EXCLUSIVE: A Biden-appointed federal judge could decide Wednesday morning that a plane carrying illegal immigrants convicted of serious crimes to South Sudan has to return. 

The plane is carrying eight men – all of whom convicted of crimes ranging from homicide to robbery, according to details exclusively provided by the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS unveiled details of the crimes after U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy threatened to order the return of the migrants at a Wednesday hearing.

"No country on earth wanted to accept [the migrants] because their crimes are so uniquely monstrous and barbaric," Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said at a press conference Wednesday. "These heinous individuals have terrorized American streets for too long."

"While we are fully compliant with the law and court orders, it is absurd for a district judge to try to dictate the foreign policy and national security of the United States of America," McLaughlin said.

INCOMING TRUMP ADMIN, CONGRESS SHOWDOWN LOOMS WITH SOUTH AFRICA OVER SUPPORT FOR RUSSIA, US FOES

Thongxay Nilakout, a Laos citizen who was convicted of first-degree murder and robbery and was sentenced to life behind bars, is also on the flight. He was arrested in January by ICE. Mexican citizen Jesus Munoz-Gutierrez is convicted of second-degree murder, and was taken into ICE custody earlier this month.

Dian Peter Domach of South Sudan is convicted of a DUI, "possession of burglar’s tools and possession of defaced firearm; sentenced to 18 months confinement" and "robbery and possession of a firearm; sentenced to 8 years confinement." He was arrested by ICE earlier this month.

TRUMP ADMIN MAKES NEW MOVE TO BRING SOUTH AFRICAN REFUGEES TO US AS PRESIDENT BLASTS NATION'S RULERS AGAIN

Two Burmese citizens, Kyaw Mya and Nyo Myint, are also headed to the African nation on the flight. Mya is convicted of "Lascivious Acts with a Child-Victim less than 12 years of age." He was sentenced to 10 years behind bars, but he was paroled after four years. Myint is convicted of "first-degree sexual assault involving a victim mentally and physically incapable of resisting" and faced 12 years behind bars. He was also charged with "aggravated assault-nonfamily strongarm." Both were arrested by ICE in February.

Vietnamese citizen Tuan Thanh Phan, a citizen of Vietnam is convicted of "first-degree murder and second-degree assault."

DHS officials noted at Wednesday's briefing that the home countries of each of the illegal immigrants refused to take them back to their home soil. The migrants remain in DHS custody, the officials added.

Murphy, a Biden appointee, ruled on Tuesday night that the Trump administration must maintain custody of the migrants in case he rules their removal unlawful, and they must be transferred back to the U.S.

TRUMP ADMIN ENDS DEPORTATION PROTECTIONS FOR MASSIVE NUMBER OF VENEZUELANS AMID ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN

Lawyers for illegal immigrants from Myanmar, also called Burma, and Vietnam accused the Trump administration of illegally deporting their clients to third-party countries. They argue the deportations violated Murphy's previous court order mandating that migrants be granted "meaningful opportunity" to establish that sending them to a third country would make them unsafe.

Murphy previously found that any plans to deport people to Libya without notice would "clearly" violate his ruling regarding third-party deportations, which also applies to people who have otherwise exhausted their legal appeals.

A 24-year-old Venezuelan man who allegedly posed as an Ohio high school student competed on the boys' swimming team and participated in state sectionals.

Perrysburg Schools confirmed on Tuesday that Anthony Emmanuel Labrador Sierra was on the Perrysburg High School swim team and the junior varsity soccer team. He competed in the 50- and 100-yard freestyle events of the Ohio High School Athletics Association (OHSAA) Fremont B Sectional back in February.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM

A stat sheet from the event listed him as "Tony Labrador" and a junior. He recorded a time of 29.10 in the 50-yard freestyle, finishing in 11th place and ahead of a fellow Perrysburg swimmer. He finished in 11th place in the 100-yard freestyle with a time of 1:07.35.

Fox News Digital reached out to the OHSAA for comment.

Labrador Sierra was enrolled at Perrysburg High School under the name and age of a 16-year-old unaccompanied minor on Jan. 11, 2024, in accordance with federal and state requirements for enrolling students experiencing homelessness or without a legal guardian, the school said in a statement.

After a preliminary investigation, a fraud case was established and handed over to the department’s detectives for further investigation.

