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      ‘Not addressing the issues’: DC residents wary of Trump’s national guard deployment even amid youth crime

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      With a small group of school-age children around him, Dylan Whitehorn is the center of attention with his clippers, trimmers and brushes. He’s known as “Mr D the Barber”, and on this summer afternoon in mid-August, Whitehorn had a steady line of kids waiting for a free back-to-school haircut at a neighborhood carnival.Several Metropolitan police department (MPD) officers patrolled the event, but their presence wasn’t overwhelming. It was a distinct difference from other parts of Washington DC, where upwards of 2,000 national guard troops were on the ground as part of Donald Trump’s temporary takeover of the city’s police department with federal troops.“It’s really been heartbreaking to see it,” said Whitehorn. “And to hear Donald Trump tell [federal officers] do what you want. You know, that kind of gasses them up, because they pretty much know or feel like they can gun you down, and there won’t be any accountability for that. And when you’re sending your kids to school in that climate, especially when this country has a history of killing young Black males, it’s a terrifying thought.”Amid a sweeping crackdown that has included immigration raids and checkpoints, Trump has called for teens as young as 14 years old to be charged as adults when accused of certain crimes in DC, citing the recent case of a 19-year-old former “department of government efficiency” (Doge) staffer who was allegedly assaulted by a group of teens.In late August on Fox & Friends, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, also doubled down, and said she would push to prosecute teens even younger than what Trump suggested. “We have got to lower the age of criminal responsibility in Washington DC. The gangs and the crews are 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 years old, I can’t touch them,” said Pirro in the clip. “If someone shoots someone with a gun and they’re 17 years old and that person does not die, I can’t prosecute them. I can’t get involved with them.”Minors aren’t part of Pirro’s jurisdiction because the US attorney for the District of Columbia is responsible for prosecuting adult felonies, while the local DC attorney general handles youth criminal cases. But the focus on young people committing crimes has become one of the central issues in the capital city’s friction with the Trump administration.Juvenile justice advocates say that DC’s current legal system ensures accountability and responsibility for minors involved in harmful behavior, without incarcerating them in a system built for adults. But DC natives and parents said they had mixed thoughts about how to effectively respond to youth crime. Frustration with community gun violence, even as violent crime has gone down after the pandemic surge, has made many residents in the Democratic city warily consider federal assistance.“It honestly depends on the crime because I’ve seen some of the younger kids out here carrying guns, like I can’t even sugarcoat it. If you out here killing then, yeah, you can serve adult time,” said Will Scales, a DC parent of three. “The punishment should be appropriate.”Research from the DC Policy Center shows the juvenile arrest rate in Washington DC is nearly double the national rate. There were more than 1,120 juvenile arrests from 1 January to 29 June this year, making up roughly 7% of all arrests in the city, according to data from the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, an independent DC agency that tracks public safety statistics. These trends have remained consistent since 2023, when youth crime spiked after the pandemic.The MPD has not publicly released any information about juvenile arrests during this federal operation, as it only publishes reports on juvenile arrests twice a year.Whenever a minor is arrested, an MPD spokesperson said, they are taken to the juvenile processing center. Depending on the severity of the criminal charge, the teen may be held overnight before they can see a judge the next day, or if they are eligible to participate in a diversion program, the teen is released to their guardian the same day as the arrest.Last year, the local DC attorney general’s office prosecuted over 84% of violent juvenile offenses, including homicide and attempted homicide, gun possession, carjacking and robbery cases.Still, city officials and advocates stress that the city has done more than prosecution alone.When crime spiked in 2023, DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, issued a public emergency declaration on juvenile crime, which expanded city resources and programs. This spring, the city launched the juvenile investigative response unit, a new initiative within the police department that expands outreach to teens in the criminal justice system and investigates violent crime involving youth.More recently, the DC city council approved tougher juvenile curfews after a series of incidents involving large groups of teens engaging in harmful and criminal behavior throughout the city.“There’s no question they still need to work on public safety,” said the DC city council member Robert White in an interview. “If we could actually get support from the federal government to keep doing the things that are working, we could continue to drive down crime. If the president spent just what he is spending from the defense budget, deploying the guards to DC on homelessness and crime, we could end both of them this week, but that’s not his goal.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhitehorn, meanwhile, acknowledges that youth crime has been an issue in DC, but he believes the answer isn’t as simple as locking teens up in jail. He knows this from his own experience: Whitehorn went to prison twice, spending nearly 15 years behind bars.“I get it that [if] they kill somebody, and I hate [for it] to be me or someone I love, but 14 years old, that’s just too young. I think it’s too young to get life … and that’s normally what you get for murder,” said Whitehorn. “I don’t think they have to be tried as an adult.”DC resident and parent Benetra Hudson believes there should be more parental involvement. She said this included more community policing efforts from neighbors, not police.“I’m 40 – when I was growing up, I had a whole community,” Hudson said. “I couldn’t do things because the lady at the corner knew my mom, and she would tell my mom or my grandmother before I could even get home from doing whatever it was I was not supposed to do.”When it comes to punishment, Hudson believes that teens aged 13 and 14 are too young to grasp the reality of their mistakes fully.“I feel like it gives them less of an opportunity if they’re charged as an adult, because they’re not going into a real adult situation in jail, and they’re not rehabilitated to look forward to the future,” said Hudson. “It’s a different thing when you’re actually incarcerated and you’re going to a juvenile facility to rehabilitate you to be better than you were as a juvenile, so when you are an adult, you don’t have those same mishaps.”Michael Umpierre, director of the Center for Youth Justice at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, agreed that police surveillance was not the most effective way to prevent youth crime.“If we truly want safer communities, we should be investing in schools, family supports and community-based youth programming. That is how we create pathways for young people – and all community members – to thrive,” he said in a statement.Others in the community echo that sentiment, arguing that the national guard’s presence won’t address the root causes of crime in the city.“People are not coming out because you’re out there, but they’re still going to kill, they’re still going to do all they’re doing as soon as you’re gone,” said Whitehorn. “It’s not fixing, it’s just blanketing the situation, but it’s not addressing the issues.” More

