WND

Even in blue cities where leaders advocate for defunding police forces, residents still expect the cops to arrest people acting threateningly in a public place – especially if the suspect has a knife in his pants and tries to pepper-sprays law enforcement officers.

That’s why residents of Portland, Oregon, are concerned about city police recently getting into an hours-long standoff with a seemingly crazed man … and then deciding to leave the scene with the armed man still lurking in the area.

This scenario occurred Monday evening when a woman in a Northwest Portland neighborhood called 9-1-1 to report a suspicious character acting strangely.

After an hour and no police had responded, she called a friend to help her close her office and leave the neighborhood safely.

Later, officers from the Portland Police Bureau arrived on scene, according to a report by KPTV Fox 12.

Officers tried to take the suspect – brandishing a knife and attempting to pepper-spray them – into custody using a taser and by firing non-lethal rounds at the suspect. Neither of those options had any effects on the man, a police commander said in a report.

Commander Brian Hughes said, “In this case we had to weigh all the things going on, the potential to injure the suspect himself, the potential to injure officers, and what we deployed here was a third technique of de-escalation.”

Such de-escalation looked more like abandonment by many of the Portlanders who were patronizing shops and restaurants in the area.

After getting shot at, the suspect ran into a crowd of people dining outside. That is when officers switched to de-escalation tactics, reported the television station. A crisis negotiator was brought in to talk to the suspect for more than two hours.

“One of the key results was they were learning from the gentleman was that he was not a threat to the public. He had no intention of harming anyone in the area. As an organization you have to take in all those factors when we decide whether or not to use force,” Hughes said.

After the decision not to arrest the suspect and leaving the scene, police said Tuesday they’d try to make an arrest at a later time “without putting others in danger.”

“It was strange nothing really happened and they left and the guy hung out here for a while,” said Scott Rivera, proprietor of Scottie’s Pizza Parlor.

Added the woman who called 911, identified only as Michelle: “It’s a bit scary actually, because I physically saw he had weapons and I don’t know what his state of mind is. Yes, he could be going through something but I don’t feel safe and I don’t know why he was just left here by police.”

Watch the KPTV Fox 12 report:

For decades, the American public has been told the nation’s future depended on importing foreign “skilled workers.” They have been fed a narrative claiming their nation’s own citizens were somehow unqualified, uninterested or incapable of filling the very jobs that built their country. But this story was a fabrication, one carefully constructed by economic elites and facilitated by government policy. Behind the curtain stands a foreign government, executing what may be the most expansive and under-acknowledged labor infiltration in modern economic history.

This is not immigration. This is infiltration by policy. A silent economic war is being waged, not with bombs or bullets, but with resumes, fake credentials and weaponized visa loopholes. This is the story of how, through a deliberate national labor export policy, India systematically overtook America’s tech, engineering, defense and research sectors while displacing qualified American citizens in the process.

This is the Skilled Worker Hoax.

India’s national strategy to export human capital is neither accidental nor benign. It is embedded in the mission statements of Indian government institutions and backed by state-supported private enterprises. Subramaniam Ramadorai, then-chairman of India’s National Skill Development Agency, made the country’s objective clear: “To meet the aspirations of the youth and to realize our full potential we have to be ready with a skilled and talented human pool. To skill India is hence a national imperative.”

Yet the skills being marketed to the world are often more myth than merit. A 2011 release by the Confederation of Indian Industry, or CII, a non-governmental business and industry organization that plays a major role in promoting India’s global competitiveness, acknowledged that although 40% of the global population under age 25 lives in India, only 5% of its workforce was considered skilled. By contrast, 85% of the global labor force already had marketable skills. Rajendran Renganathan, a senior CII official, further conceded, “Vocational training is still not seen as the most respectable thing to do after XIIth standard. We need to create employable people, not just educated people.”

Despite these admissions, India aggressively promoted its under-skilled labor force as a global tech powerhouse. Programs like Skill India and Digital India were launched alongside efforts from the National Skill Development Corporation to flood foreign labor markets with Indian nationals. Indian outsourcing giants Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies, all closely aligned with the Indian state, embedded themselves deep within major U.S. corporations. These firms secured large-scale contracts while effectively taking control of IT systems, hiring pipelines and contract staffing channels.

