The new head of the federal agency tasked with responding to disasters across the country warned staff in a meeting Friday not to try to impede upcoming changes, saying that “I will run right over you” while also suggesting policy changes that would push more responsibilities to the states.

David Richardson, a former Marine Corps officer who served in Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa, was named acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Thursday just after Cameron Hamilton, who’d been leading the agency, also in an acting role, was fired.

Richardson has been the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for countering weapons of mass destruction. He does not appear to have any experience in managing natural disasters, but in an early morning call with the entire agency staff he said that the agency would stick to its mission and said he’d be the one interpreting any guidance from President Donald Trump.

Prefacing his comments with the words “Now this is the tough part,” Richardson said during the call with staffers across the thousands-strong agency that he understands people can be nervous during times of change. But he had a warning for those who might not like the changes — a group he estimated to be about 20% of any organization.

“Don’t get in my way if you’re those 20% of the people,” he said. “I know all the tricks.”

“Obfuscation. Delay. Undermining. If you’re one of those 20% of the people and you think those tactics and techniques are going to help you, they will not because I will run right over you,” he said. “I will achieve the president’s intent. I am as bent on achieving the president’s intent as I was on making sure that I did my duty when I took my Marines to Iraq.”

New USPS leader could back privatization push

U.S. Postal Service leaders Friday selected David Steiner, a member of FedEx’s board, to be the country’s next postmaster general, a choice that critics fear could expedite the Trump administration’s push to privatize the independent agency.

Steiner, who also served as president and chief executive of Waste Management Inc., is set to take over the post office as it grapples with uncertainty over its future and loses billions of dollars annually. He is expected to start in July after clearing background and ethics checks, agency officials said Friday.

Some Democratic lawmakers and union leaders expressed deep concern over Steiner’s appointment because of his connection to a direct competitor of the Postal Service. Although the postmaster general is selected by the agency’s board and not the White House, President Donald Trump has said that he would consider a major reorganization of the agency in an attempt to reverse its financial fortunes. In February, Trump said that his administration would look at a “form of a merger,” and that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick would help lead the initiative.

Many Democratic lawmakers and union leaders saw the effort as a way for the administration to take control of the agency and try to sell off or outsource major aspects of its services to private companies. Doing so would disproportionately affect rural areas, they said, where it is less profitable for private companies to deliver mail.

Judge orders release of detained Tufts student

A Tufts University student from Turkey was released from a Louisiana immigration detention center Friday, more than six weeks after she was arrested walking on the street of a Boston suburb.

U.S. District Judge William Sessions in Burlington ordered the release of Rumeysa Ozturk pending a final decision on her claim that she’s been illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year that criticized the school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza. A photo provided by her legal team showed her outside, smiling with her attorneys in Louisiana, where the immigration proceedings will continue.

“Despite an 11th hour attempt to delay her freedom by trying to force her to wear an ankle monitor, Rumeysa is now free and is excited to return home, free of monitoring or restriction,” attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said.

Even before her release, Ozturk’s supporters cheered the decision, punctuating an earlier news conference held by her attorneys with chants of “She is free!”

“What we heard from the court today is what we have been saying for weeks, and what courts have continued to repeat up and down through the litigation of this case thus far,” Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, told reporters. “There’s absolutely no evidence that justifies detaining Ozturk for a single day, let alone the six and a half weeks that she has been detained, because she wrote a single op-ed in her student newspaper exercising her First Amendment right to express an opinion.”

Trump terminating 3 on consumer safety panel

President Donald Trump has moved to fire three of the five members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which monitors the safety of products like toys, cribs and electronics, a White House official and the three members confirmed Friday.

It is the latest of the administration’s efforts to purge perceived dissenters from independent agencies that is likely to end up in court. In statements, the three commissioners, all Democrats, asserted their removals were illegal. One had yet to receive formal notice Friday but said he was barred from performing his duties.

