WASHINGTON — White House border czar Tom Homan said Thursday that the Trump administration will continue to conduct immigration raids at worksites, including farms and hotels, but that criminals will be prioritized.
Speaking to reporters, he clarified U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s policy at worksites after the Department of Homeland Security said this week it was reversing recent guidance that called for a pause on operations at those places.
“The message is clear now that we’re going to continue doing worksite enforcement operations, even on farms and hotels, but based on a prioritized basis. Criminals come first,” Homan said.
The Trump administration is focusing resources on so-called sanctuary cities, he said, because “they knowingly release public safety threats, illegal aliens to the community every day.”
When asked why ICE directed its agents last week to hold off on investigations of farms and hotels, Homan dodged the question saying, “Worksite enforcement operations is an important part of the work we do.”
Homan said in an interview with Fox Business on Thursday that a lot of worksite enforcement operations are “based on criminal information, criminal investigations such as forced labor, such as trafficking and such as … tax fraud and money laundering.”
DHS’ Homeland Security Investigations team paused immigration enforcement actions last week at worksites tied to the agriculture industry including meatpacking plants and fisheries, as well as restaurants and hotels, according to an internal policy memo that was sent by a senior ICE official and obtained by NBC News.
But Tuesday, DHS reversed this guidance, with spokesperson Tricia Mclaughlin saying “there will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts.”
DHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about Homan’s latest remarks.
Los Angeles is among the sanctuary cities where ICE has ramped up its immigration raids, which prompted numerous protests in recent weeks. President Donald Trump deployed National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to respond to these demonstrations, drawing widespread criticism from Democrats.
Vice President JD Vance may visit Los Angeles this week, with a source with knowledge of federal law enforcement operations telling NBC News that planning is underway.
California National Guard units federalized by Trump have been involved in planning for a visit by a high-level federal official, another source said. Vance’s travel plans are not final and subject to change due to the ongoing situation in the Middle East.
“Everything happened so fast. I didn’t expect that. We heard some fighter jets, we saw some air defense systems shooting objects which were probably drones,” he said. “We are all terrified, and we don’t know what to predict, but we don’t want this war.”
As the first explosions were going off, people started sending panicked messages to their relatives abroad.
Azam Jangravi, an Iranian human rights advocate who lives in Canada, showed NBC News the texts she received from her 17-year-old cousin, Donya, in Tehran.
“It’s so frightening,” the girl wrote. “While the call to prayer is being broadcasted, you keep hearing these booms, one after another.”
Like Jangravi, thousands of Iranians abroad have been anxiously trying to reach their relatives back home, but with very little luck. Communications are patchy and increasingly difficult.
According to the site NetBlocks, which monitors internet access worldwide, on Thursday there was a near-total internet blackout in the country as Iranian authorities have shut down the network.
For Jangravi, Iranians are being caught between two warring sides.
“Two governments are fighting on our land,” she said. “In the first days of the war, people were happy because they thought they’d kill Khamenei, but right now they don’t have any hope,” she said referring to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Zohran Mamdani, a candidate in the Democratic primary for the New York City mayoral election, drew pushback from Jewish organizations and political leaders this week after he appeared to defend the slogan “globalize the intifada.”
In an interview with The Bulwark posted Tuesday, Mamdani was asked whether the expression made him uncomfortable. In response, Mamdani said the slogan captured “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He said the U.S. Holocaust Museum had used the word “intifada” in Arabic-language descriptions of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against Nazi Germany.
Mamdani, a progressive New York State Assemblyman who has forcefully criticized the Israeli government, also addressed the rise in antisemitism since the Oct. 7 terror attack and the war in Gaza, saying anti-Jewish prejudice was “a real issue in our city” and one that the next mayor should focus on “tackling.” He added that he believes the city’s community safety offices should increase funding for anti-hate crime measures.
In a post on X on Wednesday, the Washington-based U.S. Holocaust Museum sharply condemned Mamdani’s remarks: “Exploiting the Museum and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to sanitize ‘globalize the intifada’ is outrageous and especially offensive to survivors. Since 1987 Jews have been attacked and murdered under its banner. All leaders must condemn its use and the abuse of history.”
