(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Justice is appealing a federal judge’s ruling that dismissed the criminal human smuggling case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Robert McGuire, the federal prosecutor in Tennessee, filed a notice on Monday to U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw that the government is appealing the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge on Monday blocked a Trump administration voter-screening database, ruling that the government’s “haphazard” system unlawfully consolidated “the private information of millions of Americans” in an effort to purge non-citizens from voter rolls.
In her order, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said the federal government “has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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Editor’s note: This story has been updated for clarity.
(KATY, Texas) — A driver in a Tesla vehicle that was allegedly in driver-assist mode crashed into a Texas house Friday night, killing a woman who was inside the home, investigators said.
Michael Butler was traveling in his Tesla Model 3 around 8 p.m. local time in Katy, Texas, and was operating the vehicle “with an automated driving assistance system,” the Harris County Sheriff’s office said in a statement.
Butler allegedly failed to drive in a single lane, left the roadway and struck the residence, according to the sheriff’s office.
“Butler’s Tesla entered through the brick residence, at a high rate of speed, and struck M. Avila who was inside the residence,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.
Avila was airlifted to a hospital where she was later pronounced dead, the sheriff’s office said.
Investigators said Butler, who was injured, showed no signs of intoxication and he was cooperating with officers. Attorney information for the driver wasn’t immediately available.
The investigation is ongoing and as of Saturday afternoon there were no charges.
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(EUREKA, Utah) — Mandatory evacuations are underway for hundreds of people on Sunday in a central Utah town being threatened by a wind-driven, out-of-control wildfire, officials said.
The Iron Fire is burning in Juab County, about 28 miles southwest of Provo, and officials said on Sunday that flames are bearing down on Eureka, Utah, a small town in the East Tintic Mountains.
The wildfire, which started on Friday night, had burned more than 13,300 acres by Sunday morning and remains 0% contained, according to Utah Fire Info.
The wildfire, according to Utah Fire Info, was human-caused, but details of what sparked the blaze have not been released.
Shifting winds and dry vegetation fueled the wildfire on Saturday and sent it in the direction of Eureka, where authorities issued mandatory evacuation orders on Saturday. Fire officials said flames were threatening “numerous structures” in the area.
The fire rapidly grew from about 5,000 acres on Saturday to more than 13,000 overnight.
“That’s way closer than anybody wants it to be,” Daylan Hermanson, a Eureka resident, told ABC Salt Lake City affiliate station KTVX, as he watched flames creep over a mountainside headed for Eureka.
Kelly Wicken, a spokesperson for the Utah Division of Forestry, said the blaze started on private land and has now spread across Juab and two other counties, crossing onto federal land and shutting down a highway.
Before the fire, the National Weather Service had issued red flag fire danger warnings for a large part of the state.
Utah is also in the middle of a severe drought that has dried out vegetation, providing fuel for any fires.
“With June temperatures rising, Utah is facing a deepening drought that has accelerated the drying of soils and vegetation across the state,” the Utah Department of Natural Resources said in a June 11 statement. “Wildfire season has already been active with over 230 fires so far this year, a majority of which were human-caused.”
The Iron Fire is the biggest of 11 wildfires that have ignited across the state since Friday.
The Hastings Fire, which started on Saturday west of Salt Lake City, had burned 2,500 acres by Sunday morning and was 0% contained, according to Utah Fire Info.
The Middle Fork Fire near Ogden and the Boonville Fire, just east of the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City, had both burned more than 300 acres since starting on Saturday and were both 0% contained on Sunday.
“Utah is facing multiple wildfires across the state today, and we are using every available resource to support response efforts,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said in a social media post on Saturday evening. “Conditions remain dry and dangerous. Please use extreme caution, follow evacuation notices, and do your part to prevent new fires.”
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(NEW YORK) — Horse-drawn carriage rides will be suspended in Central Park until next week following the death of an 18-year-old Indian tourist who was in a runaway carriage with his family.
