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A prosecutor declined to file charges against a Missouri police officer who shot and killed a woman and her infant child last year. Independence, Mo., officers responded to a reported assault in November at an apartment building. They were determining how to arrest the woman, who was nonverbal and communicating with nods and gestures, when she abruptly grabbed a butcher knife from a bedside table and moved toward the officers while holding the child, said Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson’s office. One officer backed away, but the other was against a closet and couldn’t escape, Johnson’s. He fired four shots as the woman moved toward him with the knife. The shots killed the woman and her child, 34-year-old Maria Pike and her 3-month-old daughter, Destinii, reports the Associated Press. Advertisement Johnson’s office said the officer’s use of deadly force “falls within the protection of the law.” The office said there wasn’t enough evidence to prove the officer intentionally shot the infant. “We did not arrive at this decision lightly. The loss of a young mother and her infant are devastating and tragic,” Johnson said. “However, as prosecutors, we are bound by an oath to apply the law and analyze facts without being guided by the sympathy we feel for all those impacted. Our purpose is to determine if what was done was reasonable, defined by Missouri law, and not whether it was the best course of action.”

The Trump administration transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador despite a federal judge’s order temporarily barring the deportations targeting Venezuelan gang members under an 18th century wartime declaration. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling, reports the Associated Press. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued an order Saturday evening blocking the deportations as lawyers told him there were already two planes with migrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not. “Oopsie…Too late,” said Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who agreed to house about 300 migrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country’s prisons. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house migrants, posted on X, “We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.” The migrants were deported under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. The law, invoked during World Wars I and II and the War of 1812, requires a president to declare the U.S. is at war, giving him extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreigners who otherwise would have protections under immigration or criminal laws. It was last used to justify the detention of Japanese-American civilians during World War II. The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit that led to Boasberg’s temporary restraining order on deportations, said Sunday, "We asked the government to assure the Court that its order was not violated and are waiting to hear, as well as trying to do our own investigation." Venezuela’s government rejected the use the law, characterizing it as evocative of “the darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.”

Tom Wagner was working as a rideshare driver when he was shot during a Chicago carjacking in 2021. The shooting left a jagged scar across his abdomen where bullets pierced his gallbladder, colon and liver. After three years of calling detectives for updates — including 10 months of no response— Wagner found out last month that the police have dropped the investigation of his shooting without an arrest. “I get that they’re understaffed,” Wagner says. “But, at the same time, where’s my justice?” Wagner is among more than 19,000 people wounded in shootings in Chicago since 2018. The Chicago Police Department has made arrests in 1,200 of those cases. Last year alone, there were 2,300 nonfatal shootings in Chicago. The police made arrests in just 141 of them — a “clearance” rate of about 6%, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation found. Mayor Brandon Johnson pledged during his campaign to hire 200 more detectives. The number of detectives assigned to at least one shooting actually has fallen by nearly 20%, with 40 fewer investigators in 2024 than the police department had the year before. Experts say the chronic lack of arrests is a big part of the reason there are as many shootings as there are in many Chicago neighborhoods plagued by gunfire. Those who did the shootings remain on the street, free to hurt more people. Seeing no arrest, victims’ friends in some cases try to take justice into their own hands and retaliate. Witnesses who already might be in fear but also don’t think arrests are likely might be less willing to cooperate with detectives — part of a widespread “no-snitch code” — making it harder to make arrests. The police department has started a pilot program that dedicates detectives to investigating nonfatal shootings. It includes about 60 detectives across the city’s 22 police districts. The police department assigns 8.4% of its officers to detective work. That’s well below the percentage in New York (11.4%) and Los Angeles (15.4%), though similar to Philadelphia (8.7%). New York and Los Angeles regularly solve more than 70% of homicides. Philadelphia’s clearance rate for murders is only slightly higher than Chicago’s, which hovers around 25%.

In 2023, Donald Trump’s lawyers arrived at Justice Department headquarters, scooped up visitors badges and asked prosecutors about Trump’s imminent indictment over the hoarding of documents at Mar-a-Lago. He never faced a trial and is now the president. Two members of his defense team run the agency’s day-to-day operations. Trump will deliver a major law-and-order speech in the DOJ great hall, as much an expression of conquest and vindication as a first visit to a key cabinet department. Trump is using the speech to show he has taken political possession of DOJ, reports the New York Times , He promises a "complete gamut” of policy proposals, including on immigration. The speech comes as officials have made plans to use wartime legal authorities to accelerate the deportation of undocumented immigrants, a step that could be announced as soon as Friday. The president could also unveil new steps to combat “weaponization” of the department, even as his officials use its powers to punish his enemies and reward his allies. Trump is likely to trumpet his efforts ramping up immigration arrests, militarizing the border, turning away migrants and reshaping the system that allows people to seek sanctuary in the U.S.. Using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act could give Trump sweeping new authority to remove undocumented immigrants while providing them little to no due process. The move is likely to be contested in court — presenting a major challenge for Justice Department appellate lawyers already scrambling to defend other Trump edicts. Presidential visits to DOJ headquarters are uncommon but not unheard-of. The first came in early 1933, with President Herbert Hoover presiding over the dedication of the site of the building, roughly halfway between the Capitol and White House.

