Donald Trump

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump basks in triumph as supreme court kicks away another guard rail

      by

      He strode into the White House briefing room feeling invincible. In his own telling, he had fixed the Middle East. He had made Nato pay up. He had pacified the heart of Africa. And now Napoleon Trump had once again just been crowned emperor by the US supreme court.“We’ve had a big week,” Donald Trump, orange hair shimmering, blue tie drooping below the waist, mused from a lectern anointed with the presidential seal. “We’ve had a lot of victories this week.”The highest court had just handed the president another win by curbing the power of federal judges to impose nationwide rulings impeding his policies – though it left unresolved the issue of whether he can limit birthright citizenship.Unable to contain his glee, Trump came to talk to the press – something his predecessor Joe Biden rarely did – to goad the “fake news” while basking in glory from the Maga-friendly media.The president hailed the court’s decision as a “monumental victory for the constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law” and gloated – with some hyperbole – that “there are people elated all over the country”. He looked forward to taking aim at targets such as birthright citizenship, sanctuary city funding and refugee resettlement.In the abstract, there is a reasonable debate to be had over how much power the judiciary should have to curb an elected leader’s agenda. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, has described it as a “bipartisan problem” that has plagued five different presidents. A decade ago Barack Obama expressed frustration when a district court temporarily blocked his executive actions on immigration.In the court’s majority opinion, the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s contention that they were neglecting their duty to protect the people from government overreach. “Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary,” Barrett wrote.But context is everything. Trump has marginalised Congress, sued the media in an effort to chill free speech, assailed cultural institutions and universities and deployed the military against peaceful protesters. The courts have been leading the way in safeguarding democracy from his authoritarian impulses. Now they too are on the ropes.Asked by a reporter if the supreme court decision concentrates too much power in the White House, Trump insisted: “The question is fine but it’s the opposite. The constitution has been brought back.”Yet the supreme court that decided to make the strongman even stronger contains three Trump appointees and last year found that former presidents have presumptive immunity from prosecution for “official acts” – in effect putting Trump above the law. The four criminal investigations that once dogged him now feel like ancient history.View image in fullscreenTrump was asked a question by a reporter from LindellTV, a news organisation founded by Mike Lindell, a conspiracy theorist and founder of MyPillow, about whether he would like to see a justice department investigation of the judges whose rulings allowed the cases to proceed against him while he was out of office.“I love you,” Trump said in response to the question, adding: “I hope so.”It has been exactly 12 months since he debated with Biden and discovered an opponent in chronic decline. Democrats panicked and imploded, Trump survived an assassination attempt and rode his good fortune all the way to the White House.It is small wonder that the 79-year-old now considers himself untouchable, acting with impunity at home and abroad, holding freewheeling press conferences like Friday’s without fear of consequences.“Illegal crossings at the border are at zero now,” a reporter said.Trump interjected: “Zero! Does everyone hear that?”A cameraman in the briefing room shouted: “Trump 2028!”Later Trump reiterated his claim that Iran’s nuclear sites had been obliterated and lamented: “We had some fake news for a little while – the same people that covered the Hunter Biden laptop was from Russia … I don’t believe that they’re going to go back into nuclear anytime soon.”He also used the briefing to take a swipe at Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, for not lowering interest rates. “We have a man who’s not a smart man, and he probably has Trump Derangement Syndrome.”Later on Friday the White House would host leaders from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda to sign a peace deal to end years of fighting. Trump cheerfully admitted: “I’m a little bit out of my league in that one because I didn’t know too much about it.” He also noted that the US would gain access to critical minerals in the region.Trump even ruminated on threats to his life, including proxy groups from Iran that may issue threats, and referenced the bullet that struck his ear last summer in an attempted assassination. He gets “that throbbing feeling every once in a while”, he said.“What I do is a dangerous business. You know, I tell the story of the car companies and different people in different professions. You have race car drivers, as an example, one-tenth of 1% die. Bull riders, one-tenth of 1%. That’s not a lot, but people die. When you’re president, it’s about 5%. If somebody would have told me that, maybe I wouldn’t have run. This is a very different profession.”As raised hands in the room clamoured for attention his political lizard brain spotted an opportunity to bash his predecessor. “This is the opposite of Biden. Biden would take a half a question and he’d leave without answering it … You tell me when it gets boring, OK?” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      University of Virginia president resigns under pressure from White House over DEI programs

