Category: Nation World News Wires

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — The Federal Bureau of Investigation has established a minimum reward of $25,000 in cases where people went missing or were killed in Indian Country, part of a broader effort to address high rates of violence affecting Native American communities.

The new minimum applies to more than 50 unsolved homicides and missing-person cases in tribal communities. Most of the cases are less than 10 years old, though a dozen have been unsolved for more than two decades, an AP analysis found.

Victims’ families and experts are unsure the higher amounts will be enough to get tipsters to come forward, citing people’s fears and distrust of the federal government.

“Everybody’s scared in Oglala,” said Lisa Carlow, whose father, Patrick Carlow Sr., was found dead in his Pine Ridge Reservation home in 2023. “So to me it’s like, OK, what do you guys know that you’re not saying?”

The FBI investigates federal crimes on nearly 200 Native American reservations, along with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. At the end of 2025, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center recorded just under 1,500 active cases involving missing Native Americans, though not all become federal cases. There isn’t a minimum reward that applies across all FBI cases.

The FBI cited several cases in its recent announcement, including that of 8-year-old Maleeka Boone, who it said was likely struck by a vehicle on the Navajo Nation, and San Carlos Apache teenager Emily Pike, whose body was found after she disappeared from an Arizona group home.

Higher rewards could stir new interest

Mary Kathryn Nagle, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and an attorney who advocates for families of missing Native Americans, said federal investigators often “parachute in” to investigate crimes in tight-knit communities where witnesses may stay silent because of distrust and fear of retribution.

Still, she said, larger rewards could provide an incentive for people to talk, and show families their loved ones’ cases are being taken seriously.

“We have people in Indian Country who know what happened to our relatives,” she said.

Luana Ross, who is Bitterroot Salish and a co-director of the Native Voices program at the University of Washington, said cash rewards could boost interest but often aren’t paid out.

“It is my opinion that in reservation communities, people would be extremely reluctant to turn a friend or relative into a criminal justice system that hasn’t served them well,” she said.

Lisa Foster’s longtime friend Mona Renee Vallo was found dead after a suspected hit-and-run along historic Route 66 in Laguna Pueblo, N.M., in 2022. Foster hopes the higher reward money will renew interest in the investigation.

Foster described Vallo as a positive, bubbly friend who could have fun no matter what. She was a member of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation.

“Someone knows something there,” Foster said. “They have to. I mean, it’s weird that she went to work and then all of a sudden this happened to her.”

Frustration mounts as families seek answers

The reward in Carlow’s case was increased to $25,000 in July, up from $10,000.

Carlow’s family says the 73-year-old rancher was respected in the Oglala community. He mowed the grass for others and spent time with his grandchildren. The family said more calls started coming in after the reward was increased, but the wait for answers continues.

Meanwhile, the FBI declined to provide the Associated Press an update on the case.

“It’s so hard to get your hopes up like that and think, ‘This is it, we finally got Dad’s killer.’ And then nothing comes of it,” Lisa Carlow said.

She said fear keeps community members who may have information from contacting authorities.

“I think that’s like deep-rooted within our people,” said her sister, JoDee Carlow. “It’s not just on Pine Ridge. It’s on every reservation.”

Relatives don’t want cases to be forgotten

The FBI initially offered $5,000 for information in the deaths of two brothers from Ohio, Matthew and Philip Reagan. The reward was later doubled and now will hit $25,000. Though not Native Americans, they were killed on the Navajo Nation and are featured on the FBI’s Indian Country cases website.

The brothers planned to visit Canyon de Chelly National Monument during a trip to California. Authorities believe their SUV got stuck in mud after GPS sent them off course near Sawmill. They were shot multiple times while walking to seek help, authorities said.

Matthew Reagan’s wife, Faye Wurstner-Reagan, said she doubts a $25,000 reward will persuade anyone in the small community to come forward.

“You would have to promise someone, like, actual protection,” she said. “I mean, they brutally murdered two men.”

She suggested the FBI instead put resources toward law enforcement to keep the cases from going cold and for liaisons to keep families informed.

FBI spokesperson Brooke Brennan in Phoenix said investigating crimes in Indian Country often is complex because of the remoteness, limited resources, and extensive workload.

Wurstner-Reagan hopes that families united in pain and grief over missing loved ones and unsolved killings might one day see justice.

“We’re just getting forgotten, like no one is remembering any of us, and we’re just told it’s an active investigation,” she said.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — At least 47 people were killed and more than 50 others kidnapped when armed men attacked a once-peaceful community near Haiti’s capital earlier this week, the United Nations said Tuesday.

