May 22 (UPI) — Federal immigration officials have arrested the sister of a sanctioned Cuban executive on the grounds that her presence in the United States poses a threat to the nation and undermines U.S. foreign policy interests.
Homeland Security Investigations agents arrested Adys Lastres Morera in Miami on Thursday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said.
Little information about the arrest was made public. ICE published a photo showing the back of a woman in handcuffs being detained by immigration officers.
The arrest came as Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in a statement that he had terminated Morera’s lawful permanent resident status under a provision of thee Immigration and Nationality Act that makes non-citizens deportable if the secretary of state believes their presence or activities in the United States “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
ICE said her status had been terminated on Wednesday, paving the way for her arrest.
“Allowing Lastres Morera to remain in the country would send a signal that Cuba regime-affiliated networks could continue to access the U.S.’s financial, education and social institutions — but that is not the case,” acting HSI Executive Associate Director John Condon said in a statement.
Adys Lastres Morera is the sister of Ania Guillermina Lastres Morera, the executive president of the Cuban military-controlled financial conglomerate GAESA.
The State Department sanctioned GAESA and Ania Guillermina Lastres Morera earlier this month on accusations of diverting resources from the Cuban people to “fuel the lavish lifestyles of Castro family members and other regime elites and to finance overseas influence operations as part of Cuba’s long-standing ambition of a global communist revolution,” Rubio said Thursday.
According to ICE, Adys Lastres Morera was admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident on Jan. 13, 2023.
“For far too long, the family members of terrorist organizations, repressive anti-American regimes and other bad actors who would threaten the national security of the United States have been given a free pass to enjoy the privileges of living in the United States,” Rubio said.
“No longer. Under President [Donald] Trump, we are removing from our country the family members of [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] terrorists and Cuban regime elites.”
The arrest comes amid mounting tensions in the Caribbean.
A day earlier, U.S. federal prosecutors charged former Cuban President Raul Castro on allegations of authorizing the 1996 shootdown of an aircraft operated by the Cuban American exile organization Brothers to the Rescue.
Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has accused the Trump administration of using the Castro indictment as a pretext to escalate tensions and potentially justify another military operation in the Caribbean, similar to the January U.S. strike that abducted Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolas Maduro, and brought him to the United States to face narco-terrorism charges.
Hundreds of Tunisians have marched through the capital to denounce a worsening economic crisis and what they say is a widening crackdown on dissent. President Kais Saied is accused of undermining the country’s hard-won post-2011 revolution system.
Park Wang-yeol (C), a South Korean national detained in the Philippines, arrives at Incheon International Airport in Incheon, South Korea, 25 March 2026. Photo by YONHAP / EPA
May 1 (Asia Today) — South Korean police have taken custody of a man suspected of supplying drugs to a major narcotics figure, following his arrest in Thailand, authorities said Friday.
The suspect, identified only by his surname Choi, 51, is accused of smuggling and distributing about 22 kilograms of methamphetamine, valued at roughly 10 billion won ($7.4 million), into South Korea since 2019.
Police said Choi, who allegedly operated under the aliases “Cheongdam” or “Cheongdam Boss” on the messaging app Telegram, was identified as a key supplier to drug trafficker Park Wang-yeol, often referred to as a “drug kingpin.”
The National Police Agency’s drug and organized crime unit said it received custody of Choi from Thai authorities and has launched a full investigation into his activities and connections.
Investigators began tracking Choi while probing Park, who was previously arrested in the Philippines. Authorities combined five outstanding cases involving Choi and designated the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency as the lead investigative body.
Although no official departure record for Choi had been found since 2018, police developed intelligence suggesting he was living in Thailand. Working through liaison officers stationed in both countries, South Korean and Thai police coordinated the operation.
Authorities located Choi in Samut Prakan province, about an hour from Bangkok, and conducted a three-day joint surveillance operation before arresting him on April 10 on charges of illegal stay.
