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      Senate Republicans scrambling to pass tax-and-spend bill by Trump deadline

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      The Republican-controlled US Senate advanced president Donald Trump’s sweeping tax-cut and spending bill in a key procedural vote late on Saturday, raising the odds that lawmakers will be able to pass his “big, beautiful bill” in the coming days.The measure, Trump’s top legislative goal, passed its first procedural hurdle in a 51 to 49 vote, with two Republican senators voting against it.The result came after several hours of negotiation as Republican leaders and vice president JD Vance sought to persuade last-minute holdouts in a series of closed-door negotiations.The procedural vote, which would start debate on the 940-page megabill to fund Trump’s top immigration, border, tax-cut and military priorities, began after hours of delay.It then remained open for more than three hours of standstill as three Republican senators – Thom Tillis, Ron Johnson and Rand Paul – joined Democrats to oppose the legislation. Three others – Senators Rick Scott, Mike Lee and Cynthia Lummis – negotiated with Republican leaders into the night in hopes of securing bigger spending cuts.In the end, Wisconsin Senator Johnson flipped his no vote to yes, leaving only Paul and Tillis opposed among Republicans.Trump on social media hailed the “great victory” for his “great, big, beautiful bill.”The megabill would extend the 2017 tax cuts that were Trump’s main legislative achievement during his first term as president, cut other taxes and boost spending on the military and border security.But the controversial bill has caused division, with Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump donor again coming out in strong opposition to the House version of the bill, denouncing the Senate draft on his social media platform, X, on Saturday.“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” Musk wrote above a comment from a green energy expert who pointed out that the bill raises taxes on new wind and solar projects.“Utterly insane and destructive,” Musk added. “It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”Nonpartisan analysts estimate that a version of Trump’s tax-cut and spending bill would add trillions to the $36.2-trillion US government debt.Democrats fiercely opposed the bill, saying its tax-cut elements would disproportionately benefit the wealthy at the expense of social programs that lower-income Americans rely upon.Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat, demanded that the bill be read aloud before debate could begin, saying the Senate Republicans were scrambling to pass a “radical bill”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump is pushing Congress to wrap it up, even as he sometimes gives mixed signals, allowing for more time.The legislation is an ambitious but complicated series of GOP priorities. At its core, it would make permanent many of the tax breaks from Trump’s first term that would otherwise expire by year’s end if Congress fails to act, resulting in a potential tax increase on Americans. The bill would add new breaks, including no taxes on tips, and commit $350bn to national security, including for Trump’s mass deportation agenda.Some lawmakers say the cuts go too far, particularly for people receiving healthcare through Medicaid. Meanwhile, conservatives worried about the nation’s debt are pushing for steeper cuts.The final text includes a proposal for cuts to a Medicaid provider tax that had run into parliamentary objections and opposition from several senators worried about the fate of rural hospitals. The new version extends the start date for those cuts and establishes a $25bn fund to aid rural hospitals and providers.Most states impose the provider tax as a way to boost federal Medicaid reimbursements. Some Republicans argue that is a scam and should be abolished.The nonpartisan congressional budget office has said that under the House-passed version of the bill, some 10.9 million more people would go without healthcare and at least 3 million fewer would qualify for food aid. The CBO has not yet publicly assessed the Senate draft, which proposes steeper reductions. Top income-earners would see about a $12,000 tax cut under the House bill, while the package would cost the poorest Americans $1,600, the CBO said. More

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      ‘You open the fridge – nothing’: renewed threat of US hunger as Trump seeks to cut food aid

