Lawmakers call for release of Afghan interpreter detained by Ice at green card appointment
Lawmakers are calling for the release of an Afghan interpreter, who worked with the US military for years in his home country, who was seized by armed, masked Ice agents after a routine appointment for his green card.
The former wartime interpreter, identified only as Zia for his safety and that of his family, aided American troops in Afghanistan for about five years during the war and fled the country with his family after the Taliban resumed power in 2021.
Zia entered the US legally in October 2024 through JFK airport with humanitarian parole and an approved Special Immigrant Visa. Ice arrested him following a routine biometrics appointment for his green card in East Hartford, Connecticut, last week.
After originally being detained in Connecticut, Zia was transported to a detention facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts. His attorney, Lauren Petersen, told a press call on Tuesday:
Zia has done everything right. He’s followed the rules. He has no criminal history.
Zia has been placed in expedited removal proceedings, Petersen said. NBC News has a statement from the Department of Homeland Security saying that he is under investigation for a “serious criminal allegation,” adding: “All of his claims will be heard by a judge. Any Afghan who fears persecution is able to request relief.”
While a judge has temporarily stayed Zia’s removal, he remains in detention. Petersen said he is terrified he’ll be returned back to Afghanistan.
Following the rules are supposed to protect you. It’s not supposed to land you in detention. If he is deported, as so many of the people have articulated today, he faces death.
During the press conference, Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, of Connecticut, called Ice arrests of Afghan allies like Zia “a violation of basic trust” and vowed to fight for his release.
What happened to him is the worst kind of abhorrent violation of basic decency. Put aside the legal causes and the issues here for unmasked agents to snatch someone off the street with no warning, no counsel, no opportunity even to know who is doing it while it’s in process is un-American.
To Zia, we have your back. We’re going to fight for you. We’re going to leave no stone unturned.
Democratic representative Jahana Hayes, of Connecticut, said she had been contacted by Zia’s family directly following the arrest because they didn’t know where he was being held.
Our credibility is at stake. We have families who have risked everything not just for themselves, but for their entire family. They have risked their health and safety. And in the name of standing up for the promises of our American democracy, that could not have been easy at the time. So this betrayal has to be that much more difficult in this moment.
Democratic representative Bill Keating, of Massachusetts, told the press call:
This isn’t about one person. This is about thousands of people. This is about our veterans. If their word means nothing when they’re on the battlefield, risking their lives, and being saved in so many instances by the support of people like Zia who are giving this services as their family and their own lives are being threatened and tortured, then what does that mean for our word going forward?
Key events
Revealed: Trump has supercharged the US’s immigration crackdown
Maanvi Singh, Will Craft and Andrew Witherspoon
In the six months since Donald Trump took office, the US president has supercharged the country’s immigration enforcement apparatus – pushing immigration officials to arrest a record number of people in June.
A Guardian analysis of arrest and deportation data has revealed that Trump is now overseeing a sweeping mass arrest and incarceration scheme.
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency does not publish daily arrest, detention and deportation data. But a team of lawyers and academics from the Deportation Data Project used a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain a dataset that provides the most detailed picture yet of the US immigration enforcement and detention system under Trump.
A Guardian analysis of the dataset found:
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In June this year, average daily arrests were up 268% compared with June 2024.
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Ice is increasingly targeting any and all unauthorized immigrants, including people who have no criminal records.
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Despite Trump’s claims that his administration is seeking out the “worst of the worst”, the majority of people being arrested by Ice now have no criminal convictions.
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Detention facilities have been increasingly overcrowded, and the US system is over capacity by more than 13,500 people.
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The number of deportations, however, has fluctuated as the administration pursues new strategies and policies to swiftly expel people from the US.
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The US government has deported more than 8,100 people to countries that are not their home country.
Trump administration not in a rush to replace Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday told Bloomberg TV in an interview that the Trump administration was not in a rush to nominate a new Federal Reserve Chair to replace Jerome Powell.
After years of heated attacks on Powell, the Trump administration has begun suggesting recent costly renovations at the central bank’s Washington DC buildings could justify firing Powell.
Donald Trump’s antipathy for Powell stems mainly from the central bank boss’s refusal to lower interest rates – something the president has repeatedly called for.
Bessent said he continues to have regular meetings with Powell and that Powell had not told him whether he would leave his board seat.
For a full explainer on whether Trump could fire Powell, read here:
US President Donald Trump has created a lot of leverage on trade with his letters on tariff rates, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Bloomberg Television in an interview on Wednesday.
“President Trump is creating this leverage by saying: if you don’t want to negotiate with me, I’ve sent you a letter with a high rate. Have at the high rate or come and negotiate in better fashion,” Bessent said.
The European Commission plans to submit counter-tariffs on €93bn ($109bn) of US goods for approval to EU members, while its trade chief will hold talks with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The Commission said on Wednesday its primary focus was to achieve a negotiated outcome with the United States to avert 30% US tariffs that US President Donald Trump has said he will impose on the 27-nation bloc on 1 August.
European Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič will speak with Lutnick on Wednesday afternoon, the Commission said, before Commission officials brief EU ambassadors on the state of play.
The Commission said it would in parallel press on with potential countermeasures. It said it would merge its two sets of possible tariffs of €21bn and €72bn into a single list.
