US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded a contract to a private security company that has faced accusations of “torture” and “enforced disappearance” to assist in tracking down undocumented immigrant children who arrived in the US alone, a contracting document shows.

ICE has stepped up its work so much in pursuing these minors in the US that it has contracted out some of its mission to a third party to put “boots on the ground” and locate immigrant children previously released from US government custody.

The agency characterizes the work of tracing immigrant children who reached the US without authorization and were released into communities while they go through immigration court proceedings as “safety and wellness checks”. ICE says it wants to confirm the child’s location, school enrollment and overall wellness, including checking for signs of abuse or trafficking, according to the contracting document.

But an internal ICE document reviewed by the Guardian last year shows ICE actually runs the operations with the aim of deporting the children or pursuing criminal cases against them – or their adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US. A critic at the time called ICE’s efforts “backdoor family separation”.

“Accusations that ICE is ‘targeting’ and arresting children are FALSE and an attempt to demonize law enforcement,” a DHS spokesperson said on Friday. “Rather than separating families, ICE asks parents if they want to be removed with their children or if the child should be placed with someone safe the parent designates.”

Now, as that program continues, the agency in mid-April gave a contract to a US company, MVM Inc, to assist in carrying out such operations.

MVM is a longtime security contractor, based in Ashburn, Virginia, with about 2,500 employees, and provides detention and transport services to federal immigration agencies. It previously provided security services to the CIA.

MVM did not respond to a detailed request for comment by time of publication.

In 2024, MVM was sued by two Guatemalan fathers and their respective children in a California federal court for alleged “torture, enforced disappearance and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment”, according to the lawsuit, for the role it played in the family separation policy at the border under the first Trump administration that prompted widespread uproar.

“MVM physically took thousands of children away from their parents and transferred them to shelters,” the lawsuit said. “MVM transported and harbored these children using unmarked vehicles, commercial airlines, and makeshift detention centers.”

MVM asked a judge to toss the lawsuit, saying the company had “openly denounced” the family separation campaign, adding that since it was a private company, it should not be held liable for a US government policy.

The two Guatemalan children, a 16-year-old and a three-year-old, were separated from their respective fathers in 2017, “with the substantial assistance of MVM”, the lawsuit says. The case continues to move through federal court.

In March 2025, a judge dismissed some of the claims on procedural grounds but allowed the case to continue based on the torture, enforced disappearance and inhuman and degrading treatment claims.

Eighteen different companies offered their services to ICE to assist in the “wellness checks” operation, according to a document posted publicly on a government contracting website. But the other companies that vied for the contract lacked “the critical ‘boots on the ground’ child welfare personnel and infrastructure needed to physically locate and conduct wellness checks on children,” the document said. MVM, however, did appear to have the resources ICE was seeking, according to a review of the document.

The contract is supposed to run for one year. The amount ICE is paying MVM is redacted, along with the number of “wellness checks” the agency wants them to perform.

“MVM contractors have ZERO immigration enforcement authority. This partnership, as part of the UAC Safety Verification Initiative, represents ICE’s commitment to protect vulnerable children from sexual abuse and exploitation. The primary focus of this initiative is to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited or abused,” the DHS spokesperson added, using the official term for the program to conduct checks on children who immigrated to the US unaccompanied and have been placed with sponsors.

Last year, the Trump administration began efforts to track down immigrant children who had entered the US alone to request asylum or reunite with family members already in the US. Such children largely arrive at the US-Mexico border and either turn themselves in or are apprehended by border officials.

After an unaccompanied immigrant child enters the US, they are placed under the custody of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR). While their immigration case, which is handled by ICE, plays out, ORR will place the children in shelters, in foster homes or under a sponsor’s care if available. Typically, sponsors, who complete an assessment process and background checks, are the children’s relatives in the US; at times, they are unrelated adults.

