A federal judge in Tennessee warns Trump officials over statements about Kilmar Abrego Garcia

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By TRAVIS LOLLER, Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A federal judge in Tennessee on Monday warned of possible sanctions against top Trump administration officials if they continue to make inflammatory statements about Kilmar Abrego Garcia that could prejudice his coming trial.

U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw filed an order late on Monday instructing local prosecutors in Nashville to provide a copy of his opinion to all Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security employees, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

“Government employees have made extrajudicial statements that are troubling, especially where many of them are exaggerated if not simply inaccurate,” Crenshaw writes.

He lists a number of examples of prohibited statements as outlined in the local rules for the U.S. District Court of Middle Tennessee. They include any statements about the “character, credibility, reputation, or criminal record of a party” and “any opinion as to the accused’s guilt or innocence.”

“DOJ and DHS employees who fail to comply with the requirement to refrain from making any statement that ‘will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing’ this criminal prosecution may be subject to sanctions,” his order reads.

Earlier this year, Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation to El Salvador, where he was held in a notoriously brutal prison despite having no criminal record, helped galvanize opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Facing mounting public pressure and a court order, the Trump administration brought him back to the U.S. in June, but only after issuing an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty to those charges and asked Crenshaw to dismiss them.

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Meanwhile, Trump administration officials have waged a relentless public relations campaign against Abrego Garcia, repeatedly referring to him as a member of the MS-13 gang and even implicating him in a murder. Crenshaw’s opinion cites statements from several top officials, including Bondi and Noem, as potentially damaging to Abrego Garcia’s right to a fair trial. He also admonishes Abrego Garcia’s defense attorneys for publicly disclosing details of plea agreement negotiations.

Abrego Garcia has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the U.S. illegally from El Salvador as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from being deported back to his home country, finding he had a well-founded fear of violence there from a gang that targeted his family.

Since his return to the U.S. in June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has announced plans to deport him to a series of African countries, most recently Liberia.

Chicago’s children are getting caught in the chaos of immigration crackdowns

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By CLAIRE GALOFARO

CHICAGO (AP) — The 2-year-old boy was so frightened, he stuttered.

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“Mommy, mommy, mommy,” he repeated, clinging to her.

His mother, Molly Kucich, had been grocery shopping when her husband called, panicking. She heard “immigration raid.” Then: “tear gas.”

She abandoned her grocery cart and drove as fast as she could to her toddler and his 14-month-old brother, who, on that warm October Friday, were among the hundreds of Chicago children caught suddenly in the turmoil of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Parents, teachers and caregivers have been grappling ever since with how to explain to children what they’d seen: how much to tell them so they know enough to stay safe, but not too much to rob them of their childhood. A toddler shouldn’t know what a tear gas canister is, Kucich said.

“I don’t know how to explain this to my kids.”

Children were playing on the monkey bars outside Funston Elementary School just before noon on Oct. 3 when a white SUV rolled down their street in Logan Square, a historically Hispanic neighborhood that’s been steadily gentrifying for years. Cars followed behind it, drivers laying on their horns to alert neighbors that these were federal agents. A scooter pulled in front of the SUV, trying to block it in. There were no mass protests; some teachers walking to lunch initially didn’t realize what was happening.

Suddenly, tear gas canisters flew from the window of the SUV.

The cloud of gas rose, first white, then green, and the street exploded into pandemonium. Some people ran. Others shouted at agents to leave. Sirens screamed toward them. Parents blew through stop signs and drove on curbs to reach their children.

Kucich’s son was a half-block away, having lunch in the window of Luna y Cielo Play Cafe, where children learn Spanish as they play with pretend food and toy cars. His nanny takes him there most days. He made his best friends at the cafe, and his little brother took his first steps there.

Owner Vanessa Aguirre-Ávalos ran outside to see what was happening, as the children’s nannies hustled them to a back room. Aguirre-Ávalos is a citizen; the nannies, Hispanic grandmothers, are citizens or are legally allowed to work in the U.S.