The Justice Department sued New York and Chicago for allegedly interfering with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Federal prosecutors are investigating an Upstate New York sheriff’s office the agency blames for releasing an undocumented immigrant from custody in defiance of an arrest warrant. Tom Homan, the White House immigration czar, has warned he’ll be “bringing hell” to Boston if the city’s police chief continues to abide by sanctuary policies. President Trump has moved aggressively to compel local law enforcement agencies to actively assist with his plans for mass deportations. Their involvement is considered crucial because of the limited resources and staffing of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Washington Post reports. Officials are frustrated that the pace of arrests and deportations has failed to meet the president's expectations. Some local leaders contend the confrontational tactics risk undermining the broader public safety goals that Trump promoted during his campaign, when he pledged to “back the blue” by providing more support for local police. The president is vowing to withhold tens of millions of dollars in criminal justice grants to “sanctuary jurisdictions,” whose policies limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Critics say cutting those grants and potentially prosecuting officials would jeopardize programs designed to fight crime and would exacerbate tensions and mistrust between federal and local partners. “As a practical matter, it’s extraordinarily counterproductive for them to cut off the very types of grants and relationships where the federal government works collaboratively with local governments on actually dealing with crimes,” said James Williams, executive of Santa Clara County in California. “That doesn’t help anybody.” Last month, Santa Clara County joined San Francisco; Portland, Ore.,; New Haven, Conn.,; and King County, Wa., in a lawsuit challenging Trump’s targeting of sanctuary jurisdictions.

Congressional Democrats say the Republicans’ budget plan could threaten funding for gun violence research and prevention. Senators are expected to vote Friday on a "continuing resolution" that would largely extend current federal spending levels through September and avert a government shutdown. Democrats say the GOP’s proposal, which passed the House on Tuesday, could embolden the Trump administration to shortchange anti-violence efforts. This week, three Democratic House members and leaders from a half dozen violence prevention programs warned against the resolution and vowed to fight any attempt to divert funding from reducing gun violence, reports The Trace. “They think it’s a waste of money and time,” said Rep. Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL). “I do not believe life-saving policies are a waste.” Most at risk is the $25 million Congress has steered toward gun violence research every year since 2019. Split equally between the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the funding has not been written into budget bills themselves. Lawmakers include it in “explanatory text” meant to direct agencies on spending. The Republicans’ continuing resolution could invalidate the texts, allowing the Trump administration to spend that $25 million elsewhere. James Mercy, the former head of the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention said, “The firearm research monies would be under threat if this CR is passed. At least $137.1 million in federal money has flowed to studying gun violence since 2020, accounting for 127 projects. The dollars have been a significant boon for the field after Congress in 2019 lifted a more than two-decade-old de facto ban on federal spending for gun violence research. Funding for gun violence research was already in flux before the budget uncertainty. In January, the National Institute of Justice sent email to researchers canceling all of its funding opportunities. The agency provides most federal funding for criminology and criminal justice research, including on gun violence. The NIH paused review panels for research grant awards, including reviews of gun violence research proposals. Without the review panels, research grants can’t be processed.

Texas lawmakers are proposing at least 121 bills to clamp down on crime, threatening to overcrowd the state’s jails and prisons whose populations have grown after dipping significantly during the pandemic. The measures would increase criminal penalties by either creating mandatory minimum sentences or by elevating punishment, says the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. That group has tracked 90 bills that would create new felonies and 96 bills that would create new misdemeanors. The totals will increase by Friday’s bill filing deadline. The numbers show the state’s growing push towards more punishment, reports the Texas Tribune. “Ever since 2015 there has been a pretty steady, incremental growth in the number of crimes [lawmakers] create every session,” said Shannon Edmonds, president of the association. That growth signals a “return to the law and order sentiment of previous decades,” he added. Proposals include bills to crack down on organized retail theft, impose prison time on people who burglarize vehicles more than once and ban the possession of AI-generated child pornography. Some proposals would provide local law enforcement officers with more tools to crack down on threats from new technology, including artificial intelligence, while other legislation would do little to deter crime and could strain the state’s already overwrought prisons and jails, experts said. Texas’ prison population is projected to increase by about 10% over the next five years, according to the Legislative Budget Board, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice continues to contend with a staffing shortage. The population of county jails also is increasing. As of February, their population was about 2.5% higher than the same time last year, according to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.

