February 21, 2026 at 3:37 PM EST
'She prayed for you': Florida Trump voter pleads for return of wife 'kidnapped' by feds

Wayne DeMario, a Florida Republican who voted for President Donald Trump, on Friday delivered a "desperate plea" to the president to return his wife, Yamile Alcantu, who's been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for eight months. "Please get her home," DeMario told Local10 on Friday. "Please, she does not deserve this. She is the sweetest person, and she prayed for you." DeMario, a small business owner in Miami-Dade county, told Local10 he and his wife were Trump supporters prior to their ordeal. According to DeMario, Alcantu, who Local10 reports "moved to the U.S. from Cuba 25 years ago through a Visa Lottery," had "a minor run-in with the law during a traffic stop" back in 2008. "They go through her purse, and then they dump the purse out, and three Xanax pills fall out," DeMario explained. His wife has checked in annually with ICE "for years," Local10 reports. In June, things changed. "They grabbed her, put her in shackles and chains," DeMario said, likening her detention to being "kidnapped." "ICE held her at a detention center in Jacksonville and moved her to Louisiana," Local10 reports. "I really thought this was just going to be something more organized, but it's obviously not," DeMario told the outlet. "They just blanket everybody."

February 21, 2026 at 2:38 PM EST
'Head scratcher': Trump aides struggle to spend $500 billion more the military asked for

A stunning report in the Washington Post on Saturday reveals aides for President Donald Trump are running into "logistical challenges" surrounding how the U.S. military can spend "a whopping $500 billion in their forthcoming budget." According to four people who spoke with the Post, after Trump "agreed to a roughly 50 percent funding boost sought by" Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, White House aides and defense officials struggled with "where to put the money, because the amount is so large." Per the Post, "The White House is more than two weeks behind its statutory deadline to send its budget proposal to Congress, in part because it is unclear how precisely to spend the additional $500 billion." As the Post reports, "senior Pentagon officials have consulted with former senior defense officials as they grapple with the challenge." Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel, said with the spending increase, "it now appears that the Pentagon budget is detached from" a previous defense strategy released by Hegseth's team in January. That strategy "calls for the Pentagon to focus first on defense in the Western Hemisphere, with less emphasis on Europe, Africa and the Middle East," the Post reports. Cancian called it a "head scratcher" that the U.S. would pull back from those regions while also increasing the budget. "If you've got a 50 percent budget increase, you don't have to do any of that," Cancian said. "You'd be talking about all the new places you'd making investments."

February 21, 2026 at 2:14 PM EST
Gorsuch takes aim at Supreme Court's Trump prejudice -- and calls out Congress' dysfunction

