Texas troopers busted a border smuggling operation this week as they stopped a Mexican illegal immigrant who was smuggling a dozen illegal immigrants — including two children — while both in possession of a handgun and cocaine.

Texas’ Department of Public Safety announced that a trooper stopped a Ford Pickup in Uvalde County on US-90.

Video of the incident shows the trooper interviewing the suspect through his window. He asks him for his license and insurance. The driver responds: ‘I lost it.’ He then asks for his ID, at which point he says he lost that too.

As he checked the vehicle, he spotted four illegal immigrants hiding in the rear seat area of the truck. He subsequently found that the driver — himself an illegal immigrant — was smuggling 12 illegal immigrants in the vehicle. 

Video shows multiple troopers opening the cargo bed and finding it packed with illegal immigrants who were stuffed into the tight space. Texas DPS said two children were among the illegal immigrants found in the bed.

‘Oh s—t,’ one trooper exclaims as he sees the cargo. ‘It’s full.’

A search of the vehicle subsequently found a .380 handgun and cocaine. The driver – Sergio Sanchez-Zuniga — will be charged with smuggling, drug possession and unlawful carrying of a weapon, authorities said. The illegal immigrants, who were on their way to San Antonio, were turned over to Border Patrol.

DPS spokesman Chris Olivarez said that the agency has rescued over 900 children from smuggling operations. 

The arrest is a glimpse into the ongoing smuggling operations at the border, including of both accompanied and unaccompanied children. Migrant numbers have dropped at the border since the historic highs seen before the end of Title 42 at the beginning of May, but officials have cautioned against believing it will stay that way. However, both Border Patrol and Texas authorities remain vigilant at the border amid continued smuggling of humans and contraband.

Texas this week announced that it arrested an MS-13 gang member on a transnational criminal watchlist who had previously been deported.

Earlier this week, a migrant smuggler led Texas authorities on a high-speed chase on Tuesday along the border, hitting speed of more than 100 mph.

Texas has also been sending migrants to ‘sanctuary’ cities, including most recently Los Angeles, in what Gov. Greg Abbott says is an effort to relieve pressure on the border state from a crisis he blames on the Biden administration.

President Biden on Friday said that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been asking him to stop the U.S. from sending guns to Mexico — even as the U.S. is tackling a massive fentanyl crisis that has primarily come into the country from its southern neighbor.

‘You know what I get when we’re talking about the fentanyl at the border and all that,’ Biden said at a speech at the Safer Communities Summit in West Hartford, Connecticut. 

‘I speak to the president of Mexico: ’Will you stop sending guns to us?’’ he said. ‘We are sending dangerous weapons, particularly assault weapons, to Mexico. To Mexico. They’re asking us, ‘Please stop it. Cut it off at the border.’’

The flow of guns into Mexico from the U.S. has been a major issue between the two countries for years, with guns used in cartel violence and other crimes in Mexico often found to have originated in the U.S.

However, the U.S. has been facing a growing issue in recent years of a massive flood of fentanyl flowing into the country, directly leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans each year.

There were 14,000 pounds of the drug seized last fiscal year at the southern border and more than 11,000 pounds this fiscal year to date. There were over 70,000 deaths recorded due to fentanyl in the U.S. in 2021, according to the National Institute of Health.

The illicit narcotic is primarily produced in Mexican drug labs using Chinese precursors. Yet, despite it leading to massive numbers of death in the U.S., López Obrador has sometimes been dismissive of the problem, or sought to blame the U.S. for his country’s failure to control the cartels.

‘Here, we do not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl,’ López Obrador said in March. ‘Why don’t they [the U.S.] take care of their problem of social decay?’

Later that month, he also took another jab at the U.S. on the issue.

‘There is a lot of disintegration of families. There is a lot of individualism. There is a lack of love, of brotherhood, of hugs and embraces,’ López Obrador said, according to The Associated Press. ‘That is why [U.S. officials] should be dedicating funds to address the causes.’

He has also responded aggressively to Republicans who have suggested taking out drug labs in Mexico, promising an ‘information campaign’ to encourage Hispanics in the U.S. not to vote for Republicans. 

López Obrador has also written to Chinese President Xi Jinping in an effort to help stop the flow of precursors into Mexico — but again used that move to swipe at the U.S.

‘Unjustly, they are blaming us for problems that in large measure have to do with their loss of values, their welfare crisis,’ López Obrador wrote. ‘These positions are in themselves a lack of respect and a threat to our sovereignty, and moreover they are based on an absurd, manipulative, propagandistic and demagogic attitude.’

Hunter Biden, the 53-year-old son of President Joe Biden, was deposed in his fiery child support case in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Friday.

