NATO Baltic Air Policing jets shoot down drone over Latvia
Fighter jets operating under NATO’s Baltic Air Policing mission shot down a “foreign drone” in Latvian airspace on Friday, according to the country’s military.
In a statement, the Latvian armed forces said the drone had entered Latvia “as a result of Russian electromagnetic warfare” and that it was intercepted over the Balvi region in the east of the country.
The military has deployed additional air defence units to Latvia’s eastern borders and will continue to monitor its airspace, it said.
“As long as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine continues, a recurrence of cases where foreign drones enter or approach Latvian airspace is possible,” the military added in its statement.
Further airspace threats were identified in the municipalities of Augšdaugava, Preiļi, Rēzekne, Balvi, and Alūksne, but these have since ended.
The latest interception follows mounting drone incursions into NATO airspace along the alliance’s eastern flank, which remains particularly vulnerable to security challenges arising from Russia’s war in Ukraine, which began after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.
In July, Romanian fighter jets shot down three drones over just three days amid a surge in drone-related incidents in the country. The Romanian Prosecutor General’s Office determined that at least one of the intercepted drones was of the Shahed-type used by Russian forces in its war against Ukraine, officials have said.
Romanian military divers also destroyed two Gerbera-type drones in the Black Sea on Tuesday, close to the Neptun Deep gas project.
“To ensure the safety of the shipping lane and the work being carried out around the platform, the decision was taken to carry out a controlled destruction by detonation,” Romanian Defence Minister Radu Miruță said at the time.
In June, a Ukrainian sea drone exploded in the Romanian port of Constanta after the Ukrainian military said it had veered off course as a result of Russian electronic warfare interference.
Another drone exploded close to a compressor station of the Trans-Balkan gas pipeline in Bulgaria last week.
NATO allies gathered on Wednesday to discuss the recent drone incursions and incidents, signalling their “full solidarity with and support for the affected Allies.”
“Allies reiterated that Russia bears full responsibility for the airspace violations, which are dangerous and unacceptable, and demonstrate Russia’s increasing tolerance for risk,” NATO said in a statement, adding that it “stands ready to deter and defend against any aggression.”
NATO’s Baltic Air Policing mission sees allies deploy in four-month rotations to air bases at Šiauliai in Lithuania and Ämari in Estonia, where they can be called into action by the NATO Combined Air Operations Centre in Uedem, Germany.
Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, as host nations, provide air command and control infrastructure and personnel for the mission, which was initially launched in 2004 and was expanded in 2014 following Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.
Pentagon funded a $533 million artillery plant that made nothing
This article was originally published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer-prizewinning investigative newsroom.
A robot was on fire. Again.
It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine.
The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week.
Only weeks earlier, defense officials and executives had touted the factory’s innovative new machinery, imported from Turkey, at a gala opening ceremony. But employees were already used to spectacular mishaps, fiery and otherwise. “After the second, third, fourth time, it just became almost normal,” one former worker said. “It got to the point where I was not surprised by anything that happened there.”
Instead of producing shells in an efficient and streamlined fashion, the pricey machines kept failing in bizarre ways. The robot arms would swing out of control, smashing into carefully calibrated equipment, and sometimes they would unexpectedly drop hunks of steel five feet down to the floor.
The factory’s signature device, meant to precisely stretch the steel for the artillery shells, instead often cracked it beyond repair. Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell.
“We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.” To workers, even the factory buildings themselves came to feel doomed, with acrid smoke hanging in 100-degree heat over foundations seemingly sinking into the earth.
The situation never improved. The US Army, which funded the factory, ordered work halted on two of its three production lines in August 2025. By then, General Dynamics had blown eight deadlines. Work on the third production line continued, but the facility never produced a single usable shell, according to a report issued by the Department of Defense’s inspector general in July.
The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor — which provided the factory’s much-hyped but little-proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.
Just the opposite: General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest defense companies, has been showered with new contracts, continuing its track record as one of the greatest beneficiaries of Pentagon spending. The company is still in charge of the factory. It recently announced that it will fix things there by bringing in another much-hyped but little-proven technology.
“It’s an absolute disaster,” said one former official in an Army office supervising the project. “The Army should’ve gone after recovering money from General Dynamics,” added the official, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Publicly, the Army has been tight-lipped about what, exactly, went wrong at the factory, located in a sprawling suburb called Mesquite. The inspector general report described the failure but offered few specifics. It didn’t name the companies involved, much less any of the individuals responsible.
The report’s recommendations were tepid: The Army should determine whether the contract was “appropriately issued,” how “the money was spent” and whether it can recoup any of it. It should also “identify and implement a solution” for producing more artillery. Army officials deflected blame, telling the inspector general that they didn’t do anything wrong.
In a detailed statement to ProPublica, the Army said it will recover funding for the project by getting unspecified discounts from General Dynamics on production orders. “The Army is exercising rigorous oversight to ensure every dollar invested delivers capability to the warfighter,” the statement read. “Where vendors fail to meet contract specifications, as seen at the Mesquite facility, we are evaluating contract performance, seeking recoupment of funds and pivoting resources.”
As for General Dynamics, it has given no public explanation whatsoever. The company has said that it “met or exceeded requirements,” according to the inspector general report. General Dynamics declined an interview request from ProPublica. Company spokesperson Jeff Davis said ProPublica’s reporting “fundamentally mischaracterizes the circumstances and falsely impugns our record of employee safety and truthfulness with our customer.” He continued: “An article based on this foundation would be a materially false and misleading hit piece.” Davis did not respond to ProPublica’s request that he specify the alleged errors.
ProPublica reconstructed how the project went awry through interviews with 36 current and former employees of General Dynamics, the Army, the Pentagon and the White House. ProPublica also reviewed internal company documents as well as photographs and videos taken inside the factory.
Those involved described a project that was rushed and ill considered from the start. Congress paved the way, removing government contracting guardrails — meant to ensure taxpayer money isn’t wasted — so that Ukraine-related defense projects could be funded quickly. The Army took advantage, handing General Dynamics lucrative no-bid awards without knowing whether the machines it planned to use could perform the desired work. The Army’s due diligence was inadequate, four former Army and General Dynamics officials told ProPublica.
Compared with the multibillion-dollar budgets of other DOD projects, the financial cost of the Texas debacle is small. But the lack of consequences for the companies involved, in the view of defense-spending critics, is symptomatic of a larger problem: a deep-rooted culture at the Pentagon and in Congress in which expensive failures lead only to more spending. Such critics fear that extreme cases like this one could become more common if the Trump administration succeeds in boosting the defense budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. The administration is also seeking tens of billions of dollars for its war against Iran and pressuring defense companies to quickly ramp up weapons production.
“Too often the contractors have no accountability for their mistakes,” defense budget researcher William Hartung said. The Texas failure, he said, “is a foreshadow of what’s to come if the Trump administration gets the budget it asked for.”
