Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in the first days of the Trump administration, has made more than 460 arrests of illegal immigrants, including those with criminal histories that include sexual assault, domestic violence and drugs and weapons crimes.
Information obtained by Fox News Digital, shows that between midnight Jan. 21 and 9 a.m. Jan 22, a 33-hour period, ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) arrested more than 460 illegal immigrants that include criminal histories of sexual assault, robbery, burglary, aggravated assault, drugs and weapons offenses, resisting arrest and domestic violence.
Agents arrested nationals from a slew of countries, including Afghanistan, Angola, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Senegal and Venezuela.
Arrests took place across the U.S. including Illinois, Utah, California, Minnesota, New York, Florida and Maryland.
On January 22, 2025, ICE-ERO News York arrested Kamaro Denver Haye, a citizen of Jamaica. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) previously arrested Haye on 12/10/2024 for "Promote A Sexual Performance By A Child Less Than 17 Years of Age and Possessing Sexual Performance By Child Less Than 16 Years of Age: Possess/Access To View". (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement )
Meanwhile, ICE issued more than 420 detainers – requests ICE be notified when a national is released from custody. The nationals were arrested for crimes including homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping, battery and robbery.
Arrests include:
– A Mexican national, Jesus Perez, arrested in Salt Lake City, charged with aggravated sexual abuse of a child.
On January 22, 2025, ICE-ERO Chicago arrested Adan Pablo-Ramirez, an inadmissible Mexican national with convictions for operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol.(U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement )
– A Honduran national, Franklin Osorto-Cruz, convicted of driving while intoxicated. He was arrested in New York.
– A Jamaican national, Kamaro Denver Haye, arrested for "promote a sexual performance by a child less than 17 years of age and possessing sexual performance by child less than 16 years of age: possess/access to view."
– A Mexican national, Jesus Baltazar Mendoza, convicted of 2nd degree assault of a child. He was arrested in St. Paul.
– Colombian national Andres Orjuela Parra, who was arrested in San Francisco. He has a conviction of sexual penetration with a foreign object on an unaware victim.
– Six illegal immigrants in Miami from Guatemala, with criminal histories including battery, child abuse, fraud, resisting arrest, DWI, trespassing and vandalism.
Meanwhile, Fox News' Bill Melugin was on the ground in Boston, where agents arrested multiple MS-13 gang members, Interpol Red Notices, and murder & rape suspects.
The arrests come as the Trump administration is moving rapidly to fulfill its promise to launch a historic mass deportation operation, which it has said will focus primarily – but not exclusively – on public safety threats.
On January 22, 2025, ICE-ERO New York City arrested Jose Roberto Rodriguez-Urbina, a 22-year-old citizen of El Salvador. Rodriguez is an alleged MS13 gang member and is also the subject of an Interpol Red Notice from El Salvador for the offense of Extortion.(U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement )
This week the administration has made a slew of moves to make it happen, including a barrage of executive orders by President Trump and subsequent moves by his cabinet agencies.
Fox News reported Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security has removed limits from powers of expedited removal, a day after it rescinded a Biden-era memo restricting where ICE can conduct enforcement operations.
ICE-ERO San Francisco arrested Daniel Andres Orjuela Parra (right), a citizen of Colombia unlawfully present in the United States. Orjuela has been convicted of sexual penetration with a foreign object on an unaware victim and sentenced to 3 years in prison.(U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement )
"Teams are out there as of today," Homan said on "America’s Newsroom" on Tuesday. "We gave them direction to prioritize public safety threats that we're looking for. We've been working up the target list."
"Right out of the gate it’s public safety threats, those who are in the country illegally that have been convicted, arrested for serious crime," he said. "But let me be clear. There's not only public safety threats that will be arrested, because in sanctuary cities, we're not allowed to get that public safety threat in the jail, which means we got to go to the neighborhood and find him."
The declaration, proposed by Mayor Pat Burns and intended to prevent crime, comes after Gov. Gavin Newsom convened a special legislative session to, in part, help protect illegal immigrants from deportation.