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      Jade Johnson has a word to describe the experience of going hungry in one of the world’s richest countries. “Humbling.”The last time she endured the misery of skipping meals was about 18 months ago. She was working two jobs as a home health aide and in childcare, but after paying the rent and bills she still didn’t have enough to feed herself and her young daughter Janai.She would always make sure Janai had all she needed and then, when the money ran out, trim her own eating habits accordingly. Three meals a day became one, solids would be replaced with copious amounts of water to dull the hunger pangs.“It’s like you get humbled,” Johnson, 25, says in the apartment where she is raising Janai, six, in Germantown, Maryland. “You open the fridge, close it, open it again but nothing’s gonna change – there’s nothing in there.”Those lean times were in the days before Johnson was accepted on to Snap, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, that provides low-income families with help to buy nutritious groceries. Johnson had applied several times, but had been knocked back.She was finally approved, with the help of an adviser whom she met at a parents’ evening at Janai’s kindergarten. For more than a year now she has received $520 every month to buy good food – equivalent to $8.50 for her and Janai each day, or under $3 a meal.View image in fullscreenThat may not sound much, but it has been transformative. “Snap has been a blessing for me,” she says. “I can provide for Janai when I come home, cook dinner for myself. It’s improved my relationship with my kid, my friends, my clients.”Now Johnson is bracing herself for a return to those grim days of food insecurity. Donald Trump’s multi-trillion dollar domestic policy legislation, his “big, beautiful bill” which is currently battling through Congress, would slash up to $300bn from the Snap program in order to fund extended tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.The cuts amount to the largest in the program’s history. They come at a time when food insecurity is already on the rise in all 50 states.Voting is meant to begin soon in the US Senate, an attempt to clear the bill through the upper chamber in time to meet Trump’s ambition to sign it into law by 4 July. Senate Republican leaders are mindful that any revisions they write into the bill must avoid causing further acrimony when the legislation moves back for final approval to the House of Representatives, where the package was passed this spring by an agonising single vote.Under the House version of the bill, parents of children seven and above would become liable for stringent work requirements from which they are currently exempted until their child is 18. Johnson would be affected by the new restriction, as Janai turns seven in November.If that seven-year cutoff remains in the final bill (the Senate is proposing that parents must meet work requirements once their child reaches 14), Johnson will have to prove from Janai’s next birthday that she is working at least 20 hours a week. Otherwise she would lose her Snap benefits.That would be a tough burden to meet, given that her hours fluctuate week by week as clients’ needs change. She has very little slack in her calendar to work further hours, because on top of her two jobs she is studying part-time at night to become a dialysis technician.So Johnson is nervously following the passage of the bill, and preparing for the worst. Should her food assistance be pulled, it will be back to “grind mode” and a renewed state of humbling.Johnson is one of millions of struggling Americans who are threatened with losing their Snap benefits under Trump’s bill. Most of the political attention in Congress has focused on Medicaid, the health insurance scheme for low-income families which faces even greater cuts of at least $800bn under the House version of the bill.Anti-hunger advocates fear that the potential devastation of Snap cuts is being overlooked. “I just don’t think it’s getting the sort of press and general public attention it demands,” said Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba, executive director of Children’s HealthWatch.She described the proposed cuts as a “catastrophic attack that will change the structure of Snap, damage children’s and parents’ health, and have ripple effects that will devastate local economies”.Since it was founded as a permanent program by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Snap has grown into America’s most effective weapon against hunger. It currently helps put food on the table for over 40 million people, almost half of whom are children.Poverty experts have been stunned by the scale of Trump’s proposed cuts. They say they would deliver a terrible blow to one of the country’s core values – that all Americans should have enough to eat.