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    From LA to Paris, the populist right hates cities – and it’s fuelled by a sense of bitter defeat | Andy Beckett

    From Los Angeles to London, Istanbul to Warsaw, cities are making rightwing populists angry. Their liberal elites, immigrants, net zero policies, leftwing activists, globalised businesses, expensive transport infrastructure and outspoken municipal leaders – all are provocations to populist politicians whose support often comes from more conservative, less privileged places.Three years ago the founders of national conservatism, the transatlantic ideology on which much of modern rightwing populism is based, published a statement of principles. One of these, surprisingly little noticed at the time, declared with some menace: “In those [places] in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.”This month, Donald Trump’s administration identified the first American city – and almost certainly not the last – to meet these ominously broad criteria. “Los Angeles has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens,” he said. It was “a city of criminals” and “socialists”, said his homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. “Mob violence” was so disrupting the work of the federal government there, claimed his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, that an “insurrection” was under way. Trump promised: “We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again.”That this “liberation” involved an ongoing, expanding and legally contentious military occupation – almost unprecedented in American history – is one indicator of how deep the populist animosity towards liberal cities and their leaders runs. Another is the recent imprisonment of the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, a challenger to the authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the Turkish presidency. Another is the level of security required for London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, which is similar to that for Keir Starmer and King Charles.The death threats, public abuse and state aggression endured by such municipal figures in supposedly free democracies – along with slightly more subtle anti-urban interventions, such as Nigel Farage’s complaint in 2014 that he could not “hear English” on an inner London train – reveal much about rightwing populism, its anxieties and fundamental values. Cities are where the future often starts, and populism is often about holding on to the past.While conservative populism reveres, or says it reveres, the nation state, the countryside, community, social continuity and the traditional family, cities are often places of more fluid loyalties. While populism presents politics as a simple battle between “the people” and their enemies, cities, by gathering so many interest groups in one place, show that politics is in fact a more complex process: involving competition but also cooperation, contests over space and resources, and many social forces, including class, gender, sexuality, local pride and race.More enraging and disorienting still for conservative populists, over the past 30 years many big cities have changed. Trump acknowledges this by describing Los Angeles as “once great”. As Mike Davis laid out in his pioneering histories of the city, for most of the 20th century Los Angeles was, behind its laid-back image, a highly conservative place: racially segregated, repressively policed, ruled by Republican mayors as much as Democrats. Immigration, radical activism, more progressive administrations and liberal gentrification gradually altered the city so that now, while still often shaped by inequalities, it is a stronghold of the centre left.A similar shift has happened since the 1990s in Paris, London and many other European and North American cities. For the right, the loss of these prestigious places has been a bitter defeat – hence their insistence that they have been ruined by liberals and the left. Khan’s centrist mayoralty in London has used its very limited powers to provide free meals for primary schoolchildren and give the capital cleaner air, yet is routinely described by the rightwing press as a dogmatic and disastrous experiment.Such caricatures of cities and their government are all the more unconvincing because they ignore the political complexity of these places. Forty percent of Londoners voted for Brexit, and many of the city’s immigrants are social conservatives. Some of its supposedly most rigid leftwing areas have, or have had, well-known rightwingers as residents: Boris Johnson and Paul Dacre, the ferociously illiberal former Daily Mail editor, used to live in Islington, north London. Dominic Cummings still does. At a Turkish greengrocer in the borough, I sometimes see the Tory MP Nick Timothy – who recently told the House of Commons: “Diversity is not our strength: it is a very serious and difficult challenge” – queueing seemingly quite happily as the shop hums with different languages, before returning to his home in the even more diverse borough of Hackney.For all the aspects of city life that infuriate those on the right, there are others you might expect to please them: the emphasis on work, the entrepreneurialism, huge importance of property and endless hierarchies. These priorities and divides could push cities back to the right. In the 1980s, much of London elected Tory MPs. Paris had a conservative mayor, Jacques Chirac, from 1977 to 1995.Yet a return to urban conservatism feels less likely with the right in populist mode. As the Economist magazine – not usually an ally of the municipal left – recently pointed out, city government needs “pragmatic politicos who keep … the roads free of potholes … [and] buses running on time”. The broad-brush, administratively chaotic politics of Trump, Farage and Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives don’t seem well suited to such tasks.Perhaps that doesn’t matter to the populists. They can go on attacking cities, in order to stir up their voters elsewhere, without actually having to run them. Meanwhile, liberal and leftwing municipal politicians keep key economic and tourism hubs functional, leaving populist national politicians such as Trump free to promote less practical policies. He may hate contemporary Los Angeles and California, but the state’s economy recently overtook Japan’s to become the world’s fourth largest – helpful for a president whose own economic plan is misfiring.Yet the urban resistance to rightwing populism shouldn’t be written off as just playing into the enemy’s hands, as some political pessimists have done during the protests in Los Angeles. Whether on the street or from a grand mayoral office, defying today’s intolerant, reactionary populists has a value – as an act in itself and as an encouragement to others. City life can be grim and disappointing. But one of its virtues is that while trends come and go fast, rebellions are rarely forgotten.

    Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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    From LA to Paris, the populist right hates cities – and it’s fuelled by a sense of bitter defeat | Andy Beckett

    From Los Angeles to London, Istanbul to Warsaw, cities are making rightwing populists angry. Their liberal elites, immigrants, net zero policies, leftwing activists, globalised businesses, expensive transport infrastructure and outspoken municipal leaders – all are provocations to populist politicians whose support often comes from more conservative, less privileged places.Three years ago the founders of national conservatism, the transatlantic ideology on which much of modern rightwing populism is based, published a statement of principles. One of these, surprisingly little noticed at the time, declared with some menace: “In those [places] in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.”This month, Donald Trump’s administration identified the first American city – and almost certainly not the last – to meet these ominously broad criteria. “Los Angeles has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens,” he said. It was “a city of criminals” and “socialists”, said his homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. “Mob violence” was so disrupting the work of the federal government there, claimed his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, that an “insurrection” was under way. Trump promised: “We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again.”That this “liberation” involved an ongoing, expanding and legally contentious military occupation – almost unprecedented in American history – is one indicator of how deep the populist animosity towards liberal cities and their leaders runs. Another is the recent imprisonment of the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, a challenger to the authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the Turkish presidency. Another is the level of security required for London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, which is similar to that for Keir Starmer and King Charles.The death threats, public abuse and state aggression endured by such municipal figures in supposedly free democracies – along with slightly more subtle anti-urban interventions, such as Nigel Farage’s complaint in 2014 that he could not “hear English” on an inner London train – reveal much about rightwing populism, its anxieties and fundamental values. Cities are where the future often starts, and populism is often about holding on to the past.While conservative populism reveres, or says it reveres, the nation state, the countryside, community, social continuity and the traditional family, cities are often places of more fluid loyalties. While populism presents politics as a simple battle between “the people” and their enemies, cities, by gathering so many interest groups in one place, show that politics is in fact a more complex process: involving competition but also cooperation, contests over space and resources, and many social forces, including class, gender, sexuality, local pride and race.More enraging and disorienting still for conservative populists, over the past 30 years many big cities have changed. Trump acknowledges this by describing Los Angeles as “once great”. As Mike Davis laid out in his pioneering histories of the city, for most of the 20th century Los Angeles was, behind its laid-back image, a highly conservative place: racially segregated, repressively policed, ruled by Republican mayors as much as Democrats. Immigration, radical activism, more progressive administrations and liberal gentrification gradually altered the city so that now, while still often shaped by inequalities, it is a stronghold of the centre left.A similar shift has happened since the 1990s in Paris, London and many other European and North American cities. For the right, the loss of these prestigious places has been a bitter defeat – hence their insistence that they have been ruined by liberals and the left. Khan’s centrist mayoralty in London has used its very limited powers to provide free meals for primary schoolchildren and give the capital cleaner air, yet is routinely described by the rightwing press as a dogmatic and disastrous experiment.Such caricatures of cities and their government are all the more unconvincing because they ignore the political complexity of these places. Forty percent of Londoners voted for Brexit, and many of the city’s immigrants are social conservatives. Some of its supposedly most rigid leftwing areas have, or have had, well-known rightwingers as residents: Boris Johnson and Paul Dacre, the ferociously illiberal former Daily Mail editor, used to live in Islington, north London. Dominic Cummings still does. At a Turkish greengrocer in the borough, I sometimes see the Tory MP Nick Timothy – who recently told the House of Commons: “Diversity is not our strength: it is a very serious and difficult challenge” – queueing seemingly quite happily as the shop hums with different languages, before returning to his home in the even more diverse borough of Hackney.For all the aspects of city life that infuriate those on the right, there are others you might expect to please them: the emphasis on work, the entrepreneurialism, huge importance of property and endless hierarchies. These priorities and divides could push cities back to the right. In the 1980s, much of London elected Tory MPs. Paris had a conservative mayor, Jacques Chirac, from 1977 to 1995.Yet a return to urban conservatism feels less likely with the right in populist mode. As the Economist magazine – not usually an ally of the municipal left – recently pointed out, city government needs “pragmatic politicos who keep … the roads free of potholes … [and] buses running on time”. The broad-brush, administratively chaotic politics of Trump, Farage and Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives don’t seem well suited to such tasks.Perhaps that doesn’t matter to the populists. They can go on attacking cities, in order to stir up their voters elsewhere, without actually having to run them. Meanwhile, liberal and leftwing municipal politicians keep key economic and tourism hubs functional, leaving populist national politicians such as Trump free to promote less practical policies. He may hate contemporary Los Angeles and California, but the state’s economy recently overtook Japan’s to become the world’s fourth largest – helpful for a president whose own economic plan is misfiring.Yet the urban resistance to rightwing populism shouldn’t be written off as just playing into the enemy’s hands, as some political pessimists have done during the protests in Los Angeles. Whether on the street or from a grand mayoral office, defying today’s intolerant, reactionary populists has a value – as an act in itself and as an encouragement to others. City life can be grim and disappointing. But one of its virtues is that while trends come and go fast, rebellions are rarely forgotten.

    Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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    I grew up on American food. Trust me, it’s the last thing Europe needs | Alexander Hurst

    All over European media, the take seems to be similar – that the EU is “under pressure” to conclude some sort of deal with the US in order to avoid Donald Trump’s 9 July deadline for the unilateral imposition of broad tariffs. What might be on the table in the attempt to secure that? In early May, the EU trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, was already suggesting that a deal to increase purchases from the US could include agricultural products – a possibility that seems to remain even though Šefčovič later clarified that the EU was not contemplating changing its health or safety standards.Since I have failed to Abba (“Always be boldly acronyming”) and don’t have anything as good as Taco (“Trump always chickens out”) – coined by the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong – at the ready, I’ll simply reach for the easy line: opening the door even slightly to more US food imports into the EU would leave a bad taste in all our mouths. Trump’s hostage-taking approach to trade should not be rewarded, certainly not with something that hits as close to home as food does.“The European Union won’t take chicken from America. They won’t take lobsters from America. They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak,” declared the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, in April. Laughter aside, every time I go back to the US I become a vegetarian for the duration of my trip – even though US grocery store vegetables are themselves generally big, blemish-free and bland. Why? Call me paranoid, but I simply don’t want to ingest the same growth hormones that Lutnick’s “beautiful” meat probably contains traces of and that are banned in the EU.Growing up in Ohio, I experienced the full force of US food culture. It was the 90s, which meant that margarine was most definitely in and butter was out; an example that highlights how processed everything took root, including – in my vegetarian family – highly processed meat alternatives. The people around me meant well, but how do you fight a system that, from top to bottom, was designed to push high fructose corn syrup into practically everything (and most worryingly into school lunches)?To be fair, all of this has since generated a domestic backlash, but there’s an intense amount of momentum behind it still: almost without fail, I find that the standard sugar level in the US soars far beyond what I now find appealing. Even in places I wouldn’t expect to find added sugar at all, like pizza.And why would the Trump administration’s full-scale savaging of the US government’s administrative and regulatory capacity, including the Food and Drug Administration, increase anyone’s trust that what US regulation does exist is actually being followed?Some of you are perhaps rolling your eyes, thinking: Alexander Hurst, a naturalised French citizen, has gone full “chauvin”; converts are the worst. Except it’s not just me. There is an entire internet subgenre of content extolling the virtues of French butter, or involving Americans who come to France and realise that this is what peaches, or strawberries, really taste like.Beyond the question of whether or not Europeans want to eat US agricultural output, a hypothetical trade deal would involve hugely negative climate impacts. The distance that food travels already accounts for 20% of global agriculture-related emissions pollution, and Europe’s share in imported agriculture emissions is already high. We need to be reducing it, not adding to it through foodstuffs carted unnecessarily across the Atlantic.How can we ask European farmers to accelerate their transition to regenerative agriculture (which offers the potential to drastically reduce agriculture emissions) if, at the same time, they are being undercut by US producers who face far lower regulatory standards?“Europe already produces and grows everything it could possibly need. The last thing we want to see circulating is hormone-pumped beef or chlorinated poultry,” says Lindsey Tramuta, the author of The Eater Guide to Paris. “Even beyond the goods themselves, there’s the issue of distance: why bring food over from the US if Europeans can get their needs met from much closer to home?”Yannick Huang, who manages the Vietnamese restaurant Loan in Paris’s Belleville neighbourhood, agrees. “At a time when we’re trying to do organic, local, it’s pointless to want to import anything from the US,” he told me. Huang, who is obsessive about ingredient quality, only serves French beef. To him, US agriculture comes tainted with the connotation of “GMOs and other problems”.Hold on, you might say. Isn’t it inconsistent to oppose Trump’s tariffs while also promoting food protectionism? Fair point: it’s hard to find a “one size fits all” approach to globalisation. It has harmed some workers in wealthy economies while also reducing the gap between low-income nations and high-income ones. No country on Earth has a fully self-contained advanced semiconductor manufacturing supply chain, and in sectors where globalisation has become excessive, it might be even more economically harmful to roll back. None of that, though, means that things that have resisted becoming fully global should all of a sudden be opened up – food most of all.Ramzi Saadé is a Lebanese-Canadian chef whose Paris restaurant, Atica, is dedicated to a fiercely regional approach to haute cuisine. But taking his diners on a voyage of discovery doesn’t mean his food has to go on one too; despite focusing on first Basque, and now Corsican cuisine, he sources almost all of his ingredients from the area surrounding Paris. For a lamb dish involving 13 different elements, only the nepeta, a Corsican herb, had travelled, he said. “Is my role today to bring you Japanese culture via wasabi flown to Paris?” Saadé asked. “No, my role is to explain to you that it’s grated this way and put on fish for this reason, and I can do that with wasabi from France.”I couldn’t help but think that it’s actually far more interesting to do it his way – to interpret a cuisine rather than attempt to transpose it.We are what we eat. A cuisine is a medium of communication; it is, indelibly, tied up with the stories we tell about who we are. Perhaps that’s why it’s so disturbing to see food held hostage, or weaponised, in the pursuit of economic or geostrategic goals.Europe’s intense and varied regionality is an enormous part of how it eats and therefore what it is. Opening the market to mass penetration by US agriculture would, little by little, nibble away at that richness. It’s the kind of proposition that, if it ever makes it out of the kitchen, should be sent back straight away.

    Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist More

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    I grew up on American food. Trust me, it’s the last thing Europe needs | Alexander Hurst

    All over European media, the take seems to be similar – that the EU is “under pressure” to conclude some sort of deal with the US in order to avoid Donald Trump’s 9 July deadline for the unilateral imposition of broad tariffs. What might be on the table in the attempt to secure that? In early May, the EU trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, was already suggesting that a deal to increase purchases from the US could include agricultural products – a possibility that seems to remain even though Šefčovič later clarified that the EU was not contemplating changing its health or safety standards.Since I have failed to Abba (“Always be boldly acronyming”) and don’t have anything as good as Taco (“Trump always chickens out”) – coined by the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong – at the ready, I’ll simply reach for the easy line: opening the door even slightly to more US food imports into the EU would leave a bad taste in all our mouths. Trump’s hostage-taking approach to trade should not be rewarded, certainly not with something that hits as close to home as food does.“The European Union won’t take chicken from America. They won’t take lobsters from America. They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak,” declared the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, in April. Laughter aside, every time I go back to the US I become a vegetarian for the duration of my trip – even though US grocery store vegetables are themselves generally big, blemish-free and bland. Why? Call me paranoid, but I simply don’t want to ingest the same growth hormones that Lutnick’s “beautiful” meat probably contains traces of and that are banned in the EU.Growing up in Ohio, I experienced the full force of US food culture. It was the 90s, which meant that margarine was most definitely in and butter was out; an example that highlights how processed everything took root, including – in my vegetarian family – highly processed meat alternatives. The people around me meant well, but how do you fight a system that, from top to bottom, was designed to push high fructose corn syrup into practically everything (and most worryingly into school lunches)?To be fair, all of this has since generated a domestic backlash, but there’s an intense amount of momentum behind it still: almost without fail, I find that the standard sugar level in the US soars far beyond what I now find appealing. Even in places I wouldn’t expect to find added sugar at all, like pizza.And why would the Trump administration’s full-scale savaging of the US government’s administrative and regulatory capacity, including the Food and Drug Administration, increase anyone’s trust that what US regulation does exist is actually being followed?Some of you are perhaps rolling your eyes, thinking: Alexander Hurst, a naturalised French citizen, has gone full “chauvin”; converts are the worst. Except it’s not just me. There is an entire internet subgenre of content extolling the virtues of French butter, or involving Americans who come to France and realise that this is what peaches, or strawberries, really taste like.Beyond the question of whether or not Europeans want to eat US agricultural output, a hypothetical