Costa Rica

Venezuelan government calls on US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to cease ‘thrill-seeking and warmongering posture’.

Venezuela’s government has blasted an “illegal incursion” near its borders by United States warplanes and accused the US of “military harassment” and threatening the “security of the nation”.

Venezuelan Defence Minister General Vladimir Padrino said on Thursday that at least five F-35 fighter jets had been detected, in what he describes as a threat that “US imperialism has dared to bring close to the Venezuelan coast”.

“We’re watching them, I want you to know. And I want you to know that this doesn’t intimidate us. It doesn’t intimidate the people of Venezuela,” Padrino said, speaking from an airbase, according to the Agencia Venezuela news outlet.

“The presence of these planes flying close to our Caribbean Sea is a vulgarity, a provocation, a threat to the security of the nation,” Padrino said.

“I denounce before the world the military harassment, the military threat by the US government against the people of Venezuela, who want peace, work and happiness,” he said.

The presence of the US combat planes was detected by the country’s air defences, air traffic control systems at Maiquetia international airport, which serves the capital Caracas, as well as a commercial airliner, Venezuelan authorities said.

In a joint statement, Venezuela’s foreign and defence ministries said the US combat planes were detected 75km (46.6 miles) “from our shores”. If the planes came no closer than the distance mentioned by Venezuelan authorities, then they would not have violated the country’s airspace, which extends about 12 nautical miles, or 22km, off the coast.

Still, the ministries accused the US of flouting international law and jeopardising civil aviation in the Caribbean Sea.

Venezuela “urges US Secretary of War Peter Hegseth to immediately cease his reckless, thrill-seeking and warmongering posture”, which is disturbing the peace of the Caribbean, the statement added.

Venezuela denuncia incursión ilegal de aviones de combate de EEUU en sus costas: «Provocación que amenaza la soberanía nacional» (+Comunicado)https://t.co/GnR4wLRDzz

— Agencia Venezuela News (@AgenciaVNews) October 2, 2025

The Pentagon has yet to respond to requests for comment from media organisations.

US media reported earlier on Thursday that President Donald Trump has notified Congress that the US is now engaged in “non-international armed conflict” against drug cartels, members of which would now be considered “unlawful combatants”.

Trump’s move to a more formal war footing follows on from the US administration’s rebranding of Latin American drug cartels as “narco-terrorists” who are seeking to destabilise the US by trafficking illegal drugs across US borders.

The move follows weeks of tension with Venezuela after Trump dispatched US F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico, a US territory in the Caribbean, as part of the biggest military deployment in Latin America in decades and which has already seen air attacks on boats off the Venezuelan coast that the US president alleged were involved in drug trafficking.

So far, 14 people have been killed in the US attacks off Venezuela that officials in Caracas and several independent experts have described as extrajudicial killings.

Eight US warships and a nuclear submarine have also been deployed to the region as part of Trump’s so-called operation to combat drug trafficking, but which Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro says is a covert bid to bring about regime change in his country.

NASHVILLE — U.S. immigration officials said they intend to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Uganda, after he declined an offer to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for remaining in jail and pleading guilty to human smuggling charges, according to a Saturday court filing.

The Costa Rica offer came late Thursday, after it was clear that the Salvadoran national would probably be released from a Tennessee jail the next day. Abrego Garcia declined to extend his stay in jail and was released Friday to await trial in Maryland with his family. Later that day, the Department of Homeland Security notified his attorneys that he would be deported to Uganda and should report to immigration authorities Monday.

Abrego Garcia’s case became a high-profile story in President Trump’s immigration crackdown after he was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March. Facing a court order, the Trump administration brought him back to the U.S. in June, only to detain him on human smuggling charges.

He has pleaded not guilty and has asked the judge to dismiss the case, claiming that it is an attempt to punish him for challenging his deportation to El Salvador. The Saturday filing came as a supplement to that motion to dismiss, stating that the threat to deport him to Uganda is more proof that the prosecution is vindictive.

