing oversight, accountability and empowering local law enforcement in our communities.
Schumer said this afternoon that federal immigration agents must lose their masks, wear body cameras, observe the same use of force rules as local police, and be subject to tighter rules requiring search warrants and an end to roving patrols, as he outlined conditions that his party is seeking to extend government funding beyond Saturday’s deadline.
Schumer also said in a post on X:
The Senate is scheduled to take the first procedural vote on a funding package including DHS funding tomorrow.
Let me be clear: Until ICE is properly reined in and overhauled, the DHS funding bill won’t have the votes to pass the Senate.
He told CNN:
Our number one goal is — these are three policy areas we think must be done. What we want to do is negotiate with the Republicans and come up with a proposal that, again, reins in ice and ends the violence.
Threat of US-Iran war escalates as Trump warns time running out for deal
Patrick Wintour and Andrew Roth
The threat of war between the US and Iran appeared to loom closer after Donald Trump told Tehran that time was running out and a huge US armada was moving quickly towards the country “with great power, enthusiasm and purpose”.
Writing on social media, the US president said today that the fleet headed by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was larger than the one sent to Venezuela before the removal of Nicolás Maduro earlier this month and was “prepared to rapidly fulfill its missions with speed and violence if necessary”.
Trump said:
Hopefully Iran will quickly ‘Come to the Table’ and negotiate a fair and equitable deal – NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS – one that is good for all parties. Time is running out, it is truly of the essence!
As I told Iran once before, MAKE A DEAL! They didn’t, and there was ‘Operation Midnight Hammer,’ a major destruction of Iran. The next attack will be far worse! Don’t make that happen again.
It was the starkest indication yet from Trump that he intends to mount some kind of military strike imminently if Iran refuses to negotiate a deal on the future of its nuclear programme. The post also reflects a remarkable shift in the White House’s stated rationale for sending a carrier strike group to the region, moving away from outrage over the death of protesters to the fate of Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Here’s the full report:
Ilhan Omar’s office believes that she was sprayed with apple cider vinegar at her town hall last night in Minneapolis, her spokesperson has told NBC News citing a preliminary report.
CNN earlier reported that forensic examiners had determined with high probability that the substance was apple cider vinegar, citing a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation.
Lauren Aratani
The US Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged after its first rate-setting meeting of the year today, resisting enormous pressure from the White House to lower rates.
A majority of members in the Fed’s federal open market committee (FOMC) voted to pause interest rate cuts after slashing rates three times in the fall. Rates currently sit at a range of 3.5% to 3.75%.
The Trump administration has put unprecedented pressure on the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, to cut rates, with Donald Trump launching personal attacks on Powell and the justice department opening a criminal investigation into his handling of the refurbishment of the central bank’s offices.
The FOMC has 12 voting members and meets just eight times a year to set interest rates. The stakes of each meeting have been high during Trump’s second term. Though economists say that the Fed’s independence, as the US central bank, is key for economic stability, the president has unabashedly tried to bend the Fed to his economic agenda.
More on this story here:
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