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WASHINGTON — The Navy admiral who oversees military operations in the region where U.S. forces have been attacking alleged drug boats off Venezuela will retire in December, he and the Defense Secretary announced Thursday.

Adm. Alvin Holsey became the leader of U.S. Southern Command only in November, overseeing an area that encompasses the Caribbean Sea and waters off South America. These types of postings typically last between three and four years.

The news of Holsey’s upcoming retirement comes two days after the U.S. military’s fifth deadly strike in the Caribbean against a small boat accused of carrying drugs. The Trump administration has asserted it’s treating alleged drug traffickers as unlawful combatants who must be met with military force.

Frustration with the attacks has been growing on Capitol Hill. Some Republicans have been seeking more information from the White House on the legal justification and details of the strikes, while Democrats contend the strikes violate U.S. and international law.

Holsey said in a statement posted on the command’s Facebook page that it’s “been an honor to serve our nation, the American people and support and defend our Constitution for over 37 years.”

“The SOUTHCOM team has made lasting contributions to the defense of our nation and will continue to do so,” he said. “I am confident that you will forge ahead, focused on your mission that strengthens our nation and ensures its longevity as a beacon of freedom around the globe.”

U.S. Southern Command did not provide any more information beyond the admiral’s statement.

In a post on X on Thursday afternoon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth thanked Holsey for his “decades of service to our country, and we wish him and his family continued success and fulfillment in the years ahead.”

“Admiral Holsey has demonstrated unwavering commitment to mission, people, and nation,” Hegseth wrote.

Officials at the Pentagon did not provide any more information and referred the Associated Press to Hegseth’s statement on social media.

The New York Times first reported on Holsey’s plans to leave his position.

Toropin and Finley write for the Associated Press.

Teresa Sánchez-Gordon was just a girl when federal immigration agents came for her.

She and her mother had been on their way to drop off a jacket at the dry cleaners when they spotted a group of suspicious-looking men, watching intently from down the street.

Sánchez-Gordon remembers her heart pounding with dread that the men were there to haul them away for being in the country without papers. Her mother grabbed her and they beelined back to their house. From their hiding place in a closet, they could hear loud knocks on their front door, Sánchez-Gordon recalled.

The agents’ demeanor turned “cordial,” Sánchez-Gordon suspects, only after her light-skinned father let them in.

“Dad could pass — he had blond hair, blue eyes,” she said in an interview earlier this year. “So when he opened the door and these agents are there, they just assumed he was an American citizen.”

Looking back decades later, Sánchez-Gordon, 74, said that that experience would shape her views and career. In her new role as president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, she will help guide a Los Angeles Police Department that faces questions about how to handle the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign.

Sánchez-Gordon said she recognizes the fear and desperation felt by the immigrants even while living in so-called sanctuary cities such as Los Angeles, which try to shield immigrants from deportation unless they have committed serious crimes.

“Even my housekeeper today said, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen, but I’m even afraid to go outside and go to the market, because I’ve got the ‘nopal en la frente,’” she said, pointing to her forehead while using a popular expression for someone who appears to be of Mexican descent. “So my perspective, as an East L.A. girl: I’m horrified, I’m angry.”

After her close brush with deportation as a child, Sánchez-Gordon eventually gained citizenship. An early adulthood steeped in Latino activism led to a career in law, first as a federal public defender and later a Los Angeles County judge. She retired in 2017 after two decades on the bench and was appointed last October by Mayor Karen Bass to lead the Police Commission.

Much like a corporate board of directors, the commission sets LAPD policies, approves its multibillion-dollar annual budget and scrutinizes shootings and other serious uses of force to determine whether the officers acted appropriately.

Sánchez-Gordon was born in the western Mexico state of Jalisco. Her father, a butcher by trade, emigrated and found work as a bracero picking crops in fields up and down the West Coast. He sent for his family when Sánchez-Gordon was 3. She recalled how her mother bundled her and her siblings into a bus that took them to the border, where they hired a “coyote,” or human smuggler, to get the rest of the way. They eventually settled in East L.A.