      by

      The president of the University of Virginia (UVA) has resigned from his position after coming under pressure from the Trump administration over diversity efforts.James Ryan was facing political pressure from Washington to step aside in order to resolve a justice department investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing three people briefed on the matter.Ryan had a reputation for trying to make the UVA campus more diverse and encouraging students to perform community service.“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in a message to the university reviewed by the Guardian.He added: “To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.“This was an excruciatingly difficult decision, and I am heartbroken to be leaving this way.”The apparent campaign against a prominent public sector university in the US follows Donald Trump’s agenda since returning to the White House to cancel programs and policies aimed at greater diversity, equity and inclusion in government, workplaces, and various establishments and organizations across American society.In parallel, the US president set about attacking and taking funds from elite private sector universities, with Harvard at the forefront, in an assault on the academic and research independence of higher education more broadly.The New York Times first reported late on Thursday that the justice department had demanded that Ryan step down as part of an agreement to settle a civil rights investigation into the school’s diversity practices, as Trump further erodes the government agency’s distance from the White House by enlisting its investigative powers as part of his political agenda.Ryan said in a letter, briefed to the Times by a source, that he was going to step down next year but “given the circumstances and today’s conversations” he had decided “with deep sadness” to resign now.The justice department had reportedly told UVA that the government thought it was prioritizing race-based factors during its admissions process and other aspects of student life in a way that constitutes “widespread practices throughout every component and facet of the institution”.Ryan’s removal is another example of the Trump administration using “thuggery instead of rational discourse,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents university presidents, told the Associated Press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a dark day for the University of Virginia, a dark day for higher education, and it promises more of the same,” Mitchell said. “It’s clear the administration is not done and will use every tool that it can make or invent to exert its will over higher education.”In a joint statement, Virginia’s Democratic senators said it was outrageous that the Trump administration would demand Ryan’s resignation over “‘culture war’ traps.” “This is a mistake that hurts Virginia’s future,” Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine said.UVA is located in Charlottesville, and found itself in the global headlines early on in the first Trump administration when, in August 2017, hundreds of far-right demonstrators wielding torches and shouting racist slogans marched on to the historic campus ahead of a so-called Unite the Right rally in the small city, crowding towards a smaller group of counterprotesters.The subsequent rally, to try to prevent the removal of Confederate statues from a park, was massive and became very violent as neo-Nazi groups gathered and attacked counterprotesters, then later a white supremacist drove a car into such a group and killed a woman.Trump sparked uproar by blaming both sides for the violence, on the one hand and, on the other, saying: “You had people that were very fine people on both sides.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      US supreme court limits federal judges’ power to block Trump orders