Lunden Roberts, mother of 4-year-old Navy Joan Roberts, had made an agreement with the president’s son regarding paternity and child support payments in 2020. Roberts gave birth to Navy in August 2018, filing a paternity suit less than a year later. 

A judge ruled that Biden was Navy’s father ‘with near scientific certainty’ in January 2020.

Roberts, who is a former stripper, was present in Friday’s courtroom session — a move that a Daily Mail source described as ‘highly unusual’.

‘Attending Hunter’s deposition would have been a strategic choice and perhaps a head game,’ the source told the Daily Mail. ‘And why not? It’s harder for most people to be untruthful about a person in their presence.’

Biden has been paying the mother $20,000 a month, which he seeks to lower. Last month, the judge chided both parties for making such slow progress on the years-long legal dispute. 

‘I expect this case to move,’ Independence County Circuit Judge Holly Meyer said. ‘So, get it done.’

Meyer had also criticized Biden’s team for heavily redacting files about his financial history, saying ‘the ability to redact is somewhat being abused’ during a May hearing.

Roberts’ legal team is also fighting for the child to use Biden’s surname.

‘The Biden name is now synonymous with being well-educated, successful, financially acute, and politically powerful,’ Roberts’ attorneys wrote in a motion in December. Biden’s attorney then demanded proof that the name change was in the child’s best interest.

Roberts’ attorneys reportedly filed a motion of contempt against Biden, claiming that he is not being honest about his income.

According to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Meyer ordered both parties to appear in court on July 10, giving Biden a chance to address questions about his financial situation and defend himself from accusations.

Roberts attorney Clint Lancaster reportedly said that he is seeking criminal contempt against Biden, meaning that the president’s son could possibly face jail time, according to the Democrat-Gazette.

Fox News Digital’s Danielle Wallace and David Spunt contributed to this report.

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A group of Maine lobstermen won a big legal victory in court Friday in their lawsuit against the Biden administration over regulations they said threatened their livelihood. 

Last year, the Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) sued the Biden administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for its new rule that the government said was aimed at protecting the endangered North Atlantic right whale, but that lobstermen claimed threatened to put family-owned lobster fisheries out of business.

That rule imposed operating limits on lobster fisheries and set new technical standards on how much lobster trap rope could be in the water, which would cut in half the number of traps that could be deployed.

NMFS defended its rule in court by saying that the Endangered Species Act (ESA) demands that the agency make rules based on assumptions of worst-case scenarios and ‘give the benefit of the doubt’ to the endangered species.

But Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who was part of the three-judge panel that decided the case, lambasted the government’s theory in an opinion issued Friday: 

 ‘The Service’s legal reasoning was not just wrong; it was egregiously wrong. The Service’s argument rested entirely upon a half-sentence in the legislative history. This ‘approach is a relic from a bygone era of statutory construction,” Ginsburg said. 

‘Under the Service’s approach, legislative history may supply duties that, as the Service now concedes, are not found in the enacted law. As the Supreme Court recently said, ‘We cannot approve such a casual disregard of the rules of statutory interpretation.’ The reason is obvious; as any high school Civics student should know, legislators vote on and the president signs bills, not their legislative history,’ he continued. 

Judge Ginsburg also seemed to call out the agency for historical hypocrisy in its rulemaking. ‘Only a few years ago, the Service, revisiting its interpretive rules, agreed with commenters that ‘nothing’ in the ESA required it to use ‘a ‘worst-case scenario’ or make unduly conservative modeling assumptions,’ and rejected comments arguing it should give the benefit of the doubt to a species by evaluating ‘effects or activities that were possible even if not likely.” he said. 

Dustin Delano, former vice president of the MLA and now chief operating officer of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA), said Friday’s court decision is a welcomed moral boost to the fishing industry that he says has been drowning in overreaching regulations.

‘Today’s decision is a rare and long-sought victory for lobstermen. Regulators must confront the human cost of their skewed and unjustified approach. NMFS’ rules could have destroyed an iconic trade based on a distorted analysis of data that the law does not justify,’ Delano said.

‘Lobstermen, like all New England fishermen, are formed in an ethic of conservation that long predated federal regulations and the environmental movement. We are deeply sensitive to the marine environment,’ he added. 

The North Atlantic right whale is an endangered species, with fewer than 400 left in the ocean. They are vulnerable to vessel strikes or entanglement with fishing gear.

But the MLA says that right whales do not inhabit the coast of Maine, and there has not been a documented right whale entanglement associated with Maine lobstermen since 2004. There has also never been a documented instance of Maine lobstermen seriously injuring or killing a right whale.

