Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem | Steven Spearie/The State Journal-Register / USA TODAY NETWORK
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) confronted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about the administration sending a gay man to a prison camp in El Salvador and not even knowing if he’s still alive. Noem said that it wasn’t her problem.
Noem, who has bragged in the past about shooting her dog to death, appeared before the House Homeland Security Committee for a hearing yesterday, where Garcia asked her about Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay hair dresser from Venezuela who came to the U.S. legally to escape anti-LGBTQ+ violence and who was sent to the CECOT camp in El Salvador, which is known for torturing inmates, earlier this year.
The administration, which sent immigrants to the CECOT without letting courts determine if they were in the country illegally or if they had committed any crimes, has refused to try to bring anyone back from the camp.
“Would you commit to just letting his mother know – as a mother-to-mother – if Andry is alive?” Garcia asked Noem. “He was given an asylum appointment by the United States government. We gave him an appointment, we said, Andry, come to the border at this time and claim asylum, he was taken to a foreign prison in El Salvador.”
“His mother just wants to know if he’s alive. Can we check and do a wellness check on him?”
Noem said she doesn’t “know the specifics” of Hernandez Romero’s case but said that since he’s in El Salvador, Garcia should be asking El Salvador’s government about him.
“This isn’t under my jurisdiction,” Noem said.
Garcia reminded her that she said that the Salvadoran prison is a “tool in our toolkit” for fighting crime.
“You and the president have the ability to check that Andry is alive and not being harmed,” he said. “Would you commit into at least looking and asking El Salvador if he is alive?”
“This is a question that is best asked to the president and the government of El Salvador,” Noem responded drily.
Garcia to Noem: "Can you commit to just letting his mother know mother to mother if Andry is alive? He was given an asylum appointment by the United States government."(Noem wouldn't commit to it.)
Hernandez Romero is a Venezuelan immigrant who trekked to the U.S. and entered legally last year at San Diego. There, he asked for asylum, saying that he was being targeted in Venezuela for being gay and due to his political beliefs. He was held in a CoreCivic detention center, where he was screened by Charles Cross Jr.
“The government had found that his threats against him were credible and that he had a real probability of winning an asylum claim,” his lawyer, Lindsay Toczylowski, said.
In March, he, along with over 200 other immigrants, was taken in shackles to the CECOT camp in El Salvador. Even his lawyer said she didn’t know what happened to him until he was gone and missed a hearing in his immigration case.
In a video from the CECOT, Hernandez Romero could be heard saying, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a stylist,” as he was slapped and had his head shaved.
It was later revealed that the evidence Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had against Hernandez Romero was his tattoos, which came from a report from the contractor CoreCivic, specifically from former police officer Charles Cross Jr., who lost his job with the Milwaukee police after he drunkenly crashed into a house and allegedly committed fraud. His name was subsequently added to the Brady List, a list of police officers who are considered non-credible for providing legal testimony in Milwaukee County.
Cross claimed that Hernandez Romero had crown tattoos associated with a gang. The tattoos are labeled “Mom” and “Dad” and are common symbols associated with his hometown of Capacho, Venezuela. Capacho is known for its elaborate festival for Three Kings Day, and a childhood friend, Reina Cardenas, told NBC News that it was that festival that awakened Hernandez Romero’s desire to be an artist.
“Andry dedicated his life to arts and culture, and he worked hard to better his craft,” Cardenas said.
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Jermaine Thomas, who says he was deported to Jamaica without a passport though he’s never been to the country (Provided by Jermaine Thomas)
Ten years ago, Jermaine Thomas was at the center of a case brought before the U.S. Supreme Court: Should a baby born to a U.S. citizen father deployed to a U.S. Army base in Germany have U.S. citizenship?
Last week, Thomas was escorted onto a plane with his wrists and ankles shackled, he says. He arrived in Jamaica, a country he’d never been to, a stateless man.
“I’m looking out the window on the plane,” Thomas told the Chronicle, “and I’m hoping the plane crashes and I die.”
Thomas has no citizenship, according to court documents. He is not a citizen of Germany (where he was born in 1986) or of the United States (where his father served in the military for nearly two decades) or of his father’s birth country of Jamaica (a place he’d never been).
Thomas doesn’t remember Germany. He says he thinks his first memory is in Washington state, but he moved around so much in his military family that it was hard to keep track.
He spent most of his life in Texas, much of it homeless and in and out of jail, he says. His parents divorced when he was too little to remember. His mother, a nurse, remarried to another man in the Army. They moved a lot, and as she and the stepfather had their own kids, Thomas says he struggled in the new family setup.