“We are going to provide the best safety for our citizens, plain and simple,” said Burns during the city council meeting. “It’s going to be what’s best for Huntington Beach. Huntington Beach first.”
The mayor also addressed concerns that the declaration would be used to attack immigrant communities, saying that it would make immigrant neighborhoods safer.
Huntington Beach City Council wrote in a joint statement that “Neither the Governor nor the State Legislature with the passage of laws may interfere with the City’s voluntary cooperation with federal authorities, nor cause or compel the City to violate federal laws such as Title 8 Section 1324 for the harboring of illegal immigrants.”
According to Huntington Beach City Attorney Michael Gates, California’s sanctuary state law interferes with local agencies’ ability to comply with federal law.
“In California in particular, fighting crime is difficult enough with the relaxed criminal laws and lack of enforcement,” Gates said in a statement. “The State should get out of the way of local law enforcement, stop handcuffing our police officers and California’s cities, and get back to the business of protecting innocent citizens. Emphatically, the State should not take a position of violating federal immigration laws or encouraging cities to violate federal immigration laws.”
During the Jan. 21 meeting, councilman Chad Williams criticized Senate Bill 54, which went into effect in January 2018 and prohibits state and local resources from being used to aid federal immigration enforcement.
“I find it fascinating and really kind of disturbing the way that Sacramento plays word games with laws like SB 54—the so-called Values Act or the sanctuary law—while they freely are admitting that entering the country illegally is a violation of federal law,” said Williams.
“As a charter city in Huntington Beach, we have the right, we have the responsibility, I think, to do better. Upholding the U.S. Constitution isn’t just some abstract idea.”
Huntington Beach’s action is in contrast to other jurisdictions, such as San Diego County, which declared itself a sanctuary region in December 2024. Around the same time, Los Angeles also finalized its sanctuary city policy.
“We’re going to send a very clear message that the city of Los Angeles will not cooperate with ICE in any way,” Los Angeles Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez said at the time, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We want people to feel protected and be able to have faith in their government and that women can report domestic violence, crimes.”
Huntington Beach has long supported federal immigration enforcement. The city signed in February 2024 a letter of solidarity with Texas over its efforts to secure the border.
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, there are at least 2.5 million illegal immigrants in California.
Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock and arguably one of the most powerful men on the planet, is now openly saying that the countries with xenophobic immigration policies are going to have a higher standard of living, faster productivity growth, and will be better able to accommodate the social impact of artificial intelligence advances over the coming years.
“You know, we always used to think shrinking population is a cause for negative growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large developed countries that have xenophobic immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in, shrinking unemployment, excuse me, shrinking demographics.
These countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology.
And if the promise, I didn’t say it’s going to happen, but as a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will, we’ll be able to elevate the standard of living of countries and the standard of living of individuals even with shrinking populations,” said Fink.
“And so the paradigm of negative population growth is going to be changing. And the social problems that one will have in substituting humans for machines is going to be far easier in those countries that have declining populations,” he said.
Fink’s BlackRock manages $10.6 trillion in assets and has access to world leaders, CEOs, and some of the brightest minds on the planet, so when he speaks, people should listen whether they like what he is saying or not.
When Fink talks about xenophobic countries, he is talking about countries like South Korea, China, and Japan, where robotics and AI are being used to deal with the demographic situation instead of mass immigration. Of course, it must be noted that Fink himself has played a key role in driving DEI policies in corporations. BlackRock has used its trillions in investment dollars to strong-arm companies to adopt these policies, but society is not only turning against the policies, but Fink and others may also see the writing on the wall with AI and automation, and how many of the Asian countries seem to be outperforming the West.
Examples abound of how these countries are rapidly replacing human labor, and some of the most dramatic changes have taken place in just the last few years, if not the last few months.
Meanwhile, China is deploying self-driving buses to shuttle people around instead of refugees. The autonomous vehicle trend is exploding, and it will only accelerate over the next five years to the point that most public transportation will be automated, and if there is any driver at all, he or she will only be there in emergencies.
Notably, many of the accidents that do occur on public transport are due to human error.