State officials are warning people not to respond to a surge of scam road toll collection texts. The texts impersonating state road toll collection agencies attempt to get phone users to disclose financial information, such as credit or debit cards or bank accounts. They’re so-called smishing scams — a form of phishing that relies on SMS texts to trick people into sending money or share sensitive information, the Associated Press reports. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill received one purporting to be from the statewide GeauxPass toll system. “It is a SCAM,” Murrill posted on Facebook this week. “If you ever receive a text that looks suspicious, be sure to never click on it. You don’t want your private information stolen by scammers.” Even states that don’t charge drivers tolls have noticed an uptick. “We do not have tolls roads in Vermont but travelers may mistake these scams for actual toll operators in other states,” Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark said in a video public service announcement on Instagram. Cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks said that a threat actor has registered over 10,000 domains for the scams. The scams are impersonating toll services and package delivery services in at least 10 U.S. states and the Canadian province of Ontario. While Apple bans links in iPhone messages received from unknown senders, the scam attempts to bypass that protection by inviting users to reply with “Y” and reopen the text. A warning from the FBI said the texts used nearly identical language falsely claiming that recipients have an unpaid or outstanding toll. Some threaten fines or suspended driving privileges if recipients don’t pay up. The FBI has asked those who received the scams to file a complaint with its IC3 internet crime complaint center and to also delete the texts.

Americans reported losing over $12.5 billion to various forms of fraud last year, per new Federal Trade Commission data — up a staggering 25% from 2023. The spike suggests fraudsters are outpacing both law enforcement and efforts to educate consumers on how to protect themselves, Axios reports. Investment and impostor scams took the biggest financial tolls, with consumers losing $5.7 billion and nearly $3 billion to each, respectively. Scams where perpetrators pretend to be government representatives are particularly hot right now, with reported losses increasing from $171 million in 2023 to $789 million in 2024. The raw number of FTC fraud reports remained relatively steady year-over-year. There was a big spike in the share of victims reporting that they lost money as a result of fraud: 38% in 2024, up from 27% in 2023. Many fraudsters prey on older, less digitally savvy people,  but of those 20-29 years old who reported fraud in 2024, 44% said they lost money, compared to 24% of those 70-79 years old. Residents of Washington, D.C. (2,509); Florida (2,163) and Georgia (2,108) filed the most FTC reports per100,000 residents last year for fraud and other topics. FTC fraud reports are voluntary, and many instances of fraud and other scams go unreported, meaning these numbers areundercounts. Companies like Visa are stepping up efforts to detect and fight back against fraud and scams.

Since the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, his attorneys have fought any suggestion that this case is about whether their client committed a crime or is a threat to national security. Instead, they say, it’s about the U.S. stifling Khalil’s advocacy for Palestine. The government agrees it’s not about committing a crime. The government’s main argument against Khalil rests on a civil law provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act, which governs the immigration and citizenship system. The provision gives the secretary of state the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a U.S. citizen, if there is a “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests, The Intercept reports . Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian, in the lobby of his Columbia University apartment on Saturday. After initially alleging they had revoked his student visa, they said they had instead revoked Khalil’s green card. Authorities then transported Khalil, a U.S. permanent resident, from New York to New Jersey, then to an immigration detention facility in Louisiana where judges are known to be more favorable to the government’s legal arguments. The government says, “The Secretary of State has determined that your presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Government lawyers have not, however, provided any evidence, in court filings or hearings, to support their claim. Khalil’s legal team plans to fight the government’s “foreign policy” provision in both the push for his release in federal court and in his deportation proceedings in immigration court, said Baher Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights. A judge temporarily halted Khalil from being deported while his lawyers continue to push for his release and transfer back to New York, where his attorneys can represent him more easily and he can be closer to his wife, who is eight months pregnant. Khalil’s attorneys plan to contest his detention on free speech grounds under the First Amendment and by challenging the government’s use of the “foreign policy” provision. By evoking the “foreign policy” provision, the Trump administration is making a clear statement not just about its foreign policy goals but also free speech, Azmy said. “The United States government thinks Mahmoud’s speech in favor of Palestinian human rights and to end the genocide is not only contrary to U.S. foreign policy, which is something in itself, but that that dissent provides grounds for arrest, detention, and deportation,” Azmy said. “It’s an astonishing claim.”

A federal judge denied the Justice Department’s attempt to apply President Trump’s blanket pardon for members of the Jan. 6 mob at the Capitol to one defendant’s conviction for possessing illegal guns at his Kentucky home. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, became the first judge to reject outright the Justice Department’s recently adopted position about the scope of Trump’s clemency, Politico reports. Reversing its initial stance iafter Trump’s inauguration, the department is now arguing that Trump’s pardon extends to crimes with no connection to the attack on the Capitol other than the fact that law enforcement agents uncovered evidence of them during the Jan. 6 investigation. Friedrich said DOJ’s position “contradicts” the “clear and unambiguous” language of Trump's Day 1 executive order granting pardons to 1,500 people convicted of participating in the riot. Friedrich noted that Trump’s order said it applied to “individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” The judge found illogical the contention that the order extended to other crimes authorities came across as they conducted that investigation. “To interpret the Presidential Pardon to apply to any type of offense — no matter when or where that offense was committed — simply because evidence of that offense was uncovered incident to a January 6-related search warrant would ‘defy rationality,’” Friedrich wrote. Trump could clarify or expand his Jan. 6 pardon directive, but he has not done so, perhaps because that could draw more attention to the subject and to other crimes committed by some involved in the Capitol riot.