By KEVIN FREKING, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s pick to lead an office charged with protecting federal whistleblowers appeared to be in jeopardy on Tuesday after Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he hoped the White House would withdraw the nomination.

The growing opposition to Paul Ingrassia comes after a Politico report of a text chat that showed him saying the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell.” Ingrassia also described himself in the chat as having “a Nazi streak” at times.

“He’s not going to pass,” Thune told reporters.

Two Republicans who serve on the committee with jurisdiction over the nomination for the Office of Special Counsel job, Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, said they do not support Ingrassia’s confirmation.

“I’m a no. It never should have got this far,” Johnson said Tuesday. “They ought to pull the nomination.”

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Republicans have been able to muscle through the vast majority of Trump’s nominees in roll call votes despite stiff Democratic opposition. But there have been sporadic instances when Republicans have pushed back, generally behind the scenes, showing there are limits to their support.

Most notably, Matt Gaetz withdrew as Trump’s first choice for attorney general soon after being tabbed for the job. In May, Trump pulled his nomination of Ed Martin Jr. to be the top federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital, bowing to bipartisan concerns about the conservative activist’s modest legal experience and support for Jan. 6 rioters. And last month, the White House announced it would be withdrawing the nomination of E.J. Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni was supposed to succeed a BLS director who was fired following a disappointing jobs report.

According to texts viewed by Politico, Ingrassia told those in the chat that “MLK Jr. was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs.” Politico also spoke to Ingrassia’s lawyer, who said the text messages might have been manipulated or were missing context. The lawyer did not confirm the texts were authentic.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Ingrassia’s texts, if authentic, were “foul and disqualifying” He said Trump should pull the nomination of Ingrassia, who works as the White House liaison for Homeland Security.

“He should be fired from his current job within the administration,” Schumer said after reading some of the text messages on the Senate floor. “And he should never hold a position of leadership within the Republican Party or the government ever again.”

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is scheduled to hear from Ingrassia on Thursday. It was unclear if anything on that front has changed with the panel’s chairman, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., saying “we’re going to know more on Thursday.”

The Office of Special Counsel is an investigative and prosecutorial office that works to protect government employees and whistleblowers from retaliation for reporting wrongdoing. It’s also responsible for enforcing the Hatch Act, which restricts the partisan political activities of government workers.

The office, now under the leadership of acting Director Jamieson Greer, confirmed in August that it was investigating former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith on allegations his investigation into Trump constituted political activity. Smith’s lawyers have said the investigation was “wholly without merit,” based on an “imaginary and unfounded” premise.

In May, Trump described Ingrassia in a social media post as a “highly respected attorney, writer and Constitutional Scholar.”

Ingrassia briefly served in the White House liaison position at the Justice Department. He’s also a former right-wing podcast host who promoted the false claim that the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden, was rigged.

By María G. Ortiz-Briones, The Fresno Bee

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has made changes to the naturalization civics test that will make it more challenging for immigrants to obtain their U.S. citizenship.

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The changes are part of the federal agency’s ongoing effort to overhaul the legal immigration naturalization process.

“These critical changes are the first of many,” said USCIS Spokesperson Matthew Tragesser.

USCIS posted in September a Federal Register notice about the implementation of the 2025 Naturalization Civics Test.

The implementation of the new test is part of President Trump’s executive order to protect the U.S. from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats signed when he took office, according to USCIS.

Immigrants who file their naturalization application Form N-400 on or after Oct. 20 will take the tougher 2025 Naturalization Civics Test. According to USCIS, the new test will better assess applicants’ knowledge and understanding of U.S. history and government.

The new test is based on the 2020 test with some modifications to how the test is administered by USCIS officers.

What to know about the 2025 Naturalization Civics Test

The new civics test increased the number of potential civics test questions from 100 to 128.

The number of test questions on the exam rose from 10 to 20.

The number of correct answers needed to pass the civics test increased from 6 answers to 12.

Starting Monday, applicants who submitted citizenship applications must answer 12 questions correctly out of the 20 questions asked by a USCIS officer during their citizenship interview appointment.

According to USCIS, a computer-generated list of 20 questions is selected randomly from the bank of 128 questions.

Citizen candidates during a naturalization ceremony held at Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park to commemorate Constitution Day and Citizenship Day on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025. (María G. Ortiz-Briones/Fresno Bee/TNS)

Officers will only be required to ask questions until an applicant either passes or fails the test. So, if an applicant answers 12 questions correctly, the officer will stop administering the test. Similarly, when an applicant answers nine questions incorrectly and fails the test, the officer will stop administering the questions.

USCIS will update the Naturalization Test and Study Materials and Resources for Educational Programs that applicants may consult to study for the test.

Immigrants who already had filed a naturalization application or who applied before the Oct. 20 filing date will take the 2008 Naturalization Civics Test. USCIS will temporarily retain on its website the study materials for the 2008 Naturalization Civics Test to help immigrants prepare for the civic test.