Police said the suspect was apprehended within seven days of the formal request for cooperation, and repatriated to South Korea about three weeks later with assistance from the South Korean Embassy in Thailand and related agencies.
Items seized at the time of arrest, including a passport under another person’s name and electronic devices, will undergo digital forensic analysis to determine links to Park and to identify additional accomplices and distribution networks.
Police said the investigation will expand to include possible conspiracy with Park, violations of passport laws and broader drug trafficking activities. Authorities are also pursuing asset recovery tied to alleged criminal proceeds.
Acting National Police Commissioner Yoo Jae-sung said interagency cooperation – including coordination with customs, financial regulators, tax authorities, the food and drug safety agency and the National Intelligence Service – has been mobilized to track and dismantle transnational drug networks.
“This case sends a clear message that drug criminals will be pursued and apprehended to the ends of the earth,” Yoo said.
Sarina Hosseiny said she had never heard of Qassem Suleimani, an Iranian general assassinated by the U.S. in 2020.
That is, not until this year, when threatening comments cropped up on social media claiming that she and her mother were relatives of Suleimani and were terrorists who should be deported.
The 25-year-old, who studies fashion at Los Angeles Trade Technical College, now sits in an immigration detention facility in Texas, alongside her 47-year-old mother. And other L.A. Iranian Americans helped put her there.
Sarina Hosseiny, 25, shown in an undated photo, is a student at Los Angeles Trade Technical College now held at an immigration detention facility in Texas, alongside her 47-year-old mother.
(Courtesy of Hosseiny family)
“They were sending me death threats. Literally saying like, they were gonna find me and kill me and my mom and all this stuff,” Hosseiny said in a phone interview from the facility last week. “All I’ve ever posted is that I was against war and just innocent people dying.”
In recent weeks, as the war in Iran continues, the U.S. State Department has detained five L.A. area-based Iranian nationals, including Hosseiny and her mother — all of whom are green card holders — and moved to strip them of their residency.
The arrests have exposed a rift in the Iranian American community, which has grown increasingly polarized in recent years, leading to online smear campaigns and at times violence.
In L.A., home to the largest concentration of people of Iranian descent outside Iran, a vocal segment has joined forces with Trump-aligned far-right conservatives, including Laura Loomer, to wage campaigns against other Iranians they believe should not be allowed to live here.
Many in the local community fled Iran after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and cheered the recent U.S. military attacks on their native country. Some have turned on Iranian Americans who have expressed antiwar opinions, interpreting that stance as support for the current government.
A poster in support of Iran’s former crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, hangs in a window of the Gallery Eshgh, which sells artwork and clothing reflecting Iranian culture on Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles in April 2026.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
The tensions are interpersonal, with arguments at family gatherings and friendships strained or shattered. But much of the conflict also takes place online, as when a San Diego-based “mommy influencer” — who normally posts images of herself and her three young children in a luscious backyard shucking nuts, arranging tulips and peeling pomegranates — urged her Instagram followers to contact Loomer so that “the deportation of [the Islamic Republic’s] lackeys can be arranged.”
Anger at the Iranian government has been channeled toward family members of current or former officials, with online petitions describing them as living luxuriously in the States even as ordinary Iranians face repression from a brutal government back home.
Agoura Hills residents Seyed Eissa Hashemi and Maryam Tahmasebi, both psychology professors, were detained by immigration authorities in early April — as was their son, Seyed Mobin Hashemi. The elder Hashemi, the State Department said, is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, who gained fame as a spokeswoman for militants who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and became a reformist politician pushing for environmental protections and women’s rights.
The petition that led to the family’s detention amassed more than 140,000 signatures, with many identifying themselves as members of the Iranian diaspora in the U.S., Australia or elsewhere. The creator of the petition on Change.org, a user who also published petitions targeting five other families, did not respond to a request for comment.
The Times was not able to reach Hashemi or the family’s attorney. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on social media when announcing their detentions that the Obama administration had granted visas to the family members, who have been lawful permanent residents since June 2016.
