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    Trump fires US attorney who told border agents to follow law on immigration raids

    Donald Trump fired a top federal prosecutor in Sacramento just hours after she warned immigration agents they could not indiscriminately detain people in her district, according to documents reviewed by the New York Times.Michele Beckwith, who became the acting US attorney in Sacramento in January, received an email at 4.31pm on 15 July notifying her that the president had ordered her termination.The day before, Beckwith had received a phone call from Gregory Bovino, who leads the Border Patrol’s unit in El Centro, a border city 600 miles south of Sacramento. Bovino was planning an immigration raid in Sacramento and asked Beckwith who in her office to contact if his officers were assaulted, the Times reported, citing Beckwith.She informed Bovino that agents were not allowed to indiscriminately stop people in her district, north of Bakersfield, per a federal court order issued in April that prevents the agency from detaining people without reasonable suspicion. The US supreme court overturned a similar court order issued in Los Angeles earlier this month.In a 10.57am email on 15 July, Beckwith repeated her message, telling Bovino she expected “compliance with court orders and the constitution”. Less than six hours later, her work computer and cellphone no longer functioning, she received a letter to her personal email account notifying her that she had been terminated.Two days later, Bovino proceeded with his immigration raid at a Sacramento Home Depot.“Folks, there is no such thing as a sanctuary city,” he said in a video he shared from the California state capitol building.“The former acting US attorney’s email suggesting that the United States Border Patrol does not ALWAYS abide by the constitution revealed a bias against law enforcement,” Bovino said in a statement to the New York Times. “The supreme court’s decision is evidence of the fact Border Patrol follows the constitution and the fourth amendment.”On 8 September, the supreme court ruled that federal immigration agents can stop people solely based on their race, language or job, overturning the decision of a Los Angeles judge who had ordered immigration agents to halt sweeping raids there.Beckwith’s firing is one of a series of federal firings, including of prosecutors who did not abide by the president’s agenda. Last week, US attorney Erik Siebert resigned under intense pressure and Trump replaced him with his special assistant Lindsey Halligan just hours after ordering his attorney general Pam Bondi to do so in a since deleted social media post.Siebert had been overseeing investigations into Letitia James and James Comey. Beckwith has appealed against her termination, according to the Times.“I’m an American who cares about her country,” she told the paper. “We have to stand up and insist the laws be followed.” More

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    Trump says he expects charges for other adversaries after Comey indictment

    Donald Trump said on Friday that he expected more people whom he considers his political enemies to face criminal charges, a day after the justice department indicted former FBI director James Comey and faced a torrent of criticism for enacting the president’s campaign of retribution.“It’s not a list, but I think there’ll be others,” Trump said as he departed the White House to travel to the Ryder Cup golf tournament. “I mean, they’re corrupt. They were corrupt radical left Democrats.”Trump’s blunt remarks underscored the perilous moment for his political adversaries, given that the justice department pressed ahead with criminal charges against Comey, even though it was widely seen – inside and outside the administration – to be a weak case.The indictment against Comey, filed in federal district court on Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia, alleged that he misled lawmakers in September 2020 when he stood by his previous testimony to Congress claiming he had never authorized anyone at the FBI to leak to reporters.Prosecutors alleged that statement was not true and that Comey had authorized his friend and Columbia law school professor Dan Richman to leak to reporters about an investigation into Hilary Clinton, when Richman worked for a short time as a special government employee at the FBI.But the underlying evidence against Comey, which remains unclear from the two-page indictment, was considered to be insufficient for a conviction. The issues were laid out in a memo and Erik Siebert, the then interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, declined to bring charges.Trump fired Siebert within days and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, most recently a White House aide with no prosecutorial experience. Halligan was briefed on the problems with the case but pressed forward with charges anyway, presenting the case herself to the grand jury.The grand jury returned an indictment on two counts but declined to approve a third. Even then, only 14 out of 23 grand jurors voted to bring the false statement charge, barely more than the 12-person threshold, court documents show.The fraught nature of the Comey indictment raised fresh fears that Trump’s political appointees at justice department headquarters in Washington and at its field offices elsewhere will feel emboldened to pursue criminal cases against the president’s other adversaries.Among other people, Trump has fixated in recent weeks on criminal investigations against the New York attorney general Letitia James and Democratic senator Adam Schiff over mortgage fraud allegations. James brought a civil fraud case against Trump last year and Schiff led the first impeachment trial.Last weekend, before Comey’s indictment, Trump called on his attorney general Pam Bondi to pursue Comey, James and Schiff. “They impeached me twice and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!” Trump posted on Truth Social.The administration also launched a criminal investigation into former CIA director John Brennan, who Trump despises for his role in the US intelligence community’s assessment in 2016 about Russian malign influence operations aimed at helping the Trump campaign.Last month, the FBI also searched the home and office of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned critic, over allegations he mishandled classified documents. The FBI recovered documents with classification markings but Bolton’s lawyer claimed they had been declassified. More