VENEZUELAN MAN ARRESTED AFTER POSING AS TEEN TO ENROLL IN OHIO HIGH SCHOOL

The man was charged with forgery and is being held on $50,000 bond. Perrysburg police said officials were contacted by Perrysburg Local Schools on Monday about possible fraudulent activity. Detectives worked with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and it was discovered that Labrador Sierra was a 24-year-old from Venezuela.

Investigators also learned Labrador Sierra used fraudulent documents to enroll in Perrysburg Schools and was posing as a 16-year-old student.

Between Jan. 11, 2024 and May 14, 2025, the school said Labrador Sierra obtained documentation and support, further complicating the situation. For instance, he obtained a state-issued driver’s license, social security number and Temporary Protective Status (TPS) from U.S. Immigration.

The school also said Labrador Sierra completed an application for a visa with help from Advocating Opportunities, which provides free legal assistance. The Wood County Juvenile Court granted guardianship of Labrador Sierra to a Perrysburg family.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told Fox News they have located Labrador Sierra's information under a different spelling of his name. They added that Labrador Sierra is a visa overstay who first came to the U.S. in 2019. DHS also confirmed Labrador has received TPS.

Labrador Sierra denied the allegation on May 15, the schools said. He was ultimately arrested during a traffic stop this week. 

"What’s most heartbreaking is how many responded in good faith," Perrysburg School said. "Staff and local families offered support to someone they believed was a vulnerable teen. Their compassion reflects the best of our community. Though trust was violated, we remain proud of those who chose to help."

Labrador Sierra is set for a court hearing on May 29.

Fox News’ Greg Wehner and Bill Melugin contributed to this report.

Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.

Researchers published a massive database of more than 2 billion Discord messages that they say they scraped using Discord’s public API. The data was pulled from 3,167 servers and covers posts made between 2015 and 2024, the entire time Discord has been active. 

Though the researchers claim they’ve anonymized the data, it’s hard to imagine anyone is comfortable with almost a decade of their Discord messages sitting in a public JSON file online. Separately, a different programmer released a Discord tool called "Searchcord" based on a different data set that shows non-anonymized chat histories.

These two separate events have created some panic in some Discord communities, with server moderators and users worrying about their privacy.

A team of 15 researchers at the University of Finance Minas Gerais in Brazil conducted the scrape as part of a research project. The team explained the how and why of the project in a paper titled Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015 - 2024), which they say was created so that other teams of researchers could have a database of online discussions to use when studying mental health and politics or training bots.

“Throughout every step of our data collection process, we prioritized adherence to ethical standards,” they wrote in a section called ‘Ethical Concerns.’ “Precautions were taken to collect data responsibly. All data was sourced from groups that are explicitly considered public according to Discord’s terms of use, which every user agrees to upon signing up. The data was anonymized, and the methodology was detailed to promote reproducibility and transparency.” That may be the case, but Discord is designed to be a series of chatrooms which are not universally searchable, and which in their design feel far less public than, say, tweeting something or posting it to Reddit.

The amount of data is massive. “This paper introduces the most extensive Discord dataset available to date, comprising 2,052,206,308 messages from 4,735,057 unique users across 3,167 servers—approximately 10% of the servers listed in Discord’s Discovery tab.” 

The researchers have published the database online as a series of JSON files. Within the database, one JSON represents a single Discord server and all of the messages that were contained therein. An uncompressed sample version of the data is 6.2GB and unfurls into a 108GB database. The complete database is 118GB compressed and likely unfurls into a database several orders of magnitude larger.

The researchers said they created the dataset so that other researchers could study bots, politics, and mental health. “Our dataset enables researchers to explore the impact of digital platforms on political discourse, the propagation of misinformation, and the development of effective moderation and regulation strategies tailored to such environments,” it said in a section near the end. 

They also said the database could be of help “identifying patterns of at-risk behavior and explore [sic] critical questions such as the prevalence of harm behaviors or supportive interactions” and “facilitate the creation of domain-specific chatbots.”

The way that the Brazilian researchers scraped these messages differs from the way that a tool we reported on last year did something similar. In 2024, a service called Spy.pet scraped Discord servers en masse by placing bots into specific servers which then archived the messages. This allowed the creators of Spy.pet to target specific servers and to archive the messages within servers that were not public. It also did not anonymize the messages in any way. Days after 404 Media broke the Spy.pet story, Discord banned accounts associated with the service. The Brazilian researchers say that they scraped the messages using Discord’s API.