Once inside, these companies began funneling candidates through falsified documentation, resume mills and diploma factories. Skill centers operating under the All India Council for Technical Education, or AICTE, mass-produced certificates. Coursework was routinely plagiarized from U.S. syllabi. Fake employment histories and staged references became the norm, all coordinated by body shops across India that have flourished under this scheme.

While India institutionalized a labor-export economy, U.S. regulators remained inert. The Department of Labor and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved applications en masse without meaningful scrutiny. American tech giants like Google, Meta, Amazon and Salesforce actively enabled the takeover. Many of these companies established formal partnerships with Indian firms or entered into Memoranda of Understanding with Indian government bodies. Salesforce, for instance, signed a formal MOU with AICTE, pledging to collaborate on skilling initiatives targeting Indian job seekers.

Department of Homeland Security records show that over 70% of all H-1B visas are awarded to Indian nationals, and Indian outsourcing firms remain among the top petitioners every year. These staffing channels are not merit-based. Hiring increasingly relies on internal referrals, caste-based exclusivity and visa dependency. American citizens, veterans and recent STEM graduates are routinely overlooked or excluded entirely.

The Program Electronic Review Management labor certification system, or PERM, which was intended to protect American workers, has been exploited at scale. Companies claim that “no qualified U.S. worker applied,” often while laying off American staff to make room for foreign visa workers. These actions are submitted under penalty of perjury, yet virtually no enforcement or consequence follows.

The role of the Confederation of Indian Industry and All India Council for Technical Education cannot be overstated. These quasi-governmental bodies have signed dozens of strategic agreements with U.S. universities, multinational companies and public institutions. Publicly framed as educational and innovation partnerships, these agreements serve as channels to embed Indian labor in critical infrastructure across the United States. One strategic plan from CII plainly states its mission “to make India the undisputed global leader in the matter of skills and talent” by embedding itself in foreign economies through commercial and policy partnerships.

Universities in the United States have also played a central role in enabling this scheme. Many American schools, eager for high-paying international tuition, now enroll tens of thousands of students from India, many of whom come from unaccredited or fraudulent institutions. These students take advantage of the Optional Practical Training, or OPT, and STEM OPT extensions, bypassing normal work visa caps and displacing American graduates in the process.

Despite claims by tech companies that there is a domestic STEM shortage, the evidence proves otherwise. The United States produces more STEM graduates than there are job openings available. Millions of American workers, including those with top security clearance and advanced degrees, have been locked out of jobs or quietly replaced by visa-dependent workers with fake qualifications, which is reflected in this Government of India’s Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation document.

The threat extends beyond economics. Today, sensitive national defense projects, healthcare systems, critical infrastructure and proprietary technologies are being accessed and maintained by foreign contractors, often based in offshore locations. Data is frequently transmitted across borders without sufficient security protocols. This opens the door to espionage, sabotage and blackmail. If the workers entrusted with protecting U.S. systems are themselves products of fraud, then the entire system is compromised.

This is how nations fall, not by conquest, but by quiet economic displacement.

There is still time to reverse course. Congress must move swiftly to suspend the H-1B visa program and terminate OPT and CPT loopholes. PERM labor certifications issued under false pretenses must be revoked. Fraudulent universities should be decertified. Internal audits must be conducted within U.S. hiring systems to identify and eliminate foreign interference and discriminatory recruitment practices. Most importantly, new laws must guarantee that American citizens are given first right to American jobs, without exception.

Americans must not be afraid to say this. The Indian government is not their friend. It is a foreign power pursuing its own interest. That interest is to replace the American workforce with its own, to capture U.S. industries, and to dominate the future of technology. India is not a passive trade partner. It is executing a deliberate economic strategy designed to displace American labor and dominate critical global sectors through manufactured human capital. Not for partnership, but for control.

This ongoing WND investigation will continue to peel back the layers of a global deception that reshaped America without Americans’ vote, voice or consent. Each report will reveal the players, pipelines and policies that handed over Americans’ future. For those who want to know who stole the American Dream, and how to get it back, stay tuned.

Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen (MD) flew all the way to El Salvador for a photo op in his fight to smuggle deported MS-13 gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the US.

“I just landed in San Salvador a little while ago, and I look forward to meeting with the team at the U.S. embassy to discuss the release of Mr. Abrego Garcia,” Van Hollen said.

“I also hope to meet with Salvadoran officials and with Kilmar himself. He was illegally abducted and needs to come home,” he added.

WATCH:

I just landed in San Salvador a little while ago, and I look forward to meeting with the team at the U.S. embassy to discuss the release of Mr. Abrego Garcia.

I also hope to meet with Salvadoran officials and with Kilmar himself. He was illegally abducted and needs to come home. pic.twitter.com/MzKe7U8Wwr

— Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) April 16, 2025

To be clear, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is now home in his native country of El Salvador and Van Hollen is trying to take him out of his home country and smuggle him over the US border.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an El Salvadoran national who was illegally residing in Maryland. In 2019, an immigration judge ordered Abrego Garcia, an alleged member of the dangerous MS-13 gang, removed from the US.

Abrego Garcia is currently being held at El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison.

Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador where he was soundly rejected by the country’s vice president.

What a joke.

Senator Van Hollen said his request to meet with El Salvador’s Vice President was denied.

WATCH:

NEW: Maryland Senator @ChrisVanHollen says his request made to the VP of El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia was denied.

The senator said he was told by the Vice President “you need to make earlier provisions to visit CECOT.”

Van Hollen says he wasn’t able to meet with… pic.twitter.com/FRBYuutcNY

— Ali Bradley (@AliBradleyTV) April 16, 2025

The US Supreme Court last Thursday ordered the US to facilitate the return of alleged MS-13 gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose deportation was previously blocked by a judge over his safety concerns. However, as The Gateway Pundit reported, Trump’s DOJ argued that “federal courts have no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” and that they cannot forcibly take the individual back or force El Salvador to return him.

Judge Paula Xinis an Obama appointee, slammed the Trump Administration during Friday’s hearing and demanded ‘daily updates’ on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts.

The judge said the Trump Admin has made “no meaningful effort to comply” with her order demanding the physical location and custodial status of Abrego Garcia.

Trump said he doesn’t need to ask El Salvador to do anything and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele made it clear on Monday that he was not going to smuggle a terrorist into the US.

This article originally appeared on The Gateway Pundit.com.

House Republicans have begun pushing a plan that would take guns and ammunition away from agents of the Internal Revenue Service.

Likely among the most feared agencies, those agents now have thousands of guns and tons of ammunition.

But a congressman has determined that, “The only thing IRS agents should be armed with are calculators.”

A Fox News report explains the plan, called the “Why Does the IRS Need Guns Act,” would disarm the agents and their agency.

It would prohibit the commissioner of the IRS from using funds to buy, receive or store firearms and ammunition, and require the bureau to transfer the arms it already has to the administrator of General Services.

From there, they would go to auctions or sales to licensed dealers, the report said.

And taxpayers actually would benefit from the income from those sales.

The plan comes from U.S. Rep. Barry Moore, R-Ala., who was blunt in his assessment: “The IRS has consistently been weaponized against American citizens, targeted religious organizations, journalists, gun owners, and everyday Americans.

“Arming these agents does not make the American public safer. My legislation, the Why Does the IRS Need Guns Act, would disarm these agents, auction off their guns to Federal Firearms License Owners, and sell their ammunition to the public. The only thing IRS agents should be armed with are calculators.”

Cosponsors included GOP Reps. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, Mary Miller of Illinois and Clay Higgins of Louisiana.

Moore explained, on social media on Tax Day this year, “Tax Day is a great reminder that it’s time for the IRS to stop wasting our taxpayer dollars stockpiling guns and ammo.”

CNN’s polling analyst, Harry Enten, has dispelled the notion some Democrats have put forth that a huge segment of Americans regret giving Donald Trump their vote in November.

WATCH:

The data is in and 98% of Trump supporters do NOT regret their votes from 2024.

CNN’s Harry Enten DEBUNKS the left’s talking points. pic.twitter.com/0ROcBhM5lR

— Thomas Hern (@ThomasMHern) April 16, 2025

The Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, has suspended almost half a million government credit cards in use by federal officials as of this week, Newsweek reports.

