US congressman meets five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father at ICE detention center – as it happened

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 FBI executed a search warrant at the election office in Fulton county, Georgia for records related to the 2020 election. The warrant sought all ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton county, tabulator tapes, ballot images and voter rolls, according to a warrant obtained by the Guardian.

• Congressman Joaquin Castro met with five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father at the Dilley detention center in Texas today. In a post on social media, Castro shared a photograph of Liam resting in his father’s arms. At a press conference later in the day, Castro said Liam seemed lethargic and added that “his father said that Liam has been very depressed since he’s been at Dilley.”

• Two federal officers who fired their guns during the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti were placed on administrative leave on Saturday. An initial Department of Homeland Security review of the incident also made no mention of Pretti “brandishing” a gun.

• Video recorded on 13 January in Minneapolis by the digital news outlet The News Movement, released on Wednesday, appears to show Pretti being tackled to the ground by another group of federal officers during an altercation 11 days before he was killed.

• Donald Trump spent nearly an hour praising his administration’s new “Trump Accounts”, individual investment accounts for US children that will take effect in July as part of Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

• Democratic and Republican lawmakers came out in support of Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar, a day after she was attacked at a town hall event. At a press conference in Minneapolis today, Omar was joined by Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who called for the impeachment of the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.

• A federal judge in Minnesota blocked the Trump administration from arresting and detaining the 5,600 refugees living in the state. He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to release and return to Minnesota anyone already detained by the administration under the operation.

• A separate federal judge in Minnesota canceled a contempt of court hearing for a lead ICE official, but also noted that the agency has failed to comply with nearly 100 court orders since 1 January.

• Trump announced the formation of a new National Fraud Enforcement division of the justice department and nominated a justice department official, Colin McDonald, to lead it as a new assistant attorney general.

• Attorney general Pam Bondi has said she is “on the ground in Minneapolis” and that federal agents have arrested 16 demonstrators in Minnesota after alleged assaults on federal law enforcement officers.

• Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, laid out Democratic demands for policy changes for ICE, as he pushed for DHS funding to be separated from the other funding bills ahead of a looming shutdown at the end of this week. He also called for DHS secretary Kristi Noem and top Trump aide Stephen Miller to go.

• The Ecuadorian government said that an ICE agent attempted to enter its Minneapolis consulate on Tuesday, but was prevented from coming in by staff working at the building.

• Bruce Springsteen released a new song in response to what he described as “the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis”.

• Marco Rubio has declined to rule out future US military action in Venezuela but insisted the Trump administration did not intend to take such steps, as he faced questions from lawmakers over Washington’s unprecedented intervention.

• Trump has said a “massive armada” is heading to Iran and is ready to “fulfil its mission with speed and violence if necessary”.

• The US Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged after its first rate-setting meeting of the year today, resisting enormous pressure from the White House to lower rates.

• A new letter from the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Trump administration’s deployment of federal troops to six cities cost taxpayers $496m between June and December 2025.

• The No Kings Coalition has announced it will hold another mass mobilization event on 28 March, centered around a flagship event in the Twin Cities.

Video recorded on 13 January in Minneapolis by the digital news outlet The News Movement, released on Wednesday, appears to show Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old nurse gunned down by federal agents on Saturday, being tackled to the ground by another group of federal officers during an altercation 11 days before he was killed.

According to the News Movement report, the newly discovered video of Pretti was recorded at East 36th Street and Park Avenue, in Minneapolis’ Powderhorn neighborhood, while the outlet was “filming a documentary about ICE activity”.

The video shows the man who appears to be Pretti shouting at federal officers and kicking the taillight of their vehicle as they move away. As the light breaks, the vehicle stops and agents descend on the man identified to CNN by a representative of Pretti’s family as Pretti. After several agents hurl Pretti to the ground, they fire chemical agents at the crowd of protesters and leave.

As Pretti stands back up, what appears to be a gun can be seen in his waistband.

What prompted Pretti’s anger at the agents that morning is not clear from the video, but Sahan Journal, a nonprofit news site that reports on immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota, reported that day that dozens of residents had showed up to protest and observe a federal immigration sweep in the area. On the same morning, just two blocks away, a young woman named Aliya Rahman was violently pulled from her car while trying to drive past federal immigration agents and roughly treated in an image that prompted widespread outrage.

Andy Larson, a Minneapolis resident who was observing the federal agents that morning, told Sahan Journal that day “that one protester kicked out the taillight of an ICE vehicle and was tackled to the ground up the road on Park Avenue and E. 36th Street.”

