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Why is the US sleeping as autocracy approaches? | Governor Jay Inslee
When a woman asked me a couple of weeks ago why leaders were not standing up to Donald Trump, my thoughts went immediately to political leaders. When I started to answer, she corrected me and said: “No, no, I’m talking about college presidents and law firms. Where the heck are they?”Where indeed? From all observations, most have been asleep as the US president dismantles democracy piece by jeweled piece. They are either cutting sweet little deals on their knees, or just remaining silent as the fruits of 250 years of national labor and life are strangled by Trump’s tentacles. From the cowering of major media companies to the shameful capitulation of some law firms, and oppressive silence from virtually all of them, the nation is sleepwalking into a slow but ever encroaching totalitarian state.As the woman continued her outpouring of anger and grief, I thought of John F Kennedy’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, Why England Slept, his brilliant exposition of why a proud and resilient nation ignored Germany’s mounting threat to their democracy when it was so obvious and imminent. Kennedy recognized the centrality of moments we now face, writing: “Any system of government will work when everything is going well. It’s the system that functions in the pinches that survives.” We are now being pinched by an autocrat who eats laws for breakfast and will not be stopped by any internal restraint.Whether our democracy survives to preserve the rule of law depends on so much more than senators and representatives. In a way, they are merely personal reflections of the public’s will. Depending exclusively on their personal commitment to the constitution is a good bet for the party now in the minority, but a sore loser for the majority party, or more accurately, the majority cult. The moment demands so much more than eloquence on the floor of the House and the Senate – it demands full-throated, continuous and united rebellion against the perverse oppression and malignant illegality of this authoritarian in the White House.Unfortunately, we are not seeing the necessary courage, not in the east, not in the west, not in large law firms, not in boardrooms, not in school district superintendents, not in chambers of commerce. The silence is deafening.Where was the united voice of major law firms when Trump maliciously began to target several of them? They were hiding. Where are the concerted voices of college presidents as their colleagues are being hung out to dry? Do they not teach history at these colleges, where any freshman could tell you that the Trump plan is right out of every autocrat’s playbook? First you tame the press, then you tame the colleges, then you tame the law firms so that no one can even get to court, then you eventually ignore the orders of the supreme court.We are well on our way to that final death knell of democracy, as we advance through the first three steps.My motivation to rally for our country is not driven solely by my love for democracy. Like millions of Americans, I see my own family being jeopardized by Trump’s callousness. I have seen first-hand the power of special education teachers to raise the prospects of special needs kids in my clan. I rebel at the Musk-Trump administration’s chainsaw attack eliminating the one agency that safeguards our kids’ access to special education investments, the US Department of Education. To Elon Musk, the department may be just a bureaucracy – to our family, it is a guardian angel.Is this passivity and lack of resistance understandable? Of course it is. That’s why the old saw “first they come for the … then they come for you” was invented.But we should call upon our college presidents, law firms, leaders of civil society, to get in touch with their responsibility to democracy itself, as well as their own institutions, which surely will end up on the firing line someday if Trump continues to be emboldened by his victims’ servility.Perhaps it is too strong to refer to these organizations as collaborators. Perhaps. But this wholesale timidity and collapse must be considered rank appeasement at best, modest complicity at worst.Kudos to Harvard University, Perkins Coie and others who have stood up, but some of the finest higher educational institutions in world history are now ignoring the well-trod path of autocracy in world history. Some of the best and brightest law firms in the nation are now providing free legal services to the very administration that has broken laws beyond counting the very legal codes the law firms purport to defend.Certainly, these silent aiders and abettors can explain their individual decision making, but their cumulative damage to the very fabric of democracy calls us to heed Benjamin Franklin when he said we must “all hang together, or all hang separately”. Is it asking too much for the college presidents of the US to band together and say this choking of research funds is unacceptable? Are the law firms just too busy to all say they are not going to yield to Trump’s perverse bullying and say what any good lawyer ought to say: “We’ll see you in court”?In fighting Trump’s assaults on democracy, I speak from experience. As the first governor to come out against his Muslim ban, one of the most vocal in speaking out against his Covid negligence, and telling him to his face to stop tweeting and start protecting our children, earning me the honor of being called a “snake”, I know standing up brings the heat. So be it.But my more important experience is decades watching a courageous citizenry force its federal government to change course. In the 50s and 60s, the government was forced to change, thanks in large part to a woman refusing to sit in the back of the bus. In the 70s, the Vietnam war ended only because thousands marched, including myself, proving the ability of committed people, though unelected, to compel change. In the 80s it was private citizens who forced the federal government to start treating HIV patients like humans.In each of these decades, small acts of defiance led to national change as courage rippled outwards. The benefit of having lived these decades during the American experiment is learning that leaders in civil society who resist should be exalted, joined, and followed.Those who believe that this call to action is an overstatement of the threat understand neither the nature of the tyrant-in-chief nor the slow but inexorable nature of how democracies are lost. I witnessed Trump’s cruelty and lack of empathy as I dealt with him during the Covid pandemic, as he willfully withheld help and then consciously spread misinformation that caused so many needless deaths. Anyone who saw this up close would make the call for resistance I am making today. How can anyone not understand that the refusal to follow the law on January 6 continues in full force today? Why would it stop unless it is made to stop?More importantly, we should listen to the late Justice William O Douglas, who said: “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” It is past time for all our leaders in civil society to wake up, stand up and speak up. We are right in calling them to do so. Hiding is no longer acceptable.