South Korea features some of the most highly automated factories in the world. In fact, the country leads the world in robot density and features one robot per ten human workers in manufacturing. It has successfully replaced 10 percent of its workforce through automation. Those trends will only accelerate as humanoid robots are more and more able to fulfill human tasks, a development that will wipe out millions of factory jobs in the coming years.
Fink is arguing, in essence, that these “xenophobic” Asian countries will continue to lead in terms of automation in part due to their population decline, which makes innovation a necessity. In fact, the West’s reliance on waves of foreign labor, which has also become a serious burden on the social welfare system, has harmed productivity, as companies believe it is not necessary to innovate when many tasks can be solved with cheap labor.
It is not as if immigration has really led to an improved standard of living either. The United States, which has seen the largest influx of immigrants in the history of mankind, is continuously complaining of a labor shortage, including a “crisis” involving a lack of “skilled labor.” It appears that no matter how many millions arrive in the country from foreign countries, the skilled labor shortage only grows. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been battered by inflation, sky-high housing prices, and increasingly unlivable and highly segregated cities where random acts of violence are a part of “big city” life and where public transport is a daily exercise in whether you will be harassed, assaulted, or simply lit on fire and left to burn alive.
These countries are not only highly developed, but they actually thrive on a lack of open borders. Despite placing severe restrictions on immigration, they have a higher quality of living than many Western countries. In the schools, there is order and a rich environment for learning. On the streets, there is little fear of being assaulted or raped while out for a jog. There is of course crime, but when looking at crime statistics, for example, from multicultural France, the difference is incredible.
“Robots are becoming more capable, flexible, and cost-effective, with embodied agents bringing the power of generative AI into the factory environment. Manufacturers must prepare for the inevitable disruption — or risk falling behind,” the authors write.
All of this obviously raises serious questions about the need for mass immigration. The demand for big business and corporations for skilled and unskilled labor is real; however, if these spots are not fulfilled, these businesses will turn to automation. When it comes to immigration in countries like Germany, many of the immigrants are either on social welfare or in low-skilled professions, and waves of automation will increasingly leave these migrants and native workers unemployed, likely competing for a smaller pool of jobs. On farms, there will be no need for farmworkers anymore either, reducing the need for seasonal labor.
Japan has the oldest farmers in the world, and it is rapidly turning to technology to overcome this massive demographic challenge.
“Due to depopulation and aging, the number of Japanese farmers will rapidly decrease,”says Atsushi Suginaka, director-general for policy coordination at Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF). “In order to maintain agricultural production, there are high expectations for ‘smart agriculture’ as a new style of agriculture that combines improved productivity and sustainability.
“The Japanese government has been promoting smart agriculture in fields and the improvement of smart agriculture technologies. As a result of these efforts, many of these technologies have already been put into practical use: automated tractors, pesticide spraying drones, remote-controlled mowers.”
There is no doubt that Japan is also turning to temporary workers and limited immigration; however, these immigrants have little chance of becoming citizens, are almost all from Asian countries with similar cultures, and are coming in very limited numbers. The long-term plan for Japan is obviously to focus on productivity and automation over immigration. This means Japan does not have to deal with poor educational integration, cultural polarization, daily gang rapes, large organized foreign criminal groups, and Islamic terror attacks. Perhaps most of all, it does not have to give up its culture to accommodate hundreds of cultures, languages, and mores from all over the world that actively degrade and marginalize Japanese culture.
After all, Japan has a beautiful country, a beautiful culture, and a rich diversity of peoples within its own nation, which stretches from the tropical Amami Islands in the south to the Northern Japanese Alps. Westerners are increasingly fascinated with the lifestyle presented by Asian countries, which feature safe and luxurious public transport, clean and safe cities, and in many areas, far greater technological progress than the West. Youtube is, for example, rife with videos featuring tens of millions of views simply of individuals traveling on Asian train networks. There is nobody screaming, no threat of random stabbing attacks, and a level of service that simply could not exist on most Western trains.
