Deported 'Dreamer' Sues Trump Administration for Answers

© Juan Manuel Montes, 23, who had lived in the U.S. since he was 9, had DACA status but was deported t...

A young immigrant who was deported to Mexico earlier this year despite the fact he had protected DACA status has filed a suit against the Trump administration seeking information about his case.

Juan Manuel Montes, 23, filed a complaint Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, alleging that the government did not provide any documentation explaining the legality of sending him back to Mexico.

Montes has been in the U.S. since he was 9 and had qualified for DACA twice; he was protected until 2018.

"Juan Manuel was funneled across the border without so much as a piece of paper to explain why or how," stated Nora A. Preciado, a staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, (NILC) which put out the statement. "The government shouldn't treat anyone this way — much less someone who has DACA. No one should have to file a lawsuit to find out what happened to them."

NILC executive director Marielena Hincapié told NBC News the question is "how is it possible that in the United States of America you can be walking and be stopped by Border Patrol and then disappeared and sent to another country because you don't have your wallet on you?"

In the statement, Montes said he was "forced out" of the U.S. because he did not know what to do or say, "but my home is there," he said. "I miss my job. I miss school...But most of all, I miss my family," he Montes said.

Montes, say his attorneys, has a cognitive disability from a brain injury.

USA Today first reported that Montes was in the border town of Calexico, California visiting his girlfriend on Feb. 17 when he was stopped and asked to show ID. Though he didn't have documentation with him, he told authorities he had DACA status. According to the NILC statement, Border Patrol took him to a local station, was asked to sign papers and then removed to Mexico. According to USA Today, Montes climbed the border fence into the U.S. and was questioned and sent back again to Mexico.

In a statement to NBC News, Customs and Border Patrol spokesperson Ralph A. Desio said, "Juan Manuel Montes Bojorquez was apprehended by the Calexico Station Border Patrol after illegally entering the U.S. by climbing over the fence in downtown Calexico. He was arrested by BP just minutes after he made his illegal entry and admitted under oath during the arrest interview that he had entered illegally."

CBP also said that Montes's DACA status "had expired in Aug. 2015 and he was notified at that time," though Montes's attorneys have shown copies of his work authorization card that showed his DACA status is valid through 2018.

CBP also stated Montes "has a conviction for theft for which he received probation." But court records showed a misdemeanor for shoplifting, according to his attorneys.

Montes has filed a freedom of information (FOIA) request with Customs and Border Protection asking for records surrounding his case.

Democrats are calling on the administration to provide answers over why Dreamers are being deported.

"Just last month Secretary Kelly promised me that no one with DACA would lose this protection unless they violated the terms of DACA. I intend to hold him to this commitment," stated Illinois Democratic congressman Dick Durbin.

Javier Gamboa, Hispanic media director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), said in a statement that "President Trump and every Republican in Congress who promised that no DREAMer would be targeted, let alone be deported, owns this grave moral failure."

Montes's case has rallied immigration advocacy groups around the country.

"It is beyond the pale that border patrol officers are left to make decisions that impact people's lives and future with absolute impunity," said Angélica Salas, from the California-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). "ICE must be reigned in and stopped from grossly violating people's constitutional rights."

Hincapié said that once they get more information from the government they will assess the next legal steps in Montes's case..

But she said the fact that he had to file a FOIA lawsuit "should trouble any American that care about freedom."

Hincapie says the important thing is to get Montes back to his family.

"He belongs home, California is home," she said.

Wary of the U.S. sabotaging its missile program, North Korea is hunting for internal spies.

Soldiers last week at the birthplace compound of Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder and grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, in Pyongyang, the…

WASHINGTON — When a North Korean missile test went awry on Sunday, blowing up seconds after liftoff, there were immediate suspicions that a United States program to sabotage the test flights had struck again. The odds seem highly likely: Eighty-eight percent of the launches of the North’s most threatening missiles have self-destructed since the covert American program was accelerated three years ago.