Jay Inslee served as the governor of Washington from 2013-2025 More
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Trump 100 days: delusions of monarchy coupled with fundamental ineptitude
He has blinged it with gold cherubim, gold eagles, gold medallions, gold figurines and gilded rococo mirrors. He has crammed its walls with gold-framed paintings of great men from US history. In 100 days Donald Trump has turned the Oval Office into a gilded cage.The portraits of Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan and other past presidents gaze down from a past that the 47th seems determined to erase. Trump is seeking to remake the US in his image at frightening speed. The shock and awe of his second term has challenged many Americans’ understanding of who they are.In three months Trump has shoved the world’s oldest continuous democracy towards authoritarianism at a pace that tyrants overseas would envy. He has used executive power to take aim at Congress, the law, the media, culture and public health. Still aggrieved by his 2020 election defeat and 2024 criminal conviction, his regime of retribution has targeted perceived enemies and proved that no grudge is too small.Historically such strongmen have offered the populace a grand bargain: if they will surrender some liberties, he will make the trains run on time. But Trump’s delusions of monarchy have been coupled with a fundamental ineptitude.His trade war injected chaos into the economy, undermining a campaign promise to lower prices and raising the spectre of recession; his ally Elon Musk wreaked havoc on the federal government, threatening health and welfare benefits for millions; his foreign policy turned the world upside down, making friends of adversaries and turning allies into foes.Having promised so much winning, Trump is losing. Just 39% of respondents approve of how he is handling his job as president, according to an opinion poll by ABC News, the Washington Post newspaper and Ipsos, while 55% disapprove. For the first time Trump is even under water on his signature issue of immigration.“Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president have been 100 days from hell for the American people,” Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, wrote in a letter to Senate colleagues. “His first 100 days have been the worst for any president in modern history, and unsurprisingly, he has the lowest 100-day job approval any president has seen in 80 years.”The scale of the disaster is hard to comprehend for anyone who expected a repeat of Trump’s first term. His first 100 days in 2017 were consequential enough: a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, an order for construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border and the firing of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, over undisclosed contacts with Russia. But while America’s guardrails bent, they did not break.View image in fullscreenFrom the moment he was sworn in on 20 January 2025, with the tech oligarchs Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg looking on, it was clear that Trump’s second presidency would be of a different magnitude. Instead of the conservative stalwart Mike Pence as vice-president, there is the Maga isolationist JD Vance. Instead of the retired four-star general Jim Mattis as defence secretary, there is the former Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth.And instead of experienced hands ready to curb Trump’s impulses, there is a cabinet of sycophants eager to indulge them, including in ostentatious displays for the TV cameras. Trump, 78, told the Atlantic magazine: “The first time, I had two things to do – run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world.”Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and White House chief of staff, said: “In the first term there were some guardrails and individuals that were able to restrain him before he took action. In the second term he doesn’t have any guardrails and deliberately selected a cabinet in which loyalty was the primary quality that he was after.“The problem is that he goes ahead and takes actions that can cause tremendous disruption. The only check that I can see is when something he does could very well lead to an economic disaster of one kind or another. It’s only when that seems clear that he basically pulls back.”Trump and his allies had four years in political exile to plot and plan a disruptive agenda laid out in Project 2025, a set of proposals by the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank in Washington. Yet its execution has been undermined by the president’s mercurial nature, cabinet infighting and leaks, especially at the Pentagon, reportedly now in disarray.Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “I’m struck by this weird combination of a focused and very well-planned agenda on the one hand and reckless incompetence on the other. You have Russ Vought [director of the office of management and budget] and the Project 2025 folks who clearly had a blueprint for action ready to go and yet you also see this pattern of dysfunction running through agencies like the Department of Justice and Department of Defense.”For Trump’s diehard supporters, his key strength is his success as a businessman and promise to run the economy accordingly. As president he has imposed tariffs on trading partners including Mexico, Canada and China, with Chinese goods facing a combined tax of 145%.The impact has been profound, with consumer confidence plummeting, stock markets convulsing and investors losing confidence in the credibility of Trump’s policies. In the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, 72% said they thought it was very or somewhat likely that his economic policies would cause a recession in the short term.View image in fullscreenTrump, who promised be a dictator only on “day one”, has signed more than 135 executive orders, well ahead of any other president in their first 100 days, bypassing Congress. He tapped Musk to lead the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, aimed at reducing government waste with a Silicon Valley-inspired “move fast and break things” mentality.Doge has been slashing programmes, jobs and entire agencies, including the Department of Education, that by law receive funding under the purview of Congress. Musk and his team have combed through tax, social security and health records, putting private data at risk. While Musk initially aimed for $1tn in budget cuts, analysts predict that he will fall dramatically short.Doge has caused turmoil in medical research by firing doctors and scientists working to cure diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. It has frozen funding for military veterans’ facilities and fired critical workers at hospitals serving disabled veterans. Musk has also described health and social welfare programmes as “the big ones to eliminate” and social security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”.Even long-term political observers are aghast at Trump’s acts of self-sabotage. Paul Begala, a former White House adviser and Democratic strategist, said: “I expected him to be stupid. I expected him to be chaotic. I expected his team to be a bunch of sycophants and nincompoops. I expected the tariffs and trade war.