Still, they were terrified. One begged Aguirre-Ávalos: If they take me, please make sure the children get home safe.

The SUV eventually drove away, the cloud of smoke cleared, and parents arrived. “What’s happening?” a girl cried, over and over.

Kucich’s son, who is white, now worries about his nanny, a U.S. citizen from Guatemala. He asks where she is and when she’s coming. He jumps at the sound of sirens. His mother called their pediatrician for a therapist referral.

The brick buildings of Funston Elementary School, left, stand in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, with downtown Chicago in the background, Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

Andrea Soria, whose daughter plays at Luna y Cielo, overheard her 6-year-old whisper to her dolls: “We have to be good or ICE will get us,” referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“These kids are traumatized,” Aguirre-Ávalos said. “Even if ICE stops doing what they’re doing right now, people are going to be traumatized. The damage is already done.”

‘I had to act like nothing was wrong’

It was a beautiful Friday, so fifth grade teacher Liza Oliva-Perez walked to the grocery store across the street for lunch.

She noticed a helicopter circling, then the SUV and its tail of honking cars.

That morning, another teacher gave her a whistle, with instructions to blow it if immigration agents were in the neighborhood.

Oliva-Perez fumbled the whistle to her lips. Just then, the SUV’s window rolled down and she saw a masked man inside throw a tear gas canister.

“I couldn’t fathom that was happening,” said Oliva-Perez. Then he threw another, this time in her direction.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Border Patrol agents were “impeded by protesters” during a targeted enforcement operation in which one man was arrested.

The Chicago crackdown, dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz,” began in early September. Masked, armed agents in unmarked trucks patrol neighborhoods, and residents have protested in ways big and small against what they see as their city under siege. Agents stormed an apartment complex by helicopter in the middle of the night. They’ve detained U.S. citizens, including elected officials. An agent shot and wounded a woman who allegedly used her car to box them in. Protesters have been tear-gassed and shot with pepper bullets. President Donald Trump wants to deploy the National Guard.

DHS wrote that its agents are being terrorized: “Our brave officers are facing a surge in increase in assaults against them, inducing sniper attacks, cars being used as weapons on them, and assaults by rioters. This violence against law enforcement must END. We will not be deterred by rioters and protesters in keeping America safe.”

A nanny keeps watch as children play in the window at Luna y Cielo Play Cafe, where they practice and learn Spanish through play, in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

The statement said that in Logan Square, agents deployed tear gas along with pepper balls “after repeated vocal attempts to disperse the crowd.”

Oliva-Perez was feet away on the sidewalk and didn’t hear them say anything. Videos show cars and the scooter trying to block the SUV, and a few pedestrians heckling the officers.

Oliva-Perez ran toward the school, yelling at staff to get the children inside.

“It really shook me,” she said. “Here I am, a U.S. citizen, a teacher, and I got treated like a common criminal.”

She was shaking when she got to her classroom of 25 students, who wanted to know what just happened. All of them are Hispanic. She knows they are having agonizing conversations at home — who they’ll call if their parents disappear, where they’ll go. Oliva-Perez became a teacher six years ago, after her daughter died by suicide at 16 years old. She wanted to help kids feel loved and safe. She never had a harder time than on that afternoon.

“I had to act like nothing was wrong,” she said. “I don’t want them to be like, if Ms. Oliva is scared then I’m going to be scared too.”

She and the other teachers spent the afternoon telling the children that everything was fine. But each dreaded the bell at the end of the day. They’d have to lead the students outside, and they didn’t know what would be waiting: Masked men? More tear gas?

First grade teacher Maria Heavener spread the word in community group chats that the school needed help.

When the final bell rang, she walked her students outside. In every direction, neighbors lined the sidewalk, dozens of them. There were people who’d never considered themselves activists, or even particularly political, standing there, enraged, scanning the streets for unmarked SUVs and masked men. They signed up to come back every morning and afternoon.

