Closing summary
We will be wrapping the live blog for the 24th day of Trump’s second term. But we will return to chronicle what unfolds in a Valentine’s Day edition of US politics live on Friday.
Here is a look at some of the day’s developments:
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Antonio Delgado, New York’s lieutenant governor, called on New York city’s mayor, Eric Adams, to resign on Thursday after Adams changed city policy to cooperate with federal immigration agents in an apparent quid pro quo for the dropping of federal corruption charges against him.
More than 200,000 federal workers could be fired, after the office of personnel management directed federal agencies to lay off all their probationary employees.
Donald Trump admitted that he did not know if Elon Musk had met India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, in his private capacity as a businessperson or as a representative of the US government.
At a joint press conference, Modi said that India was “fully prepared” to take back the estimated 725,000 Indian citizens who are living in the US without legal status.
The acting US attorney for the southern district of New York, conservative lawyer Danielle Sassoon, sent a scathing resignation letter to the Department of Justice after she was asked to drop federal charges against New York’s mayor for what she called improper political reasons.
A federal judge put on hold Trump’s executive order banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth, after finding the policy “seems to deny that this population even exists, or deserves to exist”.
Robert F Kennedy Jr was confirmed and sworn in as health secretary, despite grave reservations from Democrats and scientists over his anti-vaccine activism. He thanked God for Trump and went on to trash the United States Agency for International Development, which was set up by his uncle, John F Kennedy.
Trump announced he signed a memorandum ordering reciprocal tariffs, asking his trade advisers to calculate new tariff levels for all countries.
Updated
Top New York Democrats call for mayor Eric Adams to resign after permitting Ice agents to operate on Rikers Island
Two of New York’s leading Democrats, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Antonio Delgado, the state’s lieutenant governor, called on New York city’s mayor, Eric Adams, to resign on Thursday after Adams changed city policy to cooperate with federal immigration agents carrying out Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy.
Adams announced on Thursday that he would issue an executive order to allow US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents to operate on Rikers Island, undermining the city’s 2014 sanctuary laws that banned immigration agents from the jail complex.
Adams said that he had acted after meeting Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, on Thursday.
The move was unpopular with immigrants rights groups. “Allowing ICE access to Rikers Island, where New Yorkers – including noncitizens entitled to the presumption of innocence and their day in court – are detained, is an egregious violation of NY’s commitment as a sanctuary city and undermines constitutional due process protections,” New York’s Legal Aid Society said in a statement.
Both Ocasio-Cortez and Delgado focused on the fact that Adams seemed to acting as a part of a quid pro quo arrangement with Trump, cooperating with the crackdown in return for federal corruption charges against him being dropped.
“New York City deserves a Mayor accountable to the people, not beholden to the President,” Delgado posted on social media. “Mayor Adams should step down.”
Ocasio-Cortez called the revelation, in a resignation letter from the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, that lawyers for Adams had explicitly offered to cooperate in the crackdown on undocumented immigrants in exchange for having the charges dropped, “explosive”.
The prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, wrote in a footnote to her letter that acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove – who was previously Trump’s criminal defense lawyer – had confiscated notes on a meeting with the Adams legal team she attended that made the political nature of the deal clear.
“I attended a meeting on January 31, 2025, with Mr. Bove, Adams’s counsel, and members of my office. Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion,” Sassoon wrote.
“Mayor Adams is putting the City of New York and its people at risk in exchange for escaping charges,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in response to Sassoon’s letter. “As long as Trump wields this leverage over Adams, the city is endangered. We cannot be governed under coercion. If Adams won’t resign, he must be removed.”
Later on Thursday, Homan appeared on Fox to discuss the crackdown and told host Laura Ingraham that he had sent an email to the acting deputy attorney general to ask if Ocasio-Cortez was “impeding our law enforcement efforts” by using social media to advise citizen and non-citizen New Yorkers to know their rights when confronted by immigration agents. “Maybe AOC’s going to be in trouble now,” Homan said.
“Maybe he can learn to read”, Ocasio-Cortez responded on social media. “The Constitution would be a good place to start”.
Updated