“It’s like we are throwing in the towel, and saying hunger won,” said Salaam Bhatti, Snap director at the Food Research & Action Center (Frac). “It’s upsetting that one of the wealthiest countries in the world is on the brink of increasing hunger for millions of people.”The proposed cuts fall under several headings. The one that Johnson will feel most immediately is the expanded work requirements that will put about 8 million people at risk of losing some or all of their Snap benefits.In addition to the expanded work requirements for parents of children aged seven to 18, older adults aged 55 to 64 would also now have to meet heavy work stipulations. That cohort includes Johnson’s mother, Jámene, who currently receives Snap but might be thrown off it as she is 55 and would be subject to the expanded demands.Jámene currently receives $52 a month in Snap benefits. Again, that might sound minimal, but without it she would be unable to buy fresh vegetables and meat and she would be hard pressed to offer any help to her daughter and granddaughter when reserves are running low.The bill also transfers some of the costs of benefits, for the first time in the program’s 61-year history, from the federal government to individual states. Under the House bill, states would be liable for up to 15% of the benefit costs, while the portion of administrative costs they already bear would rise from 50% to 75%.A state like Virginia would have to fork out an extra $500m a year. In Bhatti’s estimation, many states are simply going to be unable or unwilling to foot that bill – and will pass on the pain to their poorer citizens.“States don’t have that type of money, and so they would either reduce costs by removing families from the program, or by pulling out of the program entirely.”Were Virginia to bail out of Snap, that would put over 800,000 people at immediate risk of food insecurity, including over 300,000 children.Paradoxically, many of the states that would be most impacted, and by extension a large proportion of the families that could be left struggling to feed themselves, are in the rural Republican heartlands that voted heavily for Trump. One of the hardest hit would be Louisiana, which has 44% of its population on Snap or Medicaid or both.The stakes are almost as high in deep red Arkansas (38%) and Mississippi (37%). “I don’t understand why policymakers are pursuing this bill when this will obviously hurt a large majority of their own constituents for whom Snap is a lifeline,” said Lelaine Bigelow of the Georgetown Center for Poverty and Inequality.West Virginia, with 38% of its population in receipt of Snap or Medicaid, is an especially poignant example. This was the state where the food assistance program was born: John F Kennedy opened a pilot program there following his tour of the economically stricken Appalachian coal country.“I don’t know whether the cuts will give rise to what Kennedy saw – hungry children with bloated bellies,” said Tracy Roof, a political scientist at the University of Richmond who is writing a book on the history of food stamps. “But I do know that in a country as wealthy as the US, it’s unforgivable that you should have people going hungry to bed.”Trump’s hydra-headed cuts would also make it harder for low-income families to claim benefits in areas with high unemployment rates. The basket of food against which Snap is calculated would also be frozen, so that over the next 10 years the value of the benefit would decline in real terms from the current average of $6 a day, which many experts already consider inadequate.As a further threat, food assistance will be removed from up to 250,000 refugees and other people granted humanitarian protections in the US.In some ways, the Senate iteration of the bill is even more extreme than the House one. It targets millions of people in special groups, forcing them to meet tough work requirements to which they had been exempted. That includes military veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young people in foster care.Research by the Georgetown Center exposes the staggering disparity that underpins Trump’s plan. Under the House bill, over $1tn would be withdrawn in Snap and Medicaid cuts from 31% of the American people who earn on average $30,000 a year.The money would then be handed over, in the form of tax cuts, to the top 2% of the population, with average incomes of $1.5m a year.The transfer of resources would not only exacerbate America’s gaping inequality, it would also have a calamitous effect on the local economies in poorer parts of the country. Disrupting the flow of Snap food deliveries could send shock waves through the entire food supply chain, from farmer to truck driver to grocery store.Numerous studies have also revealed the damage done to the health and prospects of children when they endure food insecurity at a young age. A child’s developmental arc for language, hearing, vision and other critical faculties all peak by four, which means that if they receive insufficient nourishment in the early years it can have crushing long-term consequences.View image in fullscreen“Small deprivations have outsized impacts,” Ettinger de Cuba said. “Kids who are food insecure are more likely to be at risk of poor health, hospitalizations, and developmental delays.”In Johnson’s case, she knows Janai will be protected from such a disaster because as a parent she will do everything she can to provide for her daughter. Even if that means giving up her dream of getting on in life, or going hungry herself.What puzzles Johnson about the difficult future she is now facing, courtesy of the “big, beautiful bill”, is that it feels like she is being punished for doing everything she can to be a good American. She’s raised her daughter right, works two jobs to pay the bills, studies at night at her own cost to improve herself and find more stable work.“I’m just trying to be a decent, functioning human being,” she says. “Can’t they let me get my life together first, before they start snatching stuff away from me?” More

