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      Trump administration’s budget cuts endanger Meals on Wheels: ‘Life and death implications’

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      The Trump administration’s slashes to the Department of Health and Human Services is threatening Meals on Wheels, the popular program dedicated to combatting senior hunger and isolation. Despite decades of bipartisan support, Meals on Wheels now faces attacks from Republicans whose budget blueprint paves the way for deep cuts to nutrition and other social safety-net programs as a way to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.It’s a move anti-hunger advocates and policy experts warn could have disastrous ramifications for the millions of older Americans who rely on the program to eat each day.“It’s not hyperbolic to say that we’re going to be leaving people hungry and that this literally has life and death implications,” said Nicole Jorwic, the chief of advocacy and campaigns at Caring Across Generations, a non-profit that advocates for ageing Americans, disabled people and their caregivers. “This is not just about a nice-to-have program. These programs are necessities in the lives of seniors all over this country.”While it is still unknown exactly what will be slashed, the blueprint sets the stage for the potential elimination of the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG), a key source of funding for local Meals on Wheels programs in 37 states, and serious cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) and Medicaid, which would increase food insecurity and hardship and steeply increase demand for Meals on Wheels services. The entire staff who oversaw SSBG have already been fired, according to reports.If Congress takes away SSBG funding and weakens other programs, seniors who rely on in-home deliveries or meals in community and senior centers to survive would receive less help as Meals on Wheels community providers would be forced to reduce services, add people to waitlists or turn seniors facing hunger away altogether. Some program operators who are already making tough choices about who to serve due to strained budgets and rising need have said it feels as though they are “playing God”.“We’re talking about lives here so it’s worrisome to me,” said Ellie Hollander, the president and CEO of Meals on Wheels America. “Some of our programs are already operating on razor-thin budgets and are pulling from their reserves. [If funding goes away], it could result in some programs having to close their doors.”In the US one in four Americans is over the age of 60 and nearly 13 million seniors are threatened by or experience hunger. Meals on Wheels America, a network of 5,000 community-based programs that feeds more than 2 million older Americans each year, has been a successful public-private partnership for more than 50 years. The Urban Institute estimates that the number of seniors in the US will more than double over the next 40 years.The Older Americans Act (OAA) nutrition program, which supports the health and wellbeing of seniors through nutrition services, is the network’s primary source of federal funding, covering 37% of what it takes to serve more than 250m meals each year. The exact mix of local, state, federal and private funding of Meals on Wheels’ thousands of on-the-ground community programs varies from provider to provider.Under the orders of the Elon Musk-led unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and the health and human services (HHS) secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, 20,000 people at HHS have lost their jobs in recent weeks, including at least 40% of the staff at the Administration for Community Living, which coordinates federal policy on ageing and disability. Since many of those staffers helped fulfill critical functions to serving older Americans through the OAA, some Meals on Wheels programs are worried about funding disbursements, reporting data and the loss of institutional knowledge and expertise.HHS has said it will reorganize the ACL into other HHS agencies, although how that would happen is unclear. The co-chairs of the Disability and Aging Collaborative, composed of 62 member organizations that focus in part on ageing and disability, said in a recent statement: “This disruptive change threatens to increase rates of institutionalization, homelessness and long-lasting economic hardships.”Since experiencing multiple strokes that left her cognitively impaired and at risk for falls, Dierdre Mayes has relied on Meals on Wheels Yolo County to deliver meals that are the 64-year-old’s primary source of nutrition. “I’m really thriving off of the meals I get,” said Mayes, a Woodland, California, resident who also receives $20 a month in food stamps, which she uses to purchase cases of water. “The best part about it is I don’t have to go anywhere to get them.” For Mayes and other homebound older Americans, the program is a lifeline.The uncertainty around Meals on Wheels’ future is causing stress for seniors who are worried about how federal cuts, layoffs and tariffs will impact their daily deliveries. The non-profit FeedMore WNY, which serves homebound older adults in New York’s Erie and Niagara counties, said they’ve been hearing from fearful older clients as word of other recent cuts circulated in the news.Catherine Shick, the public relations manager for FeedMore WNY, said they served 4,775 unique Meals on Wheels clients last year and that demand for their feeding programs increased by 16% from 2023 to 2024, a trend they expect to continue. “Any cut to any funding has a direct impact on the individuals who rely on us for food assistance and any cuts are coming at a time when we know that food insecurity is on the rise,” she said. “We need the continued support of all levels of government, as well as the community, to be able to fulfill our mission.”In addition to delivering healthy, nutritious food, Meals on Wheels drivers, who are primarily volunteers, provide a host of other valuable services: they can look for signs of cognitive or other health changes. They can also address safety hazards in the home or provide pet support services, as well as offer crucial social connections since drivers are often the only person a senior may see in a given day or week.Deliveries have been shown to help keep seniors healthy and in their own homes and communities and out of costly institutional settings. Republicans in the House and Senate have said their goal is to reduce federal spending, but experts say cutting programs that help fund organizations such as Meals on Wheels would instead increase federal spending for healthcare and long-term care expenses for older Americans.“If people can’t stay in their own homes, they’re going to be ‘high flyers’ in hospitals and admitted prematurely into nursing homes,” said Hollander, “all of which cost taxpayers billions of dollars annually versus providing Meals on Wheels for one year to a senior for the same cost of being in the hospital for one day or 10 days in a nursing home.”Experts agree that even before the cuts, Meals on Wheels has been underfunded. Advocates and researchers say OAA hasn’t kept up with the rapid growth of the senior population, rising food costs or inflation. One in three local programs already have waiting lists with many programs already feeling stretched to their limits. For more than 60% of Meals on Wheels providers across the country, federal funding represents half or more of their total revenue, underscoring the serious damage that could be done if cuts or policy changes are made in any capacity.“It feels like a continuous slew of attacks on the programs that seniors rely on to be safe, independent and healthy in their own homes,” said Jorwic of Caring Across Generations. “Everything from cuts to Meals on Wheels to cuts to Medicaid, all these things that are being proposed and actively worked on being implemented, are a real threat to the security of aging Americans.” More