The notice does not change the English language proficiency parts of the naturalization test including reading, writing, speaking, and understanding.

In the past months the USCIS has made several changes to the naturalization process including a robust vetting for all immigrants and stricter reviews of disability exceptions to the English and civics requirements. It also provided its officers guidance for immigrants’ good moral character and resumed neighborhood investigation.

©2025 The Fresno Bee. Visit fresnobee.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Olivia Carville, Bloomberg News

Thousands of plaintiffs’ complaints, millions of pages of internal documents and transcripts of countless hours of depositions are about to land in U.S. courtrooms, threatening the future of the biggest social media companies.

The blizzard of paperwork is a byproduct of two consolidated lawsuits accusing Snap Inc.’s Snapchat; Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram; ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok; and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube of knowingly designing their platforms to addict users — allegedly resulting in youth depression, anxiety, insomnia, eating disorders, self-harm and even suicide.

The litigation, brewing for more than three years, has had to overcome numerous hurdles, including the liability shield that has protected social media platforms from facing user-harm lawsuits. The social media companies have filed multiple motions to dismiss the cases on the grounds that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act prevents them from being held accountable for content posted on their sites.

Those motions have been largely unsuccessful, and courtrooms across the country are poised to open their doors for the first time to the alleged victims of social media. The vast majority of cases have been folded into two multijurisdictional proceedings, one in state and the other in federal court, to streamline the pretrial discovery process.

The first bellwether trial is scheduled to begin in Los Angeles Superior Court in late January. It involves a 19-year-old woman from Chico, California, who says she’s been addicted to social media for more than a decade and that her nonstop use of the platforms has caused anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia. Two other trials will follow soon after, with thousands more waiting in the wings. If successful, these cases could result in multibillion-dollar settlements — akin to tobacco and opioid litigation — and change the way minors interact with social media.

“This is going to be one of the most impactful litigations of our lifetime,” said Joseph VanZandt, an attorney at Beasley Allen Law Firm in Montgomery, Alabama, and co-lead plaintiffs’ attorney for the coordinated state cases. “This is about large corporations targeting vulnerable populations — children — for profit. That’s what we saw with the tobacco companies; they were also targeting adolescents and trying to get them addicted while they were young.”

Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center in Seattle, makes a similar comparison to tobacco litigation in the Bloomberg documentary Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media. “In the case of Facebook, you have internal documents saying ‘tweens are herd animals,’ ‘kids have an addict’s narrative’ and ‘our products make girls feel worse about themselves.’ You have the same kind of corporate misconduct,” Bergman says in the film, which will be available to view on Bloomberg’s platforms on October 30.

Bergman’s firm was the first to file user-harm cases against social media companies, in 2022, after Frances Haugen, a former Meta product manager-turned-whistleblower, released a trove of internal documents showing the company knew social media was negatively impacting youth mental health. The first case, which is part of the consolidated federal litigation, alleged that an 11-year-old Connecticut girl killed herself after suffering from extreme social media addiction and sexual exploitation by online predators.

What set that case apart was how it got around Section 230’s immunity blanket. Bergman argued that his case wasn’t about third-party content, which the federal law protects. Instead, he said it hinged on the way social media companies were intentionally designing their products to prioritize engagement and profit over safety.

Since then, thousands of personal injury lawsuits alleging similar youth mental health harms have been filed. Almost 4,000 have been folded into the multijurisdictional proceedings — more than a quarter of them from the Social Media Victims Law Center. They have been joined by more than 1,000 school districts and about three-quarters of all U.S. state attorneys general. Some lawsuits, including one filed by New Mexico’s attorney general, are proceeding outside the framework of the consolidated cases and are also expected to go to trial early next year.

“All told, this is a massive legal siege on the social media industry,” said Previn Warren, a Washington-based lawyer at Motley Rice who is co-leading the federal cases. “We are the first major litigation to convince the court system that actually there are systemic wrongs on these platforms that victims should be compensated for. When the public becomes aware of the scale of evidence, I suspect that will have an impact on how they perceive their relationship — and their kids’ relationships — to social media.”

The pretrial discovery process closed in April, with the four defendants handing over more than six million documents and submitting to 150 depositions, including that of Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. In addition, more than 100 child psychologists, academics and experts have offered evidence.

The companies sought to bar all of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses in the state cases from testifying, arguing that they’re unreliable, cherry-pick from studies and over-extrapolate from data. That argument failed in state court in late September, with all but one of the proposed witnesses allowed to testify.

The defendants also filed a motion for summary judgment in state court in August, arguing that the plaintiffs haven’t produced enough evidence to warrant a trial. The companies said the plaintiffs hadn’t shown that mental health harms were caused by social media and that some of the claims, which stretch back to when the plaintiffs first started using social media, should be barred outright by California’s statute of limitations.