A German court on Wednesday acquitted a satirist who was charged with having approved of an assassination attempt against Donald Trump during last year’s US election campaign in a social media post and disturbed the public peace.
In a quickly deleted post under his alias “El Hotzo” on X in July last year, Sebastian Hotz drew a parallel between Trump and “the last bus” and wrote “unfortunately just missed.” In a follow-up post, he wrote: “I find it absolutely fantastic when fascists die.”
A gunman opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, while Trump was campaigning for president last July, grazing Trump’s ear and killing one of his supporters in the crowd. Trump went on to win the White House in November.
Judge Andrea Wilms said in her ruling that Hotz’s post was satire that should go unpunished, even if the comments may have been tasteless. She argued that no one would feel called upon to commit acts of violence by “such clearly satirical utterances,” according to a court statement.
The US Federal Reserve’s independence is under threat from mounting political interference, according to a clear majority of economists polled by Reuters, although no one expects a July interest rate cut despite a recent divergence in views among policymakers.
President Donald Trump has made it almost a daily routine to personally attack Fed Chair Jerome Powell over the central bank’s stance of holding rates due to tariff-related risks of higher inflation. A recent jump in inflation suggests businesses are now passing some of the tariffs onto consumers.
Most Federal Market Open Committee members favor holding rates steady, but a few, including Governor Chris Waller and Trump appointee Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman, have recently advocated a reduction as soon as July 30.
Powell’s term is set to expire in May 2026. Waller last week said he would accept the job as the bank’s head if he was offered it by Trump.
Representatives from China and the United States will meet next week in the Swedish capital Stockholm to try and hammer out a deal before an August 12 deadline agreed in May.
China said it will send its vice premier to US trade talks next week to secure its own agreement after US President Donald Trump announced a “massive” trade deal with Japan.
In an attempt to slash his country’s colossal trade deficit, the US president has vowed to hit dozens of countries with punitive “reciprocal” tariffs if they do not hammer out a pact with Washington by August 1.
As the clock ticks down, China said Wednesday it will seek to “strengthen cooperation” with Washington at the talks, and confirmed vice premier He Lifeng would attend.
Trump to outline blueprint to win the AI race
The Trump administration is set to release a new artificial intelligence blueprint on Wednesday that aims to relax American rules governing the industry at the center of a technological arms race between economic rivals the US and China.
President Donald Trump will mark the plan’s release with a speech outlining the importance of winning an AI race that is increasingly seen as a defining feature of 21st-century geopolitics, with both China and the US investing heavily in the industry to secure economic and military superiority.
According to a summary seen by Reuters, the plan calls for the export of US AI technology abroad and a crackdown on state laws deemed too restrictive to let it flourish, a marked departure from former President Joe Biden’s “high fence” approach that limited global access to coveted AI chips.
Top administration officials such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House National Economic Adviser Kevin Hassett are also expected to join the event titled “Winning the AI Race,” organized by White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks and his co-hosts on the “All-In” podcast, according to an event schedule reviewed by Reuters.
Photograph: Yuri Gripas/UPI/Shutterstock
Afghan man moving to US seized by immigration agents after green card application appointment
The Trump administration is continuing its deportations policy, which has been described as “human trafficking disguised as a deportation deal” by the largest opposition party in Eswatini. Civil society and opposition groups expressed outrage after the US deported five men to the country. You can read our full story here.
Attorneys and members of Congress have also told how an Afghan man who moved to America after working for the US military in his home country was seized by armed, masked immigration agents, put in a van and taken out of state. Identified only as Zia by members of Congress and his attorney out of concern for his safety and that of his family, the man had worked as an interpreter for the military during the war in Afghanistan. He was in the United States legally and was arrested after an appointment in Connecticut related to his application for a green card.
In other news:
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Bryan Kohberger, 30, a former criminal-justice doctoral student, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole or appeal under a deal with prosecutors that spared him the death penalty in return for his guilty plea to four counts of first-degree murder. The proceedings today in a county courtroom in Boise, the state capital, also will afford family members the chance to directly address Kohberger through the presentation of victim impact statements.
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China’s foreign ministry said Washington’s decision – to pull the US out of what Donald Trump called the “woke” and “divisive” UN culture and education agency Unesco – was “not the behaviour expected of a responsible major country”, and expressed China’s staunch support of Unesco’s work, its spokesperson told reporters during a press briefing on Wednesday.
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European shares climbed more than 1% on Wednesday, led by automobile stocks, after the US president revived hopes for a trade deal with the European Union after an agreement with Japan.
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US-funded contraceptives worth nearly $10m (£7.39m) are being sent to France from Belgium to be incinerated, after Washington rejected offers from the United Nations and family planning organisations to buy or ship the supplies to poor nations, two sources told Reuters.
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The US embassy in the Philippines has said the US has announced PHP 3bn (£39m) in foreign assistance for the country.
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The dollar struggled on Wednesday, while the yen was choppy after Trump announced a trade deal with Japan, bolstering optimism for more agreements ahead of an impending tariff deadline. The dollar index, which tracks the greenback against major peers, was at 97.48 after a three-day decline, hovering near its lowest level since 10 July. The gauge has lost 6.6% since Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement on 2 April.