So at about about 11 years old, he went to stay with his biological father in Florida. By then, his dad was retired from an 18-year career in the U.S. military, he says. His dad died from kidney failure not long after, in 2010.
“If you’re in the U.S. Army, and the Army deploys you somewhere, and you’ve gotta have your child over there, and your child makes a mistake after you pass away, and you put your life on the line for this country, are you going to be okay with them just kicking your child out of the country?” Jermaine says, phoning the Chronicle from a hotel in Kingston, Jamaica. “It was just Memorial Day. Y’all are disrespecting his service and his legacy.”
From Killeen to Kingston
Thomas says it all began with an eviction in Killeen, Texas, which is about an hour north of Austin. Thomas didn’t know where he’d go next, so to get things out of the apartment quickly, he says he moved all of the stuff into the front yard.
While he was gathering things up in the yard, he was joined by his rottweiler, Miss Sassy Pants, whose leash he had tied to a pole.
Then Killeen police showed up. Thomas says they asked for his ID without telling him what he was in trouble for. He says he responded: I haven’t committed a crime and I don’t want to talk to you. They told him that they’d gotten a call about a dog being tied up. Next, they asked if he had the dog’s immunization records or chip number. He said they checked her chip and didn’t see Sassy’s name, so they told Thomas they’d be taking her to the pound.
The dog was loaded into a truck, and Thomas says at this point, he was arrested. Killeen police confirmed that he was arrested for suspected trespassing with no other charges. That’s a misdemeanor in Texas. He went to the Bell County Jail, where he says a court-appointed lawyer told him he could be sitting in a cell for eight months if he wanted to take the case to trial.
After about 30 days in jail, which resulted in losing his job as a janitor, Thomas says he signed paperwork to be released with conditions. But instead of being released, he was transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Waco. He was there only a few hours before being transferred again to an ICE detention camp in Conroe, Texas, just north of Houston.
He says he spent two and half months incarcerated in Conroe, and it seemed like no one knew the status of his case. According to Thomas, a deportation officer told him repeatedly that he had a very unique case, and that it was out of their hands in Texas, and now in the hands of “Washington, D.C.”
“You keep explaining to me that I’m being detained in suspended custody, in detention, but if I don’t have a release day and I don’t get to see a judge, that’s pretty much a life sentence,” Thomas says.
Feeling frustrated with his indefinite imprisonment, Thomas says he called the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Inspector General to file a report about what he thought was unlawful detention.
His case only got more confusing after that, he says. After a guard told him he would soon be released, Thomas was allowed a mesh bag to put his property in. He says all he had was some paperwork from his citizenship case and a phone. The phone didn’t have service – naturally, as he hadn’t been able to pay his phone bill since being incarcerated.
Officers brought Thomas to a room full of Spanish speakers. Thomas says he found one man who spoke “broken English” who said they were all being deported to Nicaragua. “So I get to banging on the door, and I’m like: Hey, why am I in here with them?”
Jermaine Thomas in Kingston (Provided by Jermaine Thomas)
Thomas says he decided then that if officers asked him to put his hands behind his back, he just wouldn’t. “I thought, I’m not gonna do it,” he says. “I’m gonna refuse to do it: Respectfully, I don’t mean to be a problem or anything like that, but you’re not gonna just kidnap me and traffic me across the lands and international lines and deport me like I’ve been seeing y’all do on the news.”
The Back of the Airbus
At least they sent him to Jamaica, says Thomas’ new friend and fellow deportee Tanya Campbell. It may be a country he’s never stepped foot in, and it may be he’s only there because of his “appearance,” as she puts it, but at least the language is English. Campbell, who actually grew up in Jamaica, was imprisoned for manslaughter more than a decade ago in New York. Upon her release from prison a few weeks ago, ICE picked her up. On May 29, she says she was one of roughly 100 people brought to a plane on a tarmac in Miami, bound for Kingston.
At the airport, as she exited a van and was being shackled, she noticed a man surrounded by between eight and 10 officers. That’s how she describes first seeing Jermaine. He was the last to board the plane, “And it was like a walk of shame,” she says. He was seated at the back with officers on either side. She assumed he was a fugitive.
Thomas says he sat in the 31st row. Landing was “bizarre, too real,” he says. “It was like a stampede. Everybody just got up and got off the plane.”
Thomas waited in the last row.He says an ICE officer got on the plane and said: “I don’t have records for more than half of these people. There’s something wrong.”