In the past year, ICE, in partnership with local law enforcement agencies, has begun to track down those children, many of whom the Trump administration says have gone “missing”, to provide “wellness checks”. But the operations have been criticized by many immigration attorneys and advocates.

“This all seems like a ploy to do two things: one, find either kids or their sponsors to arrest and deport. Or, two, scare children into self-deporting,” said Michael Lukens, the executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, which provides legal representation to immigrant children. “It’s really deplorable. It’s really concerning.”

For years, Trump administration allies pointed to a 2024 homeland security inspector general report that found that ICE was not able to adequately track unaccompanied minors. They used that report to push a narrative that unaccompanied immigrant children have been lost and trafficked, Lukens said.

“Their parents know where they are, their lawyers know where they are, usually the courts know where they are. It’s just ICE doesn’t have their address in a file,” said Lukens. “Those kids were never missing but they’re using it as an excuse to do these ‘wellness checks’.”

The inspector general report suggested understaffing at ICE and deficient cross-agency communication is mostly to blame for the agency’s inability to keep track of the children, rather than actual trafficking.

MVM is a longtime government contractor that now mostly works with federal agencies to transport immigrant children and families between government-run facilities. It was started in the late 1970s by former Secret Service agents and ballooned into a significant government contractor. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that MVM had a secretive contract with the CIA in Iraq for security guards to protect CIA staff.

MVM also has a track record of allegations of abuse with its previous immigration-related contract work. In 2018, MVM was accused of holding immigrant children in a vacant office building for three weeks amid the family separation crisis under the first Trump administration. During the Covid-19 pandemic, MVM detained immigrant children and families in hotels before they were removed from the country. MVM also had the contract to run the ecretive Guantánamo immigration detention center, until it was taken over by another company in 2025. Most recently, last August, the non-profit newsroom Injustice Watch reported that MVM locked an immigrant woman and her baby inside a Chicago hotel for five days.

“We have seen MVM harm children in federal immigration custody in egregious ways for many years now,” said Neha Desai, the managing director of children’s human rights and dignity at the National Center for Youth Law. “It is both deeply disturbing and completely unsurprising that this government has hired MVM to conduct so-called ‘wellness checks’. These checks have already terrorized numerous children and have led to family separation throughout the country.”

“What will come next once MVM is involved will surely be even worse,” Desai added.

Less than 72 hours after a man was arrested for trying to assassinate Donald Trump at the White House, the justice department rushed to court to make an extraordinary filing.

The subject of the emergency was a lawsuit by the National Trust for Historic Preservation seeking to halt the construction of a new White House ballroom. A federal judge ruled earlier this month that construction had to stop, though an appeals court later paused that ruling.

Filled with vitriolic language, the purpose of DoJ’s Monday filing was to make clear that the failed assassination attempt only strengthened the administration’s argument for why a new ballroom was needed. “Saturday’s narrow miss – which marks the third assassination attempt on President Trump since 2024 – confirms what should have already been obvious: presidents need a secure space for large events, that currently does not exist in Washington DC, and this court’s injunction stalling this project cannot defensibly continue, for the sake of the safety of President Trump, future presidents, and their families, cabinets, and staff.”

The episode was one of several this week that underscores how the Trump administration is willing to quickly capitalize on cases of violence to pursue its political goals. The administration deployed a similar approach after the killing of Charlie Kirk last year. In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, the Trump administration pledged to crack down on “antifa” and other leftwing groups, even as the motive for the shooting remained unclear.

This week, following DoJ’s filing in the ballroom case, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, stood at a lectern at justice department headquarters to make another announcement regarding the president’s safety. A grand jury in North Carolina had indicted former FBI director James Comey with threatening Trump.

The charges stemmed from a picture he posted on Instagram last year of sea shells arranged in the beach that said “86 47” (86 is often used as shorthand to get rid of something). The post was deleted and Comey apologized, saying he was not aware that 86 could convey violent intent. After nearly a year of investigating, the justice department chose to unveil the charges in the days after the incident at the White House correspondent’s dinner.