The move comes after growing calls from advocates and elected officials to fully ban the rides following a string of incidents over the last year where people and the horses were put in danger.
The Transport Workers Union announced Thursday, a day after Romanch Mahajan was killed, that rides would be suspended while they assess safety protocols. The union announced on Friday that the suspension would continue until at least Tuesday.
The 18-year-old victim was with his parents and younger brother in a carriage Wednesday afternoon when the driver got out to take a picture of the family and suddenly the horse took off “for unknown reasons,” according to the TWU and police.
The carriage clipped the wheel of another carriage and toppled, according to TWU Local 100 Administrative Vice President Alexander Kemp.
Mahajan fell out of the carriage, and died at the hospital later in the afternoon, police said.
Deepak Mahajan, the victim’s father, told the New York Times Thursday that his son jumped out of the carriage to help his wife, Priya, who fell out of the carriage first.
This was the first time the family had visited New York City, Deepak Mahajan told the Times.
The other family members suffered minor injuries, police said. This is the first time a person has been killed during a carriage ride in the park, according to the union.
An investigation is ongoing, police said.
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(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department on Friday refused to issue a signed declaration from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche verifying that it no longer intends to pursue President Donald Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”
The DOJ’s refusal comes after a federal judge last week gave the administration seven days to verify in a declaration that it wouldn’t create the controversial fund.
“Such declarations are unnecessary and the compelled testimony of senior officials from the Executive Branch implicates serious separation of powers concerns,” the DOJ said in a court filing Friday to U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who last week issued an injunction indefinitely blocking the administration from creating the fund.
Brinkema had given the Trump administration seven days to verify in a declaration from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that it wouldn’t create the fund, which she said would likely lead to the dismissal of the lawsuit she was overseeing against the fund.
But in their filing Friday, the department argued that Brinkema’s offer was a potentially unconstitutional infringement of the executive branch by effectively requiring “testimony” of top officials on a matter that the administration has repeatedly said would not be moving forward.
The fund, which was announced last month by the DOJ to compensate those who allege they were wrongly targeted under the Biden administration, was proposed in exchange for Trump agreeing to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS as well as two civil claims for $230 million related to the Russia collusion investigation he faced during his first term in office and the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate — sparking accusations of self-dealing and a bipartisan uproar over the possible use of taxpayer money to pay rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In her ruling last week, Judge Brinkema pointed repeatedly to President Trump’s own shifting statements in recent weeks about the fund, including his pointed attack on Brinkema herself after she had temporarily paused the fund earlier this month, in which he referred to her as a “radical left judge.”
“When the president of the United States says he’s disappointed that something is not going forward,” Brinkema said, that would only add to the evidence that the fund might “rear its head” in the future.
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(STOCKTON, Calif.) — Two Northern California stores were burglarized and had thousands of dollars worth of Pokémon trading cards stolen within hours of each other this week, according to police and the stores’ owners.
Investigators in Stockton are looking for clues and suspects in the Wednesday burglaries, which have become the latest incidents in a string of Pokémon card thefts across the country.
Police do not immediately know if the two burglaries are connected.
The first incident took place at Dragon’s Den Games around 1:55 a.m. local time when a hooded suspect broke a glass display case and made off with the cards in under a minute, according to police and surveillance footage.
Tom Douglas, the store’s owner, told ABC affiliate KXTV that the thief was only looking for one thing in his store.
“They’re looking for Pokémon [cards],” Douglas said. “They’re not interested in board games.”
Around 3:30 a.m. a suspect, who was also wearing a similar black hood, broke into JNA Collectibles on Fremont Street, roughly three-and-a-half miles away from Dragon’s Den Games, according to police and surveillance footage.
JNA Collectible’s owner, Joshua Lawson, told KXTV that the suspect used a crowbar to break through the front door, smash a glass display case with the Pokémon cards and flee the scene with the cards in just a minute.
