Closing summary
This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to an end for the day. The president is ensconced at his Palm Beach resort for the holiday weekend, mulling an attack on Iran and threatening to seize control of elections in all 50 states as the furor rumbles on over the sex crimes committed by his late, former friend, Jeffrey Epstein. Here are the latest developments:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told an Israeli reporter in Munich that “completely unconditional aid” to Israel “enabled a genocide in Gaza” and should be halted in accordance with US law “when you see gross human rights violations”.
Lawmakers left Washington as the Department of Homeland Security careens towards another as shutdown stopgap funding lapses tonight.
Donald Trump threatened to impose a requirement that US voters present photo identification before being allowed to cast ballots in the upcoming midterm elections.
As Trump seemed to endorse regime change in Iran, Reuters reports that the US military “is preparing for the possibility of sustained, weeks-long operations”.
In a press release, the Pentagon’s US Southern Command announced that it had killed three more suspected drug smugglers in “a lethal kinetic strike” in the Caribbean on Friday.
Federal authorities have opened a criminal investigation into two immigration officers who appear to have lied in sworn testimony about a shooting in Minneapolis last month, after all charges were dropped against two immigrants they accused of assault.
ACLU files testimony of Minnesotans attacked and harassed by ICE and border patrol officers
The American Civil Liberties Union filed an amended complaint in its lawsuit against Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, with testimony from Minnesotans who say their constitutional rights were violated by federal agents since December.
The new complaint includes over 80 declarations documenting what the ACLU calls “the harm Minnesotans are experiencing daily at the hands of federal agents.”
“These filings show that federal agents, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, are continuing to violate the rights of people observing, documenting, and protesting ICE activity in their neighborhoods,” their lawyers say.
Examples in the new filing include these testimonies from four residents, identified by their initials:
“The ICE agent did not say anything to me. Instead, he lowered his window, and pepper sprayed me directly in the face at extremely close range. At no point did ICE give any kind of warning, order, or instruction—not even a verbal “back up”—before pepper spraying me. Had the agent issued even the simplest verbal instruction, I would have complied immediately.” (S.I.)
“On the ride over, the agents berated us, telling us that we had interrupted a secret operation to arrest a child abuser. They told me that I deserved what I got for interrupting their operation. I told them that they had been seen knocking on door after door. They did not respond. I told them that they were not treating people with dignity. They did not respond. They asked why I had gone out to observe their operation. I told them that I had seen videos of them mistreating people by tearing families apart and that I wanted to stand up to that. One of the agents admitted to me that it did break his heart to see families torn apart but added that it did not matter.” (J.D.)
“I began to turn to leave the area. Next thing I knew, I was being body-slammed into a hard surface. I felt very afraid... With the agents on top of me, I could not breathe... I felt like George Floyd. One of the agents told me to “Shut the fuck up.” I then felt someone place the nozzle of a pepper spray can behind my glasses... I felt searing pain, some of the most intense pain I have felt in my life. I had only been in the area for a few minutes. I had not done anything wrong.” (C.K.)
“A woman wearing a gaiter-style mask then leaned out of the front passenger side window of the SUV. She yelled, ‘Emily, Emily, we’re going to take you home.’ She then repeated my name again and repeated that they would take me home. She then said my address. She repeated, in a mocking tone, that they were going to escort me home. I was freaked out. I did not care that they had my name, but I was scared for my family. The agents had told me, in effect, that they knew where I lived and could come and get me and my family at any time.” (E.B.)
The lawsuit, Tincher v. Noem, was initially filed in December, on behalf of six Minnesota residents who say their constitutional rights were violated by federal agents.
Two ICE officers are under investigation for perjury after video evidence contradicts testimony on shooting in Minneapolis
Federal authorities have opened a criminal investigation into two immigration officers who appear to have lied in sworn testimony about a shooting in Minneapolis last month, after all charges were dropped against two immigrants they accused of assault.
The director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Todd Lyons, said in a statement on Friday that his agency and the justice department are investigating the officers after video evidence revealed that “sworn testimony provided by two separate officers” appeared to show that they “made untruthful statements” about the shooting of one of the immigrants during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.
The shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg in north Minneapolis on 14 January, days after the killing of Renee Good, drew protesters into the streets.
Sosa-Celis and a second immigrant, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, were then charged in a federal criminal complaint with forcibly assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers.
The day after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security claimed Sosa-Celis had fled the scene of a “targeted traffic stop” in Minneapolis in his vehicle, crashed into a parked car and kept fleeing on foot. When an ICE agent caught up to him, two men allegedly attacked the agent with a broom handle and snow shovel, and Sosa-Celis allegedly broke free and also started striking the officer. DHS said an officer then fired a “defensive shot to defend his life.”
Those allegations were repeated to an FBI agent and documented in an affidavit Minnesota’s top federal prosecutor now calls false.
The officers are now on administrative leave while the investigation is carried out, the ICE director said, and they could be fired and face criminal prosecution.
“Lying under oath is a serious federal offense,” Lyons said.
“The men and women of ICE are entrusted with upholding the rule of law and are held to the highest standards of professionalism, integrity, and ethical conduct,” Lyons said, just over a month after one of his veteran officers, Jonathan Ross, fatally shot Renee Good at point-blank range.
Earlier on Friday, a US district court judge dismissed felony assault charges against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna who were accused of beating an ICE officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel before one officer shot Sosa-Celis in his right thigh.