The Department of Homeland Security declined to respond to questions about Hosseiny and her mother’s case. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson also declined to comment. The State Department and Loomer did not respond to requests for comment.
Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said that some of the sentiment comes from real grievances about corruption in Iran, such as the banker who embezzled millions before fleeing to Canada. But he said that rumors have been weaponized to muffle voices opposing U.S. and Israeli military aggression in Iran and exploited by the Trump administration to exercise a show of strength at home during a flailing war.
The flags of pre-revolution Iran are prominently displayed in the Jordan Market, a purveyor of Persian groceries on L.A.’s Westwood Boulevard, in April 2026.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
“This witch hunt has become really pervasive, and it’s not new,” Abdi said. “What seems to be new is there’s an administration who is willing and eager to entertain this McCarthyism and actually punish people based on what the mob is calling for.”
In the section of Westwood known as “Tehrangeles,” support for Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince and son of the late shah, is apparent. A campaign to install him as Iran’s leader intensified in January, as protests ripped through the country. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a U.S.-Israeli attack in February.
“Make Iran Great Again” signs and posters of a stern-faced Pahlavi are plastered on nearly every window. Iran’s flag before the 1979 revolution — green, white and red with a lion and a rising sun — flutters from many overhangs.
In early March, as the U.S. widened its assault on Iran, crowds from the diaspora rallied in the neighborhood, dancing and celebrating even as the death toll in Iran grew and reports said a missile strike had killed more than 100 schoolchildren.
In Westwood these days, many are more tepid in their support for the war than at the outset and are hesitant to speak openly, whether because of potential backlash here in the U.S. or repercussions for relatives in Iran.
Iranians who don’t back a return to a monarchy under Pahlavi or American and Israeli intervention have gotten “a hell of a lot of backlash,” said Narges Bajoghli, an associate professor of Middle East studies at John Hopkins University. Bajoghli cited a groupthink dynamic stoked by popular Persian-language media such as Iran International, as well as U.S.-funded counter-propaganda programs during Trump’s first term.
After Aida Ashouri, a human rights lawyer who is running for L.A. city attorney, posted a video explaining why she opposes the U.S. war in Iran, the comments came rolling in.
“Please deport this woman,” one user wrote, tagging Rubio and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “She is constantly spreading suspicious anti war propaganda.”
Aida Ashouri, who is running for L.A. city attorney, poses for a picture at Astralab on April 24, 2026.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Ashouri, a U.S. citizen, spent her childhood frequenting businesses in Westwood, but she no longer feels comfortable there, fearing some sort of altercation. Some businesses removed her campaign posters from their windows after the war began, she said.
“It’s 100% impacting my campaign. It’s hard to connect with the Iranian community now, even though I’m Iranian,” she said.
The State Department has said it revoked the green cards of Iranians it targeted in recent weeks, including Hosseiny and her mother. Immigration experts said it’s not so simple, as a legal process has to play out, during which the green cards remain valid.
Even so, Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute said that the executive branch has vast discretion in immigration law, particularly when invoking national security justifications, and defense attorneys may face an uphill battle.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said he is “personally troubled by the idea that we need to deport someone because of who their grandparent is.”
“The government doesn’t usually outsource its investigatory processes to external people,” he said, referring to Loomer and others. “There’s still a lot of questions about how these people are being found and targeted.”
After Hosseiny and her mother, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, were arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on April 3, the State Department asserted that they were the Iranian general’s grand-niece and niece. Afshar had denounced America as the “Great Satan” and shown “unflinching support for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” while “enjoying a lavish lifestyle in Los Angeles,” the State Department said.
Social media posts, showing Soleimani Afshar posing for glamour shots and photos of Hosseiny in a similar vein, were published by numerous news outlets.
Loomer took credit on April 4 for the two women’s arrests, writing on X that over several months she had “quietly been documenting” their social media activity and shared the information with the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.