Discord servers are user generated and can be set to public or private and newcomers can find the public servers using Discord’s “Discovery” feature. In their paper, the researchers said they used this discovery feature to map every public Discord server, discovering a total of 31,673 as of November 17, 2024. Then they selected 10 percent of those servers to scrape at random.

The researchers accomplished this using Discord’s own public API to put in calls for all the data on the servers. Bots are popular on Discord and users stand them up for a variety of reasons including moderating channels, playing music, and rolling dice. User-designed bots are a ubiquitous part of the Discord experience and the company offers its public API, in part, to make the bots easy to launch and maintain. 

In their paper, the researchers insist that the project was conducted in the bounds of Discord’s API policies. They said that before publication, they replaced usernames with generated pseudonyms, hashed and truncated user and message IDs, and removed other identifying features entirely. “All data collection adhered strictly to Discord’s API guidelines, and anonymization techniques were applied to ensure compliance with privacy standards,” the paper said.

The paper also pointed out that all these messages were scraped from public spaces. “All data was sourced from groups that are explicitly considered public according to Discord’s terms of use, which every user agrees to upon signing up.”

It should be noted, however, that almost no one reads end-user license agreements and many of Discord’s users are children and teenagers. Discord is, first and foremost, a platform for gamers to organize communities and it’s not plausible that a 15 year old looking for a Fortnite meme server ever thought their dumb jokes about Tomato Town would end up in a public database five years later.

Even with the pains taken to anonymize the data, the scrape appears to be against Discord’s Terms of Service. The Discord Developer policy, which covers the use of its API, is clear. “Do not mine or scrape any data, content, or information available on or through Discord services,” it says. Some form of this prohibition against scraping has been in place since at least 2020.

Discord did not return 404 Media’s request for comment on this issue.

• Eight sitting members of Congress have died since November 2022.
• Every single one of them was a Democrat.
• The party has been wrestling with age and gerontocracy for years.

In the last two and a half years, eight sitting members of the House or Senate have died in office. Every time, it's been a Democrat.

Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, died on Wednesday at 75, after a battle with esophageal cancer.

He's the third House Democrat to die in the last three months. If Democrats had gained a narrow 1 or 2-seat majority in 2024, they would have lost it by now.

The streak of Democratic deaths could just be something of a coincidence. After all, there are plenty of elderly and diminished Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including former Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

But Democrats do tend to be older than Republicans, on average. A report from FiscalNote found that in the last Congress, the average House Democrat was six years older than the average House Republican, while the gap was seven years in he upper chamber.

There are some potential structural reasons for this as well, including the seniority system, which Democrats tend to employ more than Republicans.

The deaths are just another data point in a long-running conversation that's been raging within the Democratic Party for years about age and gerontocracy, which culminated last year in President Joe Biden's decision to drop out of the presidential race after a disastrous debate performance.

Since then, Democrats in particular have been taking age more seriously, including when it comes to who's serving in important committee positions. Connolly notably beat back a challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York in December for the Oversight position he's now vacated.

Here's the full list of Democratic lawmakers who have died in office since November 2022:

• Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia
• Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona
• Rep. Sylvester Turner of Texas
• Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey
• Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas
• Rep. Donald Payne of New Jersey
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California
• Rep. Donald McEachin of Virginia

• Palisade, Colorado, has become one of my favorite towns after moving to Denver four years ago.
• It's home to striking nature and more than 30 wineries.
• I've visited a handful of times, and still haven't explored all the town has to offer.

I thought I'd have to head to California's Napa Valley for wine and cross the Utah state border for canyons. For peaches, I assumed I'd have to make my way South to somewhere like Georgia.

Then, I discovered Palisade, Colorado. The small town four hours west of Denver has become one of my favorite Colorado towns after living in the state for four years.

While it has all the outdoor activities I love — hiking, camping, biking, and rafting — it also stands out for its wineries, vineyards, and farms.

Palisade is home to something I don't find everywhere in Colorado — vineyards

Most of my weekends in Colorado are spent camping. I'll head west from my home in Denver, searching for mountains, dispersed campsites, and glorious hikes.

Thankfully, the state is full of options. While living in Colorado, I've explored dozens of mountain towns, visited new national parks, and stumbled upon historic sites like former mining towns.

