CBS News
Russian officials say they are fighting off a Ukrainian military incursion in Kursk
Russian officials said Wednesday they were fighting off Ukrainian cross-border raids in a southwestern province for a second day, as Kyiv officials remained quiet about the scope of the operation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin described the incursion into the south-western Kursk region as a “large-scale provocation” and said he will hold a meeting with top defense and security officials to discuss the situation.
“The Kyiv regime has undertaken another large-scale provocation and launched indiscriminate shelling of civilian buildings, residential houses, ambulances with different types of weapons,” Putin said at a meeting with Cabinet officials. He instructed the Cabinet to coordinate assistance to the Kursk region.
ACTING GOVERNOR OF KURSK REGION/Handout via Reuters
The head of the region urged residents to donate blood due to the intense fighting.
“In the last 24 hours, our region has been heroically resisting attacks” by Ukrainian fighters, acting Gov. Alexei Smirnov said on Telegram, adding that all emergency services were on high alert.
If confirmed, the reported battalion-sized cross-border foray would be among Ukraine’s largest since Russia’s full-scale invasion, and unprecedented for its deployment of Ukrainian military units. Kyiv’s aim could be to draw Russian reserves to the area, potentially weakening Moscow’s offensive operations in several parts of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region where Russian forces have increased attacks and are advancing gradually toward operationally significant gains.
But it could risk stretching outmanned Ukrainian troops further along the front line, which is more than 620 miles long. Even if Russia were to commit reserves to stabilize the new front, given its vast manpower and the relatively small number of Ukrainian forces engaged in the operation, it would likely have little long-term impact.
However, the operation could boost Ukrainian morale at a time when Kyiv’s forces are facing relentless Russian attacks and are expected to face more challenges in coming weeks.
Several Ukrainian brigades stationed along the border region said they could not comment. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and General Staff also said they would not comment.
Russian forces have swiftly repelled previous cross-border incursions, but not before they caused damage and embarrassed authorities.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday that up to 300 Ukrainian troops, supported by 11 tanks and more than 20 armored combat vehicles, had crossed into Russia and suffered heavy losses.
It said Wednesday that military and border guard troops “continued to destroy Ukrainian military units in the areas alongside the border in the Kursk region.”
The ministry said Russian forces backed by artillery and warplanes “didn’t allow the enemy to advance deeper into the territory of the Russian Federation.”
It wasn’t possible to verify the Russian claims.
Open-source monitors have also not been able to verify the claims. The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War could not verify whether damaged and abandoned armored vehicles shown in geolocated video 4 miles north of the border west of Lyubimovka in the Kursk region were Ukrainian.
The think tank also cast doubt on video shared by Russian military bloggers claiming to show the aftermath of the Ukrainian raids. Most of the damage shown “appears to be the result of routine Ukrainian shelling and does not indicate that there was ground activity in the area,” it said in its daily report.
Responsibility for previous incursions into Russia’s Belgorod and Bryansk regions has been claimed by two murky groups: the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion, which are made up of Russian citizens and have fought alongside Ukrainian forces.
Disinformation and propaganda have played a central role in the war, now in its third year.
Some Russian war bloggers who have proved knowledgeable about the war said that Ukrainian soldiers were in Kursk.
Rybar, a Telegram channel run by Mikhail Zvinchuk, a retired Russian Defense Ministry press officer, said Ukrainian troops had seized three settlements in the region and continued to fight their way deeper into it.
Another pro-Kremlin military blog, Two Majors, claimed that Ukrainian troops had advanced up to 9 miles into the region.
Neither claim could be independently verified.
The Kursk region’s border with Ukraine is 150 miles long, making it possible for saboteur groups to launch swift incursions and capture some ground before Russia deploys reinforcements.
George Barros, of the Institute for the Study of War, recently told CBS News that Russia is using new tactics — including soldiers on motorcycles — to seize 430 square miles of territory over the past nine months.
But the price Russia is paying to make these advances is very high. According to Barros, the Russians are losing between 25,000 to 30,000 troops per month. By some estimates, Russia has suffered a staggering half-million killed or wounded since the invasion began.
