SEOUL: An American has crossed the heavily fortified border from South Korea into North Korea, the American-led UN Command overseeing the area said Tuesday, amid heightened tensions over North Korea’s nuclear program.
The UN Command tweeted that the US citizen was on a tour to the Korean border village of Panmunjom and crossed the border into the North without authorization.
It said he is currently in North Korean custody and that the UN Command is working with its North Korean counterparts to resolve the incident. It gave no further details on who the person is or why he crossed the border.
North Korea’s state media didn’t immediately report on the border incident.
Cases of Americans or South Koreans defecting to North Korea are rare, though more than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to South Korea to avoid political oppression and economic difficulties at home since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
Panmunjom, located inside the 248-kilometer (154-mile) -long Demilitarized Zone, is jointly overseen by the UN Command and North Korea since its creation at the close of the Korean War. Bloodshed and gunfire have occasionally occurred there, but it has also been a venue for numerous talks and a popular tourist spot.
Known for its blue huts straddling concrete slabs that form a military demarcation line, Panmunjom has drawn visitors on both sides, who want to see what the Cold War’s last frontier looks like. No civilians live at Panmunjom.
Tours to the southern side of the village reportedly drew around 100,000 visitors a year before the pandemic, when South Korea restricted gatherings to slow the spread of COVID-19. The tours fully resumed last year.
In November 2017, North Korean soldiers fired 40 rounds as one of their colleagues raced toward freedom. The soldier was hit five times before he was found beneath a pile of leaves on the southern side of Panmunjom. He survived and is now in South Korea.
The most famous incident at Panmunjom happened in August 1976, when two American army officers were killed by ax-wielding North Korean soldiers. The US officers had been sent out to trim a 40-foot (12-meter) tree that obstructed the view from a checkpoint. The attack prompted Washington to fly nuclear-capable B-52 bombers toward the DMZ to intimidate North Korea.
Panmunjom also is where an armistice that ended the Korean War was signed. That armistice has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty, leaving the Korean Peninsula in a technical state of war. The United States still stations about 28,000 troops in South Korea.
There have been a small number of US soldiers who fled to North Korea during the Cold War, including Charles Jenkins, who deserted his army post in South Korea in 1965 and fled across the DMZ. He appeared in North Korean propaganda films and married a Japanese nursing student who had been abducted by North Korean agents. He died in Japan in 2017.
In recent years, some Americans have been arrested in North Korea after allegedly entering the country from China. They were later convicted of espionage, subversion and other anti-state acts, but were often released after the US sent high-profile missions to secure their freedom.
In May 2018, North Korea released three American detainees – Kim Dong Chul, Tony Kim and Kim Hak Song – who returned to the United Sates on a plane with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, during a short-lived period of warm relations between the longtime adversary nations. Later in 2018, North Korea said it expelled American Bruce Byron Lowrance.
The releases came as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was engaged in nuclear diplomacy with then-President Donald Trump but the high-stakes diplomacy collapsed in 2019 amid wrangling over US-led sanctions on North Korea.
Their freedoms were a striking contrast to the fate of Otto Warmbier, an American university student who died in 2017 days after he was released from North Korea in a coma after 17 months in captivity. Warmbier and other previous American detainees in the North were imprisoned there over a variety of alleged crimes, including subversion, anti-state activities and spying.
The United States, South Korea and others have accused North Korea of using foreign detainees to wrest diplomatic concessions. Some foreigners have said after their release that their declarations of guilt had been coerced while in North Korean custody.
Tuesday’s border crossing happened amid high tensions over North Korea’s barrage of missile tests since the start of last year. The United States earlier Tuesday sent a nuclear-armed submarine to South Korea for the first time in decades as deterrence against North Korea.
An American has crossed into North Korea without authorization and has been detained
https://arab.news/nmdxj
An American has crossed into North Korea without authorization and has been detained
- The UN Command tweeted that the US citizen was on a tour to the Korean border village of Panmunjom and crossed the border into the North without authorization
- North Korea’s state media didn’t immediately report on the border incident
Trump signals interest in easing tensions, but Minneapolis sees little change on the streets
- Immigration enforcement operations and confrontations with activists continued Wednesday in Minneapolis and St. Paul
MINNEAPOLIS: President Donald Trump seemed to signal a willingness to ease tensions in Minneapolis after a second deadly shooting by federal immigration agents, but there was little evidence Wednesday of any significant changes following weeks of harsh rhetoric and clashes with protesters.
The strain was evident when Trump made a leadership change by sending his top border adviser to Minnesota to take charge of the immigration crackdown. That was followed by seemingly conciliatory remarks about the Democratic governor and mayor.
Trump said he and Gov. Tim Walz, whom he criticized for weeks, were on “a similar wavelength” following a phone call. After a conversation with Mayor Jacob Frey, the president praised the discussion and declared that “lots of progress is being made.”