The members, Mary T. Boyle, Richard L. Trumka Jr. and Alexander Hoehn-Saric, said in separate statements released Friday that they were targeted for votes they cast to stop the import of poorly made lithium-ion batteries and objecting to staffing cuts.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, defended their dismissals by asserting Friday that Trump had not overstepped his authority because the congressionally created commission operates within the executive branch.

Trump: Biden internet access law ‘racist’

President Donald Trump on Thursday attacked a law signed by President Joe Biden aimed at expanding high-speed internet access, calling the effort “racist” and “totally unconstitutional” and threatening to end it “immediately.”

Trump’s statement was one of the starkest examples yet of his slash-and-burn approach to dismantling the legacy of his immediate predecessor in this term in office. The Digital Equity Act, a little-known effort to improve high-speed internet access in communities with poor access, was tucked into the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed into law early in his presidency.

The act was written to help many different groups, including veterans, older people and disabled and rural communities. But Trump, using the incendiary language that has been a trademark of his political career, denounced the law Thursday for also seeking to improve internet access for ethnic and racial minorities, raging in a social media post that it amounted to providing “woke handouts based on race.”

In reality, the law barely mentions race at all, only stating that racial minorities could be covered by the program while including a nondiscrimination clause — language taken from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

White South Africans win U.S. refugee entry

The Trump administration will welcome more than two dozen white South Africans to the United States as refugees next week, an unusual move because it has suspended most refugee resettlement operations, officials and documents said Friday.

The first Afrikaner refugees are arriving Monday at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press. They are expected to be greeted by a government delegation, including the deputy secretary of state and officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, which has organized their resettlement under its Office for Refugee Resettlement.

The flight will be the first of several in a “much larger-scale relocation effort,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters.

State Department refugee programs have been put on hold since President Donald Trump ordered a review in February. While halting arrivals from Afghanistan, Iraq, most of sub-Saharan Africa and throughout Latin America, Trump also issued an executive order prioritizing the processing of white South Africans who claim racial discrimination in their home country.

Lawsuit seeks release of Venezuela deportees

International human rights organizations on Friday filed a lawsuit with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asking that the commission order El Salvador’s government to release Venezuelans deported from the United States and held in a maximum-security prison.

In March, the U.S. government deported more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants alleged to have ties to the Tren de Aragua gang to El Salvador, paying the Salvadoran government to imprison them.

Since then, they have had no access to lawyers or ability to communicate with their families. Neither the U.S. nor Salvadoran governments have said how the men could eventually regain their freedom.

Pentagon orders DEI book purge

The Pentagon has ordered all military leaders and commands to pull and review all of their library books that address diversity, anti-racism or gender issues by May 21, according to a memo issued to the force on Friday.

It is the broadest and most detailed directive so far on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s campaign to rid the military of diversity and equity programs, policies and instructional materials. And it follows similar efforts to remove hundreds of books from the libraries at the military academies.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the memo, which was signed Friday by Timothy Dill, who is performing the duties of the defense undersecretary for personnel.

Educational materials at the libraries “promoting divisive concepts and gender ideology are incompatible with the Department’s core mission,” the memo states, adding that department leaders must “promptly identify” books that are not compatible with that mission and sequester them by May 21.

By then, the memo says, additional guidance will be provided on how to cull that initial list and determine what should be removed and “determine an appropriate ultimate disposition” for those materials.

Librarian of Congress sacked over DEI claims

President Donald Trump fired the librarian of Congress because she promoted diversity, equity and inclusion, the White House said Friday, making Carla Hayden one of the most high-profile leaders of color to be targeted in the administration’s campaign to suppress discussions about race and gender at America’s cultural institutions.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the administration believed Hayden “did not fit the needs of the American people,” and that her firing resulted from “quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI.”

Leavitt did not offer any evidence of “DEI” pursuits Hayden engaged in. She accused Hayden of allowing “inappropriate books in the library for children.”

The Library of Congress does not lend books to adults or children and as the world’s largest library houses over 34 million books and printed materials.

“We don’t believe that she was serving the interests of the American taxpayer well,” Leavitt added. “So she has been removed from her position, and the president is well within his rights to do that.”

Hayden could not be reached for comment.

— From news services