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      Hakeem Jeffries and Cory Booker livestream sit-in against GOP funding plan

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      House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and New Jersey senator Cory Booker were holding a sit-in protest and discussion on Sunday on the steps of the US Capitol in opposition to Republicans’ proposed budget plan.Billed as an “Urgent Conversation with the American People”, the livestreamed discussion comes before Congress’s return to session on Monday, where Democrats hope to stall Republicans’ economic legislative agenda. Throughout the day, they were joined by other Democratic lawmakers, including the senator Raphael Warnock, who spoke as the sit-in passed the 10-hour mark.The proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year, the New York Times reported on Friday, includes cuts to programs that support childcare, health research, education, housing assistance, community development and the elderly.“Republican leaders have made clear their intention to use the coming weeks to advance a reckless budget scheme to President Trump’s desk that seeks to gut Medicaid, food assistance and basic needs programs that help people, all to give tax breaks to billionaires,” Booker and Jeffries aid in a statement.“Given what’s at stake, these could be some of the most consequential weeks for seniors, kids and families in generations,” they added.Booker wrote separately on X: “This is a moral moment in America. Sitting on the Capitol steps with Leader Hakeem Jeffries this morning to discuss what’s at stake with Trump’s budget and affirm the need for action to protect Medicaid, food assistance, and other safety net programs.”Booker and Jeffries started their sit-in around 6am and were joined by lawmakers including Democratic senators Chris Coons and Angela Alsobrooks and representatives Gil Cisneros and Gabe Amo, among others.Reverend Dr William J Barber II and the National Education Association president, Becky Pringle, also joined. Pringle said the Trump administration was perpetuating “the greatest assault on public education that we’ve ever seen in this country”.Democrats and independents have added a new degree of physicality to their opposition to the Trump agenda. Earlier this month, Booker set a new record for the chamber’s longest speech when he held the floor, without a bathroom break, for more than 25 hours.Booker said he was doing so with the “intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States senate for as long as I am physically able” in order to protest the actions of Trump and his administration.The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, an independent, and the New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been on a “Fighting Oligarchy” nationwide tour of the US to protest the “oligarchs and corporate interests that have so much power and influence in this country”.On Sunday, Sanders, who has accused Democrats of significantly ignoring working-class priorities, said that the party does not have “a vision for the future”.“You have Democrats appropriately, and I’m working with them, talking about Trump’s movement toward authoritarianism, vigorously opposing the so-called reconciliation bill to give over a trillion dollars in tax breaks for the 1% and make massive cuts to Medicaid, nutrition and housing, opposing what Musk is doing to dismember the Social Security Administration and the Veterans Administration, making it hard for our veterans to get decent healthcare or benefits on time,” Sanders told NBC’s Meet the Press.Throughout Sunday’s livestreamed sit-in, groups of curious passersby also found themselves sitting on the Capitol steps listening and weighing in on the discussion. More

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      Republican unity to be tested in talks over Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’