      by

      The US supreme court has supported Donald Trump’s attempt to limit lower-court orders that have so far blocked his administration’s ban on birthright citizenship, in a ruling that could strip federal judges of a power they’ve used to obstruct many of Trump’s orders nationwide.The decision represents a fundamental shift in how US federal courts can constrain presidential power. Previously, any of the country’s more than 1,000 judges in its 94 district courts – the lowest level of federal court, which handles trials and initial rulings – could issue nationwide injunctions that immediately halt government policies across all 50 states.Under the supreme court ruling, however, those court orders only apply to the specific plaintiffs – for example, groups of states or non-profit organizations – that brought the case.The court’s opinion on the constitutionality of whether some American-born children can be deprived of citizenship remains undecided and the fate of the US president’s order to overturn birthright citizenship rights was left unclear, despite Trump claiming a “giant win”.To stymie the impact of the ruling, immigration aid groups have rushed to recalibrate their legal strategy to block Trump’s policy ending birthright citizenship.Immigrant advocacy groups including Casa and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (Asap) – who filed one of several original lawsuits challenging the president’s executive order – are asking a federal judge in Maryland for an emergency block on Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. They have also refiled their broader lawsuit challenging the policy as a class-action case, seeking protections for every pregnant person or child born to families without permanent legal status, no matter where they live.“We’re confident this will prevent this administration from attempting to selectively enforce their heinous executive order,” said George Escobar, chief of programs and services at Casa. “These are scary times, but we are not powerless, and we have shown in the past, and we continue to show that when we fight, we win.”The decision on Friday morning decided by six votes to three by the nine-member bench of the highest court in the land, sided with the Trump administration in a historic case that tested presidential power and judicial oversight.The conservative majority wrote that “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts”, granting “the government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue”.The ruling, written by the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett, did not let Trump’s policy seeking a ban on birthright citizenship go into effect immediately and did not address the policy’s legality. The fate of the policy remains imprecise.With the court’s conservatives in the majority and its liberals dissenting, the ruling specified that Trump’s executive order cannot take effect until 30 days after Friday’s ruling.Trump celebrated the ruling as vindication of his broader agenda to roll back judicial constraints on executive power. “Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,” Trump said from the White House press briefing room on Friday. “It wasn’t meant for people trying to scam the system and come into the country on a vacation.”Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered a scathing dissent. She argued that the majority’s decision, restricting federal court powers to grant national legal relief in cases, allows Trump to enforce unconstitutional policies against people who haven’t filed lawsuits, meaning only those with the resources and legal standing to challenge the order in court would be protected.“The court’s decision to permit the executive to violate the constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Jackson wrote. “Given the critical role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law … it is odd, to say the least, that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the constitution.”Speaking from the bench, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor called the court’s majority decision “a travesty for the rule of law”.Birthright citizenship was enshrined in the 14th amendment following the US civil war in 1868, specifically to overturn the supreme court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision that denied citizenship to Black Americans.The principle has stood since 1898, when the supreme court granted citizenship to Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents who could not naturalize.The ruling will undoubtedly exacerbate the fear and uncertainty many expecting mothers and immigrant families across the US have felt since the administration first attempt to end birthright citizenship.Liza, one of several expecting mothers who was named as plaintiff in the case challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship policy, said she had since given birth to a “happy and healthy” baby, who was born a US citizen thanks to the previous, nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s order. But she and her husband, both Russian nationals who fear persecution in their home country, still feel unsettled.“We remain worried, even now that one day the government could still try to take away our child’s US citizenship,” she said at a press conference on Friday. “I have worried a lot about whether the government could try to detain or deport our baby. At some point, the executive order made us feel as though our baby was considered a nobody.”The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) condemned the ruling as opening the door to partial enforcement of a ban on automatic birthright citizenship for almost everyone born in the US, in what it called an illegal policy.“The executive order is blatantly illegal and cruel. It should never be applied to anyone,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.Democratic attorneys general who brought the original challenge said in a press conference that while the ruling had been disappointing, the silver lining was that the supreme court left open pathways for continued protection and that “birthright citizenship remains the law of the land”.“We fought a civil war to address whether babies born on United States soil are, in fact, citizens of this country,” New Jersey’s attorney general, Matthew Platkin, said, speaking alongside colleagues from Washington state, California, Massachusetts and Connecticut. “For a century and a half, this has not been in dispute.”Trump’s January executive order sought to deny birthright citizenship to babies born on US soil if their parents lack legal immigration status – defying the 14th amendment’s guarantee that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are citizens – and made justices wary during the hearing.The real fight in Trump v Casa Inc, wasn’t about immigration but judicial power. Trump’s lawyers demanded that nationwide injunctions blocking presidential orders be scrapped, arguing judges should only protect specific plaintiffs who sue – not the entire country.Three judges blocked Trump’s order nationwide after he signed it on inauguration day, which would enforce citizenship restrictions in states where courts had not specifically blocked them. The policy targeted children of both undocumented immigrants and legal visa holders, demanding that at least one parent be a lawful permanent resident or US citizen.Reuters contributed reporting More

    • 175 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Some immigrants chose to leave the US. But is ‘self-deportation’ really becoming a thing?