ICE and DHS did not respond to our questions.
Thomas says he doesn’t know what to do in Jamaica. He finds people difficult to understand, plus many speak Patois, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t know how to get a job. He doesn’t know if it’s the Jamaican or U.S. government paying for his hotel room, and for how long that will last. He’s not sure if it’s even legal for him to be there.
Editor’s Note Friday, June 6, 4:44pm: This story has been updated to correct the year of Thomas’ father’s death. The Chronicle regrets the error.
Riley Gaines, who has turned a fifth place finish against non-trans swimmers into career with MAGA media.
Now let me see if I have this right. Riley Gaines finished 5th in a race with a trans athlete. And, if that trans athlete had NOT been in the race, Riley Gaines would still have finished in 5th place because the two swimmers were TIED for 5th. So, a trans athlete being in the race did not have any effect on Riley Gaines at all
First of all, I would like proof of this man’s “big balls.”
Second, he is a national security disaster. From his Wikipedia page:
His maternal grandfather Valery Martynov was a KGB Lieutenant Colonel executed by the Soviet Union as a double agent. After his execution his widow moved with her children, including Coristine’s mother, to the United States.
Also from Wikipedia:
Bloomberg News reported that Coristine had been fired from his internship at cybersecurity firm Path Network in 2022 for allegedly leaking internal company information to a competitor. Following his dismissal, a large collection of internal Path documents and conversations was leaked online.
The apple may not fall too far from the tree in this instance.
Reuters published a story alleging that Coristine’s online content delivery network DiamondCDN had facilitated the work of the cybercriminal group EGodly. In 2023 Egodly thanked Coristine saying “We extend our gratitude to our valued partners DiamondCDN for generously providing us with their amazing DDoS protection and caching systems, which allow us to securely host and safeguard our website,” Egodly has claimed involvement in a number of crimes including email hacking, theft of cryptocurrency, and the harassment of a former FBI agent.
This guy would never have passed any sort of normal security clearance. That this story isn’t a massive front page scandal is an indictment of the times we live in.
Stephen Miller, the influential Trump administration aide behind its hardline immigration policies, holds a substantial financial stake in Palantir Technologies — a key tech contractor for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — raising new ethics questions, according to a report published Tuesday by the Project on Government Oversight.
Miller, who served as President Donald Trump’s senior advisor on immigration and homeland security, disclosed owning between $100,001 and $250,000 of Palantir stock as of mid-March, according to financial disclosure forms obtained by the watchdog group. Ethics experts told POGO that Miller’s dual role crafting enforcement policy and investing in Palantir, which provides “mission-critical” data services for ICE, could amount to a troubling conflict of interest.
“Given Miller’s deep involvement in ICE policy and operations, this is more than just a bad look — it could easily become a serious ethics issue,” Don Fox, former acting head of the Office of Government Ethics, told POGO. “You don’t want to be in a position to say, ‘Mr. President, I can’t work on that because I have a conflict.’”
Virginia Canter, chief counsel for ethics and anticorruption at Democracy Defenders Fund and a former federal attorney, added that Miller appeared to be “just on the verge” of breaking ethics rules.
Palantir’s ICE contract and political connections have long been controversial. The company’s tools have enabled ICE agents to identify, detain and deport people, including through recent enhancements that give officers near-real-time data on self-deportations. Meanwhile, Palantir stock has surged more than 80% this year, making it one of the top performers on the S&P 500.
Miller’s disclosure also revealed that the Palantir stock is held in one of his children’s brokerage accounts, but federal ethics rules apply the same legal standards to assets owned by spouses or minor children.
In a statement to POGO, the White House defended Miller’s disclosures and said he will continue to recuse himself from decisions that could directly impact his personal investments. Palantir did not respond to POGO’s request for comment.
The report follows a pattern of Trump appointees and allies with financial interests in Palantir. POGO previously documented that at least 10 other current or former White House and Department of Homeland Security staffers also owned stock in the company. Four Trump appointees at DHS have reported owning Palantir shares, including Paul Ingrassia, White House liaison to DHS, who was recently nominated to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
“Zohran Mamdani would do to New York City what Khomeini and Khamenei did to Tehran,” Fine said. “We cannot let radical Muslims turn America into a Shiite caliphate.”
The proposal is unlikely to generate much revenue for the government; there is almost no private-sector interest in the mail trucks, and used EV charging equipment — built specifically for the Postal Service and already installed in postal facilities — generally cannot be resold.