It is believed to be one of the largest mass kidnappings in Haiti in recent years, and one gang leader is threatening to kill the hostages if authorities kill any gang members as they try to secure the community nestled in the hills above Port-au-Prince.

Sunday’s attack on Kenscoff pierced the belief that security in the troubled Caribbean country was improving.

“This is a major political and security test, for the government, for the police, and for the international mission alike,” said Romain Le Cour, head of the Haiti Observatory at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

He said the threat of executing hostages is a trap: If forces don’t act, they’ve failed to protect them; if they do and hostages die, the gangs will blame the state.

Kenscoff resident Marc Paul, 42, said gangs kidnapped his brother, stepmother, stepfather, and two cousins. He said his 16-year-old niece also was kidnapped and raped but was able to escape and has reunited with him.

“I had to run over bodies,” he said as he recalled how he ran during the attack. “I can’t sleep knowing all these people died.”

Paul and his family had already lost their home to a previous gang attack in January 2025, but he said it was not as violent as Sunday’s attack.

“It’s horrible,” he said, adding that he was upset about the video the gangs posted. “My brother is probably going to die.”

A threat posted on social media

In a video posted on social media, the gang leader threatened Vladimir Paraison, director of Haiti’s National Police.

“Paraison, if any of our soldiers are hurt, I will kill all of them,” he said, referring to the hostages.

The gang member identified himself as Izo 2, a reference to Izo, or Johnson André, one of Haiti’s most powerful gang leaders.

Le Cour said Izo 2 is also known as “Didi” and leads the armed group in Kenscoff on behalf of and in coordination with Izo and other gang leaders.

He said the aim of Sunday’s attack could be to force Haiti’s police and the U.N.-backed gang suppression force to disperse even more of their limited resources.

“They don’t have enough personnel,” Le Cour said in a phone interview. “If you force them to deploy more troops, it would inevitably be at the expense of other areas.”

The attack might also just be a show of force and a message to Haiti’s government and police as the country prepares to hold general elections on Dec. 13 for the first time in more than a decade.

“This is a message to the government and the police that their claims of protection do not match reality,” Le Cour said. “The gangs are saying: When we choose to attack, we can, and we will succeed.”

Attacks on Kenscoff have escalated

The first major attack on Kenscoff occurred in January 2025, and since then, there have been sporadic attacks in the mountains surrounding the city center.

But Sunday’s attack was the largest yet. At least five of the 47 people killed were children, according to the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti, known as BINUH.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the attack on Tuesday, noting that 22 of the victims were reportedly executed in a church compound where they had sought shelter: “The relentless gang attacks on communities and the loss of lives underscore the alarming security conditions in Haiti,” he said.

Kenscoff Mayor Jean Massillon told the Associated Press on Tuesday that gangs set fire to 25 homes and killed two government employees including his cousin, who served as his security detail.

“The atrocity of this crime reminds us that we have to continue working stronger every day to bring peace to the community,” Massillon said. “I’m optimistic that the state will continue working to eradicate the gangs in Kenscoff.”

Gangs are coveting Kenscoff because it allows them to surround and control the upscale community of Pétion-Ville and alternate routes connecting Haiti’s capital to its southern region, said María Fernanda Arocha, a researcher with the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data.

Between January and August this year, security operations had managed to reduce violence in Kenscoff by 66% prior to the attack, she said in a statement.

“While security forces have concentrated their efforts on operations aimed at regaining control in the central areas of Port-au-Prince, criminal groups have instead sought to expand into rural communities that are vulnerable due to the limited response capacity of the police, but which remain strategic hubs,” she added.

Haitians demand police protection

Some survivors accused the government of not providing enough protection prior to the attack, with Haiti’s National Police rejecting those accusations.

Le Cour said that if police and armored vehicles were indeed stationed in Kenscoff prior to the attack, then the assertion is concerning: “You let the gangs come in even if you had everything in place?”

Armed men control an estimated 70% of Port-au-Prince and swaths of land in Haiti’s central region and beyond.

Gang violence has displaced a record 1.5 million people across Haiti, where more than 3,050 people were reported killed from January to June and another 1,400 injured, according to U.N. statistics released Tuesday.

The U.N. noted that nearly 800 rapes were reported from April to June, with 87% of those cases representing collective rapes.

At least 81 people also were reported kidnapped during that time period, according to a new U.N. report.

“These figures represent only a portion of the total number of people kidnapped,” it stated. “In many cases, victims’ relatives do not report kidnappings to the police or service providers and choose to negotiate directly with the kidnappers, believing that this approach allows for a quicker release and avoids possible reprisals.”