Like a parent canceling the ill-advised gift of a credit card to a teenager, DOGE chief Elon Musk has deactivated credit cards issued to employees of 30 federal agencies.

Since its inception, DOGE has recommended the firing of more than 200,000 federal workers, and 75,000 workers have accepted the Trump administration’s offer to voluntarily resign, notes the Newsweek report.

On Tuesday, DOGE wrote on X that it had deactivated about 470,000 credit cards in its crackdown on federal spending.

“Credit Card Update! The program to audit unused/unneeded credit cards has been expanded to 30 agencies. After 7 weeks, ~470k cards have been de-activated. As a reminder, at the start of the audit, there were ~4.6M active cards/accounts, so still more work to do,” the post said.

Musk added on X Wednesday: “Twice as many credit cards are issued and active than the total number of government employees! Crazy.”

Twice as many credit cards are issued and active than the total number of government employees! Crazy. https://t.co/6Zfr3fyHM8

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 16, 2025

One of the most damaging attacks on Americans’ constitutional rights in recent years actually came from the government itself, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he’s working on President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to “close the book” on the “weaponization” of the bureaucracy’s agenda to “silence, censor, and suppress the free speech of ordinary Americans.”

He’s doing that by eliminating organizations like the Global Engagement Center, a key player that once had a huge role in the censorship industrial complex.

In a commentary posted at the Federalist, he explains:

“Over the past half-decade, bodies like GEC, crafted by our own governing ruling class, nearly destroyed America’s long free speech history. The enemies of speech had new lingo to justify their authoritarian impulse. It was ‘disinformation,’ allegedly pushed by nefarious foreign governments, that was the No. 1 threat to ‘our democracy.’ To protect ‘our democracy,’ this ‘disinformation’ had to be identified and stamped out”

He then explained that GEC got its start in 2011 as the Center for Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications, responsible for advising the government on how to counter narratives from terrorists such as al-Qaida.

Then it strayed, he said.

“In early 2016, the Obama administration renamed CSCC the ‘Global Engagement Center,’ stripping away the explicit focus on international terrorism. Then, after Donald Trump’s historic victory in 2016 but before he took office, GEC’s mission was expanded to cover any and all ‘foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.’”

That was a deliberate move, he charged.

“Obama’s man in charge at GEC, Rick Stengel, touted his efforts to protect ‘democracy’ while redefining it so that ‘democracy’ came to mean silencing the part of the electorate he doesn’t like. In 2019, Stengel directly equated President Trump’s campaign with foreign and terrorist propaganda, writing, ‘Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS.’ That same year, Stengel wrote an entire article about ‘why America needs a hate speech law,’” Rubio charged.

America has paid a price for the leftist ideology.

That agenda created “the hoax that Russian interference, misinformation, and ‘meddling’ is what caused President Trump’s victory in 2016, rather than a winning political message that only he was offering.”

He added, “In 2020, a coronavirus from a Chinese lab swept the globe, and GEC popped up with a report warning that a ‘Russian disinformation apparatus’ was behind public speculation that the virus was an ‘engineered bioweapon’ or that it existed due to ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute.’ GEC tarred not only specific claims as foreign propaganda but also specific users. It created lists of thousands of accounts that were accused of being foreign propaganda vectors simply for sharing articles or even following certain accounts. These lists were sent to social media companies for ‘review,’ but nobody was fooled — the purpose of this was to pressure private companies in the direction of more censorship and less free speech.”

Further, “GEC was an enthusiastic participant in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), an infamous group established under constitutionally questionable conditions to monitor ‘disinformation’ about the 2020 election. The EIP pretty much exclusively singled out accounts and narratives associated with President Trump and his supporters and, in fact, directly flagged President Trump’s tweets, along with his family members and friends of the administration,” he said.

GEC even, “when it wasn’t directly nagging social media companies to censor more, the GEC paid private actors to do it for them. With its multimillion-dollar budget, paid for by American taxpayers, GEC funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting ‘disinformation.’”