“Here’s what I didn’t expect. For me, the defining word of these 100 days has been betrayal. A good politician takes office and tries to expand beyond his base; an average politician tries to reward his base; Trump is the first politician who’s screwing his base, betraying his base. I honestly don’t understand it.”View image in fullscreenIn keeping with his campaign promise, Trump has implemented some of the hardest-line immigration policies in the nation’s history, driving a sharp decline in illegal border crossings.He invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants without due process, including sending alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador in defiance of a court order. The action was met with legal challenges and judicial rebuke. Trump also pledged to end birthright citizenship and proposed “gold cards” for millionaires to buy US citizenship.Another defining theme of the first 100 days is retribution. On his first day in office, Trump pardoned virtually everyone who took part in the 6 January 2021 insurrection. He has actively targeted prosecutors who investigated him, former officials who criticised him and universities whose policies he disliked. He ordered the justice department to investigate Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity director who refuted unfounded claims of election fraud in 2020.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “This will truly be known as the administration of revenge and retribution. No one’s ever done these things before. Even Richard Nixon, who kept an enemies list and was full of anger and resentment, couldn’t hold a candle to Trump.“It’s frightening and has the effect of intimidating people. He loves to bully and he has done more than any other president, certainly in a short period of time. There’s just nothing like this in all of American history. I’ve had so many people my age say, can I survive this? Because it’s stressful.”Trump’s executive orders have faced more than 150 lawsuits and judges have blocked the administration numerous times. The president called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against him, prompting a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts. Last week agents arrested Hannah Dugan, a Milwaukee judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities at her courtroom.Trump is also waging a culture war. Funding for arts and cultural institutions has been cut, and leaders ousted, with the president declaring them fronts for a “woke” agenda. The administration has gone after the media, fighting against news organisations in court and seeking to dismantle the Voice of America broadcaster. Access for some outlets has been restricted while “Maga media” have been platformed.PEN America, which defends writers worldwide against autocratic regimes, said the opening weeks of the Trump White House were unlike anything seen since the red scare McCarthy era of the 1950s. It warned of a “five-alarm fire” for free speech, education, the right to protest and a war against ideas and language themselves.The events – along with outlandish statements about annexing Greenland, retaking the Panama canal and making Canada the 51st state – have hurt America’s reputation around the globe.View image in fullscreenPatrick Gaspard, a former official in the Barack Obama administration, said: “Donald Trump has been radically successful in demonstrating that in 100 days you can destroy a brand that’s been built up over nearly 250 years. If that’s a success then congratulations.”He added: “We’re in DefCon 1 in a democracy where the president is radically consolidating power, politicising non-partisan agencies, attacking civil society and private firms, and literally disappearing people from our streets. Tragically, those with influence only seem to be moved by the volatility in the stock market because of tariffs, failing to see that the entire edifice that makes their success possible is being dismantled.”Trump’s political honeymoon appears to be over. Even among Republicans, polling shows that there is ambivalence about his priorities, with only about half saying he has focused on the right things. Street protests are growing across the country, judges continue to hand him defeats and Harvard University stood its ground against him. As the Democratic party tries to regroup, Trump could find his second 100 days heavier going than his first.In 2021 Sabato, the University of Virginia political scientist, told the Guardian that history would remember Trump as by far the worst president ever on the basis of his first term. “I was wrong,” he acknowledged last week. “This is the worst presidency in American history.“The ignorance was actually our ally in the first Trump term. He didn’t know what he was doing and now, unfortunately, while he still doesn’t know what he’s doing, he knows more than he did. Trump believes he is infallible. He’s going to burn out with the public long before the end of this term.” More
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Trump 100 days: ‘unpredictable’ US alienates allies and disrupts global trade