The pitch
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 felt like an emergency to the Biden administration. For General Dynamics, it was an opportunity. And Firat Gezen was ready with a pitch.
In six years running General Dynamics’ Ordnance and Tactical Systems business, Gezen had earned a reputation as a deft strategist and salesman. At 50, he wasn’t an engineer, and he had no experience running factories. He had spent decades working on the financial side of the weapons business. With a ready smile and a delivery as smooth as his perfectly bald head, he knew how to woo corporate leaders and Pentagon arms buyers alike.
Gezen was also shrewd. In 2020, after the Army sought to diversify its artillery supplier base by contracting with a small Pennsylvania company, Gezen swooped in and bought that company. That allowed General Dynamics to maintain its stranglehold over the production of metal bodies for the standard American artillery shell, referred to by its caliber: 155 mm. “Firat throws his arm around you and talks to you nicely,” one former Army official said. “But he’s got, like, five things that he’s the sole provider of, and it’s exclusive. He’s got you locked up forever.”
Firat Gezen, former president of General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems. Photo: UA Army
That put General Dynamics in an ideal position. Russia and Ukraine were firing thousands of shells back and forth each day. The United States was a key supplier to Ukraine, but decades of disinvestment had left the US artillery industry emaciated. In March 2022, Congress passed the first in a series of bills allocating billions of dollars for Ukraine-related causes, including boosting artillery production. The next month, President Joe Biden pledged to send shells to Ukraine, and he wanted to move fast. But first someone had to make them.
The 155 mm shell has been a military workhorse for a century, owing to its simple, lethal power. Packed with TNT, the 33-inch cylinder can travel 10 miles when shot out of the barrel of a howitzer and send fragments flying hundreds of feet upon impact. But decades of asymmetric warfare in the Middle East, in which the United States relied largely on drones and bombs, had led some to believe the days of artillery battles were waning. By 2022, General Dynamics was the only producer of 155 mm metal shell bodies in the country, mainly in a century-old facility in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Given that, the company was an obvious candidate to meet the sudden new demand. General Dynamics could simply replicate Scranton’s traditional manufacturing method, which dated back to the time of the Korean War. But in meetings with Pentagon officials in the fall of 2022, Gezen proposed an alternative: What if the Army funded a state-of-the-art production line that used a promising new technique?
Central to this proposal was a virtual unknown in the world of American defense: Repkon. The company had been operating in its home country of Turkey for decades, providing “turnkey production facilities in the metal forming industry.” (Coincidentally, Gezen himself was born to Turkish parents in the United States.)
But Repkon had never received a Pentagon contract, and certainly not for its signature metalworking process called “flow-forming.” Whereas the Scranton method mainly involves molding ultrahot steel in giant forging presses, Repkon added a step in which a fast-spinning machine squeezes and rolls out the metal like clay on a potter’s wheel.
The advantage, Gezen told defense officials, is that the same equipment could produce shells of various calibers. Most important, Repkon had a production line already available, meaning General Dynamics could start making shells faster than if it had to procure traditional equipment piece by piece.
Warning signs abounded. Army officials learned that the production line that Repkon wanted to sell had been designed to produce an older, simpler model of 155 mm shells, which was made with different steel.
It wasn’t clear that the Turkish equipment could even work with the steel used to make the newer 155 mm model, as the equipment had never actually produced it, according to four former General Dynamics and Army officials. Repkon said other countries were using the machines to produce the older model. But the Army and General Dynamics could not inspect those active production lines, Repkon told them, citing customer privacy.
The Army could have balked at all of this and insisted on learning more about the capacity of the Repkon machines to perform the desired work. But learning more would’ve taken time, and time seemed in short supply. “There was incredible pressure to go fast,” a former Army official said. Everybody moved forward.
In November 2022, the Army raced to give General Dynamics the first in a series of contract awards for the project that would ultimately be worth nearly $600 million if carried to completion. The next month, Congress granted the DOD extraordinary powers to award money for Ukraine-related causes without the usual contracting safeguards, dropping competitive bidding requirements and restrictions on so-called undefinitized contracting actions. UCAs allow a company to begin work even before finalizing the terms of its contract with the government. One defense executive compared them to “building the airplane as you’re flying it.”
The Army made the most of its expanded powers, awarding General Dynamics a number of UCAs without considering alternate proposals in a competitive bidding process. (The Army told ProPublica it selected the company because of its unique artillery production experience.)
In fact, the Army was so enamored with the proposal that it decided to order even more than Gezen had pitched. Instead of contracting for one Repkon production line, the Army signed up to buy three – without knowing whether any of them would work.
Gezen had never overseen a project this ambitious. Until then, he had mainly presided over smaller expansions of existing factories that used traditional methods.But he was optimistic it would work.“He’s extremely aggressive, willing to take risks,” one former colleague said.
Some of the Army’s scrutiny of the proposal occurred only after it began awarding contracts for it. The service and General Dynamics sent staffers to Turkey to inspect Repkon’s machinery, but they never inspected a full production line in action and there weren’t enough experts who could spot potential defects in the equipment, four former General Dynamics and Army officials said.
Crucially, before greenlighting the deal, the Army did not require General Dynamics to demonstrate that it could use the Repkon equipment to complete the entire production process and make shells that met the Army’s specifications. (The Army told ProPublica that “formal testing could not occur prior to full machinery installation.”)
If the typical contracting safeguards had been in place, perhaps everything that followed could have been prevented. If the Pentagon had been forced to open the project to competitive bidding, it would have had to consider other proposals in a painstaking review process. If restrictions on UCAs had been in effect, the Pentagon would have had to slow down and finalize the terms of the deal before allowing it to proceed, which might have surfaced its fatal flaws.
But one man’s due diligence is another man’s red tape. Soon, Repkon’s flow-forming machines were sailing across the Atlantic, heading eventually for Mesquite.
‘This is actually Hell’
On May 29, 2024, the mood in Mesquite was triumphant. After two short years of planning, the factory was opening, and defense officials and executives gathered there to celebrate.
“Our nation’s defense relies not only on our soldiers and other servicemembers in uniform but on production facilities like this one,” then-Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told seated dignitaries. She stood at a podium branded with the General Dynamics logo, with two howitzers posed behind her. She thanked the company’s CEO, Phebe Novakovic, and Gezen by name. “It’s a pleasure to highlight the fantastic work you all have done,” she said.
But everything was not as fantastic as it appeared. Artillery shells displayed around the plant that day had been shipped in from elsewhere, three former workers told ProPublica. A worker picked one up and was startled to discover it was fake — seemingly made of plastic. General Dynamics had already failed to perform a scheduled first article test, meant to demonstrate the facility could produce shells that met the Army’s specifications. The facility was supposed to start cranking out shells soon, but machines were barely functioning.