The number of kidnappings reported from April to June represents a more than 40% increase compared with the previous quarter.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 50,000 people in July, the highest single monthly arrest total during the second Trump administration, according to new figures.

The spike in immigration arrests shows that the administration has continued to advance its mass deportations agenda despite a shift in approach earlier this year from high-profile operations in large American cities that sparked a public outcry to arrests that have garnered less attention but have nonetheless been disruptive.

The July arrest tally of 49,571 marks a 15% jump from 43,021 arrests a month earlier, and a 70% increase from 29,241 in February, in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in Minnesota, according to government data that was provided by ICE to the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA and analyzed by the Associated Press.

As part of the surging arrest numbers over recent weeks and bolstered by a hiring surge, ICE has made arrests at traffic stops. The agency has increasingly relied on state and local law enforcement partners who are assuming immigration enforcement duties. And ICE officers have started to arrest people from Haiti who’ve seen their protections from deportation stripped away.

The new arrest numbers show the administration “didn’t stop the enforcement,” said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for more immigration restrictions.

“They changed the tactics and are, if anything, being more effective.”

State partnerships becoming key to immigration enforcement

Immigration arrests the month before President Donald Trump returned to office hovered at a little over 8,000, a figure largely made up of immigrants transferred from city or state jails and prisons and turned over to ICE to remove from the country. During Trump’s first year back in office, the numbers started climbing as the administration loosened restrictions on where and whom ICE could arrest while it also infused the agency with billions of dollars.

By December, the number of arrests jumped to more than 40,177, according to the data, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Homeland Security largely stopped reporting immigration enforcement data at the beginning of the second Trump administration, making the data from the Deportation Data Project one of the few insights into how the agency is operating.

In the aftermath of two fatal shootings in Minnesota in January that sparked protests and an uproar from Democratic lawmakers, arrests began to fall in February. After remaining stagnant for months, the numbers surged in June and then again in July.

The number of arrests made by state and local police departments who partner with ICE has dramatically increased over the last year. Those partnerships, which ICE has grown with the help of generous financial incentives for participating agencies, accounted for 6,500 arrests in July, or about 13% of the total, the data showed. A year earlier, they accounted for less than 5% of ICE’s monthly arrests.

Texas and Florida accounted for nearly 20,000 of the July arrests, in a sign of how important those states have become to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. Both states have leaned heavily into those cooperation deals with ICE, known as 287g agreements, which allow local and state law enforcement to essentially operate as arms of federal immigration enforcement.

That close cooperation is increasingly resulting in arrests like one last week in Florida’s Key West. The manager at the Half Shell Raw Bar said Tuesday that one of his staff members, a 36-year-old asylum seeker who fled Haiti in 2017 after receiving death threats, was arrested by local police and turned over to ICE.

The manager, Bobby Kuchinsky, said the man had worked as a cook and supervisor at the restaurant and was the main provider of his family. Kuchinsky declined to identify the man out of concern for his safety while in custody.

“He was an excellent worker, he learned very fast, he never had any problem with the law,” Kuchinsky said in an interview with the AP, noting that it will be a challenge to replace him. “He was a nice kid, he was a family man.”

DHS secretary pledged quieter approach but mass deportations still a priority

In his confirmation hearing earlier this year, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin pledged to keep ICE out of the headlines, suggesting that the administration’s immigration crackdown might take a softer approach. But his tenure has been marred by a number of fatal shootings of immigrants in encounters with ICE officers. And the figures show Mullin hasn’t shifted the agency from Trump’s vision for mass deportations.

Under Mullin’s predecessor, Kristi Noem, immigration enforcement was often characterized by high-profile operations that targeted specific Democratic cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. Operations, often led by former Border Patrol agent Greg Bovino, were blasted out on social media videos showing officers bursting out of moving vans to chase people or rappelling from helicopters onto apartment rooftops.

But Krikorian said those tactics were “provoking a lot of ordinary people, turning them off even if they liked the idea of the immigration law being enforced.”

New data shows most immigrants arrested didn’t have criminal history

The administration has often said its immigration enforcement operations target people who have committed crimes in the U.S. as a way to make the country safer.

But the data shows that more than half of those arrested in July had not been convicted of any crimes and were not facing any criminal charges. Less than a quarter of those arrested had been convicted of a crime.

And half of the arrests were noncustodial, which means ICE agents arrested people in the community rather than someone already behind bars or held by local police.

Patricia Quiñonez, a journalist at Utahzolanos, which covers the Venezuelan immigrant community in Utah, said immigration arrests during traffic stops have increased sharply in recent months.