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      Home discomforts send Trump rushing to project image of global patriarch

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      “Daddy’s home.” So said a social media post from the White House, accompanied by a video featuring the song Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home) by Usher and images of Donald Trump at the Nato summit in The Hague.The US president’s fundraising allies were quick to market $35 T-shirts with his image and the word after Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, referred to Trump’s criticism of Israel and Iran over violations of a ceasefire by quipping: “And then Daddy has to sometimes use strong language to get [them to] stop.”Yet even as Trump seeks to project an image of global patriarch, there are signs of trouble on the home front. His polling numbers are down. His party is struggling to pass his signature legislation. Millions of people have marched in the streets to protest against him. Critics say the president who claims to put America First is in fact putting America Last.Trump is not the first president to find the foreign policy domain, where as commander-in-chief he recently ordered strikes on nuclear sites in Iran, less restrictive than the domestic sphere, where a rambunctious Congress, robust judiciary and sceptical media are constant irritants. But rarely has the gap between symbolic posturing abroad and messy politicking at home been so pronounced.“There’s two presidencies,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “The one on the domestic front is gruesome and involves long-drawn-out and disappointing negotiations with Congress and that’s exactly what Donald Trump is engaged in now. What emerges from Congress is not going to be as ‘big’ or ‘beautiful’ as he promised.“Meanwhile you’ve got staggering photographs of bombs falling from the sky, Donald Trump’s flamboyant description of what he’s achieved in Iran and Europe. That’s the kind of Hollywood performance that Donald Trump wants.”The president stunned the world last Saturday by announcing, on his Truth Social platform, that he had ordered more than 125 aircraft and 75 weapons – including 14 bunker-busting bombs – to hit three targets in Iran to prevent the country obtaining a nuclear weapon.He followed up with a White House speech, choreographed to project an image of power, in which he declared: “Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”View image in fullscreenThat narrative has since been cast into doubt by a leaked intelligence report suggesting that the operation set back Iran’s nuclear programme by only a few months. Still, Trump pivoted to the role of peacemaker, again using Truth Social to announce a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, prompting Republicans to gush that he should win the Nobel peace prize.Trump’s barrage of speeches, interactions with reporters and social media posts about the Middle East were likened by some to a daily soap opera, dominating Americans’ attention and distracting them from his one big beautiful bill, a budget plan that threatens to slash the social safety net that many of his own supporters depend on.Jacobs observed: “This is a classic deception. He’s like the carnival barker who’s waving his hands to keep the attention of the audience even as he’s hiding the part for the next trick.“What’s coming out of Congress is going to absolutely harm many of his voters. Politicians like to cover their tracks; there’s no covering the tracks here. There will be known cuts to widely used popular programmes like the healthcare for Medicaid and there will be no doubt as to who’s responsible. These are traceable, highly visible consequences of Donald Trump.”Now in the sixth month of his second presidency, Trump’s domestic honeymoon is over. A poll of 1,006 likely voters nationwide by John Zogby Strategies on 24 and 25 June found the president’s approval rating down three points to 45%. About 49% of voters approve of his handling of immigration while 47% disapprove but on the economy 43% approve and 54% disapprove.Asked if they expect Trump’s presidency will make them financially better off or worse off, 40% said better and 50% said worse. Zogby commented: “There is a lot of anxiety domestically, first and foremost on the economy. People are confused and insecure. The numbers are plunging.”View image in fullscreenConsumer confidence unexpectedly deteriorated in June, a sign of economic uncertainty because of Trump’s sweeping tariffs. The anxiety reported by the Conference Board was across the political spectrum, with the steepest decline among Republicans. And the share of consumers viewing jobs as plentiful was the smallest since March 2021.Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator, argued in a floor speech this week that Trump had broken him promise to lower costs “on day one”. She said: “American families don’t need another war – they need good jobs and lower prices, and that is what we should be focused on.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWarren listed 10 ways in which the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would raise costs for families, from rent to groceries to prescription drug prices, and warned that it will take healthcare away from more than 16 million people. Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate continue to haggle over the contents of the bill as a 4 July deadline looms.Neera Tanden, president and chief executive of the Center for American Progress and a former domestic policy adviser to President Joe Biden, told an audience on Thursday: “This legislation is the greatest Robin Hood-in-reverse legislation that I have ever seen in my lifetime. It is cutting healthcare for working-class people and using those dollars to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.”View image in fullscreenMeanwhile discontent is simmering over Trump’s signature issue of immigration, even among some of his own voters. Videos of people being snatched off the streets or beaten by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents have provoked widespread revulsion.There have also been cases such as that of Ming Li Hui, a popular member of staff at a restaurant in rural Missouri who was arrested and jailed to await deportation. Her friend Vanessa Cowart told the New York Times: “I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here. But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”Meanwhile aggressive workplace raids are hurting hotels, restaurants, farms, construction firms and meatpacking companies, including in conservative states. The alarm recently got through to Trump, who admitted that some undocumented immigrants were actually “very good, longtime workers” and ordered a temporary pause, only to then yield back to hardliners in his administration.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “In a restaurant, if you lose your cooks, you can’t serve people and you lose money. If you are in a factory where people have been swooped up by Ice, you have to do more work.“It puts more of the burden on the same people who might have voted for Donald Trump – lower-income or middle-income factory workers or meat-processing people. They’re feeling the effects of this immigration sweep in ways that the administration did not anticipate.”View image in fullscreenTrump’s second term has been further marred by the tech billionaire Elon Musk leading a “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, that fired thousands of federal workers but fell far short of its cost-saving target before Musk left amid acrimony. The president’s authoritarian attacks on cultural institutions, law firms, media organisations and universities fuelled “No Kings” protests involving more than 5 million people in more than 2,100 cities and towns across the country on 14 June.In that context, it is perhaps not surprising that Trump should relish the global stage, where any world leader is just a phone call away and where he is now being feted as statesman and father figure. It has proven easier to drop bombs on Iran or pressure Nato to agree to a big increase in military spending than to tame Thomas Massie, a rebellious Kentucky Republican defying him over both Iran and the spending bill.Schiller added: “It is true for every president, Republican or Democrat, that when things are going south domestically they turn to foreign affairs. Trump feels in some ways more powerful on the global stage than he does trying to get Congress to do what he wants. The House Republicans are giving him a hard time. The Senate Republicans are giving him a hard time. He’s annoyed by this so then he goes, well, we’re a global military power.” More