Soon problems seemed to explode out of every corner, according to interviews with 12 former factory workers. For one thing, the flaming robot arms also kept smashing into things. They slammed into computer numerical control machines, breaking their windows and bending their doors. They knocked over shells. They bashed into safety fences. Workers talked about the arms going “rogue” and began calling one of them “Johnny 5” after a sentient military robot from a 1980s movie.
Soon problems seemed to explode out of every corner, according to interviews with 12 former factory workers. For one thing, the flaming robot arms also kept smashing into things. They slammed into computer numerical control machines, breaking their windows and bending their doors. They knocked over shells. They bashed into safety fences. Workers talked about the arms going ‘rogue’ and began calling one of them ‘Johnny 5‘ after a sentient military robot from a 1980s movie.
Even simple equipment failed with slapstick regularity, six workers said. Conveyor belts broke down. Automated carts got lost. Safety gates meant to shut down machines when workers approached did not shut down machines when workers approached. A pipe exploded, spraying water up to the ceiling. Parts on Repkon machines deformed, leading a worker to discover that they were made with Chinese steel, possibly in violation of federal regulations. (The Army said it has no evidence of such violations.)
Smoke hung in the air; it rolled off the press machines when robots sprayed them with lubricant. Workers could feel the smoke in their lungs. When they blew their noses after shifts, their mucus was black. A worker complained to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about a “respirable hazard” at the factory, according to an OSHA record and spokesperson. The agency opened an investigation in October 2024, and an inspector visited the facility.
The smoke-spewing press machines were scheduled to be operating on the day of the visit, but for some reason they weren’t running during the inspection, according to four former workers. OSHA issued no penalties, the agency told ProPublica. Staffers started to think it wasn’t just Repkon’s faulty equipment to blame for problems at the factory — it was General Dynamics management, too.
The plant could reach Sahara Desert temperatures when the furnaces or presses were on. “This is actually hell,”one worker thought to himself. It was hotter still inside cabinets containing drives that controlled critical machines, where it was regularly 140 degrees Fahrenheit, two former workers told ProPublica. An outside inspector warned in an email reviewed by ProPublica that, at that temperature, “you would not only have drives failing but also human lives failing.”
Every day seemed to bring more of the same: another machine broken, another frantic effort to repair it, another batch of misshapen shells tossed into the discard pile. As 2024 became 2025, little seemed to get better.
With so few shells passing inspection stations along the production line, many workers had nothing to do. A cat-and-mouse game ensued. Bored staffers spent endless hours gazing at their phones, leading supervisors to restrict phone use. So workers began bringing crossword books. Managers nixed those. Some workers were seen sleeping, so supervisors took away chairs.
“We sat around twiddling our thumbs, trying to find work, trying to figure out what was going on,” said Natashia Passmore, a former production technician in the plant. “It was a waste of government money, and it was a waste of our time.”
The dumpster fire
Tension rose between the Americans hired by General Dynamics and Turkish workers sent over by Repkon. The Repkon team was there to install the equipment, but it seemed equally flummoxed by the problems. General Dynamics workers found them evasive. They would give curt responses to questions in English but then be seen holding long, animated conversations in Turkish outside during frequent smoking breaks. A carelessly discarded cigarette butt sparked a real-life dumpster fire, three former workers said.
Repkon was especially secretive about the flow-forming machines, refusing to answer most questions about their operations. General Dynamics workers could tell when Repkon was testing one of them, because they would find metal shards scattered on the floor around it later. The shards looked like alligator teeth. “Oh, the tooth fairy was here,” one worker would think to himself.
Paranoia set in. Repkon refused to share passwords needed to control important equipment, according to five former General Dynamics employees. Sometimes workers would be startled by the sight of a machine moving by itself and realize it was being controlled by someone in Turkey. Spooked, General Dynamics workers tore out hardware to cut off remote access to the machines, two former workers said.
Rumors swirled among the Americans that the Turks were purposefully sabotaging machinery — or perhaps even engaged in some convoluted form of espionage. “It was astonishing how little progress we would make, month after month, year after year,” one former General Dynamics worker said. “People started speculating, ‘I wonder if they’re spying on us.’” General Dynamics assigned someone to shadow the Repkon workers in the factory, two former staffers said. (The Army said it has no evidence of sabotage or spying.)
Even the buildings themselves — a trio of vast, anonymous boxes tucked into the crook of two freeways — were plagued with problems. Walls cracked, and daylight became visible around window frames. Doors began dragging on concrete floors. When it rained, water would flood in — “like a tsunami,” one former worker said. The foundations appeared to be shifting or sinking, six former employees said. It was as if the whole dysfunctional factory — its fires and smoke, its idle workers and haywire machines — was being slowly sucked down into the earth.
Faced with the kaleidoscopic array of problems, the response from General Dynamics managers always seemed to be to plow forward. “Every single time they opened their mouths, it was: ‘We need to get into production,’” one former worker said. “Production is the only thing that mattered.”
“Nobody wins”
As the situation at the factory deteriorated, General Dynamics and the Army told a very different story to the public.
In April 2024, General Dynamics CEO Novakovic told investors: “In the US, we are rapidly increasing ammunition production with the opening of our Texas facility.” General Dynamics failed to conduct a scheduled first article test in Mesquite that same month.
That July, two months after the opening ceremony, Novakovic told investors that “the first line is running and producing as we anticipated.” In fact, the first line was not producing any usable shells, six former plant workers told ProPublica.
In September Doug Bush, then the Army’s acquisition czar and a key figure overseeing the project, said “there have been no major delays” to the Army’s goal of producing 100,000 artillery shells each month — a goal for which the Mesquite factory was critical. “Any delays you’ve had have been measured in, I would call them weeks, not months, certainly not years,” Bush told reporters. He downplayed the problems, describing them as merely a matter of adjusting a machine “so that it puts out shells just so, versus a little bit off.”
The next day, a laborer in Mesquite photographed the work of a machine meant to begin giving the shells perfectly smooth noses; it had instead mangled the metal into something that resembled the swirl of soft-serve ice cream.
A machine at the factory sometimes mangled artillery shells, meant to be perfectly smooth, into swirls that looked like soft serve ice cream. Photo: obtained by ProPublica
Also in September, Secretary Wormuth touted the Army’s artillery ramp-up at a conference, saying, “part of what’s enabling that are things like the brand-new plant that we opened up in Mesquite.” One month later, an Army contracting officer sent General Dynamics a letter of concern about its performance at the facility. The company missed the Army’s deadline for completing the first production line one month after that. (Wormuth declined to comment.)
Despite it all, Gezen remained optimistic through the fall of 2024. The issues in Mesquite were mere delays, he thought, and there were plans in place to fix them, according to a person familiar with his thinking. “If Firat’s guilty of something, it’s not wanting to see the truth in the matter,” a former colleague said. He “has a tendency to not want to listen to bad news.”