But even inside the United States Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, where the operation is centered, it is nearly impossible to tell if any individual launch is the victim of a new, innovative approach to foil North Korean missiles with cyber and electronic strikes.

Bad welding, bad parts, bad engineering and bad luck can all play a role in such failures — as it did in the United States’ own missile program, particularly in its early days. And it would require a near impossible degree of forensic investigation to figure out an exact cause, given that the failed North Korean missiles tend to explode, disintegrate in midair and plunge in fragments into faraway seas.

But this much is clear, experts say: The existence of the American program, and whatever it has contributed to North Korea’s remarkable string of troubles, appears to have shaken Pyongyang and led to an internal spyhunt as well as innovative ways to defeat a wide array of enemy cyberstrikes.

By all accounts, the program that President Barack Obama stepped up in 2014 has been adopted with enthusiasm by the Trump administration. President Trump’s national security aides are eagerly hoping that the Chinese, among others, will get North Korea to freeze or reverse its program. Yet they have no compunctions about using this new class of weapon against missile tests that the United Nations has already prohibited.

Speaking in Moscow last week, Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, was put on the defensive by a Russian reporter who challenged American complaints of interference in the American election, despite Washington’s cyber attacks against Iran’s nuclear program and North Korea’s missile program. “Cybertools to disrupt weapons programs — that’s another use of the tools, and I make a distinction between those two,” Mr. Tillerson argued back, without specifically confirming their use against Pyongyang.

Perhaps taken by surprise at the question, Mr. Tillerson never took the next step to voice the argument that some of his Trump administration colleagues make in private: that since the United Nations Security Council has banned North Korean missile tests, any effort to interfere with them would have some basis in international law.

“When you look at what is emanating out of North Korea,” Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security who now runs a cyberconsulting group in Washington, said Tuesday at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “I have sympathy for the argument that anything we can do to stop an unpredictable person from using nuclear weapons is worth trying.”

But the question for the United States’ intelligence agencies is whether this new tool is as effective as many have hoped. While billions of dollars have been poured into new offensive cyberweapons, touting a success in thwarting North Korea — whether it is real or imagined — can be turned into an argument for more.

Along the North Korean Border

It is a particularly difficult question in light of Sunday’s botched test, because it is still unclear exactly what missile was launched. By nature, missiles teeter on the brink of failure, and new designs are often accident prone. At their best, missiles are dense welters of pipes, engines, valves, pumps, volatile fuels, relays, explosive bolts, wires, sensors and circuit boards that suddenly emit blistering flames and roar skyward with such shattering violence that they often quickly hit the breaking point. Things can easily go wrong, and frequently do.

But even by those measures, the North Koreans are having a rough time, and it has gotten a lot rougher since the United States accelerated its sabotage program.

In the annals of rocketry, experts say, roughly 5 to 10 percent of developmental test flights go awry. That holds even for such high practitioners of the art as the billionaires Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, who are now racing to redefine the future of spaceflight. (By contrast, American commercial airline flights have a success rate of more than 99.9999 percent. And when crashes do occur, it can take investigators weeks, months or even years to identify the cause.)

But the sheer frequency of North Korean missile mishaps suggests that sabotage lies behind at least some of the recent failures.

So does the timing. Typically, countries encounter high failure rates when they start their rocket programs. As the programs mature, and engineers gain experience, spectacular failures decline and success tends to become a habit. In North Korea, the situation has been the exact reverse.

By and large, the North was a reliable maker of missiles in the 1980s, ’90s and into the 2000s. The government sold its missiles to Pakistan and Iran, among others.

Then came the effort to launch the Musudan, an intermediate-range missile that Pyongyang first displayed in a military parade in late 2010. It was 5 feet wide and 40 feet long — remarkably small compared with the North’s big rockets. But it represented an enormous threat. Carried on a truck, it could be hauled on country roads through forested regions or kept in tunnels, making it easy to hide and, as a target, difficult to find and destroy.

