(NEW YORK) — More than 20 million Americans in eight states were under red flag warnings Tuesday morning as severe winds and dry conditions have elevated the threat of fire danger.
The alarming forecast comes in the wake of a deadly tornado outbreak over the weekend in the Midwest and South, and wind-whipped wildfires that destroyed hundreds of homes in Oklahoma.
The National Weather Service on Tuesday issued red flag warnings for a large portion of Oklahoma — including Oklahoma City, Stillwater and Wichita Falls. The NWS office in Norman, Oklahoma, said possible wind gusts of up to 45 mph combined with low relative humidity and dry conditions are producing “critical to extreme” fire danger in Oklahoma and North Texas.
Extremely critical fire danger is also forecast Tuesday for the entire state of Kansas, parts of Arizona, a major portion of Missouri, eastern Colorado and West Texas, including the Texas Panhandle.
Other major cities under red flag warnings on Tuesday are Denver; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Kansas City and Springfield, Missouri; and the Texas cities of Austin, San Antonio and El Paso.
The areas under red flag warnings are being warned that the conditions are rife for fires to spread rapidly, which makes them extremely hard to contain.
Relative humidity across the alert areas is 15% to as low as 6%, and wind gusts are forecast to be between 40 and 75 mph.
The critical fire danger comes just as people are beginning to recover from devastating wildfires in Oklahoma and a series of tornadoes.
At least 42 people were killed amid more than 970 severe storm reports — including tornadoes, severe storms, dust storms and fires — across more than two dozen states over the weekend. A three-day tornado outbreak tore through at least nine states.
Raging wildfires in Oklahoma over the weekend left four people dead and more than 140 others injured, according to the state’s medical examiner.
The Oklahoma wildfires destroyed more than 400 homes and structures and burned at least 170,000 acres, prompting evacuations amid extreme fire weather conditions.
Wildfires also raged in Texas over the weekend. The biggest blaze was the Windmill Fire that ignited in Roberts County and quickly spread to 21,000 acres, the Texas A&M Forest Service said. The fire was 95% contained on Monday.
Parts of Gray County were temporarily under a mandatory evacuation due to the Rest Area Fire, the Texas A&M Forest Service said. The fire has burned an estimated 3,000 acres and was 30% contained as of Friday evening, according to the forest service.
ABC News’ Kenton Gewecke contributed to this report.
Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump hurled insults at the federal judge who conducted a “fact-finding” hearing on Monday over whether the Trump administration knowingly violated a court order when it handed over more than 200 alleged gang members to El Salvadoran authorities over the weekend.
“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote. “WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY.”
President Donald Trump hurled insults at the federal judge who conducted a “fact-finding” hearing on Monday over whether the Trump administration knowingly violated a court order when it handed over more than 200 alleged gang members to El Salvadoran authorities over the weekend.
“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote. “WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY.”
Boasberg, in verbal instructions during a hearing on Saturday, gave orders to immediately turn around two planes carrying noncitizens if they are covered by his order, including one that potentially took off during a break in the court’s hearing. However, sources said top lawyers and officials in the administration made the determination that since the flights were over international waters, Boasberg’s order did not apply, and the planes were not turned around.
On Monday, Boasberg questioned whether the Trump administration ignored his orders to turn the planes around, saying it was “heck of a stretch” for them to argue that his order could be disregarded.
Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli argued Monday during the “fact-finding” hearing convened by Boasberg that the judge’s directive on Saturday evening to turn around the flights did not take effect until it was put in writing later that evening.
Boasberg ordered the Justice Department to submit, by noon Tuesday, a sworn declaration of what they represented in a filing Monday — that a third flight that took off after his written order on Saturday carried detainees who were removable on grounds other than the Alien Enemies Act.
Karl Merton Ferron/The Baltimore Sun/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Many of the noncitizens who were deported pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act on Saturday did not have criminal records, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said in a sworn filing overnight.
In a sworn declaration, ICE Acting Field Office Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Robert Cerna argued that “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose” and “demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”
“While it is true that many of the [Tren de Aragua gang] members removed under the AEA do not have criminal records in the United States, that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time. The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,” Cerna said.
The admission that many of the men lacked criminal records – and were deported on the assumption that they might be terrorists – comes as top Trump administration officials insist that the men were violent criminals, with President Donald Trump labeling them “monsters.”