Last week, Ukraine said it had received the bodies of 250 killed soldiers in one of the largest exchanges of remains since Russia invaded.
CBS News
Mass deportation would come with hefty bill, require more manpower, immigration experts say
The mass deportation plan former President Donald Trump has pledged to institute if he’s reelected would come with a hefty price tag.
The American Immigration Council estimated that it could cost $88 billion annually to deport one million people a year. The removal of millions of construction, hospitality and agriculture workers could reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by $1.7 trillion.
Tom Homan, who led U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump administration, said he doesn’t know if the $88 billion a year cost estimate is accurate, but he says mass deportation is necessary.
“What price do you put on national security? Is it worth it?” Homan said.
How deportations work now
60 Minutes recently joined ICE officers in Silver Spring, Maryland, as they located and arrested undocumented immigrants with criminal histories, including assault, robbery, drug and gun convictions. They’d been identified by ICE as threats to public safety.
60 Minutes
They stopped a van and arrested the passenger, a 24-year-old Guatemalan with an assault conviction, who had been ordered deported by a judge five years ago. ICE officers said the driver of the van was also in the country illegally and had been deported once before, but he was let go. Matt Elliston, director of ICE’s Baltimore field office, said the driver didn’t have a criminal record.
“He was picking up his employee to go to work,” Elliston said. “It doesn’t make sense to waste a detention bed on someone like that when we have other felons to go out and get today.”
Elliston said ICE’s mission is targeted enforcement — using immigration law to improve public safety.
“It’s not to just aimlessly arrest anyone we come across,” he said.
It took a team of more than a dozen officers seven hours to arrest six people, and that doesn’t include the many hours spent searching for them.
Are there resources to support mass deportation?
There are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States — about 3% of the population — and Trump has vowed to launch the largest mass deportation program in U.S. history. Homan, who Trump has said would join him if he wins a second term, said he’s unaware of any written mass deportation plan.
“ICE is very good at these operations. This is what they do,” Homan said.
But Elliston doesn’t know how, in Maryland, the agency could find the resources for mass deportation.
60 Minutes
“Just the amount of money that that would cost in order to detain everybody, you know, it [would be] at the Department of Defense level of financing,” he said.
Jason Houser, ICE chief of staff during the first two years of the Biden administration, said it costs $150 a night to detain people like those 60 Minutes saw arrested. The average stay as they await deportation is 46 days. One deportation flight can cost $250,000, and that assumes the home country will accept them. Many, like Cuba and Venezuela, rarely do.
Who would handle mass deportation?
ICE currently has around 6,000 law enforcement officers in its deportation branch. It would require a massive increase in manpower to arrest and deport a million people a year, Houser said.
“You’re talking 100,000 official officers, police officers, detention officers, support staff, management staff,” he said.
Trump adviser Stephen Miller has said staff could come from other government agencies, like the Drug Enforcement Administration, but Houser criticized the idea of taking people from other agencies outside ICE off their set missions.
Immigration enforcement also requires specialized training and language skills that most military and law enforcement officers don’t have.
“It is not an easy swap,” Elliston said. “What I can tell you in, from the Immigration and Nationality Act, immigration law is second to the U.S. tax code in complexity.”
Former President Donald Trump’s pledge to implement mass deportation if he’s reelected has ignited fears of family separations.
Monica Camacho Perez and her family have lived and worked in the United States since coming illegally from Mexico more than 20 years ago. Camacho Perez teaches English as a second language to immigrant adults, and she also works in the public high schools. Her family lives in Baltimore.
“We are a normal family, like anybody else,” she said. “We go to church. We work every day. We pay taxes,” she said.
She’s among the more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children who are protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program known as DACA.
“I’m the only one right now that’s, like, protected, while my parents are not, my brothers are not,” she said. “My brothers have children that are born here. So if they were to get deported, what will happen to their kids?”
Would families be separated if Trump’s reelected?