To date, the proven reach of the Musudan makes it the most threatening potential weapon in the North’s emerging arsenal of missiles that might loft nuclear warheads. It is seen as able to hit targets up to 2,200 miles away — far enough to strike the sprawling American base at Guam.

Last year, the North conducted eight flight tests. Only one succeeded, giving the missile an overall failure rate of 88 percent. It was after the last failure that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, was reported to have ordered an investigation into whether the United States was sabotaging his country’s test flights, searching for spies in his system.

Experts say that the best way to slow a program is to send a country scrambling for the causes of failures. “Disrupting their tests,” William J. Perry, defense secretary in the Clinton administration, said at a meeting this year in Washington, would be “a pretty effective way of stopping their ICBM program.”

But more recently, the effectiveness of the United States’ sabotage has grown increasingly uncertain. Some new North Korean missile designs, using solid fuels, have had a higher success rate. Moreover, the North Koreans, as sophisticated cyberoperators, have grown better at defense.

John Schilling, a technical expert on North Korea’s missile program, expressed skepticism on Tuesday about the efficacy of the foreign cyberattacks against Pyongyang’s missiles.

“We haven’t seen anything yet pointing to cyber specifically,” Dr. Schilling said on a conference call organized by 38 North, a think tank specializing in North Korea at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

An easier target of sabotage, Dr. Schilling added, would be the parts and supplies that North Korea imports to feed its factories that make the missiles.

Longtime North Korea watcher Martyn Williams, who runs a California-based blog called North Korea Tech, recently reported that the North’s scientists have developed a quantum encryption device that could completely secure communications systems from hackers, eavesdroppers and saboteurs.

The effort, Mr. Williams wrote this month, has the potential to “hamper the ability of foreign intelligence agencies to monitor and affect North Korean systems in real time.”

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Little girl lost: Officer guides crying child to family

In this April 11, 2017, image provided by Amy Amerell, Clearwater police officer Rich Edmonds holds the hand of a 6-year-old girl on Clearwater Beach, Fla. The girl w…

MIAMI — The lost little girl on the beach was wearing a T-shirt stamped with Disney's Frozen princesses.

She was crying.

But all was made right after a kind stranger comforted her and a police officer walked her back to her family.

A bystander's photo of the officer and child walking hand in hand drew widespread attention after it was posted on Facebook.

Clearwater police officers Rich Edmunds and Ryan Bianca had just started their shift Tuesday evening when the call came in: Child found on the beach.

Edmunds, who has two young children of his own, said his heart almost stopped as it always does he gets calls involving children.

Once at the beach, Edmunds found 6-year-old Hannah with a woman whose family had been enjoying the afternoon at the beach.

"She calmed the little girl down, gave her a juice box and called police," Edmunds recalled in an interview with The Associated Press on Friday.

Meanwhile, authorities learned that someone about a half-mile down the beach had approached lifeguards about a missing child. Bianca headed to the lifeguard station to meet the family. Edmunds planned to take Hannah to his patrol vehicle and drive her there.

"She was upset and didn't want to get in the vehicle," Edmunds said. "So I said, 'OK, let's walk."

As Edmunds took the child by the hand, yoga instructor Amy Amerell was walking behind them with her friend who was visiting. They immediately noticed the officer and the little girl and Amerell said she snapped a picture with her iPhone.

"I told my friend, this may not be appropriate, but I want to take a picture because it's such an example of kindness and goodness," Amerell recalled on Friday. "It was the juxtaposition of the big police officer and the tiny little girl."

Amerell posted the photo on her Facebook page, adding, "there's still beauty in the world."

The photo attracted so much attention that she sent it to the Clearwater Police Department.

"I wanted to share it with them because it was so beautiful," she said.

The police department shared the photo on its Facebook page Friday morning and by early afternoon it had been shared more than 80 times.