“In a democracy, being critical of a leader does not get you thrown in jail. James Comey’s latest indictment is yet another example of President Trump abusing his power to target his perceived political opponents,” Mike Zamore, the national director of policy and government affairs at the ACLU, said in a statement. “The Trump administration has made it clear time and again: appease the president or you will face the wrath of the federal government.”

The Federal Communications Commission also attempted to use its power to go after Trump’s critics in the wake of the Saturday shooting. On Thursday, two days before the White House correspondent’s dinner attack, ABC host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke saying Melania Trump “had a glow like an expectant widow”.

On Monday, Melania Trump criticized Kimmel, saying his “hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn’t comedy – his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.” Brendan Carr, the Trump ally who leads the Federal Communications Commission, quickly announced it was speeding up a review of eight ABC local broadcasting licenses. Carr has denied it is related to Kimmel’s joke.

“The first amendment and the FCC’s mandate do not permit the agency to use broadcast licenses as weapons to punish broadcasters for constitutionally protected content they air,” Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “The FCC is neither the journalism police nor the humor police.”

It is a 113-million-year-old bone of contention.

After Stuttgart’s museum of natural history bought a fossilised dinosaur skull in 1991, researchers found it was the most complete spinosaurid skull known to date, belonging to a previously unknown genus of the huge meat-eating dinosaurs.

Palaeontologists studying the skull in 1996 dubbed the genus Irritator – reflecting the annoyance they felt when they discovered the snout had been tinkered with – and the particular species challengeri, after Professor Challenger from Arthur Conan Doyle’s dinosaur adventure novel, The Lost World.

But as study after study was published, other interested parties were watching with irritations of their own: experts in Brazil, where the skull is believed to have originated.

According to a Brazilian law passed in 1942, fossils found in the country belong to the state, and, since 1990, specimens can be exported only with a permit and a partnership with a Brazilian scientific institution.

No one knows exactly when Irritator was dug up, or when it left Brazil, so its precise legal status has been a matter of deep concern.

Now, thanks to what has been described as as a major achievement in global restitution, Irritator challengeri is heading home.

A joint declaration by Germany and Brazil issued this month stated: “Both sides value the scientific cooperation in the field of fossil research, with the aim of utilising the expertise and exhibits available in Germany and Brazil for the mutual benefit of both countries.

“In this context, both governments welcome the willingness of the state of Baden-Württemberg and the state museum of natural history in Stuttgart to hand over the Irritator challengeri fossil to Brazil.”

Concerns about the legal ownership of the skull and the ethics of it being housed outside Brazil led to a campaign to repatriate the Irritator fossil. In recent years, an open letter calling for the skull’s repatriation was signed by 263 experts from around the world, while more than 34,000 members of the public signed an online petition.

Prof Aline Ghilardi, a Brazilian palaeontologist who was part of the campaign, welcomed the announcement and said public mobilisation was decisive.

“Its return is an important and positive step, and I hope that the process moves forward swiftly,” she said.

“I also congratulate this progress and see it as a major achievement in the broader context of global restitution efforts. This fossil will be widely celebrated and holds deep scientific, cultural and symbolic importance for Brazil.”

Prof Allysson Pontes Pinheiro, of Cariri regional university in Brazil, agreed.

“The repatriation of Irritator adds to recent returns of fossil material from France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States, and can be seen as a sign of progress toward a more ethical and less colonial science – one that is more closely aligned with local realities and better respects rights, laws, cultures and identities,” he said.

“I believe that this case can set an important precedent for how museums and research institutions around the world handle fossil material with contested origins.”

No date has been set for the return of Irritator and some experts have expressed disappointment that the joint declaration says the fossil will be “handed over” rather than repatriated or returned.

Ghilardi said this was a “a missed opportunity to more explicitly address the issue in terms of restitution”.

