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December 24, 2025

6 entries on this date.

Palau's president signed deportee MOU despite legislature's repeated objections

Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. announced a Memorandum of Understanding on December 24, 2025 to accept U.S. third-country deportees in exchange for $7.5 million in aid, after Palau's Congress and Council of Chiefs had twice rejected the same proposal. The Palau Senate sued in February 2026 alleging the president lacked constitutional authority to enter what amounted to a treaty without legislative ratification, but a judge allowed implementation to proceed; the first deportee arrived in May 2026 and left after two weeks.

United States and DR Congo signed undisclosed third-country removal agreement

The United States and the Democratic Republic of the Congo reached a third-country removal agreement via diplomatic notes dated December 24, 2025, not disclosed until the State Department posted it in June 2026. Fifteen people with U.S.-granted humanitarian protections were forcibly transferred to DRC on April 17, 2026, shackled throughout a 27-hour flight and given only 24 hours' notice of their destination; a U.S. judge later found one woman's removal was likely unlawful and ordered her return.

ICE arrested immigrants at Northern California immigration courthouses for most of 2025 without lawful authority, a federal judge found

On December 24, 2025, U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California temporarily barred U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from making arrests at immigration courts across its San Francisco Area of Responsibility -- covering Northern and Central California, Hawaii, Guam, and Saipan -- finding the policy authorizing the practice arbitrary and capricious. The order followed an October 2025 court filing documenting at least 75 courthouse arrests in San Francisco and at least 39 in Sacramento since a January 2025 nationwide ICE directive reversed decades of guidance protecting courthouses from civil immigration arrests. Pitts found the arrests deterred immigrants from attending their own hearings, undermining the immigration court system.

CIA drone strike hits dock on Venezuela's coast — first known U.S. attack on Venezuelan soil

On or about December 24, 2025, the CIA carried out a drone strike on a dock on Venezuela's coast that U.S. officials said was used by the gang Tren de Aragua to load drugs onto boats; no one was reported on the dock and no one was killed. It was the first known U.S. attack inside Venezuelan territory, a sharp escalation of the administration's pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro beyond the at-sea "drug boat" strikes. President Trump publicly claimed credit, saying the U.S. had "knocked out" a "big facility" in "the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs."

DHS denied clergy access to pray with detainees at Broadview, Illinois ICE facility on Christmas Eve

On December 24, 2025, DHS denied an interfaith group of Chicago-area clergy access to the ICE processing facility in Broadview, Illinois, where they had sought to offer Christmas Eve pastoral care to detainees. Clergy said they had contacted DHS in advance and that religious-representative access, previously permitted, has been barred since the Trump administration launched its Operation Midway Blitz immigration enforcement surge in the Chicago area in September 2025.

ICE agents shot and wounded man during Glen Burnie, Maryland arrest; agency's account of second injured man was contradicted by county police

On December 24, 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and wounded Portuguese national Tiago Alexandre Sousa-Martins during an immigration enforcement operation in Glen Burnie, Maryland, after ICE said he drove a van at officers. A second man, Salvadoran national Salomon Antonio Serrano-Esquivel, was also injured; Anne Arundel County Police disputed ICE's initial account that he had been riding in the van, saying he was already in ICE custody in a separate vehicle when he was hurt. DHS later revised its account, telling CNN that Serrano-Esquivel had been a passenger in an ICE vehicle rammed by the fleeing van, not in the van itself.