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      Donald Trump has made a simple request of Congress’s Republican leaders: deliver “one big, beautiful bill” that will turn his campaign promises into reality. By all indications, there will be little beautiful about the negotiations to come when Congress returns to session on Monday.The bill envisioned by the president will extend tax cuts enacted during his first term, fund more border defenses and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and potentially include the president’s vow to end the taxation of tips, overtime and social security payments. To pay for it, the GOP is eyeing dramatic reductions in government spending, and has targeted social safety net programs relied on by tens of millions of Americans.But even with the cuts, experts say this could be one of the steepest increases to the federal deficit in recent US history.That prospect has tested the resolve of Congress’s Republican majorities, which are relatively small – three seats in the Senate and House of Representatives each. While many lawmakers insist that government spending must be reined in to manage the United State’s budget deficit at a time of high borrowing costs, small groups of lawmakers have already registered their opposition to dismantling programs they say help their constituents.Earlier this month Republicans muscled through the budget framework for the bill, an important step that outlines how much they will spend and cut, and allows them to circumvent Democratic opposition in the Senate. But though party leaders described it as a sign of unity, experts say the plan instead illustrated just how divided the GOP is. The resolution gives the House and Senate separate targets for savings and expenditures – differences that would usually be resolved before passage.“The budget resolution that they adopted is unique, I would say, somewhat unprecedented,” said Bill Hoagland, a former top budget adviser to Republican senators who is now a senior vice-president at the Bipartisan Policy Center thinktank.“What they’ve done here is keep the ball moving by kicking the can further down the road and leaving unsettled a number of differences, particularly on the spending side.”Just how riven the party is will become clear in the weeks to come, after Congress returns and Republicans set to work crafting the bill amid an economy made newly precarious by Trump’s on-again, off-again approach to tariff policy. Party leaders have cast the bill as a way to make good on Trump’s promise of a “golden age” in American, fueled by smaller, deregulated government.“Our aim is to deliver on our promises in this big, beautiful bill regarding things like border security, restoring peace through strength, and American energy dominance and regulatory reform, to get the economy really humming again,” House speaker Mike Johnson said earlier this month.The speaker and his Senate counterpart, majority leader John Thune, say they intend for the bill to reduce government spending by at least $1.5tn, and make permanent the tax cuts that analyses found mostly benefited the rich after their enactment in 2017.But the budget framework’s instructions to the Senate target a mere $4bn in spending cuts, while assuming the tax cuts are “current policy” and therefore cost nothing, to the chagrin of many economists. The House plan acknowledges that extending the tax cuts will cost trillions of dollars, and proposes dramatic funding cuts elsewhere.Its instructions indicate that Medicaid, which provides health insurance for poor and disabled Americans, could lose around $800b in funding, which would be its largest cut in history. Republicans have additionally signaled a willingness to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as Snap, while the climate-change fighting Inflation Reduction Act passed under Joe Biden could be slashed.Both chambers also intend to couple the bill with an increase in the US government’s debt limit. The congressional budget office estimates the limit will be hit in August or September, after which the government will be unable to borrow to pay its obligations, potentially sparking a financial crisis.The resulting bill could cost as much as $5.8tn for the next 10 years, a huge amount that Maya MacGuineas, the president of the spending wary Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, described as “the largest deficit increase in history” and “an absolute disgrace”.So big is the spending plan that Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Republican George W Bush, warned that extending the tax cuts alone would likely crowd out the other policies Trump campaigned on, such as ending the taxation on tips and other income.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a very unambitious piece of tax legislation, from an economic policy point of view. It doesn’t really do much and, and I don’t think there’s any real will collectively to do big spending cuts, and they’ve taken off limits the places where that you really do need to reform,” Holtz-Eakin said, referring to social security and Medicare. Both programs are big drivers of the budget deficit, but Trump and the Republicans say they oppose cutting them.Finding an agreement on the bill is expected to be a major lift for Republican leaders in Congress, particularly since the tiny House majority could empower small groups of lawmakers to hold up the bill.Already, a dozen Republicans have publicly said they will not support legislation that reduces Medicaid coverage “for vulnerable populations” and 21 others have argued against repealing clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. Members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, meanwhile, are expected to stand against any bill that does not sufficiently reduce spending.“When you want to cut $1.5tn, you’re going to get to a lot of programs that people rely on. And when that happens, they’re going to start to hear about it,” Joe Morelle, the No 2 Democrat on the spending-focused House appropriations committee, told the Guardian.He predicted that no Democrats would vote for the forthcoming bill, meaning that Johnson and Thune will be left to get it through their chambers with their party’s votes alone.Trump has attempted to corral Congress by threatening to support challengers to Republicans who don’t vote his way. But with the GOP taking aim at safety net programs popular in their own districts, Morelle said many lawmakers will have to weigh facing the president’s wrath against losing re-election.“Who do they fear more? The retribution of an angry president, or do they fear the retribution of voters who are going to say, sorry, without healthcare, I’m not voting for you?” Morelle said. More

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      The Republican anti-tax coalition is beginning to disintegrate | David Sirota, Arjun Singh, Ariella Markowitz and Natalie Bettendorf