The cases were dropped after Daniel Rosen, the Trump-appointed US attorney in Minnesota, said in a court filing on Thursday that “newly discovered evidence” contradicted the account of the incident from the federal officers in a charging document and in courtroom testimony.
In 2021, one of the classified documents Trump kept after leaving office was the plan for a US attack on Iran
From his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Donald Trump just teased a possible attack on Iran by posting a photograph of a US aircraft carrier on his social media platform without comment.
Reporting that US military is planning for strikes on Iran, should Trump decide to order an attack, is also a reminder that one of the classified documents that special counsel Jack Smith accused Trump of illegally retaining after he left office in 2021 was a secret US plan for an attack on Iran.
The indictment Smith filed against Trump in 2023 accused the then former president of showing a secret “plan of attack” on an unnamed country to a ghostwriter for his former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, at Trump’s New Jersey golf club in the summer of 2021.
Audio of the conversation subsequently obtained by CNN made it clear that the plan was for an attack on Iran, and that Trump showed it off as part of an effort to rebut claims by General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. Milley told the New Yorker that summer that he had been concerned in the final weeks of Trump’s first term that Trump would “embark on a military conflict with Iran as part of his quixotic campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election and remain in power.”
The audio seemed to suggest that Trump showed the ghostwriter the attack plans as a way to supposedly prove that it was Milley, not him, who had wanted to attack Iran.
“Well with Milley,” Trump said, “he said that I wanted to attack Iran.” Then, after the sound of shuffling papers could be heard, he added: “I have a big pile of papers… Look. This was him. They presented me this – this is off the record but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the defense department and him.”
The conversation made its way into the prologue of Meadows’s book, The Chief’s Chief — in lightly fictionalized form (in that it was written as if Meadows had been present, instead of his ghostwriter, and leaves out that the former president kept the document.)
“The president recalls a four-page report typed up by Mark Milley himself,” the ghostwriter wrote. “It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency. President Trump denied those requests every time.”
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US Department of Homeland Security reportedly asked social media sites to identify anti-ICE users
The US Department of Homeland Security has asked tech companies, including Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to reveal the names, email addresses and telephone numbers of people who track or criticize Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the New York Times reports.
According to the Times, the companies have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security recently, according to government officials and employees of the companies. Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, government officials said.
Pentagon says it killed three suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean
In a press release, the Pentagon’s US Southern Command announced that it had killed three more suspected drug smugglers in “a lethal kinetic strike” in the Caribbean on Friday.
The latest strike, from a combatant command headquartered in Doral, Florida, across from Donald Trump’s golf resort, brings the death toll since last September to 133 suspects in 39 attacks.
Legal and human rights groups have described the strikes on the boats of suspected drug smugglers as a campaign of extrajudicial killings.
“US officials cannot summarily kill people they accuse of smuggling drugs,” Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch, said in September. “The problem of narcotics entering the United States is not an armed conflict, and US officials cannot circumvent their human rights obligations by pretending otherwise.”
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As Trump says regime change in Iran 'would be the best thing', US military reportedly prepares attack plans
As Donald Trump seemed to endorse regime change in Iran, embracing a long-term goal of his ally, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Reuters reports that the US military “is preparing for the possibility of sustained, weeks-long operations” against Iran’s theocratic government.
When Trump was asked on Friday: “Do you want regime change in Iran?” the president replied: “Well, it seems like that would be the best thing that could happen.”
Trump then pointed out that the US had deployed a large force to the region. “We have tremendous power has arrived, and additional power, as you know, another carrier is going out shortly, “ he said.
“If we could get it settled for once and for all, that’d be good,” the president said, after describing casualties Iran’s government was responsible for, without saying where.
Asked, “Who would you want to take over?” Trump said: “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“There are people,” he added.
According to US officials who spoke to Reuters, the US military is preparing for what could become a far more serious conflict than previously seen between the countries, should Trump order an attack.
US and Iranian diplomats held talks in Oman last week in an effort to revive diplomacy over Tehran’s nuclear program, which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” in strikes last year.
During his first term, Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal that barred Iran from making nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief even though his own administration had confirmed that Iran was in compliance.
US officials said on Friday the Pentagon was sending an additional aircraft carrier to the Middle East, adding thousands more troops along with fighter aircraft, guided-missile destroyers and other firepower capable of waging attacks and defending against them.
Trump said in an address to US troops in North Carolina on Friday it had “been difficult to make a deal” with Iran. “Sometimes you have to have fear. That’s the only thing that really will get the situation taken care of,” Trump said.
Ordering an attack on Iran would cut against the opposition to “regime change wars” in the Middle East Trump voiced during his first campaign for the presidency, in 2016.
But his ally Netanyahu has spent decades trying to convince a US president to attack Iran.
In 2002, Netanyahu, who was then between terms as Israel’s prime minister, testified to Congress in support of a US invasion of Iraq, arguing that it would bring about the end of Iran’s theocratic state as well.
“It’s not a question of whether Iraq’s regime should be taken out but when should it be taken out; it’s not a question of whether you’d like to see a regime change in Iran but how to achieve it,” Netanyahu said six months before the Bush administration began the “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad.
“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu said then. “And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”
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Trump administration releases some frozen funding for Hudson tunnel project
The Trump administration released $30m from the $205m in federal funding it had frozen for the $16bn Hudson Tunnel Project in New York after New York and New Jersey sued to challenge the decision.
