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      Ice is cracking down on Trump’s own supporters. Will they change their minds? | Tayo Bero

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      By now, the cycle of Donald Trump supporters being slapped in the face by his policies is common enough that it shouldn’t warrant a response. What is noteworthy is the fact that his crusade of mass deportations seems to have taken the Maga crowd by surprise in a way that makes little sense if you’ve been paying attention to Trump, his campaign promises, his party and the people he surrounds himself with.Even as they witness friends and family members hurt by this administration’s immigration clampdowns, some Trump supporters appear resistant to doing a full 180.Bradley Bartell, whose wife, Camila Muñoz, was recently detained, says he has no regrets about voting for Trump. Muñoz is from Peru and overstayed a work-study visa that expired right when Covid hit. She was trying to get permanent residency in the US when she was detained.“I don’t regret the vote,” Bartell told Newsweek. His rationale? Trump is a victim of a bad immigration system that his administration inherited. “He didn’t create the system but he does have an opportunity to improve it. Hopefully, all this attention will bring to light how broken it is.”For Jensy Machado from Manassas, Virginia, things are a bit more complex. Machado, a naturalized US citizen, was driving to work when, according to NBC 4, he was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents, who brandished guns and surrounded his truck. According to Machado, a man facing a deportation order had given Machado’s home address as his, and when Machado assured agents that they had the wrong person and offered them his Virginia driver’s license, they ordered him to leave his car and handcuffed him.“I was a Trump supporter,” Machado, who is Hispanic, said. “I voted for Trump last election, but, because I thought it was going to be like … against criminals, not every Hispanic, Spanish-lookalike.“They will assume that we are all illegals,” he continued. “They’re just following Hispanic people.”Machado said his support for the administration had been shaken. Others have been rattled by how and where Trump’s policies are being applied.That dissonance is well articulated in a recent New York Times piece about a small Missouri town that supported Trump – and is now grappling with the effects of his decisions.Many residents of Kennett, Missouri, were stunned when a beloved neighbor, Carol, was arrested and jailed to await deportation after being summoned to Ice offices in St Louis in April. According to the government, Carol came to the US from Hong Kong in 2004, and has spent the past two decades trying to secure legal stay in the country, ultimately being granted a temporary permission to stay known as an order of supervision. Carol’s most recent order of supervision was supposed to be valid through August 2025, but on the day of her arrest, she was told it was being terminated.Now, despite the fact that she’s spent the last two decades building a life and community in this small town, getting married and buying a house, she’s spent weeks moving between jails as she awaits a final decision on her deportation.“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said Vanessa Cowart, who knows Carol from church. “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 … This is Carol.”That last line – and the Kennett story as a whole – reveals a deeply American way of thinking about law and order and civil liberties: that anything is fair game once someone is considered a “criminal”. It’s an idea that has been sent into overdrive in the Trump years, where “criminal” has become a catch-all for the most evil, dangerous and undesirable in our communities, and shorthand for referencing anyone society doesn’t want to deal with.Trump ran on a campaign of hate, and the voters who helped cement that hatred and codify it into policy are now encountering the kind of state-sanctioned violence they endorsed at the ballot box.Still, to say “I told you so” in a moment like this is not only useless, it feels like a cruel understatement when the thing you were warning about is so destructive.So what can we learn from this? US leadership is clearly invested in the destruction of vulnerable American lives. If people who have been directly affected by Trump’s behaviour still find reasons to rationalize his leadership, it’s a reminder that ousting this regime will require the rest of us to speak out against tyranny and the establishment politics that got us here in the first place.

      Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘He’s moving at a truly alarming speed’: Trump propels US into authoritarianism