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      “I am a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice – I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal,” the rightwing impresario Bari Weiss told a Federalist Society gathering in 2023. “And that’s OK. Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”The assembled conservatives guffawed at hearing the quiet part out loud: in this case, the admission that tax cuts for the rich have been the glue holding the US conservative movement together.And yet, less than two years after Weiss’s speech, the epoxy seems to be less sticky.In recent weeks, polls have shown Republican voters becoming far more skeptical of across-the-board tax reduction proposals. Reflecting that shift, GOP lawmakers are now trial-ballooning a proposal to increase some taxes on the wealthy. Some Maga voices are attempting to articulate a Republican-leaning, tax-cut version of Democrats’ traditional redistributionist rhetoric, arguing that higher taxes on millionaires should finance bigger tax cuts for the working class.All of this has the Washington swamp’s old-guard Republicans in a panic; one longtime anti-tax leader insisted that “there are traitors inside the Trump White House,” and another declared: “This is a potential crisis in the party – it sounds like Bernie Sanders economics.”So what happened? Why is the anti-tax argument losing its unifying power among Republicans?As the Lever’s new investigative audio series Tax Revolt details, the answer may lie in that movement’s key revelation a half-century ago.The Santa Claus theory of tax cutsIn the mid-1970s, the Republican party was adrift, demoralized and divided amid both the post-Watergate backlash and the Republican president Gerald Ford’s attempt to raise taxes in pursuit of halting inflation and plugging federal budget holes. A young journalist named Jude Wanniski had an epiphany when at a lunch meeting, he watched the economist Arthur Laffer draw a curve on a napkin to argue to the Ford staffers Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld that cutting taxes could raise companies’ revenues.Two years later, Wanniski penned a grand unifying “Santa Claus Theory”, arguing that Republicans had “continued to play Scrooge, carping against increased spending without ever offering the obvious alternative”: tax reduction.He concluded: “Republicans, traditionally the party of income growth, should be the Santa Claus of tax reduction,” offering it as a supposed gift to Americans – and understand that “the first rule of successful politics is Never Shoot Santa Claus.”It was a revelation for a new generation of conservatives seeking to create a sunnier, more optimistic image for the GOP in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s cranky campaign and Richard Nixon’s downfall. Younger, more telegenic Republican leaders such as Representative Jack Kemp passed the essay around to colleagues, urging them to reimagine tax cuts not solely as a means to demonize government, but also as a way to court the working class with promises of life-bettering benefits.The dual message of so-called “supply-side economics” soon found its Santa Claus in the anti-tax governor turned anti-tax president Ronald Reagan.“As government’s hunger for ever more revenues expanded, families saw taxes cut deeper and deeper into their paychecks,” Reagan said before signing federal legislation to cut the top marginal tax rate. “This tax bill is less a reform than a revolution. Millions of working poor will be dropped from the tax rolls altogether, and families will get a long-overdue break with lower rates.”High-income tax cuts became the Republican party’s economic policy priority – and depicting such gifts to the wealthy as a boon to the working class became the GOP’s political strategy. Indeed, Reagan, George W Bush and Donald Trump each championed tax cut legislation that delivered disproportionate benefits to the rich, and fueled an explosion of economic inequality – all while presenting their agenda as fight-for-the-little-guy populism.“I promised we would pass a massive tax cut for the everyday, working American families who are the backbone and the heartbeat of our country,” Trump said on the eve of signing his $1.9tn tax cut bill in 2017. “We’re just days away [from] keeping that promise and delivering a truly amazing victory for American families. We want to give you, the American people, a giant tax cut for Christmas.”This sales pitch became ubiquitous, and most political prognosticators assumed it would always be effective. But survey data suggests that most Americans have come to realize that while Tax Cut Santa Claus has been stashing big gifts under billionaires’ Christmas trees, he’s been leaving everyone else’s stockings empty.Whereas more than half of Americans approved of Reagan’s first major high-income tax cut proposal, only about a third of Americans approved of Bush’s similar tax proposal at the same time in his presidency. By the time Trump assumed office for his first term, less than a third of Americans supported his high-income tax cut initiative, knowing that such policies have failed to benefit them personally and failed to boost the macroeconomy.‘The times are totally different’Fast forward to Trump’s second term. In previous eras, a new Republican president delivering more tax cuts for the wealthy would be a foregone conclusion under Wanniski’s Santa Claus theory. But that political hypothesis is now buckling under the weight of Trump’s new $4.5tn proposal to extend his 2017 tax cuts.In its current form, the White House’s initiative would deliver more than half its benefits to the richest 10% of the country. Coupled with spending cuts and tariffs, Trump’s agenda would deliver a big income boost to the top 1%, while reducing the income of the bottom 80%, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.As Trump’s legislative agenda hits Congress, opposition to more high-income tax cuts is strong not just among Democrats and independents, but also among Republicans. Morning Consult reports that 70% of GOP voters believe “the wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes” – a whopping eight-point jump from six years ago. Moreover, “roughly 7 in 10 voters, including 2 in 3 Republicans, support proposals to raise taxes on earners making more than $400,000.”Republican leaders are responding with the previously unthinkable: proposals to raise some taxes on the rich. Indeed, Trump reportedly floated the idea and some GOP lawmakers are considering creating a new top tax bracket.This has touched off an intraparty civil war. On one side are those who came of age in the Reagan and George W Bush epochs – Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, the former vice-president Mike Pence, Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, the hedge-funder-turned-GOP senator Dave McCormick, and the Club for Growth’s Stephen Moore. This old guard believes Republicans can still get away with depicting billionaire giveaways as populism, and vilifying tax hikes on the rich.“It’s vicious and full of envy. It’s a dumb idea. It’s bad for the economy,” said Norquist, who spent the last quarter-century pressing Republicans to sign pledges to oppose all tax increases. “What happened when George Herbert Walker Bush raised the top rate? Let’s see, he lost the next election. We lost House and Senate seats and taxes went up and we had a recession.”On the other side are newfangled Maga voices – the former Mitt Romney staffer Oren Cass, Vice-President JD Vance, the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, and reportedly Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought. They sense political peril in Republicans presenting themselves as populists while their party enriches billionaires and corporations.“We have to increase taxes on the wealthy,” Bannon said in December. This month he added that conservatives must prove “Republicans are not the country club Republicans”, which is “why it’s so important to not extend the tax cuts for the wealthy”.Of the old anti-tax crowd, Bannon added: “They’re arrogant and they refuse to look at the reality of the situation we’re in … The times are totally different.”‘Didn’t we already give them a break at the top?’Of course, we’ve been at these junctures before – moments when Republicans seemed to sense political vulnerability on taxes.In 1985, Reagan tried to deflect Democrats’ criticism of his tax policy by insisting: “There is one group of losers in our tax plan – those individuals and corporations who are not paying their fair share or, for that matter, any share. These abuses cannot be tolerated.”Similarly, George W Bush momentarily pushed back against conservative aides pressing him to champion yet another tax cut for the rich. “Didn’t we already give them a break at the top?” he reportedly asked.But the powerful anti-tax movement of those eras convinced both Republican presidents to plow forward. Reagan followed up his first tax cut by further reducing the top tax rate, and Bush’s sequel to his first tax cut was slashing taxes on corporate dividends.Trump could end up doing much the same. After all, ramming more tax cuts for the rich through Congress is the surest way for Trump to enrich himself, his family and the entire front row of his inauguration.But this time around, the long-term politics of taxes are in flux. Running the same tax play would show a Republican president siding with oligarchs against the preferences of his own party’s rank and file that no longer buys the Santa Claus theory.That’s a new and unpredictable dynamic – one that may finally begin weakening the anti-tax movement’s grip on power in the years ahead.