According to Chuck Schumer, the Democratic senator from New York, Donald Trump sought to use the frozen funds as leverage, suggesting that he would release the funds if Schumer agreed to get the name of Penn Station in New York changed to Trump Station.
New York and New Jersey went to court after Trump’s Department of Transportation would not commit to releasing the funds.
A US appeals court on Thursday declined to undo a lower court order requiring the funding, which had been frozen in October and forced the project to halt construction last week.
The Gateway Development Commission which is overseeing construction of the project, thanked “New York and New Jersey for their support in restoring our access to the federal funding” in a statement on Friday.
“We have received an initial disbursement of $30 million from the federal government and expect to receive the full $205 million in reimbursement funds,” the commission said. “Construction remains paused for now, and we are working with our contractors to plan how to deploy these funds in the most effective way and get workers back on the job to resume some construction as soon as possible.”
A federal judge, Jeannette Vargas, ordered the federal government last week to release funds for the project to overhaul critical rail infrastructure in New York and New Jersey, which had been frozen by Trump in October.
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Ro Khanna, a California Democratic representative, read a list of six names on the House floor earlier this week and said they were “wealthy, powerful men that the DoJ hid” in the recently released files related to Jeffrey Epstein. After questions from the Guardian, the Department of Justice said that four of the men Khanna named have no apparent connection to Epstein whatsoever, but rather appeared in a photo lineup assembled by the southern district of New York (SDNY).
Khanna, along with Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican representative, pushed the justice department to unredact names in the files, arguing that some names were being unlawfully redacted. Massie claimed credit on X earlier this week for forcing the justice department to remove redactions on a file that listed 20 names, birthdays and photos, including those of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Khanna then read some of those names on the House floor.
Two of the six men Khanna mentioned are Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, who has since resigned as CEO of DP World and an Emirati billionaire businessperson, and Leslie Wexner, a billionaire retail magnate, but the other four names did not appear to have any public profile.
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Trump threatens to impose voter ID for midterm elections, 'whether approved by Congress or not!'
In a series of messages posted on his social media platform from Air Force One on Friday, Donald Trump threatened to impose a requirement that US voters present photo identification before being allowed to cast ballots in the upcoming midterm elections.
This change, Trump insisted, would be made even if Congress fails to pass a law to alter voting requirements in a way that would seem to violate the US constitution, which leaves the conduct of elections to the states.
“There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” Trump posted.
“Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel,” the president added, untruthfully, since there is no popular majority for banning vote by mail.
In fact, polling conducted last year showed the exact opposite: that 58% of Americans favor allowing any voter to cast their ballot by mail if they want to.
Although the president claimed to have “searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future” that would allow the federal government to take unprecedented control of elections run by the states, in a second post during his flight to his Palm Beach resort, he offered more hyperbole than facts, is a long diatribe punctuated with all-caps words.
“We cannot let the Democrats get away with NO VOTER I.D. any longer. These are horrible, disingenuous CHEATERS,” Trump wrote.
“If we can’t get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order,” Trump added.
“I hope the Supreme Court realizes, as they ‘painstakingly’ review the very simple topic of Country Saving Tariffs … that these Corrupt and Deranged Democrats, if they ever gain power, will not only be adding two States to our roster of 50, with all of the baggage thereto, but will also PACK THE COURT”, the president posted.
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Ocasio-Cortez says unconditional US military aid to Israel 'enabled a genocide in Gaza'
At a Munich security conference panel which just concluded, Hagar Shezaf of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if she thinks “the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2028 elections should re-evaluate military aid to Israel”.
“To me this isn’t just about a presidential election,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, “personally, I think that the United States has an obligation to uphold its own laws, particularly the Leahy laws.
“I think that, personally, the idea of completely unconditional aid, no matter what one does, does not make sense,” she added. “I think it enabled a genocide in Gaza, and I think that we have thousands of women and children dead … that was completely avoidable.
“So I believe that enforcement of our own laws, through the Leahy laws, which requires conditioning aid in any circumstance when you see gross human rights violations is appropriate,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded.
The Leahy laws are two statutory provisions, named for the former senator Patrick Leahy who introduced them in the 1990s, which prohibit the US defense department and state department from providing funds to “units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights”.
But, according to Charles Blaha, the former director of the state department office that leads Leahy vetting of foreign security units, while state “department officials insist that Israeli units are subject to the same vetting standards as units from any other country. Maybe in theory. But in practice, that’s simply not true.”
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Ocasio-Cortez says Ukraine should lead on peace talks but 'we shouldn’t reward imperialism'
Asked to define what victory in Ukraine should look like, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that the Ukrainians should lead any peace talks. “There’s no conversation about Ukraine that can happen without Ukraine. So they of course lead in terms of setting their terms,” she said. “Overall as a principle, we shouldn’t reward imperialism.
“I don’t think that we should allow Russia or any nation to continue violating a nation’s sovereignty and to continue to be rewarded,” the congresswoman added.
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Ocasio-Cortez says radical changes in US foreign policy undermines trust of allies as we 'play hokey pokey' joining and leaving agreements
Asked at the Munich security conference about declining trust in the United States as a reliable ally, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed that it has been damaging to have radical shifts in US policy, as Trump first withdrew from international agreements during his first term, then Biden rejoined pacts only for Trump to return and pull the US out again.