Shockingly, Western rail networks are falling to pieces, and countries like Germany featured a record number of train delays in 2023, all while raising fare prices year after year. In New York City, the city’s own data on subway performance paints a miserable picture. Xenophobic Japan, in contrast, supplies incredible rail service and has not raised rail ticket fees for decades.
Japan’s functioning rail system may have less to do with automation than just practical human engineering and organization skills, but undoubtedly, Japan has invested in its train systems in a manner that works, which does include technology upgrades. This same progress is seen in a variety of fields, and even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) admits that Japan is managing its shrinking workforce through automation advancements.
The Asian countries get away “morally” with their xenophobia due to the fact that they are not White countries. Notice that Fink does not refer to them as “racist.” Xenophobia comes across as a softer more “technocratic” term. Only White countries must embrace diversity and mass immigration or face the dreaded “r” word.
Ultimately, the crisis will come when it becomes more and more apparent that humans are just not needed as much, and Fink realizes this, noting that those countries with a falling population will be better able to accommodate the falling demand for labor. Furthermore, homogenous societies like China, Japan and South Korea feature far more social cohesion than the increasingly polarized and fractured societies of the West, which enable these societies to better manage the social disruption brought on by AI.
The Chinese, for example, are far more optimistic than their European counterparts about the ability of AI to generate new jobs and opportunities. An Ipsos survey shows that 77 percent of Chinese believe AI will likely create new jobs in their country, making them the most optimistic country in the world. Europeans appear to see AI as a threat. Only 29 percent of Poles and Germans believe AI will likely create jobs.
The crisis will be huge
Goldman Sachs predicts 300 million jobs will be replaced or degraded in the Western world due to AI, hitting nearly every sector, including legal, engineering, healthcare, sales and design. Already in 2019, it was predicted by Oxford Economics that automation would replace 20 million factory workers by 2030. The same report writes that those same laid-off workers could try to enter the service sector, but they would find that those jobs too were dramatically reduced due to AI.
AI is already threatening professions that require advanced cognitive skills, such as programming, medicine, and law. Doctors, for example, are facing the reality that AI is far better than doctors at diagnosing illnesses. Already, many surgeries are performed by robotics, which are far more precise than doctors could ever be. Within 10 years, there will be no real need for doctors either.
Even in the skilled trade professions, such as factory workers, plumbers, gardeners, electricians, and other “physical jobs,” humanoid robots and other robots will increasingly muscle in on these jobs. Humanoid robots are in many ways just a far more advanced research problem than the one faced in developing self-driving vehicles. The self-driving car problem has been largely solved, it is just a matter of scaling it out further. However, you can now get into a Waymo car in San Franciso, and it can bring you from point A to point B, all without human intervention. Millions of people think that the “last-mile” problem is still a thing, but it’s not. There are hundreds of thousands of people driving the last mile every single day in their vehicles in the United States. There were many predicting even just a few years ago that this would not happen, that we were still decades away from self-driving vehicles, but it is happening in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Tesla drivers across the country are using full autonomous support to drive between cities without any intervention.
The same advances will happen with humanoid robots. In the end, they simply need to navigate 3-D space, learn from their environment through AI deep learning, and eventually solve problems even if they have not seen the problem before.
All of this also has the recipe for a disaster for humanity, freeing humans from labor, but removing their agency and sense of self-worth. It will also continue the trend of concentrating wealth, increase surveillance powers, and dramatically reduce the bargaining power of workers. Some industries may be able to ride out these changes, such as government workers or teachers, who have highly protected jobs, but on the whole, fewer and fewer people will be needed to participate to get the same outputs — if not better outputs.
The dream that the machines would do all the work so humans could “make art” and live a life of happy leisure has been made a mockery of through generative AI art and the doom scrolling that constitutes how many humans now spend their free time. This issue of AI and automation truly transcends all political ideologies, but political ideologies will almost certainly influence how each country manages these changes. The xenophobic countries will also face these challenges, but they are now in a position to reap the full gains of their xenophobic policies, and even Larry Fink is admitting as much.
President Donald Trump said he has issues with the European Union's treatment of the world's most powerful American companies, criticizing the bloc's multi-billion euro fines on Big Tech as a form of taxation.
