Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back on Wednesday to pick up where we left off. Here are some of the day’s developments:
A coalition of 20 states led by Democratic administrations filed two lawsuits aiming to stop the Trump administration from forcing them to cooperate with immigration enforcement in order to receive billions of dollars in transportation, counterterrorism and emergency preparedness grant funding. The lawsuits contend that the US Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security are unlawfully pressuring states to adopt the Republican president’s strict immigration policies by leveraging federal funding.
A federal grand jury indicted Wisconsin judge Hannah C Dugan of the Milwaukee county circuit court, who was arrested last month on allegations that she helped an undocumented immigrant avoid federal authorities. Dugan faces charges of concealing a person from arrest and obstructing official proceedings, The New York Times reports.
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN ambassador, said that he hopes Trump’s trip to the Middle East will prove fruitful for the ongoing, devastating war between Israel and Hamas. “We hope that President Trump’s visit to the region will allow to achieve such a ceasefire, and to build a political horizon of freedom for the Palestinian people, security for all and shared prosperity for our region,” Mansour said on Tuesday during a UN Security Council meeting on the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Trump announced that the US will lift all sanctions on Syria “to give them a chance at greatness”. He said the sanctions had served their purpose at the time, but now it was time for the country to move forward, a move welcomed by the UN and Syrian government.
Trump threatened Iran to take his “olive branch” and reach a nuclear deal or face “maximum pressure”. He called Iran the “most destructive country in the Middle East” and, reiterating that they can’t have a nuclear weapon, added:“The choice is theirs to make. This is not an offer that will last forever.”
US secretary of state Marco Rubio will be going to Turkey on Thursday to attend the Ukraine-Russia talks, Trump announced. He had suggested he wanted to go himself, but he is sending Rubio along with envoys Steve Witkoff and Keith Kellogg.
Trump said his Middle East tour, which kicked off in Saudi Arabia today, will add $1tn in investment to the US. In addition to the Saudi purchase of $142bn of US weapons announced earlier, Trump said there will also be this week multibillion dollar commercial deals with Amazon, Oracle, AMD, Uber, Johnson & Johnson and others. A swath of US tech firms including Nvidia and Cisco also secured AI deals with Saudia Arabia and the UAE respectively.
US senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said he is placing a blanket hold on all justice department nominees in response to Donald Trump’s acceptance of a $400m luxury jet as a gift from Qatar’s royal family. It is the first time Schumer has ever placed a blanket hold on a set of presidential nominees, and he intends to keep the hold in place until the Trump administration answers his questions about the jet.
The Trump administration said eight federal agencies will terminate another $450m in grants to Harvard University, on top of $2.2bn in federal funding that it canceled last week.
Trump encouraged Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel — but added that “you’ll do it in your own time.”
Donald Trump said that the free Air Force One replacement offered by Qatar was a “beautiful gesture”.
“There are those that say we shouldn’t be accepting gifts,” he said during an interview on board the presidential air fleet. “And I would say only a stupid person would say that, why wouldn’t we do that? It helps us out, because we’ll have a relatively new plane.”
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