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      The Jeffrey Epstein cover-up is an affront to US democracy | Rebecca Solnit

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      Rape is a crime against democracy in the most immediate sense of equality between individuals and the premise that we’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights. Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them, through shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, the obscene legal instrument known as a nondisclosure agreement and a system too often run by men for men at the expense of women and children. That is to say, rapists count on getting away with it because of a system that hands them power and steals it from their victims. They count on a silencing system. On profound inequality.Which is what makes rape such a peculiar crime: it is the ritual enactment of the perpetrator’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, buttressed by the circumstances that puts and keeps each of them in those roles. It’s driven by the desire to use sexuality to cause physical and psychic injury, to dominate, to celebrate the rapist’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, to treat another human being as a person without rights, including the right to set boundaries, to say no and to speak up afterward. A society that perpetuates and protects this desire and arrangement is rape culture, and it’s been our culture throughout most of its existence.Democracy, in this context, means a society and system in which everyone’s rights matter, everyone’s voice is heard and everyone is equal under the law. Rapists count on this not being true, but is has become more true over the past half century, thanks to feminism, and changed a lot more over the past dozen years, thanks to more feminism. There has been a shift toward equality of of voice, rights and support from the legal system, from arresting officers to investigations, judges and juries (who, thanks to feminism, are no longer exclusively male). It hasn’t changed enough, but it’s changed a lot, which is how a hundred survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s rape club were able to gather with the support of Thomas Massie, a Republican congressperson from Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California, on Wednesday morning to speak to the world about their experiences and demand justice.They became victims, and some were abused for years, because of the power differential between Epstein and the girls and young women. His power consisted not only of his immense and still-unexplained wealth, but of aid from a host of others. Some actively cooperated in manipulating and abusing them, as groomer and pimp-in-chief Ghislaine Maxwell did, along with the fellow rapists to whom Epstein offered these children and young women. Others knew and chose to protect him and his fellow abusers, and some still do, all the way to the very top.Mike Johnson, the House speaker, adjourned Congress earlier this summer to prevent votes on measures relating to Epstein and thereby protect Donald Trump. As the New Republic reported on Tuesday, “House Speaker Mike Johnson is offering Republicans a cowardly out to avoid voting on a bipartisan discharge petition to release the Epstein files in full.” Johnson’s main concern in this (and pretty much everything else he does) is to protect Trump. He is not alone. Jamie Raskin said in July: “They’d conscripted a thousand FBI agents to be working around the clock 24 hours going through a hundred thousand Epstein documents and told them to flag any mentions of Donald Trump … This might be one of the most massive cover-ups in the history of the United States unfolding before our eyes.”The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, ordered this frantic censorship scheme to protect Trump, which should have begotten a thousand front-page news stories demanding to know what exactly it took a thousand agents to hide from us and who exactly Trump is that he requires this kind of anti-democratic protection. Like Johnson, and like Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, who conducted a long, deeply wrong exculpatory softball interview with Maxwell, she’s serving one man rather than the 342 million people of this country. Trump himself, who over the summer seemed terrified and eager to distract from whatever there is to be found out about his role in all this, once again attempted to silence victims by calling the whole thing “a Democrat hoax” immediately after the news conference. Survivor Haley Robson called out Trump and declared: “I cordially invite you to the Capitol to meet me in person so you can understand this is not a hoax.”The women who spoke at Wednesday morning’s press conference made it clear they still fear they face threats, that the machinery of silencing is still at work. Katie Tarrant of the Washington Post writes, “Lisa Phillips, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, and her lawyer Brad Edwards, said victims were scared to speak publicly about other abusers for fear of legal action. Her response came in response to a question about a client list some victims said they are compiling.” Another Post journalist reports, “Anouska De Georgiou, who said she was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, said she and her daughter were threatened when she volunteered to be a witness in a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell.”And this attempt to suppress the truth about crimes and silence victims is only too consistent with the Republican party and the Trump administration. The attacks on immigrants, refugees, Black and brown people, women, trans people, the positioning of the administration as above the law with the cooperation of the rogue conservatives of the supreme court: all this is an attempt to roll back not only the democratic gains of the past several decades, but the democratic principles of universal rights and equality under the law embedded in the constitution and the Bill of Rights.Rendering women second-class or maybe 11th-class citizens again is at the heart of the current rightwing agenda, with its pursuit of criminalization of pregnancy, denial of reproductive rights including access to birth control, the right to choose whether to bear children, and life-saving care for women who have miscarriages or otherwise need a pregnancy terminated. But this is only part of the attack on women. The administration has disproportionately fired Black women from government jobs. 300,000 Black women have left – or been pushed out of – the workforce in the last three months.Pete Hegseth, who himself settled rape allegations out of court, has fired women in high positions in the military, claims women are less qualified than men and has been reposting videos from Christian fanatics asserting women should not have the right to vote. Trump’s is quite literally a pro-crime administration, as major branches of federal government are pulled away from pursuing criminals to persecuting immigrants, often violating the law to do so. The administration has sought to cut funding for and dismantle programs addressing domestic violence. And of course the Trump administration is headed by Donald J Trump – a judge found in a civil claim that it was “substantially true” that Trump raped journalist E Jean Carroll. It’s rapists all the way down, and enablers all the way up.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      Trump news at a glance: South Koreans arrested in Ice raid at Hyundai, Pentagon rebranded as ‘Department of War’