General Dynamics announced Gezen’s retirement in January 2025. Some industry insiders believe he was pushed out in part over Mesquite. (Gezen denied that but declined to sit for an on-the-record interview.)
The split screen of blown deadlines and rosy public comments continued into the second administration of President Donald Trump. In April 2025, General Dynamics missed the completion date for the second production line. That same month, Novakovic told investors, once again: “We are rapidly increasing munitions capacity and production with the opening of our projectile facility in Texas.” The company missed another first article test two months later.
As the failures mounted, a sinking feeling took hold in Army offices. The service assembled a team to assess the situation in the factory, which produced a report that gave little confidence the problems could be fixed. Finally, in June 2025, the Army told General Dynamics it was considering terminating the contract awards for the plant, a defense trade publication reported at the time. Two months later, the service ordered work halted on two of the factory’s three production lines.
But the Army did not unilaterally terminate the contract awards. “A termination for default would’ve taken years through the legal system, because General Dynamics wasn’t going to accept that,” a former Army official told ProPublica. “Nobody wins except the lawyers.”
This would not be the last act of generosity from the Trump administration to General Dynamics. In December 2025, according to the inspector general’s report, the government paid the company $26.3 million in “progress payments” for the second and third production lines in Mesquite, although neither line had ever produced a usable shell.
A novel solution
Two months ago, General Dynamics made an announcement that conjured a sense of déjà vu. To fix the problems at the factory, the company would team up with yet another unheard-of partner promising technological innovation. The solution this time? Artificial intelligence.
A news release from General Dynamics and the new company, Deterrence, was filled with techno-business jargon. “AI-enabled capabilities” and “intelligence and connectivity” would be added at Mesquite and other General Dynamics factories, the companies wrote. “AI transforms production facilities into strategic assets,” Deterrence’s CEO said in the release. “We’re building autonomous manufacturing systems that learn, adapt, and scale in real time.”
These pronouncements have baffled former Mesquite workers. “What are they talking about? There’s nothing to learn or adapt or scale,” one said. “It’s all broken.”
General Dynamics is doing this even as it replaces most of the Repkon equipment with traditional machines like those used in Scranton. How AI will wrest miracles from decades-old technology is unclear. But General Dynamics told investors it expects to be in production next year, and the Army told the inspector general that’ll amount to 20,000 shells a month.
Compared with Repkon, Deterrence is perhaps an even less conventional choice. Deterrence was established just three years ago and has never received a DOD contract. Its website gives no indication it has ever helped to manufacture anything. Its three founders have no prior defense experience. One of them worked at Tesla; the other two created a startup that enabled people to lock and unlock buildings with smartphones. Deterrence did not respond to a request for comment.
General Dynamics also pledged to put $200 million into the project. That’s a small sum for a company that generated more than $50 billion in revenue last year and gave CEO Novakovic a compensation package worth more than $25 million. (Meanwhile, the company furloughed or laid off most of the Mesquite workers.)
The Army says it won’t spend any more money on the project, but it has hardly blackballed General Dynamics. Since the Army shut down work on two production lines in Mesquite one year ago, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems has received contract awards totaling $2.5 billion, the Army told ProPublica. (The service said this was for “distinct production lines and critical national defense requirements” unrelated to Mesquite.)
Repkon’s American offshoot is now at work setting up a TNT factory after receiving a no-bid contract from the Army worth $435 million. TNT is the primary explosive fill in 155 mm shells. Repkon Turkey’s CEO co-founded the American company, which was originally named Repkon USA. In March, it changed its name to Paligen Technologies. Some interpreted this as an effort to create distance from the Mesquite disaster. Paligen told ProPublica that it and Repkon are “different and wholly separate companies.” Repkon Turkey did not respond to requests for comment.
The one thing that key decision-makers appear to agree on is that they are absolutely not to blame. Gezen, the former General Dynamics executive, told ProPublica that the company and the Army did nothing wrong. In a brief conversation at his apartment door in a ritzy section of Washington, D.C., in May, Gezen maintained his sunny optimism. The Repkon equipment was a good option, and it may still be a good option, he said, holding an iced coffee in one hand and restraining a large dog with his other. In any case, he added, “it was the fastest option available.”
Bush, the Army’s former acquisition chief who had assured reporters there were “no major delays” to increasing artillery production, also declined to be interviewed. In a terse conversation in May, peering out from his half-closed front door in Northern Virginia, he told ProPublica: “All of this was done through appropriate procedures.”
Others who were involved, speaking on the condition of anonymity, engaged in mutual finger-pointing: The White House demanded too much too fast, Repkon and General Dynamics overpromised, the Army didn’t perform due diligence and Congress underwrote the whole thing.
The United States still is not close to producing the promised 100,000 shells per month, a former Army official told ProPublica in June,although otherinvestments to increase 155 mm production have turned out better. Ukraine still needs those shells, the official said, but attention has once again shifted. In the Middle East, it’s other munitions that the Trump administration has rapidly burned through during its war with Iran. Trump officials are now calling for ramping up production in those areas — and fast.
“Conventional ammo is back on the back burner,” the official said. “Everything now is about interceptors, missiles.”
Judge gives Google one week to fix “anticompetitive” app store download in Google Play
Google began offering third-party app store downloads in the Play Store earlier this week, but US District Judge James Donato says the company isn’t doing enough. After reviewing the process for accessing the first non-Google store, Donato ruled that Google has added unnecessary “anticompetitive friction,” ordering the company to rectify the issues.
While Epic and Google are patching things up with a global partnership agreement, the two are still on opposite sides of the antitrust case in the US. Google lost the case in 2023, and the intervening years have been about determining how to implement remedies to address Google’s anticompetitive behavior. One of the court’s key elements is the requirement that Google include third-party app stores in the Play Store, giving users an easy way to get apps from non-Google sources. Aptoide Games became the first such app store recently.
However, Google worked hard to avoid this outcome, attempting to settle with Epic to keep third-party app stores out. When it was forced to admit the Aptoide store under the terms of the ruling, Google didn’t exactly put up a banner welcoming third-party app stores. In fact, Judge Donato found in a Thursday hearing that Google’s implementation was not good enough, according to The Verge.
While there is a link to the Play Store’s alternative app store page, it’s buried several levels deep in its confusing menus. Epic lawyer Yonatan Even showed the court that even searching for “app store” and “aptoide” didn’t show the intended results like any other search. Instead, the Play Store shows an “are you looking for” banner that links to the third-party app store page.
Google doesn’t expose the app store landing page very well right now.
Credit: Google
Google doesn’t expose the app store landing page very well right now. Credit: Google
Google’s lawyers contended in the hearing that Epic had already agreed that app stores are in a special category due to their expanded permissions, so the extra step was appropriate. The court didn’t buy that explanation, though.