Cerna wrote that some of the men have been convicted or arrested for crimes including murder, assault, harassment, and drug offenses, writing that ICE personnel “carefully vetted each individual alien to ensure they were in fact members of TdA.”
To determine whether a noncitizen was a “member of TdA,” he said law enforcement allegedly used victim testimony, financial transactions, computer checks, and other “investigative techniques.”
“ICE did not simply rely on social media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures, or tattoos alone,” Cerna said.
The declaration was included in the Trump administration’s recent motion to vacate Judge James Boasberg’s temporary restraining orders blocking deportations pursuant to the AEA.
“These orders are an affront to the President’s broad constitutional and statutory authority to protect the United States from dangerous aliens who pose grave threats to the American people,” Department of Justice lawyers argued.
Boasberg ordered the Department of Justice to submit, by noon Tuesday, a sworn declaration about how many noncitizens were deported under the AEA and when they were removed from the country.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is holding a high-stakes call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Tuesday as he tries to win his approval of a 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine.
Trump began the call with Putin at 10 a.m. ET and it was still ongoing as of 10:54 a.m. ET. Dan Scavino, the deputy chief of staff, posted on X that the call was “going well, and still in progress.”
The encounter is the first known call between Trump and Putin since peace talks between U.S. and Ukrainian officials a week ago in Saudi Arabia yielded Kyiv agreeing to an immediate, temporary stop to hostilities should Russia do the same.
“It’s a bad situation in Russia, and it’s a bad situation in Ukraine,” Trump said on Monday. “What’s happening in Ukraine is not good, but we’re going to see if we can work a peace agreement, a ceasefire and peace, and I think we’ll be able to do it.”
That positive assessment follows his prediction Sunday night that “we’ll see if we have something to announce — maybe by Tuesday,” saying “a lot of work” had been done over the weekend. “Maybe we can. Maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”
Since then, Putin has been noncommittal on the proposal while fighting intensifies in Kursk.
Putin said he was “for” a ceasefire but raised concerns and set out his own conditions, such as certain security guarantees. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, has accused the Russian leader of obstructing peace and “prolonging” the war.
Trump on Monday said the only reason he was involved in negotiations is “for humanity.”
“A lot of people are being killed over there. And, we had to get Ukraine to do the right thing. It was not an easy situation. You got to see a little glimpse at the Oval Office, but I think they’re doing the right thing right now. And we’re trying to get a peace agreement done. We want to get a ceasefire and then a peace agreement,” he said.
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy will monitor the conversation between Trump and Putin with caution and great interest, a Ukrainian official informed about the matter told ABC News.
“We agreed to the U.S. ceasefire proposal with zero conditions, and if Putin is gonna start playing with Trump setting demands — it will not work,” the source added.
A key question moving forward is how far Trump will go in pressuring Russia to agree to a ceasefire and ultimately bring an end to the three-year conflict, which began when Putin’s forces invaded its sovereign neighbor.
The Trump administration took drastic steps in stopping military aid and pausing some intelligence sharing with Ukraine after the Oval Office clash between Trump and Zelenskyy. Those two tools resumed after Ukraine agreed to the ceasefire last Tuesday.
Plus, U.S. officials have said it would be unrealistic for Ukraine to return to its prewar borders and expressly ruled out its bid for NATO membership.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has not publicly made similar demands of Putin.
Trump on Sunday said land and power plants were on the table for Tuesday’s discussion, as well as “dividing up certain assets” between the two countries.
“Well, I think we’ll be talking about land. It’s a lot of land. It’s a lot different than it was before the wars, you know. And we’ll be talking about land, we’ll be talking about power plants. That’s a big question, but I think we have a lot of it already discussed, very much by both sides,” he told reporters on Air Force One.
Trump last week said his administration could ramp up pressure on Russia but hoped it wouldn’t be “necessary.”
“There are things you could do that wouldn’t be pleasant in a financial sense,” he said. “I can do things financially that would be very bad for Russia. I don’t want to do that because I want to get peace.”
ABC News’ Oleksiy Pshemyskiy and Michelle Stoddart contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is ending U.S. Secret Service protection for former President Joe Biden’s adult children.
Trump made the announcement on his conservative social media platform on Monday evening.
Earlier Monday, as he toured the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Trump was asked by a reporter about the security detail assigned to Hunter Biden as he vacationed in South Africa.