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      It reads like a checklist of milestones on the road to autocracy.A succession of opposition politicians, including Alex Padilla, a US senator, are handcuffed and arrested by heavy-handed law enforcement for little more than questioning authority or voicing dissent.A judge is arrested in her own courthouse and charged with helping a defendant evade arrest.Masked snatch squads arrest and spirit people away in public in what seem to be consciously intimidating scenes.The president deploys the military on a dubious legal premise to confront protesters contesting his mass roundups of undocumented migrants.A senior presidential aide announces that habeas corpus – a vital legal defence for detainees – could be suspended.The sobering catalogue reflects the actions not of an entrenched dictatorship, but of Donald Trump’s administration as the president’s sternest critics struggle to process what they say has been a much swifter descent into authoritarianism than they imagined even a few weeks ago.“Trump is throwing authoritarian punches at a much greater rate than any of these other cases in their first year in power,” said Steven Levitsky, Harvard political scientist and author, with Daniel Ziblatt, of How Democracies Die. “But we don’t yet know how many of those punches will land or how society will respond.”Five months after Trump’s inauguration, seasoned analysts with years of studying one-time stable democracies degenerating into autocracies are voicing alarm at the speed of the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on institutions and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of expression. They are unnerved by the deployment of masked Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents – dressed in plain clothes and without identifying official insignia – to arrest people on the streets for deportation, a tactic critics say is evocative of dictatorships and designed to provoke fear among the general population.Some voice doubts about the judiciary’s capacity to act as a democratic safeguard, despite a wave of legal challenges to the president’s executive orders. They cite the 6-3 conservative majority of the US supreme court, which has a history of issuing rulings friendly to the president, who appointed three of its justices to the bench during his first administration.Trump has tried to propel the US in an authoritarian direction with greater intensity than noted autocrats like the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, or Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, according to Levitsky.Eric Rubin, a former US ambassador to Bulgaria and acting ambassador to Moscow, said Trump was outpacing Vladimir Putin, the Russia president for whom he had often voiced admiration.“This is going faster than Putin even came close to going in terms of gradually eliminating democratic institutions and democratic freedoms,” said Rubin, who witnessed Putin’s early years in power at close quarters. “It took him years. We’re not even looking at six months here.”Bright Line Watch, a survey of political scientists, recently gave the US a score of 53 – the lowest since it started collecting data in 2017 – on a spectrum ranging from 0 for total dictatorship to 100, denoting a perfect democracy, according to Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth College, one of the institutions conducting the study.Academics commissioned said they expected the country to fall further, forecasting a score of 48 by 2027.“We’re in the range of countries like Brazil and Israel, but well above countries like Russia,” said Nyhan. “I do expect things to get worse. The potential for further democratic erosion is very real.”Key to whether Trump can tilt America decisively into authoritarianism will be his efforts to assert control over the armed forces, argued Levitsky.“Trump’s ramping up of the effort to politicize the military can still go in multiple directions,” he said. “It could be really ugly and bad, because the only way that you can get from where we are to real authoritarianism like Nicaragua or Venezuela or Russia is if Trump has the military and security forces on his side, and he’s taken steps in that direction.”Padilla’s manhandling – after he tried to question homeland security secretary Kristi Noem at a news conference – drew fierce scrutiny. It took place against a backdrop of Trump’s deployment of 4,000 national guard troops on to the streets of Los Angeles, later augmented by 700 active marines, against demonstrators protesting against the administration’s anti-migrant crackdown, who did not appear to be present an undue challenge to local law enforcement authorities.View image in fullscreenThe decisions took place against the opposition of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who would normally be empowered to deploy the national guard in the state but whose role Trump usurped as he sought to make an example of a state with a large immigrant population and whose Democratic stranglehold he wishes to break.The deployments, denounced by opponents as an attempt to foment violent confrontation, took place in the run-up to a military parade staged in Washington last Saturday. Ostensibly held to honor the US army’s 250th anniversary, the event was held – perhaps not coincidentally – on the president’s 79th birthday. Opponents said it was redolent of autocracies like China, North Korea and Russia and reflected a desire by Trump to turn the military into his personal tool.Amid speculation that the parade might be disrupted by an anti-Trump No Kings protest on the same day, the president threatened to use “very big force” against demonstrators, in apparent contradiction of the US’s tradition of tolerance of peaceful dissent. In the event, no clashes between government forces and protesters were reported at the Washington parade on a day when an estimated 5 million demonstrators turned out at 2,100 locations across the US, according to organizers. However, there were sporadic reports of violence elsewhere; in northern Virginia, a man drove his car through a crowd of No Kings protesters, striking one, in what police said was an intentional act.But in a much worse portent for democracy on the same day, Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was shot dead at her home along with her husband Mark in what was called a targeted political assassination allegedly carried out by 57-year-old Vance Boelter, whose friends say was a Christian nationalist Trump supporter.Boelter, who is now in police custody, is suspected of then shooting and wounding another politician, John Hoffman – a Democratic member of the Minnesota senate – and his wife, Yvette. He is said to have had a list with more than 45 targets, all of them Democrats, at the time of his arrest.Rubin said the shootings created a climate of fear comparable to that of Weimar Germany before the rise of Hitler.“Fear is powerful and pernicious,” he said. “People won’t be willing to to be candidates for these positions because they’re afraid. The general public is intimidated. I’m somewhat intimidated.“You can say passivity is immoral in the face of evil, that it is complicity, all the things that were said about Nazi Germany. Well, it’s easy to say that. In Nazi Germany, there were some courageous people, but not very many, because they were afraid.”Equally significant, analysts say, is the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the legal boundaries of the president’s powers – the fate of which will be decided by the supreme court, which issued a ruling last year that effectively granted Trump vast prosecutorial immunity for acts committed in office.“Has Trump solidified his power? Have we reached a point where we have an out-of-control president who controls all the institutions? No, but we’re at the 11th hour,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociology and international affairs professor at Princeton University. “He’s moving at a truly alarming speed and pressing all the authoritarian buttons. We’re a few supreme court decisions away from having a president we can’t get rid of.”Trump’s national guard deployments in Los Angeles may have been aimed at establishing a legal precedent enabling him to deploy troops at will when state authorities tried to defy him.“He wants to establish that he can disable the governors from fighting back against him [by using] military force,” Scheppele said. “The Los Angeles deployment was perceived as an escalation but in reality, the military haven’t done that much. However, there’s a legal infrastructure underneath it all that’s scarier.”Levitsky, said the administration – spearheaded by Stephen Miler, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff – had adopted a practice of declaring emergencies to acquire potentially dictatorial powers.“In the US constitution, almost every existing constraint on executive power can be circumvented in a state of emergency,” he said. “And it’s becoming clear that the administration is learning that emergencies are the easiest route to circumvent the law and not be blocked by the courts. The supreme court is very reluctant to say, ‘No, that’s not an emergency, Trump, you lied. You made that up.’ It’s sort of a free pass for circumventing the rule of law.”The White House used economic emergency legislation to impose sweeping trade tariffs, while invoking the 1798 Alien and Sedition Act, passed in anticipation of a war with France, to justify summarily deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members. Miller repeatedly called last week’s protests in Los Angeles an “insurrection”, implicitly justifying the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which enables a president to use military forces to quash a rebellion on US soil.Writing in the Atlantic, David Frum, an anti-Trump conservative commentator, warned that the penchant for emergencies could be applied to next year’s congressional elections, when the Democrats hope to regain control of the House of Representatives, an outcome that could curtail his authoritarian power grab.“Trump knows full well that the midterms are coming. He is worried,” Frum wrote.“He might already be testing ways to protect himself that could end in subverting those elections’ integrity. So far, the results must be gratifying to him – and deeply ominous to anyone who hopes to preserve free and fair elections in the United States under this corrupt, authoritarian, and lawless presidency.”Even if Trump were to suffer an election reverse, his ability to wreak further havoc will remain, Nyhan warned, simply because Senate Republicans are unlikely to vote in sufficient numbers to remove him from office in the event of him being impeached by a Democratic-controlled House.“The Founding Fathers anticipated Trump precisely,” he said, referring to the constitutional provision to try and remove a president and other officials for “high crimes and misdemeanors”.“It was just assumed that Congress will jealously guard its prerogatives and impeach and remove any president who exceeded the boundaries of the constitution. But in our current political system, that is a seemingly impossible task.“So we face the prospect of a lawless authoritarian continuing to act for the next three and a half years, and there’s a great deal of damage he can do in that time.” More