Nearly 20 minutes of video posted on YouTube that day by another witness to the incident gives a sense of the roiling anger in the neighborhood over the immigration enforcement operation, with cars honking and people blowing whistles to alert their neighbors to the presence of federal agents. Then Pretti arrives to curse at the agents for what they are doing and spits at their vehicle as they drive off, before kicking the taillight and then being tackled to the ground.

Rightwing influencers claimed that the video showed Pretti spitting on officers, but the second witness video, recorded from the opposite side of the street, shows that he spat on the vehicle only after the agent he had been shouting at had closed the door.

Voting rights advocates say that the FBI’s actions in Fulton County, Georgia today – where the bureau has executed a search warrant for records related to the 2020 election – represent an attempt by the Trump administration “to see what they can get away with elsewhere”.

“We now live in a country where the sitting president attempts to undermine elections when he doesn’t like the results,” said Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, an organization focused on reducing barriers to voting. “By seizing ballots in Fulton County, the FBI is doing the president’s bidding to placate his delusions about the 2020 election. Six years later, they still can’t come to grips with the fact that they lost, and now they’re willing to tear down the American election system out of pure spite.”

“If they’re allowed to take ballots here, then what would stop them from seizing ballots or voting machines in any future election in a county or state where their preferred candidates lose? The Trump administration’s tactic has been clear from the beginning: If the results don’t go our way, we’re going to make up lies and see what sticks,” she added.

A federal judge in Minnesota has canceled a contempt of court hearing for a lead ICE official, but also noted that the agency has failed to comply with nearly 100 court orders since 1 January.

Chief US district judge Patrick J Schiltz in Minneapolis canceled acting ICE chief Todd Lyons’s appearance after the agency released a wrongly detained Ecuadorean man. At the same time, Schiltz noted that ICE had failed to comply with 96 court orders in 74 cases.

“ICE is not a law unto itself. ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this court, but, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated,” he said in the order.

Here’s a bit more on the third No Kings protest announced today and planned for 28 March.

My colleague Lex McMenamin reports:

A third No Kings protest will be held on 28 March, organizers announced on Wednesday. Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, one of the groups coordinating No Kings, said that he expected it to be “the biggest protest in American history”.

Protests will be held nationwide, with a flagship event in Minnesota’s Twin Cities – Minneapolis and St Paul – where this month federal immigration agents killed two residents, Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, amid their escalated operations in the region.

Levin said No Kings 3 was a response to many Americans’ growing outrage over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) “reign of terror” in communities across the country. The coalition behind the No Kings protests also hosted a mass mobilization “weekend of action” immediately following Good’s death, which included more than 1,000 protests, vigils and other events. According to recent polling from YouGov, more Americans now support abolishing ICE than oppose it.

Donald Trump has announced the formation of a new National Fraud Enforcement division of the justice department and has nominated a justice department official, Colin McDonald, to lead it as a new assistant attorney general, in a post on his social media platform.

Trump said he had created the division to “catch and stop FRAUDSTERS that have been STEALING from the American People” and said his administration had “uncovered Fraud schemes in States like Minnesota and California”, both states whose Democratic governors Trump has feuded with.

The nomination, for a new post that will require Senate confirmation, was previewed earlier this month by JD Vance, the vice-president, at a White House news conference. Vance’s announcement attracted attention at the time because he said the new justice department division “will be run out of the White House under the supervision of me and the president of the United States”. Currently, fraud cases are handled by the justice department’s criminal division.

In that 8 January news conference, Vance boasted of what he called the success of the effort to crack down on benefit fraud in Minnesota and said “we also want to expand this”.

He added:

We know that the fraud isn’t just happening in Minneapolis. It’s also happening in states like Ohio. It’s happening in states like California. And so, what we’re doing, in order to help coordinate this remarkable interagency effort from the Trump administration but also to make sure that we prosecute the bad guys and do it as swiftly and efficiently as possible, is we are creating a new assistant attorney general position who will have nationwide jurisdiction over the issue of fraud.

Now, of course, that person’s efforts will start and focus primarily in Minnesota, but it is going to be a nationwide effort, because unfortunately the American people have been defrauded in a very nationwide way … We’ve never seen fraud like this in the history of our country …

We’re going to make the nomination hopefully in the next few days … But this is the person who is going to make sure that we stop defrauding the American people. Here’s one final thing I’ll say about this. I’ve heard a lot of people say that we need a special council to investigate fraud in the United States of America.

