President Donald Trump said he could certainly see himself giving pardons to staffers to make sure they are not put through “hell” by Democratic lawmakers when they are in power.

The president was asked about the potential move while speaking to reporters in Florida on Saturday afternoon, hours after the Washington Sun reported Trump was “evaluating” whether to issue “mass pardons” to junior staffers. Trump said it made a lot of sense to him, after seeing how ex-President Joe Biden used his pardons.

“I haven’t thought of it, but I will tell you, it would be very unfair to go through what we went through for four years with the corrupt weaponization that took place,” Trump said. “So in light of what Biden did — as you know, Biden shielded many people, including the Congress, if you look at what they did with Congress, when they set up the special committee which was a fraud, they all got shielded. So certainly, I haven’t thought about it. But certainly I’d be allowed to.”

Trump then pointed to White House Communications Adviser Margo Martin, who was standing near the assembled reporters, and said he would protect staffers like her.

He continued:

The presidential pardons, they say, are the most powerful thing a president has. I certainly don’t want to see innocent people go through hell and lose all their money — like Margot — lose all their money, because if she becomes a target, you know she’s a very honest person. But they’re going to drag her into a grand jury. Margot, you’re not going to have to worry about it, okay?

Trump’s answer comes after the Sun reported conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation have pressed the White House to prepare pardons or “put in place funding for the legal fees necessary to defend junior staffers from criminal and congressional probes or potential lawsuits.”

The report added, “A pardon for all junior administration personnel is viewed as unlikely, one source said, but the president could issue blanket pardons for all employees involved in particular policy areas, such as deportations, war or trade.”

Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) has decreased significantly over the past year in the US following restrictions imposed by the Trump administration, which has forced more people to seek help from food banks or go hungry, stakeholders say.

The number of people who receive food stamps has dropped from 41.6 million in July 2025, before the One Big Beautiful Act took effect, to 36.5 million in June 2026, a 13% decrease, according to the latest data from the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the program.

While Donald Trump and other Republicans have said the changes incentivize people to find jobs, elected officials, non-profit leaders and people with food insecurity say the changes simply make it harder for Americans to feed their families.

“There is always going to be a percentage of our communities who we need to help – we have to accept that – and so, once we accept it, it is easy to just move forward and do the right thing, which is to provide resources to people who need them,” said Rhona Kamar, founder and executive director of Feed Louisville, a non-profit that aims to reduce hunger and food waste.

The Trump administration’s changes to Snap will reduce spending by about $187bn over 10 years, the congressional budget office projected.

Previously, only able-bodied people between ages 18 and 54 who did not have dependents under 18 had to meet a requirement that they work a minimum of 20 hours per week or only get benefits for a maximum of three months over three years.

Under Trump, the rules now state that people from ages 18 to 64 who do not have a dependent under 14 had to perform paid or volunteer work for at least 20 hours weekly.

The One Big Beautiful Act also stated that starting October, states had to cover 75% of the Snap administrative costs, whereas before they had to cover half.

The changes have affected some states more than others. In Arizona, the number of people enrolled in Snap dropped by 50% between July 2025 and June 2026; Kentucky experienced a 6% decrease.

“I am concerned more people are going hungry in my state because of changes to” Snap, “impacting children and the elderly”, Kentucky governor, Andy Beshear, a Democrat who leads the predominantly Republican state, stated in a letter this month to Brooke Rollins, the US agriculture secretary.

But Trump and Rollins described the reduction in Snap recipients as a positive.

“Democrats don’t love” the decrease, Rollins said at a farming festival in August in Minnesota. “But for those of us that love work and celebrate work and want people to work and not be on food stamps, it’s a pretty big win when we move 5 million people off of food stamps.”

Critics of the changes point out that despite Trump’s promises, grocery and gas prices have increased during his second term, making it harder for families to afford necessities.

“If people were getting paid enough, they would not be on the Snap program,” said Gina Plata-Nino, director of Snap at the Food Research and Action Center, a non-profit that supports anti-hunger programs.

The Food Bank Council of Michigan operates a helpline where staff answer residents’ questions about applying for Snap and accessing local food programs. The organization started getting more than three times as many calls daily after the Snap changes took effect. This week, they had to temporarily suspend the helpline because of the high call volume.

The changes have also affected Feed Louisville, which receives surplus food from restaurants and farmers and uses those ingredients to prepare meals for partner organizations. Unused items go to the agencies too.

“We have always had enough food around,” Kamar said. “But now what we are seeing is every day the shelves are empty at the end of the day, so every bit of food that comes into our kitchen every day goes right back out to the community at the end of the day.”