      David Sirota is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Lever, an investigative news outlet. Arjun Singh, Ariella Markowitz and Natalie Bettendorf are producers of the outlet’s weekly podcast Lever Time, which is releasing a new miniseries Tax Revolt, on the 50-year history of the anti-tax movement now culminating in the Trump tax cuts. More

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      ‘National disgrace’: US lawmakers decry student detentions on visit to Ice jails

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      Congressional lawmakers denounced the treatment of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, the students being detained by US immigration authorities for their pro-Palestinian activism, as a “national disgrace” during a visit to the two facilities in Louisiana where each are being held.“We stand firm with them in support of free speech,” the Louisiana congressman Troy Carter, who led the delegation, said during a press conference after the visits on Tuesday. “They are frightened, they’re concerned, they want to go home.”Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student, and Khalil, a graduate of Columbia, have been detained for more than a month since US immigration authorities took them into custody. Neither have been accused of criminal conduct and are being held in violation of their constitutional rights, members of the delegation said.The delegation included representatives Carter, Bennie Thompson, Ayanna Pressley, Jim McGovern, Senator Ed Markey, and Alanah Odoms, the executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana. They visited the South Louisiana Ice processing center in Basile, where Öztürk is being held, and traveled to the Central Louisiana Ice processing center in Jena to see Khalil.They met with Öztürk and Khalil and others in Ice custody to conduct “real-time oversight” of a “rogue and lawless” administration, Pressley said.Their detention comes as the Trump administration has staged an extraordinary crackdown on immigrants, illegally removing people from the country and seeking to detain and deport people for constitutionally protected free speech that it considers adverse to US foreign policy.“It’s a national disgrace what is taking place,” Markey said. “We stand right now at a turning point in American history. The constitution is being eroded by the Trump administration. We saw today here in these detention centers in Louisiana examples of how far [it] is willing to go.”McGovern described those being held as political prisoners. He said: “This is not about enforcing the law. This is moving us toward an authoritarian state.”Late last month, officials detained Öztürk, who co-wrote a piece in a Tufts student newspaper that was critical of the university’s response to Israel’s attacks Palestinians. The 30-year old has said she has been held in “unsanitary, unsafe, and inhumane” conditions in a Louisiana facility and has had difficulty receiving medical treatment.Öztürk was disappeared when she was detained, Pressley said, adding that she was denied food, water and the opportunity to seek legal counsel. Khalil missed the birth of his first child, she said. She described Donald Trump as a dictator with a draconian vision for the US.“They are setting the foundational floor to violate the due process and free speech of every person who calls this country home, whatever your status is,” she said. “It could be you tomorrow for suffering a miscarriage. It could be you tomorrow for reading a banned book.”Those in custody are shaken and were visibly upset and afraid, the delegation said. They have said they are not receiving necessary healthcare and that the facilities are kept extremely cold.“We have to resist, we have to push back. We’re a much better country than this,” McGovern said.Earlier this month a judge ruled that Khalil, who helped lead demonstrations at Columbia last year and has been imprisoned for more than a month, is eligible to be deported from the US.The Trump administration has argued that Khalil, a lawful permanent resident of the US and child of Palestinian refugees, holds beliefs that are counter to the country’s foreign policy interests.On Monday, Senator Peter Welch of Vermont met with Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and Columbia student who was detained while at a naturalization interview. More

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      Maryland senator meets Kilmar Ábrego García in El Salvador amid battle over US return

