A Washington, D.C., grandmother who lost her grandson to gun violence delivered a fiery defense of President Donald Trump during a Black History Month celebration Wednesday at the White House.

Forlesia Cook’s grandson, Marty William McMillan Jr., was killed in 2017 at the age of 22. Cook has since spoken publicly about the loss, including testifying before Congress about his killing.

After Trump invited Cook to say a few words at the event, she used the moment to defend him, urging critics to ‘get off the man’s back.’

‘I love him, I don’t want to hear nothing you got to say about that racist stuff,’ she said. ‘And don’t be looking at me on the news, hating on me because I’m standing up for somebody that deserves to be standing for.’

Cook’s voice grew louder as she continued.

‘Get off the man’s back,’ she said. ‘Let him do his job. He’s doing the right thing. Back up off him.’

She ended her remarks by declaring, ‘And grandma said it.’

The East Room crowd erupted in applause and cheers.

Trump appeared to welcome the praise, joking that she should run for public office.

‘Wow, that’s pretty good,’ Trump said. ‘When is she running for office? Forlesia, when are you running for office? You have my endorsement.’

Cook also thanked Trump for calling the National Guard to the capital and praised his tough-on-crime approach.

‘One thing I like about him, he keeps it real, just like grandma,’ she said. ‘I appreciate that because I can trust him.’

The White House event marked the annual celebration of Black History Month.

Trump also addressed the death of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, saying, ‘I wanted to begin by expressing a sadness at the passing of a person who was, I knew very well, Jesse was a piece of work. He was a piece of work, but he was a good man.’

‘I just want to pay my highest respects to Reverend Jesse Jackson,’ Trump added, calling him ‘a real hero’ and saying, ‘he really was special, with lots of personality, grit and street smarts.’

The president also announced that former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Fox News Digital’s Jasmine Baehr contributed to this report.

A South Korean court sentenced former President Yoon Suk Yeol to life in prison Thursday for leading an insurrection after declaring martial law in December 2024.

Yoon was found guilty of abuse of authority and masterminding the insurrection.

Yoon, 65, denied the charges and argued that he had presidential authority to declare martial law and that his action was aimed at sounding the alarm over opposition parties’ obstruction of government.

Prosecutors said in January that Yoon’s ‘unconstitutional and illegal emergency martial law undermined the function of the National Assembly and the Election Commission … actually destroying the liberal democratic constitutional order.’

Yoon’s attempt to impose martial law lasted roughly six hours, sparking mass street protests before parliament quickly voted it down.

Under South Korean law, masterminding an insurrection carries a maximum sentence of death or life imprisonment. Prosecutors hadsought the death penalty.

While courts last imposed a death sentence in 2016, South Korea has not carried out an execution since 1997.

Yoon is expected to appeal the ruling.

Yoon faces eight ongoing trial proceedings and was already given a five-year prison sentence last month in a separate case on charges including obstructing authorities’ attempts to arrest him following his martial law declaration. He has appealed that sentence.

Reuters contributed to this report.

The debate over U.S. missile defense is increasingly focused on space, and defense experts argue that stopping threats in the earliest moments after launch could determine whether the homeland remains protected against Russia and China’s expanding arsenals.

At a policy discussion marking roughly a year since the rollout of the ‘Golden Dome’ homeland defense initiative, former senior defense officials said the United States can no longer rely primarily on deterrence and retaliation to shield the country from missile attacks.

‘I think geography is no longer’ a shield, former Air Force Undersecretary Kari Bingen said during a C-SPAN panel Friday. ‘There are different types of threats that can reach the homeland.’

The Golden Dome initiative stems from a January 2025 executive order signed by President Donald Trump directing the Pentagon to accelerate development of a next-generation homeland missile defense architecture. The order calls for integrating existing ground-based interceptors with advanced tracking networks, new space-based sensors and potentially space-based interceptors capable of detecting and defeating ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missile threats earlier in flight.

Administration officials have framed the effort as a response to rapid modernization by Russia and China. 

Russia has fielded new intercontinental ballistic missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles designed to penetrate missile defenses, while China has expanded its nuclear arsenal and constructed hundreds of new missile silos in recent years. 

Both countries have invested heavily in maneuverable reentry vehicles and countermeasures intended to complicate U.S. interception efforts.

Stopping missiles early

Supporters of a stronger space layer argue that intercepting a missile early in flight — before it can deploy warheads or countermeasures — simplifies the defensive challenge and reduces the strain on systems closer to U.S. territory.

‘It gives the ability to neutralize before they manifest here at home,’ missile defense expert Thomas Karako said, referring to space-enabled capabilities that could track and potentially intercept threats sooner in their trajectory.

Karako said there is ‘a compelling case’ for space-based interceptors ‘not just against nonnuclear attack but even limited nuclear attacks,’ arguing that raising the threshold for adversaries contemplating a strike strengthens deterrence overall.

‘If you raise the threshold for having enough capability to meaningfully invest in enemies … there’s goodness in there,’ he said.

Panelists emphasized that the objective is not absolute protection against thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles, but improving the odds of defeating smaller or more limited attacks, including those that could involve large salvos or advanced countermeasures.

Threats are evolving

Melissa Dalton, a former senior Pentagon official, said missile and drone use has become increasingly normalized in recent conflicts, lowering the perceived threshold for employment.

‘They don’t respect the boundaries,’ Dalton said, noting the growing frequency of missile and drone attacks.

Bingen argued that the U.S. historically leaned heavily on the threat of retaliation to deter attacks but that changing technologies and adversary capabilities require a broader approach.

‘Americans would be surprised how reliant we have been on vulnerability and retaliation,’ she said.

Space and integration challenges

While space-based missile defense once drew skepticism due to cost and technical hurdles, Karako said advances in commercial launch and satellite technology have changed the feasibility calculus.