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

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

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      US citizen arrested during Ice raid in what family describes as ‘kidnapping’

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      A US citizen was arrested during an immigration raid in downtown Los Angeles this week in what her family described as a “kidnapping” by federal immigration agents.Andrea Velez, 32, had just been dropped off at work by her mother and sister, the pair said, when they saw agents grab her.“My mom looked at the rear mirror and she saw how my sister was attacked from the back,” Estrella Rosas told ABC7. “She was like: ‘They’re kidnapping your sister.’”Velez, a graduate of Cal Poly Pomona, was taken into custody during an immigration raid on Tuesday. In video captured from the scene, agents can be seen surrounding her as a crowd gathers in the street and police officers stand by. Meanwhile, Rosas and her mother, who has residency but is not a citizen, screamed from a nearby vehicle for help.“She’s a US citizen,” Rosas said through tears. “They’re taking her. Help her, someone.”In other video, an agent can be seen lifting Velez off the ground and carrying her away. Witnesses told media, including CBS Los Angeles, that the agents never asked Velez for identification, and that she did nothing wrong.“The only thing wrong with her … was the color of her skin,” Velez’s mother, Margarita Flores, told CBS Los Angeles.The incident comes as numerous US citizens have been swept up in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants. People have reported they are being targeted for their skin color and for attempting to aid immigrants being detained by immigration agents.While it’s not yet clear how many citizens have been affected by the administration’s attack on immigrant communities, a government report found that between 2015 and 2020, Ice erroneously deported at least 70 US citizens, arrested 674 and detained 121.Velez’s family was unaware of her whereabouts for more than a day until attorneys for the family tracked her down. “It took us four hours to find her and we’re attorneys. That’s crazy,” attorney Dominique Boubion told ABC7.“Just to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and you have the full weight of the federal government against you and your family can’t find you – it is very scary.”Authorities have not told lawyers what charges Velez faces, but an official with the Department of Homeland Security told media that she was arrested for assaulting an Ice officer. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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