“You don’t mess with the kids. You don’t go near the schools,” Heavener said. “Whatever your agenda is, that feels like it’s crossing a lot of lines.”

‘Our skin color defines us’

Two little boys walking by Evelyn Medina’s gift shop next door to the school gripped each other so tightly their fingers dug into each other’s hands.

“They were so scared,” said Medina, who cries when she thinks about how they looked leaving school that day. “It was really hard to see, imagining what’s going on in their little minds.”

Medina, a 43-year-old citizen, understands the fear these children face: She came to the U.S. from Mexico at age 8. As a child, she worried someone would take her parents away.

She noticed people picking up multiple children that day, for their friends and neighbors who were too afraid to leave their houses. One parent packed seven children into a minivan. A 13-year-old girl wept when she saw a neighbor there to get her. Her mother usually comes for her, but not that day.

When that girl got home, she told her mother she thought the house might be empty, that agents might have been there and taken her away.

Her mother does not have permanent legal status and asked that her name not be used out of fear of being targeted for deportation. Her greatest fear is being separated from her children.

This fear coursing through this community is no longer reserved for families lacking permanent legal status.

One mother, whose 12-year-old son was in the school that day, now jolts awake each morning at 4 a.m., her head pounding, her heart racing. She checks social media frequently for reports of people spotting Border Patrol or ICE: another tear gassing; another raid; a 15-year-boy, an American citizen, detained.

She and her son are citizens, but she asked that only her first name, Ava, be used because she’s scared that their citizenship won’t matter.

“Our skin color defines us,” she said.

Her son cries constantly, “I don’t want to lose my grandparents.”

He’s offered to get them groceries so they can stay inside. She’s struggling with how to balance letting him help without burdening him and without making him grow up too quickly.

“Losing them, it would forever break him apart,” she said. “His question is always: why? Why?

“I don’t know why.”

‘We’ll always be targeted’

Vanessa Aguirre-Ávalos keeps the door locked now at Luna y Cielo, and she wears her whistle like a necklace, always at the ready.

When she hears a car horn honk, she panics. Is it happening again?

That day, she ran in and out of her shop, bringing milk and vinegar to help people clean the tear gas and pepper residue from their faces. She coughed for two days.

A bus drops a passenger off, across the street from Funston Elementary School in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

Her neighborhood has become a symbol for what happens when children get caught in the fray of aggressive, sometimes violent federal actions. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, spoke outside of the school a few days later: “In order to educate children, we have to protect them. We have to create a safe and welcoming environment. That is who we are as educators. That is who educators have always been.”

Now, every utility pole is plastered with anti-ICE stickers and instructions for what to do if detained. “ICE TEAR GASSED THIS NEIGHBORHOOD,” reads one. “No one is safe unless we all are.”

Aguirre-Ávalos, who grew up in this neighborhood, was born in Texas to a mother from Mexico, and she’s considering moving there. It’s hard for her to imagine a future in Chicago or anywhere else the U.S. for her children, an 8-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter.

“They don’t want us here,” Aguirre-Ávalos said of her own government. “We’ll always be targeted.”

She opened Luna y Cielo two years ago to be a fun place for children to learn Spanish, to help the next generation learn to love the language. Her business is suffering now; she’s not sure she can make this month’s rent.

People are staying inside, their curtains drawn. Playgrounds are quiet. The vendor who sold ice cream on her corner doesn’t come out anymore. Everyone is scared.

She scheduled a guided journaling session with parents. She’s bringing in a Spanish-speaking therapist to talk to the nannies.

‘This is not living’

One of the nannies, who watches two young sisters, doesn’t wear pajamas to bed anymore. She sleeps in her clothes, unable to get a full night’s rest.

“This is not a life. This is not living,” she said.

She wakes up every morning by 4 a.m., and she drops to her knees to pray.

She is the grandmother of five and great-grandmother to two, and legally allowed to work in the U.S. She spoke on the condition that her name not be used because she worries about what could happen to her and her family, as well as the 2-year-old and 3-year-old she cares for.