The U.S. Holocaust Museum did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how it had translated the Warsaw Uprising into Arabic.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, decried the phrase on X as an “explicit incitement to violence.” Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who is Jewish, said in a statement that the term “intifada” is “well understood to refer to the violence terror attacks against innocent Israeli civilians that occurred during the First and Second Intifadas.”
“If Mr. Mamdani is unwilling to heed the request of major Jewish organizations to condemn this unquestionably antisemitic phrase,” Goldman added, “then he is unfit to lead a city with 1.3 million Jews — the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.”
Mamdani has also faced criticism from some of the other candidates in the crowded Democratic primary field — including the frontrunner, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo’s polling advantage has narrowed in recent weeks as Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, built momentum and nabbed a key endorsement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
In a statement, Cuomo called on all the contenders in the race to “denounce” Mamdani’s comments and invoked recent violent attacks on Jewish people nationwide.
“At a time when we are seeing antisemitism on the rise and in fact witnessing once again violence against Jews resulting in their deaths in Washington, D.C. or their burning in Denver — we know all too well that words matter,” Cuomo said in part, referring to the killings of two Israeli Embassy employees and an attack on Israeli hostage advocates in Boulder. “They fuel hate. They fuel murder.”
The war in Gaza and the spike in antisemitism have loomed large over New York City’s mayoral primary. Cuomo, 67, casts himself as a fierce defender of Israel and pitches himself to Jewish residents and ideological moderates as the obvious choice in the race. Mamdani, who has characterized Israel’s conduct in Gaza as “genocide,” gained traction partly thanks to enthusiastic support from the city’s progressives.
Mamdani, speaking to reporters at a press event in Harlem on Wednesday, addressed the outcry over his interview with The Bulwark and the ensuing pushback, saying in part that “it pains me to be called an antisemite.”
“I’ve said at every opportunity that there is no room for antisemitism in this city, in this country. I’ve said that because that is something I personally believe,” Mamdani said.
He broke down crying as he described the vitriol he has received as he seeks to become the first Muslim mayor of New York City.
“I get messages that say: ‘The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.’ I get threats on my life, on the people that I love,” Mamdani said, eyes welling up with tears.
New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary is on June 24. The scandal-plagued incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, won election as a Democrat in 2021, but he is not participating in the party’s nominating contest. He is reportedly petitioning to run on two independent ballot lines: “EndAntiSemitism” and “Safe&Affordable.”
President Donald Trump has extended the deadline for TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the short-form video app to an American owner by another 90 days.
On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order granting a third extension for the Chinese company to sell its platform so it can continue to operate in the United States.
“I’ve just signed the Executive Order extending the Deadline for the TikTok closing for 90 days (September 17, 2025). Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump said on Truth Social.
While aboard Air Force One on Wednesday morning, Trump said he believed Chinese President Xi Jinping would be amenable toward a deal selling the wildly popular app. Trump said he believed Xi would have to sign off on a deal if a buyer comes forward. ByteDance is based in Beijing.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that the administration wanted to ensure Americans could continue to access TikTok.
“As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure,” Leavitt said.
TikTok has 170 million users in the U.S. and support for a ban has declined, according to Pew Research Center. A law banning TikTok initially passed under the Biden Administration over national security concerns, which led the app to briefly go offline ahead of Trump’s inauguration earlier this year.
However, once Trump signaled he planned to keep the app running in the U.S., TikTok resumed functioning.
TikTok has denied that it posed any security concerns to the United States and said American data is not stored in China. After the TikTok ban passed last year, American users began flocking to Chinese social media app RedNote claiming they were indifferent to China accessing their data. Since TikTok was given an extension in the United States, it appears users have returned to the platform and are using RedNote less.
Once in office, Trump signed an extension of the deadline to sell the app, giving ByteDance 75 days to find a buyer. That extension ended on April 5. Ahead of the April 5 deadline, some potential TikTok suitors expressed interest in purchasing the app. Amazon made a last-minute bid to buy TikTok. Others who expressed interest included Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who joined billionaire investor Frank McCourt’s bid; artificial intelligence search engine startup Perplexity AI; and Steven Mnuchin, treasury secretary in the first Trump administration.