      by

      Their stories have emerged in new reports and on social media feeds: individuals and families, sometimes of mixed immigration status, who have lived in the United States for years and are now choosing to leave. Or, as it’s sometimes called, “self-deport”.There was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former deputy communications director Diego de la Vega, who lived as an undocumented New Yorker for 23 years before he and his wife left for Colombia in December, shortly after Donald Trump’s election. Or the decorated army veteran, a permanent resident in the US for nearly 50 years, who left for South Korea this week after being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Or newlyweds Alfredo Linares, an undocumented chef, and his wife, Raegan Klein, a US citizen, who recently moved their lives from Los Angeles to Mexico.But experts warn that just because we see stories of so-called “self-deportation”, we should be careful about believing there’s any real trend. Not only does taking this route create potentially serious legal and financial issues for those leaving, convincing the public that a lot of people are self-deporting is also part of Trump’s larger strategy to create an illusion of higher deportation numbers than he can truly deliver.The emphasis on self-deportation is clearly a recognition by the administration that they can’t really accomplish what they’ve promised, says Alexandra Filindra, professor of political science and psychology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. “It’s way too costly to identify, arrest, process and deport large numbers of immigrants, especially when there are so many court fights and so many organizations that are willing to support the rights of immigrants.”Filindra says Trump is trying to take the cheap route, hoping his performative politics – everything from the widespread Ice raids across the US to sending the national guard to Los Angeles – will get people to pack up their own accord.Leaving everything behindIt’s impossible to put a precise number on how many immigrants have decided to leave the country since Trump took power. But for those who have, the decision is deeply personal.Linares, who was born in Mexico, still thinks of California as home because it was where he came as a teen and lived undocumented for decades. Klein was born in Canada and became a naturalized US citizen nearly two decades ago. They married last year in Los Angeles.“We received a small amount of money for our wedding,” Klein said. “We planned to use it to start Alfredo’s immigration process.” After Trump won, though, Klein was the first to have second thoughts.View image in fullscreen“I didn’t like Trump in his first term, and then when he got away with 34 felonies and was elected again as the president, I just was like, well, come on! I mean, he’s going to do any and everything he wants to do. No one’s holding him accountable for anything, so I’m not sitting around.”Linares – as well as most of their family and friends – thought Klein was overreacting. The couple met with three immigration attorneys. Though he married a legal US citizen, Linares crossed the border as a teen illegally. Attempting to rectify his status would be expensive and take untold years of waiting – with no guarantee of a path to legal residency or citizenship. Furthermore, beginning the legal process to adjust his status would put him on the government’s radar and may have even increased his risk of deportation.In fact, immigration court has become a dragnet of sorts. People lawfully going through the process of becoming a citizen have been showing up for mandatory court dates and getting arrested by Ice officers outside the courtrooms.Klein was eventually able to persuade Linares that they should take their small nest egg and leave while they still could.They created a video about their departure to Mexico that was equal parts love story and epic adventure. “Apparently our video went really, really viral,” said Klein, who kept busy as a freelance television producer until a big industry slowdown a couple of years ago. Friends started contacting them and saying influencers were reposting their video. Major media outlets soon amplified the newlyweds’ saga.Klein and Linares now dream of opening a restaurant together in Mexico. They say they don’t think of their situation as self-deportation but rather “voluntary departure” – the government didn’t force them out or pay them to leave, they made the decision themselves.Self-deportation: a catchy term, or a real trend?Filindra also takes issue with the phrase “self-deportation”, and warns against the rebranding of an old phenomenon known as return migration.“Return migration has always been a phenomenon,” she says. Filindra points out that migration levels between the US and Mexico are “practically zero” because so many people eventually go back home to Mexico, so the numbers of those arriving and those going back all but even out. According to the Pew Research Center, an estimated 870,000 Mexican migrants came to the US between 2013 and 2018, while an estimated 710,000 left the US for Mexico during that period. During the decade prior, however, more migrants left the US for Mexico than came here.“The same was true in the 20th century with European migrants who often spent 20 or 30 years here, made enough money to retire and then went back home,” says Filindra.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut this isn’t exactly self-deportation, and the phrase itself has a problematic history. Though now being used in serious policy discussions, it was created as a joke by comedians Lalo Alcaraz and Esteban Zul in the early 90s. The duo posed as conservative Latinos supporting Hispanics Against a Liberal Takeover (Halto). They even invented a militant self-deportationist and sent fake press releases to media outlets promoting satirical self-deportation centers. In 2012 Mitt Romney, seemingly unaware of – or perhaps unbothered by – the comedic roots of the term, started using “self-deportation” during his unsuccessful bid for the presidency.Now the US Department of Homeland Security has latched on to the term. In May, the DHS claimed that 64 people took a government-funded flight to Colombia and Honduras as part of its new program encouraging undocumented immigrants to “self-deport”.View image in fullscreenThe International Organization for Migration (IOM) is one agency supporting the effort, which it calls “assisted voluntary return” (AVR). Undocumented people can apply for AVR using the CBPHome app. Though the details remain murky, applicants supposedly receive a $1,000 stipend and travel assistance home.However, according to a source familiar with the program who requested anonymity, approximately 1,000 individuals have been referred by the US government to the IOM through the AVR program, but to date the agency has facilitated the departure of “only a few” people.Immigration experts say this also squares with what they are seeing.“A thousand dollars is chump change when it comes to giving up a life in the United States,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at American Immigration Council. “The majority of undocumented immigrants have been here for more than 15 years. They have a job. Many have family here, some own property. Some run their own businesses.”Furthermore, many immigrants are here because of dire situations and life-threatening conditions in their home countries. They have nowhere to return to. Immigration attorneys also warn that because the Trump administration hasn’t been transparent, too little is known about the program to trust it. In fact, an additional directive from the administration on 9 June announced that the DHS would “forgive failure to depart fines for illegal aliens who self-deport through the CBP Home app” – though most people would have no idea that fines are levied or how much those fines are.Even with the administration’s recent Ice raids and the supposed sweetening of the self-deportation deal, Filindra says most migrants will still not just leave. “What is more likely is that people who have a non-permanent status and need to visit immigration offices to extend their status, or those who have hearings, will not go out of fear of being arrested and deported.”And she says we should all hope that the administration’s obsession with all types of deportation is a flop. If too many immigrants are forced, threatened or incentivized to leave, industries from agriculture to healthcare will take a huge hit.“Economically, this could be devastating for the US,” said Filindra.Linares and Klein also warn that while they believe they made the right decision, leaving home is rough.Linares describes it as a rollercoaster. “The people have embraced us in Mexico, but it’s also been a challenge to figure out how things work here.” He’s still trying to get his Mexican driver’s license and passport. And he misses his LA friends, co-workers and even Griffith Park, his favorite place to hike with his dog. “It was 20 years of my life there that I dedicated to building something. It’s gone.”After going public with her story, Klein expected to hear from many undocumented people or mixed-status families choosing, or at least considering, leaving the US on their own terms – but so far, she hasn’t.“I don’t think a lot of undocumented people are leaving right now,” she says. “But if something doesn’t change – like if Trump isn’t put into check very soon – I think you will see a lot more people abandoning the US in 2026.” More