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      South Korea’s foreign ministry has expressed concern after “many of our nationals” were among hundreds detained during a major Ice raid on a Hyundai factory in Georgia, in a dramatic iteration of the Trump administration’s harsh crackdown on immigrants in the US.“The economic activities of our companies investing in the United States and the interests of our citizens must not be unduly violated during the course of US law enforcement,” a ministry spokesperson, Lee Jae-woong, said in a statement on Friday.The facility is part of what would be the biggest industrial investment in the state’s history and had been hailed as a huge boost for the economy by Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp.Here’s the day’s Trump administration news at a glance.At least 475 workers detained in major Ice raidHundreds of workers at a factory being built in Georgia to make car batteries for Hyundai and Kia electric vehicles were detained in a huge raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Thursday that stopped construction.About 475 workers were arrested, according to US immigration officials on Friday, the largest single-site enforcement operation in the history of the US Department of Homeland Security, which was created in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US in New York and Washington DC.Read the full storyTrump signs order rebranding Pentagon as ‘Department of War’Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to rebrand the Department of Defense as the “Department of War”, a callback to the department’s original name used from 1789 to 1947. The directive will make “Department of War” the secondary title while instructing the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to pursue congressional approval for a permanent change.Read the full storyEric Adams says he’s staying in New York mayoral race amid dropout talkThe New York City mayor, Eric Adams, announced on Friday that he is going to stay in the fall’s highly anticipated mayoral race, just days after reports that Donald Trump was encouraging him to drop out in order to help fellow independent candidate Andrew Cuomo gain more votes against the frontrunner, the Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani.Read the full storyUS added just 22,000 jobs in August amid Trump tariffsThe US jobs market stalled over the summer, adding just 22,000 jobs in August and continuing a slowdown in the labor market as businesses adjusted to disruptions caused by tariffs.The latest jobs report also contained more bad news. The US lost 13,000 jobs in June, according to the latest survey, the first time it went into the negative since December 2020.Read the full storyTrump sends 10 stealth fighter planes to Puerto RicoDonald Trump is sending 10 F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico to bolster US military operations against drug cartels in the Caribbean region, it was reported on Friday. If follows a deadly US missile strike on Tuesday on a boat in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration insisted was carrying 11 Venezuelan drug traffickers, and comments by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Wednesday that such attacks “will happen again”.Read the full storyUS killed North Korean civilians in botched 2019 missionUS Navy Seals shot and killed a number of North Korean civilians during a botched covert mission to plant a listening device in the nuclear-armed country during high-stakes diplomatic negotiations in 2019, the New York Times reported on Friday.Read the full storyChicago gears up as Trump troop deployment looms: ‘We aren’t helpless’Communities are on edge as the long-discussed arrival of federal law enforcement and Ice agents in Chicago is reportedly set to begin in the coming days, marking the potential start of a contentious period of federal policing in the Democratic-led midwestern city.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Ticket sales at the Kennedy Center have continued to plummet following Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington DC’s premier performing arts venue.

      A potential UN-endorsed reconstruction plan for Gaza is being discussed with the US to prevent the UN general assembly descending into a bitter row about the symbolic recognition of Palestine as a state.

      A federal judge on Friday ruled against the Trump administration from ending temporary legal protections that have granted more than 1 million people from Haiti and Venezuela the right to live and work in the United States.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 4 September 2025. More

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      Trump says US will host next year’s G20 meeting at his Doral resort in Miami – live