“That is not acceptable,” said Donato. “That has to be fixed. I want every possible variation that’s even only 70 percent properly phrased.”
You can get a non-Google app store in Google Play now, but Judge Donato says the process is still too cumbersome.
Credit: Google / Aptoide
You can get a non-Google app store in Google Play now, but Judge Donato says the process is still too cumbersome. Credit: Google / Aptoide
Another problem is the process of actually installing the store. When you finally get to the page with Aptoide (and eventually other stores), there is no install button, as you’d get with an app or game in the store. A “view” button opens another dialog to actually install. Again, Donato said this additional step was unnecessary and seemed geared toward discouraging users from downloading alternative stores. He said the button must change to “install” instead of “view.”
Google’s legal team agreed to make these changes, and Donato gave the company one week, noting they should contact him if there is any problem with that timeline. So we can expect a smoother install experience for alternative app stores very soon. It’s possible that once this process is complete, Epic will finally take advantage of the ruling it worked toward for years and release its own storefront in Google Play. For now, Aptoide stands alone.
Father Had ‘No Control’ When He Murdered Pregnant Wife and Daughters
Eight years after one of America’s most horrifying family murders, convicted killer Chris Watts is once again drawing attention for a chilling claim about the night he wiped out his entire family.
Watts, now 41, has said he felt as though he had “no control” over himself when he murdered his pregnant wife, Shanann Watts, and their two young daughters at their Colorado home in August 2018.
Shanann, 34, was 15 weeks pregnant with the couple’s third child when Watts strangled her. Their daughters, Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3, were also killed before Watts disposed of their bodies at the remote oil site where he worked.
The murders stunned the nation — especially after Watts initially appeared on television pleading for his family to come home.
In the hours after Shanann and the girls disappeared, Watts portrayed himself as a desperate husband and father searching for answers.
He gave television interviews and spoke about wanting his family back, all while investigators were beginning to focus their attention on him.
Behind the scenes, however, Watts’ marriage had reportedly been falling apart.
He had been having an affair with a co-worker and later admitted that he no longer wanted to remain married to Shanann.
Watts initially gave police a wildly different version of what happened, claiming Shanann had killed their daughters after he told her he wanted to separate.
He claimed he then strangled Shanann in a rage after supposedly discovering what she had done.
That story quickly unraveled.
During a February 2019 interview with investigators, Watts confessed that he was responsible for killing all three members of his family.
He said Shanann had returned from a trip before the couple argued about their marriage.
Watts admitted telling her about his affair and said he no longer loved her. According to his account, Shanann threatened to leave with the children.
Watts then climbed on top of her in bed and strangled her.
“I didn’t want to do this, but I did it,” Watts told investigators.
He then made an especially disturbing claim about his state of mind that morning.
“It just felt like there was already something in my mind that was implanted that I was gonna do it,” Watts said, adding that when he woke up, “it was gonna happen, and I had no control over it.”
After killing Shanann, Watts loaded her body into his truck and drove to an oil field with Bella and Celeste.
He buried Shanann in a shallow grave before killing the two little girls and placing their bodies inside separate oil tanks.
Police recovered their remains on Aug. 17, 2018.
More disturbing allegations about Watts’ secret life surfaced years after the murders.
Colorado hairdresser Amanda McMahon claimed she had an affair with Watts after he allegedly told her he was separated from Shanann.
McMahon said she did not realize he was still married.
She claimed the two met several times between late spring 2017 and early 2018 and had sex on at least two occasions.
According to McMahon, Watts painted himself as the victim of an ugly breakup and accused Shanann of using their children against him.
She also claimed Watts repeatedly insulted his wife behind her back.
McMahon alleged he called Shanann a “f—— psycho” and a “gold digger,” while complaining that he was forced to financially support her.
“He would say the most awful things,” McMahon recalled, claiming Watts constantly tried to make Shanann appear unstable.
“Any shot you could take, he took,” she said. “He just did not like that poor woman.”
Watts ultimately pleaded guilty to the murders and is serving multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole.
The horrific case continues to fascinate and disturb the public years later, in part because of the extraordinary contrast between Watts’ seemingly ordinary suburban life and the brutal crimes he committed against his pregnant wife and two little girls.
Vietnam launches homegrown anti-sub frigate to check China
Vietnam’s first domestically designed anti-submarine frigate marks an ambitious attempt to leverage limited naval resources to achieve asymmetric deterrence while accelerating the country’s shift toward a more self-reliant and diversified defense-industrial base.
This month, multiplemediaoutlets reported that Vietnam has begun constructing its largest and most advanced domestically designed surface warship, launching the steel-cutting ceremony for a multi-purpose anti-submarine frigate at the defense ministry’s Song Thu Shipyard in Da Nang.
Built by Song Thu Corporation under the supervision of the Vietnam People’s Navy (VPN), the unnamed vessel is slated for completion within 36 months to bolster maritime sovereignty and counter sub-surface threats in the South China Sea.
Developed alongside state-run telecom giant Viettel and domestic defense units, the frigate integrates indigenous active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar systems, air-defense missiles, and VCM-01 anti-ship missiles.
Designed to embark a Kamov Ka-28 anti-submarine helicopter, the ship retains Russian-derived armament, including a 76.2-millimeter main gun, RBU-6000 anti-submarine rocket launchers, vertical launch systems (VLS), and torpedo tubes.
During the frigate’s groundbreaking ceremony, Vietnamese Deputy Minister of Defense Lieutenant General Pham Hoai Nam framed the project as part of a broader effort to strengthen maritime sovereignty, modernize the navy and gain greater strategic autonomy in weapons and shipbuilding, with domestic production also aimed at reducing dependence on foreign military technology.
Vietnamese officials have not publicly identified a specific adversary the frigate is intended to counter. Still, Vietnam is engaged in long-running territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea and has fought naval clashes over disputed features.
While the frigate itself does little to address the significant naval power gap between Vietnam and China, it should be viewed in the context of Vietnam’s broader asymmetric naval strategy.
As of March 2026, China has about 60 submarines, including six nuclear attack submarines (SSNs), two nuclear guided-missile submarines (SSGNs), six nuclear ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), and more than 50 conventional submarines (SSKs); by contrast, Vietnam has six Kilo-class SSKs.
In response to that imbalance, Vietnam could adopt a two-tier asymmetric naval posture: its Kilo-class SSKs could hold China’s major surface combatants at risk, while its anti-submarine frigates could threaten Chinese submarines.
Vietnam could also employ these assets under a fleet-in-being strategy, avoiding the need to destroy Chinese ships and submarines outright while making contested waters sufficiently dangerous to constrain China’s freedom of action. The presence of anti-submarine frigates in critical waters such as the Gulf of Tonkin could complicate China’s operational calculus.