For US foreign policy, Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office were the weeks when decades happened.In just over three months, the US president has frayed alliances that stood since the second world war and alienated the US’s closest friends, cut off aid to Ukrainians on the frontlines against Vladimir Putin, emboldened US rivals around the world, brokered and then lost a crucial ceasefire in Gaza, launched strikes on the Houthis in Yemen and seesawed on key foreign policy and economic questions to the point where the US has been termed the “unpredictable ally”.The tariffs Trump has unleashed will, if effected, disrupt global trade and lead to supply chain shocks in the United States, with China’s Xi Jinping seeking to recruit US trade allies in the region.The pace of the developments in the past 100 days makes them difficult to list. Operating mainly through executive action, the Trump administration has affected nearly all facets of US foreign policy: from military might to soft power, from trade to immigration, reimagining the US’s place in the world according to an isolationist America First program.“The shake-up has been revolutionary, extraordinary. It’s upended 80-some years of American foreign policy,” said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to Nato.The Trump presidency has ended the relative peace in the western hemisphere since the end of the second world war underwritten by US economic, military and diplomatic influence, Daalder said.“The foundation of the Pax Americana was trust, and once you break trust, it’s extraordinarily difficult to restore,” he said. “And restoring trust – trust in America, trust in American institutions, trust in American voters – it takes a long time to rebuild.”The US’s key foreign policy and national security making institutions are in crisis. The Pentagon is mid-meltdown under the leadership of Pete Hegseth, whose erratic and unsteady leadership has been reflected in score-settling among his senior staff, while a leaked Signal chat embroiled the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and others in scandal. The state department under Marco Rubio is undergoing a vast shake-up, and the US’s diplomats are being sidelined in favour of envoys such as Steve Witkoff with little background in foreign policy. Critics say the gutting of USAID will cut back on US soft power for generations.“There’s no better way to get us into a war, perhaps a catastrophic war, than essentially poking out your eyes and numbing your brain, and you’re left with Donald Trump and a few people sitting in the White House winging it, and they’re not competent to wing it,” said Steven Cash, a former intelligence officer for the CIA and Department of Homeland Security, and the executive director of the Steady State, an advocacy group of former national security professionals. “And so we’ve seen that with the tariffs. We’ve seen that with Nato. We’ve seen that with Ukraine, and we’re gonna see a lot more of it.”After assuming office in 2021, Joe Biden declared: “America is back.”“The world now knows America is not back,” Daalder said. “America is gone again.”In a recent interview with the Zeit newspaper, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, expressed similar sentiments, saying: “The west as we knew it no longer exists.”View image in fullscreenIn Munich, JD Vance delivered a landmark speech openly pandering to Europe’s far right, accusing European leaders of “running from their own voters” and saying: “America can do nothing to help you.”A backlash has begun. Last month the EU presented an €800bn ($913bn) plan on the future of European defense, a putative step in what would be a herculean task to overcome internal divisions and onshore European defense manufacturing. The UK and other US allies have considered other efforts, such as limiting intelligence-sharing with the US. “We still need America now, but there is a vision [of a time] when we won’t any more,” said one European diplomat.Meanwhile, the Trump effect is beginning to sway elections as well – though not as he might hope.In the western hemisphere, Trump has terrorised US neighbours and tacitly declared what some have compared to a new Monroe doctrine, saying the White House planned to “take back” the Panama canal and annex Greenland, while regularly calling Canada the future 51st state.In an extraordinary bit of election-day meddling, Trump wrote a social media post suggesting that he was on the ballot in Canada’s vote, repeating that Canada should become the 51st state in order to avoid tariffs and reap economic awards.Canadians responded by duly electing the liberal candidate Mark Carney, completing a 30% swing in polling that has largely been explained by opposition to Trump’s tariff war and territorial menaces.In Europe, populist parties seen as Trump’s ideological allies are also on the defensive. While Trump was popular in terms of his ideological and anti-woke agenda, the trade war has made him “quite toxic, just in the last month or two, with a lot of the populist voting bases”, said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former special adviser to the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.Nowhere has the shift in US foreign policy been felt more acutely than in Ukraine, where the sudden cutoff in US military and intelligence sharing confirmed the Trump administration’s goals of pressuring Ukraine to accept a deal with the Kremlin, rather than the other way around. Those frustrations boiled over into an Oval Office meltdown fueled by Vice-President JD Vance that one former US official close to the talks called “disgraceful”.Trump has swung wildly on the war, on certain days targeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and then quickly pivoting to call out Putin for continuing to rain down missiles on Ukrainian cities. His theatrics have produced symbolic moments, including a sudden recognition that “maybe [Putin] doesn’t want to stop the war” after speaking with Zelenskyy this weekend in the baptistry of St Peter’s Basilica. But in terms of hard results, Trump has not fulfilled a promise to end the war within 24 hours or produced a clear path to peace many months later.View image in fullscreenThe Russians have said they largely tune out what he says in public.“We hear many things coming from President Trump,” said Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during a television appearance this weekend. “We concentrate, as I said, on the real negotiations which President Trump supports and instructed his people to continue to engage in these negotiations.”Key among those people is Witkoff, a neophyte diplomat who has spent hours in conversation with Putin, often with no other adviser present. One person close to the Kremlin said that Witkoff was viewed as a reliable negotiator in Moscow with “a chance to make an agreement”, but added: “There is a chance it will pass by.”Much of the burden of international diplomacy now rests on Witkoff, who is also running point on other key negotiations. Trump has tasked him with reaching a deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, in effect renegotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that he scuttled in 2018. Both the US and Iran have played up the talks, although “differences still exist both on major issues and on the details”, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told state television this week.And then there is the Middle East, where the Trump administration scored its greatest early success by negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza but then failed to prevent its collapse, with Israel cutting off new aid to Gaza as the fighting continues.