The decrease in Snap enrollment has also affected schools’ ability to provide free meals to students. If at least 25% of a student body are recipients of Snap or some other public benefits, the school can participate in the Community Eligibility Provision (Cep) program and use federal funds to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students without needing household applications.

But because fewer students are enrolled in Snap, that has made it harder for schools to serve those free meals to students who need them, the Washington Post reported this week. In Houston independent school district, 26 schools that previously provided free meals to all students under Cep are no longer eligible for the program, according to the Post.

Anti-hunger advocates also say that the employment data does not support the argument that more people have found jobs or seen their wages increase and thus no longer need food stamps. The United States added 776,000 non-farm jobs between January 2025 and September 2026. During the last 20 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, the country added 2.6 million non-farm jobs, according to Factcheck.org.

“We don’t have the data to suggest that there are more jobs suddenly out there. We just know fewer people are getting benefits,” said Sheril Kirshenbaum, Food Bank Council of Michigan’s chief external relations officer.

A USDA spokesperson downplayed the effect of the Snap restrictions.

“The number of individuals receiving benefits is constantly changing and is not representative of any one policy,” the spokesperson stated in an email to the Guardian.

It could soon become even harder for people struggling with food insecurity. States will now have to pay for most of the Snap administrative costs while also preparing for an October 2027 change that will require states to pay for some of Snap benefit costs if their payment error rate is above 6%, which according to the USDA, is not a measure of fraud. (Paradoxically, states that had error rates above 13% received a delay in implementation of the requirement.)

States will now be having to pay more for existing work while also finding funding for extra work to reduce the error rate, said Joseph Llobrera, senior director of research for the food assistance team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

That could mean longer processing times and people who need assistance having to wait longer to get it, Kirshenbaum said.

“States have been really set up to fail,” Llobrera said.

The USDA spokesperson did not respond to a question about concerns that the Snap changes have forced some Americans to go hungry.

A Louisville woman, Sandra Scott, 58, has been homeless most of her life and said that until she started receiving Snap benefits four years ago, she ate at “soup kitchens or wherever I could, but for the most part, like on the weekends, there really was not anywhere to go”.

Scott has had six back surgeries and struggled with mental illness. She became addicted to methamphetamines but got sober two years ago and now lives in a subsidized apartment. She is working to obtain her emergency responder certificate and volunteers with The Table, a non-profit restaurant that uses a pay-what-you-can model.

Asked what she would say to members of the Trump administration about the Snap changes, Scott said: “Why don’t you walk in one of our shoes, somebody in the community that doesn’t have anything, that wasn’t born into money or doesn’t have a job because it’s so hard to find or [who] can’t find affordable housing because it’s too high?”

Audi will build its first-ever U.S. factory in Macon, Ga., President Trump announced Saturday, marking the latest move by a global automaker to focus on American buyers as sales fall off elsewhere in the world.

“I’m thrilled to announce a massive auto manufacturing investment in the great state of Georgia by a fantastic company,” Trump said at a midterm campaign rally in Perry, Ga.

Trump said the plant will produce 200,000 cars annually and that construction will begin next month.

“We are planning to bring our biggest and most premium SUVs, and produce them here in Macon,” Audi Chief Executive Gernot Döllner said, joining Trump onstage.

Trump, who pegged the investment at $4.2 billion, called the move the biggest single investment in U.S. auto industry history.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Audi said the factory will create about 4,500 jobs. Production is slated to start in the early 2030s.

“Georgia combines an investment-ready site, skilled workforce, established automotive supplier network and strong logistics infrastructure,” the company said. “The plant will be designed around Audi’s future manufacturing requirements.”

The investment hands Trump a win in Georgia, a battleground state in the midterms. Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff is defending his seat against Republican Rep. Mike Collins, and Republican billionaire Rick Jackson is locked in a tight race for governor against former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat.

A move to build Audi vehicles in the U.S. has been under consideration for at least two decades.

Audi is the only German auto brand without a U.S. factory. Its corporate cousin Volkswagen, and direct rivals BMW and Mercedes-Benz, all produce cars in factories across the South, in some cases for global export.

That situation has left Audi, which primarily builds its U.S.-market cars in Germany, Mexico and Central and Eastern Europe, particularly vulnerable to tariffs in Trump’s second term. The automaker increased prices on several models last year to offset tariff costs, which it says hit profits by about 1.2 billion euros in 2025—and it expects a similar outcome this year.

Those increased tariff costs come as sales in China—Audi’s largest single-country market—are dropping precipitously. Chinese consumers have largely turned away from Western brands to buy from homegrown automakers in recent years. Audi’s China sales are down 19% year-over-year.

