Closing summary
This brings our live coverage of US politics during the second Trump administration to a close, but just for the day. We will be back at it on Friday. Here are the latest developments:
Donald Trump plans to meet Vladimir Putin again, this time in Budapest, a four-hour drive from the border with Ukraine, where the Russian president’s forces continue to kill civilians and occupy territory.
Federal charges were filed against John Bolton, a former national security to Trump who became a fierce Trump critic, for allegedly retaining classified documents. Trump was indicted for the same crime in 2023 before being gifted a get-out-of-jail-free card by federal judges he nominated.
Trump was one of the central focuses throughout much of the first 40 minutes of tonight’s New York City mayoral debate.
Federal prosecutors charged two alleged members of an “antifa cell” in Texas with “providing material support to terrorists” in relation to the shooting of a police officer at immigration detention center outside Dallas of the Fourth of July.
Republican members of Congress have taken to social media in recent days to spread the claim that George Soros – the billionaire that the GOP have frequently cast as a liberal puppet master – is funding the ‘No Kings’ protests that are taking place across the country.
Amid escalating tensions with Venezuela, and US military strikes on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean, the US admiral who commands military forces in Latin America will step down at the end of this year, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth announced on social media.
A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected the Trump administration’s request to lift a lower court’s order that temporarily blocks the deployment of national guard troops in Illinois during its appeal.
Federal terrorism charges filed against alleged members of 'antifa cell' in Texas shooting
Federal prosecutors charged two alleged members of an “antifa cell” in Texas with “providing material support to terrorists” in relation to the shooting of a police officer at an immigration detention center outside Dallas on the Fourth of July.
According to the indictment, the two men are accused of taking part in an attack on the Prairieland detention center in Alvarado, Texas, which began with a group of about 11 black-clad suspects shooting fireworks at the facility.
The fireworks caused detention center workers to call the police and when local police officers arrived, someone in a mask in the woods nearby opened fire, shooting one officer in the neck.
After the incident, 10 people were arrested who are now accused of being part of an anti-fascist terror cell by federal prosecutors.
The FBI director, Kash Patel, posted on social media that this was the “First time ever” that terrorism charges were brought against “Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremists” for the detention center.
The indictment accuses two men, Cameron Arnold and Zachary Evetts, of multiple accounts of attempted murder and discharging a firearm, and a single count of providing material support to terrorists. Neither man is accused of actually firing the shot that hit the officer, however. According to the government, it was an unnamed “co-conspirator-1” who shot the officer.
Although the former FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress in 2020 that “antifa” is “more of an ideology or a movement than an organization”, the indictment calls the leftwing movement a “militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups, primarily ascribing to a revolutionary anarchist or autonomous Marxist ideology”.
One of the people arrested after the shooting, Meagan Morris, told KERA, a public radio station in Texas, that she was only at the facility to show her support for people detained in immigration raids.
“The original intent was just to show solidarity with the detainees who hopefully lift their spirits with a fun fireworks display and go home,” she said. “If the officer got shot by someone, that person was acting alone. But they want to punish all of us.”
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