“They stop you for whatever reason — for example, you don’t have a driver’s license, your vehicle tags are expired, your windows are more tinted than what is allowed. From there, they take advantage of the situation and ask about immigration.”

People with valid work permits and pending asylum claims are among those arrested, said Quiñonez, who believes they are being targeted by race.

NEW YORK — Ghislaine Maxwell’s bid to overturn her sex trafficking conviction and be freed from prison was rejected by a federal judge Tuesday who said the claims by Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend and longtime associate that new evidence had emerged were “demonstrably meritless.”

Maxwell filed a habeas petition last December seeking to set aside her conviction and free her from a 20-year prison sentence, claiming exonerating information was withheld and false testimony presented at her trial, resulting in a “complete miscarriage of justice.”

Judge Paul A. Engelmayer rejected her arguments, saying in his written ruling they “all or almost all are frivolous” and that she had presented nothing that could upend the outcome of her trial.

“Nearly all its claims are procedurally barred; the overwhelming testimonial and documentary evidence adduced at trial conclusively established her guilt; and her petition’s claims are demonstrably meritless, and generally based on speculation, distortions, and/or outright falsehoods,” Engelmayer wrote.

A request for comment was sent to lawyers who represented Maxwell in the past.

Habeas petitions are often filed as a last resort and to protect against unlawful confinement after appeals are exhausted, as happened after Maxwell’s conviction and sentencing.

Epstein, a millionaire financier, was arrested in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges. Ordered detained until trial, he was found dead in his cell at a New York federal jail in August 2019 and his death was ruled a suicide.

Maxwell, a British socialite, was arrested a year later and was convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021. She was moved from a Florida prison to a prison camp in Texas last year, shortly after she was interviewed by the Justice Department’s then second-in-command, Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and now U.S. attorney general.

The judge noted that many of Maxwell’s claims of “new evidence” stem from documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

As a result of that law, the Justice Department over the last eight months has released 18 categories of investigative materials gathered in the massive sex trafficking probe, including search warrants, financial records, notes from interviews with victims, and data from electronic devices.

Engelmayer said that material is “largely irrelevant to the charges against Maxwell and does not support her claims of error.”

“On the contrary, to the extent it is relevant, far from exculpating her, it incriminates her or reinforces the correctness of the legal rulings Maxwell challenges,” he wrote.

The judge also rejected Maxwell’s claim that she was selectively prosecuted and made a “scapegoat” when the Justice Department did not indict four co-conspirators named in a government document or 25 men who settled with victims.

Engelmayer said she could have raised that claim on appeal after her trial, but he found it to be frivolous nonetheless.

Among the recently released Justice Department documents, “she does not cite any that reveals the existence of an uncharged confederate, let alone one as instrumental as she in facilitating Epstein’s horrific crimes,” the judge said.

DAKAR, Senegal — Six people who were deported by the United States to Liberia last week resisted getting off the plane and instead were sent to Equatorial Guinea, another ‌African nation that signed a third-country deportation agreement with the Trump administration, a person on the plane and a lawyer in contact with the six said Monday.

Under a series of often secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported thousands of people to two dozen countries that aren’t their own as it pushes ahead with its immigration crackdown, advocates say. Immigration lawyers say the practice is being used as a legal loophole to indirectly return some asylum seekers to countries they fled.

The group who refused to get off the plane in Liberia on Thursday include four Cuban men, a Brazilian man, and a Cameroonian woman, the person and lawyer said.

A Honduran deportee aboard the flight said the group refused to disembark, saying Liberia was “not their country” and that they would face danger there. They were then separated from the others, he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals.

He said the other passengers got off in Liberia because they feared officers would force them.

Meredyth Yoon, litigation director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, said the deportees who resisted leaving the plane in Liberia were told they would be returned to the United States but instead were flown to Malabo city in Equatorial Guinea.

“It was a really heartbreaking and chaotic scene when they arrived in Malabo on Thursday,” Yoon said.

Some arrived in chains and in extreme distress, she said, including the Cameroonian woman and one of the Cuban men, who Yoon said has a large abdominal growth and uses a colostomy bag that must be drained regularly.

There is no medical staff at the hotel in Equatorial Guinea where the six are being held, alongside around 40 other deported migrants, she added.

Conditions at the hotel have worsened in recent months, Yoon said, with food sometimes withheld and guards accused of threatening, beating, and choking some of the migrants.

Equatorial Guinea’s government did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment.

Under an opaque $7.5 million deal with the Trump administration, Equatorial Guinea’s all-powerful president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has turned the hotel owned by his family into a prison for asylum seekers deported from the U.S.