Top Trump officials were confident the app would sell but after sweeping tariffs were placed on China, no deal was made. Trump then gave the app another 90 days, which was set to expire on Thursday.
Under the law, ByteDance must sell TikTok to a U.S.-based buyer. ByteDance previously said it would not sell TikTok and has been quiet on whether it has decided to make a deal.
A spokesperson for TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The position to keep TikTok in the United States is an about face from Trump’s first term, during which he signed an executive order banning it. That ban was later overturned by the courts.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the Biden era law banning the app unless it is sold to an American owner.
For 19-year-old Emerson Colindres, it was supposed to be a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.It turned out to be a trap.He never returned home.
Colindres, who came to the United States with his family more than a decade ago to escape the violence in their native Honduras, was detained by ICE on June 4, just days after the talented student and soccer player graduated high school in Cincinnati. Colindres, whose teammates said was one of the greatest players they met on the field, dreamed of continuing his sports career and hoped to attend a university. He did not have a criminal record, according to the Butler County Sheriff’s Office.
In the span of two weeks, Colindres went from celebrating his graduation to being detained by ICE to then being deported to a country where he has not lived since he was 8 years old.
“Sadly, he’s not the only one. I think there are a lot of Emersons in the same situation right now,” Bryan Williams, Colindres’ coach at the Cincy Galaxy soccer club, said ahead of the young man’s deportation. “They’re all the same story, someone who was here doing everything they were asked, trying to make a better life for themselves and their family, and now they’re being detained somewhere.”
Ada Bell Baquedano-Amador, in Cheviot, Ohio, says she and her son were fleeing violence in their native Honduras.Albert Cesare / The Enquirer via USA Today Network
While President Donald Trump has long promised to enact mass deportations, the administration initially said it would focus on criminals and bad actors who were in the country illegally.
But as pressure to increase deportations has grown, young people without criminal records — including teens like Colindres who have lived in the U.S. since they were children — have been caught up in immigration enforcement.
Colindres’ arrest did not go unnoticed.
Protests erupted in the Cincinnati area and outside the detention center in Butler County, Ohio, where Colindres was, for a time, being held. His coach, teachers, classmates and teammates — all called for the release of a beloved teenager who they said was unfairly ripped away from their tight-knit community.
On Wednesday, Colindres was deported.
“It’s devastating,” Johanna Froelicher, a middle school teacher who had Colindres as a student, told NBC News. “But we aren’t giving up on him.”
Coach Bryan Williams with Emerson Colindres.Courtesy Bryan Williams
Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, told NBC News “we are delivering on President Trump’s and the American people’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens to make America safe.”
McLaughlin said that during the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency, 75% of immigrants arrested had convictions or pending charges. According to reporting from Reuters, the top charges making up 39% of that total were traffic offenses or immigration-related crimes.
A senior spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security told NBC News that immigrants arrested during routine check-ins, “had executable final orders of removal by an immigration judge and had not complied with that order. If you are in the country illegally and a judge has ordered you to be removed, that is precisely what will happen.”
After he was arrested, Colindres was spirited out to the Butler County jail, where Sheriff Richard Jones said about 450 immigrant detainees were being held after the sheriff’s office agreed to partner with the Trump administration.
On June 17, Colindres was taken from the jail and “none of us, including his family or legal team, have been informed where he was taken,” Froelicher said ahead of his deportation.
Jones said that Colindres never had any legal issues, and that he was given due process on his ability to stay in the U.S. through his immigration case. “He had a court order from a judge to be deported, and he was deported,” he said.
Emerson Colindres has lived in the U.S. since he was 8 years old.Courtesy Bryan Williams
Williams said he was shocked by the turn of events.
“These are your friends and neighbors,” Williams said. “They make your community what it is, and then one day they’re just gone.”
Colindres arrived in the U.S. in 2014 with his mother and sister at a time when many Central American families were fleeing gang violence and extreme poverty in their home countries.