trade deal would involve hugely negative climate impacts. The distance that food travels already accounts for 20% of global agriculture-related emissions pollution, and Europe’s share in imported agriculture emissions is already high. We need to be reducing it, not adding to it through foodstuffs carted unnecessarily across the Atlantic.How can we ask European farmers to accelerate their transition to regenerative agriculture (which offers the potential to drastically reduce agriculture emissions) if, at the same time, they are being undercut by US producers who face far lower regulatory standards?“Europe already produces and grows everything it could possibly need. The last thing we want to see circulating is hormone-pumped beef or chlorinated poultry,” says Lindsey Tramuta, the author of The Eater Guide to Paris. “Even beyond the goods themselves, there’s the issue of distance: why bring food over from the US if Europeans can get their needs met from much closer to home?”Yannick Huang, who manages the Vietnamese restaurant Loan in Paris’s Belleville neighbourhood, agrees. “At a time when we’re trying to do organic, local, it’s pointless to want to import anything from the US,” he told me. Huang, who is obsessive about ingredient quality, only serves French beef. To him, US agriculture comes tainted with the connotation of “GMOs and other problems”.Hold on, you might say. Isn’t it inconsistent to oppose Trump’s tariffs while also promoting food protectionism? Fair point: it’s hard to find a “one size fits all” approach to globalisation. It has harmed some workers in wealthy economies while also reducing the gap between low-income nations and high-income ones. No country on Earth has a fully self-contained advanced semiconductor manufacturing supply chain, and in sectors where globalisation has become excessive, it might be even more economically harmful to roll back. None of that, though, means that things that have resisted becoming fully global should all of a sudden be opened up – food most of all.Ramzi Saadé is a Lebanese-Canadian chef whose Paris restaurant, Atica, is dedicated to a fiercely regional approach to haute cuisine. But taking his diners on a voyage of discovery doesn’t mean his food has to go on one too; despite focusing on first Basque, and now Corsican cuisine, he sources almost all of his ingredients from the area surrounding Paris. For a lamb dish involving 13 different elements, only the nepeta, a Corsican herb, had travelled, he said. “Is my role today to bring you Japanese culture via wasabi flown to Paris?” Saadé asked. “No, my role is to explain to you that it’s grated this way and put on fish for this reason, and I can do that with wasabi from France.”I couldn’t help but think that it’s actually far more interesting to do it his way – to interpret a cuisine rather than attempt to transpose it.We are what we eat. A cuisine is a medium of communication; it is, indelibly, tied up with the stories we tell about who we are. Perhaps that’s why it’s so disturbing to see food held hostage, or weaponised, in the pursuit of economic or geostrategic goals.Europe’s intense and varied regionality is an enormous part of how it eats and therefore what it is. Opening the market to mass penetration by US agriculture would, little by little, nibble away at that richness. It’s the kind of proposition that, if it ever makes it out of the kitchen, should be sent back straight away.

    Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist More

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    Trump news at a glance: President mulls whether ‘bunker busters’ can destroy Iranian nuclear site

    Will he or won’t he? That’s the question many are asking regarding whether Donald Trump will join Israel’s attacks on Iran and take out one of its most difficult targets: the Fordow nuclear enrichment site.But another question has arisen. Can he?Trump signalled on Thursday that he will take two weeks to decide whether or not to strike. Guardian reporting suggests he is not fully convinced the US Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs – better known as “bunker busters” – will effectively destroy Fordow, built deep into a mountain south of Tehran. That the 13.6-tonne bomb could fall short of that goal is a concern that some military analysts have echoed.But it’s a coveted target for Israel, which has already destroyed some of Iran’s nuclear capability but lacks the powerful bombs and aircraft to do any real damage to the secretive site. The US is the only country in the world to possess bunker busters and only US aircraft can deliver them.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump sets deadline of two weeks to decide if US will join Israel’s war on IranTrump has set a two-week deadline to decide whether the US will join Israel’s war with Iran, allowing time to seek a negotiated end to the conflict, the White House has said.The president also denied a report by the Wall Street Journal that he told senior aides he had approved attack plans but was delaying on giving the final order to see if Tehran would abandon its nuclear program. The report cited three anonymous officials.Read the full storyLA Dodgers say they denied Ice agents entry to Dodger StadiumThe Los Angeles Dodgers said they blocked US immigration enforcement agents from accessing the parking lot at Dodger Stadium on Thursday and got into public back-and-forth statements with Ice and the Department of Homeland Security, which denied their agents were ever there.Read the full storyOutrage as DHS moves to restrict lawmaker visits to detention centersThe Department of Homeland Security is now requiring lawmakers to provide 72 hours of notice before visiting detention centers, according to new guidance. The guidance comes after a slew of tense visits from Democratic lawmakers to detention centers amid Trump’s crackdowns in immigrant communities across the country.Read the full storyJudge blocks Trump plan to tie states’ transportation funds to immigration enforcementA federal judge on Thursday blocked Trump’s administration from forcing 20 Democratic-led states to cooperate with immigration enforcement in order to receive billions of dollars in transportation grant funding.Chief US district judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, granted the states’ request for an injunction barring the Department for Transportation’s policy, saying the states were likely to succeed on the merits of some or all of their claims.Read the full storyHegseth reportedly orders ‘passive approach to Juneteenth’ at PentagonThe office of the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, requested “a passive approach to Juneteenth messaging”, according to an exclusive Rolling Stone report citing a Pentagon email.The messaging request for Juneteenth – a federal holiday commemorating when enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free – was transmitted by the Pentagon’s office of the chief of public affairs. This office said it was not poised to publish web content related to Juneteenth, Rolling Stone reported.Read the full storyWere the ‘No Kings’ protests the largest single-day demonstration in US history?Depending on who you ask, between 4 and 6 million people showed up to last weekend’s “No Kings” protests. Now the real number is becoming clearer, with one estimate suggesting that Saturday was among the biggest.Read the full storyKaren Bass in hot seat as Trump targets Los Angeles – but it’s not her first crisisKaren Bass, a 71-year-old former community organizer, is leading Los Angeles’ response to an extraordinary confrontation staged by the federal government, as federal agents have raided workplaces and parking lots, arresting immigrant workers in ways family members have compared to “kidnappings”. Here’s what to know about the mayor of Los Angeles.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    Friends and family of Moises Sotelo, a well-known vineyard manager, say they are “disappointed and disgusted” after he was detained outside the Oregon church he attends.