“The government immediately responded to Mr. Abrego’s release with outrage,” the filing reads. “Despite having requested and received assurances from the government of Costa Rica that Mr. Abrego would be accepted there, within minutes of his release from pretrial custody, an ICE representative informed Mr. Abrego’s counsel that the government intended to deport Mr. Abrego to Uganda and ordered him to report to ICE’s Baltimore Field Office Monday morning.”

Although Abrego Garcia was deemed eligible for pretrial release, he had remained in jail at the request of his attorneys, who feared the Republican administration could try to immediately deport him again if he were freed. Those fears were somewhat allayed by a recent ruling in a separate case in Maryland, which requires immigration officials to allow Abrego Garcia time to mount a defense.

Loller writes for the Associated Press.

The conservative president faced a legislative panel weighing whether he should retain his immunity from prosecution.

Rodrigo Chaves Robles has become the first sitting president in the history of Costa Rica to testify to a legislative committee as he faced charges of corruption and the possibility of a criminal trial.

The three-member committee held the hearing on Friday to consider whether or not to lift Chaves Robles’s immunity as president.

Doing so would pave the way for Chaves Robles to be prosecuted based on allegations he used government-related funds to give kickbacks to an ally.

Chaves Robles has denied any wrongdoing and accused his opponents of using the judiciary to oust his government.

“What we are experiencing has historic consequences,” Chaves Robles said on Friday. “The entire country is witnessing a legal rigging by the attorney general and the criminal court.”

He told his supporters outside the Legislative Assembly that his adversaries had “staged a ridiculous case to carry out a judicial coup d’etat” and convince the public he was a “scoundrel”.

The committee must deliver a report following Chaves Robles’s testimony to the full Legislative Assembly, which will then vote on whether to strip him of his immunity from prosecution.

A conservative economist and former minister of finance, Chaves Robles has been accused of forcing an associate to take money from a contract awarded by a development bank, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, and use it to pay his former presidential adviser, Federico Cruz.

The sum was allegedly $32,000, and Cruz used it to buy a house, according to prosecutors.

The bank told the Reuters news agency that it had conducted its own internal investigation, the conclusions of which were provided to Costa Rica’s attorney general. Witnesses for the prosecution include the president’s former communications minister, Patricia Navarro, and businessman Christian Bulgarelli.

“I never ordered the delivery of money to anyone,” Chaves Robles said in response to the allegations.

His lawyer, Jose Miguel Villalobos, also argued that the accusations do not meet the “minimum requirements” for the removal of presidential immunity.

The Legislative Assembly would need a supermajority in order to strip Chaves Robles of his immunity.

Chaves Robles was considered a dark horse candidate when he ran for president in 2022, representing the conservative Social Democratic Progress Party.

Even then, however, he faced scrutiny for allegedly running an illegal parallel campaign financing structure. Multiple women also came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment during his time employed at the World Bank.

Chaves Robles is ineligible to run for a second term in 2026: The law does not permit back-to-back presidential terms.

Costa Rica is scheduled to hold its next presidential election on February 1, and Chaves Robles’s term is slated to end the following May.

New details about the circumstances of “Cosby Show” star Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s death have emerged.

The Red Cross in Costa Rica confirmed to The Times on Wednesday that its first responders also tended to another man in the same drowning incident that claimed Warner’s life on Sunday. The patient, whose identity was not disclosed, survived the drowning.

Costa Rican Red Cross said in a statement that it received an emergency report on Sunday at 2:10 p.m. of a “water-related incident” at Playa Grande, Cahuita, Limón, involving two men who required emergency treatment. Three ambulances arrived at the beach where Red Cross personnel attended to the two men. They performed CPR and revived the unidentified swimmer. He was transported to a nearby clinic in “critical condition,” the statement said.

First responders also performed CPR on Warner, but to no avail. “He was unfortunately declared deceased at the scene,” the statement said. The Costa Rican Red Cross also told People that “two people were dragged by a water current at the beach,” and they were out of the water when paramedics arrived.