“In Honduras, families have no security,” Colindres’ mother, Ada Bell Baquedano Amador, said in Spanish. “It’s a very complicated situation.”
Seemingly safe in the U.S., her family filed for asylum and settled in Cincinnati. And while they waited for their immigration case to play out, they started rebuilding their lives.
Colindres was a gifted student and “and did amazing academically,” said Froelicher, the middle school teacher who is now a family friend and supporter.
When he wasn’t hitting the books, Colindres was on the soccer pitch and quickly became a star player at a local soccer club. “He’s continued to be beloved by anyone who came in contact with him,” Froelicher said.
Baquedano Amador said she is so grateful to have Colindres as her son.
“As a mom, sometimes I don’t even have words for how much I thank God for Emerson,” she said. “I’m so proud of him.”
The family’s hopes for a future in the U.S. took a hit after an immigration judge denied their asylum application and in 2023 they were given a final order of removal, Baquedano Amador said.
Colindres aspired to continue playing soccer and attend university.Courtesy Bryan Williams
During the Biden administration, immigration officials were ordered to exercise discretion on a case-by-case basis and to prioritize deportation for immigrants with criminal convictions who were a threat to national or public safety.
So instead of immediate deportation, Baquedano Amador was given an ankle monitor and ordered to check in with ICE.
When Colindres came of age, he too was given a schedule to check in with ICE and told he too would soon have to don an ankle monitor, his mother said.
Williams said to boost the morale of his star player, he started going with Colindres to his ICE check-in appointments. And June 4, he also brought along his wife and son.
But Colindres was not allowed to return home that day, in a pattern seen around the nation of immigrants showing up for what were once routine appointments and being taken into ICE custody for deportation.
“They took him out of the building in handcuffs,” Williams said. “My son got to see him and give him a hug and tell him he loved him. But one of his good friends was in handcuffs being taken away and he doesn’t know if he’s ever going to see him again.”
McLaughlin said in a statement that Colindres had a final order of removal from 2023 and that “if you are in the country illegally and a judge has ordered you to be removed, that is precisely what will happen.”
Froelicher said Colindres and his family are not the kind of migrants the Trump administration should be targeting.
“He and his family have literally done every single thing that they have been asked,” Froelicher said. “They have complied with everything because they’re just such good people. They truly want to be here and they wanted to do things the right way.”
“This is not just about policy,” Froelicher added. “This is about human lives. These are real people with dreams and aspirations.”
Colindres’ soccer teammates said they can’t picture celebrating their graduations without him.
“He is one of my closest friends,” said 18-year-old Alejandro Pepole, who said he has known Colindres for about 10 years. “Emerson has always been a very funny guy. I never saw him in a bad mood. Every time we hung out on or off the field, he was always uplifting people’s moods and he always had a smile on his face. He was overall just a very good person and what he’s going through right now just isn’t right.”
Pepole said Colindres was an inspiration on the soccer field.
Colindres, he said, “can just do everything as a player. He wins us games. He’s like the main goal scorer. He controls the game. And he’s just an overall good team leader as well.”
And Colindres was ambitious, his friends said.
“He had a dream to play at the next level in soccer and eventually play professionally,” Preston Robinson, 18, said. “You could tell by the amount of effort he put in and how good he was, it was definitely possible for him. We were trying to help him get to the next level for soccer, no matter what it took.”
Robinson said he was shocked when Colindres was arrested.
“He was going there expecting to just have a check-in, like he was supposed to be doing, and then they took him away,” he said. “It was almost like he got trapped, which just doesn’t seem fair.”
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices makes recommendations on how to use the nation’s vaccines, setting a schedule for children’s vaccines, as well as advice for adult shots. Last week, Kennedy abruptly dismissed the existing 17-member expert panel and handpicked eight replacements, including several anti-vaccine voices.
The agenda for the new committee’s first meeting, posted Wednesday, shows it will be shorter than expected. Discussion of Covid shots will open the session, but the agenda lists no vote on that. Instead, the committee will vote on fall flu vaccinations, on RSV vaccinations for pregnant women and children and on the use of a preservative named thimerosal that’s in a subset of flu shots.