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      New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles

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      Foreign students will be required to unlock their social media profiles to allow US diplomats to review their online activity before receiving educational and exchange visas, the state department has announced. Those who fail to do so will be suspected of hiding that activity from US officials.The new guidance, unveiled by the state department on Wednesday, directs US diplomats to conduct an online presence review to look for “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States”.A cable separately obtained by Politico also instructs diplomats to flag any “advocacy for, aid or support for foreign terrorists and other threats to US national security” and “support for unlawful antisemitic harassment or violence”.The screening for “antisemitic” activity matches similar guidance given at US Citizenship and Immigration Services under the Department of Homeland Security and has been criticised as an effort to crack down on opposition to the conduct of Israel’s war in Gaza.The new state department checks are directed at students and other applicants for visas in the F, M and J categories, which refer to academic and vocational education, as well as cultural exchanges.“It is an expectation from American citizens that their government will make every effort to make our country safer, and that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing every single day,” said a senior state department official, adding that Marco Rubio was “helping to make America and its universities safer while bringing the state Department into the 21st century”.The Trump administration paused the issuance of new education visas late last month as it mulled new social media vetting strategies. The US had also targeted Chinese students for special scrutiny amid a tense negotiation over tariffs and the supply of rare-earth metals and minerals to the United States.The state department directive allowed diplomatic posts to resume the scheduling of interviews for educational and exchange visas, but added that consular officers would conduct a “comprehensive and thorough vetting” of all applicants applying for F, M and J visas.“To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M and J non-immigrant visas will be asked to adjust the privacy settings on all their social media profiles to ‘public’”, the official said. “The enhanced social media vetting will ensure we are properly screening every single person attempting to visit our country.” More