“US foreign policy and some of our more basic and foundational values-based commitments seem to be enacted based on the partisanship of whoever is elected,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“We play hokey pokey,” the congresswoman continued, “with USAID, with the Paris Climate agreement, with many of our commitments, and I don’t think that is good for the country. I think that what is best is for when we sign an agreement, and we’re a part of it, we stay in it so they know that our commitments are reflective of our nation’s values in a way that transcends partisanship.”
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Speaking in Munich, Whitmer focuses largely on Michigan
Despite speculation that she might enter the 2028 race for the presidency, Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, has focused her remarks at the Munich security conference largely on the impact of Trump’s trade war with Canada on her own state.
“Michiganders love Canadians and we are absolutely interwoven,” Whitmer said as she discussed what she described as intense anger from Canadians at Trump’s tariffs.
In Munich panel, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gretchen Whitmer assail Trump for damage to US standing in the world
Two potential Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2028, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman, just criticized the damage Donald Trump has done to US foreign relations in their opening remarks on a panel discussion now in progress at the Munich security conference that just started.
Whitmer focused on the impact to her state’s economy by the tariffs Trump has imposed on Canada, and mentioned the economic importance of the auto manufacturing that takes place across the border between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario.
Trump has recently threatened to block the opening of a new, Canadian-financed bridge between Detroit and Windsor that he supported in his first term.
Ocasio-Cortez began by saying that the United States is “very much in a compromised position” as a result of Trump’s policies, which have “strained” relations with European allies and abandoned a committment to human rights.
“Tariffs of course have hurt Americans,” she added, and further damaged relations with US allies.
“We are shocked at the president’s destruction of our relationship with our European allies,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “his threatening over Greenland is not a joke, it is not funny, it threatens the very trusted relationships that allows peace to persist.”
“The vast majority of the American people do not want to see these relations frayed,” the New York congresswoman said.
The third member of the panel, defending Trump’s foreign policies is Matthew Whitaker, who served in the first Trump administration and is now US ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
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Here's a recap of the day so far
Lawmakers in the House and Senate left Washington as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) careens towards another as shutdown stopgap funding lapses tonight. Nearly all Democrats blocked a second attempt to pass the annual DHS appropriations bill as negotiations for guardrails on federal immigration enforcement have stalled.
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem announced the end of temporary protected status (TPS) for Yemen on Friday. According to the National Immigration Forum, there are about 1,380 Yemeni nationals living and working in the country with TPS. The designation will officially terminate for Yemeni immigrants 60 days after the notice is published in the Federal Register.
The annual rate of US inflation eased in January, according to the latest data consumer price index report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Over the last 12 months, the cost of goods has increased by 2.4% – down from 2.7% in last month’s report.
The Department of Justice filed a new lawsuit against Harvard University, accusing it of failing to hand over documents and comply with a federal investigation into alleged racial discrimination in its admissions process. Harvard stressed in a statement that it was responding to inquiries “in good faith” and prepared to engage “according to the process required by law”. The justice department accuses Harvard of failing for over 10 months to comply with the government’s request to provide documents, including applicant-level admissions data, and other records and information pertaining to the investigation.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) expects to spend an estimated $38.3bn on a plan to acquire warehouses across the country and retrofit them into new immigration detention centers with capacity for tens of thousands of detainees, according to documents the agency sent to the governor of New Hampshire. The documents, published on the state’s website yesterday, disclose that the Department of Homeland Security estimates it will spend $158m retrofitting a new detention facility in Merrimack, plus an additional estimated $146m to operate the facility in the first three years.
A federal judge has ordered the DHS to guarantee that immigrants held at the Bishop Henry Whipple federal building can speak with a lawyer before they are transferred out of Minnesota. Judge Nancy Brasel, a Trump appointee, chided the administration and called its failure to provide detainees at the Minneapolis holding facility a meaningful chance to consult counsel an “unconstitutional infringement”.
Jeffries says Democrats will respond to 'latest unserious' offer from GOP on DHS funding bill, as shutdown looms
The top Democrat in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, said that the looming shutdown is the fault of Republicans. He noted that the House speaker Mike Johnson has honored the week of recess and sent lawmakers home on Thursday.
Jeffries also said that he expects that Democrats will respond to the “unserious” offer that Republicans have made when it comes to a full year of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding that “clearly omits things that need to happen”. This includes a demand that federal immigration agents have judicial warrants in order to conduct raids or arrests on private property. “Then it will once again be in the hands of Donald Trump and Republicans to decide what’s next,” Jeffries said.
“We haven’t called for a direct meeting at this point, but again, we’re ready to sit down with anyone, anytime, anyplace, if they are serious about the types of dramatic reforms that are necessary to get ICE under control,” Jeffries said, while noting that any future discussions need to include lawmakers from both sides of the aisle and both chambers, as well as the White House.
“Every single change needs to be ironclad and part of the law,” he added, emphasizing that Tom Homan’s announcement that the administration will draw down federal immigration agents in Minnesota is not a sufficient promise for Democrats.
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Macron urges Europe to ‘show unwavering commitment to defend interests’ with swipes to the US
During his address at the Munich security conference today, French president Emmanuel Macron continued his call to reassert Europe’s position globally, and added some swipes at the US trade and foreign policy towards Europe.