Paul Stewens, a legal researcher at Maastricht University who helped organise the open letter, said the removal of specimens from their country of origin for study elsewhere without the involvement of local scientists or institutions was an example of neo-colonial research practices.

“The research that is being done on these specimens, the output, the museum income, all of these things, they don’t stay in the country from which the fossil originated,” he said, adding that fossils are part of the heritage that connects people to where they are from.

In 2023, another fossil initially given the name Ubirajara was returned from Germany to Brazil after a long campaign. Dr Emma Dunne, of Trinity College Dublin, who helped draft the Irritator letter, said there were “many more specimens that should return home, following in the pawprints of Ubirajara and Irritator”.

David Martill, an emeritus professor at the University of Portsmouth, meanwhile, said that while he was “delighted” to see Irritator return to Brazil, he thought it was “a real shame that some Brazilians turned it into a political hot potato and picked on German museums” when there were many Brazilian specimens in other countries, notably the US.

Martill, who has studied the skull, added: “I hope they look after it, as we spent many man hours preparing the specimen and studying it to make it one of the most important scientific dinosaur discoveries of the 1990s.”

Stewens said he thought it unlikely that Irritator’s return would lead to a host of other fossils being sent back to Brazil. But he said he believed the diplomatic efforts involved – and collaborative relationships established – could pave the way for other approaches, such as programmes to help Brazilian scientists study specimens in Germany.

“I think the trailblazing element about this restitution is the element of cooperation between the governments,” he said. “I think it shows that there is a lot of space for non-zero-sum solutions.”

Few political aspirations have proved more futile over the past two decades than running as a Republican for statewide office in California. Yet Steve Hilton – transplanted Brit, erstwhile business entrepreneur, a former Downing Street adviser to David Cameron and a former Fox News host who says he is friends with half of Donald Trump’s cabinet – is having a remarkably good time of it.

With less than six weeks to go before a primary election that has proved to be both dramatic and wildly unpredictable, most polls put Hilton narrowly ahead of a fractured field of Democrats in the race to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor. It is an astonishing turn of events in a state where Democrats enjoy supermajorities in the state legislature and a two-to-one advantage over the Republicans in voter registration.

Hilton and a second Republican polling in the top tier, Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco, have been boosted in part by disarray in the Democratic ranks, where no candidate has emerged as a clear frontrunner in a crowded field and one leading contender, Eric Swalwell, was drummed out of the race and out of politics last month following sexual assault and misconduct allegations. Swallwell has strongly denied the claims.

But Hilton also has the largest number of individual campaign donors and ranks third in fundraising behind the free-spending, self-financing Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer and the Silicon Valley backed centrist Matt Mahan. Some of Mahan’s donors, including Google founder Sergey Brin, are now moving over to him – in part, Hilton says, because of Mahan’s poor polling numbers.

Hilton’s campaign stops tend to be crowded and energetic. He has bucked the conventional wisdom that says California campaigns are fought and won on the airwaves. Instead, he’s visited almost every corner of the state, working his low-key British charm and his knack for a pithy turn of phrase to woo everyone from farmers to suburban moms to Latino small business owners with the argument that one-party rule by the Democrats has been disastrous and it’s time for a dramatic change.

“Each day that goes by, I believe more and more that we can pull this off. There is a majority for change in California,” he told a pumped-up crowd last weekend in Huntington Beach, a surfing town whose local government has itself bucked the Golden State’s liberal reputation with a sharp turn to the Donald Trump-loving right.

In many ways, Hilton is seeking to harness the same political energy as he did when he helped rebrand the Conservative party in its wilderness years two decades ago. Then as now, he dislikes suits and ties, preferring to talk to voters in single-button T-shirts. He has a talent for dressing the hard-right positions of his friends in the Trump administration in the language of common sense and compassion for working people.

