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    How Democrats are trying to bust Republican lies about healthcare for undocumented immigrants

    Leading up to the government shutdown on Wednesday, congressional Republicans and Donald Trump have repeated misleading claims that Democrats were trying to pass a resolution that would provide “free healthcare for illegals”. It’s become a well-rehearsed refrain fueling GOP lawmakers as government funding lapsed this week.At the White House on Wednesday, the vice-president JD Vance said the Democrats’ spending plan “would have undone” the work of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) – which ended the eligibility of many types of lawfully present immigrants to access federally funded health coverage, like Medicaid, Medicare and Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies for private health insurance.Meanwhile Republican leadership on Capitol Hill has maintained their colleagues across the aisle are holding the government “hostage”, while dueling funding bills continue to fail in the Senate.“They have made a decision that they would rather give taxpayer funded benefits to illegal aliens, than to keep the doors open for the American people,” said Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, in a news conference on Thursday.Democrats have lambasted Republicans’ claims.“Not a single federal dollar goes to providing health insurance for undocumented immigrants. NOT. ONE. PENNY,” said the top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer. “Republicans would rather lie and shut down the government down than protect your healthcare.”In an interview with ABC News, on the first day of the government shutdown, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries fact-checked Republican claims. “Federal law prohibits the use of Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Affordable Care Act to provide health insurance in any way, shape or form, to undocumented immigrants. Period, full stop,” he said. “And Democrats aren’t trying to change that.”By framing the issue as being about illegal immigration, it shifts the debate to ground that is politically “friendlier” for the GOP, according to Jonathan Oberlander, professor of healthcare policy at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.“[Republicans] absolutely do not want to talk about the healthcare provisions,” Oberlander said. “Whereas Democrats, in general, don’t want to talk a lot about immigration. They do want to talk a lot about healthcare and people losing health insurance, and so that’s exactly what they’re doing.”Undocumented immigrants remain ineligible for federally funded health insurance, and are only able to receive emergency Medicaid treatment, according to longstanding US laws. Instead, Democrats’ funding patch seeks to reverse many of the cuts to Medicaid that are set to take effect after Trump’s sweeping domestic policy agenda passed earlier this year.View image in fullscreenThis includes allowing lawfully present noncitizens – which includes several groups, such as refugees and asylum seekers, those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and survivors of domestic abuse and human trafficking who are awaiting visas or documentation – to still enroll in certain federal health care programs. All of these immigrants have entered the country legally and are accounted for by the federal government.The congressional budget office (CBO) estimates that the impact of the OBBBA will leave around 1.4 million lawfully present noncitizens without coverage.While the impasse in Washington continues, vocalizing any of this nuance seems futile, says Oberlander. “These are all groups that potentially could command political sympathy, but I’m not sure they can break through the misinformation, the toxic environment and the restrictive era we’re living in right now,” he added.“I think what they [Democrats] are going to do, and what they have been doing, is simply to say this has nothing to do with undocumented immigrants. This is not about them. You’re taking health insurance away from Americans.”According to Michael Trujillo, a veteran Democratic strategist, Republicans have been able to land their messaging around the government shutdown by playing “offense”, mainly because Democrats’ language of preservation is harder to sell.“What we’re trying to do is keep what people have today,” Trujillo said.Trujillo noted that Democrats also have to “repeat the lie” in order to dismantle Republicans’ rapid and spurious claims that their funding bill will provide healthcare for undocumented immigrants.“If their [Republicans’] debate is, we’re accusing you of liking sour milk. And then our response is, ‘we in fact do not like sour milk’. Well, guess what, sour milk just became the issue,” Trujillo said.This week, Karoline Leavitt said that programs like TPS are a “complete abuse of the immigration system” that allow “illegals from all over the world to get free benefits”, while speaking to reporters. Since returning to office, Trump has attempted to end temporary protections for several countries through a series of lawsuits with varying degrees of success.Notably, the White House press secretary was unclear when answering a question from a reporter, who asked whether doctors should treat patients in emergency rooms regardless of their immigration status – which is required under federal law. “I don’t speak for emergency rooms across the country, I speak for the president of the United States,” she replied.Through their continuing resolution, Democrats are also trying to remedy the OBBBA’s cuts to Medicaid dollars hospitals receive from the federal government – for emergency care they are mandated to provide to individuals who do not have an eligible immigration status, but would otherwise qualify for Medicaid. According to a recent analysis by KFF, this kind of emergency Medicaid spending accounted for less than 1% of the program’s total expenditure between 2017-2023.Larry Levitt, executive vice-president for health policy at KFF, said the false claim about who is getting access to healthcare has been the “biggest effort at misinformation on a health policy issue since Republicans claimed that the Affordable Care Act included ‘death panels’”.“I’m sure it’s an effective talking point to say the Democrats want to expand health care for undocumented immigrants, but it’s just not true,” he said.A key aspect of the Democrats’ funding bill, and one they have emphasized more than the reversal of the cuts in the Republican budget law, is a permanent extension of the widely popular ACA premium tax credits, which are set to expire at the end of this year. KFF estimates that healthcare costs are set to double for the vast majority of enrollees when these subsidies lapse. Meanwhile, the CBO has projected that around 4 million people stand to lose their health insurance if enhanced tax credits expire at the end of 2025.“My sense is that they [Democratic leadership] would take a deal if they just get the subsidies extended,” Oberlander said. He also underscored that Democrats’ push to reverse the wider healthcare cuts in the president’s sweeping tax legislation may be more of a statement than a demand: “They want to call attention to the fact that Republicans enacted them and what the consequences are, but they know, realistically, there’s no chance that they’re going to reverse what they just passed.” More

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    Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is trying to warn us about something. Are we listening?

