US politics
fromABC7 Chicago
8 hours agoSenate confirms Markwayne Mullin to lead Homeland Security as TSA standoff deepens
Markwayne Mullin confirmed as Homeland Security Secretary amid immigration enforcement controversies and budget standoff.
A mathematician by training, he earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later taught at the University of Chicago before entering public office. He served in the Illinois House and Senate from 2011 to 2019, where he built a reputation as a policy-driven progressive focused on campaign finance reform, voting access, and structural changes to government.
President Donald Trump, to address what he called a national emergency, ordered a stretch of borderland transferred to the military so that troops could help apprehend unauthorized migrants. Because prosecutors believed Flores-Penaloza had crossed through that zone, now called a national defense area, they charged him with trespassing on military property under statutes including one enacted in 1909 to keep spies away from arsenals.
The portal is explicitly for reporting potentially unlawful activity and misconduct by federal agents enforcing immigration law. This could include ICE agents, as well as those from Customs and Border Protection and others working to enact President Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign. Submissions may help officials identify patterns of potential misconduct and "inform possible legal action or policy recommendations."
When they saw their house engulfed in flames, as if a fire-breathing dragon were slowly swallowing it, the Gutierrez-Pulido family felt they had lost too much: the birth photos of their three children, now reduced to ashes; the collection of Princess House pots, disfigured by the fire; the children's musical instruments, reduced to rubble; even the jacket their eldest son, 17, had bought for his high school graduation.
Laime Arold, a 26-year-old Haitian, buys energy bars at a small shop on the side of the Pan-American Highway in southern Chiapas, Mexico. Jose Adan, a Honduran, prays aloud in a park in Tapachula, asking God to protect him from kidnappers and the police along the way. Gerardo Aguilar, a Venezuelan, travels at 60 miles per hour, lying across two seats on a bus headed for Guatemala. The three all have something in common: they are in Mexico and they are migrants. None of them are heading north. They are heading south.
In a February 19 memo sent to civilians across the DoD, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth wrote that he expects "every supervisor to encourage their civilian employees to volunteer. Leadership must continue to promote this detail program and educate their civilian employees on its importance."