PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Former Haitian President Michel Martelly returned to Haiti on Wednesday, making a rare visit to his homeland.
Martelly has not said why he traveled to Haiti, although local media have reported that he is expected to testify as part of the ongoing investigation into the July 2021 killing of former President Jovenel Moïse.
He has not been accused or charged in the case, which last led Martelly to visit Haiti roughly three years ago.
Several dozen supporters greeted Martelly, who served as president from 2011 to 2016 and lives in the United States.
He did not answer questions as he made his way through the crowd. Supporters played music, held pictures of him and shouted, “The father is back!” and “Long live Martelly!”
Martelly had chosen Moïse as his successor; both are members of the Tèt Kale Party, or PHTK. It has played a prominent role in Haitian politics but did not register a candidate for the upcoming general elections, which have not been held for more than a decade.
Martelly, a musician known as “Sweet Micky,” has long faced corruption accusations.
In November 2022, Canada sanctioned Martelly, and in August 2024, the U.S. followed suit, accusing him of facilitating drug trafficking and sponsoring multiple gangs.
“It is unacceptable for Haitian political and economic elites to plunder Haiti’s future,” the U.S. Department of State said at the time.
In December 2025, the Council of the European Union announced a travel ban and an asset freeze against Haitian politicians including Martelly, whom it accused of arming and financing gangs to promote his political agenda, control territory and defend his personal and economic interests.
Haiti’s Anti-Corruption Unit also has accused Martelly of misrepresenting assets.
Martelly has not publicly addressed the allegations.
Martelly's arrival comes as Haiti continues to struggle with deepening poverty and a surge in gang violence.
A supporter holds an outdated campaign flyer for former Haitian President Michel Martelly, who lives in the U.S., as he arrives home in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, July 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
Former Haitian President Michel Martelly, center, who lives in the U.S., walks with supporters who came to welcome him home in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, July 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
President Donald Trump says Immigration and Customs Enforcementshould continue traffic stops after two deadly shootings within a week, seeming to contradict a new policy to halt them. To remove criminals from the country, “we CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” the president wrote on social media.
In Florida on Tuesday, a third man in roughly a week died during an encounter with immigration officers. The 28-year-old was killed after he was hit by a tractor-trailer while running from immigration and other federal officers, authorities said.
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DHS said Monday that an officer, “fearing for public safety,” shot and killed Durán Guerrero while officers were watching the home of someone they believed was in the U.S. illegally and facing a final order of removal from the country. But some of Durán Guerrero’s neighbors said the Biddeford, Maine, neighborhood tends to be fairly quiet on workday mornings.
“There wasn’t any threat to the public until they started shooting at a car in the street at 7 in the morning,” said Mary Hayes, who lives nearby.
Hayes and others described the community as a working class neighborhood where Monday mornings typically consist of residents rising to go to work. They disputed the characterization that the public was facing a threat at the time of the shooting.
“We’re a working town, we’re a mill town, we’re the heart of Maine,” Hayes said.
Minnesota authorities are suing the Trump administration for not cooperating with their investigation into the January arrest of a U.S. citizen by immigration agents.
Officials in Ramsey County said the Department of Homeland Security failed for months share information about the arrest of ChongLy “Scott” Thao, a Hmong American who said federal agents broke into his St. Paul home and forced him out in sub-freezing weather.
“I don’t think there’s a question that there was a law broken,” Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher said at a Wednesday news conference announcing the lawsuit.
Officials at the news conference said DHS had never responded to a formal request for information, despite granting the agency multiple extensions.
“We all stand before you today hearing nothing. We do not have any information,” said Hao Nguyen, the county attorney leading the case.
Durán Guerrero’s partner, Karolina Rojas, the mother of their toddler daughter, shared a photo of the three of them hugging and smiling together on Instagram.
Advocacy groups helping the family have cited the Instagram account as belonging to Rojas and it appears consistent with other publicly available information about her.
Rojas captioned the photo with: “I love you, my darling, my life. I love you. I have no words for this pain. You were my everything. Please watch over me. Help me find the strength to carry on. Stay with me always. Don’t leave me alone. I’m begging you, my love.”
Three other men who were also in the van when Lorenzo Araujo Salgado was fatally shot last week are being held at an immigration detention center in Texas.
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office told The Associated Press it has signed off on special visa certifications that describe the men as witnesses in local prosecutors’ ongoing investigation into the shooting. The visa applications would still need approval from federal immigration officials.
Attorneys for Daniel Tirado Pantoja, Jose Rojas and Victor Salgado, the victim’s brother, say their clients have disputed the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the July 7 shooting. The temporary visas, known as U visas, are intended to protect from deportation witnesses who are assisting law enforcement.
In May, a federal court temporarily blocked ICE from detaining immigrants with pending U visas.
Maine’s governor said Wednesday that ICE should be scrapped as a federal agency, if it can’t be fixed in the wake of a fatal shooting in her state.
Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, said in a letter to the state’s congressional delegation that Congress must act to “require ICE to respect the rule of law and honor our collective security.”
Mills had criticized ICE before, including in January after a surge of enforcement activity in Maine that she said was marred by “lawless, dangerous conduct” by the agency. She said Wednesday the agency must be fixed “before more families are robbed of a loved one.”
She added: “ICE needs to be fundamentally reformed, and if not, then it is time to abolish it.”
“We need DHS to allow independent authorities to investigate,” Whitmire told CNN on Wednesday. “The jurisdiction is federal. They control the evidence. We’re asking them to release that to the Texas Rangers.”
