Closing summary
Dr Anthony Fauci, the face of the US government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, took questions from a Republican-led congressional committee about the origins of the virus and whether US-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started.
Meanwhile, jury selection continues in Hunter Biden’s trial in Wilmington, Delaware, on three firearms-related charges brought by special counsel David Weiss, a Trump appointee. Joe Biden released a statement saying that he has “boundless love for my son, confidence in him, and respect for his strength”. Also:
Stormy Daniels said she believes Donald Trump should be jailed and urged Melania Trump to leave her husband, in her first interview after Trump was convicted last week on 34 felony charges in a hush-money case aimed at influencing the 2016 election.
Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order allowing him to temporarily close the southern US border to asylum seekers in a sharp political U-turn aimed at winning support on a key voter concern in a presidential election year.
Kevin McCarthy, former Republican House speaker, said Americans should accept the results of November’s presidential race amid rising political tensions in the aftermath of Trump’s campaign finance violation conviction.
Trump called on the supreme court to step in and annul his guilty verdict in a hush-money trial that left him with the unwanted distinction of being the first former US president to be a convicted felon.
Biden has congratulated Claudia Sheinbaum for her historic win after she was elected Mexico’s first female president on Sunday.
Bob Menendez, the embattled Democratic senator charged with bribery, will reportedly enter the race today to seek re-election in New Jersey as an independent. Andy Kim, the Democratic congressman running to replace Menendez’s Senate seat, said Menendez “isn’t running for the people of New Jersey, he’s doing it for himself.”
Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee revealed that she has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and said her treatment may require her to be “occasionally absent” from Capitol Hill.
Migration at the southern border surged to record numbers at the end of last year. Joe Biden’s expected executive order comes at a moment when the number of migrants crossing from Mexico is down in the past six months, a trend attributed to stronger enforcement on the part of the Mexican authorities but which is not expected to sustain itself.
Biden initially rolled back Donald Trump’s restrictive border policies after taking office in January 2021, issuing orders to freeze his predecessor’s border wall construction and reissuing protections set up under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) scheme originally adopted by the Barack Obama White House.
Biden suspended Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy – whereby asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico while their US immigration claims were being considered – on the first day of his administration before the homeland security department formally cancelled it months later. The US supreme court subsequently upheld Biden’s approach following a lower court ruling against it.
When Trump’s policy was in operation, Biden denounced it, saying:
This is the first president in the history of the United States of America [under whom] anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. That’s never happened before.
A recent Associated Press poll showed about two-thirds of voters, including 40% of Democrats, disapproved of Biden’s handling of the southern border.