“The funds realized by auctioning the vehicles and infrastructure would be negligible. Much of infrastructure is literally buried under parking lots, and there is no market for used charging equipment,” Peter Pastre, the Postal Service’s vice president for government relations and public policy, wrote to senators this month.
Read the full article. $10 billion into the sewer to please their Glorious Leader. Something something DOGE.
Stephen Miller spoke at an April event in Warren, Mich., marking President Trump’s first 100 days in office.Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images
Stephen Miller wanted to keep the planes in the air—and that is where they stayed.
When a federal judge in March told the Trump administration to turn around flights of deported migrants headed to El Salvador, senior officials hastily convened a Saturday evening conference call to figure out what to do.
If they didn’t return the passengers, they would be defying a court order, some administration officials worried. Miller, who is President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, pushed for the planes to keep flying, which they ultimately did. The judge would later say that allowing officials to defy court judgments would make a “solemn mockery” of the Constitution.
The 39-year-old immigration hawk, who has been by Trump’s side since the 2016 campaign, has emerged as a singular figure in the second Trump administration, wielding more power than almost any other White House staffer in recent memory—and eager to circumvent legal limitations on his agenda.
He has his own staff of about 30 and a Secret Service detail, which White House officials said was because he had received death threats and serves as homeland security adviser. He has been responsible for the administration’s broadsides against universities, law firms and even museums. He has written or edited every executive order that Trump has signed.
Miller had considerable sway in Trump’s first term. But when aides at the time suggested promoting Miller to a leadership role at the Department of Homeland Security, Trump declined, according to a former administration official, telling aides he thought Miller wasn’t leader material.
His influence has expanded sharply since, thanks largely to his steadfast loyalty to Trump. This account of Miller’s tenure is based on interviews with current and former White House officials, Trump advisers and other prominent Republicans.
Some of Miller’s colleagues said they were alarmed by some of the legal maneuvers that Miller has proposed for executing the administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, and Trump has gently ribbed him for being too “happy” about deportations.
Miller, who has written or edited every executive order signed by Trump in his second term, attended a May event of the Make America Healthy Again Commission.Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press
Miller, who isn’t a lawyer, is the official who first suggested using the wartime Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants, which the Justice Department pursued. He also privately, then publicly, floated suspending habeas corpus, or the right for prisoners to challenge their detention in court, which the administration hasn’t tried. That prompted pushback from other senior White House and Justice Department officials.
His orders to increase arrests regardless of migrants’ criminal histories set off days of protests in Los Angeles. Miller coordinated the federal government’s response, giving orders to agencies including the Pentagon, when Trump sent in the Marines and the National Guard, according to officials familiar with the matter.
Miller’s portfolio covers almost every issue Trump is interested in. In recent months, he talked to CEOs about a coming tariff announcement; joined a meeting between Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Trump about the company’s antitrust case; and met with other tech companies on artificial intelligence.
Even some posts at cabinet agencies have been described by administration officials as reporting directly to Miller, effectively bypassing cabinet secretaries.
There are some limits to his influence. He was supportive of Meta’s push to settle its antitrust case, which fell flat. Trump last week signaled concerns that the administration’s deportation policies were too aggressive, calling for a pause in some deportations that he has since rolled back. Trump, asked how Miller’s directives on deportations squared with his own, declined to put distance between the two of them. “We have a great understanding,” Trump said.
The aggressive posture has started to spark some voter backlash, with polls showing Trump’s approval rating on immigration and deportations has turned negative.
Several White House staffers said Miller always takes the most “extreme” view of any issue, and his positions have cost the administration in court. In Trump’s first 100 days back in office, courts issued nationwide injunctions in 25 cases against the federal government, compared with six in his entire first term and four during the Biden administration, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. Several cases have already reached the Supreme Court, which has ruled against Trump on some immigration cases.
“I think the administration has miscalculated and overstepped,” said Skye Perryman, who leads Democracy Forward, an organization that has repeatedly sued Trump.
Miller has responded to the courts’ intervention by denouncing it as “judicial tyranny.” His allies argue illegal border crossings are down to almost zero because his aggressive proposals are deterring migrants.
“Stephen Miller is one of President Trump’s most trusted and longest serving aides for a reason—he delivers,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary.
In the wilderness
Miller stuck by Trump when many staffers quit their jobs after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He had helped draft Trump’s speech that morning, and worked until 12 p.m. on Jan. 20—the day Trump’s first term ended—telling the officer taking his badge he would be back in four years.
