Last December, Gophers star defensive end Anthony Smith told the Pioneer Press his goal was to be a first-round pick in the 2026 NFL draft.

“Being in the green room and my name being called, literally, the first day,” Smith said before the playing in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.

The conventional wisdom was the Battle for Paul Bunyan’s Axe against Wisconsin on Saturday would be his final regular-season game, but the redshirt junior was not bidding farewell when asked about his future in Wednesday’s news conference. The Shippensburg, Pa., native has one more year of eligibility remaining for next fall and appears to be contemplating using it.

“I don’t know yet,” Smith said Wednesday. “I got to focus on this week. Like always, my goal has been to go to the NFL, whenever that happens.”

Smith was then asked a similar question on whether he will walk on Senior Day at Huntington Bank Stadium. He was noncommittal on participating in those festivities Saturday, which are not a guarantee on whether a player is coming back or not.

Smith has been considered the only candidate to potentially continue the Gophers’ streak of having a first- or second-round pick in six straight drafts since 2020. But his stock might be slipping; he was left off The Athletic’s list of Top 50 draft candidates earlier this fall.

At 6-foot-6 and 285 pounds, Smith has a Big Ten-leading 10 1/2 sacks in 11 games as well as 37 total pressures, according to Pro Football Focus. But his season has been up and down, including a season-low 40.9 overall grade from PFF in the 38-35 defeat to Northwestern last Saturday.

One litmus test for draft stock is how a player performs against the best of the best, and Smith did not show out against Ohio State (zero pressures), Iowa (one pressure) and Oregon (two pressures and one sack).

If Smith does return for next fall, it would be a big boost for the Gophers D-line. Minnesota will lose a handful of key interior linemen, including fifth-year senior tackle Devein Eastern, sixth-year tackle Jalen Logan-Redding and sixth-year tackle Rushawn Lawrence.

That trio has run out of eligibility, but it’s wait and see on Smith.

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By MICHAEL R. SISAK and LARRY NEUMEISTER

NEW YORK (AP) — As the Justice Department gets ready to release its files on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, a court battle over sealed documents in Maxwell’s criminal case is offering clues about what could be in those files.

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Government lawyers asked a judge on Wednesday to allow the release of a wide range of records from Maxwell’s case, including search warrants, financial records, survivor interview notes, electronic device data and material from earlier Epstein investigations in Florida.

Those records, among others, are subject to secrecy orders that the Justice Department wants lifted as it works to comply with a new law mandating the public release of Epstein and Maxwell investigative materials.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump last week.

The Justice Department submitted the list a day after U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer in New York ordered the government to specify what materials it plans to publicly release from Maxwell’s case.

The government said it is conferring with survivors and their lawyers and that it will redact records to ensure protection of survivors’ identities and prevent the dissemination of sexualized images.

“In summary, the Government is in the process of identifying potentially responsive materials” that are required to be disclosed under the law, “categorizing them and processing them for review,” the department said.

The four-page filing bears the names of the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Jay Clayton, along with Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

FILE – In this July 30, 2008, file photo, Jeffrey Epstein, center, appears in court in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Uma Sanghvi/The Palm Beach Post via AP, File)

Also Wednesday, a judge weighing a similar request for materials from Epstein’s 2019 sex trafficking case gave the department until Monday 1 to provide detailed descriptions the records it wants made public. U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman said he will review the material in private before deciding.

In August, Berman and Engelmayer denied the department’s requests to unseal grand jury transcripts and other material from Epstein and Maxwell’s cases, ruling that such disclosures are rarely, if ever, allowed.

The department asked the judges this week to reconsider, arguing in court filings that the new law requires the government to “publish the grand jury and discovery materials” from the cases. The law requires the release of Epstein-related files in a searchable format by Dec. 19.

FILE — Audrey Strauss, Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, speaks during a news conference to announce charges against Ghislaine Maxwell for her alleged role in the sexual exploitation and abuse of multiple minor girls by Jeffrey Epstein, July 2, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

Epstein was a millionaire money manager known for socializing with celebrities, politicians and other powerful men. He killed himself in jail a month after his 2019 arrest. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking for luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

In initial filings Monday, the Justice Department characterized the material it wants unsealed in broad terms, describing it as “grand jury transcripts and exhibits.” Engelmayer ordered the government to file a letter describing the materials “in sufficient detail to meaningfully inform victims” what it plans to make public.

Engelmayer did not preside over Maxwell’s trial, but was assigned to the case after the trial judge, Alison J. Nathan, was elevated to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Tens of thousands of pages of records pertaining to Epstein and Maxwell have already been released over the years, including through civil lawsuits, public disclosures and Freedom of Information Act requests.

In its filing Wednesday, the Justice Department listed 18 categories of material that it is seeking to release from Maxwell’s case, including reports, photographs, videos and other materials from police in Palm Beach, Florida, and the U.S. attorney’s office there, both of which investigated Epstein in the mid-2000s.

Last year, a Florida judge ordered the release of about 150 pages of transcripts from a state grand jury that investigated Epstein in 2006. Last week, citing the new law, the Justice Department moved to unseal transcripts from a federal grand jury that also investigated Epstein.

That investigation ended in 2008 with a then-secret arrangement that allowed Epstein to avoid federal charges by pleading guilty to a state prostitution charge. He served 13 months in a jail work-release program. The request to unseal the transcripts is pending.

“The young people enduring these conditions are overwhelmingly low-income and from communities of color. Their suffering is not inevitable, and the city has immediate options it could act on today to improve conditions.”