If we want to be taken seriously on the European continent and beyond, we must show the world our unwavering commitment to defend our own interests. It starts, of course, with continuing to extend our support to Ukraine, but it could nicely follow with fanning off unjustified tariffs and politely declining unjustified claims on European territory.
This is what we did and this is what we will [continue to] do.”
He appeated to refer to the US threat of tariffs and Trump’s plans to annex Greenland.
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A reminder that while the crux of this funding battle is about implementing further guardrails on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), federal immigration enforcement has already received a $75bn cash infusion, thanks to the Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that he signed into law last year. This means those key agencies are likely to be unaffected by the looming shutdown.
Instead, as my colleague Robert Tait notes, disruption is likely to fall on services such as the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Secret Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).
TSA workers, who include airport security staff and baggage handlers, are expected to continue working over the weekend without pay, to minimize the travel disruption that marked last year’s 43-day government shutdown, the longest in US history. Many Fema workers are expected to be furloughed without pay, limiting its ability to work with local and state partners. Officials have warned that the funding lapse could impede the agency’s ability to respond to natural disasters.
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Before the president left for Fort Bragg earlier, he weighed in on the breakdown in negotiations over the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill. The agency is heading towards a shutdown tonight after Democrats demanded greater guardrails on federal immigration enforcement.
Donald Trump said of Republicans, “I know what they want, I know what they can live with.” He continued, adding that Democrats – who have pushed for body-worn cameras, barring officers from wearing masks while on duty, and requiring the use judicial warrants – have “gone crazy”.
“They’re radical left lunatics. That’s why their cities are so unsafe,” Trump said.
On the brink of her department being shut down in a congressional impasse over the conduct of immigration agents in her charge, Noem held the press conference in a secure facility in Arizona, bussing journalists to the building.
Noem said she spoke with Maricopa county recorder Justin Heap before the press conference held in Arizona. County supervisors – Republicans and Democrats – have threatened to remove the former Republican state representative from office after a year of contentious relations, in which Heap has refused to respond to questions from elected officials and his chief of staff discussed picking sides “in the coming civil war”.
Heap has expressed an intent to give Noem access to the county’s voter rolls, which is strongly opposed by elected leaders out of concern for protecting personal information from disclosure.
Noem also met with state senator John Gillette, a far-right Republican and army veteran who In September 2025 called for Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington to be executed for encouraging anti-Trump protests.
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The Save America Act would require all voters to present proof of citizenship at the time of registration and photo ID to vote. The Brennan Center estimates that 21 million US citizens of voting age have neither a passport nor a copy of their birth certificate readily available.
The legislation requires states to share their voter rolls with the Department of Homeland Security to compare it with federal databases, while placing no restrictions on what the department might do with the information. If passed, the law would also subject elections officials to as much as five years in prison if they registered someone to vote without the required documentation, even if the registrant is a citizen and eligible to vote.
Implementation of the requirements in the original bill, including the proof of citizenship requirements, would take effect immediately, leaving states scrambling to align their voting systems to the new law.
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Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem touted the virtues of the Save America Act, a package of election legislation passed largely by Republicans in the US House this week that is almost certainly dead on arrival in the Senate.
“Although the constitution gives states the primary responsibility for running their elections, Congress also gives authorities and duties to the federal government,” Noem said at a press conference in Scottsdale, Arizona on Friday. “Now, as the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, those authorities lie within my department and the responsibility lies with me.”
Noem described the legislation as “commonsense” and “extremely popular with American citizens”, citing polls showing strong public support for voter ID. “It’s a fact that non-citizens have been voting in our elections. They’ve been registered and they have voted from state to state,” she added, citing incidents in Maryland and Kansas.
Noem and other administration officials have argued against existing evidence that non-citizens are voting in meaningful numbers.
Audits by several states have consistently shown that the number of incidents has been in single or double digits, with many people registering by mistake and never voting at all. For example, a 2022 audit of voter rolls in Georgia following conservative reaction to Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden showed just 20 non-citizens enrolled out of 8.2 million people. Only nine had voted.
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Trump addresses military families at Fort Bragg
Donald Trump is now addressing military families at the Fort Bragg military base in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
The president claimed that if Democrats win big in the 2026 midterm elections, the US military will be “severely disturbed”.
“We rebuilt it in my first time, and now we’re making it stronger, bigger, better than ever before,” he added.
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The Department of Justice filed a new lawsuit against Harvard University, accusing it of failing to hand over documents and comply with a federal investigation into alleged racial discrimination in its admissions process, in the latest escalation of Donald Trump’s long-running legal pursuit of the nation’s oldest university.
Harvard stressed in a statement that it was responding to inquiries “in good faith” and prepared to engage “according to the process required by law”.
In its lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Massachusetts on Friday, the justice department accuses Harvard of failing for over 10 months to comply with the government’s request to provide documents, including applicant-level admissions data, and other records and information pertaining to the investigation.
“Harvard has thwarted the Department’s efforts to investigate potential discrimination,” the justice department claimed in the filing. “It has slow-walked the pace of production and refused to provide pertinent documents relating to applicant-level admissions decisions … The repeatedly extended deadlines for document production have long passed.”
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Trump is ‘tearing apart’ transatlantic partnership, AOC warns
In a Q&A during a panel on populism earlier, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked about her presence at the Munich Security Conference and the signal she wants to send by being involved in these discussions here.