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    Her sharpest words were not in the body of her opinion. They were tucked away in a footnote.That subtle placement speaks volumes about Ketanji Brown Jackson, the supreme court’s newest member and already its fiercest liberal voice.The footnote in question can be found in Trump v Casa, the June ruling that gave a big boost to Donald Trump by clipping the wings of federal judges and limiting their use of nationwide injunctions to block the president’s worst excesses.Over 21 pages of taut dissent against Casa, Jackson decried the 6-3 ruling as “an existential threat to the rule of law” and a “sad day for America”. The ruling was “profoundly dangerous”, she wrote, because it gives Trump permission “to wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate”.Looking ahead, she added that the decision would “surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise”.This is strong medicine. But then there is footnote No 5, which takes her dissent to another level entirely.In it, she cites The Dual State by Ernst Fraenkel, a German Jewish labor lawyer who fled the Nazis in 1938. Fraenkel’s book analysed how the Nazis had created two coexistent legal systems.There was the normative one that kept the economy of Germany running as usual. And then there was the separate legal system that operated alongside it, in which anyone deemed an enemy of the regime was stripped of all rights and subjected to arbitrary violence.In the footnote, Jackson quotes The Dual States’s description of the way unchecked power is incompatible with the rule of law:
    See E Fraenkel, The Dual State, pp xiii, 3, 71 (1941) (describing the way in which the creation of a ‘Prerogative State’ where the Executive ‘exercises unlimited arbitrariness … unchecked by any legal guarantees’ is incompatible with the rule of law)
    The footnote is three and a half lines of small print. But its import is booming.By citing Fraenkel’s work, the justice is drawing a parallel between the drift in jurisprudence that is taking place under the combined actions of Trump and the supreme court, and the legal structure of Nazi Germany.View image in fullscreenAziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, has studied The Dual State and wrote about it in the Atlantic a month before the Casa decision came down. Pointing to Jackson’s footnote, he said that it was clearly charged.“It’s hard not to see that as a kind of warning,” he said.On Monday, the nine justices of the US’s top court will assemble at the start of a new judicial term. They will share the usual niceties, make congenial small talk, then get down to business.It will be a tough time for Jackson, who has carved out a role as the “great dissenter” and has been challenging the conservative bloc that now controls the court.Outnumbered and outgunned by the rightwing supermajority, she and her two other liberal colleagues have had to watch from the sidelines as critical constitutional laws that have been settled for half a century have been torn up by the very court on which they sit.So far, the list of casualties includes the right to an abortion, affirmative action, environmental protections, voting rights and much more.Over the summer, the majority has also supercharged its shadow docket, in a series of temporary emergency decisions that have overturned lower court rulings and handed Trump almost everything he wants. That includes the ability to mass-fire federal employees, summarily deport migrants to war-torn countries, withhold billions of dollars in funds already approved by Congress and more.The liberal justices have granted us rare glimpses into the hardship of their working lives. Last year, Sonia Sotomayor told an audience at Harvard that there were days after the announcement of a ruling when she retreated to her office, closed the door and cried.Asked about her colleague’s mournful behavior a few weeks later, Elena Kagan said: “I’m not much of a crier. I’m more of a wall-slammer.”Jackson, who is 55, has studiously restrained herself in public. In recent book readings and talks she has come across as invariably cheerful and upbeat.She has reserved her evident frustrations – about the current state of the US, its presidency and its top court – exclusively for her dissents. Of which there have been many.Last term, Jackson wrote 10 dissents, more than any other justice including the ever vociferous far-right Clarence Thomas with nine. In her dissents, Jackson has piercingly criticised the court under the chief justice, John Roberts, for undermining the US’s foundations as a country of rules: no one is above the law and everyone has equal access to justice.In addition to her most searing writing in the Trump v Casa case, with its Fraenkel footnote, there have been a stream of other pointed dissents. In July, she castigated the court’s decision to allow Trump to go ahead with mass firings of federal workers, saying that it was “the wrong decision at the wrong moment”.In August, she lamented the decision by Roberts and his fellow rightwingers to allow Trump to cut almost $800m in federal health grants. She said the majority “bends over backward to accommodate” the administration’s wishes.Like Huq, Franita Tolson, dean of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, sees Jackson’s dissents as sending a message. She is speaking directly to the American people, as well as to lower court judges who will have to interpret and apply the supreme court’s rulings going forward.View image in fullscreen“It is a warning,” Tolson said. “She is warning us about the state of our democracy, about threats to the rule of law. There’s a lot of unfair criticism, but she’s consistent. She believes what she believes, and she says it bravely.”The billion-dollar question is: amid all the noise, will Jackson’s message be heard?Jackson has paid a heavy price for sticking her neck so high above the parapet. She has been scoffed at for somehow stepping outside normal supreme court decorum by speaking out so forcefully.Some of the most