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      Donald Trump just announced that the US will host the 2026 meeting of the G20 at his privately owned Doral golf course and spa in Miami.The president was joined by Miami’s mayor, Francis Suarez, for the announcement in the Oval Office.Trump initially did not mention that his Doral resort was the location, but confirmed it in response to a question from a reporter. The president then quickly moved to downplay concerns that he was using his office for personal profit, claiming that “we will not make any money on it” and that the location was chosen because “everybody wants it there”.The president was asked if he intends to invite Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, to attend as an observer. He initially said that he had not yet considered that possibility, but has previously claimed that excluding Russia, over its initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, was a mistake.Minutes later, Trump was asked again and said that both Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, were welcome to attend as observers. “I’d love them to, if they want to”, the president said. “If they want to, we can certainly talk”.Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, just announced that he will not end his re-election campaign, despite reports that he was recently offered a position in the Trump administration if he would do so.Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Donald Trump just claimed that “a lot of illegal aliens, some not the best of people” were working at a factory in Georgia raided by immigration officers on Friday, resulting in nearly 500 arrests.However, a warrant for the raid on the HL-GA battery factory, which is being built to make car batteries for South Korean electric vehicles, identified just four “target persons”. The warrant was obtained and posted online by Politico.Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday authorizing the US Department of Defense to refer to itself as the “Department of War”, as part of an attempt to formalize his rebranding effort without the legally required act of Congress.According to a draft White House factsheet seen by the Guardian on Thursday, the order designates “Department of War” as a “secondary title”, as a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency.The move, to have the executive branch use a name for the department Trump called “much more appropriate”, restores a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.Referring to the creation of the defense department in 1949, the president said: “We decided to go woke and we changed the name to Department of Defense, so we’re going Department of War”.Trump also introduced the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, as “our secretary of war” and claimed that the name change “really it has to do with winning”, suggesting that the US military had somehow been hampered by the choice “to be politically correct, or wokey” and, as a result, failed to win “wars that we would’ve won easily”.The draft White House factsheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledged that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary to propose legislation that would make the change permanent.Eric Adams, the sitting mayor of New York, has just announced a hastily scheduled event to begin 30 minutes from now in which he will “make an important announcement regarding the future of his campaign”. The event is scheduled for 4.30pm ET.Adams, who is running as an independent and trails in the polls, has previously denied reports that he is in talks with the White House over taking a role in the Trump administration in exchange for ending his apparently doomed re-election campaign.At a dinner with tech industry leaders last night, Donald Trump denied that he is encouraging Adams to drop out of the race to help New York’s former governor, Andrew Cuomo, defeat Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist who is the frontrunner to be elected mayor in November. Trump then immediately said that he would like Adams to drop out for that reason.The New York Times reported on Friday that Adams met in person with Trump’s friend and diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss the possibility of being nominated as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia.Last year, federal prosecutors accused members of the Turkish government of a years-long influence campaign to cultivate and secure favors from Adams.In the federal indictment, the US attorney for New York’s southern district alleged that government officials and business leaders with ties to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, showered Adams with thousands in illegal foreign campaign donations and free or heavily discounted luxury hotel stays and flights around the world.Charges against Adams were dropped by the Trump justice department this year, over the strong objections of prosecutors who claimed that there was an explicit quid pro quo arrangement in which the mayor would cooperate with federal immigration enforcement in the city in return for corruption charges being dropped.Should Adams become the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, he would oversee diplomacy with the kingdom whose de-facto leader, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, US intelligence believes approved the 2018 murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.Donald Trump plans to announce executive orders shortly in the Oval Office, with the theme we know most about so far being an instruction to rename the Department of Defense the “Department of War”.Until then, here’s a quick recap of some of the day’s key developments:

      Trump criticized the European Union’s decision to fine Google $3.46bn over antitrust concerns and threatened a wider trade probe against the EU in response to the move.

      Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr plans to announce that use of Kenvue’s popular over-the-counter pain medication Tylenol in pregnant women is potentially linked to autism, without including evidence for the claims, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

      Georgia is about to become the eighth state to send national guard troops to Washington DC to support Trump’s federal law enforcement big foot operation there, as the US capital sues the administration over its actions.

      Most of the 475 people arrested in a massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid at a Hyundai factory construction site in southern Georgia are Korean nationals.

      The federal Ice raid is being described as the biggest single Department of Homeland Security (DHS, the parent agency of Ice) enforcement operation at one side in the department’s history. The DHS was created after 9/11.

      Treasury secretary Scott Bessent called for renewed scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, including its power to set interest rates, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to exert control over the US central bank.

      Vladimir Putin has said any western troops placed in Ukraine would be “legitimate targets” for Russian strikes, upping the stakes for Kyiv as Donald Trump’s efforts to forge a peace deal show little sign that are any closer to success.

      Trump is sending 10 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico to bolster US military operations against drug cartels in the Caribbean region. The action to send jets to be based in the US territory follows a deadly US missile strike on Tuesday on a boat that the administration insisted was carrying 11 Venezuelan drug traffickers.