‘This is not the Soviet Union in the ’80s or the ’90s,’ he said. ‘The technology has evolved quite a bit.’

Still, experts acknowledged that integration — linking sensors, interceptors and command-and-control systems at machine speed — may be the most difficult challenge.

‘We have to remember this is a layered defense system,’ Bingen said. ‘We’re not asking the space layer to do it all.’

Participants also stressed that any major expansion of homeland missile defense will require bipartisan political support to endure through election cycles and shifting budget priorities.

‘If you don’t persuade people what it’s about, it will never be built,’ Karako said.

Officials have floated an aggressive timeline — including a three-year push to stand up initial capabilities — but the Golden Dome is still in early development, with much of the work focused on planning, prototypes and initial contracts. Significant technical and acquisition hurdles remain, particularly for any space-based interceptor layer, which defense officials acknowledge would take years to fully field.

The effort marks a broader shift in how the U.S. approaches homeland defense. Rather than relying mainly on midcourse interceptors and the threat of retaliation, Golden Dome is designed to push defenses earlier in a missile’s flight — and further into space — with the goal of stopping threats before they can deploy countermeasures or overwhelm existing systems.

: This was the kind of prison break officials say could have changed the region, and perhaps even the world, overnight.

Nearly 6,000 ISIS detainees, described by a senior U.S. intelligence official as ‘the worst of the worst,’ were being held in northern Syria as clashes and instability threatened the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the guards responsible for keeping the militants locked away and preventing a feared ISIS resurgence. U.S. officials believed that if the prisons collapsed in the chaos, the consequences would be immediate.

‘If these 6,000 or so got out and returned to the battlefield, that would basically be the instant reconstitution of ISIS,’ the senior intelligence official told Fox News Digital.

In an exclusive interview, the official walked Fox News Digital step by step through the behind-the-scenes operation that moved thousands of ISIS detainees out of Syria and into Iraqi custody, describing a multi-agency scramble that unfolded over weeks, with intelligence warnings, rapid diplomacy and a swift military lift.

The risk, the official explained, had been building for months. In late October, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard began to assess that Syria’s transition could tip into disorder and create the conditions for a catastrophic jailbreak.

The ODNI sent the official to Syria and Iraq at that time to begin early discussions with both the SDF and the Iraqi government about how to remove what the official repeatedly described as the most dangerous detainees before events overtook them.

Those fears sharpened in early January as fighting erupted in Aleppo and began spreading eastward. Time was running out to prevent catastrophe. ‘We saw this severe crisis situation,’ the official said.

According to the source, the ODNI oversaw daily coordination calls across agencies as the situation escalated. The official said Secretary of State Marco Rubio was ‘managing the day to day’ on policy considerations, while the ODNI drove a working group that kept CENTCOM, diplomats and intelligence officials aligned on the urgent question: how to keep nearly 6,000 ISIS fighters from slipping into the fog of war.

The Iraqi government, the official said, understood the stakes. Baghdad had its own reasons to move quickly, fearing that if thousands of detainees escaped, they would spill across the border and revive a threat Iraq still remembers in visceral terms.

The official described Iraq’s motivation bluntly: leaders recognized that a massive breakout could force Iraq back into a ‘2014 ISIS is on our border situation once more.’

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the official said, played a pivotal role in smoothing the diplomatic runway for what would become a major logistical undertaking.

Then came the physical lift. The official credited CENTCOM’s surge of resources to make the plan real on the ground, saying that ‘moving in helicopters’ and other assets enabled detainees to be removed in a compressed timeframe.

‘Thanks to the efforts… moving in helicopters, moving in more resources, and then just logistically making this happen, we were able to get these nearly 6000 out in the course of just a few weeks,’ the official said.

The SDF, he said, had been securing the prisons, but its attention was strained by fighting elsewhere, fueling U.S. fears that a single breach could spiral into a mass escape. Ultimately, detainees were transported into Iraq, where they are now held at a facility near Baghdad International Airport under Iraqi authority.

The next phase, the official said, is focused on identification and accountability. FBI teams are in Iraq enrolling detainees biometrically, the official said, while U.S. and Iraqi officials examine what intelligence can be declassified and used in prosecutions.

‘What they were asking us for, basically, is giving them as much intelligence and information that we have on these individuals,’ the official said. ‘So right now, the priority is on biometrically identifying these individuals.’

The official said the State Department is also pushing countries of origin to take responsibility for their citizens held among the detainees.

‘State Department is doing outreach right now and encouraging all these different countries to come and pick up their fighters,’ he said.

While the transfer focused strictly on ISIS fighters, the senior intelligence official said families held in camps such as al-Hol were not part of the operation, leaving a major unresolved security and humanitarian challenge.

The camps themselves were under separate arrangements, the official said, and responsibility shifted as control on the ground evolved. 

According to the official, the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Syrian government reached an understanding that Damascus would take over the al-Hol camp, which holds thousands of ISIS-affiliated women and children.

‘As you can see from social media, the al-Hol camp is pretty much being emptied out,’ the official said, adding that it ‘appears the Syrian government has decided to let them go free,’ a scenario the official described as deeply troubling for regional security. ‘That is very concerning.’

The fate of the families has long been viewed by counterterrorism officials as one of the most complicated, unresolved elements of the ISIS detention system. Many of the children have grown up in camps after ISIS lost territorial control, and some are now approaching fighting age, raising fears about future radicalization and recruitment.

For now, the official said, intelligence agencies are closely tracking developments after a rapid operation that, in their view, prevented thousands of experienced ISIS militants from reentering the battlefield at once and potentially reigniting the group’s fighting force. 

‘This is a rare good news story coming out of Syria,’ the official concluded.