caustic attacks have come from her own fellow justices on the right. The most scathing rebuke was made by Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, who disdainfully dismissed Jackson’s dissent in Trump v Casa as being untethered to conventional legal thinking or “frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever”.The comment must have stung. But Jackson has been accustomed to being criticised and maligned ever since she was a child.In her memoir Lovely One – the title is a translation of her African name, Ketanji Onyika – she recalls as a teenager asking her grandmother: “Why do they think just because I’m Black I’m going to steal from them?”Her grandmother replied: “Guard your spirit, Ketanji. To dwell on the unfairness of life is to be devoured by it.”She has kept that advice close as she has risen up the judicial ladder. “I rejected self-doubt and self-loathing,” she writes. “Instead I chose possibility. I chose purpose.”She has needed such personal armor. A year into her tenancy on the supreme court, she was targeted by Charlie Kirk, the rightwing activist who was murdered last month, as one of four prominent Black women whom he denigrated as “affirmative-action picks”.“You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously,” he said on his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show.The attacks coming at Jackson from fellow justices on the conservative wing of the supreme court have not been tainted with such overt racism. But some of the brickbats thrown at her have been bruising.Barrett’s riposte to Jackson in the Casa case was dripping with condescension. “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument,” Barrett wrote in her majority opinion.View image in fullscreenShe slammed Jackson’s dissent as being at odds with more than 200 years of precedent, “not to mention the Constitution itself”. She went on to accuse her of embracing “an imperial judiciary”.Barrett’s criticism was rooted in a textual approach to the law in which judgments are made up-close and line by line. Jackson, by contrast, is stretching for the bigger picture: she is standing back, widening the frame, and seeking to capture the peril of this singularly dangerous moment.The clash between the two justices raises questions. At a time when democracy and adherence to the rule of law is being tested to the breaking point, when the supreme court is under more pressure to safeguard democracy than at any time in recent history, is there a place for decorum? And if there is, who is breaching it?Is it the justice who is warning about the threat posed by an authoritarian-minded president? Or is it her peers who control the court, whom she argues are emboldening him?Jackson’s determination to sound the alarm can be traced in part to her personal history. She was born in Washington DC on 14 September 1970, just a few years after the civil rights movement achieved its crowning glories: the 1964 Civil Rights Act that ended southern segregation, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that ensured access to the ballot box for African Americans.In her memoir, Jackson recalls growing up in Miami as the “only dark-skinned girl in rooms full of white kids”. Hard work and success in the high school debating team helped her walk into those rooms “with my head held high”.In her letter of application to Harvard (she was accepted as an undergraduate and went on to study at Harvard Law School), she said her dream was to become “the first Black, female supreme court justice to appear on a Broadway stage”.Audacious perhaps, but she did both. She joined the court as its first Black female justice in June 2022, and in December made a one-night guest appearance in the Broadway musical & Juliet.In Lovely One, she describes how she imbibed fundamental legal principles from the former supreme court justice Stephen Breyer, for whom she clerked (it was his seat on the court that she later assumed). He taught her about the importance of seeing legal theory not as a thing in itself, but as part of the great American experiment, with its commitment to government by and for the people and its rejection of monarchs and dictators.Jackson also articulates her sense of responsibility, as a Black woman standing on the shoulders of those who came before her, to protect the achievements of the civil rights struggle. As she noted the day after she was confirmed as a justice in her speech on the south lawn of the White House: “In my family, it took just one generation to go from segregation to the supreme court of the United States.”“She understands the assignment,” said Tolson, the USC School of Law dean. “She understands that she is standing on a legacy that is built on a constitution that works for everybody, not just some people.”View image in fullscreenThat assignment will be tougher than ever as Jackson enters her fourth year on the court on Monday. The nine-month term that lies ahead has the potential to profoundly affect the state of American democracy and the extent of presidential power.Enormous questions are on the docket, including whether Trump gets away with scrapping birthright citizenship and other blatantly unconstitutional moves. At stake are the future of Trump’s tariffs, the fate of hundreds of thousands of people facing deportation and similar numbers of federal workers who could lose their jobs, and the independence of the Federal Reserve.Voting rights are also on the line. Two cases coming before the justices have the potential to gut the final vestiges of the Voting Rights Act, eviscerating one of those crowning glories of the civil rights movement without which Jackson might not have hoped to climb to the top.The spotlight will be intense. The consequences will be immense.“She’s been preparing for this moment,” Tolson said, anticipating further poignant Jackson dissents in the months to come.“There’s a sadness to her dissents,” she added. “A sadness about where we are, a reflection of our politics. But there’s also a resolve. That we don’t have to be like this.” More