      And the big economics news of the day was that the US added just 22,000 jobs in August, continuing the slowdown amid Trump’s tariff policy.
      Donald Trump has criticized the European Union’s decision to fine Google $3.46bn over antitrust concerns and threatened a wider trade probe against the EU in response to the move.“We cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity and, if it does, I will be forced to start a Section 301 proceeding to nullify the unfair penalties being charged to these Taxpaying American Companies,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform.Google’s fine for breaching the EU’s competition rules by favoring its own digital advertising services marks the fourth such antitrust penalty for the company as well as a retreat from previous threats to break up the tech giant.The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, also ordered the US company to end its “self-preferencing practices” and take steps to stop “conflicts of interest” along the advertising technology supply chain.The commission’s investigation found that Google had “abused” its dominant positions in the ad-technology ecosystem.Google said the decision was “wrong” and that it would appeal.Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr plans to announce that use of Kenvue’s popular over-the-counter pain medication Tylenol in pregnant women is potentially linked to autism, without including evidence for the claims, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.Kennedy, in a report, will also suggest a medicine derived from folate called folinic acid can be used to treat symptoms of autism in some people, the WSJ reported.Tylenol, whose active ingredient is acetaminophen, is a widely used pain reliever, including by pregnant women.The report, expected this month from the US Department of Health and Human Services, is likely to highlight low levels of folate, an important vitamin, and Tylenol taken during pregnancy, as well as other potential causes of autism, the report said.The health department and Kenvue did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.It is not the first time Kenvue or J&J have faced questions about the link between Tylenol and the condition. In 2023, a judge rejected claims the drug causes autism if mothers take it during pregnancy.The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says Tylenol is safe to use in pregnancy, though it recommends pregnant women consult their doctors before using it, as with all medicines.Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group formerly headed by Kennedy, has posted several times in recent weeks on social media site X about the potential link between Tylenol and autism.Georgia is about to become the eighth state to send national guard troops to Washington DC to support Donald Trump’s federal law enforcement big foot operation there, as the US capital sues the administration over its actions.Georgia governor Brian Kemp announced he would be sending 316 members of the state national guard to Washington later this month, in the latest indication that Trump’s law enforcement action there will drag on, the Associated Press reports.Kemp, a Republican, said he will mobilize the roughly 300 troops in mid-September to take part in Trump’s DC operation to relieve soldiers from elsewhere who deployed earlier.
      Georgia is proud to stand with the Trump administration in its mission to ensure the security and beauty of our nation’s capital,” Kemp said in a statement.
      Trump initially called up 800 members of the District of Columbia national guard to assist federal law enforcement in his unilateral action to impose federal resources on DC with the stated goal of cracking down on crime, homelessness and illegal immigration. Since then, seven other Republican-led states have sent troops – Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and West Virginia.The nationwide debate over gerrymandered redistricting has come to Kansas, as the Topeka Capital-Journal wrote on Thursday.Republicans initiated efforts, on Donald Trump’s urging, to engineer mid-decade redistricting in Texas, to gerrymander district maps and gain an edge in next year’s midterm elections.In Kansas, Democratic congresswomen Sharice Davids, who sits in the house with three Republicans to represent the state’s four seats in the lower chamber, could be in difficulty if the district map is gerrymandered by the GOP.Davids spoke out on Friday, saying: “Under pressure from Donald Trump, Kansas state politicians are pushing an unprecedented mid-decade redraw to make the already gerrymandered maps even more extreme – breaking their promises and putting their own political power ahead of Kansans.”She added: “Their goal is clear: stack the deck in their favor because they know their policies aren’t popular, including their disastrous budget that rips 79,000 Kansans off their health care just to give billionaires massive tax breaks. Voters, not politicians, should choose their representatives. This potential gerrymander is clearly political, threatens our democracy, and deepens division in our country.”Donald Trump plans to announce executive orders today in the Oval Office, with the theme we know most about so far being an instruction to rename the Department of Defense the “Department of War”.Trump was initially expected to issue first orders at 2pm ET then more at 4pm ET, but the media has since been informed that a single event at the White House is now due to take place at 4pm ET.Some context from my colleague Hugo Lowell: The US president is expected to sign an executive order authorizing the rebrand of the Defense Department, the White House said, as part of an attempt to formalize a name change without an act of Congress.The order will designate “Department of War” as a “secondary title”, an administration official said, as a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency.But the order will instruct the rest of the executive branch to use the “Department of War” name in internal and external communications, and allows the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to use “secretary of war” as his official title.Hello, US politics live blog readers, it’s another busy Friday and there is much more to come, so stay with the Guardian for all the relevant news as it happens. Here’s where things stand:

      Most of the 475 people arrested in a massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid at a Hyundai factory construction site in southern Georgia are Korean nationals.

      The federal Ice raid is being described as the biggest single Department of Homeland Security (DHS, the parent agency of Ice) enforcement operation at one side in the department’s history. The DHS was created after 9/11.

      Treasury secretary Scott Bessent called for renewed scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, including its power to set interest rates, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to exert control over the US central bank.

      Vladimir Putin has said any western troops placed in Ukraine would be “legitimate targets” for Russian strikes, upping the stakes for Kyiv as Donald Trump’s efforts to forge a peace deal show little sign that are any closer to success.

      Donald Trump is sending 10 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico to bolster US military operations against drug cartels in the Caribbean region. The action to send jets to be based in the US territory follows a deadly US missile strike on Tuesday on a boat that the administration insisted was carrying 11 Venezuelan drug traffickers.