"The EU treats us very, very unfairly, very badly," he said Thursday during a question and answer session following his video address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, adding that the region's lengthy and complicated bureaucracy makes it harder for businesses to compete and grow.
Trump hit out at a string of high-profile fines the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, has handed tech giants Apple and Google in recent years that have wound up in court.
"They won billions from Google," he said, also singling out a state aid case Apple lost last year leaving the company with a 13 billion-euro ($13.53 billion) tax bill in Ireland. The region is after "billions and billions" from Meta Platforms' Facebook, he said.
The EU fined Meta EUR797.7 million in November after an antitrust probe into its Marketplace seller platform, and has issued some EUR8.25 billion to Google in the last decade.
"These are American companies whether you like them or not, they are American companies and you shouldn't be doing that," he said, "as far as I'm concerned it's a form of taxation, so we have some very big complaints with the EU."
Trump's comments come just as the commission is expected to move forward with several investigations against Apple, Google and Meta under the Digital Markets Act, a relatively new EU law designed to regulate competition in the tech sector. Companies face hefty fines under the DMA if the regulator decides they are flouting the rules.
A technique now widely used in sports medicine to speed recovery from leg injuries helped reduce symptoms and improve function in people with osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee, a randomized trial showed.
Among 87 patients completing the 24-week study, adding blood flow restriction (BFR) to a low-intensity exercise regimen provided patients with an average of 9.44 more Knee OA Outcome Score (KOOS) points for pain, and similar improvements for other symptoms, activities of daily living, and quality of life, compared with an exercise-only control group, according to Erik Witvrouw, PhD, of Ghent University in Belgium, and colleagues.
"Given the limited tolerance for high-intensity exercise therapy and the suboptimal results from low-intensity exercise, BFR training serves as a viable alternative to high-intensity exercise mitigating excessive loading on degenerated knee joints," Witvrouw and colleagues concluded.
Strength training has long been recommended for knee OA patients as a means of reducing symptoms in the short term and delaying the need for joint replacement. But, as Witvrouw and colleagues observed, the degree of benefit is usually not great and many patients either refuse entirely or give it up after a short while.
"By significantly increasing the metabolic stimulus, BFR allows for much lower mechanical loads compared with the 70% of one repetition maximum recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine for strength increments," Witvrouw and colleagues wrote. "Consequently, BFR might offer a suitable and more effective strength training method for patients with [knee] OA whose degenerated joints do not tolerate high-intensity exercises well."
For their trialopens in a new tab or window, the researchers randomized 120 people with symptomatic and radiographically confirmed knee OA to BFR or control in equal numbers. Their disease could not be so severe that arthroplasty was imminently necessary, and participants had to be in relatively good overall health and non-obese. There was significant attrition as the trial progressed, with 17 participants dropping out by week 12 and another 16 in the final 12 weeks.
The training regimen consisted of twice-weekly sessions focusing primarily on quadriceps strengthening through leg press and extension exercises. BFR involved applying a pressurized tourniquet around the thigh to achieve 60% vascular occlusion during exercises; it was deflated between exercises. BFR was not begun in earnest until week 3, except for having the tourniquet applied during the leg press "for familiarization," the researchers explained. The program for both groups lasted 12 weeks, after which patients could do as they wished; they were asked to return at week 24 for a follow-up assessment.
For the initial 120, mean age was about 58 and roughly three-quarters were women. About 40% had knee OA at severity grade 2; most of the rest were at grade 3. KOOS scores at baseline averaged approximately 60 for pain, 55 for other symptoms, and 37 for quality of life, all out of a possible 100 points (lower scores mean greater severity).
Separation between the groups was apparent at week 6 and increased as the study went on. Patients in the control group generally showed some improvement initially but plateaued after week 12. On the other hand, improvement in the three major domains (pain, other symptoms, and quality of life) continued for the BFR group through the study's end at week 24.