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    Trump news at a glance: president says he hopes ‘there will be others’ after Comey indictment

    Donald Trump has denied the indictment of former FBI director James Comey is part of a campaign of retribution against his political opponents.The US president told reporters on Friday: “It’s about justice, it’s not about revenge. He didn’t think he’d be caught, and he got caught,” Trump said, referring to the former FBI director he fired in 2017. “He lied. He lied a lot,” the president claimed.Trump also said he hoped “there will be others” who were prosecuted.Comey, a former Republican appointed to lead the bureau by Barack Obama and kept on by Trump until he fired him in 2017, was indicted on Thursday on charges related to allegedly lying to Congress five years ago during a hearing on the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US election.‘Dangerous abuse of power’: lawmakers sound alarm over Comey indictmentThe indictment is the latest sign that the president is making good on his promise “to turn our justice system into a weapon for punishing and silencing his critics”, said Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.Democratic senator Adam Schiff, a former federal prosecutor who played a lead role in Trump’s first impeachment, said on X he had “never witnessed such a blatant abuse” of the justice department, calling it “little more than an arm of the president’s retribution campaign”.Read the full storyMusk among names in latest Epstein cache releasedDemocratic lawmakers on Friday released documents from the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein that may show interactions between the disgraced financier and prominent conservatives including Elon Musk, Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel.Read the full storyIce officer ‘relieved of duties’ after manhandling woman A federal officer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has been “relieved of his duties” after a video showing him pushing a woman to the floor at an immigration court in New York City spread quickly on social media.Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, sent a statement to the Guardian saying the officer’s actions were “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of Ice”. “This officer is being relieved of current duties as we conduct a full investigation,” she added.Read the full storyImmigrants without criminal records now largest group in Ice detentionImmigrants who have no criminal record are now the largest group in US immigration detention, according to data released by the government. The number of people with no criminal history arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detained by the Trump administration has now surpassed the number of those charged with crimes.According to the official data, 16,523 people in immigration detention with no criminal record were arrested by Ice, compared to 15,725 who do have a criminal record and 13,767 with pending criminal charges.Separately, the superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district was detained by Ice agents on Friday, prompting shock among fellow educators.Read the full storyUS refuses to support UN health declaration on noncommunicable diseasesA new vision for tackling the global noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) crisis has failed to reach consensus at the UN after the US refused to give its support, forcing member states to a vote.After months of negotiations, the fourth political declaration on NCDs and mental health received overwhelming backing from governments at the UN general assembly on Thursday, but was rejected by the US during a speech by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary.Read the full storyRepublican lawmaker makes post calling for execution of Democratic congresswomanAn Arizona Republican state representative who has expressed support for January 6 insurrectionists called on Wednesday for a Democratic congresswoman to be executed, as a response to a video clip.Read the full storyAbu Dhabi royal family to take stake in TikTok US under Trump dealThe Abu Dhabi royal family is to take a stake in TikTok’s US business after Donald Trump signed an executive order brokering a deal valuing the social media company at $14bn. MGX, a fund chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, will take a 15% stake and gain a board seat when TikTok US is spun out.Read the full storyTrump jokingly asked Rolex executives if tariffs prompted US Open invite, CEO saysDonald Trump asked Rolex executives if he would have been invited to watch this month’s US Open final from the luxury watchmaker’s VIP box had he imposed steep tariffs on Swiss exports weeks earlier.The US president’s remarks were made “in jest”, stressed Jean-Frederic Dufour, the Rolex CEO, in a letter to Elizabeth Warren, the US senator who had raised questions about the decision to invite Trump – including whether the conglomerate was seeking to “curry favor” with the administration.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    The mass shooter who suspected he had CTE when he killed four people and himself in a Manhattan office building in July did in fact have the degenerative brain disease, the New York City medical examiner said on Friday.

    Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to “finish the job” in Gaza and said the recognition of a Palestinian state was “insane” as delegations walked out of his address to the UN.

    Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that 20 US soldiers who took part in the 1890 massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee will keep the Medals of Honor that were awarded to them.

    The supreme court extended an order that allows Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5bn in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.