The Red Cross statement confirms details previously shared by Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Department, which told the Associated Press on Monday that first responders found Warner without vital signs and he was taken to the morgue. Warner was on vacation with his family. He was 54.

Warner, an Emmy-nominated actor, was best known for starring as Theo Huxtable for eight seasons on “The Cosby Show.” His numerous TV credits also include “The Resident,” “Malcolm & Eddie,” “Sons of Anarchy,” “9-1-1” and “Suits.” He was a director for shows “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Kenan & Kel,” among others, and a Grammy-winning musician.

As news of his death spread Monday, Warner’s Hollywood peers, including Morris Chestnut, Tracee Ellis Ross, Viola Davis and Niecy Nash paid tribute on social media. Beyoncé also honored the actor, updating her website to include a tribute to the TV star.

“Rest in power, Malcolm-Jamal Warner,” reads the tribute, which features a black-and-white photo of the actor in his youth. “Thanks for being a big part of our shared television history. You will be missed.”

MINNEAPOLIS — Damion Downs scored in the sixth round of a shootout after three saves by Matt Freese, sending the U.S. to the semifinals of the CONCACAF Gold Cup with a 4-3 penalty-kicks win over Costa Rica after a a 2-2 tie on Sunday night.

The U.S. advanced to a Wednesday matchup in St. Louis against Guatemala, which upset Canada on penalty kicks in the opener of the quarterfinal doubleheader.

Mexico plays Honduras in the other semifinal on Wednesday in Santa Clara. The championship is in Houston on July 6.

The U.S. has reached the semifinals in 17 of 18 Gold Cups, including 13 straight since a quarterfinal loss to Colombia on penalty kicks in 2000.

Diego Luna and Max Arfsten scored in regulation for the U.S., which faced its highest-ranked opponent of the tournament in Costa Rica (54th) after breezing through the group stage with an 8-1 goal differential.

Alonso Martinez scored the tying goal for the Ticos in the 71st minute with a left-footed shot after Carlos Mora split Luca de La Torre and Arsten to take a shot on Freese and seize the rebound to set up Martinez.

CONCACAF changed the rules for this edition of the biennial championship for North America, Central America and the Caribbean, eliminating extra time except for the championship game.

John Tolkin had the first chance to win the shootout for the U.S. Keylor Navas knocked down his try in the fifth round. Freese then denied Andy Rojas with a diving hand, climbing to his feet while nodding his head and sticking out his tongue toward his cheering teammates at midfield. That set up the winner by the 20-year-old Downs.

Missing the tournament for the U.S. are regulars Christian Pulisic, Yunus Musah, Weston McKennie, Tim Weah, Gio Reyna, Antonee Robinson, Folarin Balogun and Sergiño Dest, due to a variety of reasons from injuries to rest to Club World Cup commitments.

Three of Costa Rica’s six goals during the group stage came by penalty kick, and Francisco Calvo added another one in the 12th minute after a foul by Arsten. Calvo went low to zip the ball just out of reach of a diving Freese.

Malik Tillman, who had three group stage goals, put a 37th-minute penalty kick off a post and Navas knocked away Arfsten’s attempt off the rebound.

Luna picked him up with his first goal in international competition by rocketing a shot off the chest of defender Alexis Gamboa for the equalizer in the 43rd minute.

Tillman made amends for his miss early in the second half by poking a pass ahead for Arfsten, who surged in from the left wing to send the ball into the opposite corner for the lead.

A retired Nicaraguan military officer who later became a critic of President Daniel Ortega has been killed in a shooting at his condominium in Costa Rica, where he lives in exile.

The death of Roberto Samcam, 67, on Thursday has heightened concern about the safety of Nicaraguan dissidents, even when they live abroad.

Police in Costa Rica have confirmed that a suspect entered Samcam’s condominium building in the capital of San Jose at approximately 7:30am local time (13:30 GMT) and shot the retired major at least eight times.

Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Organisation identified the murder weapon as a 9mm pistol. Samcam’s wife, Claudia Vargas, told the Reuters news agency that the suspect pretended to be a delivery driver to gain access to her husband.

The suspect allegedly fired on Samcam and then left without saying a word, escaping on a motorcycle. He remains at large.

Samcam went into exile after participating in the 2018 protests, which began as demonstrations against social security reforms and escalated into one of the largest antigovernment movements in Nicaragua’s history.

Thousands of people flooded Nicaragua’s streets. Some even called for President Ortega’s resignation.

But while Ortega did ultimately cancel the social security reforms, he also answered the protests with a police crackdown, and the clashes killed an estimated 355 people, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

More than 2,000 people were injured, and another 2,000 held in what the IACHR described as “arbitrary detention”.

In the months and years after the protests, Ortega has continued to seek punishment for the protesters and institutions involved in the demonstrations, which he likened to a “coup”.

Samcam was among the critics denouncing Ortega’s use of military weapons and paramilitary forces to tamp down on the protests. Ortega has denied using either for repression.

In a 2019 interview with the publication Confidencial, for instance, he compared Ortega to Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last member of what is commonly known as the Somoza family dictatorship, which ruled Nicaragua for nearly 43 years.

And in 2022, Samcam published a book that roughly called Ortega: El Calvario de Nicaragua, which roughly translates to: Ortega: Nicaragua’s torment.

Ortega has long been accused of human rights abuses and authoritarian tendencies. In 2023, for instance, he stripped hundreds of dissidents of their citizenship, leaving them effectively stateless, and seized their property.

He has also pushed for constitutional reforms to increase his power and that of his wife, former Vice President Rosario Murillo. She now leads with Ortega as his co-president.

The changes also increase Ortega’s term in office and grant him the power to coordinate all “legislative, judicial, electoral, control and supervisory bodies” — putting virtually all government agencies under his authority.

From abroad, Samcam was helping to lead an effort to document some of Ortega’s alleged abuses.

In 2020, he became the chain-of-command expert for the Court of Conscience, a group created by the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, a nonprofit founded by a Nobel Prize-winning Costa Rican president, Oscar Arias.

As part of the group, Samcam solicited testimony of torture and abuses committed under Ortega, with the aim of building a legal case against the Nicaraguan president and his officials.

“We are documenting each case so that it can move on to a trial, possibly before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights,” Samcam said at the time.

Samcam is not the only Nicaraguan dissident to face an apparent assassination attempt while in exile.

Joao Maldonado, a student leader in the 2018 protests, has survived two such attempts while living in the Costa Rican capital. The most recent one, in January 2024, left him and his partner seriously injured.

Maldonado has blame Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front — which Ortega leads — for the attack.

They arrive at the U.S. border from around the world: Eritrea, Guatemala, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ghana, Uzbekistan and so many other countries.

They come for asylum, insisting they face persecution for their religion, or sexuality or for supporting the wrong politicians.

For generations, they had been given the chance to make their case to U.S. authorities.

Not anymore.

“They didn’t give us an ICE officer to talk to. They didn’t give us an interview. No one asked me what happened,” said a Russian election worker who sought asylum in the U.S. after he said he was caught with video recordings he made of vote rigging. On Feb. 26, he was deported to Costa Rica with his wife and young son.

On Jan. 20, just after being sworn in for a second term, President Trump suspended the asylum system as part of his wide-ranging crackdown on illegal immigration, issuing a series of executive orders designed to stop what he called the “invasion” of the United States.

What asylum seekers now find, according to lawyers, activists and immigrants, is a murky, ever-changing situation with few obvious rules, where people can be deported to countries they know nothing about after fleeting conversations with immigration officials while others languish in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.

Attorneys who work frequently with asylum seekers at the border say their phones have gone quiet since Trump took office. They suspect many who cross are immediately expelled without a chance at asylum or are detained to wait for screening under the U.N.’s convention against torture, which is harder to qualify for than asylum.