The government granted a path to legal status to laborers like Sánchez-Gordon’s father that no longer exists. In recent months, she said she has been troubled by “the way that people are being treated and the separation of families in our community … and this level of hatred toward the immigrants, the people that sustain this city.”

Of particular concern for Sánchez-Gordon is the perception that LAPD officers are working closely with federal immigration agents.

“The optics of the military being here, the optics of the National Guard being in our city, the optics of our community seeing the LAPD in some of these raids is troubling,” she said.

Sánchez-Gordon said she is open to revisiting “certain language” in Special Order 40, the policy that bars officers from stopping people for the sole purpose of asking them about their citizenship status. But she doesn’t think it necessarily needs to be overhauled in order to add more protections.

At commission meetings, she has pushed harder than her colleagues to get answers from LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell about the department’s response to the immigration raids and the protests that ensued — but stopped short of openly challenging the chief.

Sánchez-Gordon replaces Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent who is now a security official at USC, as president of the commission. Southers may still remain on the body, pending a decision by the City Council.

The commission has been down a member for months, since former member Maria “Lou” Calanche resigned so she could run for City Council. A lack of quorum has led to the cancellation of roughly a third of its meetings this year. To fill Calanche’s seat, the mayor has nominated Jeff Skobin, vice president at Galpin Motors Inc. and the son of a former longtime police commissioner.

Activists have long denounced commissioners as being puppets of the Police Department who are disconnected from the everyday struggles of Angelenos. Week in and week out, some of the board’s most vocal critics show up to its meetings to blast commissioners for ignoring the threat of mass surveillance, hiding their affiliations with special interest groups and failing to curb police shootings, which have risen to 34 from 21 at this time last year.

Sánchez-Gordon said she was surprised at first by the intensity of the meetings, but that she also understands the desire for change. Early in her career, she organized to improve conditions for people who had moved to the U.S. from other countries as part of the AFL-CIO’s Labor Immigrant Assistance Project.

She got her first taste of politics volunteering for the City Council campaign of Edward R. Roybal, who would go on to serve 15 terms in Congress. She later enrolled at the People’s College of Law, an unaccredited law school in downtown, where she rubbed shoulders with other Latino political luminaries such as Gil Cedillo and future L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

She credits conversations around the breakfast table with her husband and father-in-law, both prominent civil rights lawyers, with inspiring her to pursue a law career. After working for several years as a federal public defender, she decided to run for judge at the prodding of a mentor. Like many activists of her generation, she thought that the best way to effect change was from the inside.

Since retiring from the bench, she has continued to work as an arbitrator and is a partner at a local injury law firm.

Sánchez-Gordon said her to-do list on the commission includes understanding the department’s ongoing struggles with recruiting new officers, and getting the department ready for the upcoming World Cup and Olympic Games. Once she gets settled, she said she intends to spend more time outside the commission’s meetings attending community events.

Given the recent rise in police shootings, she said it’s also important that officers have the right training and less-lethal options so they don’t immediately resort to using their guns.

She sees her new role as an extension of the work she’s been doing her whole career: “I just see it as what I’ve always done as a judge: You ask questions.”

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The Trump administration has dismissed five out of seven members on Puerto Rico’s federal control board that oversees the U.S. territory’s finances, sparking concern about the future of the island’s fragile economy. The five fired are all Democrats.

A White House official told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the board “has been run inefficiently and ineffectively by its governing members for far too long and it’s time to restore common sense leadership.”

Those fired are board Chair Arthur Gonzalez, along with Cameron McKenzie, Betty Rosa, Juan Sabater and Luis Ubiñas. The board’s two remaining members — Andrew G. Biggs and John E. Nixon — are Republicans.

Sylvette Santiago, a spokesperson for the board, said they are in touch with the White House.

The board was created in 2016 under the Obama administration, a year after Puerto Rico’s government declared it was unable to pay its more than $70-billion public debt load and later filed for the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

In remarks to the AP, the White House official claimed the board had operated ineffectively and in secret and said it “shelled out huge sums to law, consulting and lobbying firms.” The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the subject, also accused the board’s staff of receiving “exorbitant salaries.”