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    Every American should read this judge’s stirring rebuke to Trump | Austin Sarat

    Democracy requires that we do more than look out for our own interests and defend our own rights. Ever since the birth of this nation, its citizens and leaders have echoed Benjamin Franklin’s admonition that “we must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”In Donald Trump’s America, hanging separately seems to be the order of the day. This seems especially true when it comes to his treatment of this country’s millions of non-citizen residents.From the start of his political career, demonizing immigrants has been Trump’s stock in trade. Since his return to office, he has been unusually aggressive in his campaign to round up, detain and deport people whose citizenship status is questionable, and, in some cases, citizens have been caught up in the dragnet.The administration has repeatedly violated the constitution by targeting people because of how they look or the sound of their accents. It has even singled them out because of what they have said or written.On 30 September, Judge William Young of the United States district court of Massachusetts made clear that when it comes to freedom of speech, the constitution does not distinguish between people born in the United States and those who have come here as immigrants. His decision in American Association of University Professors v Rubio offers both a stirring civics lesson and an unusually personal rebuke against the Trump administration. The court found that the Trump administration had violated the right to free speech in its push to detain and deport pro-Palestinian foreign scholars.In his opinion, the judge went beyond the usual bounds of a judicial decision to note that the president “ignores everything … The Constitution, our civil laws, regulations, mores, customs, practices, courtesies – all of it; the President simply ignores it all when he takes it into his head to act”. Young added: “While the President naturally seeks warm cheering and gladsome, welcoming acceptance of his views, in the real world he’ll settle for sullen silence and obedience. What he will not countenance is dissent or disagreement.”The judge also accused the president of “bullying”.Legal purists who might applaud the judge’s reading of the constitution will be offended by seeing that kind of language in a judicial opinion. But what he did helps frame the danger Trump poses to the rights of immigrants in a way that connects them to the rest of us.Bravo, Judge Young.Recall the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and graduate of Columbia University. He was arrested and detained in March for participating in pro-Palestinian protests on the Columbia University campus. He was held for more than a hundred days in Louisiana.As his lawyer said on Democracy Now: “If free speech means anything in this country,” he noted, it means “government agents can’t pick you up off the street and throw you into jail because of what you’ve said.” But that is exactly what the administration did, hoping to make an example out of Khalil and send a chilling message to other immigrants.Or how about Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate student, arrested by masked Ice agents for writing an op-ed calling on Tufts to do something to protect human rights in Gaza? As a Washington Post story notes, “Ozturk had committed no crime, yet her detention was a priority for the new Trump administration. US officials used the immigration system in unprecedented ways to covertly research and detain noncitizen students, relying on an investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security whose work traditionally has focused on crimes such as drug smuggling and human trafficking.”“The effort to deport pro-Palestinian student activists,” the Post reports, “represented the Trump administration’s first major challenge to free-speech norms in the United States.” It had to know that what it was doing violated the First Amendment but went ahead anyway under the pretext that it was acting to prevent or punish terrorist activities.This is not the first time that immigrants have been punished for saying or doing things that an administration labelled dangerous. But since the middle of the 20th century, the supreme court has held that the government cannot deport people because of their views or what they say.At that time, Justice William Douglas explained that “freedom of speech and of the press is accorded aliens residing in this country” and that “the utterances made by … [them] were entitled to that protection”. Justice Frank Murphy joined him and stated: “Once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country he becomes invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within our borders.”Young cited those views in his own opinion. “Noncitizens’ speech rights are,” he said, “identical to those of citizens.” He argued: “Political speech is not, on its own, a facially legitimate reason for expelling persons from this country.”After laying out in great detail all the things the Trump administration has done to violate that principle, including its mistreatment of Khalil and Öztürk, he called out Trump for ignoring the constitution and acting as if “the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech applies to American citizens alone”.Young called the case he was deciding “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court”.Citing the language of the first amendment – “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” – the judge insisted: “‘No law’ means ‘no law.’ The First Amendment does not draw President Trump’s invidious distinction” between citizens and non-citizens, “and it is not to be found in our history”, Young wrote.That reference to “our history” suggests that Trump’s treatment of non-citizens is un-American. But Young was not finished.He added: “Triumphalism is the very essence of the Trump brand. Often this is naught but hollow bragging: ‘my perfect administration,’ wearing a red baseball cap in the presidential oval office emblazoned ‘Trump Was Right About Everything,’ or most recently depicting himself as an officer in the First Cavalry Division.”He criticized Trump for his “triumphal, transactional, imperative, bellicose, and coarse” language that “seeks to persuade – not through marshaling data driven evidence, science, or moral suasion, but through power”.Near the end of his opinion, Young quotes former president Ronald Reagan. “Freedom,” Reagan said, “is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people …”Returning to Trump, the judge goes on to say: “I’ve come to believe that President Trump truly understands and appreciates the full import of President Reagan’s inspiring message – yet I fear he has drawn from it a darker, more cynical message … [and that he] believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.”By going beyond the precise issue in this case, the free speech rights of immigrants, and going after Trump, Young’s opinion helps frame threats to the rights of immigrants in a way that connects them to the rest of us. He hopes to rekindle the spirit of Reagan and inspire Americans to prove Trump wrong by showing that they will “stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values”.

    Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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    Trump news at a glance: Hamas says it has approved parts of Donald Trump’s ultimatum to end war in Gaza

    Hamas said on Friday it approved parts of Donald Trump’s ultimatum to end the war in Gaza, agreeing to a hostage exchange and to surrender governing power in the Gaza Strip, but insisted on further negotiations over aspects of the plan.The group did not say whether it would lay down its arms – a key part of Trump’s proposal – and kept its response vague to other parts of the 20-part proposal unveiled on Monday.Nevertheless Trump welcomed its statement and ordered Israel to “immediately” stop bombing Gaza. “Based on the Statement just issued by Hamas, I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE,” he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform.The unprecedented order from Trump underlined that Israel and Hamas are the closest they have been in two years to achieving an end to the war in Gaza.Hamas agrees to release all Israeli hostages as it accepts part of Trump’s planIn a statement, Hamas said it was giving its “approval of releasing all occupation prisoners – both living and remains – according to the exchange formula contained in President Trump’s proposal, with the necessary field conditions for implementing the exchange”.Hamas also said it was prepared to turn over “the administration of the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian body of independent technocrats based on Palestinian national consensus and supported by Arab and Islamic backing”.Read the full storyUS government shutdown continues as Senate funding bills again fail to passThe US government remained shut down for a third straight day on Friday, with no signs that congressional leaders had made progress on reaching an agreement to restart operations.Senators convened in the afternoon to vote for a fourth time on competing Democratic and Republican proposals to restart funding. Neither bill won enough support to cross the 60-vote threshold for advancement, and no lawmakers changed their votes from recent days.Read the full storyHegseth says four killed in US strike on alleged drug boat off Venezuelan coastThe United States carried out a strike against an alleged drug-trafficking boat on Friday that killed four people, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said, a day after the Trump administration told Congress it was entering a new “non-international armed conflict” with cartels.Read the full storyApple removes Ice tracking apps after pressure from Trump administrationApple has removed an app from its App Store that uses crowdsourcing to flag sightings of US immigration agents after facing pressure from Donald Trump’s administration.IceBlock, a free iPhone-only app that lets users anonymously report and monitor activity by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, was no longer available on Friday. The app’s developer said last month that it had more than 1 million users.Read the full storyUS supreme court allows Trump to strip temporary status from VenezuelansThe US supreme court on Friday allowed Donald Trump’s administration to strip legal protections from more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants.Read the full storyFBI cuts ties with two advocacy groups that track US extremism after rightwing backlashKash Patel, the FBI director, says the agency is cutting ties with two organizations that for decades have tracked domestic extremism and racial and religious bias, a move that follows complaints about the groups from some conservatives and prominent allies of Donald Trump.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    The US government has put $2.1bn in funding for infrastructure projects in Chicago on hold, Russ Vought, the office of management and budget director, said on Friday, in another jab at a Democratic-led city.

    To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the US’s independence, the treasury department is mulling production of a $1 coin displaying Donald Trump with a clenched first under an American flag and the words “fight, fight, fight”.

    A California resident who admitted trying to assassinate the US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 was sentenced on Friday to eight years and one month in federal prison.

    An Arkansas man, who was detained for a month by Ice after authorities mistook his bottle of perfume for opium, is seeking to have his visa status restored after the charges were dropped.
    Catching up? Here’s what happened 2 October 2025. More

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    Trump says Hamas is ready for peace and Israel ‘must immediately stop bombing of Gaza’ – live