“I don’t think it’s completely clear to anyone what happens when people show up and ask for asylum,” said Bella Mosselmans, director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council.

Restrictions face challenges in court

A thicket of lawsuits, appeals and countersuits have filled the courts as the Trump administration faces off against activists who argue the sweeping restrictions illegally put people fleeing persecution in harm’s way.

In a key legal battle, a federal judge is expected to rule on whether courts can review the administration’s use of invasion claims to justify suspending asylum. There is no date set for that ruling.

The government says its declaration of an invasion is not subject to judicial oversight, at one point calling it “an unreviewable political question.”

But rights groups fighting the asylum proclamation, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, called it “as unlawful as it is unprecedented” in the complaint filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court.

Illegal border crossings, which soared in the first years of President Biden’s administration, reaching nearly 10,000 arrests per day in late 2024, dropped significantly during his last year in office and plunged further after Trump returned to the White House.

Yet more than 200 people are still arrested daily for illegally crossing the southern U.S. border.

Some of those people are seeking asylum, though it’s unclear if anyone knows how many.

Paulina Reyes-Perrariz, managing attorney for the San Diego office of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said her office sometimes received 10 to 15 calls a day about asylum after Biden implemented asylum restrictions in 2024.

That number has dropped to almost nothing, with only a handful of total calls since Jan. 20.

Plus, she added, lawyers are unsure how to handle asylum cases.

“It’s really difficult to consult and advise with individuals when we don’t know what the process is,” she said.

Doing ‘everything right’

None of this was expected by the Russian man, who asked not to be identified for fear of persecution if he returns to Russia.

“We felt betrayed,” the 36-year-old told the Associated Press. “We did everything right.”

The family had scrupulously followed the rules. They traveled to Mexico in May 2024, found a cheap place to rent near the border with California and waited nearly nine months for the chance to schedule an asylum interview.

On Jan. 14, they got word that their interview would be on Feb 2. On Jan. 20, the interview was canceled.

Moments after Trump took office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced it had scrubbed the system used to schedule asylum interviews and canceled tens of thousands of existing appointments.

There was no way to appeal.

The Russian family went to a San Diego border crossing to ask for asylum, where they were taken into custody, he said.

A few weeks later, they were among the immigrants who were handcuffed, shackled and flown to Costa Rica. Only the children were left unchained.

Turning to other countries to hold deportees

The Trump administration has tried to accelerate deportations by turning countries like Costa Rica and Panama into “bridges,” temporarily detaining deportees while they await return to their countries of origin or third countries.

Earlier this year, some 200 migrants were deported from the U.S. to Costa Rica and roughly 300 were sent to Panama.

To supporters of tighter immigration controls, the asylum system has always been rife with exaggerated claims by people not facing real dangers. In recent years, roughly one-third to half of asylum applications were approved by judges.

Even some politicians who see themselves as pro-immigration say the system faces too much abuse.

“People around the world have learned they can claim asylum and remain in the U.S. indefinitely to pursue their claims,” retired U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, a longtime Democratic stalwart in Congress, wrote last year in the Wall Street Journal, defending Biden’s tightening of asylum policies amid a flood of illegal immigration.

An uncertain future

Many of the immigrants they arrived with have left the Costa Rican facility where they were first detained, but the Russian family has stayed. The man cannot imagine going back to Russia and has nowhere else to go.

He and his wife spend their days teaching Russian and a little English to their son. He organizes volleyball games to keep people busy.

He is not angry at the U.S. He understands the administration wanting to crack down on illegal immigration. But, he adds, he is in real danger. He followed the rules and can’t understand why he didn’t get a chance to plead his case.

He fights despair almost constantly, knowing that what he did in Russia brought his family to this place.

“I failed them,” he said. “I think that every day: I failed them.”

Sullivan writes for the Associated Press.