“There now seems to be less focus on ending the devastating conflict,” wrote Stefanie Hausheer Ali, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs. “Trump’s threat in February to Hamas to release the hostages or ‘all hell is going to break out’ has, in practice, meant Israel restarting the war and blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Without an alternative to Hamas rule, the militant group may hang on and continue to fight as an insurgency, replenishing its ranks by recruiting desperate people.”Trump’s most extreme remarks have turned out to be bluster: he stunned the world when he claimed that he would turn the Gaza Strip into beachfront condos and said that the local Palestinian population would be forcibly removed. Months later, the initiative is largely forgotten.While attempting to close three landmark negotiations at once, the Trump administration has also launched a trade war with the entire world, establishing sweeping tariffs on all foreign imports before abruptly reversing course and cutting tariffs to 10% save for those against China.With so many major efforts ongoing, observers say that the government is largely paralysed to deal with smaller but still crucial issues in foreign policy and national security. As part of a blanket ban on refugees, tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted US troops against the Taliban are left waiting for relocation to the United States, a promise that was extended by previous administrations.“The lack of clarity and the chaos are the things that are causing so much pain,” said Shawn VanDiver, the founder and president of #AfghanEvac, a group that works with the state department to help resettle Afghans.He said he was critical of both the Biden and Trump administrations for failing to relocate the tens of thousands of Afghans who were far enough along in the vetting program to be relocated before Trump came into office.“The truth is, is that when America makes a promise, you should be able to trust our word,” he said. “If our flag waving over an embassy in Tunisia or Baghdad or Kabul, or Kyiv doesn’t mean this is the place where there’s truth, where there’s justice … well, then what are we even doing here?” More
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Trump news at a glance: children targeted in immigration crackdown
As part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, unaccompanied minors are now being targeted for deportation, with the Department of Homeland Security engaging in “welfare checks” on children who arrived in the US alone, usually across the US-Mexican border.The moves have sparked fears of a crackdown and prompted alarm about what one critic called “backdoor family separation”.The president has also signed two executive orders related to immigration, including one targeting so-called “sanctuary cities” that “obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration laws”.Here are the key stories at a glance:Unaccompanied immigrant children could be deported or prosecutedImmigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials are seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide with a view to deporting them or pursuing criminal cases against them or adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US, according to sources and an Ice document.Read the full storyTrump signs executive order requiring list of sanctuary cities and statesDonald Trump signed two new executive orders on Monday afternoon related to immigration, according to the White House, including one targeting so-called “sanctuary cities” and another the administration says will strengthen law enforcement.Read the full storyPeace Corps to undergo ‘significant’ cuts after Doge reviewThe Peace Corps is offering staff a second “fork in the road” buyout, according to a source familiar with the matter. Allison Greene, the chief executive of Peace Corps, sent an email to staff on Monday with an update about the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) assessment of the agency.Read the full story Doge conflicts of interest worth $2.37bn, Senate report saysElon Musk and his companies face at least $2.37bn in legal exposure from federal investigations, litigation and regulatory oversight, according to a new report from Senate Democrats. The report attempts to put a number to Musk’s many conflicts of interest through his work with his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), warning that he may seek to use his influence to avoid legal liability.Read the full storyTrump’s justice department appointees remove leadership of voting unitDonald Trump’s appointees at the Department of Justice have removed all of the senior civil servants working as managers in the department’s voting section and directed attorneys to dismiss all active cases, according to people familiar with the matter, part of a broader attack on the department’s civil rights division.Read the full storyDemocrats warn cuts at top US labor watchdog will be ‘catastrophic’Democrats have warned that cuts to the US’s top labor watchdog threaten to render the organization “basically ineffectual” and will be “catastrophic” for workers’ rights. Elon Musk’s Doge has targeted the National Labor Relations Board for cuts and ended its leases in several states.Read the full storyJB Pritzker’s fiery speech urging mass protests sparks talk of 2028 runIllinois’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, scorched Donald Trump’s administration, calling for “mass protests” and declaring that Republicans “cannot know a moment of peace” during a fiery speech in New Hampshire that immediately sparked presidential speculation.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:
An Irish woman who has lived legally in the US for four decades has been detained by immigration officials because of a criminal record dating back almost 20 years.