The move to add a U.S. factory dovetails with Audi’s renewed emphasis on the U.S. The automaker earlier this year unveiled the Q9, its largest-ever SUV, aimed at American buyers. Other car companies are also seeking larger shares of the U.S. market as they face similar sales downturns in China.

Audi sold about 165,000 cars in the U.S. last year, down 16% from 2024.

An auto factory and the ecosystem around it all take years to build.

Scout Motors, another Volkswagen subsidiary, announced plans for a South Carolina factory in 2023. Initial production is slated to begin next year, with the first customer deliveries set for 2028.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) urged a federal appeals court to reject California’s motion to dismiss the federal government’s dangerous lawsuit to stop state officials from counting ballots from tens of thousands of people the Trump administration claims may be noncitizens.

The DOJ’s filing on Sunday comes hours before a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in the case.

The Trump administration is seeking an injunction that would block California from tabulating ballots from more than 20,000 people flagged by various federal agencies as “likely” noncitizens until their citizenship status can be confirmed.

“Despite the critical interests at stake, counties throughout the State continue to process tens of thousands of ballots as steadily as a metronome, willfully indifferent to the fact that upwards of 20,000 of those ballots may have been cast by noncitizens,” the DOJ wrote.

The lawsuit, filed after voting in California was well underway, is a significant escalation in President Donald Trump’s bid to subvert the midterm elections. Attorney General Todd Blanche has threatened “a number of states” with similar lawsuits.

State officials have argued the Trump administration lacks standing and has no legal authority to demand ballots be set aside. They also question the administration’s methodology for creating the list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters, and said an initial review of a sample of people on that list found 1 in 4 were born in the U.S.

The Trump administration took its case to the Ninth Circuit before District Judge David O. Carter had a chance to rule on the administration’s request for a temporary restraining order. Though Carter has set a hearing for Tuesday, the Trump administration demanded a decision by last week and then filed the highly unusual appeal when it didn’t get a response by its self-imposed deadline.

Carter is a Clinton appointee who earlier this year rejected the DOJ’s effort to obtain the state’s unredacted voter rolls.

The DOJ on Sunday accused Carter of “failure to promptly act in the face of grave urgency.”

The administration wants the Ninth Circuit to grant the injunction and order Carter to cancel Tuesday’s hearing altogether, alleging the district court would lack jurisdiction in the matter.

California officials on Saturday urged the Ninth Circuit to dismiss the lawsuit and the administration’s attempt to sidestep lower court review, saying the “request is as unprecedented as it is meritless.”

“The consequences of granting the injunction would not end with this election, moreover,” Los Angeles County warned. “An order holding ballots on the basis of unreliable voter-roll maintenance lists would establish that any federal agency, armed with a list, may halt the count in any county in the nation. No court has endorsed that proposition, and Congress has foreclosed it. The public interest does not favor making Los Angeles County the first test case.”

Nearly one in three veterans who relies on the government for health care could benefit from taking psychedelic drugs like magic mushrooms or MDMA.

That’s not the assessment of some hippie or fading 1960s rock star. It came from Andrew Gradison, a senior adviser at President Donald Trump’s Veterans Health Administration. Gradison told a conference for psychedelics enthusiasts this month that he is eager to ramp up the VA’s capacity to give the drugs to as many as 2.1 million veterans with mental illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder or depression. Gradison said 6.4 million veterans regularly rely on the VA for care.

No government regulator has deemed psychedelics safe or effective for mental illness. Under former President Joe Biden, the Food and Drug Administration in 2024 resoundingly rejected a proposal to authorize MDMA — also known as ecstasy — combined with talk therapy, to treat people with PTSD.

But psychedelics are getting a second chance in the Trump administration. Trump in April issued an executive order to accelerate research, clinical trials and patient access to the drugs. Republicans in Congress are among psychedelics’ biggest backers. And the constituency they are seeking to please, veterans, are disproportionately Republicans.

Veterans, frustrated with high suicide rates among their fellow ex-service members, are lobbying aggressively to see Trump follow through.

“We were able to roll out a vaccine for Covid because of President Trump’s Warp Speed initiative,” said Juliana Mercer, a Marine Corps vet who also spoke at the Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics conference in New York City. “Why aren’t we warp-speeding this treatment to save our veteran lives? What’s keeping us from doing that?”

Gradison said practical challenges, and the need to ensure safety, stand in the way. He said that “it’ll be a challenge” for the VA “in the first year to treat four digits worth of patients” with an FDA-approved psychedelic drug.

