December 11, 2025 — Timeline

Dec 11

ICE agents fired pepper balls at neighbors who confronted a North Portland immigration arrest

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Erik Téllez outside his home in Portland's St. Johns neighborhood on December 11, 2025, while his teenage children waited in the family's minivan. When neighbors gathered and one shouted at the departing agents, ICE fired pepper balls at the group, which city officials said was the first documented use of pepper balls during an ICE arrest in Portland.

Dec 11

Trump directed DOJ to sue states over AI laws and threatened to withhold federal funds, bypassing Congress on AI regulation

On December 11, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14365, "Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence," directing the Justice Department to establish an AI Litigation Task Force to sue states over AI laws the administration considers excessive. The order also instructs the Commerce Department to identify conflicting state laws and to condition states' access to federal broadband (BEAD) funds on compliance, and directs all federal agencies to weigh conditioning discretionary grants on states not enacting conflicting AI legislation — achieving through executive action what Congress had not enacted.

Dec 11

DOJ sued Colorado to compel release of unredacted, sensitive voter roll data

On December 11, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division sued Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, seeking to compel production of the state's complete, unredacted voter registration database, including voters' full names, dates of birth, and driver's-license or Social Security number fragments. The suit, filed under the Civil Rights Act of 1960, followed Griswold's May and December 2025 refusals to share the unredacted data and a November 2025 letter, which she led with nine other secretaries of state, asking DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security to clarify how the collected data would be used and shared.

Improper collection or dissemination of personal data

Dec 11

ICE detained Tennessee construction worker Diego Hernandez Garcia, then deported him in violation of a federal court order

On December 11, 2025, ICE agents detained Diego Hernandez Garcia, a 24-year-old Salvadoran construction worker with Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and deferred action valid through May 12, 2026, during a raid on a Hardin Valley, Tennessee job site; USCIS revoked his deferred action the same day, after he was already in custody. On December 23, despite a federal court order requiring he remain in the U.S. pending his case, ICE placed him on a flight to El Salvador; he was returned hours later after his attorney intervened, with the government calling the removal "inadvertent."