Victory in November still seems like a dizzying long shot, but the state Democratic party’s leaders have certainly fretted over scenarios in which they somehow lose control of the richest, most populous US state for the first time since Arnold Schwarzenegger forged a path from Hollywood to the governor’s office in 2003.

Under a Schwarzenegger-era reform, the state no longer picks one Democrat and one Republican to duke it out in the general election but rather holds an “open” primary in which the top two vote-getters advance regardless of party. There’s a slim chance Hilton and Bianco will advance and shut out the Democrats altogether, but it’s not a chance Hilton is betting on.

Rather, he is looking for what he calls a “political revolution” – a watershed moment when Democratic voters dispense with party allegiance in decisive numbers because of the pinch they feel from the state’s high cost of living and poverty rates, its top-three unemployment rate, and the basement ratings it receives for economic opportunity.

Hilton is certainly right to say people are unhappy about these things. According to one respected poll, a majority of Californians think their state is heading in the wrong direction, with inflation and the cost of housing and health care uppermost among their concerns.

Hilton’s Democratic rivals are taking these issues seriously, too, and describe California as being unaffordable and in crisis. But the way Hilton sees it, they have only themselves to blame because it has been their party in charge. At campaign stops, he portrays the last 16 years of state government under the Democrats as bloated, overly interested in taxing small businesses and weighing ordinary working people down with rules and red tape, effectively sacrificing the common good for what he describes with undisguised contempt as a “bottomless money pit” in Sacramento, the state capital.

That message resonates in places like Downey, a workaday Los Angeles suburb sometimes called the “Mexican Beverly Hills” because of its dynamic Latino business class, which saw an 18.8 percentage-point swing away from the Democrats towards Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Attendees at a brunch organized for Hilton in a local shopping mall were thrilled by his promises to abolish a flat annual $800 business tax and his vow to crack down on worker compensation lawsuits that he said were a racket orchestrated by trial lawyers and their political proteges in the Democratic Party.

“Hopefully he can do a Doge with all the bureaucracy and fraud in California,” said one brunch attendee, insurance executive Joe Murillo, referring to the controversial purge of federal employees that the White House’s special appointee, Elon Musk, orchestrated in the opening months of Trump’s second presidential term.

The question, though, is whether such sentiments, and the candidate who champions them, stand a chance of breaking through California’s dauntingly high blue wall in what is expected to be a rough year for Republicans nationally. One significant problem for Hilton is that he has been endorsed by Trump in a state where the president’s approval rating hovers around 25%, roughly 10 points lower than the national average. Newsom’s approval rating, by contrast, stands at about 50%.

Hilton calls himself “a pragmatist, not an ideologue” and points to his experience in coalition government under Cameron’s premiership as proof that he can work well with people whose politics do not align with his. He sees the fact that he gets along with Trump and his cabinet as a potential asset, a way of attracting federal dollars and other forms of cooperation from Washington that, he hopes, will lower the temperature after more than a year of feuding and name-calling between Trump and Newsom.

“My job [as governor] will be to deliver pretty pragmatic things, all focused on making your life easier and better,” he says. “I’m a reasonable person who is very focused on practical changes.”

That self-description is most plausible when Hilton listens sympathetically to plumbers, restaurant owners and real-estate agents describing their day-to-day struggles and life experiences. He talks less now than he did a year ago about California’s failures and how terrible everything is, and more about how much he loves and admires the state’s restless creative energy and wishes only for better political leadership to bring that energy to the fore.

The messaging is reminiscent of Hilton’s work for Cameron when he was instrumental in shaking the Tory party’s austere image and promising a “big society” vision, nodding to the environmental movement by switching the party logo from a torch to a tree, and making sure Cameron and other key figures felt approachable, not distant – what at the time was described as the Tories’ “hug a hoodie” moment.

There were questions even then about how moderate Hilton’s views were – he went on to embrace Boris Johnson’s Brexit campaign – and those questions arise again now, especially when Hilton comes face to face with a more partisan Republican crowd.