    Brad Lander, the New York mayoral candidate arrested by Ice says “Trump is looking to stoke conflict, weaponize fear”.

    What is Donald Trump’s plan for Iran? The Guardian’s Rachel Leingang and Andrew Roth discuss in the Politics Weekly America podcast. Also, this Today in Focus episode explores what Israel’s new war means for Gaza.
    Catching up? Here’s what happened on 18 June 2025. More

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    Judge blocks Trump plan to tie states’ transportation funds to immigration enforcement

    A federal judge on Thursday blocked Donald Trump’s administration from forcing 20 Democratic-led states to cooperate with immigration enforcement in order to receive billions of dollars in transportation grant funding.Chief US District Judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, granted the states’ request for an injunction barring the Department of Transportation’s policy, saying the states were likely to succeed on the merits of some or all of their claims.The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by a group of Democratic state attorneys general who argued the administration was seeking to unlawfully hold federal funds hostage to coerce them into adhering to Trump’s hardline immigration agenda.The states argued the US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, lacked the authority to impose immigration-enforcement conditions on funding that Congress appropriated to help states sustain roads, highways, bridges and other transportation projects.Since returning to office on 20 January, Trump has signed several executive orders that have called for cutting off federal funding to so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that do not cooperate with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) as his administration has moved to conduct mass deportations.Sanctuary jurisdictions generally have laws and policies that limit or prevent local law enforcement from assisting federal officers with civil immigration arrests.The justice department has filed a series of lawsuits against such jurisdictions, including Illinois, New York and Colorado, challenging laws in those Democratic-led states that it says hinder federal immigration enforcement.The lawsuit before McConnell, who was appointed by Barack Obama, was filed after Duffy on 24 April notified states they could lose transportation funding if they do not cooperate with the enforcement of federal law, including with Ice in its efforts to enforce immigration law.The states argue that policy is improper and amounts to an unconstitutionally ambiguous condition on the states’ ability to receive funding authorized by Congress as it leaves unclear what exactly would constitute adequate cooperation.The administration has argued the policy was within Duffy’s discretion and that conditions should be upheld as there is nothing improper about requiring states to comply with federal law.The 20 states are separately pursuing a similar case also in Rhode Island challenging new immigration enforcement conditions that the homeland security department imposed on grant programs. More

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    Trump’s plan for Iran divides Republicans – podcast

    Archive: ABC News, AP, BBC News, CBS Mornings, CNN, KTLA 5, MSNBC, NBC News, PBS Newshour, Tucker Carlson, The War Room
    Listen to the Today in Focus episode on what Israel’s new war means for Gaza
    Subscribe to the Guardian’s new narrative series Missing in the Amazon
    Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
    Help support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politcspodus More

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    Outrage as DHS moves to restrict lawmaker visits to detention centers