The former Florida senator confirmed he chose to publish his piece in the Federalist, because one group funded by taxpayers, the British Global Disinformation Index, “once produced a list of the top 10 ‘riskiest online news outlets’ in a direct bid to drive off their ad revenue and put them out of business. Every one of those 10 sites was on the political right, and The Federalist was among them.”

He cited another group getting State Department dollars, NewsGuard, “a company that rates the reliability of various websites, once again for the purposes of driving traffic and ad revenue away from those rated poorly.”

“NewsGuard claims to be nonpartisan — but its board of advisers has included one Rick Stengel, the very man who built the Global Engagement Center, who says Donald Trump uses ISIS propaganda tactics, and who believes that propagandizing the American people is a good thing.”

He said the Trump administration rejects propaganda, and the belief that information Americans get must be censored.

“The American people don’t need an obscure agency to ‘protect’ them from lies by pressuring X to ban users or trying to put The Federalist out of business.”

He explained one of his projects has been to “liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center.”

It was “supposed to be dead already,” he noted. But when Republicans in Congress ordered the end of its funding last year, “Biden State Department simply slapped on a new name. The GEC became the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI) office, with the same roster of employees. With this new name, they hoped to survive the transition to the new administration.”

Not so, he said. “Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return.”

Perhaps sourcing some straightforward talk from his years growing up in the Appalachia, Vice President JD Vance Wednesday unloaded on an X user for her characterization of Trump supporters.

Jesse Singal had posted: “Joining the Trump bandwagon means you either need to be dumb or pretend to be dumb. JD Vance might have mortgaged his morality and his legacy, but he’s not dumb. He doesn’t actually think anyone’s proposing 20 million [deportation] trials. Rather, he knows he has very, very dumb supporters.”

The post was part of a thread critical of President Trump’s effort to deport millions of illegal aliens and the deportation of Salvadoran Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

“I hate this smug, self-assured bullsh**,” responded Vance, referring to the notion of: “I know I’m right, and people must be dumb or immoral to disagree with me.”

“It’s an easy way to go through life, because then you never have to think seriously about why your worldview is a justification for the mass invasion of the country my ancestors built with their bare hands.”

A federal judge is threatening President Donald Trump and his administration with criminal contempt charges for removing illegal aliens, those who also were described as members of violent criminal gangs, from America.

The judge had ordered several jetliners carrying the deportees, apparently already in flight, to turn around and bring the criminals back to America, and the administration didn’t, as it explained the flights already were in international airspace and the judge had no authority for his order.

Now the judge, James Boasberg, who is well known for his open antagonism for the president, has unleashed his ire.

#BREAKING: Activist Judge Boasberg has “found cause” to hold Trump officials in CRIMINAL CONTEMPT for not “turning around the planes” carrying illegal deportees

He says they can clear the contempt by RETURNING illegal gang members to the United States

LMAO! NOT HAPPENING! pic.twitter.com/fDUWVZR1ik

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) April 16, 2025

He claims to have decided there was “cause” to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt for refusing to follow his political ideology.

Boasberg now alleges the administration can “clear” the contempt by following his latest strategy to accommodate illegals, likely members of criminal gangs.

The judge said, “Given the finding of probable cause for contempt set forth in the accompanying memorandum opinion, the court orders that; {1) if defendants opt to purge their contempt, they shall file by April 23, 2025, a declaration explaining the steps they have taken and will take to do so, and (2) if defendants opt not to purge their contempt, they shall instead file by April 23, 2025, declaration{s} identifying the individual{s} who, with knowledge of the court’s classwide temporary restraining order, made the decision not to halt the transfer of class members out of U.S. custody on March 15 and 16, 2025.”

The demand for “steps” suggests that the judge is insisting the criminals be brought back to the United States, a move that the president of El Salvador where they now are imprisoned has said, in another similar high-profile case, won’t happen.

The judge, in his opinion, said he had decided that the administration’s actions were a “willful disregard” for the court.

Of course, the judge has no resources to enforce his “contempt” campaign.

Fox News reported, “The Justice Department could then request that the contempt be prosecuted by an attorney for the government and, should they decline to prosecute the matter, could ‘appoint another attorney to prosecute the contempt.’”

Watch the latest video at foxnews.com