She said:
“I think this is a moment where we are seeing our presidential administration tear apart the transatlantic partnership, rip up every democratic norm, and … really calling into question, as was mentioned by Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum, the rules based order that we have, or, question mark, do we have?”
She laid out her pitch for the need to address hypocrisies in the international order:
“But that does not mean that the majority of Americans are ready to walk away from a rules-based order and that we’re ready to walk away from our commitment to democracy.
I think what we identify is that in a rules-based order, hypocrisy is vulnerability.
And so I think what we are seeking is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates the hypocrisies … when, too often, in the west, we’d look the other way for inconvenient populations to act out these paradoxes, whether it is kidnapping a foreign head of state, whether it is threatening our allies to colonise Greenland, whether it is looking the other way in a genocide.
Hypocrisies are our vulnerabilities and they threaten democracies.
And so I think many of us are here to say we are here and we are ready for the next chapter, not to have the world turn to isolation, but to deepen our partnership on greater and increase commitment to integrity to our values.”
She got a good reception from the audience here with a round of applause.
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Trump says US is 'negotiating right now for Greenland'
Asked about Greenland as he left for Fort Bragg, Donald Trump said:
Well, I think Greenland’s going to want us. We get along very well with Europe. We’ll see how it all works out. We’re negotiating right now for Greenland.
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Donald Trump said earlier today that Volodymyr Zelenskyy will miss “a great opportunity” for peace if he doesn’t “get moving”, claiming that Russia wants to make a deal amid its ongoing war in Ukraine.
Trump told reporters at the White House:
Russia wants to make a deal, and Zelenskyy’s going to have to get moving. Otherwise he’s going to miss a great opportunity. He has to move.
Since returning to office, the US president has repeatedly put the onus on Ukraine to secure peace, rather than squarely on Russia, the aggressor that launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost four years ago.
Documents reveal ICE plans to spend $38.3bn converting warehouses across US into detention centers
USCIS expects to spend an estimated $38.3bn on a plan to acquire warehouses across the country and retrofit them into new immigration detention centers with capacity for tens of thousands of detainees, according to documents the agency sent to the governor of New Hampshire.
The documents, published on the state’s website yesterday, disclose that the Department of Homeland Security estimates it will spend $158m retrofitting a new detention facility in Merrimack, plus an additional estimated $146m to operate the facility in the first three years.
According to an overview of the plans, which were first reported by the Washington Post, ICE would buy and convert 16 buildings across the US into regional processing centers, each holding 1,000 to 1,500 people at a time. Another eight large-scale detention centers would hold 7,000 to 10,000 people at a time, and serve as “the primary locations” for deportations. Detainees would spend an average of three to seven days at the processing sites before being transported to the larger facilities, where they would be held about 60 days before being deported.
The new model for increasing detention space is needed, according to the document, due to a surge in ICE hires and an anticipated rise in arrests.
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Noem revokes TPS for Yemen, leaving thousands in limbo
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem announced the end of temporary protected status (TPS) for Yemen on Friday. According to the National Immigration Forum, there are about 1,380 Yemeni nationals living and working in the country with TPS.
A reminder, TPS is a type of status that allows nationals fleeing designated countries for various humanitarian reasons – such as war or natural disaster – to attain temporary authorization live and work in the country without risk of deportation. In that period a TPS beneficiary is able to apply for a visa or permanent residency if eligible.
“After reviewing conditions in the country and consulting with appropriate US government agencies, I determined that Yemen no longer meets the law’s requirements to be designated for Temporary Protected Status,” Noem said.
The designation will officially terminate for Yemeni immigrants 60 days after the notice is published in the Federal Register.
The state department designates Yemen as a level four “do not travel” country due to to risk of terrorism, unrest, crime, health risks, kidnapping and landmines.
Since Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has sought to strip TPS from several countries, including Haiti, Somalia and Venezuela.
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Federal judge orders government to grant detainees access to lawyers at Minneapolis ICE holding center
A federal judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to guarantee that immigrants held at the Bishop Henry Whipple federal building can speak with a lawyer before they are transferred out of Minnesota.
Judge Nancy Brasel, a Trump appointee, chided the administration and called its failure to provide detainees at the Minneapolis holding facility a meaningful chance to consult counsel an “unconstitutional infringement”.
Her 41‑page ruling, which remains in effect for two weeks, stems from a class‑action lawsuit alleging that detainees are denied even a single outgoing phone call – the only opportunity many have to reach an attorney or family members who could help secure representation. The suit says detainees are frequently moved out of state before they are formally “booked” and allowed to make that call.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that even when calls occur, they are rarely private and often take place in the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. They also contend the Whipple building lacks basic necessities, including beds and adequate toilets.
“The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights,” Brasel wrote. She ordered the DHS to provide detainees private access to telephones and to lists of free legal service providers in multiple languages within one hour of detention – and before any transfer out of the Whipple facility.
Brasel further barred the DHS from transferring detainees out of Minnesota during the first 72 hours of custody, and required federal agents to disclose the destination if and when a transfer occurs.
The Whipple building has been the focal point of sustained protests during Minnesota’s immigration crackdown, which included the fatal shooting of two US citizens. On Thursday, the president’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, said the surge of federal immigration enforcement in the state would wind down, announcing a drawdown of the hundreds of officers deployed there.
In response to Brasel’s ruling, a DHS spokesperson insisted that claims of “sub-prime conditions or overcrowding at the Whipple Building are FALSE”.
