A far-left sheriff in Michigan has walked back some of her comments regarding federal immigration arrests in her jurisdiction.
On Wednesday, Washtenaw County Sheriff Alyshia Dyer took to her Facebook page — which the Detroit News described as her "personal" page, though the account name is Sheriff Alyshia M. Dyer and shares the address, phone number, and website for the sheriff's office — to claim that four people had been arrested near school bus stops in Ypsilanti earlier this week just as schools were let out for the day.
'ICE does NOT target schools for enforcement actions or bus stop locations.'
"On Tuesday (1/27/26), we received multiple reports from community members that ICE detained a mother in front of her child in the Ypsilanti area, along with other residents," Dyer wrote. She also attached a parent letter from Ypsilanti Public Schools Superintendent Alena Zachery-Ross, claiming that "several parents in our community were taken into custody while off school grounds."
Dyer added that "parents connected to local schools" may have been "targeted at a bus stop in Ypsilanti during student drop-off times." She noted that the arrests "did not occur on any school grounds."
Dyer then blamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement because she could not "confirm details" about those reports: "Unfortunately, it is often difficult to confirm details, as ICE frequently provides no advance notice, does not contact Metro Dispatch, and leaves families, schools, and communities to process the impact on their own in the aftermath."
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Photo by Jim Watson - Pool/Getty Images
By Thursday, ICE had slammed Dyer's allegations as "lies." "ICE does NOT target schools for enforcement actions or bus stop locations. To be clear, NO children were present during these arrests," the agency said in a statement to the Detroit News.
"Lies like these are just another reason why our officers are grappling with a 1,300% increase in assaults, a 3,200% increase in vehicle attacks and a staggering 8,000% uptick in death threats," the statement added.
Dyer updated her claims on Thursday to note that she had spoken with "immigration enforcement leadership," who reassured her that they had not and will not "do any enforcement on school grounds, or school bus stops." She then passively blamed the officials for some kind of miscommunication.
"They have agreed to better communicate in the future when they leave Washtenaw County," she wrote.
In the statement, ICE clarified that agents "were conducting targeted operations seeking to apprehend illegal aliens with final orders of removal from the United States."
The agents tailed two vehicles leaving a targeted residence and then arrested four individuals during at traffic stop: Delmy Yamileth Molina Vasquez, Gissel Alejandra Pavon Nunes, and Elder Alberto Veliz-Mencia of Honduras and Carolina Hernandez-Aviles of Mexico.
ICE database records confirmed that, as of Friday morning, the three women are detained in an ICE facility in Michigan, but Blaze News could not find any record for Veliz-Mencia. Whether any of the four individuals have criminal records unrelated to immigration is unclear.
Crystal Campbell, director of operations at the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office, told Blaze News in a statement: "The ICE arrests on Tuesday in Ypsilanti caused local panic and school communities to be extremely alarmed. As [Sheriff Dyer] shared in her post, this is why the agenda around how immigration enforcement is being handled has been so concerning."
Campbell reiterated in her statement that the arrests caused "significant stress." "We don’t work with or assist in immigration enforcement, and any time they do come to the county, it causes tremendous stress and anxiety for the whole community," the statement concluded.
Zachery-Ross' office did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.
Dyer, who identifies as "pansexual," was elected in 2024 on a radical agenda. According to her campaign website, she pledged to prevent the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office from "collaborating with ICE" and to provide the "undocumented" with driver's license documentation.
The same month Dyer was sworn into office, the Ypsilanti City Council voted to discontinue saying the Pledge of Allegiance before meetings.
H/T: David Bondy
The U.S. African Development Foundation, a foreign aid agency that poured millions of taxpayer dollars into African initiatives over the past four decades, desperately fought the Trump administration's efforts to dismantle the agency and audit its finances.
It's now painfully obvious why there was so much resistance to transparency at the U.S. Agency for International Development-adjacent outfit.
Months after government watchdog Judicial Watch sued the USADF for records regarding its expenditures and in the wake of allegations that agency officials were abusing their positions and misusing funds, the USADF's director of financial management, Mathieu Zahui, is now admitting wrongdoing.
'The USADF Director of Financial Management's fraudulent acts betrayed the trust of the American people.'
Zahui, an official who denied DOGE access to the agency's financial records last year, has agreed to plead guilty to taking secret payments and lying to federal law enforcement officers about those payments.
"Mathieu Zahui is charged with accepting payments from a government contractor and then abusing his position by directing USADF funds to that contractor for little-to-no work," Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department's Criminal Division said in a statement on Friday. "Corruption by senior officials representing the United States cheats American taxpayers and rigs the system against honest work."
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Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesThe Justice Department indicated in court documents obtained by Rikki Ratliff-Fellman, chief content officer for Glenn Beck, and shared with Blaze News that Zahui, 59, arranged for the USADF to pay vendors and contractors through a Kenya-based company owned by a government contractor Zahui has known since 1999.
"Zahui arranged for ADF to pay certain vendors and contractors through Company-1 rather than pay them directly," the DOJ noted in the filing. "Zahui then approved invoices for Company-1 and CC-1 that included mark-ups ranging from 17% to 66% on these pass-through invoices, even when Company-1 did no work justifying the mark-up."
The company belonging to Zahui's associate submitted over 20 pass-through invoices for the African Development Foundation for which Zahui had USADF shell out at least $617,625.49. His associate's company allegedly kept $134,886.34 of that sum as a mark-up for "logistical support."
Between 2019 and 2022, Zahui personally and directly received $12,000 in cash payments, the DOJ alleged.
Zahui and his associate's company unsurprisingly failed to disclose the details of their little arrangement to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which oversaw and authorized USADF's payment to external parties.
Adding insult to injury, Zahui told federal agents when interviewed in 2024 that he had never received any kickback from his friend's company.
The USADF financial director has, however, since agreed to plead guilty to one count of accepting gratuities from his associate's company and one count of making a false statement to a federal law enforcement officer. He faces a maximum of two years in prison for the first charge and five years in prison for the second.
Peter Marocco, former director of the Office of Foreign Assistance and USAID deputy administrator, wrote in response to the agreement, "USADF is garbage. A culture of defiant fraud, waste and abuse that must come to an end. This is only scratching the surface. Abolish it!"
"The USADF Director of Financial Management's fraudulent acts betrayed the trust of the American people," said Sean Bottary, the acting assistant inspector general at the USAID's Office of Inspector General.
Zahui's guilty plea apparently will not be the end of the crackdown on USADF.
"There are active investigations as we dig deeper into the African Development Foundation's egregious and systemic fraud, waste, and abuse," Marocco told Blaze News. "After battling obstructionist efforts to block the president's executive order, the more we dig, we find evidence of intimidating whistleblowers and other outrageous conduct."
"This rogue agency is rotten waste to the core, and it needs to be defunded," added Marocco.
The USADF was one of the agencies President Donald Trump ordered the elimination of "to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law" in February 2025.
Blaze News has reached out to USADF for comment.
Editor's note: This story has been edited after publication to clarify how Blaze News obtained the documents and to add comment from Peter Marocco.
In the words of the long gone NYC radio show host Bob Grant: It's sick out there and getting sicker
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