NEW: FBI Director Melts Down As ICE Deports DACA Recipients

Kash Patel Freaks Out; Trump Admin Deports DACA Recipients; Court Interpreter Detained In ICE Facility; Insider Trading Scandal Continues

Good morning.

The director of the FBI just had a meltdown because he thought he was fired — and he wasn’t, but multiple officials wish he were. The administration deported 174 people who were legally protected from deportation under DACA. A court interpreter who has lived in Texas for 35 years is sitting in a detention cell, possibly about to be sent to a country she has never been to. And the largest insider trading scandal in American political history may be unfolding in plain sight — with hundreds of millions of dollars in suspiciously timed bets placed moments before major war announcements — and the agency that is supposed to regulate it has exactly one commissioner, appointed by Trump. Corporate media is not asking hard questions about any of this. The FCC chair has made clear what happens when they do. And the Ellisons just won their bid to own both CBS and CNN. This is what independent journalism looks like today.

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THE FBI DIRECTOR THOUGHT HE WAS FIRED. HE WASN’T. EVERYONE WISHES HE HAD BEEN.

On the afternoon of Friday, April 10, FBI Director Kash Patel struggled to log into an internal computer system. He immediately became convinced he had been fired, and spent the next several hours frantically calling aides and allies to announce his termination. Nine people familiar with the outreach described it to reporters. Two of them used the phrase “freak-out.” The White House fielded calls from the FBI and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge. The answer was still Patel. It had been a technical error.

This might be darkly funny if Patel were not in charge of an agency of 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. It would also be less alarming if what follows were not an account of a man that dozens of current and former officials describe as erratic, frequently absent, and — according to multiple accounts — regularly drinking to the point of obvious intoxication in Washington bars and Las Vegas clubs while in the company of administration staff.

Multiple officials told reporters that Patel is known to drink to excess at a private Washington club called Ned’s and at the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings had to be rescheduled because of his alcohol-fueled nights. Members of his security detail have had difficulty waking him on multiple occasions. A request was made last year for “breaching equipment” — normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams — because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors. The DOJ’s own ethics handbook prohibits employees from habitually using alcohol to excess and warns that off-duty drinking can make officials vulnerable to exploitation by foreign adversaries.

When Trump launched his war with Iran, Patel fired members of a counterintelligence squad that had focused, in part, on Iran. He said the agents had ethics violations. Multiple officials say the firings were rushed and have left the country shorthanded at a critical moment. “The instinctive level of muscle memory or discernment that is necessary to identify and counter a terror attack is missing,” one former senior intelligence official told reporters.

Patel has reportedly been effective at one thing: purging agents and staff he views as insufficiently loyal to Trump, and using polygraph sessions to identify anyone who has said anything critical of either himself or the president. The White House says he is doing a fine job. One FBI official put it more directly: “We don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”

174 DREAMERS DEPORTED. DACA PROTECTIONS IGNORED.

The acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has confirmed in a letter to Congress that ICE deported 174 people who were in the process of renewing their DACA protections in the first nine months of Trump’s second term. Another 270 DACA recipients were arrested during that same period.

DACA — the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — was established in 2012 to protect people brought to the United States as children. There are roughly 533,000 active recipients. ICE’s own letter acknowledges the deportations. DHS says most of those arrested had criminal records. Advocates say that is not consistent with what they are seeing on the ground.

“Daca does not confer any form of legal status in this country,” a DHS spokesperson said. “Any illegal alien who is a Daca recipient may be subject to arrest and deportation.”

These are people who grew up in the United States. Many have never known another country. One hundred and seventy-four of them have now been sent to one.

THE ONLY PUNJABI COURT INTERPRETER IN TEXAS IS IN AN ICE DETENTION CELL

Meenu Batra has lived in south Texas for 35 years. She fled anti-Sikh pogroms in India in 1991, raised four children here, and became the only licensed Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu court interpreter in the state of Texas. In 2000, an immigration judge granted her legal protection, concluding that she faced likely persecution if returned to India.

Last month, ICE agents stopped her at the airport in Harlingen, put her in handcuffs, and transferred her to a detention facility in Raymondville. She has been held there for a month without explanation. Her lawyer says the government has not told them where they plan to send her, and because the government has not reopened her immigration case, they cannot legally send her back to India — which her attorney says means they may be planning to ship her to a third country she has never set foot in.