    Donald Trump just welcomed the response from Hamas to his peace plan, without worrying about the parts of it that the Palestinian movement said need to be negotiated further, and urged Israel to stop bombing Gaza “immediately” in a social media post that was shared by the White House.Trump, who is eager for a Nobel peace prize and appears ready to declare victory, wrote:
    Based on the Statement just issued by Hamas, I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE. Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly! Right now, it’s far too dangerous to do that. We are already in discussions on details to be worked out. This is not about Gaza alone, this is about long sought PEACE in the Middle East.
    Yair Lapid, the former television anchor who leads Israel’s main opposition party, says that he has informed the White House that his party will support the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to close a peace deal in Gaza. The opposition’s support would be necessary to keep Netanyahu in power should far-right ministers in the governing coalition who want to continue the war withdraw from the government.“President Trump,” Lapid posted, “is right that there is a genuine opportunity to release the hostages and end the war. Israel should announce it is joining the discussions led by the president to finalize the details of the deal. I have told the US administration that Netanyahu has political backing at home to continue the process.”In a statement posted on social media, the Egyptian government, which has played a central role in negotiations with Hamas, has welcomed the Palestinian movement’s response to the plan announced this week by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.The statement thanks Trump for his vision to achieve peace and stability in the region, his “complete rejection” of the annexation of the Israeli-occupied West Bank by Israel or the displacement of the Palestinian people from their lands.Donald Trump just welcomed the response from Hamas to his peace plan, without worrying about the parts of it that the Palestinian movement said need to be negotiated further, and urged Israel to stop bombing Gaza “immediately” in a social media post that was shared by the White House.Trump, who is eager for a Nobel peace prize and appears ready to declare victory, wrote:
    Based on the Statement just issued by Hamas, I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE. Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly! Right now, it’s far too dangerous to do that. We are already in discussions on details to be worked out. This is not about Gaza alone, this is about long sought PEACE in the Middle East.
    Donald Trump has posted the full text of the Hamas statement in response to his proposed plan to end the war in Gaza on his social media platform.The White House initially posted the text on X as well, but that post was removed without explanation, forcing anyone who wantws to read it to visit the president’s own platform.Donald Trump has just recorded an Oval Office video in response to what his White House press secretary calls “Hamas’ acceptance of his Peace Plan.”While the Hamas response to the Trump plan for an end to the war in Gaza signals a willingness to had over governance of the territory, it specifically says that the new government should be made up of Palestinian technocrats, not a foreign-run “board of peace” overseen by the US president.A few hours ago, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who rules over isolated sections of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, announced that Palestinian officials were drafting a temporary constitution for the state of Palestine, which includes Gaza, to be ready within three months.“We reaffirm our commitment to holding general presidential and parliamentary elections within one year after the end of the war,” Abbas said, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.Abbas has not stood for election since 2005, and there have been no elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council since 2006, when Hamas won a majority of seats in the West Bank and Gaza. In 2007, power-sharing between Hamas and Abbas collapsed and Hamas seized control of Gaza after armed conflict with forces loyal to the president.In a copy of the statement seen by Reuters, Hamas issued its response to Trump’s 20-point plan after the US president today gave the group until Sunday to accept or reject the proposal. Trump has not said whether the terms would be subject to negotiation, as Hamas is seeking.Notably, Hamas did not say whether it would agree to a stipulation that it disarm, a demand by Israel and the US that it has previously rejected.In its statement, Hamas said it “appreciates the Arab, Islamic, and international efforts, as well as the efforts of U.S. President Donald Trump, calling for an end to the war on the Gaza Strip, the exchange of prisoners, (and) the immediate entry of aid,” among other terms.It said it was announcing its “approval of releasing all occupation prisoners — both living and remains — according to the exchange formula contained in President Trump’s proposal, with the necessary field conditions for implementing the exchange.”But Hamas added: “In this context, the movement affirms its readiness to immediately enter, through the mediators, into negotiations to discuss the details.”The group said it was ready “to hand over the administration of the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian body of independents (technocrats) based on Palestinian national consensus and supported by Arab and Islamic backing”.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Hamas’ response to the proposal, which is backed by Israel as well as Arab and European powers.Among the 20 points in Trump’s plan are an immediate ceasefire, an exchange of all hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, a staged Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the disarmament of Hamas and the introduction of a transitional government led by an international body.As we get more from Hamas’s statement trickling in, the group has said it has accepted some elements of Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan, including handing over administration of Gaza and releasing all the remaining hostages, but that it would seek further negotiations over many of its other terms.In its statement, Hamas says it appreciates the efforts of Arab, Islamic and international efforts, as well as the efforts of US president Donald Trump.I’ll bring you more from the statement as soon as we get it.Hamas has also agreed to hand over the administration of the Gaza Strip “to a Palestinian body of independent technocrats”, according to the statement. More

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    US treasury considers special $1 Trump coin reading ‘fight, fight, fight’

    To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the US’s independence, the treasury department is mulling production of a $1 coin displaying Donald Trump with a clenched first under an American flag and the words “fight, fight, fight”.The words overtly reference what Trump said immediately after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt four months before he won a second presidency.US treasurer Brandon Beach effectively announced a draft design of the coin Friday on X, saying: “No fake news here. These drafts honoring America’s 250th birthday and [Trump] are real.”The X post – which boosted another account commenting on the draft design – said Beach looked “forward to sharing more” after the end of the partial government shutdown that began after midnight Wednesday when Senate Democrats demanding concessions on healthcare and other spending priorities refused to provide the votes necessary to pass a Republican-backed funding bill.As Politico pointed out, in 2020, at the end of his first presidency, Trump signed bipartisan legislation authorizing the treasury secretary to issue $1 coins during the calendar year 2026 that are “emblematic of the United States semiquincentennial”.One side of the coin on whose draft design Beach commented Friday showed Trump’s profile alongside “Liberty”, “In God we Trust”, and “1776-2026”.The other side referenced the attempt on Trump’s life at a political rally in Pennsylvania last year, when authorities said a sniper injured Trump’s right ear and wounded two others before being shot to death by the US Secret Service.Trump raised his fist after the attack – one of two attempted assassinations for him as he successfully ran for a second Oval Office term in 2024 – and shouted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” with an American flag looming nearby.A statement from a treasury department spokesperson to Politico said the draft which Beach’s X post discussed was not the “final $1 coin design”. But the statement maintained that “this draft reflects well the enduring spirit of our country and democracy, even in the face of immense obstacles”.Trump’s approval rating on average has plummeted to -9.5%, as his second administration has cut healthcare protections and nutrition assistance that benefits the poor – while also implementing tariffs that preceded a reported rise in consumer prices.A poll of 3,445 US adults taken by Pew Research between 22 and 28 September showed 53% believed Trump had made the national economy worse. Only 24% believed that he’s improved the economy, according to the poll’s finding.Among other things, the Trump administration has also deployed US military troops into the streets of multiple cities, axed roughly half a billion dollars in funding for vaccines such as the ones that helped end the Covid pandemic, and struggled to contain a scandal over his past friendship with late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. More

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    Nature, books and naked bike rides: Portlanders push back on Trump claims that city is ‘like living in hell’