Delano says that for decades, the NMFS has been imposing rules based on assumptions and bad data, because it has been ‘caving’ to the environmental groups without input from the fishing community. 

‘Enough’s enough,’ Delano said.

‘I just I really can’t stress enough obviously what this will do for the people in our industry,’ Delano said of the Friday ruling. 

‘Everybody’s under a great deal of stress between multiple things. 2022 being one of the worst seasons, the threat of offshore wind development off our coast. So to have some positive news, and to get a win for the fishing industry. You know, it gives me goosebumps, because it’s not something that we’ve experienced in quite a while,’ he said. 

Delano helped launch NFSA earlier this year, a group that aims to represent New England fisherman to beat back federal regulations that are crippling the industry.

Delano praised the work of the MLA for Friday’s court victory and said that he hopes his new organization can follow in its footsteps. 

‘You know, growing up, half of the kids in my class were fishermen. We’d go to school, and we talked about what we got in our traps the night before. That’s what we’ve been doing since we were 10 years old. And that still continues today,’ Delano said. 

‘And that’s part of why NFSA was formed, because we want more than anything to continue that tradition. And we need a larger presence in Washington, D.C., and that’s why we really wanted to try to get all the fishing associations together to represent all fishermen all across New England to have a larger voice,’ he said. 

Republicans are rallying behind former President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, according to a new poll that reveals an increase in support among the GOP following his two indictments.

After being indicted on charges related to alleged mishandling of classified documents, a Marist Poll survey found that 56% of Americans — the majority being Democrats and independents — think Trump should halt his 2024 presidential campaign, while 43% think he should remain in the race.

But the poll reveals strong GOP support for Trump, with 83% of Republicans supporting his run for president amid the investigations, while 87% of Democrats and 58% of independents think he should drop out of the race.

The majority of Republicans, 76%, reported having a favorable opinion of the former president, increasing from 68% in a February poll.

‘As former President Trump deals with his latest legal woes, Republicans are mostly standing with him, while Democrats are calling for him to exit the 2024 campaign,’ Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, said alongside the polling results. ‘Time will tell if this pattern holds, but for now, Republicans are grounded on where they stand on Trump regardless of these unfolding events.’

Trump received a boost in support from Republicans around his indictment, with 50% believing he did nothing wrong, up five points from 45% in a March poll.

Looking forward to 2024, 64% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they will support Trump in his campaign if he does not drop out, while 32% said they are going to support another GOP candidate.

The poll also revealed a decrease among Americans who believe Trump did something wrong in the indictment, dropping from 75% in March to 73% in the June survey.

The results suggest that 78% of Democrats and 50% of independents believe Trump broke the law.

Trump was first indicted in April on state-level charges stemming from alleged claims he made hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.

Last week, the former president faced a second indictment from Special Counsel Jack Smith on 37 federal counts relating to retention of sensitive documents.

Despite speculation over how the indictments might affect Trump’s presidential bid, his campaign reportedly received over $6.6 million in fundraising within days of the federal indictment. Trump pleaded not guilty in a Miami court Tuesday and has not made any indication at this time that he will drop out of the 2024 race.

The Marist poll was conducted June 12-14, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a protective order to prevent former President Donald Trump from releasing classified documents that will be shared with his lawyers amid his Mar-a-Lago records indictment, The Hill reported.

According to the motion, which was obtained by The Hill, the documents Trump has ‘include information pertaining to ongoing investigations.’

The motion, which is pending review from Judge Bruce Reinhart, would prevent Trump from accessing the 31 classified documents except in the presence of his lawyers

‘Defendants shall only have access to Discovery Materials under the direct supervision of Defense Counsel or a member of Defense Counsel’s staff,’ the motion said. ‘Defendants shall not retain copies of Discovery Material.’

‘Defendants may take notes regarding Discovery Materials, but such notes shall be stored securely by Defense Counsel,’ the motion added.

Trump was indicted on 37 federal counts this month after Special Counsel Jack Smith investigated his alleged improper handling of documents at his club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.

The former president is accused of intentionally retaining classified documents after federal investigators issued a subpoena summoning him to return them. The specific charges include conspiracy to obstruct justice, false statements and willful retention of national defense information.

The Mar-a-Lago indictment claimed that Trump’s alleged actions ‘could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.’ 

Trump called the indictment a ‘political hit job’ by President Joe Biden, commenting on Truth Social ahead of his Miami court appearance this week.

‘ONE OF THE SADDEST DAYS IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE!!!’ Trump wrote.

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Milwaukee County’s first openly LGBTQ+ county supervisor says an assailant called him a gay slur and then punched him in the face this week at a suburban mall.