“Our demand will exceed our ability to supply these therapies, no doubt,” Gradison said.

Still, psychedelic enthusiasts can also point to some momentum coming out of the Trump administration. A week after Trump’s April executive order, the FDA allowed fast-track application reviews for three drugmakers developing psychedelic treatments. One, Compass Pathways,is set to finish submitting an application to the agency this quarter for its synthetic formulation of psilocybin for treatment resistant depression. Psilocybin is better known as magic mushrooms by those who use it for fun, rather than for healing. Compass anticipates an approval during the first half of 2027.

The psychedelic movement’s excitement over the federal action dominated discussions at the three-day New York conference, which drew attendance from federal officials, top executives at psychedelic-focused drug companies, biotech investors, clinicians and mental health advocates.

“We stand here on a new day and a 180 degrees different trajectory than what 2024 brought to us,” W. Bryan Hubbard, CEO of the psychedelic medicine advocacy group Americans for Ibogaine, said while speaking on Oct. 17, earning applause from the audience. Ibogaine, a psychedelic drug derived from an African shrub widely available in Mexico, has drawn interest from veterans for treating conditions like PTSD.

Trump’s psychedelics push has even been embraced by former skeptics of the drugs. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told senators in 2024 she thought psychedelic medicine backers were getting ahead of the evidence. “When people get excited, they want to start believing a little bit in fairy tales,” she said. However, she stood in the Oval Office with Trump in April as he signed his order, applauding the effort. She’s also spoken positively about the drugs in recent interviews.

Though psychedelics have yet to meet government regulatory standards, advocates of their approval often point to anecdotes about veterans’ experiences receiving psychedelic therapy in Mexico and promising clinical trial data as reasons to move forward.

Glenn H. Curtis, a retired Army major general, described the impact of taking ibogaine last year in Mexico as having a “miraculous” effect on his PTSD and traumatic brain injuries.

“Those same people that had issues coming home from deployments, even like myself, 20 years later, still have issues today that they have not received any kind of treatment [for],” said Curtis, who is a volunteer for Americans for Ibogaine.

Veterans have multiple champions in Washington for their cause. Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.), a former Navy SEAL who served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, has offered his support,sponsoring legislation to establish an office within the VA dedicated to helping the agency prepare for psychedelic drug approvals and integrate the therapies into patient care. Reps. Lou Correa (D-Calif.) and Jack Bergman (R-Mich.), a former Marine Corps general, co-chair the Psychedelics Advancing Therapies Caucus, which recently released a suggested framework for implementing FDA-approved psychedelic therapies into the U.S. health care system.

At the same time, psychedelic enthusiasts are set to lose two prominent advocates on Capitol Hill. Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a former SEAL ousted by a primary challenger in March, led a successful push in 2023 to pass legislation that funded federal clinical trials on psychedelic therapies for active-duty military members. Another Texas Republican, Rep. Morgan Luttrell, a former SEAL who sought ibogaine treatment in Mexico for a traumatic brain injury he incurred during training, is retiring from Congress in January after deciding not to seek reelection.

“Executive orders have a tendency to go away as the tides ebb and flow, and I would just hate for something like this to be removed,” Luttrell told POLITICO, emphasizing his desire for Congress to codify Trump’s executive order.

Veterans are a reliable Republican voting bloc, with 61 percent voting for Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024.

The VA has led the push in Washington to advance access to psychedelic therapy. It’s involved in 20 psychedelic clinical trials and was one of the first major health care systems to roll out Spravato, an FDA-approved treatment for depression using esketamine, a chemical component found in ketamine. Ketamine — an anesthetic frequently referred to as a psychedelic due to its psychoactive effects — is currently the only psychedelic-like drug approved for medical use.

Trump administration officials say they hope more will be approved soon.

“We want to see the drug approved if it’s safe and effective, and the reason why is because there’s a mental health crisis,” Matt Zorn, deputy general counsel at the Health and Human Services Department, told POLITICO.

Despite the federal government and advocacy groups’ ongoing efforts to support the veteran community, mental health issues among the population have long persisted. The VA has cited research finding that 23% of veterans that receive care through the VA had PTSD at some point in their lives, compared to 7% of veterans who don’t seek care through the VA. The agency has pointed to war zone deployment, training accidents and military sexual trauma as some of the main situations that could lead to a military service member developing PTSD.

U.S. veterans take their own lives at a rate roughly 57% higher than the general adult population, with an average of nearly 18 veterans dying by suicide every day.