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“These lawsuits fundamentally misunderstand how YouTube works, and the allegations are simply not true,” José Castañeda, a spokesperson for the company, said in an email. “YouTube is a streaming service where people come to watch everything from live sports to podcasts to their favorite creators, primarily on TV screens, not a social network where people go to catch up with friends.”

A Meta spokesperson said the company disagreed with the allegations raised in the lawsuits and pointed to safety tools the company has rolled out to support its youngest users, including limiting who teens can connect with and the content they see. “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously in these cases,” the spokesperson said.

Snap and TikTok didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who is presiding over the consolidated state cases, is expected to rule on the summary judgment motion in the coming weeks. Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, a U.S. district court judge in Oakland, California, is overseeing the federal litigation. The first federal trial, in a case filed by a school district in Kentucky, is set to kick off in June.

©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Julia Marnin, The Sacramento Bee

The Department of Homeland Security says immigration officers are arresting accused criminals, the “worst of the worst.” But a federal lawsuit argues authorities are regularly jailing and deporting immigrants who are survivors of human trafficking, domestic abuse and other crimes.

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The lawsuit filed in Los Angeles federal court on Oct. 14 says that a new U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement policy disregards legal protections previously established by Congress to protect immigrant crime survivors and allows ICE to detain and deport them even when they have been granted formal permission to stay in the U.S.

ICE is also targeting immigrant crime survivors who have pending applications for protections, according to a 76-page complaint.

In a statement to McClatchy News on Oct. 20, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin referred to the lawsuit’s accusations as “clickbait,” adding that “Every illegal alien ICE removes has had due process and has a final order of removal — meaning they have no legal right to be in the country.”

The Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, one of the organizations representing eight individual plaintiffs, said in a news release that ICE’s new policy is “dehumanizing, unjust, and illegal” and “enables the widespread jailing and deportation of immigrant survivors.”

“The 2025 guidance reverses course from decades of agency practice under which immigration agencies generally refrained against enforcement against survivors of serious crime, unless warranted by adverse factors,” attorneys for the lawsuit wrote in the complaint.

According to the lawsuit, ICE’s new policy violates measures that were put in place by Congress to allow immigrant crime survivors to pursue legal status under the Violence Against Women Act, the “U visa,” and the “T visa.”

The Violence Against Women Act allows domestic violence survivors to petition for immigrant visas, the complaint notes. The U visa lets victims of serious crimes who help authorities in the investigation of those crimes apply for legal status. The T visa grants legal status, known as “survivor-based benefits,” to labor or sex trafficking survivors.

Plaintiff Jackie Merlos, 48, applied for a U visa, then received permission to stay in the U.S. in December 2024 after she and her husband were held at gunpoint outside their home in Portland, Oregon in June 2023, the complaint says.

Merlos, who is from Honduras, has lived in the U.S. for 22 years and is a mother of four U.S. citizen children, a 7-year-old and 9-year-old triplets, according to the complaint.

She is on deferred action status, meaning she is allowed in the U.S. for a certain period of time, the complaint says.

Despite this, ICE is detaining her at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, and refusing to release her from its custody, according to her attorneys.

Merlos has been in immigration detention since June 2025, when she had a family reunion with her parents, who were visiting from Honduras on a visa, and her sister’s family, at a park near the Canadian border, according to the complaint.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection arrived at the park and detained everyone, including Merlos, her children and her 71-year-old mother, according to the complaint.

CBP let Merlos’ sister, who legally lives in Canada, go a day later, the complaint says.

Merlos and her children were detained together in CBP custody for two weeks before she was separately transferred to ICE custody in July, according to the filing.

In a statement, Merlos said: “As the agent was processing us, as my children were sobbing, he said to us, ‘Do you know why you’re here? Because you are a criminal.’”

Merlos remains detained, without her children, and fears her husband has since been deported, the complaint says.

Her children are now being cared for by a friend, according to the National Immigration Law Center, which is advocating for her release.

So is Oregon Congresswoman Maxine Dexter, who said in an Oct. 16 news release that an immigration judge has terminated Merlos’ deportation proceedings, acknowledging that there is no reason for her to stay in ICE custody.

“Thanks to immense public pressure and a community that refused to stay silent, we not only stopped Jackie’s deportation and freed her children, but we also secured a ruling that there is no legal basis for ICE to detain or deport Jackie,” Dexter said in a statement.

“However, Jackie’s fight is not over,” Dexter added.

Merlos and the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit are also represented by Public Counsel, La Raza Centro Legal and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

The lawsuit seeks to secure the release for all plaintiffs in ICE custody, and for the return of plaintiffs who have been removed from the U.S.

“Now, because of this administration’s unlawful actions, immigrants are not reporting violent crimes, including domestic violence, rape, trafficking, and assault, out of fear of being turned over to the deportation machine,” Rebecca Brown, a supervising attorney in Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.

“Worse still, survivors are being separated from their families — and in some cases being sent straight back to their abusers,” Brown added.

©2025 The Sacramento Bee. Visit at sacbee.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.