Within hours, however, Hosseiny and her mother’s connection to the slain general was disputed, with his daughter writing on social media that they had “no relation whatsoever” to her family. A review of family documents, as first reported by Dropsite News, shows that Afshar’s father had no brothers and that the general is from a different province than Afshar’s family.
Hosseiny said her mother has been sharply critical of the U.S. and Israel’s military assault in Iran. But Hosseiny “always thought that in America, people have freedom.”
She said that her mother’s health has deteriorated as she battles severe autoimmune-related anemia and that her mother’s home and car were broken into, amid the stream of online hate.
After four weeks in detention, Hosseiny said, she is “still in disbelief.” Her friends have been raising funds for her legal defense.
Times staff writer Cierra Morgan contributed to this report.
Prosecutors say the man, identified only as ‘Sergej K’, has been in ‘continuous contact’ with Russian intelligence.
Published On 29 Apr 202629 Apr 2026
German authorities have arrested a Kazakh man in Berlin on suspicion of spying for Russia, according to the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office.
Identified only as Sergej K, the man had been “in continuous contact from Germany with a Russian intelligence service” since at least May last year, the office said in a statement on Wednesday, a day after the arrest.
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Prosecutors said Sergej K provided his Russian handler with details about German military aid for Ukraine, including companies involved in developing drones and robotic systems. He also allegedly sent photos of NATO military convoys and public buildings in Berlin.
Other activities included offering to find other espionage agents in Germany, prosecutors added, but they did not make clear whether he had done so.
There was no immediate reaction from Kazakhstan or Russia.
Previous cases
The case is the latest in a string of Moscow-linked espionage and disinformation plots German authorities claim to have discovered since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Two German-Russian dual nationals were arrested in 2024 on suspicion of plotting sabotage attacks on United States military sites in Germany to undermine Western military support for Ukraine.
German police have also arrested various alleged “disposable” agents, known to carry out sabotage and espionage without any formal training for Russia in exchange for small payments.
Earlier this month, Berlin summoned the Russian ambassador to condemn what it called “direct threats” against “targets in Germany”.
Berlin’s Federal Foreign Office said at the time that the threats were intended to undermine Germany’s support for Ukraine. “Our response is clear: we will not be intimidated. Such threats and all forms of espionage in Germany are completely unacceptable,” the Foreign Office said.
Germany has also accused “state-sponsored” Russian hackers of carrying out an “intolerable” 2023 cyberattack on members of the Social Democratic Party, a charge that Russia’s embassy in Germany “categorically rejected”.
Meanwhile, Russia has essentially banned Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle on the grounds that it produces “hostile anti-Russian propaganda”.
Moscow has repeatedly denied any involvement in Germany-based espionage schemes.
At the peak of the crackdown, carloads of masked immigration officers were a common sight in the streets of Minneapolis, while thousands of people were being arrested every week in Texas, Florida and California.
“Turn and burn,” top Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino called the strategy, with relentless displays of force and teams of agents descending on restaurant kitchens, bus stops and Home Depot parking lots.
In December, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents peaked at nearly 40,000 nationwide and were nearly as high the next month, according to data provided to UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Associated Press.
In late January, the killings in Minneapolis of two American citizens by immigration officers and growing concerns over the government’s heavy-handed tactics led to a shake-up of top immigration officials. In the weeks that followed, ICE arrests across the country dropped on average by nearly 12%.
Polling has found the public felt the immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota went too far, a factor that may have contributed to the abrupt firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in early March.
The numbers don’t follow the same pattern everywhere
Bovino, who swaggered through raid scenes in tactical gear and was the public face of the Trump administration crackdown, was pushed aside following the killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Border advisor Tom Homan was then sent to the Twin Cities to chart a new course for immigration enforcement, and he announced the drawdown of immigration agents in the state on Feb. 4.
An AP analysis of ICE arrest records show the department averaged 7,369 weekly arrests nationwide in the five weeks after Homan’s drawdown announcement, , the most recent period for which data is available, down from 8,347 per week in the previous five weeks. Those arrest numbers were still higher on average than during much of the first year of President Trump’s second term, and were dramatically higher than during the Biden administration.