Mean differences between the two groups at week 24, all favoring BFR, were as follows:
KOOS pain: 9.44 points (P=0.0008)
KOOS other symptoms: 9.03 points (P=0.0004)
KOOS activities of daily living: 6.95 points (P=0.0144)
KOOS sport: 7.49 points (P=0.1296)
KOOS quality of life: 13.23 points (P=0.0001)
Significant improvements with BFR relative to control were seen in other outcome measures as well, including 30-second knee bend and chair-to-stand tests, fast-pace walking, and stair climbs. For most outcomes, the researchers indicated, effect sizes were "moderate to large" after the 12-week program and these "persisted and [were] even enhanced" after the additional 12 weeks of follow-up.
Limitations to the study included its open-label design (although participants weren't told what hypothesis was being tested); its exclusion of patients with common comorbidities such as obesity, severe hypertension, and type 2 diabetes; and the substantial dropout rate.
Disclosures
The trial was funded by the Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen. Authors declared they had no relevant financial interests.
Primary Source
Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases
Source Reference: opens in a new tab or windowJacobs E, et al "Vascular occlusion for optimising the functional improvement in patients with knee osteoarthritis: a randomised controlled trial" Ann Rheum Dis 2025; DOI: 10.1136/ard-2024-226579.
Bluejay Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to developing potentially life-changing therapeutics for serious viral and liver diseases, today announced that its lead product candidate brelovitug (also known as BJT-778) has received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Breakthrough Therapy designation for the treatment of chronic hepatitis delta (CHD). There are currently no approved treatments for chronic hepatitis D in the United States and most countries around the world.
opens in a new tab or window that she "wept tears of joy" after President Donald Trump granted her "a full and unconditional pardon" on his first day back in office, along with nearly 1,600 other Jan. 6 defendants.
Gold, who was convicted and served time in federal prisonopens in a new tab or window for trespassing the U.S. Capitol during the riots, also posted a statement on letterhead from America's Frontline Doctors, a group she founded in the early days of the COVID pandemic.
"I am a physician serving my patients, my community and my country. I care for people. I am a civil rights attorney defending our constitutional right to free speech. Today I was exonerated from any wrongdoing by the President of the United States," the statement read.
"Now that this long distraction is behind me, I will get back to the business of serving others with my medical and legal training in the private and public sector," she continued. "I thank President Donald J. Trump for correcting this historical wrong so that I can continue the work of helping people."
In a plea deal in U.S. District Court, Gold pleaded guiltyopens in a new tab or window to one of five criminal counts against her and was ordered to serve a prison sentence of up to 6 months -- which ended up being 60 days -- and ordered to pay a $9,500 fine. Her California license was placed on inactive status after she reportedopens in a new tab or window to a Miami prison in July 2022.
She was releasedopens in a new tab or window from a Miami prison 2 weeks early, but faced an internal battle with AFLDS colleagues who accusedopens in a new tab or window her of using the organization's funds to buy a $3.6 million home in Florida and three cars, including a Mercedes Benz and a GMC Denali, for personal use.
During the time she was in the Capitol with rioters, she used a megaphone to give a speech opposingopens in a new tab or window government-imposed lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
At a press conference in front of the Supreme Court building in 2020, she extolled hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, despite compelling evidence of its ineffectiveness and complication risks.
It could not be determined as of press time whether other physicians involved with the Jan. 6 riots were pardoned or had their sentences commuted.
Jacquelyn Starer, MDopens in a new tab or window, of Ashland, Massachusetts pleaded guilty to 8 counts, including a felony assault charge, and was sentenced to 9 months in prisonopens in a new tab or window. She reportedly tried to push past police guards in a hallway to the office of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Starer reportedly punched a police officer who tried to hold her back.
She no longer has a license to practice in Massachusetts.
The late Tamara Towers Parry, MD, a former Seattle physician who lost her license in that state after her participation in Jan. 6, had posted videos of herself during the insurrection carrying a QAnon flag, according to media reports.
She had been going through a divorce, was being evicted, and was facing several medical issues. When she appeared outside her home armed with a shotgunopens in a new tab or window as two people tried to serve her paperwork, one of them shot her in the torso and she died at the scene.