“That will be something I’ll look at this afternoon. OK. I just heard about it for the first time,” Trump responded. His Truth Social post came hours after the exchange.
Shortly after his inauguration, Trump revoked Secret Service protection for John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Mark Milley, despite threats against their lives from Iran because of their work in the first Trump administration. He also removed the security detail assigned to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who faced threats over the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“When you have protection, you can’t have it for the rest of your life,” Trump told reporters at the time.
Presidents, vice presidents and their families are given Secret Service protection throughout their time in office.
Former presidents and their spouses can keep their details for the rest of their lives after leaving office, unless they choose to decline it. Federal law also provides security for children of former presidents until age 16, though outgoing presidents can extend it. Hunter Biden is 55 and Ashley Biden is 43.
When Trump left office after the 2020 election, his four adult children and their two spouses received Secret Service protection for an additional six months.
Before leaving office, Joe Biden issued a controversial pardon for his son over tax evasion and federal gun charges. ABC News recently reported that Hunter Biden now finds himself in debt and without a permanent home, according to court documents.
Plus, Hunter Biden continues to be a target of Republican attacks, including criticism from Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
(WASHINGTON) — The Treasury Department has promoted two IRS whistleblowers who accused the Justice Department under President Joe Biden of granting his son, Hunter Biden, special treatment during a yearslong probe into his tax affairs.
Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, two veteran IRS investigators, will serve as senior advisors to incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said in a statement on Tuesday that he was “pleased to welcome Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler to the Treasury Department, where they will help us drive much-needed cultural reform within the IRS.”
Shapley and Ziegler came forward in 2023 with allegations that the Biden administration improperly interfered in an investigation into Hunter Biden’s unpaid taxes led by then-U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss — claims that Justice Department and FBI officials fiercely disputed at the time.
“It appeared to me, based on what I experienced, that the U.S. Attorney in Delaware in our investigation was constantly hamstrung, limited and marginalized by DOJ officials,” Ziegler said during congressional testimony in July 2023.
Days after Shapley and Ziegler testified on Capitol Hill, a plea deal negotiated by Hunter Biden and the Justice Department fell apart under questioning from a federal judge. The deal would have allowed Hunter Biden to plead guilty to a pair of tax-related misdemeanors and enter into a pretrial diversion agreement on a felony gun charge.
Weiss, the Trump-appointed prosecutor who led the probe into Hunter Biden, repeatedly refuted the claims leveled by Shapley and Ziegler and asserted that he faced no political pressure from Biden administration officials to grant Hunter Biden any special treatment.
Hunter Biden later pleaded guilty to nine tax-related charges, including multiple felonies. His father granted him a sweeping pardon in the waning weeks of his presidency.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, touted his role in securing promotions for Shapley and Ziegler in a statement Tuesday. Grassley said he wrote Bessent multiple letters encouraging him to promote the two whistleblowers.
“Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler put their entire careers on the line to stand up for the truth, and instead of being thanked, the Biden administration treated them like skunks at a picnic,” Grassley wrote in a press release. “I hope today is the first of many redemption stories for whistleblowers who’ve been mistreated.”
(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department’s National Security Division has been in a scramble trying to meet President Donald Trump’s promise on Monday to release declassified information from the JFK assassination investigation today.
Trump, during a visit Monday to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, announced the government would be releasing all the files on Kennedy’s assassination on Tuesday afternoon.
Less than half an hour after that announcement, the Justice Department’s office that handles foreign surveillance requests and other intelligence-related operations began to shift resources to focus on the task, sources said.
In an email just before 5 p.m. ET Monday, a senior official within DOJ’s Office of Intelligence said that even though the FBI had already conducted “an initial declassification review” of the documents, “all” of the attorneys in the operations section now had to provide “a second set of eyes” to help with this “urgent NSD-wide project.”
Eventually, however, it was other National Security Division attorneys who ended up having to help, sources said.
Attorneys from across the division were up throughout the night, into the early morning hours, each reading through as many as hundreds of pages of documents, sources said. Only prosecutors with an impending arrest or other imminent work did not have to help, sources said.
A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
In promising the release of JFK files today, Trump said Monday that there is “a tremendous amount of paper.”
“You’ve got a lot of reading,” he said. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, ‘Just don’t redact. You can’t redact.'”