Puerto Rico is struggling to restructure more than $9 billion in debt held by the state’s Electric Power Authority, with officials holding bitter mediations with creditors demanding full payment.

It’s the only Puerto Rico government debt pending a restructuring, with the White House official accusing the board of preferring to “extend the bankruptcy.”

In February, the board’s executive director, Robert Mujica Jr., said it was “impossible” for Puerto Rico to pay the $8.5 billion that bondholders are demanding. He instead unveiled a new fiscal plan that proposed a $2.6-billion payment for creditors. The plan does not call for any rate increases for an island that has one of the highest power bills in any U.S. jurisdiction as chronic power outages persist, given the grid’s weak infrastructure.

Alvin Velázquez, a bankruptcy law professor at Indiana University, said he worries the dismissal of the board members could spark another crisis in Puerto Rico.

“This is really about getting a deal out of [the power company] that is not sustainable for the rate payers of Puerto Rico,” he said.

Velázquez, who was chair of the unsecured creditors committee during the bankruptcy proceedings, also questioned whether the dismissals are legal, since board members can only be removed for just cause.

“What’s the cause?” he said. “What you’re going to see is another instance in which the Trump administration is taking on and testing the courts.”

The dismissals were first reported by the Breitbart News Network, a conservative news site.

Coto writes for the Associated Press.

US President Trump alleged that the data had been manipulated to make him look bad.

United States President Donald Trump has removed the head of the agency that produces the monthly jobs figures after a report showed hiring slowed in July and was much weaker in May and June than previously reported.

Trump, in a post on his social media platform on Friday, alleged that the figures were manipulated for political reasons and said that Erika McEntarfer, the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, should be fired. He provided no evidence for the charge.

“I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump said on Truth Social. “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.”

Trump later posted: “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

After his initial post, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said on X that McEntarfer was no longer leading the bureau and that William Wiatrowski, the deputy commissioner, would serve as the acting director.

“I support the President’s decision to replace Biden’s Commissioner and ensure the American People can trust the important and influential data coming from BLS,” Chavez-DeRemer said.

Friday’s jobs report showed that just 73,000 jobs were added last month and that 258,000 fewer jobs were created in May and June than previously estimated. The report suggested that the economy has sharply weakened during Trump’s tenure, a pattern consistent with a slowdown in economic growth during the first half of the year and an increase in inflation during June that appeared to reflect the price pressures created by the president’s tariffs.

“What does a bad leader do when they get bad news? Shoot the messenger,” Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said in a Friday speech.

Revisions to hiring data

Trump has sought to attack institutions that rely on objective data for assessing the economy, including the Federal Reserve and, now, the BLS. The actions are part of a broader mission to bring the totality of the executive branch – including independent agencies designed to objectively measure the nation’s wellbeing – under the White House’s control.

McEntarfer was nominated by Biden in 2023 and became the commissioner of the BLS in January 2024. Commissioners typically serve four-year terms, but since they are political appointees, they can be fired. The commissioner is the only political appointee of the agency, which has hundreds of career civil servants.

The Senate confirmed McEntarfer to her post 86-8, with now Vice President JD Vance among the yea votes.

Trump focused much of his ire on the revisions the agency made to previous hiring data. Job gains in May were revised down to just 19,000 from 125,000, and for June they were cut to 14,000 from 147,000. In July, only 73,000 positions were added. The unemployment rate ticked up to a still-low 4.2 percent from 4.1 percent.

“No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers,” Trump wrote. “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”

The monthly employment report is one of the most closely-watched pieces of government economic data and can cause sharp swings in financial markets. The disappointing figure sent US market indexes about 1.5 percent lower on Friday.

While the jobs numbers are often the subject of political spin, economists and Wall Street investors – with millions of dollars at stake – have always accepted US government economic data as free from political manipulation.

RIO DE JANEIRO — The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday announced sanctions on Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes over alleged suppression of freedom of expression and the ongoing trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro.