    Fewer than one in three teenagers with opioid use disorder receive treatment, according to a study published in this month’s Health Affairs journal that looked at the disorder in minors from 2022 to 2023. Drug overdoses are now among the leading causes of death for US teenagers.

    Scores of Ryder Cup fans were denied glimpses of the opening tee shots at Bethpage Black due to stringent security measures put in place before the arrival of Trump.
    Catching up? Here’s what happened 25 September 2025. More

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    Elon Musk and Peter Thiel mentioned in Epstein documents released by Democrats

    Democratic lawmakers on Friday released documents from the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein that may show interactions between the disgraced financier and prominent conservatives, including Elon Musk, Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel.The six pages of documents made public with redactions come from a batch provided by the justice department to the House oversight committee, which is investigating how the sex-trafficking charges against Epstein, who died in 2019 in federal custody, were handled.Copies of Epstein’s calendar released by the committee’s Democratic minority show a breakfast planned with Bannon, an influential Donald Trump ally, in February 2019. Other schedules mention a lunch with Thiel in November 2017 and a potential trip by Musk to Epstein’s private island in December 2014.A manifest from 2000 for Epstein’s plane includes Prince Andrew, whose relationship with Epstein is well documented, while a financial disclosure the Democrats released shows Epstein paying someone listed as “Andrew” for “Massage, Exercise, Yoga” that same year.Earlier this year, Musk accused Trump of being in the so-called “Epstein files” on social media after the tech mogul criticized Trump’s tax and spending legislation.Then in July, Musk publicly said: “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”Pointing to the significance of the latest records’ release, Sara Guerrero, a spokesperson for the oversight committee, said: “It should be clear to every American that Jeffrey Epstein was friends with some of the most powerful and wealthiest men in the world. Every new document produced provides new information as we work to bring justice for the survivors and victims.”Meanwhile, Eric Swalwell, a Democratic representative of California, wrote on X following the records’ release, saying: “Trump OUTS @elonmusk as being in Epstein Files. Revenge for Elon outing Trump? Elon, what do you know about Trump’s involvement?”In response to the latest release, the Republican-led committee took to X and accused Democrats of selectively deciding which records to publicize.“This is old news. It’s sad how Democrats are conveniently withholding documents that contain the names of Democratic officials. Once again they are putting politics over victims. That’s all Robert Garcia and Oversight Dems know how to do. We are releasing them all soon,” the statement said, referring to Robert Garcia, the committee’s ranking member.Garcia, a Democrat of California, pushed back on X, writing in a separate statement: “We don’t care how wealthy or powerful you are – or if you are a Democrat or Republican. If you are in the Epstein documents and files we are going to expose it, and bring justice for the survivors. Release ALL THE FILES NOW!”The documents are the latest in the saga over the government’s handling of the Epstein case.In the House, Democrats have joined with a small group of Republicans on a petition that will force a vote on legislation to compel the release of the Epstein files. The push needs 218 signatures to succeed, which it is expected to soon get after Democrat Adelita Grijalva this week won a special election to an Arizona seat that became vacant when her father died.However, any legislation that passes the House will also need approval by the Senate, whose Republican leaders have shown little interest in the issue. Trump, who has called the furor over Epstein a “Democrat hoax” would also need to sign the bill.The Guardian has requested comment from Musk and Thiel.

    This article was amended on 26 September 2025. The seat won by Adelita Grijalva is in Arizona, not New Mexico, as we originally said. More

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    Hegseth says Wounded Knee massacre soldiers will keep Medals of Honor

    Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that 20 US soldiers who took part in the 1890 massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee will keep the Medals of Honor that were awarded to them.The move is the latest in a number of contentious actions taken by the Trump administration to reinterpret US history.The long debate over the events at Wounded Knee includes a dispute over its characterization as a “battle” given that, according to historical records, the US army killed about 250 Lakota Sioux people – many of whom were unarmed women and children – despite fighters in the camp having surrendered.“We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals,” Hegseth said, announcing the move in a video on social media on Thursday. Calling the men “brave soldiers”, he said a review panel had concluded in a report that the medals were justly awarded. “This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.”Hegseth’s Democratic predecessor at the Pentagon, former defense secretary Lloyd Austin, ordered the review of the honors in 2024 after Congress called for it in the 2022 defense bill. Announcing the review, the Pentagon said Austin wanted to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor”.But in Thursday’s video, Hegseth – who has a history of Christian nationalist sympathies – said his predecessor had been “more interested in being politically correct than historically correct”. It is unclear if the report will be made public.Hegseth’s move also halts a push from Democratic lawmakers to revoke medals tied to the massacre at a camp on what is now the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. For Native Americans, the massacre marked a devastating climax to the tragedy of Indigenous removals from their land.“We cannot be a country that celebrates and rewards horrifying acts of violence against Native people,” senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement earlier this year after reintroducing the proposed Remove the Stain Act.After the massacre, 19 soldiers from the seventh cavalry were awarded the Medal of Honor for their “bravery” and “gallantry” over actions ranging from rescuing fellow troops to efforts to “dislodge Sioux Indians” hiding in a ravine.Native Americans have long pushed for revocation of the medals. As time has gone on, the isolated site has become a place of mourning for many tribes, symbolizing the genocidal history of brutality and repression they have suffered at the hands of the US government. While Congress issued a formal apology in 1990 to the descendants of the massacre, the medals were left in place and no reparations offered.Thursday’s announcement is the latest move to sanitize the nation’s history taken by the Trump administration since Donald Trump signed an executive order in March titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”.In recent months, Hegseth has reverted the names of several US army bases back to Confederate-linked names, monuments to the Confederacy and Confederate figures have been restored, and he renamed a US navy ship that honored gay rights activist Harvey Milk.The Trump administration has also gone after cultural institutions like Smithsonian museums for exhibits it considers “unpatriotic”, purged and rewritten federal webpages related to topics including slavery, diversity and discrimination (some of which were later restored), and cut funding to grants to institutions that honor the lives of enslaved people.Some historians took to social media to denounce the administration’s latest move.“Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a ‘battle’ rather than what it truly was,” Columbia University history professor Karl Jacoby posted on Bluesky.Jacoby added: “Fortunately, history does not work as Hegseth seems to believe. It is never “settled” and the government cannot (at least for now!) impose its interpretation of events on the rest of us.” More

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    US supreme court allows Trump to withhold nearly $5bn in foreign aid

    The supreme court on Friday extended an order that allows Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5bn in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.The court acted on the Republican administration’s emergency appeal in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.The justice department sought the supreme court’s intervention after US district judge Amir Ali ruled that Trump’s action was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.The federal appeals court in Washington declined to put Ali’s ruling on hold, but John Roberts, the chief justice, temporarily blocked it on 9 September. The full court indefinitely extended Roberts’ order.The court has previously cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of migrants, fire thousands of federal employees, oust transgender members of the military and remove the heads of independent government agencies.The legal victories, while not final rulings, all have come through emergency appeals, used sparingly under previous presidencies, to fast-track cases to the supreme court, where decisions are often handed down with no explanation.Trump told House speaker Mike Johnson in a 28 August letter that he would not spend $4.9bn in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.He used what’s known as a pocket rescission. That’s a rarely used maneuver when a president submits a request to Congress toward the end of a current budget year to not spend the approved money. The late notice essentially flips the script. Under federal law,Congress has to approve the rescission within 45 days or the money must be spent. But the budget year will end before the 45-day window closes, and in this situation the White House is asserting that congressional inaction allows it to not spend the money.The Trump administration has made deep reductions to foreign aid one of its hallmark policies, despite the relatively meager savings relative to the deficit and possible damage to America’s reputation abroad as people lose access to food supplies and development programs.Justice department lawyers told a federal judge last month that another $6.5bn in aid that had been subject to the freeze would be spent before the end of the fiscal year next Tuesday. More

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    ‘Dangerous abuse of power’: lawmakers sound alarm over Comey indictment