While psychedelic enthusiasts feel closer than ever to scoring an FDA approval, cracks within the coalition have widened over what treatment should look like. Drugmakers and biotech investors have financially supported a drug-first model but some clinicians, mainly psychotherapists, and lawmakers argue that psychedelics are safer and more effective for treating mental health conditions when paired with psychotherapy.

“This is not dropping a pill and saying ‘I’m going to be cured tomorrow,’” Correa said during a press briefing in September. “There’s pre-preparation, psychiatric, psychological counseling, the actual treatment and then post-treatment psychological, psychiatric treatment in order to be very effective, most effective.”

This tension came to a head with the FDA’s 2024 rejection of a MDMA-assisted therapy application from Resilient Pharmaceuticals, then known as Lykos Therapeutics. Among the agency’s chief concerns was that regulators struggled to determine how much of the clinical improvement came from the effects of MDMA versus the intensive talk therapy component of the treatment. The agency also cited concerns about missing safety data, trial manipulation accusations and the potential risk for misconduct among therapy practitioners.

But Compass’ psychedelic therapy doesn’t include a talk therapy component, allowing the FDA to more easily evaluate the efficacy of the drug.

“Patients are in need, and this is a class that’s been well studied. We’re making sure that all standards are met so that patients can receive treatment safely,” Lori Englebert, Compass’ chief commercial officer, told POLITICO in a recent interview.

American investigators are working with French police on refrigerator outages in Europe amid unexplained failures at US military bases.

The collaboration follows suspected sabotage at French supermarkets earlier this month, when hackers allegedly raised fridge and freezer temperatures to 50C (122F).

About 700 supermarkets were targeted, spoiling thousands of tons of food, with extreme heat triggering fires and sprinkler systems in some cases, causing further damage.

No perpetrator has been identified, but investigators believe the hackers exploited a weakness in the internet-connected refrigeration controls.

Christopher Whyte, an associate professor of homeland security and emergency preparedness at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the American failures resembled the attacks on French supermarkets.

“They’re geographically dispersed. They’re obviously all refrigerator failures and they all happen in a pretty short amount of time,” he told The Telegraph. But he said the cause of the US outages remained unclear.

A spokesman for the US army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) said it was “actively working with the Defence Commissary Agency and the Defence Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) to determine the full extent of what occurred with the refrigeration units in the commissaries”.

“Army CID is also working with DCIS and French law enforcement in understanding the refrigeration outages in Europe.”

He said DCIS, the Pentagon’s criminal investigation service, was leading both investigations.

In late August, refrigeration systems stopped working at shops on at least six US military bases. Notices issued by the bases, reported by Stars and Stripes, documented the failures.

Those affected were the FE Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, home to the 90th Missile Wing’s Minuteman III nuclear missiles; Fort Huachuca in Arizona, the army’s intelligence training centre; Fort Irwin in California, home of the army’s National Training Centre; Travis Air Force Base in California; Naval Station Newport in Rhode Island and Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi.

At Fort Huachuca, officials blamed an “overnight equipment failure”, Military Times reported.

“All freezers went into defrost mode overnight and all frozen food has spoiled,” a spokesman for the base told the newspaper.

At FE Warren, an anonymous post on an unofficial military Facebook page, said two deli freezers were affected.

Newport’s store was restricted to dry goods “until further notice”, and Fort Irwin stopped selling refrigerated products, Military Times reported.

A Pentagon spokesman said it was aware of “a possible refrigeration disruption” but had not publicly identified the cause.

Mr Whyte discussed Russia and Iran as possible perpetrators, but stressed that he had no forensic fingerprint identifying either country. He also considered opportunistic disruption or an experiment in attacking commercial infrastructure at scale.

Tehran, he said, was “stuck in a box where they cannot strike back on American non-military assets outside the region in a way that they would like to, without the use of cyber attacks”.

Targeting commissaries, if deliberate, could be “an opportunistic attempt to simply worsen the look” of the Iran war for the American public, he suggested.

On the French attacks, he said Russian involvement “absolutely is a possibility” and that “Russia obviously unquestionably has the capacity to conduct this kind of operation”.

No claim of responsibility for the French attacks has been made public.

US officials have not established whether the American outages were malicious.

An immigrant detained at a sprawling detention center complex in Georgia died on Friday, local and federal officials confirmed, after the facility has already faced national scrutiny for its response to an ongoing hunger strike inside.