De Moraes oversees the criminal case against Bolsonaro, who is accused of masterminding a plot to stay in power despite his 2022 election loss to current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

“De Moraes is responsible for an oppressive campaign of censorship, arbitrary detentions that violate human rights, and politicized prosecutions — including against former President Jair Bolsonaro,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.

The Treasury cited the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which targets perpetrators of human rights abuse and corrupt officials, as its authority to issue the sanctions.

The decision orders the freezing of any assets or property De Moraes may have in the U.S.

Brazil’s Supreme Court and the presidential palace did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wednesday’s announcement follows the U.S. State Department’s announcement of visa restrictions on Brazilian judicial officials, including De Moraes, on July 18.

It also comes after President Trump announced a 50% tariff on Brazilian imported goods that is set to take effect Friday. In a letter announcing the tariff, Trump explicitly linked the import tax to what he called the “witch hunt” trial of Bolsonaro that is underway in Brazil.

Days later, Bolsonaro was ordered to wear an ankle monitor after being deemed a flight risk.

Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo celebrated the Treasury’s announcement on X, calling it a “historic milestone” and a warning that “abuses of authority now have global consequences.”

Eduardo Bolsonaro relocated to the U.S. in March and is under investigation for allegedly working with U.S. authorities to impose sanctions against Brazilian officials.

Hughes writes for the Associated Press.

July 19 (UPI) — The U.S. visa of the Brazilian judge overseeing the criminal case against former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was revoked Friday, four days after President Donald Trump called the South American nation’s treatment of the former leader a “witch hunt.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the announcement on Friday.

“President Trump made clear that his administration will hold accountable foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States,” Rubio said in a statement. “Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s political witch hunt against Jair Bolsonaro created a persecution and censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also extends beyond Brazil’s shores to target Americans.

“I have therefore ordered visa revocations for Moraes and his allies on the court, as well as their immediate family members effective immediately.”

The visa restriction policy is pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act, which authorizes the secretary of state to not allow anyone whose entry into the United States “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Rubio, in a cable to diplomatic and consular posts on Thursday, said public comments on foreign elections “should be brief, focused on congratulating the winning candidate and, when appropriate, noted shared policy interests,” according to The New York Times, which obtained the memo.

De Moraes doesn’t travel often to the United States, The Washington Post reported.

Friday, de Moraes accused Bolsonaro and his son, Eduardo, of conspiring to incite U.S. hostilities against Brazil, ordering the former president to wear an ankle bracelet. Bolsonaro was also barred from contacting foreign governments, and blocked from using social media.

The judge also is investigating online misinformation, and has ordered the takedown of social media accounts that violate Brazil’s freedom of speech. In 2024, Elon Musk’s X restored service in the country after paying a $5 million fine and appointed a new legal representative there.

Trump’s social media company, The Trump Media & Technology Group, sued de Moraes in February, accusing him of censoring conservative voices on social media.

The judge is on the judicial panel to preside over Bolsonaro’s trial before Brazil’s Supreme Court, who was indicted in February after the alleged coup.

Bolsonaro has been accused of attempting to violently to retain power after his 2022 election loss to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Lula, in a speech Thursday night, condemned Bolsonaro’s supporters, whom he accused of siding with Trump about the “witch hunt.”

“They’re the true traitors of the homeland,” he said. “They don’t care about the economy of the country or the damage caused to our people.”

On Monday, Trump wrote a letter to Lula threatening a 50% tariff on imported goods, because of how Bolsonaro “has been treated” and an “unfair trade relationship.” Unless there is an agreement, the new rate takes effect on Aug. 1, he wrote.

Trump said that “the way Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader throughout the World during his term, including by the United States, is an international disgrace. The trial should not be taking place. It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY.”

Trump also noted “Brazil’s insidious attacks on Free Elections, and the Fundamental Free Speech Rights of Americans.”

Then on Thursday, he posted on Truth Social a letter sent to Bolsonaro about his “terrible treatment you are receiving at the hands of an unjust system turned against you,” demanding an immediate trial.

“It is my sincere hope that the Government of Brazil changes course, stops attacking political opponents, and ends their ridiculous censorship regime. I will be watching closely.”