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's 46-page opinion on President Donald Trump's tariff case reveals the conservative's trepidation over his colleague's apparent double standard toward the current president compared with former President Joe Biden -- and reminds Congress it, too, can make decisions. While the Supreme Court largely struck down Trump's tariffs in Friday's ruling, conservatives "splintered," NBC News senior Supreme Court reporter Lawrence Hurley wrote, with Chief Justice John Roberts penning the ruling, and Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett joining the majority. Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito dissented. Hurley on Saturday detailed Gorsuch's opinion that "took aim at his colleagues on the Supreme Court for a lack of consistency" in their handling of presidential power under the Trump administration. Hurley notes Gorsuch "chided several of his fellow justices" for "effectively applying the same Supreme Court precedent differently under Trump than they did under Biden." According to Hurley, under Biden, conservatives on the Supreme Court adhered to the "major questions doctrine," or the notion that "sweeping presidential action" must be "authorized by Congress." In his opinion, Gorsuch argued his liberal colleagues "do not object to [the major questions doctrine's] application in [the tariff] case" despite rejecting the theory under Biden. As for his conservative colleagues, Gorsuch called out those "who have joined major questions decisions in the past [but] dissent from today's application of the doctrine." As NBC News reports, "Thomas, Kavanaugh, Barrett and liberal Justice Elena Kagan all felt the need to respond to Gorsuch in their own opinions." Kagan, in her concurring opinion, had "a side-battle [with Gorsuch] over the major questions doctrine," taking aim at the conservative justice's assertion she was somehow embracing his favored legal theory, Slate legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern wrote Friday on BlueSky. In her note, Kagan wrote that Gorsuch "[insists] that I now must be applying the major questions doctrine, and his own version of it to boot " Given how strong his apparent desire for converts ... I almost regret to inform him that I am not one." Fordham University School of Law professor Robin Effron said the splintering "shows you how much internal dissension there is on the Supreme Court right now." She also called Roberts' majority opinion a "huge fail," noting that it read like he'd hoped to land a unanimous decision on the ruling. While Kagan argued in her concurring opinion that she was not, in fact, embracing the doctrine, George Mason University law school professor Ilya Somin told NBC News that Kavanaugh actually argued the major questions theory does not apply to Trump's tariff case at all. "It seems like they want to carve out this arbitrary exception to major questions for tariffs even though it can't be justified," Somin said. Still, Gorsuch appears to believe athe Supreme Court strife related to Trump's tariff case could have been solved by "the bygone era of legislative power," a separate New York Times analysis explained. "Yes, legislating can be hard and take time," Gorsuch wrote. "And yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people's elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man." Times reporter Catie Edmondson noted Gorsuch's language was "a description of governing completely at odds with what is currently underway across the street from the Supreme Court at the Capitol, where Republicans controlling the House and the Senate have ceded their power to one man -- Mr. Trump -- on a variety of issues." Edmondson detected in Gorsuch's opinion "a note of reproach for the current dysfunctional state of affairs in Congress," pointing out a specific phrase from his writing: "Deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions," the conservative justice wrote. "For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious."

February 21, 2026 at 1:03 PM EST
'String of embarrassing defeats' for Trump DOJ as courts expose officers' lies

The Department of Justice has "suffered a string of embarrassing defeats" in court as federal government cases against people accused of "physically attacking officers or interfering with their duties " have recently been dismissed or ended in not guilty verdicts," the Guardian reports. After President Donald Trump surged federal agents in Minnesota, a number of cases in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region revealed a gulf between federal agent's claims and the actual facts on the ground, often backed by video of the events. Frederick Goetz, a lawyer for a man charged with felony assault for allegedly attacking an officer, and whose charges were later dismissed by prosecutors, told the Guardian he sees "a pattern" among similar cases in the region. "There are unreasonable uses of force by ICE agents and border patrol," Goetz explained. "You immediately have stories perpetuated to justify that force: 'The officer was being attacked. This was an ambush.' All of that spin is to cast the victims as violent perpetrators. Then the story falls apart once you get the facts." In Goetz's client's case, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Todd Lyons last week acknowledged "sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements." Lyons insisted federal authorities are investigating the officers. As the Guardian reports, several other cases in Minnesota have "fallen apart" under the facts. "Earlier this year, Minnesota federal prosecutors dropped assault charges against a man, who was accused of ramming his car into agents during an immigration operation," the Guardian reports. "The DOJ presented no witnesses to establish probable cause." And on Tuesday, Judge Donovan Frank "dismissed with prejudice federal assault charges filed against a Minneapolis man accused of 'tackling' an ICE agent," calling the "allegations 'vague and contradictory.'" The DOJ's inability to secure convictions in these cases come as "the number of assistant U.S. attorneys in Minnesota has fallen from more than 40 prosecutors before Trump retook office to fewer than two dozen," the AP reports. Minnesota, according to the AP, "has been hit especially hard" by a slew of resignations across the United States. Because of this, "a growing number of defendants are beginning to escape accountability, as the remaining prosecutors are forced to dismiss some cases, kill others before charges are filed and seek plea agreements and delays." "Public safety has not been served by these rash of cases," Goetz told the Guardian. In one such case, 12-time convicted felon Cory Allen McKay, "with a three-decade record of violent crime that includes strangling a pregnant woman and firing a shotgun under a person's chin " walked free after the prosecutor on his case retired," the AP reports. According to the report, McKay's lawyer, Jean Brand, said the move was "completely surprising" to her. She didn't learn that Trump appointee Daniel Rosen abruptly dropped the case until after her client's release. Last year, former assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Hollenhorst successfully argued that McKay "was too dangerous to be released before trial," the AP reports. McKay's lawyer called Hollenhorst's retired "a huge loss' for the Justice Department, despite the win for her client.

