The Trump administration arrested an illegal immigrant who pretended to be a United States citizen to become a corrections officer in Minnesota. The alleged “serial immigration fraudster,” 45-year-old Morris Brown of Liberia, was captured on January 15 after going AWOL from the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, according to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Federal authorities said the “serial fraudster was identified as part of the major enforcement operation that targeted suspected immigration fraud in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area last fall,” and had “multiple violations of U.S. immigration law, including overstaying his student visa and making false claims to U.S. citizenship.” While the Trump administration recently ended its massive immigration sweeps in Minnesota, dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” officials have made clear that they will not pull federal officers investigating fraud from the North Star State. “Operation Twin Shield continues to deliver results as the Department of Homeland Security relentlessly pursues those who seek to cheat our immigration system,” USCIS Director Joseph Edlow said in a statement Wednesday. “This alien tried every trick in the book to remain in the United States after losing legal status. We will use every tool at our disposal to ensure he faces justice for his many violations of the law,” Edlow added. Brown came into the country in 2014 on a student visa that was “terminated” in 2015 after he failed to enroll “in a full course of study,” USCIS said. He also joined the Pennsylvania Army National Guard in 2014, despite having no legal immigration status, and went AWOL the next year. He was later apprehended and discharged under other than honorable conditions in 2022. He applied for a green card under the Liberian Refugee Fairness program in 2020, but was ultimately denied “due to misrepresentations, including his failure to disclose prior military service and his false claim to U.S. citizenship,” according to USCIS. Brown then applied for citizenship “based on prior military service” in 2024. Federal investigators probing allegations of fraud in the Twin Cities looked into Brown’s citizenship application, finding “evidence of marriage fraud and prior instances where he falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen in official documents,” USCIS said. It was also discovered that he was employed as a corrections officer with the state. The Minnesota Department of Corrections confirmed that Brown was employed from May 2023 to October 2025, saying that they’ve provided his employment documents to USCIS, according to local news outlet KSTP. The department claimed to have adhered to federal document verification requirements when it hired Brown, the outlet reported. “If these federal allegations are accurate, this individual engaged in sophisticated efforts to misrepresent their identity, extending well beyond Minnesota. We are grateful to USCIS and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] for their work in investigating and addressing immigration fraud,” Minnesota Department of Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell said. “We will continue to comply with federal law and work professionally with our federal partners.” USCIS notified ICE of its findings, resulting in Brown being placed into removal proceedings and facing possible prosecution for his alleged fraud offenses. Since the Trump administration commenced its mass deportation campaign, federal authorities have discovered several other instances of illegal immigrants working as law enforcement officers. In early February, ICE revealed that officers had arrested an illegal immigrant from Cameroon who was just one week away from graduating from the New Orleans Police Department academy. In October, federal authorities nabbed Radule Bojovic, an illegal immigrant from Montenegro, who was employed as a police officer with the Hanover Police Department in Illinois. A judge later granted Bojovic a $2,500 immigration bond, and the police department has since allowed him to return to work.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** Perhaps the most common feature of the flurry of articles about young women rejecting hormonal birth control is the claim that their concerns are fueled by “misinformation” or based on “unfounded theories.” I’m a younger millennial. I’ve never used hormonal birth control, and I don’t plan to. But what these writers and doctors fail to grasp is how fed up women are of being told their pain is normal and prescribed a pill at 13, only to be told they have “unexplained infertility” and need IVF at 30. It doesn’t take a medical degree to hypothesize that women’s healthcare has gone terribly wrong. It is almost entirely structured around either suppressing or bypassing the female reproductive system altogether. When journalists and doctors claim women like me are misinformed, they reject an opportunity to help make women healthier.  