Turning that concept into a credible wartime capability, however, could prove difficult. As noted by Evan Laksmana in a February 2026 report for the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), Vietnam conducts only one blue-water exercise a year, with its four Gepard-class frigates and other ships going out to sea only two or three times a month, and rarely beyond the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
Laksmana points out that the maintenance costs for Vietnam’s Kilo-class SSKs may be three times their acquisition costs, which keeps them mostly at port or on display for ceremonial purposes.
Beyond potentially unsustainable costs, Vietnam’s shipbuilding industry may face significant bottlenecks, including a lack of metallurgical expertise and machinery manufacturing capacity, reliance on imported materials, aging shipyards, outdated technology, and insufficient capital.
Moreover, Nory Ly points out in a June 2026 Modern Diplomacy article that Vietnam’s state-owned Shipbuilding Industry Corporation (SBIC) has entered bankruptcy proceedings, while secondary sanctions risks on Russian arms purchases add complexity to planning.
Achieving that strategic autonomy, however, may prove difficult given Vietnam’s continuing dependence on Russian technical know-how.
In a 2025 article in the peer-reviewed Russian Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Nghiem Tuan Hung notes that 70% of Vietnam’s heavy military equipment still comes from Russia, making a sudden transition to systems from other manufacturers impractical. Hung highlights that maintenance, spare parts, training, and systems integration keep Russia central to Vietnam’s defense architecture.
That dependence also gives Vietnam strong incentives to diversify its defense suppliers. Le Thi Phuong Loan and Bach Thai Hien note in an April 2026 article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Science and Technology of the University of Da Nang (UD-JST) that Russia’s increasingly close ties with China raise questions about Russia’s reliability as a strategic partner.
They also point out that the Russia-Vietnam defense partnership framework itself prioritizes stability over military integration, deliberately avoiding joint defense commitments.
Rather than abruptly replacing Russia, Vietnam has increasingly diversified its defense partnerships to plug capability gaps, reduce dependence on a single supplier, and preserve strategic autonomy.
For instance, in May 2026, Vietnam signed a deal with India for BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles, making Vietnam the second customer of the type after the Philippines. The BrahMos would complement Russian-origin missiles already in service alongside domestically developed systems such as the VCM-01.
Underlying both domestic defense production and supplier diversification is Vietnam’s ambition to become a more self-reliant middle power without being forced to choose sides, writes Phan Xuan Dung in an October 2022 Asia Policy article.
Dung notes that Vietnam’s historical experiences, along with its concerns for maintaining the Vietnamese Communist Party’s hold on power, ensure that the country pursues a non-aligned foreign policy.
He stresses that while Vietnam is increasingly wary of China’s behavior, it is unlikely to enter into a formal alliance with the US but will continue to leverage multilateral avenues to counterbalance China’s influence.
Ultimately, the strategic significance of Vietnam’s new anti-submarine frigate will depend not on whether it can narrow the naval balance with China, but on whether the country can turn a one-off indigenous warship into a sustainable, diversified defense-industrial ecosystem capable of imposing credible undersea-denial costs on China without trading dependence on Russia for dependence on yet another external power.
Kushner Plans Israel, Egypt Visit as US Seeks to Revive Stalled Gaza Plan
Jared Kushner is planning to travel to Israel and Egypt with senior Board of Peace officials for talks aimed at advancing the stalled Gaza postwar plan following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public rejection of a US-backed proposal for Hamas disarmament and an Israeli military withdrawal.
Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and US envoy, is expected to travel with Board of Peace high representative Nickolay Mladenov and executive board member Tony Blair, according to five sources with knowledge of the plans. The trip would be Kushner’s first visit to Israel since January.
A US official told AFP that the visit remained “under discussion” and that its precise timing could change.
“We see eye-to-eye on the strategic goal, but Israel has expressed some doubts about the plan, and we want to talk to them in order to make sure we are coordinated,” the official said.
The delegation is expected to hold meetings with Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, before traveling to Cairo for discussions with regional mediators from Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey.
President Trump announced two weeks ago that the Board of Peace had reached an agreement with Hamas under which the group would disarm and transfer civilian and security control of Gaza to a new Palestinian technocratic government.
Netanyahu publicly rejected the plan for disarming Hamas on Sunday after facing pressure from coalition partners and political opponents.
His statement followed a phone conversation with Kushner several days earlier in which Netanyahu promised to give the proposal a chance despite his skepticism, a US official said. Netanyahu also agreed to restrain attacks in Gaza to allow the demilitarization process to begin, according to the official.
A senior US official said the White House viewed Netanyahu’s subsequent public remarks as related to election-season politics rather than necessarily representing a change in Israeli policy.
“We understand Bibi’s political needs. We have no problem with it as long as he continues to do what we ask — especially regarding restraining attacks in Gaza,” the U.S. official said.
Ars Live recap: How can we stop publishers from killing their own games?
Video Game Preservation: Saving Yesterday’s Games for Tomorrow’s Players | Ars Live
This week, Ars hosted a live discussion with Ross Scott about the Stop Killing Games movement and its ongoing efforts to ensure that games remain playable even after the original publisher shuts down the online servers undergirding them.
Scott talked with Ars Technica Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland, saying said he felt the situation around long-term game access was already “intolerable a decade and a half ago” and that he “kept hoping someone else would kick this off, [someone] more experienced or knowledgeable, but it felt like nothing was happening.” Scott said he felt making the effort to organize a movement against the practice was like “[drawing] the short straw on this, essentially.”
During the conversation, Scott noted how the standard practice of shutting down game access for any reason, at any time, with minimal notice, would seem ludicrous in other areas of life:
Let’s say… the plan was to shut down [a game] in five years if it didn’t do well. That needs to be communicated then, if you want to go down that road, because this manner of things doesn’t really apply to other goods and services. Compared to, let’s say you got… a warranty for a product, and it doesn’t tell you a year or two; it just tells you, ‘Well, we’ll tell you when it expires.’ Or an insurance policy: ‘Yeah, we’ll tell you when your insurance policy expires.’ Like that would trip up other laws than that.
From the technical side, Scott said that when a publisher plans ahead for the end of an online game, the costs to transition to third-party servers can often be minimal:
I think many developers will back me up on this, that if you’re planning for this from the beginning, where that’s an established requirement, we need to have some way to run this game at end of life, while you’re designing it. As I understand it, the cost can be extremely low then because it comes down to developing the game differently rather than having to have all these additional costs.
Because even online, most online-only games, as I understand it, have what are called local test environments. Because let’s say it does depend on Amazon servers to host their game, but there’s an interruption, or it’s down for a while, or there’s incompatibility that they missed. Well, then you don’t want all your development to come to a standstill because of that. So you usually have to have some version of the server that’s operational that you can kind of keep testing. If they already have that, that’s half the battle right there.