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

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      Judge blocks Trump plan to tie states’ transportation funds to immigration enforcement

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      A federal judge on Thursday blocked Donald Trump’s administration from forcing 20 Democratic-led states to cooperate with immigration enforcement in order to receive billions of dollars in transportation grant funding.Chief US District Judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, granted the states’ request for an injunction barring the Department of Transportation’s policy, saying the states were likely to succeed on the merits of some or all of their claims.The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by a group of Democratic state attorneys general who argued the administration was seeking to unlawfully hold federal funds hostage to coerce them into adhering to Trump’s hardline immigration agenda.The states argued the US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, lacked the authority to impose immigration-enforcement conditions on funding that Congress appropriated to help states sustain roads, highways, bridges and other transportation projects.Since returning to office on 20 January, Trump has signed several executive orders that have called for cutting off federal funding to so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that do not cooperate with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) as his administration has moved to conduct mass deportations.Sanctuary jurisdictions generally have laws and policies that limit or prevent local law enforcement from assisting federal officers with civil immigration arrests.The justice department has filed a series of lawsuits against such jurisdictions, including Illinois, New York and Colorado, challenging laws in those Democratic-led states that it says hinder federal immigration enforcement.The lawsuit before McConnell, who was appointed by Barack Obama, was filed after Duffy on 24 April notified states they could lose transportation funding if they do not cooperate with the enforcement of federal law, including with Ice in its efforts to enforce immigration law.The states argue that policy is improper and amounts to an unconstitutionally ambiguous condition on the states’ ability to receive funding authorized by Congress as it leaves unclear what exactly would constitute adequate cooperation.The administration has argued the policy was within Duffy’s discretion and that conditions should be upheld as there is nothing improper about requiring states to comply with federal law.The 20 states are separately pursuing a similar case also in Rhode Island challenging new immigration enforcement conditions that the homeland security department imposed on grant programs. More

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      America had open borders until 1924. Racism and corporate greed changed that | Daniel Mendiola

