Closing summary
Our live coverage is ending now. In the meantime, you can find all of our live US politics coverage here. Here is a summary of the key developments from today:
The supreme court has rejected the Trump administration’s request to remove a temporary block on deportations of Venezuelans under a rarely used 18th-century wartime law. Over two dissenting votes, the justices acted on an emergency appeal from lawyers for Venezuelan men who have been accused of being gang members, a designation that the administration says makes them eligible for rapid removal from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Trump wrote on social media: “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!”
The Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya, NBC reports. Two people familiar with the move said that the plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya’s leadership.
Moody’s Ratings downgraded the United States’ credit rating today, lowering it one notch from the top-tier AAA to Aa1, citing mounting fiscal pressures and high interest rates. With this move, it now joins Standard & Poor’s, which downgraded the US in 2011, and Fitch Ratings, which followed suit in 2023, both assigning an AA+ rating.
Rightwing lawmakers derailed Donald Trump’s signature legislation in the House of Representatives, preventing its passage through a key committee and throwing into question whether Republicans can coalesce around the massive bill. The major and embarrassing setback raises the stakes for the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who had set a goal of Memorial Day to get the legislation passed through the House and on to the Senate.
Trump said the US will send letters to some of its trading partners to unilaterally impose new tariff rates, suggesting that Washington lacks the capacity to reach individual trade deals.
Trump accused the former FBI director James Comey of calling for his assassination in a coded social media post written in seashells. Comey’s Instagram post – a photograph of seashells on a beach arranged to spell the numbers 8647, which he captioned: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk” – was used by rightwing supporters of Trump to claim it was a call to assassinate the US president. Former FBI Director James Comey was escorted to the US Secret Service’s Washington Field Office on Friday afternoon for an interview, CNN reports.
Trump acknowledged that people are starving in Gaza and the US would have the situation in the territory “taken care of” as it suffered a further wave of intense Israeli airstrikes overnight. On the final day of his Gulf tour, the US president told reporters in Abu Dhabi: “We’re looking at Gaza. And we’re going to get that taken care of. A lot of people are starving.”
The Trump administration has terminated nearly 600 contractors at Voice of America, the US-funded international news network known for delivering independent journalism to countries with restricted press freedom. Among those dismissed are journalists from authoritarian countries who now face deportation, as their visas are linked to their jobs at VOA.
Ice effectively misled a judge in order to gain access to the homes of students it sought to arrest for their pro-Palestinian activism, attorneys say. A recently unsealed search warrant application shows that Ice told a judge it needed a warrant because the agency was investigating Columbia University for “harboring aliens”.
The former US ambassador to Ukraine, who resigned from the role in April, has said that she quit the post because she disagreed with Donald Trump’s foreign policy. Ambassador Bridget Brink, who served as ambassador to Ukraine from May 2022 until her departure last month, outlined the reasons for her departure for the first time in an op-ed published today by the Detroit Free Press. In the piece, Brink hit out at Trump for pressuring Ukraine rather than Russia and said she felt it was her duty to step down. “Peace at any price is not peace at all ― it is appeasement,” she wrote. More here.
US government records reveal Latin American leaders have spent millions hiring Washington’s top lobbyists to push for a laundry list of requests – from free-trade deals, security assistance and energy investments – to be heard by the Trump administration, according to an analysis by the Guardian and The Quincy Institute.
US district judge Paula Xinis expressed frustration on Friday that the Trump administration once again failed to provide sufficient details about its efforts bring back Kilmar Ábrego García, who was deported in error from the United States in March and sent to a prison in El Salvador.
The US Department of Homeland Security is reportedly considering an “out-of-the-box” pitch to participate in a television gameshow that would have immigrants compete to obtain US citizenship. Department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin described the pitch to the New York Times as a “celebration of being an American” and said the show would include challenges based on American traditions.
NBC News has done a deep dive on the artifacts that have been removed from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, finding 32 removals since the Trump administration issued an executive order to remove certain pieces of history from the Smithsonian museums.
American abolitionist Harriet Tubman’s personal hymn book, with gospels that were sung as she led enslaved people to freedom, and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, are among some of the museum’s losses.
The museum said in late April that “recent claims that objects have been removed for reasons other than adherence to standard loan agreements or museum practices are false.”