    • 225 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: No mention of ‘big beautiful bill’ July 4 deadline in president’s final pitch

      by

      Just two days ago, Donald Trump told Republican members of Congress to cancel their vacation plans until his “big beautiful bill” is sewn up and ready for his signature on 4 July.But in his final pitch to congressional leaders and cabinet secretaries at the White House on Thursday, he made no mention of deadlines, as his marquee tax-and-spending bill develops a logjam that could threaten its passage through the Senate.Trump stood before an assembly composed of police and fire officers, working parents and the mother and father of a woman he said died at the hands of an undocumented immigrant to argue that Americans like them would benefit from the bill, which includes new tax cuts and the extension of lower rates enacted during his first term, as well as an infusion of funds for immigration enforcement.“There are hundreds of things here. It’s so good,” he said.The bill is highly divisive and deeply unpopular with segments of the country. Democrats have dubbed the bill the “big, ugly betrayal”, and railed against what would be the biggest funding cut to Medicaid since it was created in 1965, and cost an estimated 16 million people their insurance. It would also slash funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps Americans afford food.A win for Democrats opposing Trump’s billRepublicans intended to circumvent the filibuster in the Senate by using the budget reconciliation procedure, under which they can pass legislation with just a majority vote, provided it only affects spending, revenue and the debt limit. But on Thursday, the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, ruled that a change to taxes that states use to pay for Medicaid was not allowed under the rules.Democrats took credit for MacDonough’s ruling, with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer saying the party “successfully fought a noxious provision that would’ve decimated America’s healthcare system and hurt millions of Americans. This win saves hundreds of billions of dollars for Americans to get healthcare, rather than funding tax cuts to billionaires.”Read the full storySupreme court paves way for states to defund Planned ParenthoodThe US supreme court has paved the way for South Carolina to kick Planned Parenthood out of its Medicaid program over its status as an abortion provider, a decision that could embolden red states across the country to effectively “defund” the reproductive healthcare organization.Read the full storyHegseth defends Iran strike amid doubts The US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, defended the US strikes on Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities and said that Trump had “decimated … obliterated” the country’s nuclear program despite initial intelligence assessments that last week’s strikes had failed to destroy key enrichment facilities and they could resume operations within just months.But he and the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Dan Caine, largely based that assessment on AI modeling, showing test videos of the bunker buster bombs used in the strikes and referred questions on a battle damage assessment of Fordow to the intelligence community.Read the full storyExclusive: State department told to end most overseas pro-democracy programsThe US state department has been advised to terminate grants to nearly all remaining programs awarded under the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which would effectively end the department’s role in funding pro-democracy programming in some of the world’s most hostile totalitarian nations.Read the full storyRFK Jr’s vaccine panel votes against preservative in flu shots in shock moveA critical federal vaccine panel has recommended against seasonal influenza vaccines containing a specific preservative – a change likely to send shock through the global medical and scientific community and possibly impact future vaccine availability.Read the full storyVaccine panel also suggests new RSV treatment for infantsHealth secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s reconstituted vaccine advisory panel recommended a new treatment to prevent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in infants. The treatment, a new monoclonal antibody called clesrovimab, was recommended by the powerful committee after being approved by the Food and Drug Administration roughly two weeks ago.The tortured vote took place a day late and after rounds of questions from the panel’s seven new members – all ideological allies of Kennedy, who views “overmedicalization” as one of the greatest threats to American children.Read the full storyPurple heart army veteran self-deports after 50 years from ‘country I fought for’A US army veteran who lived in the country for nearly 50 years – and earned a prestigious military citation for being wounded in combat – has left for South Korea after he says past struggles with drug addiction left him targeted by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.“I can’t believe this is happening in America,” Sae Joon Park, who held legal permanent residency, told National Public Radio in an interview before his departure Monday from Hawaii. “That blows me away – like [it is] a country that I fought for.”Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The dollar has fallen to a three-year low following a report that Trump is considering soon announcing his choice to succeed the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell.