A girl touches her grandmother’s hand inside Luna y Cielo Play Cafe where children learn and practice the Spanish language through play in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

“If I’m walking with them and they grab me, what do I do?” she asked. “I can’t leave them alone.”

She has not been this afraid in 31 years, since she fled from El Salvador to escape war and violence.

“We already lived this war once,” said her friend, the nanny who looks after two brothers.

That nanny left Guatemala 33 years ago, also to escape war and the constant threat of danger.

She’s a U.S. citizen and always carries her passport now. She asked that she not be named because some of her relatives aren’t legal residents. She helps pay rent and buy groceries for a second family because they’re too afraid to go to work.

She’s scared that immigration agents could grab her when she has the boys. She didn’t want them to see her cry on Oct. 3. But once the boys were home, she got in her car and wept.

She drove to her church, lit a candle and prayed.

She asked God to protect all the immigrants, and all the children.

Associated Press reporter Sophia Tareen, photographer Rebecca Blackwell and videographer Laura Bargfeld contributed to this report.

The AP’s education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Feds: St. Paul man put $45K hit on Pam Bondi in TikTok post

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A St. Paul man faces a federal felony charge for allegedly putting a $45,000 hit on U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in a TikTok post.

Tyler Maxon Avalos, 29, is charged in U.S. District Court of Minnesota with making a threat with the intent to injure in connection with his alleged post, which included a caption that read, “WANTED: Pam Bondi / REWARD: 45,000 / DEAD OR ALIVE (Preferably Dead).”

It included a photo of Bondi with a sniper-scope red dot on her forehead. Under the photo, Avalos allegedly wrote: “cough cough / when they don’t serve us, then what?”

A TikiTok user from Detroit saw the post and reported it to the FBI National Threat Operations Center on Oct. 9.

Avalos’ TikTok page, which has since been deleted, included an anarchist FAQ book and the spelling of “wacko” with an anarchist symbol for the second letter, the complaint said.

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Avalos was arrested Oct. 16 and went before a judge Oct. 22. He was released the same day on a personal recognizance bond, with conditions including wearing a GPS monitoring device and staying off computers and the internet.

Avalos is “not guilty of any crime,” his attorney Daniel Gerdts said Tuesday, adding he has yet to be indicted by a grand jury, which in federal court is required for felonies to move forward. “Our hope is that the grand jury would reject this frivolous charge.”

When asked about the post, Gerdts said, “No reasonable person would consider that a true threat.”

Minnesota court records show Avalos has been on supervised probation since July 2022 after pleading guilty to felony harassment for assaulting his then-girlfriend in Eagan. In April 2016, he was convicted of misdemeanor domestic assault.

Bill Gates calls for climate fight to shift focus from curbing emissions to reducing human suffering

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By JENNIFER McDERMOTT

NEW YORK (AP) — Bill Gates thinks climate change is a serious problem but it won’t be the end of civilization. He thinks scientific innovation will curb it, and it’s instead time for a “strategic pivot” in the global climate fight: from focusing on limiting rising temperatures to fighting poverty and preventing disease.

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A doomsday outlook has led the climate community to focus too much on near-term goals to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that cause warming, diverting resources from the most effective things that can be done to improve life in a warming world, Gates said. In a memo released Tuesday, Gates said the world’s primary goal should instead be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions in the world’s poorest countries.

If given a choice between eradicating malaria and a tenth of a degree increase in warming, Gates told reporters, “I’ll let the temperature go up 0.1 degree to get rid of malaria. People don’t understand the suffering that exists today.”

The Microsoft co-founder spends most of his time now on the goals of the Gates Foundation, which has poured tens of billions of dollars into health care, education and development initiatives worldwide, including combating HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. He started Breakthrough Energy in 2015 to speed up innovation in clean energy.

He wrote his 17-page memo hoping to have an impact on next month’s United Nations climate change conference in Brazil. He’s urging world leaders to ask whether the little money designated for climate is being spent on the right things.