It’s not clear who wrote the agenda. No committee chairperson has been named and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not comment.
Committee won’t take up HPV or meningococcal vaccines
Missing from the agenda are some heavily researched vaccine policy proposals the advisers were supposed to consider this month, including shots against HPV and meningococcal bacteria, said Dr. Susan Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Instead, the committee is talking about subjects “which are settled science,” she said.
“Every American should be asking themselves how and why did we get here, where leaders are promoting their own agenda instead of protecting our people and our communities,” she said. She worried it’s “part of a purposeful agenda to insert dangerous and harmful and unnecessary fear regarding vaccines into the process.”
The committee makes recommendations on how vaccines that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration should be used. The recommendations traditionally go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director. Historically, nearly all are accepted and then used by insurance companies in deciding what vaccines to cover.
But the CDC has no director and the committee’s recommendations have been going to Kennedy.
Thimerosal is a longtime target of anti-vaccine activists
Thimerosal was added to certain vaccines in the early 20th century to make them safer and more accessible by preventing bacterial contamination in multi-dose vials. It’s a tiny amount, but because it’s a form of mercury, it began raising questions in the 1990s.
Kennedy — a leading voice in an anti-vaccine movement before he became President Donald Trump’s health secretary — has long held there was a tie between thimerosal and autism, and also accused the government of hiding the danger.
Study after study has found no evidence that thimerosal causes autism. But since 2001, all vaccines manufactured for the U.S. market and routinely recommended for children 6 years or younger have contained no thimerosal or only trace amounts, with the exception of inactivated influenza vaccine.
Thimerosal now only appears in multidose flu shot vials, not the single-shot packaging of most of today’s flu shots.
Targeting thimerosal would likely force manufacturers to switch to single-dose vials, which would make the shots “more expensive, less available and more feared,” said Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Doctors’ groups have opposed Kennedy’s vaccine moves
Last week, 30 organizations called on insurers to continue paying for Covid vaccines for pregnant women after Kennedy said the shots would no longer be routinely recommended for that group.
Doctors’ groups also opposed Kennedy’s changes to the vaccine committee. The new members he picked include a scientist who researched mRNA vaccine technology and became a conservative darling for his criticisms of Covid vaccines, a top critic of pandemic-era lockdowns and a leader of a group that has been widely considered to be a source of vaccine misinformation.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has long put out its own immunization recommendations. In recent decades it has matched what the government recommended. But asked if they might soon diverge, depending on potential changes in the government’s vaccination recommendations, Kressly said; “Nothing’s off the table.”
“We will do whatever is necessary to make sure that every child in every community gets the vaccines that they deserve to stay healthy and safe,” she said.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The Stanley Cup is a little banged up, thanks to the Florida Panthers’ celebration of back-to-back titles.
The bowl of the famous trophy is cracked and the bottom is dented. Not for the first time and likely not the last.
The Panthers won their second consecutive championship on home ice Tuesday night, beating Edmonton in six games. The team, following decades of tradition, partied with the Cup into the wee hours and kept the revelry going in Fort Lauderdale well into Wednesday afternoon.
A spokesperson for the Hockey Hall of Fame said the keepers of the Cup are taking the appropriate steps and plan to have it repaired by the celebration parade on Sunday. Made of silver and a nickel alloy, the 37-pound Cup is relatively malleable.
Sam Reinhart #13 of the Florida Panthers lifts the cup in the locker room during their team celebration on Tuesday in Sunrise, Florida.Eliot J. Schechter / NHLI via Getty Images
Damage is nothing new for the 131-year-old silver chalice that has been submerged in pools and the Atlantic Ocean and mishandled by players, coaches and staff for more than a century.
Just this decade alone, the Tampa Bay Lightning dropped the Cup during their boat parade in 2021 and the Colorado Avalanche dented it on the ice the night they won the following year.