“This is a processing facility, not a detention facility. Illegal aliens are quickly processed and transferred to permanent housing at a detention facility,” the spokesperson said, adding that ICE provided detainees with “a court-approved list of free or low-cost attorneys”.
“All detainees receive due process. No lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens in the United States,” the spokesperson said in a statement to the Guardian.
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A reminder that my colleague, Jakub Krupa, is covering the latest from Munich at the annual security conference. We’re due to hear from Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will make her debut appearance at the summit. This, of course, comes as lawmakers in Washington grapple with the impending Department of Homeland Security shutdown.
We’ll bring you the latest as it gets under way.
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Democratic lawmakers, led by the senators Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Duckworth and the representative Mike Quigley, are demanding answers about how Donald Trump’s immigration policies are exacerbating childcare shortages and costs in the US.
About 20% of the childcare workforce in the US are immigrants – and as high as 70% in some regions of the US – and the president’s immigration policies could reduce the childcare workforce by an estimated 15%, according to a letter sent today by 48 lawmakers to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families (ACF).
“Immigration policy changes – including terminations of temporary protected status (TPS), the elimination of other lawful immigration pathways, and immigration raids in and around childcare programs – are driving childcare providers out of the workplace, exacerbating childcare workforce shortages and high prices,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter.
The lawmakers provided examples of childcare workers ensnared by Trump’s deportation push, including a nanny in Wisconsin, an asylum seeker with no criminal record who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after a routine check-in, and immigrant teachers at a preschool in Washington DC who lost their work authorizations and were forced to quit due to TPS terminations by the Trump administration.
White House says it has made 'every good faith effort' to keep DHS open amid looming shutdown
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the Trump administration has made “every good faith effort” to keep the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) open as negotiations to place stronger guardrails on federal immigration enforcement have stalled with Democrats on Capitol Hill, and lawmakers failed to advance a full-year appropriations bill to keep the department funding through September.
In an interview with Fox News, Leavitt said that Democrats are “barreling” the agency towards a shutdown for “political and partisan reasons”. This week, Democrats rejected the White House’s legislative counter-proposal for a DHS funding bill, saying that it was insufficient.
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Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, said that the latest inflation figures from Bureau of Labor Statistics show a failure from the Trump administration to make good on campaign promises.
“One year into his [Donald Trump’s] second term, food continues to get more expensive, utility costs are soaring and housing prices are rising,” Warren said in a statement. “Trump is making life less affordable for American families – and instead of fixing the economic pain he’s caused, he says this is the Trump economy and he is ‘very proud’ of it.”
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Core inflation, which does not include food and energy prices, slowed to 2.5%, in line with expectations.
It comes after official figures on Wednesday showed the US economy added 130,000 jobs last month, well ahead of forecasts. Last month the Federal Reserve held interest rates at a range of 3.5% to 3.75%, after three consecutive quarter-point cuts.
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US inflation eases to 2.4% according to latest data
The annual rate of US inflation eased in January, according to the latest data consumer price index report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Over the last 12 months, the cost of goods has increased by 2.4% – down from 2.7% in last month’s report.
DHS shutdown looms as negotiations on funding bill stall on Capitol Hill
Lawmakers in the House and Senate left Washington on Thursday as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) heads for another shutdown, when stopgap funding lapses tonight. Nearly all Democrats blocked a second attempt to pass the annual DHS appropriations bill as negotiations for guardrails on federal immigration enforcement have stalled. Senator John Fetterman was the only lawmaker to break ranks with the party.
Forcing a shutdown is one of the few levers Democratic members of Congress can use to force Republicans to consider their demands to rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they conduct surges throughout the country. These include preventing officers from wearing masks, making sure body-worn cameras are used at all times, and requiring judicial warrants to conduct raids and arrests. Notably, these are requests that Republicans say are off the table.
This ongoing battle on Capitol Hill comes as Tom Homan – Trump’s “border czar” – announced the immigration crackdown in Minnesota would end on Thursday, after widespread backlash against ICE and CBP officers’ use of force in the state, which saw the fatal shooting of two US citizens and several weeks of protests.
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Donald Trump will travel to Fayetteville, North Carolina, with the first lady, Melania Trump, later today. He’ll deliver remarks to families of the Fort Bragg military base at 1.30pm ET, before heading to Palm Beach, Florida – where he’ll hold closed-door meetings over the weekend.
We’ll bring you the latest lines.
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The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said on Friday that any decision to narrow the scope of US metals tariffs would be made by President Trump.
Bessent, asked on CNBC about a Financial Times report that Trump is planning to roll back some of his 50% tariffs on steel, aluminum, copper and other metal goods, said he spoke to US trade representative Jamieson Greer about the matter and added: “We’ll see if there is a narrowing.“
“If anything is done, I think it would be some sort of clarification on some incidental objects, but again, that’s going to be the president’s decision,” Bessent said.
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Donald Trump’s return to the White House has accelerated a profound shift in the global order, according to new analysis.
A report from Focal Data, which analyses UN voting records, reveals how Washington’s “America First” agenda has started to redraw the geopolitical map in favour of China.
In 2026, the world is now diplomatically closer to Beijing than it has been in recent memory, with significant shifts in alignments taking place during the start of Trump’s second presidential term.
These charts show how Trump is isolating the US on the world stage:
Donald Trump plans to scale back some tariffs on steel and aluminum goods, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Officials in the commerce department and the US trade representative’s office believe the tariffs are hurting consumers by raising prices for goods including pie tins and food-and-drink cans, the FT report said.