I actually agree and that’s what this position does. It has all the benefits, all the resources, all the authority of a special counsel, but with two crucial differences. Number one, it will be run out of the White House under the supervision of me and the president of the United States. And number two, it’s actually constitutionally legitimate.

As you guys may know, the special counsel statute has some major constitutional questions. When we get the bad guys, we want to make sure we get them permanently and they don’t have some legal technicality they can get out of which is why we set it up as an associate attorney general.

Shortly after she appeared alongside Donald Trump this afternoon, musician Nicki Minaj posted a photograph on social media of her new Trump Gold Card.

Launched in December, the program allows wealthy foreign individuals to buy a US “golden visa” for $1m.

An official government webpage promises US residency “in record time” with the new “Trump Gold Card” – once applicants have paid a $15,000 processing fee to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), passed a background check and paid up $1m.

We report more on the “gold card” here:

Joining Omar in Minneapolis today is Ayanna Pressley, a Democratic congresswoman. The Massachusetts representative repeated the ongoing calls for the impeachment of the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.

“We need to abolish ICE and dispense the systems of oppression that have gotten us to this point,” Presley said.

At the Karmel Mall of Somalia in Minneapolis, Representative Ilhan Omar addressed residents and the press a day after she was attacked at a town hall event.

In her opening remarks, the Democratic congresswoman didn’t reference the attack, but condemned the ongoing immigration surge in the Twin Cities.

“We know this not about public safety … It’s political retribution,” she said.

Omar also said the killings of two US citizens, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, were “entirely avoidable”.

“No immigration enforcement agent should ever be allowed to act as a judge, jury and executioner,” she added.

Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s “border czar”, is scheduled to hold a press conference in Minneapolis on Thursday, just two days after he arrived in the city and took over the federal immigration enforcement surge in the Twin Cities from Gregory Bovino.

He’s set to speak to reporters at 7am CT/8am ET.

A federal judge in Minnesota has blocked the Trump administration from arresting and detaining the 5,600 refugees living in the state.

In a ruling issued today, US district judge John R Tunheim granted the Advocates for Human Rights, which represents midwesterners seeking asylum, a temporary restraining order blocking Operation Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening (“Operation Parris”). He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to release and return to Minnesota anyone already detained by the administration under the operation.

“The refugees impacted by this Order are carefully and thoroughly vetted individuals who have been invited into the United States because of persecution in the countries from which they have come. They are not committing crimes on our streets, nor did they illegally cross the border,” he wrote. “Refugees have a legal right to be in the United States, a right to work, a right to live peacefully – and importantly, a right not to be subjected to the terror of being arrested.”

An immigration judge has granted asylum to Chinese national Guan Heng, who secretly filmed human rights abuses at detention facilities in Xinjiang.

Guan, who applied for asylum after entering the United States in 2021, has been in custody since he was picked up during an immigration enforcement operation in August 2025. Despite the judge’s ruling, Guan will remain in custody while the Department of Homeland Security decides whether it will appeal the judge’s ruling, which it has 30 days to do.

The parents of Alexi Pretti have retained a former federal prosecutor who helped Minnesota’s attorney general convict police officer Derek Chauvin of murder after he kneeled on George Floyd’s neck, killing him.

Pretti’s family has retained Steve Schleicher, a partner at the Minneapolis firm Maslon. Schleicher served as a special prosecutor in the 2021 trial over Floyd’s murder. Schleicher has taken on the case pro bono, PBS News reports.

Earlier this month, the family of Renee Good, who was also killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, retained another lawyer involved in the George Floyd case – the Chicago-based firm Romanucci & Blandin, which represented Floyd’s family.

The No Kings Coalition has announced it will hold another mass mobilization event on 28 March, centered around a flagship event in the Twin Cities.

The coalition, which brought together millions of Americans to protest Donald Trump’s presidency in 2025, launched an “Eyes on ICE” training program earlier this week, to train Americans to safely document federal law enforcement.

“The events in the last few weeks in Minnesota make clear what is at stake in America today,” said the American Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten, one of the leaders of the coalition. “We have a leader who acts like an unbridled king, as opposed to a president who abides by a legal and moral responsibility to the people of our country. Americans are fighting back, peacefully, with signs, whistles and cameras – from thousands in the bitter cold in Minnesota to millions across the country last October. It’s clear that courageous, everyday citizens refuse to be intimidated by our government’s abuse of power.”