      US jobs report. Our sister live blog run by the business team in London has closed now, so here’s our story on the big economics news of the day, that the US added just 22,000 jobs in August, continuing the slowdown amid Trump tariffs.
      Reuters notes that the arrests could exacerbate tensions between Washington and Seoul, a key ally and investor in the US, as the countries remain at odds over the details of a trade deal that includes $350bn of investments.Just last month, South Korea pledged $150bn in US investments – including $26bn from Hyundai Motor – at a summit for the nations’ leaders.The arrested workers were being held at Ice’s Folkston detention facility in Georgia, Schrank said. Most of the 475 people are Korean nationals, he said.Local Korean media said roughly 300 people detained were South Korean nationals.“It is our understanding that none of those detained is directly employed by Hyundai Motor Co. We prioritize the safety and well-being of everyone working at the site and comply with all laws and regulations wherever we operate,” a Hyundai spokesperson said in a statement provided to Reuters.Homeland security officials said the workers it arrested at the Hyundai facility in Georgia were barred from working in the US after crossing the border illegally or overstaying visas.The investigation took place over several months, Steven Schrank, special agent in charge of investigations for Georgia, said during a press briefing.“This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses,” he said in comments reported by Reuters.Schrank said there was a network of subcontractors on the site.A spokesperson at Hyundai’s battery joint venture partner, South Korean battery maker LG Energy Solutions, said in a statement it was cooperating and had paused construction work.The facility, a joint venture between LGES and Hyundai Motor, was due to start operations at the end of this year, according to LGES.With some 475 workers arrested, according to US immigration officials, the Ice raid at the Georgia Hyundai facility is the largest single-site enforcement operation in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, Reuters notes.Treasury secretary Scott Bessent earlier called for renewed scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, including its power to set interest rates, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to exert control over the US central bank, whose insulation from short-term political pressures is widely seen as key to its effectiveness.“There must also be an honest, independent, nonpartisan review of the entire institution, including monetary policy, regulation, communications, staffing and research,” Bessent wrote in the Wall Street Journal.He called for the Fed to leave bank supervision to other governmental authorities and to “scale back the distortions it causes in the economy”, including by bond purchases made outside of true crisis conditions.A US homeland security department spokesperson had earlier said that US immigration authorities executed a judicial search warrant at the Hyundai facility in Georgia on Thursday over unlawful employment practices and other alleged federal crimes.The spokesperson said in a statement provided to Reuters that Ice’s investigative arm executed the warrant as part of acriminal investigation.“This operation underscores our commitment to protecting jobs for Georgians, ensuring a level playing field for businesses that comply with the law, safeguarding the integrity of our economy, and protecting workers from exploitation,” the spokesperson said.Following on from my last post, the White House said today that the Trump administration will enforce laws that require foreign workers have proper authorization to be in the United States, after immigration authorities raided a Hyundai facility in Georgia.“Any foreign workers brought in for specific projects must enter the United States legally and with proper work authorizations,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, quoted by Reuters.“President Trump will continue delivering on his promise to make the United States the best place in the world to do business, while also enforcing federal immigration laws.” More

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      Judge blocks ending of legal protections for 1m Venezuelans and Haitians in US

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      A federal judge on Friday ruled against the Trump administration from ending temporary legal protections that have granted more than 1 million people from Haiti and Venezuela the right to live and work in the United States.The ruling by US district judge Edward Chen of San Francisco for the plaintiffs means that 600,000 Venezuelans whose temporary protections expired in April or whose protections were about to expire on 10 September have status to stay and work in the United States.Chen said the actions of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Kristi Noem, in terminating and vacating three extensions granted by the previous administration exceeded her statutory authority and were arbitrary and capricious.The DHS did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.Friday’s ruling came after an appeals court blocked Donald Trump’s plans to end protections for 600,000 people from Venezuela who have permission to live and work in the US, saying that plaintiffs were likely to win their claim that the Trump administration’s actions were unlawful.That appellate court ruling on 29 August came after Chen in March ruled that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail on their claim that the administration had overstepped its authority in terminating the protections.Temporary protected status (TPS) is a designation that can be granted by the homeland security secretary to people in the US if conditions in their homelands are deemed unsafe for return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangerous conditions.Designations are granted for terms of six, 12 or 18 months, and extensions can be granted as long as conditions remain dire. The status prevents holders from being deported and allows them to work.Soon after taking office, Noem reversed three extensions granted by the previous administration to immigrants from Venezuela and Haiti, prompting the lawsuit. Noem said that conditions in both Haiti and Venezuela had improved and that it was not in the national interest to allow migrants from the countries to stay on for what is a temporary program.Millions of Venezuelans have fled political unrest, mass unemployment and hunger. Venezuela is mired in a prolonged crisis brought on by years of hyperinflation, political corruption, economic mismanagement and an ineffectual government.Haiti was first designated for TPS in 2010 after a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of people, and left more than 1 million homeless. Haitians face widespread hunger and gang violence. More

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      Trump signs executive order rebranding Pentagon as Department of War

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      Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, a callback to the department’s original name used from 1789 to 1947.The directive will make Department of War the secondary title, and is a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency, an administration official said.“We won the first world war, we won the second world war, we won everything before that and in between,” Trump said at the signing. “And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense.”The administration has already begun implementing the symbolic changes: visitors to the Pentagon’s defense.gov website are now automatically redirected to war.gov.The move comes days after a deadly US navy airstrike killed 11 people on a small boat in international waters, which the military said involved a drug vessel operated by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Some legal experts questioned whether the strike was lawful under international law.The combination of aggressive military action and symbolic rebranding goes in contrast with Trump’s repeated claims to be “the anti-war president” who campaigned on promises to end conflicts and avoid new wars. Trump said during the signing of the order that his focus on strength and trade has improved America’s position in the world..Trump has argued the original name better reflects military victories and honestly represents what the department does. The rebrand would reverse the 1947 name change made as part of postwar reforms that emphasized defense over warfare.Seven US warships and one nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine were reported to be heading for the Caribbean following Monday’s strike, another layer in the measures Trump has taken to combat what he claims is the threat from Tren de Aragua.Congressional approval would ultimately be required for any permanent name change, though the House member Greg Steube from Florida and the senator Mike Lee from Utah, both Republicans, introduced legislation to make the switch official.“We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct,” the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, said in the Oval Office. “We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this war department, Mr President, just like America is back.” More