“It feels bizarre,” Batra said by phone from detention. “I don’t know how else to put it. Here I am just staring at the wall wondering what exactly I’m doing here.”

She added that she has been helping other detained women understand how to request attorneys and make confidential phone calls, because her fluency in English and knowledge of immigration law make her one of the most informed people in the facility. ICE agents, she said, forced her to pose for photos with her hands behind her back to give the impression she was still handcuffed, and told her the photos were “for social media.”

“This made me feel humiliated and treated like a criminal,” she said.

HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN SUSPICIOUS BETS PRECEDED MAJOR WAR ANNOUNCEMENTS. ONE REGULATOR IS WATCHING.

The pattern of suspicious trading around Trump’s Iran war announcements is becoming impossible to ignore.

Sixteen betting accounts on the prediction market Polymarket each pocketed more than $100,000 by accurately predicting the precise date of the U.S. strikes on Iran the night before they happened. A single account called “Magamyman” made more than $553,000 by betting that Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei would be “removed” from power — moments before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. On April 7, at least 50 Polymarket accounts bet that the U.S. and Iran would reach a ceasefire hours before Trump announced it on Truth Social — the same day Trump had said “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not open the Strait of Hormuz.

The oil futures market tells the same story. On March 23, traders placed $580 million in oil futures bets just 15 minutes before Trump posted that Iran talks were going “productively,” triggering a price drop. On April 7, traders placed $950 million in oil futures bets hours before the ceasefire announcement. Both times, the bets paid off.

“Not only the timing, but the amount of these bets makes it look very likely that someone had insider knowledge,” said one public interest attorney who has filed a formal complaint with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Here is the problem: the CFTC currently has exactly one commissioner. Trump appointed him at the end of 2025, and he has described himself as friendly toward prediction markets. The agency responsible for investigating these trades has been reduced to a single person installed by the administration that would be implicated in an investigation.

No one has been charged. The administration denies wrongdoing. The trades are still sitting there, time-stamped, on the public ledger.

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STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED

• Democrats just won another special election — and the House majority is now on a knife’s edge. Progressive Democrat Analilia Mejia won New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District Thursday night by roughly 20 points, continuing a pattern in which Democrats have overperformed their 2024 margins by an average of 11 points in every special election so far this year. The win leaves Republicans with a working majority of just 217-214-1 in the House, barely functional, particularly with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie routinely voting against his own party. A war powers resolution vote this week fell one vote short. If Mejia had already been seated, the outcome could have gone the other way.

• Trump’s own voters don’t believe him about the Iran war. A focus group of 13 Georgia voters who all supported Trump in 2024 was conducted this week. Not a single participant said they would describe the military action in Iran as going well, despite Trump’s claims that the war is nearly over. When asked how the conflict made them feel, participants used words like “afraid,” “angry,” “concerned,” “sad,” and “despair.” Twelve of the 13 said they are more anxious about the economy now than before Trump took office, with rising prices as their primary concern.

• Europe may have six weeks of jet fuel left. The head of the International Energy Agency warned this week that Europe has “maybe six weeks” of jet fuel supplies remaining and called it the global economy’s “largest energy crisis.” Jet fuel prices have roughly doubled since the war began, and airlines including KLM, easyJet, and Lufthansa are already cutting flights and raising fees, with more cancellations expected if the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t reopen soon. The peak summer travel season is weeks away.

• Russia hammered Ukraine with hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles — while the world was looking elsewhere. Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure this week, killing at least 16 people across Kyiv, Odesa, and Dnipro with hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles in a strike that stretched for hours. Ukraine has now lost roughly 20 percent of its territory to Russian occupation, and the war continues with almost no American diplomatic attention while the administration remains focused on Iran.

• A prediction market trader made $300,000 betting on Biden pardons — moments before they happened. The insider trading story goes further than previously reported. In the final hours of Biden’s presidency, an anonymous trader placed lucrative bets on who would be pardoned even as the betting odds were nearly zero — and walked away with more than $300,000. The pattern of suspiciously timed prediction market activity now spans multiple administrations, multiple announcements, and hundreds of millions of dollars — and the regulatory agency meant to investigate it remains a one-person operation.