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      The US immigration system is a scam that dehumanizes people for profit. Communities across the country have had enough.The protests in Los Angeles have invited a long overdue conversation about the true nature of the US immigration system. While the immediate catalysts for the protests were ramped up Ice raids attempting to meet Donald Trump’s arbitrary deportation quotas, the protests spring from a deeper history.In reality, the protests reflect decades-long frustrations with an abusive immigration system designed to dehumanize immigrants, weaken workers and keep wealth flowing upward. Ice’s recent tactics were only the last straw.Excellent articles have shed light on why Los Angeles in particular, with generations of immigrant communities and a history of immigrant rights movements, has emerged as an epicenter of resistance. Whether immigrants themselves, or families, neighbors, coworkers, or friends of immigrants, people in these communities have long experienced the trauma of a system that renders people “illegal” just for doing basic things like getting a job. Similar statements could be made for other major sites of protest such as New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Denver and Houston.While much of the news coverage has turned toward the US president’s mobilization of the military and what that means for his growing authoritarian tendencies, this is only half the story. To fully understand what is at stake in the protests, we can’t lose sight of the thing that drove people to protest in the first place: a violently unfair immigration system that is an affront to us all.It is worth noting that this immigration system is not an original component of US governance. Whereas the first government under the US constitution formed in 1789, there were no federal immigration laws until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and even this law was limited in the sense that it banned a specific class of immigrants. The US did not have closed borders until the Immigration Act of 1924, which established national origins quotas across the board.The primary justifications for these early immigration laws were xenophobia, eugenics, and overt racism. By the 1990s, however, multinational corporations understood that closed borders – especially combined with free trade agreements freeing multinational companies to shop around for “cheap” workers, while at the same time constraining the options of workers to move around and look for better jobs – were a powerful weapon in their arsenal to squeeze ever more profit out of global supply chains. While cleverly hidden behind discourses of “security” and “sovereignty,” our immigration system is actually a scam rigged to guarantee an upward flow of wealth at the cost of human rights.The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) illustrates this dynamic. Signed in 1992, Nafta created a free trade zone among Mexico, Canada and the US, specifically making it easier for goods, capital and corporations to move freely while conspicuously ignoring the movement of workers. Far from an oversight, as the scholar Bill Ong Hing has written, this was the whole point of the agreement.While no US labor unions or other human rights representatives had a seat at the table, the US advisory committee for trade and negotiations – composed almost entirely of representatives of multinational corporations – led the negotiations, ensuring that the agreement followed corporate interests. The drafters wanted easier access to cheaper Mexican labor, but they understood that if Mexicans had the same rights as companies to cross borders in search of better opportunities, then the “invisible hand” of supply and demand might make this labor less cheap. Accordingly, immigration restrictions helped to rig the game. In line with these interests, the Clinton administration, in power when the agreement took effect in 1994, not only went along with the plan to leave immigrants out of the deal, but also doubled down on closed borders with harsh new measures to restrict immigration through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996.Ultimately, Nafta and the IIRIRA worked hand-in-hand to trap Mexican workers and give artificial negotiating advantages to multinational corporations. The mechanism made sure that Mexicans would have to either stay put on their side of the border and tolerate whatever working conditions were available, or live without legal status if they did “vote with their feet” to seek better opportunities in the US. In either case, they were far more vulnerable to exploitation. Unsurprisingly, this harmed workers all around, especially Mexicans, leading to stagnant wages, harsh working conditions, and irregular migration that forced people into an exploitative informal economy, even as productivity and corporate profits soared.Significantly, Nafta was not an isolated case, but rather an embodiment of how the US immigration system enshrines this major power imbalance between labor and capital. In fact, the same Clinton administration and private sector advisory committee that oversaw the implementation Nafta also played a key role in creating the World Trade Organization in 1995 following similar principles. Today, multinational corporations continue to move freely around the world, while people seeking a better life continue to face restrictive borders enforced by state violence.At the same time, we as taxpayers pay increasingly absurd sums of money for the violent border security measures that keep this system in place. The American Immigration Council has calculated that since 1994, the annual budget for the US Border Patrol has risen from $400m dollars to more than $7bn in 2024 – an increase of over 700% even when factoring in inflation. They further estimate that since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the federal government has spent more than $400bn dollars on the various agencies that carry out immigration enforcement.Under the current Trump administration, these numbers are set to soar even further. In the same “big, beautiful” spending bill that is already facing backlash for slashing public programs while offering enormous tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, a massive increase in spending for Trump’s signature deportation plan is included. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that this will add $168bn to the deficit over the next five years – already an extreme amount – though the Cato Institute has noted that the CBO calculation left out key variables. In fact, Cato finds that the number could actually be closer to $1tn.In short, our immigration system is a massive grift. It divides communities, separates families, hurts workers, and subjects people to state violence for doing normal things like working at an Italian restaurant or going to church on Mother’s Day. And we as taxpayers subsidize the companies profiting on this abusive system.As I have previously written, the Trump administration has distinguished itself from previous governments by intentionally targeting legal immigrants. However, as protesters flood the streets with signs saying “No One is Illegal,” the deeper significance of this protest movement becomes clear. The message is that someone’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness shouldn’t depend on their immigration status. And it certainly shouldn’t depend on the whims of multinational corporations who have essentially coopted violent border enforcement for their own profits.As a final thought, I think people are also tired of all the gaslighting. Despite the barrage of official rhetoric claiming that tough immigration measures are for our own good – that they make our communities safer, that they protect jobs, that we shouldn’t feel bad because immigrants don’t deserve to be treated as we would want to be treated ourselves – we know from both academic analysis and our lived experiences that these are all vicious lies, and the policies that spring from these lies have deadly consequences for real human beings. For me, the recent protests demonstrate that communities across the country are standing up to reject these lies.As I think about the significance of this movement, I am reminded of a passage from Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s 2020 book The Undocumented Americans. Reflecting on the power of storytelling as a counterweight to the deluge of dehumanizing assaults immigrants face on a daily basis, she concludes: “What if this is how, in the face of so much sacrilege and slander, we reclaim our dead?”People are protesting because they are fed up. And they are right to be.

      Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College More