Basketball courts at Crossroads Juvenile Center, in Brownsville, Brooklyn. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

In the richest city in America, with a $116 billion budget, about 100 children are locked in city custody at youth detention centers without beds to sleep in or rooms of their own. They haven’t been convicted of a crime—only accused—and under the law they are presumed innocent. Yet the inhumane conditions they endure make clear they are being treated as if they are beneath the law, while the city shows little appetite to fix it. 

At any given time, a third of young people in the custody of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), New York City’s child welfare agency that operates the youth detention facilities, has no assigned room. They sleep in classrooms, hallways, or visiting areas—spaces unfit for anyone, let alone vulnerable youth. Many are merely provided plastic cots commonly referred to as “boats,” some directly on the floor, and are moved late at night and awakened by 5 a.m., exhausted, disoriented, and still without a place to rest or any sense of safety or stability. 

The environment is filthy and chaotic. Rodents and vermin scurry across the floors. A therapist from Bellevue Juvenile Justice Mental Health Services, which serves youth in these facilities, recently testified in a Bronx trial case that the environment is “very chaotic. It’s a pretty dangerous space. It’s very dirty. It’s unpredictable. It’s loud. There’s absolutely no consistency. There’s a lot going on. There’s—my word would be chaotic at all times. It’s unsafe. There’s nothing normal or comfortable about it.”

The stress of overcrowding has created an uptick in violence. The mayor’s own Management Report acknowledges that “a significant increase in population in a limited space [has] presented additional stressors on the detention environment.” In recent weeks alone, one teen required 70 stitches to his face after being attacked without supervision. Others have been hospitalized with broken bones and stab wounds. Some fights reportedly erupt over the most basic resource of all —a mattress. 

ACS does not always tell families or lawyers when a child is hurt, further deepening their isolation. Because common areas double as sleeping spaces, education and programming—the very things that are supposed to distinguish youth detention from adult facilities—are constantly disrupted. New York law mandates schooling for detained youth, but ACS often fails to deliver even that. 

This is not new. Reports of overcrowding and inhumane conditions date back at least two years. Yet ACS’ response has been to seek state waivers from the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, which has unconditionally approved the requests despite knowing full well the conditions in the facilities. The waivers allow ACS to ignore critical housing regulations instead of fixing the problem. The agency has even floated transferring youth to Rikers Island, a facility mired in a full-fledged humanitarian crisis and soon to be placed under outside receivership, as if that were an acceptable solution. 

Let’s be clear: if these were the children of affluent families, this crisis would have been resolved long ago. The young people enduring these conditions are overwhelmingly low-income and from communities of color. Their suffering is not inevitable, and the city has immediate options it could act on today to improve conditions, including: 

Immediately reducing the population in these facilities by providing community-based alternatives to detention; 

limiting the duration of displacement for youth without a room;  

ensuring access to education and programming for all youth; 

providing secure storage for personal belongings;  

publicly reporting data on youth housing status and facility conditions; and  

notifying parents, guardians, and attorneys within 48 hours when a youth lacks assigned housing or is denied programming. 

New York City cannot continue to warehouse kids like luggage in its detention centers. These are children who deserve safety, education, and a chance to grow into some better than what the system is currently offering them. 

Dawne Mitchell is the chief attorney of the Juvenile Rights Practice at The Legal Aid Society.

The post Opinion: Addressing ‘Chaotic’ Conditions at NYC’s Youth Detention Centers appeared first on City Limits.

By HOLLY RAMER

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A Massachusetts woman who was once engaged to the brother of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt remains in ICE custody two weeks after being arrested on her way to pick up the son she shares with her former fiancé.

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Bruna Ferreira, 33, was driving to her son’s school in New Hampshire on Nov. 12 when she was pulled over in Revere, Massachusetts, her attorney, Todd Pomerleau, said Wednesday.

“She wasn’t told why she was detained,” he said. “She was bounced from Massachusetts, to New Hampshire, to Vermont, to Louisiana on this unconstitutional merry-go-round.”

Pomerleau said Ferreira’s 11-year-old son lives with her former fiancé, Michael Leavitt, in New Hampshire, but they have shared custody and maintained a co-parenting relationship for many years since their engagement broke off.

“She was detained for no reason at all. She’s not dangerous. She’s not a flight risk. She’s not a criminal illegal alien,” he said. “She’s a business owner who pays taxes and has a child who was wondering where mommy was after school two weeks ago.”

Michael Leavitt did not respond to a message sent to his workplace. The White House press secretary declined comment. Karoline Leavitt grew up in New Hampshire, and made an unsuccessful run for Congress from the state in 2022 before becoming Trump’s spokesperson for his 2024 campaign and later joining him at the White House.

Pomerleau said his client was 2 or 3 when she and her family came to the U.S. from Brazil, and she later enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the Obama-era policy that shields immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. He said she was in the process of applying for a green card.

The Department of Homeland Security said Ferreira entered the U.S. on a tourist visa that required her to leave in 1999. A department spokesperson said Ferreira had a previous arrest for battery, an allegation her attorney denied.

An online search of court cases in several Massachusetts locations where she has lived found no record of such a charge.

“They’re claiming she has some type of criminal record we’ve seen nowhere. Show us the proof,” Pomerleau said. “She would’ve been deported years ago if that was true. And yet, here she is in the middle of this immigration imbroglio.”

A DHS spokesperson confirmed Ferreira is being held in Louisiana.

President Donald Trump’s efforts to broadly reshape immigration policy have included changing the approach to DACA recipients. Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin recently issued a statement saying that people “who claim to be recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) are not automatically protected from deportations. DACA does not confer any form of legal status in this country.”