Being in the mountains never gets old, but finding new activities keeps camping trips from feeling repetitive.

So, when I crave an experience other than shopping on Main Street and hiking up a mountain, I head to Palisade for wine.

The small Colorado town is known as the state's wine country. It's home to over 30 wineries, and the region's desert climate creates an ideal environment for growing grapes.

When it comes to the wine itself, Palisade doesn't specialize in just one variety. Instead, you'll find everything from rosé to cabernet franc and riesling.

I've visited the town a few times, and my favorite way to explore is on a bike. Some lodges, campsites, and businesses offer daily bike rentals, which means I can check off a handful of wineries in a day. Other tour operators have shuttles, horse-drawn carriages, and limos that take visitors wine hopping across the town.

Regardless of how you get to each winery, most have breathtaking views of grape vines with Colorado's Grand Mesa, the largest flat-top mountain, as the backdrop. It's a view that's hard to beat.

Beyond wineries, Palisade has accessible nature

Sure, wine is the town's main appeal, but that just scratches the surface of how I spend a weekend in Palisade.

Surrounding the small town is stunning nature. The area is more arid than the nearby Rocky Mountains, which means the terrain includes canyon systems, plateaus, and rusty red stone. In some hiking areas, you'll find wild horses, and in others, you'll find canyons overlooking the Colorado River.

During hot summer months, paddleboarding and rafting are popular activities.

There's also plenty of camping. While there are a couple of RV resorts and state parks with amenity-filled campsites, the region also has primitive camping around the Grand Mesa.

Palisade is a hidden gem

While plenty of people in Colorado have heard of Palisade, when I step outside my Denver bubble, I've learned it's a hidden gem — one I'm still exploring since I haven't discovered all the town has to offer.

While I've stopped by small farm stands to pick up fresh fruit and jams, I haven't picked peaches yet. Palisade is one of Colorado's top peach producers, and during harvest seasons, nearby farms will welcome visitors to their orchards for peach picking.

I'm also itching to return for the town's annual bluegrass festival with national artists and local musicians.

There are also restaurants, breweries, distilleries, and vineyards I've eyed from past trips.

So, while there are plenty of small Colorado towns I've yet to visit, I'm always willing to return to Palisade and shake up the traditional weekend camping trip.

• I drove three hours to visit one of the last-remaining KFC buffets in the world.
• The $13 meal included chicken, side dishes, desserts, and a few items not on the regular menu.
• I was pleasantly surprised by the meal, but wished this location offered mac and cheese as a side.

During an eight-hour drive from northern Delaware to Charlotte, North Carolina, my girlfriend's voice broke my glassy-eyed daze.

"Did that sign say KFC Buffet?" she asked.

My immediate reaction was disbelief, that maybe we'd been driving too long and hallucinated it — but a quick Google search confirmed that the KFC buffet was real. Although I couldn't find much about it online, according to an article from Mashed, they seemed to be most popular in the '80s before fizzling out after a decade or so.

During my research, I also stumbled across a Facebook group called "KFC Buffet Aficionados," where fans of the restaurant answer questions about the buffets and keep a map of all the remaining locations in North America.

There aren't many left in the world, but there is one pretty famous location in Tokyo. Turns out, the nearest one to my house is even closer than the one we originally passed.

So, my girlfriend and I took a three-hour drive to Dunn, North Carolina, to see what a KFC buffet is like.

Inside, the restaurant looked like any other KFC I'd been to.

We arrived tired and hungry on a Saturday night to a mostly empty parking lot. A small blue sign advertised that the location did indeed offer buffet-style dining.

On the inside, it looked no different than any other KFC I'd been to, save the approximately 8-foot-long self-serve buffet set up next to the cashier.

I ordered two buffet dinners at the counter.

I ordered two buffet dinners and was handed back two plastic trays: both complete with a large, three-section Styrofoam plate, a smaller dessert plate, a small soft-drink cup, and a spork.

My total before tax was $26, making the cost of one buffet dinner at this location $13.

The buffet had a nice mix of familiar favorites and special offerings.

The buffet offered much of what you might get at KFC when ordering a family meal: fried or grilled chicken pieces, and some of the signature sides like biscuits, green beans, mashed potatoes, and gravy.

The biggest disappointment was that the buffet didn't have my favorite side dish — mac and cheese.