Senior British government officials have asked golf bosses to host the 2028 Open championship at Donald Trump’s Turnberry course after repeated requests from the US president, sources have said.
A host of CBS’s 60 Minutes rebuked the show’s corporate owners as part of a dispute over journalists’ independence amid a lawsuit from Trump and attempted sale.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 27 April 2025. More - in US Politics
Jalen Hurts stays away as Eagles visit White House to celebrate Super Bowl victory
Donald Trump feted the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles at the White House on Monday, but several players, including quarterback Jalen Hurts, decided to skip the celebration.Hurts and other players cited scheduling conflicts as the reasons for their absences, according to a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity.Despite the quarterback’s absence, Trump called Hurts a “terrific guy and terrific player” who turned in “one stellar performance after another” during the Eagles’ run to the championship.“The Eagles have turned out to be an incredible team, an incredible group,” Trump said.In April, Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said attending the White House was not compulsory for players. “Our culture is that these are optional things,” Lurie said. “If you want to enjoy this, come along and we’ll have a great time and if you don’t, it is totally an optional thing.”NBC Sports Philadelphia reported that other Eagles players who did not attend Monday’s ceremony included AJ Brown, DeVonta Smith, Jalen Carter, Jordan Davis and Brandon Graham.The Eagles were disinvited to the White House in 2018, the last time they won the Super Bowl, after a number of players said they would drop out amid tensions over the anthem protests that had swept the NFL. Trump, then in his first term as president, had attacked players who knelt during the anthem to protest against racial inequality. At the time, Trump wrote on social media that the Eagles were in dispute “with their President because he insists that they proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart, in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country.”Asked by a reporter on the red carpet of the Time magazine gala last week whether he would take part in the White House visit, Hurts responded with an awkward “um” and long silence before walking away.The Eagles’ star running back, Saquon Barkley, visited Trump over the weekend at Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey, and caught a ride with the president to Washington on Air Force One.“He loved it,” Trump said of Barkley’s flight on the presidential airplane. “He’s a great young guy and an incredible football player. Saquon had a season for the ages, running behind the most powerful offensive line in the NFL,” Trump said.Barkley, meanwhile, pushed back on social media criticism earlier Monday for spending time with Trump. He noted that he has golfed with Barack Obama too.“Maybe I just respect the office, not a hard concept to understand,” Barkley posted on X.While Trump’s first term in office led to a number of athletes, such as LeBron James and Megan Rapinoe, criticizing the president, there has been little pushback from the sports world so far in his second term. In February, Trump became the first sitting US president to attend the Super Bowl, and his presence was welcomed by several players, including the Kansas City Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.Teams who have won a major championship are traditionally invited to the White House to celebrate their victory with the president. However, during Trump’s first-term several teams were not invited or made it clear they would not attend if they were. Those teams included the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, and the United States Women’s National Team after their victory at the 2019 Women’s World Cup. More
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MLB commissioner Manfred to rule on Pete Rose ban after Trump meeting
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said he discussed Pete Rose with Donald Trump at a meeting two weeks ago and he plans to rule on a request to end the sport’s permanent ban of the career hits leader, who died in September.Speaking Monday at a meeting of the Associated Press Sports Editors, Manfred said he and Trump have discussed several issues, including Manfred’s concerns over how Trump’s immigration policies could impact players from Cuba, Venezuela and other foreign countries.Manfred is considering a petition to have Rose posthumously removed from MLB’s permanently ineligible list. The petition was filed in January by Jeffrey Lenkov, a Southern California lawyer who represented Rose prior to the 17-time All-Star’s death at age 83.“I met with President Trump two weeks ago, I guess now, and one of the topics was Pete Rose, but I’m not going beyond that,” Manfred said. “He’s said what he said publicly, I’m not going beyond that in terms of what the back and forth was.”Trump posted on social media in February that he plans to issue “a complete PARDON of Pete Rose.” Trump posted on Truth Social that Rose “shouldn’t have been gambling on baseball, but only bet on HIS TEAM WINNING.” It’s unclear what a presidential pardon might include – Trump did not specifically mention a tax case in which Rose pleaded guilty in 1990 to two counts of filing false tax returns and served a five-month prison sentence. The president said he would sign a pardon for Rose “over the next few weeks” but has not addressed the matter since.Rose had 4,256 hits and also holds records for games (3,562) and plate appearances (15,890). He was the 1973 National League MVP and played on three World Series winners.An investigation for MLB by lawyer John M Dowd found Rose placed numerous bets on the Cincinnati Reds