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      RFK Jr’s anti-science agenda will be catastrophic for the United States | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Things seem to be going well at the CDC, the federal agency charged with protecting US public health. By “well” I mean terrible, thanks to the leadership of the health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. Not only is the agency in complete disarray under his leadership, but the secretary’s fringe agenda is now also putting the lives of everyone in the country at risk.Let me recount a few of Kennedy’s stellar accomplishments. He is, after all, a man labeled “a crown jewel of this administration” by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP), a panel that has long developed scientifically based recommendations on the use of vaccines. Kennedy dropped them like a hot beaker and replaced them with new members, several of whom share his anti-vaccine views and half-baked skepticism of the most common mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.Covid is still with us, unfortunately, and the vaccines are helping us survive a dangerous reality. In fact, 14,660 people have died of Covid as an underlying or contributing cause so far this year alone. Yet, at his Senate hearing on Thursday, Kennedy was asked by Senator Jeff Merkley if he accepted the statistic that a million Americans had died of Covid since the outbreak began. “I don’t know how many died,” Kennedy responded. Meanwhile, the CDC’s own website, an agency he’s responsible for, tabulates the number of deaths as 1,234,371. At the same hearing, Kennedy also said he agreed with the statement made by one of his appointees to ACIP that “mRNA vaccines cause serious harm, including death, especially among young people”. Never mind that numerous studies have repeatedly shown the vaccines to be safe and effective.That’s not all. Getting that Covid booster shot will probably become significantly harder in the future. In late August, the Food and Drug Administration, also overseen by Kennedy, approved some updated Covid vaccines, but at the same time severely restricted who would be authorized to receive boosters. Last year, anyone over the age of six months was eligible. But this year, you must be over 65 years of age or have an underlying health condition that increases the risk of severe Covid-19 infection.We should have seen something like this coming. In May, Kennedy took the unprecedented unilateral move to remove Covid-19 booster shots from its recommended immunization schedule for pregnant women and healthy children. “Our healthcare system is now solidly anti-children and anti-science,” Fatima Khan, co-founder of the Protect Their Future group, which advocates for vaccine access for children, told CNN.Booster shots will still be available, Kennedy says. But what he’s not saying is that they will probably be a lot harder to find and afford. Private insurance companies generally base their decisions on covering the costs of vaccines by following government recommendations, and many states limit which vaccines pharmacists can administer based on those same recommendations. (California, Oregon and Washington recently announced an alliance to safeguard vaccine access.)The long and the short of it is that Kennedy is behind “a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public-health system and vaccine protections”. This is what Susan Monarez wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Monarez served as the director of the CDC for a whole 29 days before she was ousted from her position. (Jim O’Neil, Monarez’s replacement, is unsurprisingly a Trump loyalist with no medical or scientific background.) The ACIP is scheduled to meet later this month, and will discuss among other topics the Covid-19 vaccines. Monarez wrote that in August she was told to “preapprove the recommendations” to be made by ACIP. She refused. In another statement made through her lawyers, she said she would not “rubberstamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts”.Kennedy, of course, has done all those things. He fired 2,400 workers (about 18% of the CDC workforce), later rehiring about 700 people. He has “severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more”, according to nine previous directors of the CDC who sounded the alarm about Kennedy’s leadership in the New York Times. He downplayed the use of highly effective vaccines during the largest single measles epidemic in 25 years in this country while cheering on the use of home remedies such as cod liver oil or vitamins.It’s all so ideological and irresponsible, leading predictably to horrible consequences. There have been three confirmed deaths from the measles outbreak, but they are not the only victims. Our collective trust in the government is perhaps the main casualty. After Monarez was fired, four senior officials of the CDC resigned in protest at the politicization of the agency. More than 1,000 past and present workers of the Department of Health and Human Services signed a letter demanding his resignation and stating that “Secretary Kennedy’s actions are compromising the health of this nation”. We’re now living through a battle between sane scientists and zealous anti-vaxxers, and nobody knows who will win.What do anti-vaxxers and the rightwing get out of such politicization of public health? They live in the same country as the rest of us, after all. Do they feel somehow healthier knowing that Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, aims to end childhood vaccination against preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis? I certainly don’t. Routine childhood vaccinations prevented about 508m cases of illness in the US between 1994 and 2023. And he’s getting rid of them? Madness.Ladapo claims that “what you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God”. OK. Fine. But none of us lives entirely alone, and your health affects my health, and vice versa. Living together means taking care of ourselves but also each other for our individual and collective wellbeing. It’s not rocket science. But it must be based on science.The right wing sees it otherwise. To them, the government response to Covid in particular and public health in general is leading us straight to “a regime of suppression, censorship, and coercion reminiscent of the power systems and governance that were previously condemned”. The result? “Human rights and individual freedom, as under previous fascist regimes, will lose,” according to David Bell of the Brownstone Institute, a thinktank established to oppose Covid-19 restrictions.But this seems a lot more like projection than any semblance to reality. Recent scholarship tends to point in the opposite direction, showing how social instability from the world’s last major pandemic before Covid, the 1918 global influenza pandemic, helped pave the way for the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the Fascist party in Italy. One study found that “Mussolini’s newspaper tended to blame ‘others’ for the pandemic … and portrayed themselves as the voice of the common people against an out-of-touch ‘elite.’” Sounds familiar.Kennedy’s anti-science anti-vax agenda could have catastrophic health outcomes across the nation, helping fuel the rise of an even more extreme rightwing politics in the future. Could that result be what this government is even counting on? The idea sounds too far-fetched to be true, but I would also like to be alive when I’m proven wrong.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Why Trump is targeting Boston and its Democratic mayor as part of his ‘immigration enforcement blitz’

