Closing summary
The Guardian’s live blog is closing. Thank you for reading along today. Here are the top stories of the day in US politics.
The US Senate has passed a six-month spending bill on a 54-46 vote, narrowly avoiding a government shutdown. The bill is now headed to Donald Trump’s desk for signing.
The family of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, has released a video of his arrest by plainclothes immigration officers. The video, recorded by his wife Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant, shows immigration agents confronting Khalil and informing him that he is ‘going to be under arrest’ and ordering him to ‘stop resisting’.
The US Senate passed the Halt Fentanyl Act on Friday on a roll call vote of 84-16. The act would impose harsher penalties on people who traffic the drug and would reclassify fentanyl as a schedule one substance, a classification for drugs that have a high potential for abuse.
Donald Trump is cancelling the construction of a new FBI headquarters in Maryland. The FBI is currently based in downtown Washington DC, but has long been eyeing a move to the city’s suburbs.
Speaking to reporters after a meeting with G7 foreign ministers in Canada, secretary of state Marco Rubio has warned that more visas of anti-war protesters who are on temporary status in the US will be revoked, Reuters reports.
Updated
The family of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, has released a video of his arrest by plainclothes immigration officers. The video, recorded by his wife Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant, shows immigration agents confronting Khalil and informing him that he is ‘going to be under arrest’ and ordering him to ‘stop resisting’.
The agents then handcuffed Khalil and took him into a car, refusing to give Abdalla their names when she asked for them. Khalil, a legal US resident and a green card holder, was sent to an immigration detention center in Louisiana and is being threatened with deportation over his participation in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University.
In a statement, Abdalla described the video as “the most terrifying moment of my life.”
This felt like a kidnapping because it was: Officers in plainclothes — who refused to show us a warrant, speak with our attorney, or even tell us their names — forced my husband into an unmarked car and took him away from me. They threatened to take me too, even though we were calm and fully cooperating. For the next 38 hours after this video, neither I or our lawyers knew where Mahmoud was being held. Now, he’s over 1,000 miles from home, still being wrongfully detained by US immigration,” Abdalla said.
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