Trump in January signed an executive order directing the “full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy” in order to end the decades-long wait for the release of the government’s secret files on Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
ABC News’ Hannah Demissie and Molly Nagle contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Last month, Jose Franco Caraballo Tiapa, a 26-year old Venezuelan migrant who was seeking asylum in the U.S., showed up to his routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Dallas, Texas, when authorities detained him, his wife told ABC News.
Ivannoa Sanchez, 22, told ABC News she believes her husband is one of the hundreds of Venezuelan men who this past weekend were sent by plane to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.
According to Sanchez, the couple crossed the U.S. border in November 2023 and surrendered to authorities. After claiming asylum and being detained for a few days, ICE released them and ordered them to check in routinely with the federal agency.
Sanchez said the couple had gone to several of their scheduled check-ins without experiencing any issues. But on Feb. 3, Tiapa was not allowed to return home with his wife despite being scheduled to have his first court appearance in his asylum case in March.
Sanchez provided ABC News with documents that confirmed Tiapa’s scheduled appointment with an immigration judge on March 19.
“He went to his routine ICE appointment and he didn’t come out,” Sanchez told ABC News.
She said she was able to complete her check-in with ICE that day and has not yet received an appointment for another check-in.
Similarly, ABC News spoke with Sebastian Garcia Casique, who claims his brother was detained by ICE after his routine-check-in.
According to Casique, his brother Francisco Garcia Casique. who entered the United States in December 2023 and surrendered to authorities, was detained after going to an ICE office last month for his appointment.
“There, some police officers detained him because they saw his tattoos and said they were going to investigate him because of them,” Casique told ABC News.
Casique said that on Friday, his brother called his family from the detention center in Texas where he was being held to let them know that he believed he was being deported to Venezuela. But on Sunday, Casique said that he and his family recognized his brother in a photo posted on social media by the White House.
“It’s a nightmare,” Casique told ABC News.
Sanchez said that after being detained in Dallas, her husband was transferred to a detention center in Laredo, Texas, where she was able to speak with him regularly.
But on Saturday, she said her husband told her that he believed he was going to be transferred and possibly deported.
On Sunday morning, after Sanchez saw the video posted on X by the president of El Salvador showing Venezuelan migrants being sent there, she checked the ICE locator website that shares updated information about where migrants are being detained.
“I check the system, and he doesn’t show up,” Sanchez told ABC News. “I constantly think and know he’s there because he has tattoos, because he’s a barber, but he has no involvement with the group they’re associating him with.”
Sanchez said that her husband is being unfairly targeted by the Trump administration for being Venezuelan and having tattoos, after Trump on Saturday said he was invoking the 18th century Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
She provided ABC News with documents that show Tiapa does not have any criminal records in Venezuela.
Casique also told ABC News his brother has not committed any crimes beyond crossing the U.S. border.
Casique claims that after his brother surrendered to authorities, he was detained and investigated for a few days, then appeared before an immigration judge who ordered him to be released with an ankle monitor to be tracked.
Casique said his brother turned 24 while being detained
“Never in his life had he spent a birthday in that situation,” he said. “The depression must be getting to him.”
Casique said his brother had the American Dream of working as a barber in the U.S.
“[He] was hoping for a better future to help us, help all the family members, and look at the situation now,” Casique said.
A review of federal court records found no criminal court cases associated with Garcia Casique or Tiapa.
ABC News previously reported that advocacy groups and relatives of some of the Venezuelan migrants who were recently sent to the prison in Guantanamo Bay claim the administration provided no evidence the migrants were “high-threat” criminals or that they belonged to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
The Trump administration, over the weekend, announced that would begin deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law that allows for the arrest and removal of non-U.S. citizens when their nation or government is at war with the United States. The Trump administration designated the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, calling it a “hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States.”
After the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act was challenged in court on Saturday, a federal judge verbally ordered two planes carrying alleged gang members to El Salvador to turn around and return to the U.S., but sources said administration officials made the determination that since the flights were already over international waters, the judge’s order did not apply, and the planes were not turned around.
On Monday, the judge held a “fact-finding” hearing over the whether the administration knowingly violated his court order, but did not issue ruling on the matter.
Sanchez and Casique told ABC News they reached out to ICE and the Department of Homeland security several times. but that the agencies have not provided any information about their relatives.
ICE and DHS officials did not responded to ABC News’ request for information on Tiapa or Garcia Casique.