Voters nationwide are worried about prices, and cost-of-living concerns are expected to be a major factor for Americans heading into the November midterm elections.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 30% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the rising cost of living, while 59% disapproved, including nine in 10 Democrats and one in five Republicans.
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Justice department moves to drop charges against men accused of hitting ICE officer in Minnesota
Federal prosecutors in Minneapolis have moved to drop felony assault charges against two Venezuelan men, including one shot in the leg by an immigration officer, after new evidence emerged undercutting the government’s version of events.
In a filing on Thursday, the US attorney’s office for the district of Minnesota said “newly discovered evidence” in the criminal case against Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis “is materially inconsistent with the allegations against them” made in a criminal complaint and a court hearing last month.
The government’s motion asked the judge for “dismissal with prejudice”, meaning the charges against the two men cannot be resubmitted.
The pending dismissal comes after a string of high-profile shootings involving federal immigration agents where eyewitness statements and video evidence called into question claims made to justify using deadly force. Dozens of felony cases against protesters accused of assaulting or impeding federal officers have also crumbled.
The case at issue in Thursday’s filing stemmed from a 14 January incident during which an FBI investigator alleged in an affidavit that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers attempted to conduct a traffic stop on a vehicle driven by Aljorna, who crashed and fled on foot toward an apartment complex.
As an immigration officer chased and tried to arrest him, the government claimed, Aljorna began to violently resist.
As the officer and Aljorna struggled on the ground, Sosa-Celis and another man came out of a nearby apartment and attacked the officer with a snow shovel and a broom handle, the complaint alleged. The officer, who was not named in court filings, then fired his handgun, striking Sosa-Celis in the upper right thigh. The men then fled into a nearby apartment, where they were later arrested.
Thursday’s one-page motion seeking to dismiss the charges did not detail what new evidence had emerged, but cracks began to appear in the government’s case during a 21 January court hearing to determine whether the accused men could be released pending trial.
A senior US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official says Moderna’s clinical trial on a new, potentially more effective flu vaccine was a “brazen failure” and that the FDA is now calling it into question.
The FDA unexpectedly refused to consider Moderna’s application for a flu shot based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in a decision that experts say is already having a chilling effect on vaccine development.
Officials say the issue is the design of the study, in which control group participants over the age of 65 should have received a high-dose flu shot instead of a standard flu shot. Outside experts say the reasons seem to go deeper.
“It’s all pretext and obfuscation when the real agenda is rejecting conventional science and serving a predetermined anti-vaccine agenda,” said Richard Hughes IV, a partner with Epstein Becker Green and law professor at George Washington University.
Dorit Reiss, professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, said “personally humiliating a company is not a legitimate reason to refuse to review a submission”, and the refusal needs to “address substantive reasons”. Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, says “they’re just coming up with reasons to not approve mRNA anything, and they’re going to eventually do it to all these vaccines”.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services, said the concerns that mRNA and other vaccines are being targeted by officials were “baseless”.
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, met his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, on Friday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, an AFP journalist said, at a time of heightened Washington-Beijing tensions.
The meeting came days after Donald Trump said he would host the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, at the White House late this year, as the world’s two biggest economies look to reset ties marred by a trade war.
Rubio arrived late on Friday in the Germany city, and is set to deliver a speech on Saturday to the annual meeting focused on international security and defence.
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Trump’s climate repeal 'un-American' and 'Orwellian', says Kerry
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that the Trump administration has revoked the bedrock scientific determination that gives the government the ability to regulate climate-heating pollution. The move was described as a gift to “billionaire polluters” at the expense of Americans’ health.
The endangerment finding, which states that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare, has since 2009 allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit heat-trapping pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources.
Donald Trump called the move “the single largest deregulatory action in American history”. “This is a big one if you’re into environment,” he told reporters on Thursday. “This is about as big as it gets.”
The move comes as part of Trump’s bigger anti-environment push, which has seen him roll back pollution rules and boost oil and gas.
On social media, Barack Obama said the repeal will leave Americans “less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change – all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money”.
The former secretary of state John Kerry called the new rule “un-American”.
“Repealing the Endangerment Finding takes Orwellian governance to new heights and invites enormous damage to people and property around the world,” said Kerry, who also served as Joe Biden’s climate envoy. “Ignoring warning signs will not stop the storm. It puts more Americans directly in its path.”
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
Daniel Rosen, the Trump-appointed US attorney in Minnesota, said in a court filing that charges should be dropped against an immigrant who was shot by a federal immigration officer last month because “newly discovered evidence” contradicts the account of the incident from federal officers.
Sensitive intelligence that a whistleblower has accused Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, of mishandling concerned a report from the National Security Agency on an intercepted phone call last year between two members of foreign intelligence who were discussing Jared Kushner and Iran, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times report.
Asked if he has “fired or disciplined that staffer who posted the video from your account that included the Obamas”, Donald Trump said that he had not. The president then went on to excuse the racist clip, which depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as cartoon apes.
A federal judge denied a request on Thursday from the Trump administration to pause her order keeping temporary legal protections for Haitian immigrants in place, and said that she would not be intimidated by death threats she read aloud in court.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, claimed US Customs and Border Protection in the San Diego area has saved 1.7 billion lives by seizing drugs.
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