      The US justice department sued the Maryland federal judiciary over an order that bars deporting undocumented immigrants for at least one day after filing a challenge.

      Clothing prices are starting to rise in the US as Trump’s tariffs on imported goods start to have an effect, according to the CEO of H&M.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 25 June 2025. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Briefing on Iran strikes leaves senators divided as Trump threatens new row

      by

      Republican and Democratic senators have offered starkly contrasting interpretations of Donald Trump’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities after a delayed behind-closed-doors intelligence briefing that the White House had earlier postponed amid accusations of leaks.Thursday’s session with senior national security officials came after the White House moved back its briefing, originally scheduled for Tuesday, fueling Democratic complaints that Trump was stonewalling Congress over military action the president authorized without congressional approval.“Senators deserve full transparency, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening,” the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said following the initial postponement, which he termed “outrageous”.Even as senators were being briefed, Trump reignited the row with a Truth Social post accusing Democrats of leaking a draft Pentagon report that suggested last weekend’s strikes had only set back Iran’s nuclear program by months – contradicting the president’s insistence that it was “obliterated”.“The Democrats are the ones who leaked the information on the PERFECT FLIGHT to the Nuclear Sites in Iran. They should be prosecuted!” he wrote.The partisan divisions were on display after the briefing, which was staged in the absence of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who previously told Congress that Iran was not building nuclear weapons, before changing her tune last week after Trump said she was “wrong”.Instead, the briefing was led by CIA director John Ratcliffe, secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who had publicly assailed journalists over their reporting on the strikes at a Pentagon press conference.With intelligence agencies apparently in open dispute over the strikes’ effectiveness, Thursday’s briefing did little to clear up the clashing interpretations on Capitol Hill.Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina senator and close Trump ally, said “obliteration” was a “good word” to describe the strikes’ impact.“They blew these places up in a major-league way. They set them back years, not months,” he said. “Nobody is going to work in these three sites any time soon. Their operational capability was obliterated.”But he warned that Iran would be likely to try to reconstitute them, adding: “Have we obliterated their desire to have a nuclear weapon? As long as they desire one, as long as they want to kill all the Jews, you still have a problem on your hands. I don’t want the American people to think this is over.”But Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, said Trump was “misleading the public” in claiming the program was obliterated and questioned why Gabbard had not attended the briefing.His skepticism was echoed by Schumer, who said the briefing gave “no adequate answer” to questions about Trump’s claims.“What was clear is that there was no coherent strategy, no endgame, no plan, no specific[s], no detailed plan on how Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon,” he said, adding that Congress needed to assert its authority by enforcing the War Powers Act.Gabbard and Ratcliffe had scrambled on Wednesday to back Trump, with Gabbard posting on X: “New intelligence confirms what POTUS has stated numerous times: Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed.”The ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Jim Himes, dismissed the destruction claims as meaningless. “The only question that matters is whether the Iranian regime has the stuff necessary to build a bomb, and if so, how fast,” he posted.The destruction response has also rankled Republican senators in the anti-interventionist wing of the party such as Rand Paul, who rejected claims of absolute presidential war powers.“I think the speaker needs to review the constitution,” said Paul. “And I think there’s a lot of evidence that our founding fathers did not want presidents to unilaterally go to war.”The Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution requiring congressional approval for future military action against Iran, though the measure appears unlikely to pass given Republican control of the chamber.The White House also admitted on Thursday to restricting intelligence sharing after news of the draft assessment leaking.Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the administration wants to ensure “classified intelligence is not ending up in irresponsible hands”. Leavitt later said the US assessed that there “was no indication” enriched uranium was moved from the nuclear sites in Iran ahead of the strikes.Trump formally notified Congress of the strikes in a brief letter sent on Monday, two days after the bombing, saying the action was taken “to advance vital United States national interests, and in collective self-defense of our ally, Israel, by eliminating Iran’s nuclear program”.The administration says it remains “on a diplomatic path with Iran” through special envoy Steve Witkoff’s communications with Iranian officials. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump makes case for ‘big, beautiful bill’ and cranks up pressure on Republicans