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      ‘Abducted by Ice’: the haunting missing-person posters plastered across LA

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      “Missing son.” “Missing father.” “Missing grandmother.”The words are written in bright red letters at the top of posters hanging on lampposts and storefronts around Los Angeles. At first glance, they appear to be from worried relatives seeking help from neighbors.But a closer look reveals that the missing people are immigrants to the US who have been disappeared by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Some of the faces are familiar to anyone who has been following the news – that missing father, for instance, is Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who was deported to El Salvador in March without a hearing, in what the Trump administration admitted was an error. “Abducted by Ice,” the poster reads, under a picture of Ábrego García with his small son. “Did not receive constitutional protections. Currently being held in detention.”The missing grandmother is Gladis Yolanda Chávez Pineda, a Chicago woman who was taken by Ice when she showed up for a check-in with immigration officials this month. She had arrived in the US seeking a better life for her daughter and was in the midst of applying for asylum. “Lived in the US for 10 years,” the poster states. “No criminal history.”View image in fullscreenThe missing son is Andry Hernández Romero, a makeup artist who fled persecution in Venezuela. On arrival in the US, he was detained, with US authorities claiming his tattoos indicated gang membership. His family and friends say that’s ridiculous. He was among hundreds of people deported to the El Salvador mega-prison known as Cecot in March. “Currently being held in a concentration camp,” the poster says.The posters are just a few examples of a campaign of quiet resistance on the streets of Los Angeles. On Monday, a walk down Sunset Boulevard in the historic Silver Lake neighborhood meant encountering an array of flyers, artwork and spray-painted messages of support for disappeared immigrants and fury at the administration.The “missing” posters, which have also appeared in other neighborhoods, were particularly effective. Duct-taped to telephone polls amid ads for comedy shows, guitar lessons and yard sales, they reminded passersby of the individual lives derailed by Trump’s immigration crackdown – instead of names in the news, these were families and friends who might have lived just down the road.View image in fullscreenHumanizing people’s stories was precisely the goal, said the creators behind the posters.“I just wanted to reframe this idea of immigrants as criminals, and put into perspective that these are people – this is someone’s grandmother, this is someone’s father, this is someone’s son,” said Ben*, the posters’ 28-year-old designer. He worked with his friend Sebastian*, 31, to distribute them around town.What began as a friends-and-family effort expanded after Ben shared the PDF: “I shared it with a few friends, then they shared it, and so it kind of just blew up.”For Sebastian, the issue was personal. “I moved here from Colombia 14 years ago, and ever since the first Trump administration, I’ve seen my community being attacked,” he said. “So as soon as I saw these posters that my friend was doing, that I felt something in me that needed to go out and help.”While they worked, “people started taking photos, and I had a moment with this one elderly woman where she was looking at it, and she really just started tearing up,” Ben said. “At that moment, I was like, ‘OK, this is actually connecting to people.’”The images have appeared in recent days as the city has become a focal point for protests against Trump’s immigration policies, which began on 6 June amid raids targeting immigrants at several locations in the city.As the protests emerged in parts of LA, Donald Trump called in the national guard without the governor’s consent – an action no president has taken since 1965. Shortly afterward, he summoned hundreds of marines. Much news coverage painted the city as a kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape, with protesters facing off against troops and cars on fire, fueling Trump’s narrative of a lawless city hopelessly embroiled in chaos.In fact, much of the unrest was confined to a small area of downtown LA. Across most of the vast city and county, life continued as normal, the sun shining over familiar traffic jams, studio lots and suburban sprawl. Still, the protests – and the federal government’s wildly disproportionate clampdown – served as a spark that has helped to fuel a national outcry, as well as this subtler demonstration of local solidarity.Alongside the “Missing” posters were a series of alternative descriptions of Ice – rather than Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, stenciled messages on the pavement and shop windows condemned “Illegal Country-wide Embarrassment”, “Institution of Child Endangerment” and the perhaps less clear “Insecure Confused Ejaculation”.View image in fullscreenOther flyers advertised Saturday’s “No Kings” protests, while still others noted that “Undocumented hands feed you”, with an illustration of a person working in a field. Those latter posters were created by Sydney*, 29, who works in the music industry in Los Angeles. Her 9-to-5 job makes it impossible to attend protests, she said, so creating this image was an alternative way to participate in resistance. “You read something tragic every morning lately about the Ice raids,” she said.She was particularly moved by the plight of agricultural workers, toiling for low wages under the threat of immigration crackdowns. “I just felt very compelled to speak up for them in places that people probably don’t think about them, like Silver Lake and the city,” she said. “I am Latina. I have many family members that came here and are immigrants, and so it just touches home for me.”Inspired by a slogan she saw in protest photos and Mexican decor flags, Sydney created the stylized image as a social media post. “I just wanted to tie something beautiful with something very political and loud,” she said. A friend saw the post, asked if she could print it out, and plastered it around town.That DIY approach adds to the posters’ power: there is a sense of neighbors helping neighbors. As the administration conjures a tale of a city in crisis, the images – unpretentious and haunting – serve as a reminder of what the protests are actually about.* The Guardian is withholding full names for privacy reasons More