For 60 years now, the standard of care for women in the United States has been a protocol that seeks not to understand and work with the female body, but to inhibit and short-circuit it. It’s no surprise that the women who watched their mothers and grandmothers unquestioningly swallow the pill and continue to suffer are now demanding a better way. The increased rejection of hormonal birth control also comes amid a tectonic shift in medical treatment for minors.  Several major medical associations recently issued statements against pediatric gender transition in the wake of the Fox Varin lawsuit, which held medical providers responsible for performing a double mastectomy on a minor. Sex-rejection treatments and surgeries involve medicating children with puberty blockers and hormone therapies, among other things. And yet many adolescent girls, some as young as 11, are prescribed hormone therapy in the form of the hormonal birth control pill or an IUD, despite their long-term effects being largely unknown. Of sexually active 15 to 19-year-olds, almost half are prescribed some form of hormonal birth control. This, despite the fact that there are no large randomized controlled trials on the effects of synthetic hormones during girls’ pubescent years. Some research on this cohort has shown reductions in bone mass and density, which is itself concerning. But little exists on long-term effects to adolescent brain or cardiovascular health, both of which actively require sex hormones for development. Animal studies show that exposure to hormonal contraceptives during adolescence has persistent effects on the female brain and behavior, though it’s unclear how this translates to humans. Your response to women rejecting hormonal birth control will almost certainly depend upon your answer to one question: What is medicine? The same ideology that undergirds the transgender movement forms the foundation of women’s health, too: “My body, my choice.” But making your body in your own self-image is not medicine. It’s choice theory applied to the human body. And the philosophy of choice will always be insufficient because it inherently rejects the bounds of reality. What if women’s health was actually about making women healthy instead of maximizing choice? The solution to America’s health problem is the same as the solution to transgender ideology: Respect reality, recognize that our bodies bound us and we can’t make ourselves into whatever we choose to be, and accept that women’s bodies are different from men’s. That’s not only okay but also good. Women’s bodies were made to bear children; blaming the patriarchy or raging about the system will not change that fact. Let medicine be about restoring the body’s natural function, not trying to change it. When we become unfocused on what the practice of medicine is in principle, people get hurt, even when medical professionals have the best intentions. As a woman who has been on the receiving end of so-called “women’s healthcare,” it seems as though there is little will to understand the potentially negative effects of hormonal birth control, or the positive effects of working with rather than against the female body’s natural function. After all, birth control is convenient and perhaps even something of a sacrament to the feminized, sexually evolved West. “Women have been taking the pill for decades,” I was told by a pushy doctor at an Ivy League research hospital, who wouldn’t let me leave his exam room without a prescription for the minipill for the extreme cramps I was having in my early 20s. When I asked for a hormone panel to help diagnose a potentially underlying health condition, fearful I’d be unable to conceive later in life, he said, perhaps revealing more about himself than intended, that a hormone panel wouldn’t tell him anything. But not all women’s health practitioners are so unimaginative. Dr. Naomi Whittaker is a board-certified OBGYN and surgeon focused on women’s restorative reproductive medicine. She’s also the founder of RRM Academy, which employs both conventional medicine and the latest in restorative reproductive techniques. “Working with the female body rather than against it is the cornerstone of what I do,” she said. “I see hormones not as a nuisance to suppress, but as a language the body uses to communicate.” She calls restoring the body’s natural function “the spirit of restorative reproductive medicine.” Even still, the establishment offers these doctors no help. Medical associations and education do not teach the kind of medicine Dr. Whittaker practices, and they are deeply skeptical of it. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine have issued statements and held congressional briefings against restorative reproductive medicine. After all, it is a competitor to the medical status quo at a time when the government has expressed more interest in women’s health and fertility. It seems as though the medical establishment is vying for a cut of a much-hoped-for government check. Regardless, women continue rejecting the status quo. And this rejection comes amid an explosion of so-called “fem-tech” companies marketing devices (usually wearables, such as rings or watches) to assist women in either avoiding or achieving pregnancy naturally. These devices use sensors to track temperature, sleep, and heart rate, among other things, to pinpoint ovulation or even underlying health conditions. Natural Cycles, which uses an AI algorithm adjusted to each individual user, became the first app to be cleared by the Food and Drug Administration as birth control in 2018. And Oura, whose sensor-laden rings have become something of a status symbol in Washington, is aiming higher than transforming women’s healthcare: It is purporting to change the face of American healthcare altogether. Wearables such as the Oura ring are not only designed for tracking menstrual cycles, though they can do that. They are also designed to help wearers know more about their bodies (sleep quality and blood oxygen, activity, or stress levels, for example) and to help alert them to potential illness. Only a few months ago, an older-style wearable — the Fitbit — alerted me that my heart was in arrhythmia and told me to go to the emergency room. At 31, I am not the usual candidate for atrial fibrillation, and the ER doctor assumed the device had been faulty. After performing an EKG, he was amazed to find the watch had been right. Untreated heart arrhythmias are the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in the world. American medicine has long suffered from being reactive rather than proactive. We treat symptoms and diseases rather than teaching people how to avoid them. After all, symptom and disease management is where all the money is, and healthcare, like all businesses, needs money to survive. But wearables may be a sign that’s changing. After all, Oura’s market valuation of $11 billion dollars is more than four times greater than it was just three years ago.  As women continue rejecting the pill, those beholden to the medical status quo will probably continue blaming women for falling prey to misinformation. That’s a lazy response. They’d do well to look a little closer: Women may be the early adopters of a new age of American medicine, rejecting pills and their unintended side effects in favor of preventative and restorative approaches, with wearables at the helm. American women seem to be ahead of the curve in heralding a return to true medicine. The only question is: Will the medical establishment get on board? *** Katelyn Walls Shelton is a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Bioethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing Program and a 2025 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.  The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

INGERSOLL: No 'Boob Jobs' For 16-Year-Olds: The Latest Absurd Argument In Support Of Child Sex Changes

'The law must take its course'

'Thank you Billie for your generosity.'

'I don’t need to be lectured'

Having removed Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro in January, the Trump administration is now endeavoring to rebuild Venezuela after decades of corruption, neglect, and theft. Under Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, Venezuela declined from what was once South America’s richest country and among the 20 wealthiest in the world to “a failed petrostate.” Between 2014 and 2021, Venezuela’s GDP shrank by more than 70%. Today, the country’s infrastructure is in tatters, its judicial system is riddled with corruption and cronyism, and, given Venezuela’s history of expropriating private assets, many foreign investors say the country is “uninvestable.” In addition, much of the country’s wealth and savings evaporated as the nation’s currency, the bolivar, endured two episodes of hyperinflation, peaking at 234% per month in 2018, and again exceeding 150% per month in 2020. How does a country begin to recover from this? Having spent decades advising governments on how to fix their broken economies, Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke, known as the “money doctor,” says he has seen worse. “China was in a lot worse shape than Venezuela in 1979, so all these things are possible,” Hanke told The Daily Signal. But the first critical step is stabilizing a currency that has been in free fall. “If they can’t get the inflation genie back in the bottle,” he said, “nothing much really is going to happen.” When Hanke was advisor to Bulgaria in 1997, that country was likewise suffering from economic ills including runaway inflation and a banking crisis. The solution he proposed was a currency board, in which a country’s domestic currency is 100 percent backed by a foreign reserve currency, like the U.S. dollar or euro, at a fixed exchange rate. “The inflation rate was 242% per month, and we put in the currency board in July and smashed inflation immediately, down to below 10% on an annual basis,” he said. Within a year, Bulgaria’s foreign exchange reserves had tripled, short term interest rates were down to 2%, the banking system returned to solvency, and the economy was growing again. Last month, Bulgaria qualified to join the euro area.  