“In one minute, I lost thousands of dollars,” he said.
Lawson noted Pokémon cards can range in value from about a dollar to tens of thousands of dollars for some graded cards. There have been similar thefts in California, New Jersey and other states.
“This is a problem for every single store in this area,” Lawson said.
Douglas told the affiliate that the ongoing thefts are one of the reasons he’s decided to close Dragon’s Den Games at the end of the month after nearly a decade of business.
He said the store has been burglarized four times since January.
“This is brand new this year,” Douglas said. “It kind of feels like it came out of nowhere.”
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(WASHINGTON) — The cost to repaint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has ballooned to more than $14.65 million — exceeding the original estimated cost of the no-bid contract by more than $4 million, according to federal contract data.
In addition to the repainting by Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the National Park Service paid $1.74 million to Green Water Solutions, an Ohio-based company, earlier this year to install a “nano bubble” system to kill algae, using a similar no-bid contract to speed up the work in time for Fourth of July celebrations.
Between the two companies that received separate contracts for the resurfacing and filtration systems, the project is set to cost more than $16 million. The status of the payments to the contractors was not immediately available in the federal government’s contract database.
The Interior Department said in a statement via X, “The advanced nanobubbler technology very effectively killed the algae that has plagued every Lincoln Reflecting Pool reopening—most infamously Obama’s reopening—since 1922. The Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear, and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool—just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.”
Trump has repeatedly defended the project, though the new paint job — described in the contract documents as a “seamless, monolithic, waterproof, antimicrobial, and anti-algae system suitable for continuous submersion” — and appears to be peeling, and an algae bloom has overtaken the reflecting pool.
“As a developer, I’ve probably built more than 100 swimming pools in different buildings I built, and I have some really good pool builders,” Trump said in April about the project. “They’re great people. I have such great respect for contractors that are good and such disdain for contractors that are bad. They charge you more money and they give you a bad job, but we — we don’t accept it.”
In the two weeks since the repainting of the reflecting pool was completed, Atlantic Industrial Coatings was also awarded two payments totaling $1.54 million, a total of $14.65 million since it began the project. Contracting documents offered few details about the extra payments, other than saying the work was within the scope of their original agreement and describing it as ” PAINT LINCOLN REFLECTING POOL.”
The millions of dollars being paid to the contractor are taxpayer funds. ABC News has sent repeated requests to Atlantic Industrial Coatings for comment.
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(KANSAS CITY, Mo.) — The FBI said it’s offering a reward of up to $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspect in a string of shootings in Kansas City, Missouri.
Oscar Sanchez-Munoz, 22, is not only the suspect in Tuesday’s five shootings, but he is also wanted for allegedly shooting at a car days earlier in Wyandotte County, Kansas, the FBI said.
On June 11, an adult and a child were driving in Wyandotte County when their car was struck by gunfire, police said.
Then on Tuesday evening, five shooting incidents — including one that was deadly — unfolded in close succession from west to east along the Interstate 70 area, according to Kansas City, Missouri, Police Chief Stacey Graves.
The four surviving victims — three adults and one teenager — told officers they were driving when one or more shots were fired into their cars, Graves said.
The teen was hospitalized in stable condition, one adult suffered life-threatening injuries, and the other two surviving victims had non-life-threatening injuries, Graves said.
An Uber driver taking passengers to the Kansas City World Cup game was among the victims, Graves said, and responding officers drove the fans to the match.
A motive is not known, Graves said.
On Tuesday night, Sanchez-Munoz allegedly barricaded himself inside a house in Independence, Missouri, east of Kansas City, and engaged in a standoff with police, authorities said.
At about 12:45 a.m., police reported the house was on fire, and firefighters responded and extinguished the blaze, Graves said. When responders entered the house, Sanchez-Munoz was not there, Graves said.
Sanchez-Munoz is considered armed and dangerous, authorities said, and they urge anyone who sees him to call 911.