February 21, 2026 at 9:27 AM EST
Republican election expert undermines key Trump claims

Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer is sounding the alarm. Speaking to CNN on Thursday, Richer said that if SB 1570 becomes law, it "would prove a significant disruption."

February 21, 2026 at 9:23 AM EST
How the end of America begins

Donald Trump's Crusade against Kilmar Abrego Garcia is "on life support" as it may finally be dismissed this week or next by District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee. But will that be the end of this father's and husband's ordeal? This week, I told you about the historic pattern associated with countries moving from democracy to tyranny. First, they start breaking the law and ignoring the Constitution in small ways, and the more they get away with it -- and buy off or threaten politicians who may otherwise stop it -- the more they do it. We've been watching Trump do this almost from the first day of his second term in office.

February 21, 2026 at 8:44 AM EST
UK journalist attacks America's 'culture of complete impunity'

British police released former Prince Andrew on Thursday after 11 hours in custody, with his shocking arrest earlier in the day making him the first senior British royal to be arrested in nearly 400 years. Police are probing his connections to the deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and whether he shared classified government information with him while serving as a U.K. trade representative from 2001 to 2011. King Charles' brother, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor after being stripped of his royal title, is the most high-profile figure in the U.K. to be implicated in a widening scandal over ties to Epstein, who died in a New York jail in 2019 awaiting trial on sex trafficking. Authorities did not reference sexual abuse allegations against Mountbatten-Windsor or Epstein's sex trafficking case; Mountbatten-Windsor settled a lawsuit with Epstein survivor Virginia Roberts Giuffre in 2022 and has denied all wrongdoing.

February 21, 2026 at 7:54 AM EST
'Gonna be big mad': Trump's no good, very bad day fueled by more than tariff ruling

President Donald Trump's Friday got off to a rough start as three critical components of his economic agenda collapsed. A major economic indicator, gross domestic product (GDP), slowed significantly, dropping to just 1.4% annually as inflation rose. And the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the legal basis for the president's sweeping global tariffs, ruling that his use of that authority was unlawful.

February 21, 2026 at 7:43 AM EST
'Shuddering': Architect of Bush torture memos counsels Trump

A former Bush Justice Department official is warning President Donald Trump against smearing the U.S. Supreme Court after the justices delivered a highly anticipated ruling that struck down the legal foundation of his sweeping global tariffs -- a major setback for his economic agenda. "It's my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think," the president said on Friday, as the Guardian reported. Trump said he was "ashamed" of the six justices who sided with the majority opinion. "Absolutely ashamed for not having the courage to do what's right for our country."

February 21, 2026 at 6:04 AM EST
Exploitation -- and murder -- took place in Michigan decades before 'Epstein Island'

Warning: Some of the events and depictions in this article are disturbing in nature. As the revelations and debate continue about the millions of files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and their international ties to wealth, privilege, and perversity, the idea of a sophisticated network of elites sexually preying upon children is not just a modern facet of an internet-connected world, but eerily similar to a scandal that was centered in Michigan more than half a century ago.

February 21, 2026 at 5:31 AM EST
I'm done tolerating Trump supporters who won't turn their backs on him

The other day, an old musician friend of mine in Nashville, sent along a zinger he knew would wind me up. He's only too aware I'm an easy target these days, because try as I might to stay loose during this relentless GOP attack on America, I'm wound tighter than one of his piano strings.

February 20, 2026 at 10:17 PM EST
Steve Schmidt warns new Congress will investigate Trump's 'every despicable act'

Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt swore the American people will eventually come face to face with the colossal depths of President Donald Trump's corruption and the fraud of his administration's top lieutenants Schmidt was a guest on Jim Acosta's Friday "Jim Acosta Show" podcast when the conversation veered from the Supreme Court's Friday decision to yank Trump's illegal exploitation of an emergency order to impose tariffs at his whim.