    In Portland, Oregon, a city Donald Trump claims to have seen “burning down to the ground” on his television, residents are pushing back on the US president’s false depiction of their tranquil city as a war zone.Trump, who refuses to accept firsthand accounts from Oregon’s governor and the Portland mayor that the widespread unrest he thinks he’s seen on television is not actually happening, has ordered the military in to the Pacific north-west city.Portland police made three arrests on Thursday night after fistfights broke out between demonstrators and a pro-Trump influencer from Washington DC at an Ice field office, and 200 national guard troops are expected to arrive in the coming days. But a visit to the Ice field on Thursday afternoon showed that, far from being “under siege” by militants, there were fewer than 10 protesters on the sidewalk, nearly outnumbered by journalists.Now residents, frustrated with the president’s false claims that Portland is “war ravaged”, are showing a different side of their city from the one depicted by Trump and Fox News.A raft of Instagram and TikTok videos from Portlanders are poking holes in Trump’s claim that life in their city is “like living in hell”, showcasing verdant hiking trails, trees in rich fall colors and a thriving food scene. Plans are also being drawn up for the most Portland of all possible responses: an Emergency Naked Bike Ride against “the militarization of our city”.View image in fullscreenOn a rainy Thursday in the city, the kitchen at Kann, Portland’s award-winning Haitian restaurant, was busy preparing for dinner. Jokes about Trump’s war were shared at Coava, a cafe with a single-origin coffee menu that changes seasonally which is popular with Japanese tourists. Business was brisk at Powell’s Books, the downtown icon which inspired the new protest slogan: “Portland isn’t a war zone; it’s a bookstore with a city around it.”The parking lot was full at Providore Fine Foods, a culinary marketplace whose owner, Kaie Wellman, said she was concerned about how Trump’s “threats against our city” could be “devastating for local businesses” like hers, which worked so hard to survive the pandemic only to be hit first by Trump’s tariffs and now his “100% false” portrayal of a minor protest at the Ice field office in the city’s south waterfront district. “It’s really profoundly upsetting,” she said.Wellman, a fifth-generation Oregonian, is opening a bistro this month in the Portland Art Museum’s new Mark Rothko Pavilion, a $110m expansion that has taken a decade to complete. “It really is such a cornerstone for our community, for downtown Portland, to have such a significant new building,” she said. She describes her leap of faith in opening a new restaurant just blocks from where the 2020 protests for racial justice took place as “a love letter to Portland and what a vibrant community we are.“One of the main reasons that we’re opening up this cafe downtown, and do what we do here in town, is because of our deep love for the state and for the city. And to see it portrayed anything less than what it is, you know, is just so frustrating. It’s a place that people want to come and live and raise their families. And it’s kind of unmatched in beauty,” Wellman said.View image in fullscreen“Yes, we’ve had issues here, but we’ve had the same issues that basically every other city around this world has had. And we’re coming at these issues from a thoughtful place and not trying to sweep them away. But the issue that’s being portrayed right now does not exist in this town.”Asked about Trump’s claims of lawlessness, Wellman said it was “not the case at all”. “And I am in the south waterfront at least two to three times a week because my 92-year-old mother lives in the south waterfront,” she added. “So I can tell you firsthand what’s been happening down there. And what I have seen, at the quote-unquote very worst, it’s still been peaceful protests. Maybe there’s been some strong words thrown around.”“I would say right now, if there is any disturbance that’s been going on, it’s Black Hawk helicopters that are circling around a neighborhood that is filled with many retirees and older people … causing all of them fear and a lack of sleep,” she added.View image in fullscreenBack at the Ice field office protest, Amanda Cochran, a US army veteran, was holding a homemade sign that read “Vets Against Militarization” on one side, and “Immigrants Are Not the Enemy’ on the other. She wore a tour shirt for the Canadian rock band Three Days Grace with the lyrics “Let’s start a riot.”“I’m here because I’m really fed up with the fact that Trump is talking about using the military to go into cities and to train the forces,” she said.“I served in the US army for six years and this is my first time ever protesting,” she said. “I just felt really strongly that if we don’t stand up and say something then this could easily become a militarized country and the citizens will be under the control of the military, and I don’t think that that is OK, and that’s not what I fought for.“Us veterans, we have the privilege of being able to express our opinions because we’re out, and hopefully we can kind of give those soldiers that don’t want to be there a voice. If enough of us show up, maybe Trump will back off,” she added.Across the street, the Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin, who has been reporting from inside the facility, prepared for a live hit out front, accompanied by three men with covered faces who appeared to be private security guards.Just to their left, a young protest organizer, Jack Dickinson, who achieved a measure of viral fame this week for the chicken costume he wears to mock Trump, was being interviewed for the local news.Why a chicken? One of the advantages of the costume, Dickinson explained, is that “it disarms people.“We’re dealing with a real influx of rightwing agitators right now,” he continued. “It becomes difficult for them to interact in certain ways, I think, when there’s the chicken suit, but not just the chicken suit, it’s then somebody who tries to have a conversation with them about the soybean situation that we’re facing right now,” referring to the collapse in crop prices for US farmers due to Trump’s trade war with China.View image in fullscreen“We do not want this to escalate,” he said, agreeing with local officials who suggest that Trump wants to provoke a response from the protesters.“There is definitely a desire for a response. We saw this most clearly on Sunday night because for that protest, we had 30 people that were down here associated with rightwing Twitter accounts or rightwing YouTube channels,” Dickinson said. “There is a clear desire to get somebody reacting in a way that they can frame as a justification for what they are doing. And Portland just isn’t giving them what they want.” More