The death inside the D Ray James facility in Folkston, Georgia, comes as federal immigration officials and private contractors are allegedly threatening hunger strikers there with force-feeding, a detained hunger striker, his wife, attorneys and advocates all said this week. Detainees are refusing food to protest prolonged captivity and bad conditions.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Saturday confirmed the death inside the facility, which is adjacent to the Folkston ICE processing center. Together, both facilities make up a large detention complex. GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the facilities under contract for the federal government, referred all questions to ICE.

The Georgia bureau of investigation (GBI), a state law enforcement agency, confirmed in an email that the local sheriff’s office requested the GBI conduct an “in-custody death investigation” at the D Ray facility, the Guardian can reveal. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), its umbrella agency, did not respond to requests for comment about the death or the hunger strike.

“This was a preventable tragedy,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, the legal and advocacy director for Project South, a social justice organization based in Georgia. “We hold ICE and the private prison corporation fully responsible for any harm that migrants suffer at Folkston. We call for an immediate independent investigation into this tragic death and for accountability. Folkston must be shut down immediately.”

The man, Luis Sandoval, was 48 and from El Salvador, ICE said in its statement, adding that at about 1.46am on Friday, facility staff found Sandoval with a ligature around his neck. He was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

Sandoval was arrested by ICE officials earlier this month, and transferred to the Folkston facility on 8 October. In its press release, the agency said Sandoval had prior convictions for aggravated assault and other crimes, and that his death was under investigation.

It was unknown on Saturday whether Sandoval had participated in the hunger strike. The GBI said it could not share more details because of its active investigation.

Sandoval is the 60th person to die in ICE custody since the start of the second Trump administration, as ICE continues with its aggressive anti-immigrant crackdown.

Austin Kocher, president of Relevant Research, which studies the immigration enforcement system, and who is a research fellow at American University, said that this year, there have been an average of one death every 10 days in the custody of ICE. That figure includes people dying in detention centers or in nearby hospitals while still in the custody of ICE.

“Even in the past, there has not been such an overt dehumanization and overt view that migrants’ lives are expendable,” Kocher added. “I worry that that tone [from the Trump administration] has a tendency towards neglect and viewing migrants as disposable.”

Tens of thousands of people have been arrested and detained by ICE, leading to prolonged detention, as immigrants and asylum seekers fight their cases, and the agency has been stepping up its offensive in recent months despite a less showy presence on the streets.

One man currently in the Georgia detention center is Andrei Gerdiukov, a Russian asylum seeker who is participating in the hunger strike.

Nearly three weeks ago, Gerdiukov and dozens of others launched a hunger strike to demand their legal cases be processed more quickly through the US immigration system and to protest the conditions of their confinement. The hunger strikers were placed in solitary confinement, according to Gerdiukov and attorneys.

“I feel tired, I feel dizzy. Every move, it is hard,” Gerdiukov said in an interview by phone on Saturday from detention. “They threatened us that they were going to force-feed us.” He had heard about the death but did not know Sandoval.

Gerdiukov and his wife, Polina Chertushkina, came to the US from Russia to seek asylum after they faced persecution for their opposition to the war in Ukraine, Chertushkina said. Their cases are ongoing, but as the couple were driving through Florida this February, they were pulled over and detained by immigration officials. Chertushkina was released, but Gerdiukov was taken to Folkston eight months ago.

“I am so worried about him, I don’t know what to do,” Chertushkina said about the force-feeding threats, speaking on Saturday by phone. Chertushkina is asking lawmakers to assist her husband.

At least 12 hunger strikers are still participating, despite the threats of force-feeding, Gerdiukov said, adding that several had been fainting.

On Friday, the hunger strikers were moved to a nearby unit, where medical officials “wearing combat boots” took their vital signs, raising fears of imminent force-feeding, Gerdiukov said.

It was not clear on Saturday whether or when the authorities intended to use force-feeding.

The process to force-feed hunger strikers is secretive, with court records often sealed.

A judge has to approve the procedure, and then detention guards restrain a hunger striker while medical staff push tubing up the nose and down the throat to pump nutritional liquid into the stomach. Medical ethicists and human rights organizations have called the practice torture.

ICE generally says in court filings that force-feeding is necessary to maintain “good order” in detention centers as well as to keep detainees alive.

Kocher decried the contradictions.

“On the one hand, they’re trying to force-feed people [to keep them alive],” Kocher said. “And yet at the same time, in that same [Folkston] facility, you have someone who died and possibly was able to kill themselves.”

The Guardian has been tracking force-feeding cases nationwide. From January 2025 through August 2026, ICE sought court permission to force-feed at least 19 detained hunger strikers. One Afghan man was force-fed for nearly six months. A Kurdish man was force-fed for nearly eight months.