Lorenzo Araujo Salgado, who had no criminal record and had lived in the U.S. for 35 years, was shot last week while driving his construction crew to a job site in Houston. His death sparked protests in Houston and demands for an independent investigation from Democrats and Salgado Araujo’s family.
On Tuesday, Houston Police Chief J. Noe Diaz, Jr. formally requested that the Texas Department of Public Safety’s investigative agency conduct an independent and transparent probe.
Mayor Whitmire also told CNN the U.S. Department of Homeland Security should pause ICE vehicle stops for 90 days to review its policies.
In a statement, he also questioned why the ICE officers involved in the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero weren’t wearing body cameras. LaFountain pointed out that his city’s police officers have been equipped with body cameras for nearly a decade.
“The fact that ICE is swimming in billions of taxpayer dollars and can’t perform a basic function like properly equipping their people is a severe indictment,” LaFountain said. “Corrective action is required immediately.”
LaFountain added that the city is offering mental health services to Durán Guerrero’s family and all residents affected by the shooting.
In response to questions about President Trump’s Wednesday morning social media post, Mullin said in a statement that the department’s “#1 goal” is to keep officers safe and get criminals off the streets.
The department didn’t respond to specific questions about whether ICE officers are now able to do traffic stops but Mullin’s statement said people in the country illegally would be “arrested and deported wherever they are.”
“If you are here illegally, LEAVE NOW,” said Mullin. “We remind illegal aliens attempting to evade arrest is dangerous.”
Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national, had illegally entered the U.S. on Sept. 1, 2023, through the southern border, the Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday.
He was killed Monday in Biddesford, Maine, a coastal city roughly 15 miles (24 kilometers) southwest of Portland.
Sen. Angus King said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told him Monday that ICE officers were in Biddeford to serve an arrest warrant but that it was not for the person who was shot.
The Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, said agents were surveilling an address for a person with a final order of removal from the country.
When ICE tried to stop a vehicle driven by someone coming from that address, the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon,” the department said.
At least four of those deaths involved people in vehicles, including the one last week in Houston, a trend so troubling that U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Tuesday that she had urged Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin “to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”
John Sandweg, who was acting director at ICE, which is part of DHS, during President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration, estimated recently that there have been roughly 18 traffic stop shootings during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Photos showed bullet holes in Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s car windshield, but the officers involved in the shooting didn’t have body cameras, leaving many questions. Among them are how close the officer was to the vehicle when shooting, whether officers told Durán Guerrero to stop and why ICE believes he had put the public in danger.
Border czar Tom Homan told reporters Tuesday the investigation needs to play out and that officers will be held accountable if they’re found to have acted inappropriately or illegally.
Maine’s attorney general’s office, which said it is working with federal agencies to investigate, said initial statements suggest the driver was trying to flee in the direction of the officer, whose name hasn’t been released and who was placed on leave.
Hundreds of people in Maine protested Tuesday over the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national. Advocacy groups said Guerrero, who had a wife and a young daughter, was authorized to work in the United States.
DHS said Monday that an officer, “fearing for public safety,” shot and killed Durán Guerrero while officers were watching the home of someone they believed was in the U.S. illegally and facing a final order of removal from the country. It said in a post on X that when ICE tried to stop a car driven by someone who came from the home, the person attempted to flee in the vehicle and the officer fired.
In a scathing post on X, outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the shooting a targeted killing “at the hands of the U.S. government.”
As the committee convened Wednesday for a confirmation hearing, the late South Carolina Republican’s seat at the rostrum was also marked with a vase of white roses.
Graham had been set to chair the panel in the next Congress. He died over the weekend of a tear in his aorta.
On Tuesday, Graham’s sister, Darline Graham, was sworn in to serve out the remaining months of his term, which expires in January. South Carolina Republicans are standing up a special primary election to pick a new nominee for this fall’s midterms.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is expected to face bipartisan scrutiny as he seeks the chance to serve out the duration of Trump’s term.
Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney, has run the department on an interim basis since April, when Pam Bondi was fired after struggling to bring successful cases against Trump’s political foes.
Since taking the reins at the Justice Department, Blanche has accelerated investigations into Trump foes, functioned as the public face of a maligned fund meant to compensate the president’s allies and alarmed press freedom advocates with an aggressive pursuit of news media leaks.
Jay Clayton, President Trump’s pick to head the nation’s intelligence agencies, will testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, weeks after Trump abruptly delayed his nomination.
Republicans and even some Democrats have been eager to quickly confirm Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, as they’ve expressed concerns about Trump’s interim appointee for the intelligence post, Bill Pulte. Pulte, who has been in the job since June 19, is a former housing official with no known intelligence experience and who used his previous administration perch to target perceived adversaries of the president.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, a Republican, expressed frustration when Trump delayed Clayton’s nomination in a social media post last month, allowing Pulte to take office. Cotton said then that Clayton had been instructed not to appear at a scheduled confirmation hearing, but he rescheduled the hearing three weeks later, with apparent approval from the White House.
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Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will confront questions Wednesday about his brief but turbulent tenure atop the Justice Department during a Senate confirmation hearing that will test President Donald Trump’s grip on Republican lawmakers whose support the nominee will need for the job.
Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney, has run the department on an interim basis since April, during which time he’s accelerated investigations into Trump foes, functioned as the public face of a maligned fund meant to compensate the Republican president’s allies and alarmed press freedom advocates with an aggressive pursuit of news media leaks.
Those actions will receive fresh scrutiny at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing as Blanche testifies for the opportunity to serve out the duration of Trump’s term.
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President Donald Trump speaks as he meets with Iraq's Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
President Donald Trump speaks as he meets with Iraq's Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