      by

      Donald Trump convened congressional leaders and cabinet secretaries at the White House on Thursday to make the case for passage of his marquee tax-and-spending bill, but it remains to be seen whether his pep talk will resolve a developing logjam that could threaten its passage through the Senate.The president’s intervention comes as the Senate majority leader, John Thune, mulls an initial vote on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” on Friday, before a 4 July deadline Trump has imposed to have the legislation ready for his signature.But it is unclear whether Republicans have the votes to pass it through Congress’s upper chamber, and whether any changes the Senate makes will pass muster in the House of Representatives, where the Republican majority passed the bill last month by a single vote and which may have to vote again on a revised version of the bill.Trump stood before an assembly composed of police and fire officers, working parents and the mother and father of a woman he said died at the hands of an undocumented immigrant to argue that Americans like them would benefit from the bill, which includes new tax cuts and the extension of lower rates enacted during his first term, as well as an infusion of funds for immigration enforcement.“There are hundreds of things here. It’s so good,” he said. But he made no mention of his desire to sign the legislation by next Friday – the US Independence Day holiday – instead encouraging his audience to contact their lawmakers to get the bill over the finish line.“If you can, call your senators, call your congressmen. We have to get the vote,” he said.Democrats have dubbed the bill the “big, ugly betrayal”, and railed against its potential cut to Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low-income and disabled people. The legislation would impose the biggest funding cut to Medicaid since it was created in 1965, and cost an estimated 16 million people their insurance.It would also slash funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps Americans afford food.Republicans intend to circumvent the filibuster in the Senate by using the budget reconciliation procedure, under which they can pass legislation with just a majority vote, provided it only affects spending, revenue and the debt limit. But on Thursday, Democrats on the Senate budget committee announced that the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, had ruled that a change to taxes that states use to pay for Medicaid was not allowed under the rules of reconciliation.That could further raise the cost of the bill, which the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation recently estimated would add a massive $4.2tn to the US budget deficit over 10 years. Such a high cost may be unpalatable to rightwing lawmakers in the House, who are demanding aggressive spending cuts, but the more immediate concern for the GOP lies in the Senate, where several moderate lawmakers still have not said they are a yes vote on the bill.“I don’t think anybody believes the current text is final, so I don’t believe anybody would vote for it in it’s current form. We [have] got a lot of things that we’re working on,” the senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a top target of Democrats in next year’s midterm elections, told CNN on Wednesday.In an interview with the Guardian last week, the Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski declined to say how she would vote on the bill, instead describing it as “a work in progress” and arguing that the Senate should “not necessarily tie ourselves to an arbitrary date to just get there as quickly as we can”.Democrats took credit for MacDonough’s ruling on the Medicaid tax, with the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, saying the party “successfully fought a noxious provision that would’ve decimated America’s healthcare system and hurt millions of Americans. This win saves hundreds of billions of dollars for Americans to get healthcare, rather than funding tax cuts to billionaires.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Democratic senator sounds alarm on party’s failures: ‘We don’t act as a team’