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    When will US generals stand-up to Trump? | Moustafa Bayoumi

    At what point will the US’s top military brass decide that enough is enough, that loyalty to the constitution and the rule of law supersedes blind fealty to job and Donald Trump?The question is hardly academic. The president has been rapidly intensifying military operations on United States soil during his second term. In April, he began expanding the military presence along parts of the US’s southern border by establishing so-called “national defense areas”. Troops are now authorized to search, question and detain people in those zones, dangerously muddling the line between military rule and civilian law enforcement.By the summer, Trump sent in the marines and the national guard to Los Angeles, against the wishes of the governor, and later to Washington DC. Similar deployments of the national guard, also against the wishes of the respective state governors, are expected for Chicago and Portland, Oregon.Needless to say, US law, under the Posse Comitatus Act, generally prohibits the use of the military in civilian law enforcement roles. A federal judge ruled in September that Trump’s troop deployment in Los Angeles violated the act, but Trump is doing it anyway. And he expects the military to follow him.Not just follow him. He expects the military to venerate him. Trump turned a 250th Anniversary Parade for the Army, which we already didn’t need, into his own 79th birthday celebration, which we definitely didn’t need. (Both anniversaries were on the same day. Attendance at the parade was not only sparse, but was dwarfed by the estimated 5 million people who turned out for the “No Kings” demonstrations across the country on the same day.)And most recently, he joined his recently renamed secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, in an abruptly summoned meeting of the country’s military commanders on 30 September. (“I love the name,” Trump said, referring to the Department of War. “I think it’s so great. I think it stops wars.”) At the meeting, Trump told the leadership: “We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.” His evidence was that “Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape,” even though all the cities he listed – San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles – have some of their lowest levels of violent crime in decades. And then he said: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”Trump and Hegseth are attempting to reshape the US military into a partisan force committed to preserving Trump’s power, a prospect which is not only anathema to our tradition but should also worry all Americans. And they want to make this restructuring into a spectacle. Everything Hegseth said at this highly publicized and very expensive meeting could have been issued by memorandum, and in fact was. But Hegseth in particular needs a rebrand. He is, at this point, much less known for leading military operations than he is for leaking them. For Hegseth, the very public lecture was a vainglorious attempt at buffing his own tarnished image. Unfortunately for him, it came across more like a condescending Ted talk that had possibly been directed by the ghost of Leni Riefenstahl.But far more significant, and infinitely more troubling, was Trump’s foreshadowing of even greater numbers of troops on our American streets. So, I return to my initial question: when will the nation’s top military brass decide that enough is enough?There’s every reason to believe that high ranking members of the military might already be worried about getting sacked by this president, either for being insufficiently loyal to Trump, insufficiently white, or insufficiently male, based on past actions from this administration. Within weeks of assuming office, Trump sacked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Air Force Gen CQ Brown, only the second Black man to hold the position. Adm Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to be named to chief of naval operations, the US Navy’s highest rank, was also dismissed.Trump also got rid of judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force, and fired Gen Tim Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, reportedly at the request of far-right activist Laura Loomer, who claimed Haugh was insufficiently loyal to the president. There are many more examples.While it’s true that every administration does some house cleaning upon assuming power, it’s also true that the scale and mission to restructure the military during this administration is unprecedented. As Peter Feaver and Heidi Urben write in Foreign Policy: “No previous administration exercised its power in this dramatic fashion for fear that doing so would effectively treat the senior officer corps as akin to partisan political appointees whose professional ethos is to come and go with changes of administration, rather than career public servants whose professional ethos is to serve regardless of changes in political leadership.”Hegseth claimed that he will also now get rid of “stupid rules of engagement”. Those rules, however, define what is lawful and unlawful behavior by the military, a line made more difficult to discern as the administration decimates the legal wing (the judge advocate generals) of the military. Clearly, there has been plenty of illegality in the US military behavior from its inception until today. But if you are a member of the military, you have the right, if not the duty, to refuse illegal orders.The Trump administration is currently engaged in blatantly illegal acts being carried out by the US navy. Lethal strikes are being launched against vessels in the Caribbean that the US claims are drug smuggling boats. No evidence has been provided, and now the administration is claiming the US is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels and the people who were murdered by the US in the strikes are “unlawful combatants”.This is ludicrous, of course, and is reminiscent of the worst legal reasoning developed during the early War on Terror era. Even if the people on those boats were participating in drug smuggling (which is quite unlikely), being involved in the sale of a controlled substance does not rise to the standard of engaging in hostilities, as noted by Geoffrey Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer and formerly the army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues.When a state intentionally kills a person outside of armed conflict and without due process, it’s a form of murder. It’s already happening in the Caribbean Sea. Is that the path we’re headed down on the streets of our own cities? Trump may have drawn up his own battle plans for his purposes, but it’s the members of the military who will have to carry them out. With all our institutions currently on the line, including the military, we need a much stronger defense against his idea of war.

    Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York More