But on city streets, there were few signs of a shift. Immigration enforcement operations and confrontations with activists continued Wednesday in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
A group of protesters blew whistles and pointed out federal officers in a vehicle on a north Minneapolis street. When the officers’ vehicle moved, a small convoy of activists followed in their cars for a few blocks until the officers stopped again.
When Associated Press journalists got out of their car to document the encounter, officers with the federal Bureau of Prisons pushed one of them, threatened them with arrest and told them to get back in their car despite the reporters’ identifying themselves as journalists. Officers from multiple federal agencies have been involved in the enforcement operations.
From their car, the AP journalists saw at least one person being pepper sprayed and one detained, though it was unclear if that person was the target of the operation or a protester. Agents also broke car windows.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is visiting Minnesota, said 16 people were arrested Wednesday on charges of assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement in the state. She said more arrests were expected.
“NOTHING will stop President Trump and this Department of Justice from enforcing the law,” Bondi said in a social media post.
Messages seeking comment were left with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol.
Woman tells agents: ‘They’re good neighbors’
On Wednesday afternoon in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center, half a dozen agents went to a house in a small residential neighborhood.
One agent knocked on the door of the home repeatedly. Another told the AP they were seeking a man who had been twice deported and was convicted of domestic abuse. The agent said the man had run into the home and the agents lacked a judicial warrant to get inside.
Some federal immigration officers have asserted sweeping power to arrest someone considered illegally present or otherwise deportable using an administrative warrant but without a judge’s warrant. The key difference in the two warrants is whether agents can forcibly enter a private property to make an arrest, as they were captured on video doing in Minneapolis earlier this month.
A handful of activists blew whistles at the agents in Brooklyn Center. One agent said: “They’d rather call the police on us than to help us. Go figure.”
As the agents were preparing to leave, a woman called out to them saying, “You need to know they’re good neighbors.”
Kari Rod told the AP that she didn’t know these neighbors well, but they had come to her garage sale, kept their yard clean and waved hello when she drove by. She didn’t believe enforcement agents to be speaking the truth about whom they arrest, including another neighbor whom she said was deported to Laos last summer.
“I don’t trust a single thing they said about who they are,” Rod said. “From my interactions, I know them way better than anyone else does, any one of those federal agents.”
Immigrants are ‘still very worried’
Many immigrant families are still fearful of leaving their homes, and Latino businesses are still closed, said Daniel Hernandez, who owns the Minneapolis grocery store Colonial Market. He also runs a popular Facebook page geared toward informing the Hispanic community in the Twin Cities.
While Colonial Market is open, all but one of the dozen immigrant-run businesses that rented space inside have closed since late December, and none has plans to reopen, Hernandez said.
“The reality is the community is still very worried and afraid,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez referenced Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who helped lead the administration’s crackdown in the Twin Cities and who has reportedly been assigned elsewhere.
Bovino “was removed, but the tactics so far are still the same,” Hernandez said. “Nobody now is trusting the government with those changes.”
The federal enforcement extended to the city’s Ecuadorian consulate, where a federal law enforcement officer tried to enter before being blocked by employees.
Judge warns ICE about not complying with federal orders
In Minnesota federal court, the issue of ICE not complying with court orders came to the fore as Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz said the agency had violated 96 court orders in 74 cases since Jan. 1.
“This list should give pause to anyone — no matter his or her political beliefs — who cares about the rule of law,” he wrote. “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
Schiltz earlier this week ordered ICE’s acting director to personally appear in his courtroom Friday after the agency failed to obey an order to release an Ecuadorian man from detention in Texas. The judge canceled the order after the agency freed the man.
The judge, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, warned ICE that future noncompliance may result in future orders requiring the personal appearances of Acting Director Todd Lyons or other government officials.
ICE didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Veteran visits sidewalk memorial
Elsewhere on Wednesday, Donnie McMillan placed a cardboard sign reading “In remembrance of my angel” at the makeshift memorial where Alex Pretti was shot.
The Vietnam veteran knelt to pay his respects and saluted to honor the nurse whom he said he remembered seeing during his frequent visits to the Veterans Affairs hospital where Pretti worked.
“I feel like I’ve lost an angel right here,” McMillan, 71, said, pointing to the growing sidewalk memorial covered in flowers, candles and signs. “This is not the way we should operate.”
Also Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security said two federal agents involved in Pretti’s death have been on leave since Saturday, when the shooting happened.
US Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat, spoke to journalists one day after a man attacked her during a town hall meeting by squirting a strong-smelling substance on her as she denounced the Trump administration.
“What is unfolding in our state is not accidental. It is part of a coordinated effort to target Black and brown, immigrant and Muslim communities through fear, racial profiling and intimidation,” Omar said. “This administration’s immigration agenda is not about law enforcement — it is about making people feel they do not belong.”