to win from 1985-87 while playing for and managing the team. Rose agreed with MLB on a permanent ban in 1989.Lenkov is seeking Rose’s reinstatement so that he can be considered for the Hall of Fame. Under a rule adopted by the Hall’s board of directors in 1991, anyone on the permanently ineligible list can’t be considered for election to the Hall. Rose applied for reinstatement in 1997 and met with Commissioner Bud Selig in November 2002, but Selig never ruled on Rose’s request. Manfred in 2015 denied Rose’s application for reinstatement.Manfred said reinstating Rose now was “a little more complicated than it might appear on the outside” and did not commit to a timeline except that “I want to get it done promptly as soon as we get the work done. I’m not going to give this the pocket veto. I will in fact issue a ruling.”Rose’s reinstatement doesn’t mean he would automatically appear on a Hall of Fame ballot. He would first have to be nominated by the Hall’s Historical Overview Committee, which is picked by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America and approved by the Hall’s board. Manfred is an ex-officio member of that board and says he has been in regular contact with chairman Jane Forbes Clark.“I mean, believe me, a lot of Hall of Fame dialogue on this one,” Manfred said.If reinstated, Rose potentially would be eligible for consideration to be placed on a ballot to be considered by the 16-member Classic Baseball Era committee in December 2027.Manfred added he doesn’t think baseball’s current ties to legal sports betting should color views on Rose’s case.“There is and always has been a clear demarcation between what Rob Manfred, ordinary citizen, can do on the one hand, and what someone who has the privilege to play or work in Major League Baseball can do on the other in respect to gambling,” he said. “The fact that the law changed, and we sell data and/or sponsorships, which is essentially all we do, to sports betting enterprises, I don’t think changes that. It’s a privilege to play Major League Baseball. As with every privilege, there comes responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is that they not bet on the game.”Manfred did not go into details on his discussion with Trump over foreign-born players other than to say he expressed worry.“Given the number of foreign-born players we have, we’re always concerned about ingress and egress,” Manfred said. “We have had dialogue with the administration about this topic. And, you know, they’re very interested in sports. They understand the unique need to be able to go back and forth, and I’m going to leave it at that.” More
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Ice seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children to deport or prosecute
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials are seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide with a view to deporting them or pursuing criminal cases against them or adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US, according to sources and an Ice document.The moves are sparking fears of a crackdown on such children and prompting alarm about what one critic called “backdoor family separation”.In recent months, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Ice have begun engaging in “welfare checks” on children who arrived in the US alone, usually via the US-Mexico border, to “ensure that they are safe and not being exploited”, according to a DHS spokesperson.Although DHS is characterizing the welfare visits as benevolent, an internal Ice document accessed by the National Immigration Project advocacy group and then shared shows Ice is also seeking out children who came into the US alone as immigrants – and their US-based sponsors – for immigration enforcement purposes and/or to pursue criminal prosecutions. The recent operations and document confirm a February report from Reuters, that the Trump administration has directed Ice to track down and deport this group.Meanwhile, in Donald Trump’s second term, legal services provided to unaccompanied minors have been slashed and funds are not flowing despite court intervention. And the federal agency monitoring unaccompanied immigrant children has begun sharing sensitive data with Ice.The Ice document shows “ it’s not just about checking in on kids, making sure that they can account for them and that they’re not being exploited”, said Michelle Méndez, the director of legal resources and training for the National Immigration Project. “It shows they have other goals, and the goals are criminalization of the kid or criminalization of the sponsor. It’s backdoor family separation.”In addition to verifying that the children are not trafficked or exploited, the Ice document shows officials are also gathering intelligence to see whether the children are a “flight risk” or a “threat to public safety” or whether they are viable to be deported. Immigration experts and attorneys say such “fact finding” operations by Ice to track unaccompanied minors are still in their early stages.“It’s enforcement. It’s in the name of saying that they’re pursuing children’s welfare. They seem to be actually trying to conduct an enforcement operation,” said Shaina Aber, the executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice. “It seems very clear that what they are actually doing is gathering intelligence on the family.”For advocates, one of the most troubling aspects, as stated in the document, is that Ice officials will target children with alleged “gang or terrorist ties/activities”. In recent months, the Trump administration has been engaging in arrests, expulsions and deportations of immigrants – mostly Salvadorians and Venezuelans – accused of having links to gangs deemed to be terrorist organizations. The administration has used flimsy evidence to justify many of the expulsions and deportations under the controversial, rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act, or AEA, leading to a showdown between the administration and the judiciary and a threat to the rule of law.