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(NEW YORK) — Several flash flood emergencies continued to hit Gulf states Thursday night into Friday morning as the remnants of Tropical Storm Arthur, the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, wreaked havoc, resulting in at least one death and serious damage in several cities.
And the forecast shows more heavy rain and extreme weather heading toward the region this weekend.
In Louisiana, Gov. Jeff Landry declared a statewide emergency in response to the storm, citing widespread rainfall, severe storms and flooding concerns across the state.
The emergency order follows reports of tornadoes and more than a foot of rain in some areas over a 24-hour period. State officials said the storm has caused dangerous conditions, including flooding, downed trees and damage to homes and businesses.
A flash flood warning in Dallas escalated Friday to “considerable” with 2 inches per hour rainfall rates and at least 4 inches of rain fallen so far, according to the National Weather Service.
The city’s emergency management department reported that multiple roads in downtown Dallas were impassable due to high water, especially under overpasses.
Several flash floods took place overnight Thursday in Seminary and Sanford, Louisiana, where homes and businesses were taking in water due to more than 10 inches of rainfall, according to the NWS.
Water rescues took place overnight as vehicles were stranded and left in flood waters.
Parts of Louisiana reported more than 20 inches of rainfall, according to the NWS. Plaucheville and Moreauville were hit especially hard, with more than 100 homes flooded, NWS noted.
Some cars in these neighborhoods were seen floating down roads.
Meanwhile, the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said crews were at the scene of the Anchor Lake Dam, located near the city of Carriere, in southern Mississippi, to monitor the conditions there but reported the dam “has not been breached” and was functioning as designed.
However, about 30 homes had been evacuated as a precautionary measure.
In a social media post Thursday, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said the dam was being monitored.
“At this time, according to MDEQ, the system is functioning as designed – water is flowing through the primary and auxiliary spillways. However, there is very little storage capacity remaining and there is additional precipitation predicted. If that happens, it could quickly overwhelm the spillways and compromise the structure,” he said.
Reeves also said a county road crew worker was killed during cleanup operations in Franklin County, in southwestern Mississippi.
The Pearl River County Office of Emergency Services said in an update late Thursday that the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality had identified areas of erosion around the dam caused by the recent heavy rainfall but “expressed a high level of confidence in the dam’s structural integrity.”
The agency lifted an evacuation order for homes near the dam later Thursday night, but officials urged residents to pay attention to alerts.
Earlier, the NWS said a flash flood emergency was issued for Anchor Lake Dam and areas downstream on the East Hobolochitto Creek.
The NWS had earlier reported that the Anchor Lake Dam had failed, citing local emergency management, though it later issued an update that the dam “is being monitored for possible failure.”
A rare High Risk, level 4 of 4, for life-threatening flood potential was in place over southern Mississippi, southern Alabama and western Florida panhandle along the central Gulf Coast Thursday, the NWS said.
Historically, a third of all flood-related fatalities and 80% of all flood-related damages occur in such high-risk areas, according to NWS data.
On Friday, the NWS issued a level 3 of 4 flash flood risk in place for parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle, as rainfall rates of 2 to 3 inches per hour are possible.
A flood watch extends from eastern Louisiana through central Georgia through Friday.
Forecasters are also watching the soil conditions in these areas.
Since some locations saw over a foot of rain in the last 24 hours, any additional heavy rain on the ground will quickly lead to heightened flash flood risks, according to the NWS.
One of the reasons for the continuing flood threats across the South is how incredibly moist the atmosphere is overhead, which is translating into dangerous heat indices.
Feels-like temperatures are soaring above 110 degrees from Texas to Florida.
New Orleans is under a heat advisory today for heat indices up to 110, Houston up to 112 and Corpus Christi up to 114.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Anchor Lake Dam has not failed, as previously reported by the National Weather Service, and to correct the spelling of the Anchor Lake Dam.
ABC News’ Jason Volack and Jack Moore contributed to this report.
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