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State Department Halts Medical Visas For Palestinians

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The State Department said it would stop issuing visas to Palestinians from Gaza, including to those coming to the United States for humanitarian and medical treatment, following a campaign by far-right political activist Laura Loomer.

“All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement on Saturday.

The decision will impact several programs that have evacuated dozens of critically injured children from Gaza over the last 21 months, including amputees and severe burn victims.

The announcement came just hours after a series of social media posts from Loomer criticizing the medical evacuations of Palestinian children to the U.S. In one post, she shared a video of a child amputee arriving in a wheelchair at Seattle airport for medical treatment, adding: “The Trump administration needs to shut this abomination down ASAP.”

Loomer, who once described herself as a “proud Islamaphobe” and said 9/11 was an “inside job,” made false claims in her posts and said she had sent her “evidence” to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Hours later, the pause was announced.

Read more: I Can No Longer Feed Kids in Gaza

Rubio told “Face the Nation” on CBS on Sunday that the action came after “outreach from multiple congressional offices asking questions about it.” But Loomer quickly took credit for the pause, posting: “It’s amazing how fast we can get results from the Trump administration.”

The Palestinian Children Relief Fund (PCRF), a charity that organizes medical evacuations of children to the U.S., said the move will prevent them from providing “lifesaving medical treatment” for “critically ill children” from Gaza.

“Medical evacuations are a lifeline for the children of Gaza who would otherwise face unimaginable suffering or death due to the collapse of medical infrastructure in Gaza,” the PCRF said in a statement. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Gaza’s health system has been in collapse, and there has been a “relentless and systematic decimation of hospitals in Gaza.”

The United Nations children’s charity, UNICEF, said in July that more than 17,000 children have been killed and 33,000 injured in Gaza in the last 21 months.  

HEAL Palestine, another charity that organizes evacuations and which was specifically targeted by Loomer in her posts, said this month it has evacuated 63 injured children and 148 total evacuees to the U.S. to receive treatment. Earlier this month, it carried out the largest known evacuation of wounded children from Gaza to the U.S., which included 11 children and their families, most of them for treatment of amputations.

HEAL Palestine made it clear on social media that the visas it uses to bring people to the U.S. for treatment were not for resettlement, but for lifesaving care, contrary to Loomer’s claims.

“After their treatment is complete, the children and any accompanying family members return to the Middle East. This is a medical treatment program, not a refugee resettlement program,” HEAL Palestine said Saturday. The charity added that U.S. tax dollars do not fund the treatment provided to these children. 

Loomer, a conspiracy theorist with a history of using hate speech to gain attention, has acquired an outsized influence over the White House in President Donald Trump’s second term. 

She has successfully lobbied to remove people from top government roles whom she considers disloyal to the president, including six from the National Security Council, a senior Customs and Border Protection official, and a Food and Drug Administration vaccine official.

TIME has contacted the State Department for comment. 





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Florida State QB Tommy Castellanos mocks Alabama with merch after opener upset

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Less than 24 hours after handing Alabama its first loss in a season opener since 2001, Florida State quarterback Tommy Castellanos is capitalizing on the weekend’s biggest upset.

Castellanos’ website is selling eight shirts and sweatshirts taunting the No. 8 Crimson Tide over its 31-17 loss to the Seminoles. Alabama entered the game as a heavy favorite, even on the road.

Some of the merchandise features the line “Nick Can’t Save Them,” a reference to his eyebrow-raising comments about the Tide in June, when he said, “They don’t have Nick Saban to save them. I just don’t see them stopping me.”

At ACC media days in July, he doubled down on his prediction, telling reporters: “We stand on what I said. I said what I said, and we stand on that.”

 

 

On Saturday, he backed up those words, leading FSU to a stunning victory.

Other items Castellanos is selling show a cartoon of him standing on a brick with Saturday’s score painted on it, while others say “Stand On What I Said.”

Castellanos, a senior who transferred to FSU after two seasons at Boston College, completed 9 of 14 pass attempts for 152 yards against Alabama. He also ran for 78 yards and a touchdown.

Alabama suffered multiple upsets last season under new head coach Kalen DeBoer, and some fans feel the team has underperformed since Saban’s retirement, posting a 9-5 record since the switch.

The Seminoles will face East Texas A&M next Saturday, while Alabama is set to take on Louisiana-Monroe the same day.

(Photo by Butch Dill / Getty Images)





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Rudy Giuliani hospitalized after his “vehicle was struck from behind at high speed”

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Rudy Giuliani was hospitalized with multiple broken bones after his vehicle was “struck from behind at high speed” in New Hampshire, his spokesperson said Sunday.

According to his spokesperson, Michael Ragusa, Giuliani was diagnosed with “fractured thoracic vertebrae, multiple lacerations and contusions, as well as injuries to his left arm and lower leg.” 