“As long as the government has some nebulous allegation, they know an immigration judge will likely order the person removed,” Méndez said.Earlier this month, Ice officials visited a 16-year-old girl in Washington state for a “welfare check”. During the visit, which was first reported by the Spokesman-Review, the frightened girl messaged and called Samuel Smith, the director of immigrant legal aid at Manzanita House, the organization that is representing the girl in her immigration case.“Both the text messages sent and the tone of communication when talking on the phone, was of a child who was incredibly scared,” Smith said. “She had no idea what was going on and was worried that her life would be flipped upside down.”The Washington Post reported this month that other federal agencies have also been conducting welfare checks and reporting information to Ice.“I can appreciate the publicly stated goal, but I don’t necessarily believe it,” Smith said.According to the Ice document and a federal law enforcement source with knowledge of the operations, two offices within Ice are conducting the unaccompanied immigrant children operations: enforcement and removal operations (ERO) and homeland security investigations (HSI). The former, ERO, runs Ice’s deportation system while HSI runs mostly international criminal investigations into drug smuggling, human trafficking and fraud, but they are increasingly working together in this administration.According to the Ice document, officials from ERO and HSI will coordinate “on pursuing UAC”, which stands for “unaccompanied alien children”, while ERO will verifiy that “immigration enforcement action is taken”, if necessary.“ERO officers should remember they are to enforce final orders of removal, where possible, and HSI will pursue criminal options for UAC who have committed crimes,” the document says.Becky Wolozin, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, finds it “difficult to reconcile the alleged well-meaning intention of these visits with the reality of the terror and trauma they have caused for children and families across the country”.“Given the intent articulated in this memo, families have well-founded fear surrounding these visits,” Wolozin added.Unaccompanied immigrant children who reach the US border are apprehended by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and then placed in custody of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR), under the department of Health and Human Services (HHS), while their immigration case proceeds. ORR will place children in shelters and later, if there is a sponsor available, children are placed under a sponsor’s care. Typically, sponsors are the children’s relatives in the US; at times, they are unrelated adults. The sponsors complete an assessment process and undergo a background check, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service.For years, ORR has operated independently of DHS, in an attempt to address the immigration of children in a humane manner, rather than through law enforcement.Unaccompanied minors then go through lengthy proceedings and in the meantime enroll in school.Some children released to ORR sponsors have been found to have been trafficked and exploited.“There are instances of trafficking in the United States,” Smith said. “But it’s the exception, not the rule here. The vast majority are in placements that are supportive, in a good place for them to be able to live.”For years, Trump allies have pushed the narrative that unaccompanied immigrant children have been trafficked, placing blame on the Biden administration. They have pointed to a DHS inspector general report that found that Ice was not able to adequately track unaccompanied minors under their care. Experts point to a bureaucratic paperwork backlog by Ice, saying most of those children are safe, with relatives or sponsors.“The previous administration allowed many of these children who came across the border unaccompanied to be placed with sponsors who were actually smugglers and sex traffickers,” the DHS assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement. “Unlike the previous administration, President Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem take the responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to reunite children with their families.”Since the Trump administration returned to office, HHS has cut legal services for unaccompanied children. There is currently a legal fight at play, in an attempt to restore legal resources for unaccompanied minors who are attempting to stay in the US.During the first Trump administration, ORR began to share data with Ice regarding immigrant children and their sponsors. Similarly at that time, immigration officials arrested 170 undocumented immigrants who tried to become sponsors for children in government custody.Although the Biden administration stopped the data-sharing practice, the new Trump White House has again begun the process of information sharing between agencies. A new Trump-era change now also allows for ORR to share the legal status of children’s sponsors with Ice, sparking fears that the information will be used to arrest and deport undocumented sponsors.ORR did not respond to a request for comment.“I worry about the trauma the kids are going through. There is a climate of fear for immigrants in this country right now,” Aber said. “The amount of trauma that this administration seems willing to put kids through is really upsetting.”The new acting director of ORR is Angie Salazar, a former Ice agent under HSI. Salazar took over the role in March after the prior acting director of ORR, another Ice official, was ousted from the role. More