Daughter of Charleston Church Pastor Reflects on 2015 Shooting
04:07
J.J. Spaun Reveals He Didn’t Look at Scoreboard During US Open
06:04
Breyers Recalls Rocky Road Ice Cream Over Packaging Misprint
00:27
At Home Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, 26 Stores Set to Close
00:24
Survivors Reflect on Charleston Church Shooting 10 Years Later
04:54
Video captures the moment an Iranian rocket hit Soroka Hospital in Beersheba in southern Israel, forcing an evacuation of patients and spurring a search for survivors. Israel’s defense minister calls it a war crime while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vows a fierce response. Iran says it was aiming for a military sight near the hospital. NBC’s Richard Engel reports for TODAY.June 19, 2025
UP NEXT
Buffalo Bills’ Dion Dawkins Shows off Cornhole Skills on TODAY!
04:42
Trump Extends TikTok’s Sale Deadline for Third Time
00:22
How Beauty Brand Megababe Tackles Taboo Body Issues
05:44
Home Camera Captures Pet Dog Go Face-to-Face with Black Bear
00:25
Anne Burrell, Chef and Food Network Star, Dies at 55
03:19
Florida Panthers Win Stanley Cup for Second Year in a Row
00:52
NYC Mayoral Candidate Brad Lander Arrested at Immigration Court
00:29
Here’s How to Get Tickets to TODAY’s First-Ever Fan Fest!
01:10
Could the Rise of Artificial Intelligence Soon Threaten Your Job?
04:03
Karen Read Jurors Ask Judge About Issue of a Possible Hung Jury
04:31
Kraft Heinz, General Mills to Remove All Artificial Dyes in Products
02:39
Federal Reserve Interest Rate Decision June 2025: What to Expect
01:51
Girl Scouts Rescued After Floodwaters Surrounded Their Cabin
02:40
Striking Images Show Iran Military Bases After Israeli Attack
An anti-Iranian hacking group with possible ties to Israel announced an attack on one of Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges on Wednesday, destroying nearly $90 million and threatening to expose the platform’s source code.
A group known as Gonjeshke Darande, or “Predatory Sparrow,” claimed the attack, making it the group’s second operation in two days. On Tuesday the group claimed to have destroyed data at Iran’s state-owned Bank Sepah amid the increasing hostilities and missile attacks between Israel and Iran.
Wednesday’s attack targeted Nobitex, one of Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. The platform allegedly helps the Iranian government avoid sanctions and finance illicit operations around the world, the hackers claimed in a message posted to its social media channels early Wednesday.
Nobitex’s website was unavailable Wednesday. Messages sent to the company’s support channel on Telegram were not returned. Gonjeshke Darande did not respond to requests for comment.
Nobitex said in a post on X that it had pulled its website and app offline as it reviewed “unauthorized access” to its systems.
Gonjeshke Darande is an established hacking group with a history of sophisticated cyberattacks targeting Iran. A 2021 operation claimed by the group caused widespread gas station outages, while a 2022 attack targeting an Iranian steel mill caused a large fire and tangible, offline damage.
Israel has never formally acknowledged that it is behind the group, although Israeli media has widely reported Gonjeshke Darande as “Israel-linked.”
Wednesday’s attack started in the early hours of the morning when funds were moved to hacker-controlled wallets denouncing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), according to blockchain analysis firm TRM Labs, which pegged the total theft at about $90 million across multiple types of cryptocurrencies.
The way the hacker-controlled wallets were created suggests the hackers would not be able to access the stolen money, meaning that the hackers “effectively burned the funds in order to send Nobitex a political message,” blockchain analysis firm Elliptic said in a blog post.
Elliptic’s post shared evidence that Nobitex had sent and received funds to cryptocurrency wallets controlled by groups hostile to Israel, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Yemen’s Houthis.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Angus King had raised concerns about Nobitex’s role in enabling Iranian sanctions evasion in a May 2024 letter to top Biden administration officials, citing Reuters reporting from 2022.
Andrew Fierman, head of national security intelligence with Chainalysis, confirmed in an email to Reuters that the value of the attack was roughly $90 million and that it was most likely geopolitically motivated, given that the money was burned.
Chainalysis has “previously seen IRGC-affiliated ransomware actors leveraging Nobitex to cash out proceeds, and other IRGC proxy groups leveraging the platform,” Fierman said.