Gates, whose foundation provides financial support for Associated Press coverage of health and development in Africa, is influential in the climate change conversation. He expects his “tough truths about climate” memo will be controversial.

“If you think climate is not important, you won’t agree with the memo. If you think climate is the only cause and apocalyptic, you won’t agree with the memo,” Gates said during a roundtable discussion with reporters ahead of the release. “It’s kind of this pragmatic view of somebody who’s, you know, trying to maximize the money and the innovation that goes to help in these poor countries.”

Climate scientists say every fraction of a degree of warming matters

Every bit of additional warming correlates to more extreme weather, risks species extinction and brings the world closer to crossing tipping points where changes become irreversible, scientists say.

University of Washington public health and climate scientist Kristie Ebi said she thoroughly agrees with Gates that the U.N. negotiations should focus on improving human health and well-being. But, she said, Gates assumes the world stays static and only one variable changes — faster deployment of green technologies — to curb climate change. She called that unlikely.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, called the memo “pointless, vague, unhelpful and confusing.”

“There is no reason to pit poverty reduction versus climate transformation. Both are utterly feasible, and readily so, if the Big Oil lobby is brought under control,” he wrote in an email.

Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field said there is room for a healthy discussion about whether the current framing of the climate crisis is typically too pessimistic.

“But we should also invest for both the long term and the short term,” he wrote in an email. “A vibrant long-term future depends on both tackling climate change and supporting human development.”

Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said he doesn’t dispute the principle of making human well-being the primary objective of policy, but what about the natural world?

FILE – Residents embrace outside of a burning property as the Eaton Fire swept through Jan. 8, 2025, in Altadena, Calif. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope, File)

“Climate change is already wreaking havoc there,” he wrote in an email. “Can we truly live in a technological bubble? Do we want to?”

Gates is clear in his memo that every tenth of a degree of warming matters: “A stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.”

Carbon dioxide pollution is increasing

A decade ago, the world agreed in a historic pact known as the Paris agreement to try to limit human-caused warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since pre-industrial times. The goal: to stave off nastier heat waves, wildfires, storms and droughts.

In a 2021 book, Gates laid out a plan for reducing emissions to avoid a climate disaster. But humans are on track to release so much greenhouse gas by early 2028 that scientists say crossing that 1.5-degree threshold is now nearly unavoidable.

Breakthrough Energy focuses on areas where the cost of doing something cleanly is much higher than the polluting way, such as making clean steel and cement. Gates concluded his memo by saying governments should work toward driving this difference to zero, and be rigorous about measuring the impact of every effort in the world’s climate agenda.

Gates is optimistic innovation will curb climate change

Gates said the pace of innovation in clean energy has been faster than he expected, allowing cheap solar and wind energy to replace coal, oil and natural gas plants for electricity and averting worst-case warming scenarios. Artificial intelligence is helping accelerate advances in clean energy technologies, he added.

At the same time, money to help developing countries adapt to climate change is shrinking. Led by the United States, rich countries are cutting their foreign aid budgets. President Donald Trump has called climate change a hoax.

Gates criticized the aid cuts. He said Gavi, a public-private partnership started by his philanthropic foundation that buys vaccines, will have 25% less money for the next five years compared to the past five years. Gavi can save a life for a little more than $1,000, he added.

Vaccines become even more important in a warming world because children who aren’t dying of measles or whooping cough will be more likely to survive when a heat wave hits or a drought threatens the local food supply, he wrote.

Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change, Gates said, citing research from the University of Chicago Climate Impact Lab that found projected deaths from climate change fall by more than 50% when accounting for the expected economic growth over the rest of this century.

Under these circumstances, he thinks the bar must be “very high” for what’s funded with aid money.

“If you have something that gets rid of 10,000 tons of emissions, that you’re spending several million dollars on,” he said, “that just doesn’t make the cut.”

AP writer Seth Borenstein in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.