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      The Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen met in El Salvador with Kilmar Ábrego García, a man who was sent there by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation.Van Hollen posted a photo of the meeting on X, saying he also called Ábrego García’s wife “to pass along his message of love”.The lawmaker did not provide an update on the status of Ábrego García, whose attorneys are fighting to force the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the US.It was not clear how the meeting was arranged, where they met or what will happen to Abrego Garcia. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, posted images of the meeting minutes before Van Hollen shared his post, saying: “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”Bukele continued mockingly: “Kilmar Ábrego García, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ and ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” The tweet ended with emojis of the US and El Salvador flags, with a handshake emoji between them.The meeting came in the hours after Van Hollen said he was denied entry into an high-security El Salvador prison while he was trying to check on Ábrego García’s wellbeing and attempting to push for his release.The Democratic senator said at a news conference in San Salvador that his car was stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint about 3km from the Terrorism Confinement Center, or Cecot, even as they let other cars go on.“They stopped us because they are under orders not to allow us to proceed,” Van Hollen said.Donald Trump and Bukele said this week that they have no basis to send Ábrego García back, even as the Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake and the US supreme court has called on the administration to facilitate his return.Trump officials have said that Ábrego García, a Salvadorian citizen who was living in Maryland, has ties to the MS-13 gang, but his attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of that and Ábrego García has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.Van Hollen’s trip has become a partisan flashpoint in the US as Democrats have seized on Ábrego García’s deportation as what they say is a cruel consequence of Trump’s disregard for the courts. Republicans have criticized Democrats for defending him and argued that his deportation is part of a larger effort to reduce crime.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt held a news conference on Wednesday with the mother of a Maryland woman who was killed by a fugitive from El Salvador in 2023.Van Hollen told reporters on Wednesday that he met with Vice-President Félix Ulloa, who said his government could not return Ábrego García to the United States.“So today, I tried again to make contact with Mr Ábrego García by driving to the Cecot prison,” Van Hollen said on Thursday.Van Hollen said Ábrego García has not had any contact with his family or his lawyers. “There has been no ability to find out anything about his health and wellbeing,” Van Hollen said. He said Ábrego García should be able to have contact with his lawyers under international law.“We won’t give up until Kilmar has his due process rights respected,” Van Hollen said. He said there would be “many more” lawmakers coming to El Salvador.New Jersey senator Cory Booker is also considering a trip to El Salvador, as are some House Democrats.While Van Hollen was denied entry, several House Republicans have visited the notorious gang prison in support of the Trump administration’s efforts. Riley Moore, a West Virginia Republican, posted on Tuesday evening that he’d visited the prison where Ábrego García is being held. He did not mention Ábrego García but said the facility “houses the country’s most brutal criminals.”“I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Moore wrote on social media.Missouri Republican Jason Smith, chair of the House ways and means Committee, also visited the prison. He posted on X that “thanks to President Trump” the facility “now includes illegal immigrants who broke into our country and committed violent acts against Americans”.The fight over Ábrego García has also played out in contentious court filings, with repeated refusals from the government to tell a judge what it plans to do, if anything, to repatriate him.Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the US more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants – whom Trump administration officials have accused of gang activity and violent crimes – and placed them inside the country’s maximum-security gang prison just outside San Salvador. That prison is part of Bukele’s broader effort to crack down on the country’s powerful street gangs, which has put 84,000 people behind bars and made Bukele popular at home.Human rights groups have accused Bukele’s government of subjecting those jailed to “systematic use of torture and other mistreatment”. Officials there deny wrongdoing. More

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      Democratic senator heads to El Salvador to try to visit Kilmar Ábrego García

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      Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland will travel to El Salvador on Wednesday and attempt to visit Kilmar Ábrego García, a constituent whose deportation and incarceration in the Central American country, he warns, has tipped the United States into a constitutional crisis.In an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday, Van Hollen said he hopes to learn of Ábrego García’s condition and convey it to his family, who also live in the state he represents.The state department has confirmed that Ábrego García is held in El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), and despite the US supreme court last week saying the Trump administration must “facilitate” his return to the United States, the president refuses to do so.“We were in the gray zone before this. But if the Trump administration continues to thumb its nose at the federal courts in this case we’re in, we’re clearly in constitutional crisis territory,” Van Hollen said.In a hearing on Tuesday, federal judge Paula Xinis criticzed justice department officials for not complying with the supreme court’s order, saying “to date, nothing has been done”. She gave the government two weeks to produce details of their efforts to return Ábrego García to US soil.It’s unknown how far Van Hollen, who has represented Maryland since 2017, will get in El Salvador. While its government has welcomed homeland security secretary Kristi Noem to Cecot, Van Hollen said it has not responded to his request to visit the prison, where rights group have warned of abuses and and squalid conditions.“We’ve made those requests of the government of El Salvador, and I hope they will agree to meet to discuss Mr Ábrego García’s situation, and let me see him so I can report back to his family in Maryland on his wellbeing,” the senator said.“This is a Maryland man. His family’s in Maryland, and he’s been caught up in this absolutely outrageous situation where the Trump administration admitted in court that he was erroneously abducted from the United States and placed in this notorious prison in El Salvador in violation of all his due process rights.”Van Hollen this week sent a letter to El Salvador’s ambassador to the United States requesting to meet with Bukele when he was in Washington, but received no response, prompting the senator to plan travel to the country. Last week, Democratic House representative Adriano Espaillat, who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, also asked Bukele to meet with Ábrego García at Cecot.During his appearance alongside Trump in the Oval Office, Bukele rejected releasing Ábrego García from custody, saying: “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it.”Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers arrested and deported Ábrego García last month, even though an immigration judge had in 2019 granted him “withholding of removal to El Salvador”, a protected status for people who feared for their safety if returned to their home country. The Trump administration has accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang, which Ábrego García’s attorneys have denied, noting that the allegation is based on a single informant who said he belonged to a chapter in New York, despite him never living there.The arrest comes as Trump presses on with plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, which have seen him clash with judges nationwide. The supreme court last week upheld his administration’s use of the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act to deport suspected Venezuelan gang members, but ruled they were also entitled to due process to challenge their removals.Van Hollen said that the case of Ábrego García marks a turning point for the Trump administration because the president is refusing to follow an order from the nation’s highest court – something Democrats have long warned he will do.“What they have not overtly done previously is outright defy a court order,” Van Hollen said. “They’ve slow-walked court orders, they’ve tried to parse their words based on technicalities, they’ve not outright defied a court order. In my view, this now clearly crosses that line.” More