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      Tensions between Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston, and the Trump administration have been escalating in recent months over the administration’s aggressive immigration policies, with reports now signaling the possibility of a federal immigration enforcement surge in the city.The friction came to a head last week when the Trump administration reportedly began preparing an “immigration enforcement blitz” for Boston in the coming weeks, according to Politico.The report, which cited unnamed current and former administration officials, prompted a swift rebuke from Wu, who has in recent months become a vocal defender of sanctuary laws and immigrant protections.“Unlike the Trump administration, Boston follows the law – city, state and federal,” Wu said in a statement. “We are the safest major city in the country because all of our community members know that they are part of how we keep the entire community safe. Stop attacking cities to hide your administration’s failures.”This standoff has been steadily building since March when Wu testified before Congress alongside three other Democratic mayors to defend their cities’ immigration policies – specifically so-called sanctuary city laws that limit state and local law enforcement cooperation with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).Supporters of the laws, including local leaders and police chiefs in jurisdictions that have them, argue that these measures can help build trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement. Some studies have found that crime rates tend to be lower in sanctuary counties compared with those without such protections.Critics of these policies claim that sanctuary laws undermine federal law enforcement’s ability to arrest and deport individuals with criminal records.So-called “sanctuary cities” have become a central target of this Trump administration, as it pushes for mass deportations as part of its crackdown on immigration. In June, Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, sent letters to 32 US mayors, including Wu, demanding they end their sanctuary policies or face cuts to federal funding and possible legal consequences.Wu then issued a staunch defense of Boston’s policies in a letter to Bondi and in a subsequent press conference.“The City of Boston is the safest major city in America,” she wrote. “Our progress is the result of decades of community policing and partnership between local law enforcement and community leaders, who share a commitment to making Boston a safe and welcoming home for everyone.”The progress, Wu said, was in part a result of the city’s local laws, including the Boston Trust Act, which prohibits local police from engaging with federal immigration enforcement unless there is a criminal warrant and is “fully consistent with federal law”.“On behalf of the people of Boston, and in solidarity with the cities and communities targeted by this federal administration for our refusal to bow down to unconstitutional threats and unlawful coercion, we affirm our support for each other and for our democracy,” she wrote.After Wu’s remarks, the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, said that the agency intended to “flood the zone, especially in sanctuary jurisdictions”.“Now you’re going to see more Ice agents come to Boston to make sure that we take these public threats out that she wants to let go back in the communities,” he said, vowing to make “America safe”.Patricia Hyde, Boston’s acting Ice field office director, echoed Lyons’s sentiment, warning that Ice was “not backing down” and that “the men and women with Ice, unlike Mayor Wu”, took an oath that they swore to uphold “to protect the cities and communities where we work and where we live, and that’s what we’re gonna do, despite the obstacles”.Wu fired back on social media and said she took an oath to uphold the US constitution, noting that she was sworn in with her hand on a 1782 Aitken Bible “also known as the Bible of the Revolution”.As the threat of federal actions looms, Wu said last week that her administration was actively preparing for the possibility of a federal national guard deployment. Such a move would mirror recent actions by the Trump administration in both Washington DC and Los Angeles.The administration sent national guard troops to Washington DC last month under the pretext of combating a supposed surge in violent crime – a claim that stands in contrast to the city’s current crime data. Earlier this summer, the administration also sent thousands of national guard troops to Los Angeles during protests against the administration’s immigration crackdown, a move a federal judge recently ruled as unlawful.“We are following what’s happening in other cities around the country very closely,” Wu told GBH’s Boston Public Radio last week. “Unfortunately, we have seen what it would look like if that should come to pass, and that this federal administration is willing to go beyond the bounds of constitutional authority and federal law.”Wu also said her administration was reviewing relevant legal precedents and working “very closely” with community members “to ensure people know what’s happening and that this is not something that is needed or wanted or legally sound”.She added that “in this moment, however we got here, every mayor of every major city is having to take preparations for the national guard coming in against their will”.Wu’s comments come as leaders in other Democratic-led cities around the country are also bracing for the possibility of national guard deployments or Ice surges in their communities.The Trump administration announced plans this week to ramp up immigration crackdowns and deploy federal agents to Chicago, sparking strong backlash from local leaders.On Thursday, JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, said he had been informed that expanded Ice operations would begin in and around Chicago this weekend, according to ABC News Chicago.Pritzker said earlier this week that he was “deeply concerned“ that Ice would target Mexican Independence Day celebrations on Saturday. So far, one independence day parade in North Chicago has been postponed. More