Scott also said he has been disappointed by the way the EU Parliament has handled the movement’s concerns so far, but he remains hopeful for action in the near future:
One of the biggest problems we faced on this is so many governments and ruling bodies aren’t sure how the law applies to this. So I figured, OK, if we can have a million people coming to the EU commission saying, ‘Hey, please resolve this.’ Even if they don’t agree with it, clarify the law on this. Like, do we have protections on this? I thought, OK, they’ll look at that and they’ll settle it one way or the other. Nope.
Instead, they managed to just dodge it in every way and say, “Oh, yeah, we’ll let the courts in each country handle this, even though our part of our job is to harmonize policy across the member states.” In my opinion, they’re not doing their job. Not because they disagree with us but because of their charter for this.
But during that time, all the attention from that helped us to gather a lot of support and attention from EU Parliament. And they’ve been very favorable to what we’re trying to do. And right now, we’re scheduled, so far so good, to get included into the Digital Fairness Act, which, it’s a complete coincidence, but it happens to cover many issues that we’re practically a perfect fit for.
Inflated Claims: HSI deployed its tech platform to find noncitizens on voter rolls, despite warnings from agency insiders that it would lead to an “ungodly” number of false positives.
Privacy Concerns: DOJ leaders ignored internal concerns that transferring voter lists to HSI for criminal investigation might not be legal.
Scant Results: Despite intense White House pressure, the effort has produced only a few dozen noncitizen voter prosecutions nationwide — and even fewer convictions.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.
The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.
Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — within hours.
Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.
“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.
“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,” Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”
Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.
He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.
It’s well known the administration has tasked HSI — a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises — with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.
But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.
According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.
The administration plowed forward anyway.
HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.
Those searches went forward, ProPublica’s reporting shows, helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.
Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)
In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.
“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica’s request for comment. “Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”
A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work. The agency wouldn’t specify what tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced “publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica’s questions. “It’s an easy step to secure our elections.”
Teirab and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to comment.
There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countlessstudies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).
The administration’s critics say its hunt for noncitizen voters aligns with Trump’s attempts to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.
Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.
“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”
Matt Rota for ProPublica
“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”
Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.
Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top field hierarchy — signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency would play a central role in investigations related to the president’s twin obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.
Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.
Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he once appeared at the agency’s headquarters with his face bruised and eye blackened from a recent bout. He’d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.
To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he’d overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against Salisbury, however.
Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. A White House official called him “a critical member of the Trump administration” who was “cleared” in every review of the Mexico incident and was subsequently “promoted six times under multiple administrations.”
“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar. It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”
Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser
Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of carrying out the second Trump administration’s agenda for HSI, personally issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.)
Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.
“Stephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,” said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with former colleagues.) “Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”
In early July 2025, Frank Quiñones, an HSI special agent who’d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency’s technology to find noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica. Quiñones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that had been enlisted into voting investigations.
The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government’s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.
Quiñones was a true believer in Trump’s claims about election fraud: In multiple Facebookpostsandreposts, ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab’s overseers, according to sources who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab’s technology to identify illegal voters — even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Quiñones did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.)
For proof of concept, Quiñones proposed using a February 2021 public voter list he’d obtained for New Jersey and running it through HSI’s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as “a little insane,” one recalled — both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don’t include voters’ unique identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI’s data would produce mismatches — what the staffer called an “ungodly” number of false positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They “didn’t want to touch this,” the staffer added. Quiñones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring: “The president wants this!”
Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all of HSI’s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment. Sandia referred ProPublica’s questions to the facilities’ parent agencies, including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)
Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they’d found large numbers of noncitizens on Quiñones’ 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they’d found “5,000 high-confidence illegal voters” in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state’s office, which oversees the state’s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)
The apparent breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better time.
The Trump administration’s other efforts to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.
The administration had hoped to persuade states to check their voters’ citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn’t. Most states also refused the Justice Department’s demands to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency’s plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ’s attempts to sue for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over elections to the states.
In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration officials, Quiñones touted the solution he’d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab: using HSI’s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Quiñones noted, could fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.
By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the “HSI Tool” as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government’s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey’s “expertise in election administration” was “invaluable to the Department’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.”)
The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a “very significant number” of “potential non-citizens.” (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: “It is of paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.”
Matt Rota for ProPublica
Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy
As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged.
Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.
The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included voters’ addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16 states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ had citizens’ partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license information, too.
Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person’s information can’t be released or shared without their consent, subject to limited exceptions.
From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for example, a judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches, ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has appealed that ruling.
In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.
Instead, the DOJ’s office of legal counsel pushed forward with plans to share the public voter rolls, claiming a Privacy Act exception allowed HSI to receive such data without public notice as long as it was for law enforcement purposes. DHS just needed to submit a letter officially requesting the data for those purposes, an attorney in the legal counsel’s office explained, according to internal emails.
But this exception was meant to be used to get information on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that eventually limited SAVE’s use.
“[Anthony] Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”
Eric Balliet, a former high-level HSI manager
Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency’s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.
In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he’d rewritten an initial draft memo to “make the information sharing arrangement far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.”
Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn proposed having DHS request “pertinent and relevant” information about specific people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland Security “coordinate” to fulfill the requests.
“Having slept on it,” Winn wrote, “I ended up deciding that our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.”
Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.
Winn’s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned, however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered language providing that the voter information would be “transferred” to HSI, with one exception: Voters’ party affiliation would be redacted, if possible, it said.
The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any “appropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.”
In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said “I can’t really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.”
A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government’s actions, saying “no one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien voting.” DHS echoed the DOJ’s view, calling such information sharing “essential to protecting America’s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter rolls” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”
Sus said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a “1984-style database” that could be used to surveil political participation.
Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns, saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS’ systems amounted to “a mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a non-criminal setting.” On a practical level, he added, the data sharing increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to identity theft.
“As a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the protection of my private data,” he said. “If it falls into the wrong hands, it’s not the government that suffers. It’s me.”
Matt Rota for ProPublica
Collapsing Claims
By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.
About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.
Still more leads came from running public voter rolls through the HSI lab’s databases, though it’s not clear how many. Agency sources told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said that included “as many as” 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.
Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.
Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.
The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Quiñones (no relation to the HSI agent), a staunch Trump ally who has led investigations of the president’s political opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office’s cases; seven others are pending.
Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states have more than 40 million registered voters.
Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.
Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register, they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who’d been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren’t citizens. Many had never voted.
“Our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens.”
Peter Winn, a Justice Department veteran, in an email urging limits on data sharing that were not adopted
Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least six counties got subpoenas for voters’ records. The demands “presented a host of issues,” Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)
“An unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,” Teirab complained. “Instead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the investigation.”