However, there were also a few items that weren't on the regular menu, like rice and beans, collard greens, and fried okra, to name a few.

What surprised me most was the selection of fried chicken gizzards and livers. These were also offered as a regular menu item at this location, which is something that I hadn't seen at the numerous KFC's I'd been to up north.

The food was pretty good.

For the most part, everything I ate was hot and tasted fresh and flavorful. The chicken was just as crispy as any other piece of KFC chicken I'd had.

My favorite side was the fried okra, which was crunchy but not overcooked.

My girlfriend also insisted I try the fried chicken gizzards and liver. I had never had them before and decidedly did not enjoy eating even the smallest bites of either.

I enjoyed the apple cobbler for dessert.

In my opinion, the crowning item of the evening was the apple cobbler — a gooey mixture of apple chunks, pie crust, and sugar. It was one of a few dessert options like Jell-O, pudding, and fruit.

The cinnamon-apple filling might have been one of the strongest scents from the entire buffet.

Thankfully, it tasted as good as it smelled. I would go as far to say it tasted homemade. Was it worth the three-hour drive, though? Probably not.

I'd recommend stopping at a KFC buffet location.

Overall, this definitely wasn't the worst buffet I'd ever been to, but somehow, it wasn't the best experience I've ever had at KFC, either.

However, this was mostly due to the absence of notable menu items like the mac and cheese. Looking back, though, I could've easily ordered it from the standard menu for an additional charge.

At the end of the day, I was pleasantly surprised by the fresh-tasting, flavorful food, and I'd definitely recommend it to others, especially for the price.

• TikTok Shop employees are bracing for layoffs after the company said it's making personnel changes.
• The company sent an email to e-commerce staffers telling them to work from home today.
• TikTok Shop sales have been slumping amid global tariffs and broader economic uncertainty.

TikTok Shop employees in the US are bracing for layoffs after the company told staffers to work from home Wednesday ahead of "organizational and personnel changes," per a memo viewed by Business Insider.

The moves are expected to impact employees who work in US operations and global key accounts, a team that works with large brands.

The company said it was making the changes after "careful analysis of how to create more efficient operating models for the team's long-term growth," according to the memo, which was sent by e-commerce executive Mu Qing.

Employees began receiving emails that their roles were affected on Wednesday morning.

BI was not able to determine the scale of employees who would be affected by the changes. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bloomberg earlier reported on the memo.

TikTok's US e-commerce business has been off to a rocky start this year, as sales have slumped amid global tariffs and broader economic uncertainty. Employees previously told BI that daily US sales from foreign sellers, many based in China where tariffs skyrocketed in April, contributed to a broader sales drop-off on the platform starting in late March.

TikTok's coming personnel changes follow a round of job cuts in April when it restructured its e-commerce governance and experience team, BI previously reported.

TikTok Shop's growth in the US is a big priority at ByteDance, which sees hundreds of billions in annual sales on its Chinese sister app, Douyin. But even before its more recent sales slump, the US e-commerce business failed to meet many of its performance goals in 2024, company leaders told staffers during a February all-hands.

Over the past year and a half, TikTok has shaken up its leadership structure across the company, giving greater oversight to some Chinese and Singaporean leaders in departments including Shop.

TikTok's US future is up in the air due to a divest-or-ban law that requires ByteDance to give up majority ownership of its US app.

TikTok has until June 19 to find a new owner, though President Donald Trump may extend that deadline. During a recent press appearance, he said he had a warm spot in his heart for TikTok.

Read the full memo sent to e-commerce staffers telling them to stay home ahead of personnel changes:

Over the past month, I have taken the opportunity to learn and evaluate how best to support US business in meeting the opportunities and challenges ahead of us.

We have undergone careful analysis of how to create more efficient operating models for the team's long-term growth and, as a result, will be communicating organizational and personnel changes to the e-Commerce US operations, US operations center, and global key accounts teams beginning early on Wednesday, May 21 (PT).

Our goal is to communicate with employees swiftly and with as much clarity as possible. All updates will be made via your company email, followed by HRBP outreach.

To best facilitate these conversations, it is recommended that you work remotely on Wednesday, May 21.

We appreciate everyone's patience and understanding as we navigate these difficult discussions. We are committed to supporting our teams throughout this transition with as much compassion and support as possible.

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