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      Barbara Lee forged a historic path in Congress. Does Oakland want her back for mayor?

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      Barbara Lee represented Oakland in Congress for a quarter-century. Now, in what would probably be the capstone of her storied political career, the 78-year-old progressive icon is vying for the chance to lift the “city I love” out of crisis.“I’m always ready to fight for Oakland,” Lee said, announcing her bid to lead the city of roughly 440,000 residents, known for its liberal politics and deep legacy of civil rights activism. When she entered the mayoral race in January, she was widely seen as the presumptive frontrunner.But in the months since, the race has tightened considerably, as her leading opponent, the former city council member Loren Taylor, gains ground. The 47-year-old engineer is aiming for an upset in Tuesday’s special election, tapping into a wave of discontent with progressive leadership that has swept the San Francisco Bay Area in recent years – and led to the recall of Oakland’s mayor, Sheng Thao, in November.“It’s not about whether or not we appreciate her service in Congress,” Taylor said in an interview as he made his final pitch to voters in east Oakland over the weekend. “It’s about what we need right now to fix Oakland’s problems – and particularly with the urgency that Oaklanders need.”The next mayor of Oakland must immediately confront a gaping budget deficit as well as a housing crisis that has given rise to sprawling homeless encampments. While violent crime fell sharply in 2024, persistently high rates of property crime – coupled with the widespread perception that Oakland is unsafe – continue to take a toll on the city.Over the last decade, Oakland has seen an exodus of its professional sports teams. Many businesses and retailers have left town, citing safety concerns. In-N-Out closed its only Oakland location last year, a first in the burger joint’s history. Kaiser Permanente, one of the city’s largest employers, has scaled back its downtown presence. Adding to the turmoil, Thao was recently indicted on federal bribery charges; she has pleaded not guilty.View image in fullscreenIn her homecoming pitch, Lee has presented herself as a unifying force, steeled by a decades-long political career that began in Sacramento and took her to Washington, where she championed racial justice and antiwar causes that set her apart – and sometimes at odds with her own party. Her most famous stand came in 2001, when she cast the sole vote in Congress against the authorization for the use of military force following the 9/11 terrorist attacks – a decision that resulted in hate mail and death threats but is now seen as prescient. And yet she built a reputation as a principled collaborator beloved by Democrats, with a record of working across the aisle with Republicans.Lee, who retired from Congress in January after an unsuccessful run for the US Senate last year, is now promising to bring that experience home. On the campaign trail, she has pledged to bridge Oakland’s political divides and improve public safety, while securing the city’s “fair share” of state and federal funding and partnering with civic and business leaders to spur economic growth.“I believe Oaklanders are tired of division and distraction, and are ready to move forward. They are looking for a leader who can bring all corners of the city together to solve our toughest challenges,” Lee said in a statement, citing her broad base of support, which includes nearly every member of the Oakland city council, the city’s interim mayor, several former mayors – Jerry Brown and Libby Schaaf, among them – as well as organized labor, faith leaders and key members of the business community.Describing herself as a “tested and proven leader who has built the coalition needed to govern in Oakland on day one,” Lee said: “Talk is cheap; leadership is what matters.”Tuesday’s special election, which will use ranked choice voting, has drawn hundreds of thousands of dollars in spending. Yet Ernestine Nettles, the president of the League of Women Voters of Oakland, worries that the off-cycle timing and low morale could dampen turnout. She said she had heard voters say the election “doesn’t matter” because the winner will only serve for a short time before having to run for re-election next year.A recent survey by the city of Oakland found that satisfaction with local government had fallen to a record low. An October poll by the Oakland chamber of commerce showed that voters were “more pessimistic than ever” about the direction of the city.“People have lost a lot of hope,” she said. But a packed crowd at a recent weeknight candidate forum left her hopeful that the city was tuning in. “People need to turn out to vote so that a handful of people will not be making decisions about what happens in our city,” she said.Many progressive activists view the contest as part of a broader regional fight against the growing influence of Silicon Valley wealth that is transforming Bay Area politics. The movement has already succeeded in elevating more moderate, tech-friendly leaders in nearby San Francisco and San Jose, and progressives are determined to prevent a similar shift in Oakland.