Following this model, currency stability was similarly achieved in countries like Estonia, Lithuania, and Bosnia. Hanke had also recommended a currency board to Venezuela’s then-president Rafael Caldera in the 1990s, but those were different times. “The rule of law has deteriorated so much that I would never recommend a currency board right now,” Hanke said. Instead, he said, Venezuela should do away with the bolivar entirely and adopt U.S. dollars as the national currency. In a process called dollarization, “you essentially get rid of the central bank, get rid of the local currency and replace it with what would have been the anchor currency under a currency board,” he said. Dollarization has been implemented effectively in Panama, El Salvador, and Ecuador. Venezuela is informally dollarized, with estimates that more than half the transactions there are conducted in dollars already. Once macroeconomic stability is achieved, the government can then begin to “chip away at all these other things that have to be done,” he said. “If you look at the big reforms, like in New Zealand or Great Britain with [Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher, or the Chicago boys in Chile, these things didn’t happen overnight,” Hanke said. “You have to build confidence and momentum, and let the momentum carry you along opportunistically, and pick these things off one at a time.” Much of the focus since January has been on Venezuela’s massive oil reserves, though its wells are currently in disrepair after decades of government mismanagement and theft. “Chavismo has rendered the world’s largest crude oil reserves effectively worthless,” Hanke said, and to date, western oil companies have been reluctant to reinvest. In January, Venezuela’s parliament passed a new law intended to open its oil industry to private development, but it will probably have to do more to attract investment back into the country.  Venezuela must establish a credible legal system to guarantee property rights, such as the laws that Chile put in place for mining concessions in the 1980s, Hanke said. “Chile’s mining law established sound property rights and clear rules of the game,” Hanke said. “Among other things, the law mandates that if an expropriation by the state occurs, the state must pay the owner the full present value of the future cash flows from the property that has been expropriated,” as well as stipulating that foreign investors are treated the same as Venezuelans. Beyond oil, other industries that have great potential include agriculture and mining, which were also subject to nationalization under Chavez and Maduro. Venezuela has a wealth of unused agricultural land and extensive freshwater resources, but “land prices are extremely depressed under the weight of severe legal and political risk,” Hanke said. “Property rights insecurity, input-market disruption, price and exchange controls, and infrastructure decay have combined to push the sector far below its production possibility frontier.” In addition, “there are considerable reserves of gold, iron ore, bauxite, coal, nickel, and some critical materials, like coltan,” Hanke said. “But, like agriculture, mining is plagued by infrastructure problems.” For America’s part, Hanke called for a complete end to the U.S. embargo. “The first immediate action the U.S. should take in Venezuela is to remove all sanctions, and this could literally be done with the stroke of a pen,” he said. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post How to Recover from Decades of Socialism: A Conversation with ‘Money Doctor’ Steve Hanke appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Trump administration has stopped more than 4,000 firearms from going to Mexican drug cartels over the last year, and estimates it kept about 1,600 rounds of ammunition per day away from drug gangs.  The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, announced that since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, it seized 4,359 guns bound for Mexico to be used by cartels and gangs.  Further, the ATF says it seized 648,975 rounds of ammunition bound for Mexico, averaging about 1,600 rounds per day.  “Illegal crime guns increasingly originate from every state in the country. This is not a southwest border problem, it is a national threat,” ATF Deputy Director Robert Cekada said in a public statement.  Trump nominated Cekada as the director of the burueau to replace outgoing director Steven Dettelbach. “ATF agents are aggressively targeting gangs, cartels, and transnational criminal organizations that illegally traffic firearms and turn American streets into war zones,” Cekada added. “We will dismantle these networks at every level, cut off their access to weapons, and hold every criminal fully accountable under the law.” Overall, the ATF said it has seized 36,277 illegal crime guns and 2.3 million rounds of ammunition from gang members, suppliers for transnational criminal organizations, and others, during Trump’s second term.  The post Here’s How Many Guns the Trump Administration Kept From Mexican Cartels appeared first on The Daily Signal.