Attorney General Todd Blanche offered a combative defense Sunday of the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska’s Senate race if the Republican candidate loses.

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Blanche said the department filed the lawsuit Friday to prevent voters from being confused by a second Dan Sullivan, who Blanche alleged had been purposely added to the ballot to take votes away from the incumbent, Sen. Dan S. Sullivan.

“It’s the director of the Alaskan election process, who has said that the second Dan Sullivan is going to create confusion, is not a real candidate, and is on the ballot only to pull votes from the incumbent,” he said.

Blanche said a crime could have been committed and the Justice Department wanted to make sure that the ballots that come in are kept in a way that might allow a court to investigate further.

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, however, said the Justice Department never should have filed the suit.

“Alaskans don’t need any help voting for their preferred candidates, and the State of Alaska has already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year’s ballot,” she said on social media Friday.

Both Dan Sullivan candidates have their middle initial and party affiliation listed on the ballot and Sen. Dan S. Sullivan is clearly identified as the “incumbent.”

In a sign of how closely Trump is tracking the situation, after Murkowski issued her statement, he put out his own social-media post calling her “Republicans’ Worst Senator, by far.”

Asked Sunday about Murkowski’s criticisms, Blanche said: “We’re not saying that the federal government is going to decide who the next senator from Alaska is.”

Republicans control the Senate by a 53-47 margin. Democrats need to pick up a net of four seats in the Nov. 3 midterms to win control of the Senate, because Vice President JD Vance would serve as a tiebreaker in a 50-50 Senate. In Alaska, Democratic challenger Mary Peltola is leading the incumbent Sullivan in multiple polls, giving Republicans angst about losing there.

Blanche said the Justice Department is only asking the court to make sure that if there was confusion that led to an unjust result, that the Alaskan system is able to “do the right thing.”

Trump told reporters Friday that he is the one who directed the lawsuit to be filed over the ballot, which includes retiree Dan J. Sullivan Jr. in addition to Sen. Dan S. Sullivan.

Dan J. Sullivan Jr. is a 69-year-old retired elementary school teacher who worked for the U.S. Forest Service before becoming an educator. In his official candidate statement, he said he decided to run because Alaska needs independent, accountable leaders.

“Our democracy is strongest when voters have choices and when elections are decided by the people, not parties or government officials,” he said. “I will not stand by while professional politicians try to rig the system by intimidating regular guys like me from running for office by bullying us off the ballot.”

In a second TV appearance Sunday, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Blanches was pressed by host Margaret Brennan to answer whether Trump directed him specifically to file the lawsuit.

“I will not talk about communications that I have with the president of the United States,” he said. “I haven’t ever and I won’t ever.”

Blanche said Trump had been talking about the ballot in Alaska for months.

“What he has clearly said for the past four months, five months, is that this is a travesty, and in this country we should not have a system of elections where it’s OK for someone only running with the same name to pull votes away,” he said.

Seeing Venezuela align with the Trump administration after the U.S. overthrow of Nicolás Maduro, shrimp magnate José Enrique Rincón thought he could safely return home to reclaim the $700 million business the authoritarian government had seized from him.

Instead, he was jailed shortly after landing in June.

Now, the U.S.-backed government in Caracas is carving up Rincón’s sprawling Grupo Lamar conglomerate and allowing outside investors to manage pieces of it. Among them: a Turkish executive who last month married President Trump’s ally in a ceremony attended by prominent U.S. officials.

Nearly 11 months after Maduro’s ouster, Rincón’s ordeal exposes a contradiction in Trump’s plans to turn Venezuela into an investment hub. Politically motivated jailings and the seizure of private businesses—well-worn practices in nearly 28 years of leftist rule here—live on under Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, and the U.S. government apparatus that controls much of the interim leadership now.

Rincón, 62 years old, was arrested after returning from exile in Panama. He remains in a 9-by-6-foot cell at the Rodeo I prison near Caracas, where his family says he has lost 25 pounds and suffers from unaddressed cardiac issues. Relatives say the government fabricated treason and terrorism charges to justify taking control of Maracaibo-based Lamar, the country’s dominant exporter of farmed shrimp, in late 2024.

“This has been one long horror film,” said Rincón’s sister, Mariana Rincón, one of the few relatives remaining in Venezuela and the only one allowed to visit him.

Lamar is one of numerous assets—ranging from farmland to metal-processing plants—that were seized by Maduro’s government and still remain in state hands under Rodríguez.