OKLAHOMA CITY — 6501 S. Meridian Ave. is not the type of place where a championship parade would be expected to kick off.
Twenty minutes southwest of downtown Oklahoma City, along a little-used road just outside the city’s international airport, a chain-link fence separates a parking lot with a few dozen spaces from an airplane hangar and a small runway.
Yet should the Thunder win an NBA championship Thursday night in Game 6 of the NBA Finals in Indianapolis, the celebration that ensues across Oklahoma will symbolically, and logistically, start here, where every Thunder road trip ends and the city’s embrace of the team begins.
The first time Devin Newsom drove to South Meridian to stand at the chain-link fence, it was 2012, when the Thunder, who had relocated from Seattle to Oklahoma City only four years earlier, were in the midst of a breakout playoff run that enthralled their new home. A Thunder employee at the time, Newsom wanted to celebrate a critical playoff win and asked friends who also worked for the team when the plane carrying coaches and players home from Dallas would land. He spread the word, and when the Thunder stepped off their charter jet well after midnight, they did so to cheers.
A young fan holds up a photo of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander at a Western Conference playoff game against the Memphis Grizzlies in Oklahoma City on April 20.William Purnell / Getty Images
Newsom has been organizing “airport welcomes,” as they are called, ever since.
“What it really comes down to,” Newsom said, “is coming together as a community to support something bigger than us.”
Now it is not uncommon to see several hundred people waiting at the fence alongside Newsom, who also livestreams the arrivals to Thunder fans living abroad, who watch as players approach the fence to sign autographs and slap hands. On May 27, after a gritty win in Minnesota during the Western Conference finals, several dozen Thunder fans even endured through a thunderstorm and a two-hour delay that pushed back Oklahoma City’s arrival until 3 a.m. to welcome their team home.
“And it was a weekday,” Thunder wing Ajay Mitchell said. “So I was like, man, they’re going to wake up and go to work right after that.”
Thunder guard Cason Wallace, referring to his college team’s large, passionate fan base, said: “Coming from Kentucky, we had fans waiting on us. But it wasn’t 3 in the morning.”
Cities have rallied behind their teams since sports began, yet in Oklahoma City, what is atypical is the degree to which that relationship is not one-sided. Fans, city officials and the team itself are intertwined more closely than perhaps any other NBA market. Fans show up for the Thunder in uncommon ways — during late nights at the airport, yes, but also at the ballot box, where a 2023 measure to use public money to help fund a new Thunder arena scheduled to open in 2028 passed with 71% of the vote.
The team has returned the embrace.
Sam Presti, the team’s top basketball executive since 2007, “may be the only GM in America who texts with the mayor,” the mayor himself, David Holt, said with a laugh in his office, which is decorated with a framed Thunder jersey. It hangs to the left of the desk where, this week, Holt signed an agreement that will keep the team in Oklahoma City through 2053 and could extend up to 15 additional years.
Holt said Presti asked him in 2020 to record a video to explain the city’s racial-justice efforts to players amid national protests as the team was entering the delayed NBA playoffs held near Orlando, Florida. And a year earlier, Holt had used Presti’s direct line to make a request of his own. One year into his term, he was making plans to become the city’s first mayor to walk in its LGBTQ Pride parade. He wanted to ask whether Presti would show support and walk in the parade, too, and Presti agreed.
“Where else would that even mean anything?” Holt said. “Like a sports team, who cares? But in this context here, in our unique situation, it was just as important that the Thunder did that as it was that the mayor did that, and for us to do it together kind of communicated everybody is doing this. I say that to say that they’re a cultural institution in the city that I think we, if we want something to receive credibility, we will think about including the Thunder in that conversation. Whereas I think in a lot of markets, professional sports teams are just another entertainment option.”
The Thunder are Oklahoma’s only big-league option — the scarcity has taken a region divided by college allegiances and coalesced that fandom behind one franchise. Winning, of course, has only deepened the support; since 2010, the Thunder own the NBA’s second-best record, and this trip to the Finals is the team’s second in that span.
But to Newsom, the team’s choices to take part in the community and the circumstances of its arrival have also stoked a loyalty that has kept the region exceptionally possessive of its team.