Supervisor Peter Burgelis was struck in the face while inside a store at the Mayfair Mall on Monday, news outlets reported, citing Wauwatosa police.

The attack happened after a dispute in the parking lot, police said Friday. Officers said the suspect left before they arrived at the scene but they have identified a person of interest.

Burgelis told WTMJ-TV that he went to a hospital after the attack and will have surgery on his jaw.

‘I will never be silenced, nor will I allow this act of violence to detract from our ongoing efforts to secure acceptance and equality for the LGBTQ+ community,’ Burgelis said in a written statement. ‘If anything, this assault serves as a stark reminder of the pervasive challenges we continue to face.’

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A federal judge issued an order on Friday preventing Indiana’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors from taking effect July 1 as scheduled.U.S. District Court Judge James Patrick Hanlon allowed the law’s ban on gender surgeries for minors to stand.Hanlon, a Trump appointee, justified the ruling by noting constitutional challenges to such legal provisions may come with ‘some likelihood of success’

A federal judge issued an order Friday stopping an Indiana ban on puberty blockers and hormones for transgender minors from taking effect as scheduled July 1.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana sought the temporary injunction in its legal challenge of the Republican-backed law, which was enacted this spring amid a national push by GOP-led legislatures to curb LGBTQ+ rights.

The order from U.S. District Court Judge James Patrick Hanlon will allow the law’s prohibition on gender surgeries to take effect. Hanlon’s order also blocks provisions that would prohibit Indiana doctors from communicating with out-of-state doctors about transgender procedures for their patients younger than 18.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit within hours after Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb signed the bill April 5. The challenge, on behalf of four youths undergoing transgender treatments and an Indiana doctor who provides such care, argued the ban would violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection guarantees and trampled upon the rights of parents to decide medical treatment for their children.

Indiana’s Republican-dominated Legislature approved the ban after contentious hearings that primarily featured testimony from vocal opponents, with many arguing the gender procedures lessened the risk of depression and suicide among young people diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria,″ or distress caused when gender identity doesn’t match a person’s assigned sex.

Hanlon, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, wrote that he was blocking the law from taking effect because its opponents had demonstrated potential irreparable harm to those undergoing treatment and shown ‘some likelihood of success’ in arguments that it was unconstitutional.

The ACLU had provided ‘evidence of risks to minors’ health and wellbeing from gender dysphoria if those treatments can no longer be provided to minors — prolonging of their dysphoria, and causing additional distress and health risks, such as depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and suicidality,’ Hanlon said. ‘While the State has identified legitimate reasons for regulation in this area, the designated evidence does not demonstrate, at least at this stage, that the extent of its regulation was closely tailored to uphold those interests.’

ACLU leaders hailed the ruling as a victory in the fight ‘to defend the right of all trans people to be their authentic selves, free from discrimination.’

‘We won’t rest until this unconstitutional law is struck down for good,’ Ken Falk, the ACLU of Indiana’s legal director, said in a statement.

At least 20 GOP-led states have now enacted laws restricting or banning such medical treatments for transgender minors after Missouri’s governor signed that state’s bill into law last week. Lawsuits have been filed in several states against transgender treatment bans. Federal judges have also blocked enforcement of laws in Alabama and Arkansas, and Oklahoma has agreed to not enforce its ban while opponents seek a temporary court order blocking it.

Indiana bill sponsor Republican Rep. Joanna King of Middlebury said as the ban was debated that it would ‘protect our children from irreversible, harmful, life-altering procedures.’

The Indiana attorney general’s office didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on Hanlon’s ruling and whether it would attempt to appeal the injunction before July 1. Provisions of the law that were blocked gave trans youth taking medication to transition until Dec. 31 to stop.

A top attorney for the state told Hanlon during a court hearing on Wednesday that risks from gender treatments during puberty such as future fertility, bone strength, brain development and possible reversibility had not been adequately studied by scientists.

Such factors make it within the Legislature’s authority to decide ‘we don’t want our children to be part of this grand experiment,’ Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher said.

Though guidelines from leading authorities on transgender procedures already say surgery generally should be reserved for adults, with exceptions for older teens who meet certain criteria, the Indiana law calls for an immediate ban on surgeries.

The provisions of the law banning gender surgeries for minors in Indiana will have no immediate impact. Hanlon wrote in his ruling that no medical providers in the state perform those procedures on people younger than 18.

Representatives from Indiana University Health Riley Children’s Hospital, the state’s sole hospital-based gender health program, told legislators earlier this year that for patients who are minors, doctors do not perform genital surgeries or provide those surgery referrals. IU Health was not involved in the ACLU’s lawsuit.

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