Category: Wires

WASHINGTON — Federal agents around the country were told in recent days that the FBI would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents — cases that sometimes yield evidence that could be used to prosecute Department of Homeland Security agents implicated in violent encounters, according to people briefed on the decision.

If enacted, such a change would sharply limit law enforcement scrutiny of immigration agents, as the Trump administration draws mounting criticism over killings at the hands of federal officers. In the past two weeks, two fatal shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Texas and Maine have thrust the government’s tactics back into the spotlight.

FBI managers around the country received a written notice informing them of the change Thursday, according to the people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal communications. The same day, some ICE agents around the country were notified by their FBI counterparts.

The guidance shared with them said that the bureau would stop investigating claims of assaults against Department of Homeland Security agents, the people said. Even though such investigations are intended to determine whether the officers were in fact attacked, they can provide a crucial means of gathering evidence implicating the agents themselves.

A joint statement by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, however, denied that any such change was underway.

“The relationship between DHS and DOJ in investigating assault on federal officer cases has not changed, and FBI will continue to investigate in accordance with agency policy,” the statement said. “This administration has been clear, anyone who assaults law enforcement will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Under the change, responsibility for investigating cases involving federal immigration officers would likely fall to Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, effectively leaving the agency to investigate itself, according to guidance circulated among FBI and ICE agents.

Cases involving an assault on a federal officer have been a source of tension inside federal law enforcement agencies for more than a year. White House and Justice Department officials have pushed prosecutors to bring charges in as many of them as possible, particularly as Americans protest the administration’s immigration crackdown.

Under the federal statute, felony charges can be brought against anyone who “forcibly assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates, or interferes” with a federal law enforcement officer.

Trump administration officials have claimed that language means anyone who makes physical contact with an agent should be charged with felony assault, which is punishable by up to eight years in prison.

“It’s abhorrent to ever, ever touch a law enforcement officer, which is why anytime anybody does that and it’s a federal officer, we’ll prosecute them,” the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said in an interview in May on CNN.

An investigation by the New York Times found that the Trump administration had filed charges against more than 550 people for assaulting federal officers. Of the more than 400 cases that had been resolved, nearly half had unraveled, with charges being thrown out or withdrawn, or the defendants being acquitted.

Under the Trump administration, when ICE agents have shot and killed people, the FBI has been assigned to scrutinize a narrow question: whether the agents were assaulted before the gunfire.

While the bureau in past administrations has investigated potential civil rights abuses and law enforcement misconduct, it has been limited from doing so in high-profile ICE shootings over the past year, according to law enforcement officials.

However, FBI investigations involving an assault on a federal officer could yield evidence that is valuable to other cases, including future civil rights investigations or prosecutions of an ICE agent. If that responsibility shifts to Homeland Security Investigations, it would leave a gap in holding immigration agents to account, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Homeland Security Investigations does not have jurisdiction to investigate civil rights violations, so putting the change into practice would make it far less likely that shootings of unarmed people by ICE agents would be investigated to determine if the agents broke federal law.

The enforcement crackdown in President Donald Trump’s second term has resulted in nearly two dozen people being fired on by federal immigration agents since January 2025. Six people, including three U.S. citizens, have been killed as a result of those shootings, nearly all of which involved officers firing into vehicles.

On July 7 in Houston, an ICE agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the country for more than three decades, during a traffic stop while he was driving to work with three passengers. He was not the target of the ICE operation, federal officials later acknowledged.

In Maine on July 13, an ICE agent shot and killed a Colombian man, who was also in his vehicle. He was identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, according to a spokesperson for Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

THUNDER BAY, Ontario — Out-of-control wildfires in Ontario continued to force evacuations and affect major cities in Canada and the United States on Saturday as the province’s leader made his first visit near the devastated area.

Speaking from a parking lot in Thunder Bay on Saturday, Premier Doug Ford said that 191 wildfires — seven more than Friday — were burning northwest of the city and that 73 were raging out of control.

Ten communities have been evacuated, and 300 people have been rescued from campsites in 40 operations, Ford added. Roughly 1.7 million acres have burned in Ontario, data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center shows.

In a short address, Ford said it was critical that people in the area did not return to their campsites or homes, especially because water bombers did not drop fire suppression loads when they saw people in the bush from overhead. He said there were 155 fire crews at work and 80 water bombers and helicopters flying, with 40 additional aircraft ready to deploy.

Ford has faced harsh criticism by his political opponents for budgeting 150 million Canadian dollars ($107 million) for the current wildfire season after spending CA$271 million, last year.

“It’s not time to politicize these emergencies,” Ford said. “It’s absolutely disgusting in my opinion that they want to politicize and play games when people’s lives are on the line,” he added, vowing there would be “no limit to spending.”

Under Canada’s division of powers, most forest lands are owned and managed by provinces, which collect royalties for commercial tree cutting and, with some exceptions like national parks, are also responsible for firefighting.

On a late flight to Thunder Bay from Toronto on Friday night, the pilot was forced to make three approaches on landing because of unsafe conditions from the thick smoke, earning loud applause from the passengers when the twin turboprop touched down at Thunder Bay Airport. At least one plane could not land in the smoke and was forced to return to Toronto.

On the ground, smoke hung heavy over the road and diffused the light of street lamps, casting an eerie glow that was replaced at dawn Saturday by the piercing orange light from the sun breaking through the hazy sky.

Mount McKay, a landmark in Thunder Bay visible from most places in the city, was mostly lost in the smoke, only a faint outline visible.