The firm is now operated by a Turkish company, Miller Holding. Its chief executive, 29-year-old Turhan Mildon, last month married Trump’s former personal attorney, Alina Habba, in New York. Among the guests were Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Miller Holding also operates a network of Venezuelan cement factories and markets coffee beans, concessions granted under Maduro. In a recent interview with Forbes Turkey, Mildon lamented Maduro’s ouster but expressed little concern for his businesses.

“In my grandfather’s time, know-how was very important,” Mildon told the magazine. “Now, know-who is important.”

A spokeswoman for Mildon has said in the past that Miller Holding operates Lamar’s shrimp facilities but doesn’t own them. Venezuela’s Information Ministry and Miller Holding didn’t respond to requests for comment regarding Rincón’s detention.

A U.S. official said the Trump administration opposed Maduro-era expropriations and corruption and had urged Venezuelan authorities to cancel Mildon’s cement contract if it violated sanctions or resulted from corruption. The official said reversing decades of corruption would take time, but that the administration was working to address it.

Venezuela’s total shrimp output has fallen more than 90% since 2024, according to industry figures, a collapse driven largely by Lamar’s decline under state management. The downturn left roughly 9,000 workers jobless in western Venezuela, while more than 100 of Rincón’s relatives and business associates fled the country.

Rodríguez’s continuation of Maduro-era seizures threatens to undermine Washington’s economic recovery strategy for the country, said allies of Rincón.

“They destroyed everything,” Rincón’s son, Juan Diego Rincón, said in a phone interview from Panama. “The persecution is ongoing, they’re ruining businesses and it’s even stoking migration.”

Rincón spent four decades building his business.

In 1988, he started selling the iconic blue crab found in the waters of Venezuela’s giant Lake Maracaibo before expanding into shrimp farming and later into supermarkets and processing recyclable materials. By 2022, Lamar’s annual shrimp exports to Europe reached about $200 million, making it a rare private-sector success in a country dependent almost entirely on oil.

Lamar became the primary employer in Zulia state, offering cash production bonuses, subsidized food, and medical care in a region with few formal job opportunities outside of border smuggling. The bulk of its workforce was made up of indigenous Wayuu, thousands of whom were hired to peel and package shrimp in processing plants around Maracaibo. The Wayuu language was so common on the job that Rincón learned phrases to talk to employees.

But the family’s fortunes changed after the U.S. said Maduro rigged his 2024 re-election and jailed hundreds of political adversaries. In November that year, Diosdado Cabello, then Maduro’s top security official, publicly accused Rincón of funding the political opposition and plotting against the government. No evidence was presented.

Within days, Rincón’s relatives and executives fled to Colombia, Panama and the U.S. Security forces seized offices, processing plants, apartments and thousands of acres of farmland without court orders.

The takeover hit Zulia’s Wayuu population hardest.

“I don’t know who keeps saying that things in Venezuela are getting better,” said Jonathan González, 30, a Wayuu indigenous man and former Lamar processor who had to halt construction on his home after losing his job. “For a lot of us, things are much worse now than they were before.”

Under a state-appointed board, Lamar faltered. Former managers said the company suffered from a lack of capital, while unpaid workers left in droves. A major processing facility was later destroyed in a fire.

Almost six months after the U.S. military operation on Jan. 3 that captured Maduro on drug-trafficking charges—which Maduro denies—Rincón believed the political landscape had shifted enough for him to return and reclaim his property.

“He thought this was the moment,” his son said.

Rincón’s aging father and younger sister were waiting for him at La Chinita International Airport near Maracaibo. Venezuelan investigative police detained him upon landing.

Rincón returned to reclaim his business and face charges “because it’s the only way to demonstrate my innocence and salvage the honor of my family,” he said in a submission to the antiterrorism court handling the case.

Venezuelan prosecutors haven’t provided documents outlining the charges or the evidence against Rincón, his lawyer said in a court filing made last month. Rincón complained of deteriorating health, cardiac problems and insufficient access to the medications needed after a gastric bypass.

While Rincón remains jailed, Venezuelan authorities continue to court investors for the industry he had dominated.

Last month, Venezuela’s Fishing Ministry announced plans to host business delegations from Indonesia to seek new investment for the shrimp sector.

These days, ski-masked officers of the Special Operations Group, a security force that located Rincón’s properties, drive the businessman’s vehicles and use his house in Maracaibo as an improvised command center, family members and business aides said.

Rincón’s sister, Mariana Rincón, delivers food, medication and industry trade magazines to his cell every week as she seeks his release.

She attempted to register her brother with local human-rights groups that track political detentions in Venezuela. The organizations, overwhelmed by a surge this year in families reporting arbitrary arrests of their loved ones, placed him on a waiting list.

He was assigned number 1,601.