“The tech bros, the oligarchy, crypto bros, all of that stuff that we’re starting to see here – it came from San Francisco politics,” said Pamela Drake, a longtime activist and progressive political commentator who is supporting Lee. She pointed to the outside support Taylor’s campaign has received, including backing from some of the wealthy investors, real-estate developers and tech executives who have poured money into defeating progressive incumbents as well as the recalls of former mayor Thao and the former Alameda county district attorney, Pamela Price.Drake said she feared a “tech takeover” of the city’s politics. “That is what we see as a real threat,” she said, “that it is no longer going to be Oaklanders deciding what we want done.”In the interview, Taylor, who narrowly lost the 2022 mayor’s race to Thao, called the claim that his campaign was driven by outside money “inaccurate” and emphasized his fundraising strength among grassroots Oakland-based donors.“What’s resonating with everyone is the fact that when Oakland does better, we all do better,” Taylor said.San Jose’s mayor, Matt Mahan, a former tech entrepreneur who has clashed with labor unions and progressives in his liberal city, endorsed Taylor at a recent press conference, praising him as a leader with “fresh ideas” and drawing parallels between his own 2022 insurgent win and Taylor’s challenge to what he called “an establishment that has become complacent”.Lee rejects the suggestion that her progressive politics are out of step with the people she served, in a place she proudly called the “wokest” district in the nation”. “I believe my values are Oakland values,” she said in a statement.On Saturday, the representative Maxine Waters, a longtime friend and progressive ally who serves a Los Angeles-area congressional district, joined Lee on the campaign trail. Waters praised Lee’s deep devotion to the city of Oakland – which last elected her to Congress with more than 90% of the vote – and said she was moved to hear residents still use the slogan “Barbara Lee speaks for me”.“People in the city are going to need someone like Barbara Lee more than ever,” Waters said. With Donald Trump slashing agencies that the city relies on for housing and public health services, she said Lee would be a “powerhouse of information” for residents navigating the disruptions.Lee is “well-experienced in handling bullies” like the president, Waters said. Trump targeted Oakland during his first administration and has vowed again to retaliate against liberal cities that resist his policies on immigration, LGBTQ+ equality and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Some Lee supporters say they relish a clash between the hometown hero and Trump, in defense of the city where Kamala Harris was born and launched her political career.As for those calling for generational change, the 86-year-old Waters was confident they would not be disappointed: “Barbara Lee as the leader of the city of Oakland will absolutely have them thinking a bit differently.”Both Taylor and Lee agree the city is at a crossroads. And both candidates have made public safety a top campaign issue, while promising to rein in government spending to stabilize city finances.Yet they offer starkly different visions. Taylor has cast himself as a pragmatic “problem-solver” who can “fix” a city he says is “broken”. Lee rejects the notion that Oakland is broken. Instead, she argues the city needs a “unifier” to heal the divisions deepened by the recent recalls.View image in fullscreenTaylor has put forward a series of data- and technology-driven proposals – such as the use of drones to fight crime – to improve public safety and restore good governance to city hall. His campaign’s promise to shake up city hall earned the endorsement of the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board, who wrote that Taylor had the “ideas and the will to lead Oakland into the future”.On the campaign trail, Lee calls for more crime prevention solutions, as well as more police, highlighting the need for expanding community services and affordable housing.But part of her pitch is being Barbara Lee. Supporters hail her as an “uplifted elder” with the gravitas and experience to marshal resources for the beleaguered city and build consensus where none seems achievable. “Lee has the political clout needed to unify the city’s fractured leadership,” the East Bay Times editorial board wrote in its endorsement.Still, not all voters are convinced that experience in Washington prepares someone to lead at city hall. Some critics point to Los Angeles, where mayor Karen Bass, also a former member of Congress, has taken heat for her handling of the deadly wildfires. And many Oakland residents remember the late former mayor Ron Dellums – Lee’s political mentor and a longtime representative – as largely absent while the city struggled during the onset of the Great Recession.In a recent radio interview, Lee noted that Oakland had a history of electing mayors without prior local government experience. She highlighted Brown – the former California governor – who leveraged his political clout to help rebuild Oakland’s downtown during his time as mayor.View image in fullscreenAt a mayoral forum hosted by the non-profit news site Oaklandside, the candidates were asked why they were vying for what many consider the daunting, even unenviable, task of leading the city through one of its most challenging chapters. Lee, as she so often has throughout her political career, saw it differently.“I don’t think that being mayor of Oakland is an impossible, thankless job,” she replied. “I recognize the challenges, but I also recognize the opportunities.” More