While Thunder Bay remains safe from flames — the closest fires are burning roughly 90 miles to the northwest — heavy smoke has seriously affected air quality.

There was rain in the region Friday, and on Saturday temperatures remained fairly cool at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Local air quality alerts warned of a high health risk caused by toxic particles in the smoke that drifted on light wind and smelled like a campfire.

Provincial officials said they had delivered 3,000 N95 masks to an evacuation support center to be distributed to residents.

Thunder Bay is quickly becoming overcrowded with people fleeing their homes. Some evacuees have been sent to Toronto and other locations. Indigenous communities have been among the worst affected by the fires.

All week, smoke from the Ontario wildfires has darkened skies from Toronto to Detroit, New York, and beyond. Air quality for millions of people across the United States and Canada has plummeted to unhealthy, even hazardous levels.

New York, Toronto, and Washington, D.C., had the worst air quality in the world Saturday morning, and the plume of smoke floating far above Earth’s surface since Wednesday had not drifted clear.

On Friday, President Donald Trump threatened to charge Canada tariffs to pay for harms caused by the wildfire smoke, joining a handful of Republican lawmakers who have criticized the Canadian government over what they called poor forest management.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney did not immediately address the accusations Friday, but he suggested this past week that the United States should do more to combat climate change.

Ford on Saturday called the U.S. lawmakers’ comments “unacceptable” and said they should focus more on helping a neighboring country — Canada has often contributed firefighting resources to the United States — than assigning blame.

“I find it a shame the administration in the U.S. and congresspeople writing these letters and blaming us and so on and so forth,” he said. “They have a very short, short memory.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

For years, Shaoping Wu was part of an increasingly endangered group of human rights lawyers in China.

His work culminated in 2019, when he attended a meeting with other prominent lawyers and activists. Within days, the Chinese government began to detain the participants. Wu quickly fled to the United States, where in 2020 he applied for asylum.

On Wednesday, Wu was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Pennsylvania, where he had been living with his family and working as a contract delivery driver for Amazon.

Supporters and relatives now fear that Wu could be deported to China, where he would likely face persecution from the Chinese Communist Party. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the government has gone to great lengths to snuff out political expression, including by arresting human rights lawyers and activists. Two of the participants in the 2019 meeting are still serving lengthy prison sentences.

Wu’s wife, Caoliu Li, said that her husband had been subject to questioning and harassment by China’s security apparatus over the years but had remained dedicated to the cause of championing rights for ordinary Chinese.

“All along, he has been very focused on the things that are unfair in China and how to change them,” Li said in an interview Thursday from Lancaster, Pa., where the couple lives with their 17-year-old daughter.

John Visher, Wu’s lawyer, said that Wu had been delivering packages near Mount Holly Springs, Pa., when a police officer pulled him over as part of a traffic stop.

Visher said that Wu had entered the United States on a tourist visa in 2019 and that he had told the police officer about his pending asylum application and employment authorization document. Because Wu lacks legal status, police notified immigration officials, who detained him and brought him to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania, where he is now being held.

Wu is scheduled to appear in immigration court on July 27, Visher said.

The Department of Homeland Security said in an unsigned statement that Wu had overstayed his expired visa by six years and that he would receive due process. It noted that the department was offering $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport.

Wu’s case shows how even opponents of the United States’ biggest geopolitical rival are not guaranteed favorable treatment if their legal status is in question. And it is the latest test of how far the Trump administration is willing to go in its campaign to carry out mass deportations and curb the presence of asylum seekers.

This year, another Chinese dissident, Heng Guan, won his asylum case after he was detained by U.S. immigration officials who had tried to send him to Uganda. The department did not appeal the decision, and Guan was released.

Other cases involving Chinese nationals remain unresolved. Several Uyghurs, members of a predominantly Muslim ethnic group that has been systematically oppressed by the Chinese government, remain in ICE detention. They face deportation to third countries, according to Rushan Abbas, executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs, a Washington-based nonprofit.

The immigration actions have happened even as Trump has personally pushed for the release of two prisoners held by the Chinese government.

In May, during a summit with Xi in Beijing, Trump raised the case of Jin Mingri, a pastor who was detained in October as part of a major crackdown on Christians in China. This month, Jin was released and allowed to leave for the United States. The other prisoner, Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong pro-democracy media tycoon, remains in Chinese custody.

In 2015, Wu was working as a commercial attorney in Shanghai when China, under the tightening grip of Xi, initiated its largest crackdown on human rights lawyers in decades. Many lawyers and activists who were arrested faced lengthy sentences. Some who remained went underground or stepped away from the work.

It was against that background that Wu joined the movement of rights defenders.

He began to take on more politically sensitive cases. His clients included Zhang Kun, an anti-corruption activist; Zhu Chengzhi, a human rights defender; and practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China.

“He defended some defendants that most lawyers would avoid,” said Fengsuo Zhou, executive director of Human Rights in China, a group based in New York.

At the 2019 meeting, which Wu attended with prominent human rights defenders like Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi, participants discussed China’s besieged human rights movement and democratic change.

Even after he came to the United States, Wu continued his work for human rights and civil society in China. This month, Zhou noted, Wu had spoken at an online gathering commemorating the government’s sweeping 2015 crackdown on lawyers.

“To the outside world, human rights lawyers might seem like a group of idealistic and tragic heroes,” Wu told the audience. “However, for us, this is not a romantic or performative act, but rather our unavoidable mission and responsibility.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.