Author: Houston Stringer

EMPIRE, CA – A teacher with the Empire Union School District has been arrested after two students at Glick Middle School reported being inappropriately touched, according to the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office. File Photo (November 2022) On October 22, 2025, at approximately 1:30 p.m., investigators from the Sheriff’s Special Victims Unit responded to the campus after school staff notified law enforcement of the allegations. The inappropriate contact allegedly occurred during the 2024–2025 school year, with the most recent incident reported on October 20. Detectives identified 52-year-old Javier Villanueva, primarily an 8th grade English teacher, as the suspect. He was arrested near his home in Patterson with assistance from Patterson Police Services and booked into the Stanisl...

WASHINGTON, DC – Dozens of retired United Airlines pilots have been denied claims for FICA tax refunds after a federal appeals court ruled they missed strict statutory deadlines and lacked entitlement under current tax law. (File Photo) September 2025 On October 23, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the U.S. Court of Federal Claims’ decision to dismiss the pilots’ lawsuits. The case involved multiple pro se plaintiffs, including James H. Biestek and others, who sought refunds for employment taxes they paid on retirement benefits they never received due to the airline’s bankruptcy and termination of its nonqualified deferred compensation plan. The court found the pilots failed to timely file refund claims with the IRS as required under 26 U.S.C. § 6511...

CINCINNATI, OH – The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has denied a petition from two Guatemalan brothers who sought asylum in the United States, ruling that their claims failed to show that persecution by local gangs in Guatemala was based on their indigenous heritage. According to court records, Cristian and Kevin Macario-Tzoc entered the U.S. illegally with their mother in 2014, fleeing after gang members threatened their family and injured one of the boys. They claimed asylum on the grounds that they were part of a particular social group: "Indigenous Maya Quiche family members of victims of extortion." An immigration judge denied the claims in 2020, stating that the group was not legally recognizable under asylum law and that the threats were motivated by gang extortion rather ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Department of Justice has reinstated a 2020 opinion holding that individuals who participated in the persecution of others are barred from asylum in the United States, even if they acted under coercion or duress. In a decision dated October 22, 2025, Attorney General Merrick Garland vacated a stay previously imposed on the Board of Immigration Appeals' March 16, 2021, ruling in the case Matter of Negusie, 29 I&N Dec. 285 (A.G. 2025). As a result, the opinion issued by former Attorney General William Barr in Matter of Negusie, 28 I&N Dec. 120 (A.G. 2020), once again becomes binding. The case involves a man who entered the U.S. as a stowaway in 2004 and was initially found ineligible for asylum and withholding of removal under the “persecutor bar...