“He has never done anything, not even a fine, absolutely nothing,” Sanchez said of her husband. “We chose this country because it offers more security, more freedom, more peace of mind. But we didn’t know it would turn into chaos.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump will hold a high-stakes call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Tuesday as he tries to win his approval of a 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine.
“It’s a bad situation in Russia, and it’s a bad situation in Ukraine,” Trump said on Monday. “What’s happening in Ukraine is not good, but we’re going to see if we can work a peace agreement, a ceasefire and peace, and I think we’ll be able to do it.”
That positive assessment follows his prediction Sunday night that “we’ll see if we have something to announce — maybe by Tuesday,” saying “a lot of work” had been done over the weekend. “Maybe we can. Maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”
The Kremlin on Tuesday said it expects the call within a two-hour window beginning at about 9 a.m. ET. The encounter would be the first known call between Trump and Putin since peace talks between U.S. and Ukrainian officials a week ago in Saudi Arabia yielded Kyiv agreeing to an immediate, temporary stop to hostilities should Russia do the same.
Since then, Putin has been noncommittal on the proposal while fighting intensifies in Kursk.
Putin said he was “for” a ceasefire but raised concerns and set out his own conditions, such as certain security guarantees. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, has accused the Russian leader of obstructing peace and “prolonging” the war.
Trump on Monday said the only reason he was involved in negotiations is “for humanity.”
“A lot of people are being killed over there. And, we had to get Ukraine to do the right thing. It was not an easy situation. You got to see a little glimpse at the Oval Office, but I think they’re doing the right thing right now. And we’re trying to get a peace agreement done. We want to get a ceasefire and then a peace agreement,” he said.
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy will monitor the conversation between Trump and Putin with caution and great interest, a Ukrainian official informed about the matter told ABC News.
“We agreed to the U.S. ceasefire proposal with zero conditions, and if Putin is gonna start playing with Trump setting demands — it will not work,” the source added.
A key question moving forward is how far Trump will go in pressuring Russia to agree to a ceasefire and ultimately bring an end to the three-year conflict, which began when Putin’s forces invaded its sovereign neighbor.
The Trump administration took drastic steps in stopping military aid and pausing some intelligence sharing with Ukraine after the Oval Office clash between Trump and Zelenskyy. Those two tools resumed after Ukraine agreed to the ceasefire last Tuesday.
Plus, U.S. officials have said it would be unrealistic for Ukraine to return to its prewar borders and expressly ruled out its bid for NATO membership.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has not publicly made similar demands of Putin.
Trump on Sunday said land and power plants were on the table for Tuesday’s discussion, as well as “dividing up certain assets” between the two countries.
“Well, I think we’ll be talking about land. It’s a lot of land. It’s a lot different than it was before the wars, you know. And we’ll be talking about land, we’ll be talking about power plants. That’s a big question, but I think we have a lot of it already discussed, very much by both sides,” he told reporters on Air Force One.
Trump last week said his administration could ramp up pressure on Russia but hoped it wouldn’t be “necessary.”
“There are things you could do that wouldn’t be pleasant in a financial sense,” he said. “I can do things financially that would be very bad for Russia. I don’t want to do that because I want to get peace.”
ABC News’ Oleksiy Pshemyskiy and Michelle Stoddart contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Blizzard warnings are in place for parts of Kansas and Nebraska, with winter storm watches — which could turn to blizzard warnings — stretching northeast into Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and into the upper peninsula of Michigan.
Snow accumulations from 2 to 6 inches are generally expected, with higher amounts locally being possible. Wind gusts of up to 60 mph are also possible and could reduce visibility to a quarter mile or less for large parts of the day making travel difficult or even impossible in some areas.
The blizzard is expected to hit Wednesday morning and head east through the afternoon, stretching from Kansas City to Green Bay before it loses some strength.
Ahead of the snow, there is a likelihood a line of storms form along a cold front and some of these storm could turn severe due to damaging wind gusts and large hail, though tornadoes are unlikely.
A slight risk for severe weather also extends from Chicago to Evansville later this afternoon and into the evening with storms moving past Chicago around 6 p.m. CT.
The storm system is expected to give a dusting of snow to Chicago on Thursday morning and may make the commute a little difficult with reduced visibility.
On Thursday afternoon, showers will move into Washington, D.C. by 4pm and then move on to New York Coty later in the evening, ending around 7 a.m. Friday morning, but continuing for Boston and parts of the New England region until early afternoon.