At two events immediately following the business brunch in Downey, the first at a conservative evangelical church and the second addressing the Huntington Beach Republican Club at a popular sports bar, Hilton talked about his close friendship with Charlie Kirk, the polarizing Trump loyalist and campus activist who embraced the theory that immigrants are coming to American to “replace” white Christians among other extreme positions before being shot dead in Utah last September.

“He’s with me every step of this journey,” Hilton said of Kirk. “We’re going to save California, and we’re going to do it for Charlie.”

Hilton responded positively to questions from vaccine skeptics, saying he thought it “outrageous” that children needed to be vaccinated as a condition of attending public school and that he was a strong believer in “medical freedom”.

He stirred up both crowds with promises not just of a new politics but of some sort of payback. “It’s over for these people,” he said of California’s Democrats. “It’s absolutely over.” At another point, talking about the Covid pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 – a source of continuing resentment among Trump Republicans who saw face masks and business closures as an affront to their personal freedoms – he said: “We mustn’t let them forget what they did to us.”

When asked by the Guardian who won the 2020 presidential election, Hilton refused to give a straight answer. “I can’t stand that question,” he said. “It’s a game, and I don’t want to play it. I just don’t.”

Instead, he accused California Democrats of making “an enormous number of last-minute changes that have caused huge distrust in the system” in the run-up to the 2020 election – a way of casting his own shade on a race that vote tallies, dozens of court rulings, and the US Congress all say Trump clearly lost to Joe Biden. The changes he was referring to were to California’s mail-in ballot rules in the wake of the Covid pandemic, but reports of attempted cheating that year were rare and came to light largely because they were thwarted by safeguards within the system.

On this and other issues there appears to be little daylight between Hilton and the hard-right Republican leadership in Huntington Beach, which has cried foul about California’s electoral system for years without producing evidence of substantive problems.

At most, election experts say, their complaints have picked up on procedural issues like signature verification and vote counts that can linger weeks past election day and used them as a pretext to accuse Democrats of foul play. In the name of ballot security Huntington Beach’s Republicans have now sponsored an initiative that, if approved, would require voters to produce formal identification and prove their citizenship at the polls.

Critics say the initiative is an onerous solution to a non-existent problem and would depress turnout, especially among Latinos and other minorities who may not have passports and are fearful of falling into the clutches of Trump’s immigration and customs enforcement police. Hilton, though, has leapt on it as an opportunity to boost Republican voter enthusiasm in November, and with it his chances in the governor’s race.

Huntington Beach is where Hilton launched his gubernatorial campaign in April 2025, and he has taken several other strategic leaves from the local leadership’s playbook, including the idea of running a slate of candidates who can help lift each other up.

Hilton has an ideological partner he calls his “running mate”, former state senator (and former Democrat) Gloria Romero, who is vying to become lieutenant governor. He has also formed an alliance with Huntington Beach’s former city attorney, Michael Gates, who is running for state attorney general. Hilton calls this informal lineup a “golden ticket”, and he has ambitions to use it not just to elevate himself but to try to break the Democratic supermajorities in the California assembly and senate.

The slate’s existence may not alter the grim math for Republicans statewide, but the promise alone of a new approach and fresh leadership is energizing the party faithful and giving them real hope after decades in the wilderness. Tony Strickland, the tip of the spear of the Trump revolution in Huntington Beach now serving in the state legislature, said of Hilton: “We’re one leader away from prosperity here in California.”

The room erupted in chants of “Tony! Tony!” as he spoke these words, and the chants soon switched to “Steve! Steve! Steve!” as Hilton made his entrance, high-fiving right and left. Outside, the faces of Republicans turned away from the event pressed up against the bar’s plate glass windows.

“It’s like there’s a strip club opening in there or something,” a man in a Los Angeles Lakers basketball cap remarked. In surf-crazy, Trump-loving Huntington Beach, that passes as the highest of compliments.