    For Donald Trump, the indictment of former FBI director and longtime foe James Comey was,“justice in America”. Legal observers and lawmakers see something far more troubling.A former Republican appointed to lead the bureau by Barack Obama and kept on by Trump until he fired him in 2017, Comey was indicted Thursday on charges related to allegedly lying to Congress five years ago during a hearing on the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.The charges were filed in the eastern district of Virginia only after Erik Siebert was forced out as US attorney for reportedly finding no grounds to indict Comey. The justice department replaced him with a Trump loyalist with little prosecutorial experience, Lindsey Halligan, and shortly after, a grand jury indicted Comey on one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding.The indictment is the latest sign that the president is making good on his promise “to turn our justice system into a weapon for punishing and silencing his critics”, said Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.“This kind of interference is a dangerous abuse of power. Our system depends on prosecutors making decisions based on evidence and the law, not on the personal grudges of a politician determined to settle scores,” Warner said.Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator and a former federal prosecutor who played a lead role in Trump’s first impeachment, said on X he had “never witnessed such a blatant abuse of the” justice department, calling it “little more than an arm of the president’s retribution campaign”.In a letter to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee described Siebert’s firing and Comey’s indictment as “the latest steps in President Trump’s efforts to reshape the nation’s leading law enforcement agency into a weapon focused on punishing his enemies”.Top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries said it was “crazy to me” that Trump was pursuing a “malicious prosecution” against Comey, given that the FBI chief’s public revival of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email use days before the 2016 election is seen as playing a role in Trump’s victory.“These charges are going to be dismissed. James Comey will win in court. But what it reflects is a broader attack on the rule of law that should frighten every single American, whether you’re a Democrat, an independent or a Republican,” he said at the Capitol.Mike Zamore, national director of policy and government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union, said Trump “has yet again proven his disdain for the principles that have actually made America great”.“By undermining the rule of law at each and every turn, threatening individuals who speak out against him, and arresting, investigating, and prosecuting elected officials of the opposition party and others who displease him, the president and his administration have corrupted our system of justice to turn his campaign of retribution into reality,” he said, adding that Trump’s public push to indict Comey amounts to “a grotesque abuse of presidential power”.Eric Swalwell, the Democratic congressman and member of the House judiciary committee, told CNN: “I promise you, when Democrats are in the majority, we are going to look at all of this, and there will be accountability, and bar licenses will be at stake in your local jurisdiction if you are corruptly indicting people where you cannot prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt on.”Norm Eisen, executive chair of pro-democracy group Democracy Defenders Fund, warned the indictment puts “the safety of every American and our national security itself in danger. This indictment has all the hallmarks of a vindictive and meritless prosecution, worthy only of the totalitarian states the United States used to oppose”.“This matters far beyond James Comey. It’s about every citizen’s right to live free from persecution by their own leaders. Criticizing our leaders is a fundamental right, regardless of how much our leaders don’t like it,” he said.Trump has spent the hours since Comey’s indictment was announced insulting him on Truth Social, calling him “One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to” on Thursday night and “A DIRTY COP” on Friday morning.His allies have taken up his argument, if not his tone.“Comey demonstrated complete arrogance and unwillingness to comply with the law,” said Ted Cruz, the Republican senator whose exchange with the former FBI director at a 2020 hearing is the subject of the allegations.Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the Senate judiciary committee, said: “If the facts and the evidence support the finding that Comey lied to Congress and obstructed our work, he ought to be held accountable.”“Say it with me, Democrats: nobody is above the law,” said Mike Davis, a prominent Trump legal defender, echoing a phrase often used by Democrats when Trump and his allies were facing prosecutions before his election victory last year.“We are just getting started today with this indictment,” Davis said. “It’s going to get much worse for the Democrats.” More

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    Rare orange lobster found in New York supermarket returned to sea

    A rare orange lobster was released back into the wild this week after being spotted by an enthusiast at a local grocery store.The lobster, swiftly nicknamed Jean-Clawed Van Damme, is a one-in-30m catch, according to Humane Long Island, a wildlife rescue group, and the New York Aquarium, who aided in releasing it.Given that seeing an orange lobster typically means it is dead and boiled and on a plate, shopper Kyle Brancato did a double take when he spotted the lobster moving among the others for sale at a Tops grocery store in upstate New York.“I walked by the lobster tank, and I saw this bright orange lobster,” Brancato told WHAM, a local CNN affiliate. “Very different from all the other ones in the tank.”He suspected other shoppers mistook the lobster as diseased and passed it by.View image in fullscreenBrancato decided to buy it, with the hopes of ultimately freeing it, but without much experience in crustacean care he improvised at first.“I borrowed some tank water from Palmer’s, down the road,” said Brancato, referring to a local restaurant. “That bought me enough time to go to [pet supply store] Petco and pick up a 20-gallon tank, and I got 20 gallons of sea water that they sell in the store in boxes. And I emptied it into the tank, and cooled it down to the proper temperature.”The lobster was released into the open waters of the Long Island Sound on Wednesday, just a day before National Lobster Day, which marks the peak of the annual US lobster harvesting season.Amid seasonal special offers from eateries, thousands more lobsters than usual suffered a different fate from their wild orange cousin and ended up boiled, buttered, and eaten.In 2021 an orange lobster was rescued in Ontario by a Canadian couple, after being held captive in a grocery store tank, where it had languished for weeks after being shunned by shoppers because of its rare hue and was apparently being picked on by the other lobsters. That one ended up in an aquarium. More