The numbers were not, however, uniform across the country.
ICE arrests rose significantly in Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina and Florida during those five weeks, in some cases hitting their highest weekly count since the start of Trump’s second term.. In Kentucky alone, weekly arrests more than doubled, reaching 86 by early March.
Those increases were offset by steep drops in a handful of large states, including Minnesota and Texas.
Many arrested were not Trump’s ‘worst of the worst’
The Trump administration insists it is targeting the most vicious criminals living illegally in the U.S., and the president has referred to them as “ the worst of the worst.”
In some cases the description is accurate, but the reality is complicated.
Many of the toughest criminals taken into ICE custody were already in prison, but many others who were arrested have no criminal history.
Nationally, some 46% of the people ICE arrested in the five weeks before Feb. 4 had no criminal charges or convictions, dropping to 41% in the five weeks that followed.
Yet that’s still above the 35% weekly average for the time since Trump returned to office. And in a number of states, even after Feb. 4, the share of noncriminals being arrested went up, not down.
Has there been a change in approach?
Across the country, thousands of federal court filings offer an imperfect window into how the Trump administration’s deportation tactics remain in high gear, even if activity has waned.
Like the 21-year-old Honduran man with no criminal record who has filed a petition for release after being arrested Feb. 22 in a suburban San Diego traffic stop. The father of three U.S. citizen children — ages 5, 3 and 10 months — had been under ICE surveillance, the petition says, before officers in tactical gear pulled him over.
Or the 33-year-old Venezuelan woman, a well-known south Texas doctor who worked in a region designated as medically underserved, who was arrested earlier this month with her 5-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen, on her way to her husband’s asylum hearing.
She was arrested, officials said, for overstaying her visa.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the research and advocacy group the American Immigration Council, says he sees signs of change in lower arrest and detention numbers but warns it’s too early to know if those shifts are permanent.
“The Trump administration says: ‘We’re not slowing down,’ ‘Nothing has changed,’” in immigration enforcement, he said. “But it’s very clear that they have pulled back from some of the tactics of Operation Metro Surge,” the crackdown that swept Minneapolis.
Kessler and Sullivan write for the Associated Press. Kessler reported from Washington and Sullivan from Minneapolis. AP reporters Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.
Mahmoud Khader Abed Adra, sought for over four decades, was surrendered by Palestinian authorities
Published On 17 Apr 202617 Apr 2026
A man suspected of organising a deadly attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris has been arrested and placed in custody in France after being handed over by Palestinian authorities.
Mahmoud Khader Abed Adra, also known as Hicham Harb, arrived in France on Thursday after Palestinian officials surrendered him to French authorities, a handover that French President Emmanuel Macron linked directly to France’s recent recognition of Palestinian statehood.
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On August 9, 1982, three to five men threw a grenade into Jo Goldenberg, a Jewish-owned restaurant in the Rue des Rosiers, in Paris’s historic Marais district, before opening fire on the street outside.
Six people were killed and 22 wounded in the incident.
The attack was blamed on the Fatah-Revolutionary Council, a Palestinian armed faction that had split from the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Adra was arrested in the West Bank by Palestinian security forces in September last year.
French antiterrorism prosecutors filed an extradition request days later, and he was flown to the Villacoublay military airbase outside Paris on Thursday, where he was taken into custody.
His lawyer described the extradition as “a serious violation of Palestinian fundamental law”.
“Forty-four years is too long,” said David Pere, a lawyer representing several families.
Two other suspects are already in French custody, and in February, France’s highest court confirmed that a trial will proceed, a ruling that had been challenged by the defendants.
Macron praised the Palestinian Authority’s cooperation, saying it reflected a commitment by President Mahmoud Abbas to work with France on counterterrorism.
Abbas had told French newspaper Le Figaro late last year that France’s recognition of Palestinian statehood in September 2025 had “created an appropriate framework” for the extradition request.