“Sixteen Hundred Pennsylvania Avenue is the greatest address in the world, and though we now leave these gates, rest assured, this is not goodbye,” he wrote to colleagues.
Three months later, Miller launched a nonprofit, America First Legal, aimed at countering what Miller described as a “years-long, one-sided legal assault” by the left. “Now, we must turn the tables,” he said at the time.
Over the next four years, it filed dozens of lawsuits, many of which are ongoing, categorized on its website under topics including “DEI,” “Woke Corporations” and “Women’s Sports.” The group’s targets are now under fire from the Trump administration, too.
Miller speaking with reporters outside the White House in January.Photo: Francis Chung/Press Pool
In 2022, the group called on the Education Department to stop distributing federal funds to universities where it alleged antisemitism was festering. Three years later, the Trump administration would do just that at universities including Harvard, Columbia and Northwestern.
In 2024, Miller’s group helped 16 Republican-led states sue the Biden administration over a policy that protected illegal immigrants married to U.S. citizens from deportation. A judge ruled in the states’ favor, and the Trump administration overturned the policy this year.
By the time Trump returned to the White House, the group had about two dozen lawyers on staff and had raised more than $60 million from donors, whose identities it doesn’t disclose. The group paid Miller more than $500,000 last year, according to his financial disclosure.
Meanwhile, Miller continued to play an active role across the Republican Party, even if his outreach wasn’t always welcome.
Congressional aides fielded lengthy calls from Miller about illegal immigration, often without any specific requests. One likened him to a grandmother who wouldn’t stop talking and said his calls were akin to listening to a podcast. Others said he would call to scold aides about how they had framed a social-media post on a particular issue or criticizing the way they had worded a press release.
As a House committee prepared for then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to testify, Miller came to the Hill to play the role of Mayorkas, aides said. During the prep, he answered questions as the secretary—but also chimed in to give lawmakers advice on questions.
Miller was determined to kill a bipartisan bill pushed by Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma in 2024 on the border and regularly called House Speaker Mike Johnson.
He also called the Republican National Committee to offer his advice on how the party should communicate on immigration, sometimes offering his thoughts on what the RNC chairman could tweet, people familiar with the discussions said.
He was a regular visitor to Mar-a-Lago during the campaign, meeting with Trump above his ballroom. Campaign aides say Miller always wanted to talk more about immigration. Trump’s top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, and his other aides wanted to keep the message on the economy. Trump staffers started displaying ominous photos of migrants at his events.
Some posts at cabinet agencies have been described by administration officials as reporting directly to Miller.Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Hundreds of orders
In the first term, Trump was largely unprepared to govern. Miller regularly complained then that others in the administration tried to block his immigration decisions, and outside lawyers would stymie their efforts. This time, Miller came in determined to correct that.
He brought hundreds of proposed orders to the White House as well as his own staff. Russell Vought, the onetime treasurer of America First Legal, is now the White House budget chief. Reed Rubinstein, the group’s senior vice president, was nominated as legal adviser of the State Department. Matt Whitaker, a board member, is the U.S. permanent representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
He now tells other staffers how to behave around Trump, people who have heard his comments say, and upgraded his office from one on a different floor to one steps from the Oval Office.
During the first term, Miller would push for hard-line policies that others blanched at, including advocating for several dozen countries to be added to the travel ban list of seven, a former administration official said. People laughed, but he was serious, the official said. This time, Trump announced a ban that covered a dozen countries.
He keeps in Trump’s good graces by giving Trump ideas—but more importantly, helping the president carry his own out.
Administration officials noted how Miller shut down discussion about whether the U.S. should bomb Houthi targets in a Signal chat that was accidentally shared with The Atlantic’s editor in chief. As the vice president and top national security officials discussed options, Miller weighed in.
“As I heard it, the president was clear,” Miller said. “Green light,” he added.
Earlier this month, Leavitt, the press secretary, interviewed Miller at a private event for Republican donors at the Four Seasons in Washington.
Miller, who grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., said large swaths of Los Angeles were engaged in a “rebellion,” according to people present.
Los Angeles had become like Cancún, he said—it was fine to visit, but not good for its own citizens. To conclude the event, Leavitt told the crowd that Miller needed to return to his work of deportations.
Miller smiled in response, and then left to return to the White House.
Alex Bollinger (He/Him)May 15, 2025, 9:14 am EDTHomeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem | Steven Spearie/The State Journal-Register / USA TODAY NETWORK
Jermaine Thomas in Kingston (Provided by Jermaine Thomas)
Scottie's Playtime 