      by

      A Democratic senator has sounded the alarm about her own party’s failings, urging colleagues to “slaughter some sacred cows” if they want to combat Donald Trump and win back power.Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan castigated fellow Democrats for losing their “alpha energy” and “bravado”, being “scared” to enforce immigration rules, taking an “elitist” approach to the climate crisis and having “a bias towards navel gazing”. She painted a bleak picture of a leaderless party pulling in different directions.“Democrats are very disparate,” Slotkin told an audience at the Center for American Progress thinktank in Washington DC. “We’re like a solar system with no sun. We got a lot of planets, some with their own gravitational pull, we’ve got a lot of stars but there’s not enough cohering us.”The senator added: “You can’t retake the town of Mosul without a plan but then also a coordination effort by all parties to specialise and do things. Everyone has a different role to play … My concern is that we don’t act as a team and, when we don’t work as a team, we turn our guns on each other and it’s so, so, so fruitless.”Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who served three tours in Iraq, is a first-term senator widely regarded as a rising star in the party. In March, she delivered the Democrats’ rebuttal to Trump’s joint congressional address.The 48-year-old used her speech on Thursday to unveil an “economic war plan”, proposing that the government addresses problems such as rising costs and declining trust in institutions rather than exacerbating them.The plan focuses on five areas: creating well-paying jobs, modernising education to prepare for future economies, making housing affordable through increased construction, pursuing an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy to lower costs, and reforming a broken healthcare system by introducing a public option and tackling drug pricing.“As a CIA officer and Pentagon official by training, I believe that the single, greatest security threat to the United States is not coming from abroad,” she said. “It’s the shrinking middle class here at home.”When people cannot provide for their children as they themselves were provided for, she argued, it breeds “anger and suspicion among Americans”. This frustration can be unifying for Democrats including “moderates, progressives and everything in between”.Slotkin argued that government failed to uphold its “Great American Deal” by not ruthlessly expanding the middle class, instead being swayed by special interests and political expediency. She proposed rebuilding systems around jobs, education, housing, energy and healthcare rather than simply “nibbling at the margins”.She also advocated for political reforms, such as banning corporate political action committee donations and congressional stock trading, to regain public trust and refocus politicians on the needs of the middle class.The senator urged Democrats to take a pragmatic approach willing to “slaughter some sacred cows” to achieve results. She called on her colleagues to distinguish between small businesses and multinational corporations and avoid “vilifying success”.Slotkin, who hails from a border state, said there must be acknowledgment that the immigration system is broken. “Both parties have been a mess on this issue. Republicans say border security should substitute for an immigration policy and are rounding up people in a way that goes against American values.“Democrats are scared to impose real rules. So let me slaughter another sacred cow. We need to move past the talking point on comprehensive immigration reform … We need big, bold change to fix a broken system but at this point that can be one bill or spread across five bills. I will work with any adults I can find who are actually interested in making some kind of progress on immigration.”On education, Slotkin called for mobile phones to be banned from every K-12 classroom in the US and advocated for investment in certification programmes, community colleges, trade schools and apprenticeships as well as a radical overhaul of federal workforce training programmes.“Killing another sacred cow: in America you don’t have to go to college to be successful … Making a living using your hands is a worthy path. Some Democrats give that lip service but it’s time to put our money where our mouth is.”She called for an “all-of-the-above energy plan”, including natural gas, nuclear, batteries, renewables and new technologies, rejecting the “elitist” climate change approaches of some fellow Democrats that create “purity tests”.Slotkin represents swing state Michigan, which Democrat Kamala Harris narrowly lost to Trump in last year’s presidential election. She was speaking two days after the progressive candidate Zohran Mamdani stunned the Democratic establishment by beating the moderate Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayoral primary.Asked for her reaction, Slotkin replied: “The message that came across loud and clear to me was number one, people just like in November are still really focused on costs and the economy and their own kitchen table math. And they’re looking for a new generation of leadership. Those were to me the two big takeaways.“That’s why, again, it reinforces for me we may disagree on some key issues but understanding that people are concerned about their family budget – that is a unifying thing for our coalition. The message, at least for me, was clear.”She rejected the common observation that Trump supporters were voting against their own interests. “Their interest was in believing that someone was going to do something different and, while I don’t believe Donald Trump for one second on what he’s been selling, he at least was offering something different, and we need to hear that.” More