The crash occurred Saturday night. 

Ragusa said that before the crash, Giuliani was flagged down by a woman who was a victim of domestic violence. He “rendered assistance,” contacted 911, and “remained on scene with her until responding officers arrived to ensure her safety.” It’s unclear how that incident is related to the car crash that injured the former mayor.

In a follow-up, Ragusa said the crash was “not a targeted attack.”

Giuliani rose to fame in the 1980s and ’90s in New York City as a prosecutor before being elected mayor. After two terms as mayor, he dabbled in national politics, even running for president in 2008. Later, he became a close adviser to President Trump in his first term and became a key spreader of conspiracy theories targeting the ballot counters after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election.

Giuliani was disbarred in New York and Washington, D.C. and he declared bankruptcy after being found liable for $146 million for spreading falsehoods about Georgia election workers. 



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Judge blocks deportation of Guatemalan migrant children as flights were ready to take off

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A federal judge on Sunday blocked the Trump administration from sending any unaccompanied migrant child to Guatemala unless they have a deportation order, just hours after lawyers alerted her of what they described as a hurried government effort to deport hundreds of children.

U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan issued her order as the deportation effort was fully underway, with planes with migrant children on board ready to take off from Texas.

Earlier Sunday, in the overnight hours, Sooknanan issued a temporary restraining order barring officials from sending a group of 10 migrant children between the ages of 10 and 17 to Guatemala, granting a request from attorneys who alleged the effort would skirt legal protections Congress established for these minors. She also scheduled a hearing in the afternoon to weigh the case’s next steps.

But Sooknanan abruptly moved up the hearing earlier on Sunday, saying she had been alerted that some migrant children were already in the process of being deported.

As that hearing got underway, Sooknanan announced she had just issued a broader temporary restraining order blocking any deportations of unaccompanied children from Guatemala and in U.S. custody who did not have a deportation order. She instructed Drew Ensign, the Justice Department lawyer representing the Trump administration, to quickly inform officials they had to halt their deportation plans.

Ensign acknowledged deportation planes had been prepared to take off on Sunday, but said they were all “on the ground” and still on U.S. soil. He said he believed one plane had taken off earlier but had come back. 

At the request of Sooknanan, Ensign said he confirmed that the children on the planes would be deplaned and returned to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for caring for migrant minors who enter the U.S. without authorization and without their parents or legal guardians.

HHS houses unaccompanied children in shelters or foster homes until they turn 18 or until they can be placed with a suitable sponsor in the U.S., who are often family members.

Sooknanan conceded her temporary restraining order, which is set to last 14 days, is “extraordinary” but justified it on the grounds that the government had decided to “execute a plan to remove these children” in the “wee hours” of a holiday weekend.

In their lawsuit, lawyers for the group of Guatemalan children said the Trump administration had launched an effort to deport more than 600 migrant minors to Guatemala without allowing them to request humanitarian protection, even though U.S. law protects them from speedy deportations. They alleged the children could face abuse, neglect or persecution if returned to Guatemala.

Ensign, the Justice Department attorney, said the Trump administration was not trying to formally deport the Guatemalan children under U.S. immigration law, but instead repatriate them to Guatemala so they could reunite with relatives there. He said the Guatemalan government and the children’s relatives had requested the reunifications.

But lawyers for the children disputed the government’s claims, citing one case in which they say a child’s parents did not request any repatriation. They also said a law known as the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act says unaccompanied migrant children who are not from Mexico must be allowed to see an immigration judge and apply for legal protections before any deportation effort.  Some of the children facing return to Guatemala still have pending immigration cases, the attorneys said.

Ensign said the government’s legal position is that it can “repatriate” these children, based on authority given to HHS to reunite “unaccompanied alien children with a parent abroad in appropriate cases.”

Representatives for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the deportation plans. 

Neha Desai, an attorney at the California-based National Center for Youth Law who works with migrant minors, said the U.S. government was attempting to deport children with “already filed claims for legal relief based on the abuse and persecution that they experienced in their home country.”

“This is both unlawful and profoundly inhumane,” Desai added.

Most of the unaccompanied children who cross the U.S. southern border without legal permission hail from Central America and tend to be teenagers. Once in the U.S., many file applications for asylum or other immigration benefits to try to stay in the country legally, such as a visa for abused, abandoned or neglected youth.

As part of its larger crackdown on illegal immigration, the Trump administration has sought to make drastic changes to how the U.S. processes unaccompanied children. It has made it harder for some relatives, including those in the country illegally, to sponsor unaccompanied children out of government custody and offered some teenagers the option to voluntary return to their native countries.

The Trump administration has also directed agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies to conduct “welfare checks” on children released from HHS custody, a move it has said is in response to disputed claims that the Biden administration “lost” hundreds of thousands of migrant minors.

There are currently roughly 2,000 migrant children in HHS care. 



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