In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica. Only six turned out to live there.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is “microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”
As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.
Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.
In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than 1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government, claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.
The agents bombarded local election officials with requests for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. “Sorry again for piecemealing these to you,” one agent wrote to an official in Butler County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks. Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to “witch hunts” that ate up staff time.
In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio’s two U.S. attorneys’ offices for an “election integrity” update, asking: “How close are we to complaints/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you’ve run into, how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.”
As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.
Now, however, U.S. attorneys’ offices are taking a different approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or deportation.
In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who’d registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024 presidential election. They’ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she could vote. They and their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of Florida also didn’t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled to go to trial in September.
Matt Rota for ProPublica
“Far-Reaching Consequences”
Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president’s claims about noncitizen voting.
Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.
In February 2026, according to court files and emails reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who’d been leading a multistate child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn’t until May that he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving at least five 14-year-old girls.
Cases like this “don’t just stop,” said Balliet, the 23-year HSI veteran. “When you pull people off them for an extended period of time, those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.”
Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been HSI’s most urgent work. According to an annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS — often to investigate drug trafficking — plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including “changes in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.”
“It’s never been a better time to be involved in transnational organized crime,” said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official who retired in early 2025.
“The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon
In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive orders.
Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.
“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.”
Flags, Field Marshals, and foreign masters: Pakistan’s independence pageant
Every August 14, Pakistan performs sovereignty like a state auditioning for the role of itself. Flags breed on rooftops. Fighter jets carve patriotism into the sky. Politicians discover freedom for twenty-four hours. Generals appear beneath enough ribbons to upholster a sofa and assure 250 million people that Pakistan bows before no one.
Then the ceremonies end, the bunting droops, and the rulers return to asking Washington, Riyadh and assorted creditors what sovereignty should look like this quarter.
Seventy-nine years after 1947, Pakistan’s problem is not that it lacks the legal furniture of independence. It has borders, embassies, nuclear weapons and an anthem thunderous enough to frighten colonialism retroactively. Its problem is that the ruling order has repeatedly treated sovereignty not as power to be exercised, but as an asset to be rented.
The British departed. Dependency merely changed accents.
SEATO, CENTO, Afghan jihad, the War on Terror: Pakistan discovered early that geography could be monetized more easily than industry could be built. Thus emerged the governing genius of the postcolonial state: sell strategic usefulness abroad, manufacture patriotic mythology at home, and call the difference national interest.
Washington supplied weapons. Gulf monarchies supplied deposits and patronage. China supplied infrastructure and strategic ballast. The IMF periodically arrives to explain, with accountant’s precision, that flags cannot service debt.
The patrons change. The posture survives.
Pakistan’s deeper tragedy is institutional. It inherited a formidable colonial bureaucracy and military but no comparably powerful tradition of popular sovereignty capable of subordinating them. The state was stronger than society; the cantonment better organized than the citizen.
From that imbalance came coups, managed elections, palace conspiracies and the enduring conviction that the public may periodically vote but must never be permitted to rule.
The political tendency associated with Imran Khan became dangerous because it popularised two ideas Pakistan’s establishment finds almost indecent: that social justice should matter at home, and that sovereignty should mean conducting foreign policy without permanently seeking permission abroad.
These propositions are hardly revolutionary elsewhere. In Pakistan, apparently, they require tear gas.
The crisis of 2022 and the repression that followed transformed a political dispute into a civic education. Whatever judgment one makes about the competing accounts of Khan’s removal, millions began asking the question every postcolonial elite dreads:
Who actually governs Pakistan — and for whom?
By 2026, the establishment’s answer has become almost magnificent in its absurdity.
Field Marshal Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif celebrate Pakistan’s renewed “geopolitical relevance.” Trump is friendly. Vance is friendly. Washington takes Munir’s calls. Islamabad appears at important tables.
This is not sovereignty. It is social climbing with nuclear weapons.
Access is not autonomy. Relevance is not independence. Being useful to Empire does not mean one has escaped it.
A valet may be indispensable to the banquet. He still does not own the house.
Nothing illustrates this confusion better than Pakistan’s enthusiasm for Trump’s cartoonishly titled “Board of Peace.” Islamabad treats membership as proof that Pakistan has returned to the diplomatic high table. But sovereignty is not measured by the quality of the chair one receives at somebody else’s table.
If Pakistan cannot materially shape the terms, defend Palestinian rights, and resist arrangements designed to domesticate resistance while accommodating Israeli power, then its seat is not evidence of influence. It is decorative Muslim upholstery.
The same applies to defense arrangements with Saudi Arabia. Regional security cooperation could advance genuine autonomy if it reduced dependence on outside powers. But supplying Pakistani military competence to protect a fabulously wealthy monarchy from the consequences of its own asinine strategic behavior, while Pakistan remains financially dependent upon Gulf largesse, is not independence.
It is subcontracting with a crescent attached.
Yet Pakistan’s unfinished decolonization is not a counsel of despair. It is precisely where the promise of Pakistan survives.
That promise lies in constructing a republic whose independence is social as well as diplomatic: where sovereignty belongs to citizens rather than cantonments; where the exploited majority receives justice rather than sermons; where foreign policy is neither American nor Gulf-owned, but Pakistani; where solidarity with Palestine means confronting Zionism rather than inventing ever more sophisticated mechanisms for accommodating it.
Pakistan could still become something far larger than the strategic rental property its rulers have made of it: a genuinely sovereign, socially just leader of the Global South, capable of cooperating with great powers without kneeling before them and confronting Empire without searching first for permission from Empire.
That would be decolonization completed.
Until then, August 14 remains less a commemoration than a reminder.
Pakistan became a state in 1947.
The struggle to become free is still underway.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
Italy fines businesses after water safety violations found in nationwide sweep
More than half of the inspections carried out at bars and restaurants across Italy last month found irregularities involving the bottling and serving of treated water, Italy’s NAS Carabinieri health and hygiene police said Thursday.
The nationwide campaign, conducted from July 1 to 31 in agreement with the Health Ministry, was aimed at checking compliance with rules governing the bottling and serving of treated water.
The NAS conducted 272 inspections and collected 53 samples for laboratory analysis. Authorities found 147 non-compliant situations, representing 54% of the inspections, and reported 126 people to the relevant administrative and health authorities.
Investigators identified 256 violations overall.
One criminal offense was reported for the sale of food products bearing false markings, while 255 administrative fines were issued for irregularities involving instructions for the sale and serving of non-prepackaged products, as well as hygiene, structural, procedural and authorization deficiencies. The fines totaled about 175,000 euros.
Authorities also seized 2,000 liters of unfiltered drinking water and seven pieces of equipment that failed to meet requirements.
Ten businesses were suspended because of hygiene, structural and/or authorization deficiencies. Their estimated market value was about 4.7 million euros.