As they walked down the beach, Edmunds said he told Hannah she did the right thing by finding a family with children to ask for help. He said everyone needs to have a plan in case they get lost. For children, it's to approach someone with children, or an authority figure, such as a lifeguard on the beach.

Their walk ended at the lifeguard station, where Hannah's uncle was waiting for her.

Clearwater is on Florida's west coast, near Tampa.

Social media helps reunite ring lost years ago with owners

A viral post on social media helped reunite a ring lost years ago in an Oklahoma pond with its rightful owners.

Trisha O’Quinn posted photos of the ring on Facebook. She said she went fishing with her grandmother about eight to 10 years ago at a pond in Sayre, Oklahoma, and they met a couple who were frantically looking for her wedding ring.

O’Quinn said the ring flew off the woman’s finger when she cast her line and fell into the pond. The four of them looked for a long time, but they could not find it. O’Quinn said she took the couple’s contact information.

O’Quinn said the pond dried up about six months later and she decided to go look for the ring again and found it. She tried to contact the couple, but she said the contact information they gave her didn’t work.

O’Quinn said that when she recently came across the ring in her jewelry box, she decided to use social media to help find the owner.

The post has been shared more than 33,000 times since it was posted Tuesday afternoon. O'Quinn updated the post Thursday night, saying the owners of the ring have been found. The couple lives in Sayre as well and has been reunited with the ring.

Rare gold coin becomes a lifesaver for church looking to expand

The 1866 Double Eagle $20 dollar gold coin was provided by an anonymous woman.

CHICAGO -- A rare coin is helping change the future for an Indiana church.

The mystery person does not want the recognition for her good deed, but she did talk with CBS Chicago.

Piles of dirt and construction equipment will eventually be replaced by worship and song.  

The $3.5 million plans for GracePoint Church include an auditorium for more than 500, a kid’s center and a lobby.

Pastor Ben Lamb said his congregation was outgrowing the space at a nearby elementary school and they needed $300,000 to secure a building loan.

And then a kind of angel showed up.

A woman provided the money with a single coin: an 1866 Double Eagle $20 dollar gold coin, a one that was never in circulation.

The donor -- asked not to be identified by name -- said her late husband was an avid coin collector and bought it decades ago for $125,000. These days, at auction it could go for $300,000 or more.

The woman downplayed her gift.

“I have a roof over my head, I’ve got food in my mouth. I can get by just fine. I’m not looking for wealth. I’m just looking to be comfortable,” she said.

The coin goes up for auction April 27 in Schaumburg located in a suburb in northwestern Chicago.

Inclusion gym class leads to friendships, 'promposals'

Teacher Scott Richardson places a baseball bat in the hands of student Ragine Frazier, while Susana Guerro, center, and Nicole Connors, right, assist, at Bo Jackson's Elite…

This school year, instead of enrolling in regular old gym class, Erika Brann, a senior at Shepard High School in Palos Heights, Ill., applied to be a mentor in the school's Power Physical Education program.

She was interviewed and accepted and then paired with a junior, who is involved in the school's special education program.

The two not only work together through activities such as kickball, baseball and calisthenics, they spend the class time chatting and bonding the way teens are known to do.

"You work one on one with someone who is in one of the special programs in our school," Erika said.

Standing inside the Bo Jackson Elite Sports Dome in Lockport, Ill., where students enrolled in District 218's Power PE program spent the day recently, hitting the batting cages, obstacle courses and soccer fields for boisterous games of dodge ball, Erika explained why she wanted to be in the program at Shepard.

"I wanted the chance to connect with one of the students who doesn't really get the opportunity to really connect with gen-ed students. I felt making that connection was really important," she said. "People always like to define someone by their abilities."

But, she added, friendships are not based on abilities.

Since they began working together last fall, the two have become good friends, so good, in fact, that Erika recently asked him to prom.

She plans to wear red to the May 5 dance at Navy Pier.