New Thunder employees, players included, are required to go eight blocks north of the Thunder’s home arena and tour the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum. There, they learn about the 1995 bombing that destroyed a federal building and killed 168 people and the rebuilding that followed.
“The Thunder would not be in Oklahoma City without the response that took place on April 19, 1995, and without the sacrifices and the efforts that were made to rebuild this city,” Presti said last fall at a banquet for the memorial.
“This is why we ask all of our new players and all of our new staff to go through the museum and memorial to come in contact with the stories about the recovery, the efforts, the optimism and the compassion to connect the dots as to why people are so passionate about Oklahoma City.”
On the bombing’s 25th anniversary, the team debuted jerseys designed as a nod to the memorial.
“You want to know the history,” reserve Jaylin Williams said. “When you see how connected we are with the community in basketball, that’s how connected the community was when the tragedy happened here.”
Before 1995, mentioning you were from Oklahoma City to a London cabdriver would have evoked a blank stare, Holt said. After the bombing, the city evoked a different association.
“Though we are rightfully proud of our response to that, it’s not really something you can build a brand on,” Holt said. “We were always looking for something else to be identified with.”
The city got that opportunity in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina left New Orleans unable to host the NBA’s Hornets, and the team temporarily relocated to Oklahoma City. Team employees moved into the Crimson Park Apartments a half-hour south of the city, in Norman, and team operations were run out of a Sheraton hotel a block from the arena in what became a trial run to gauge the city’s readiness to support a major-league team.
It became real in 2008, when an Oklahoma-based ownership group bought the Seattle SuperSonics and moved the team. The relocation devastated fans in Washington and left new Thunder fans resolving not to squander their opportunity to be elevated to what Holt called “a new tier” of city.
“We grew up with the team, because the team was brand new,” Newsom said. “We checked all the Seattle SuperSonics stuff at the door. That was way back; that had nothing to do with us. We don’t claim any other history, we don’t claim their first title, their only title. We don’t care about any of that. What we care about is what has happened since the team came to Oklahoma and how we’ve come together to support an amazing, amazing franchise.”
That support can be distilled to a number. Of the proposed $900 million price tag to build the team’s new arena, $50 million came from the team’s owners, but the vast majority will come from taxpayers. A sales tax passed in 2019 will contribute $70 million, and the remaining $700 million and more will be funded by a 1-cent sales tax that will run for six years.
Getting voters to commit public money to stadium construction is rare, said J.C. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University in Georgia and expert on stadium subsidies. Like Bradbury, other economists have been skeptical of the price tag and economic benefits of a new stadium, but Holt — who can quickly rattle off statistics that there are 18 markets larger than Oklahoma City, the country’s 42nd-largest metro area, that do not have NBA teams — said it was critical for the city to become a partner with the team.
The shine from being part of the NBA has led Bricktown, a neighborhood just blocks east of the current arena, to fill with restaurants and new hotels. He described his shock at once seeing a Thunder jersey while he was touring the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.
“When I grew up here in the ’80s and ’90s, it felt like growing up in an alternate universe outside of American pop culture,” Holt said. “So now to be a place where things happen, a place that people are interested in, a place that people are just flat-out aware of, because, as I often say, like you, you are not very likely to live in, invest in or visit a city you’ve never heard of. So just the fact that billions of people will pay a passing glance to what happens over the next two weeks in the NBA Finals has a very material benefit for us. …
“As a mayor, I’m selling our city constantly, and I can guarantee you, especially after these Finals, every conversation for the next five years will start with Thunder. And you may think that’s superficial, but it absolutely ends up having a real-world positive economic impact in OKC, and we have seen it.”
Fans and players say that bond is not superficial. When free agent Carmelo Anthony signed with the team in 2017, fans waited at the fence wearing hoodies with their long sleeves cut off, a nod to Anthony’s signature sartorial look.
And whether the Thunder win or lose Game 6 in Indianapolis, Newsom will still track the tail number of the team’s charter flight, send out the estimated arrival time on social media and wait at the fence at South Meridian for the season’s final “airport welcome.” It is expected to be the biggest yet.