When asked whether there was a way to carry out mass deportations without separating families, Tom Homan, who led immigration enforcement during the first year-and-a-half of the Trump administration, said, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”
Like Camacho Perez’s nieces and nephews, more than four million U.S.-born children live with an undocumented parent.
60 Minutes
Asked why children should have to leave the country where they were born and raised, Homan said, “Because their parent absolutely entered the country illegally, had a child knowing he was in the country illegally. So he created that crisis.”
During Homan’s time leading ICE – in what became one of the most controversial policies of the Trump administration – at least 5,000 migrant children were forcibly separated from their parents when their parents were arrested at the border and prosecuted for crossing into the U.S. illegally.
Asked about published accounts saying that family separation at the border was his idea, Homan replied: “Not true. I didn’t write the memorandum to separate families. I signed the memo. Why’d I sign the memo? I was hoping to save lives. While you and I are talking right now, a child’s going to die in the border. . . . So we thought, ‘so maybe if we prosecute people, they’ll stop coming.'”
Trump has said Homan would be joining him in the new administration if he wins a second term. Asked if this family separation policy would be re-instituted then, Homan said, “I don’t know of any formal policy where they’re talking about family separations.”
60 Minutes
Asked whether it should be on the table, he replied, “It needs to be considered, absolutely.”
How that would happen given a court settlement reached late last year between the federal government and the American Civil Liberties Union is unclear. Under the settlement, the federal government is barred from separating migrant families at the border for the next eight years if the sole purpose is to prosecute the parents for entering the U.S. illegally.
“I can’t imagine living here without them.”
Back in Baltimore, Camacho Perez said she has given a lot of thought to what she would do if her parents were deported. Even though Baltimore is where she grew up, and she now owns her own home there, she thinks she would go back to Mexico with her parents if they were deported.
“They’re also part of my American dream,” she said. “And I can’t imagine living here without them.”
NEW YORK — Thousands of people, including from other parts of the country, descended on Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday afternoon for former President Donald Trump’s campaign rally.
The NYPD said it had drones over the area, robots, and a helicopter, as well as antiterrorism units outside monitoring the situation to keep everyone safe.
With just nine days to go until Election Day, a new CBS News poll has the two presidential candidates neck and neck, with Vice President Kamala Harris at 50% and Trump at 49% among likely voters. In battleground states, both are polling at 50%.
The focus of the respective campaigns has been on issues, including immigration, the war between Israel and Hamas, and crime.
JD Vance, Elon Musk, Melania Trump spoke
Sunday’s rally marked a detour from the battleground states for Trump. Among those who took the stage before the former president spoke were former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Staten Island activist Scott LoBaido.
“President Trump grew up here. He’s a New Yorker,” Giuliani said. “That’s why people get a little bit annoyed at him. He speaks his mind.”
When Trump entered the arena there was applause, a standing ovation, and everyone started chanting. Every seat appeared to be filled from the floor to the highest sections. In addition to Trump, vice presidential nominee JD Vance, billionaire supporter Elon Musk and Trump’s wife, Melania, all spoke.
Trump supporters revel in former president’s appearance
The former president is from Queens. CBS News New York met supporters from his home borough, but also a couple from Chicago.
“I just love him, and he’s the best. I want the economy to get better,” a woman said.
“We have an influx of migrants, illegal migrants. Our economy is … just go to the grocery store,” a man from Dutchess County added.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman was one of several Long Island representatives who came to the Garden in the Trump motorcade.
“Just look around. This is incredible. We’re in New York City in the middle of, you know, this is liberal … one of the most liberal cities in the country, and it’s amazing,” New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov said.
Vulgar language during the introductions
Before Trump took the stage, there was some vulgar language in the speeches. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who goes by Kill Tony, referred made a crude joke referring to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and made other offensive jokes about Black people and Latinos.
Sid Rosenberg, a radio host that Trump often talks to, called Hillary Clinton a “sick son of a b***,” and referred to migrants as “f—ing illegals.”
David Rem, a childhood friend of Trump’s, called Harris “the antichrist.”
Grant Cardone, a business owner, said Harris “and her pimp handlers will destroy the country.”