Her date said he, too, "will get all dressed up."

The "promposal" was one of four that took place during Shepard's Special Olympics assembly March 10, Power PE teacher Ashley Lythberg said.

During the gathering, Erika held a larger-than-life head shot of the student and a poster that read, "It would be really, really great if you went to prom with me."

Relying on Starbursts and Skittles to persuade, other students "popped" the question in a similar manner during the event.

The invitations are evidence that the district's ongoing attempts to blur the divide between special-needs students and standard education kids is working, Lythberg said.

Dan Hennigan, who works with kids with autism at Shepard, said the mixed physical education class is "changing the lives of kids with disabilities and also the lives of kids without."

The program, he said, "proves inclusion works in the real world."

In addition, he said, "So many seniors now want to become special education teachers because of this program. They would never have had that exposure if it wasn't for this program."

Illinois District 218's two other schools, Richards in Oak Lawn and Eisenhower in Blue Island, also offer the class, which invites general education students to work with kids enrolled in any of the district's multi-needs, cognitive, and autism programs. Power PE, which began as a pilot two years ago at Shepard, now boasts 55 "mentors" and 43 "buddies," Hennigan said.

The initiative was started "because we want all our kids to be included," Hennigan said. "We want them to want to be together."

Under the watchful eye of mentor Grace Betz, Richards sophomore Trevor Thompson ran the obstacle course that culminated in "downing" a large bop bag.

At the end, the two reviewed a "high-five" routine they created.

"Hugs, hand shakes, fist bumps, and high-fives," Grace said. Trevor repeated the sequence, physically and verbally.

"All right," Grace said.

Hennigan, who also works part-time at the sports facility, said the company donates the space and time to the district _ an outing that, he said, would costs into the thousands if they had to pay.

As the students moved from baseball to kickball, many pausing to bounce a giant silver ball across a field, Hennigan said, traditionally, special-needs students "are in a self-contained setting. We wanted our kids to be around their peers, to be teenagers because they are teenagers. Some may look different on the outside but they want to be included, they want to be liked, they want to have friends."

The hard part, particularly with autism, he said, "is that some of our students lack the social skills to maybe start a conversation or meet a friend. This sets that up for them. Now, we're starting to see kids visiting each other after school. It's expanding more than we ever expected."

Kate Evoy also works in the Shepard autism program. She said Power PE is not unique to the district.

"We're seeing more of a push at high schools across the country to include students with special needs as much as possible," Evoy said. "I think electives in PE are a really good place to start. There are other districts that have similar programs. They're all kind of the same in the sense that they pair mentors with special-needs kids. The mentors get training, which helps them learn how to interact."

Lauren Sheehan, a special education teacher at Shepard, said the concept of unification is expanding to other programs, including athletics.

"This is the first time we did a unified sports team for Special Olympics," Sheehan said. "Unified means gen-ed and special-ed peers on the same team. Everyone plays. It's an initiative that Special Olympics started a few years ago."

This year, she said, Shepard also fielded a unified soccer team. "We had seven athletes in special-ed and six or seven gen-ed peers on the same team," she said.

"The point," she said, "is to take that inclusion mind frame that schools are trying to promote as much as possible and do that in athletics."

Ohio man turns in $14,000 found on side of road

WORTHINGTON, Ohio — An Ohio man says he was trying to set a good example for his children when he turned in $14,000 he found on the side of the road.

WBNS-TV reports (http://bit.ly/2oGSCeU ) Jake Bowers found the money on April 8 as he drove his family to a park in Worthington, a Columbus suburb.

Bowers said when he initially saw the bag on the roadside, he thought it might contain someone's laptop. Instead, it was filled with $100 bills.

Bowers took the bag to the Worthington police station, and it was returned to its owner.

A police report says the owner had taken the cash to a car dealer but left without buying a vehicle. He told police he must have left it on top of his car and driven off.