    The US Department of Homeland Security is now requiring lawmakers to provide 72 hours of notice before visiting detention centers, according to new guidance.The guidance comes after a slew of tense visits from Democratic lawmakers to detention centers amid Donald Trump’s crackdowns in immigrant communities across the country. Many Democratic lawmakers in recent weeks have either been turned away, arrested or manhandled by law enforcement officers at the facilities, leading to public condemnation towards Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (Ice) handling of such visits.Lawmakers are allowed to access DHS facilities “used to detain or otherwise house aliens” for inspections and are not required “to provide prior notice of the intent to enter a facility”, according to the 2024 Federal Appropriations Act.Previous language surrounding lawmaker visits to such facilities said that “Ice will comply with the law and accommodate members seeking to visit/tour an Ice detention facility for the purpose of conducting oversight,” CNN reported.However, in the new guidance, the DHS updated the language to say that Ice “will make every effort to comply with the law” but “exigent circumstances (eg operational conditions, security posture, etc) may impact the time of entry into the facility”.The new guidance also attempts to distinguish Ice field offices from Ice detention facilities, noting that since “Ice field offices are not detention facilities” they do not fall under the visitation requirements laid out in the Appropriations Act.The Guardian has contacted Ice for comment.In response to the updated guidance, Mississippi’s Democratic representative and the ranking member of the House committee on homeland security, Bennie Thompson, condemned what he called the attempt by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to “block oversight on Ice”.“Kristi Noem’s new policy to block congressional oversight of Ice facilities is not only unprecedented, it is an affront to the constitution and federal law. Noem is now not only attempting to restrict when members can visit, but completely blocking access to Ice field offices – even if members schedule visits in advance,” Thompson said.“This unlawful policy is a smokescreen to deny member visits to Ice offices across the country, which are holding migrants – and sometimes even US citizens – for days at a time. They are therefore detention facilities and are subject to oversight and inspection at any time. DHS pretending otherwise is simply their latest lie.”Last month, the New Jersey representative LaMonica McIver was charged with assaulting federal agents during a visit to a detention facility in Newark alongside two Democratic members of the state’s congressional delegation. McIver called the charges against her “purely political … and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight”.New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, also condemned the charges, saying it was “outrageous for a congresswoman to be criminally charged for exercising her lawful duty to visit a detention site in her own district”.On the day of McIver’s visit, law enforcement also arrested the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, who they charged with trespassing as he attempted to join McIver’s delegation visit. The charges against Baraka were later dropped and Baraka has since filed a lawsuit against the state’s top federal prosecutor over his arrest.Bonnie Watson Coleman, another New Jersey representative who was part of McIver’s visit, rejected the DHS’s claims that the lawmakers assaulted law enforcement officers.“The idea that I could ‘body-slam’ anyone, let alone an Ice agent, is absurd,” the 80-year-old representative said on X last month, adding: “We have an obligation to perform oversight at facilities paid for with taxpayer dollars.”Earlier this month, law enforcement officers forced the California senator Alex Padilla on to the ground as he attempted to ask a question to Noem during a press conference in Los Angeles.Despite repeatedly identifying himself, Padilla was handcuffed and forced into the hallway before law enforcement officers shoved the two-term US senator chest-first on to the floor. Following the incident, which triggered widespread outrage across both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, Noem said she did not recognize the two-term senator and claimed that he did not request a meeting with her. The two then reportedly met for 15 minutes after the incident.On Tuesday, the Illinois representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi and Jonathan Jackson were denied entry during their attempted visit to an Ice facility in Chicago.That same day, the New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate, Brad Lander, was forcibly arrested by multiple federal agents and detained for hours as he tried to accompany a Spanish-speaking immigrant out of a courtroom. The DHS claimed Lander “was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer”, an accusation Lander denies.Following his release, New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, called his arrest “bullshit” and said that the charges against Lander had been dropped.A day later, the New York representatives Dan Goldman and Jerry Nadler were refused entry into Ice detention facilities in Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza, despite requesting a visit in advance via letter, the City reports. More