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      Trump overseeing a ‘fascist regime’ says Brad Lander after arrest – US politics live

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      Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller and a mayoral candidate, has lashed out at Donald Trump and “his fascist regime”, after he was arrested on Tuesday by masked federal agents while visiting an immigration court and accompanying a person out of a courtroom.Posting on X, Lander wrote:
      We will all be worse off if we let Donald Trump and his fascist regime undermine the rule of law.
      Lander was arrested, according to video footage of the incident, as he and his staff walked with an immigrant – who he later identified as “Edgardo” – who had their case dismissed pending appeal earlier in the day, per AMNY.Lander can be seen and heard in videos of the incident asking the immigration officials if they have a judicial warrant. Additional footage of the arrest shows Lander telling the officials:
      I’m not obstructing. I’m standing right here in the hallway. I asked to see the judicial warrant.
      In a statement to the Guardian, assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin from the Department of Homeland Security said Lander “was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer”.Upon his release, Lander said he “certainly did not” assault an officer.In an interview with CNN after his arrest, Lander said:
      All I was trying to do was the things I had done [in] the prior two weeks of just accompany people out to safety. That was my goal today. I sure did not go with any intention of getting arrested.
      Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is expected to meet Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, for talks today. The meeting is expected to take place in the White House cabinet room at 1pm Washington time.It comes after India’s prime minister Narendra Modi told Trump late on Tuesday that a ceasefire between India and Pakistan after a four-day conflict in May was achieved through talks between the two militaries and not US mediation.Trump had said last month that the nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours agreed to a ceasefire after talks mediated by the US, and that the hostilities ended after he urged the countries to focus on trade instead of war.“PM Modi told President Trump clearly that during this period, there was no talk at any stage on subjects like India-US trade deal or US mediation between India and Pakistan,” Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri said in a press statement, according to Reuters.More on both of these stories in a moment, but first, here are some other developments:

      Israel’s war on Iran appeared to be approaching a pivotal moment on Tuesday night after five days of bombing and retaliatory Iranian missile strikes, as Donald Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and weighed his military options. Trump convened a meeting of his national security team in the White House situation room after a day of febrile rhetoric in which the president gave sharply conflicting signals over whether US forces would participate directly in Israel’s bombing campaign in Iran.

      An unlikely coalition of lawmakers has moved to prevent the president from involving US forces in the conflict without Congress’s approval. Republican congressman Thomas Massie, whose libertarian-tinged politics have often put him at odds with Trump, joined several progressive Democrats to introduce in the House of Representatives a war powers resolution that would require a vote by Congress before Trump could attack Iran. Democrat Tim Kaine has introduced companion legislation in the Senate.

      “Effective today, I am lifting the curfew in downtown Los Angeles,” the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon.

      A federal judge in Boston ruled that transgender and intersex people can obtain passports that align with their gender identity during litigation that seeks to overturn Trump’s executive order that US passports must conform to the sex citizens were assigned at birth.

      Ukrainian diplomats have been left frustrated – and in some cases embittered – at Donald Trump’s refusal to make Ukraine a priority after Volodymyr Zelenskyy flew 5,000 miles to the G7 conference in Canada only for the US president to return home the night before the two leaders were due to meet. Trump said he needed to focus on the Israel-Iran conflict.

      Donald Trump has abandoned his brief immigration and customs enforcement (Ice) reprieve for farm and hotel workers, ordering the agency’s raids in those sectors to resume after hardliners crushed a pause that lasted just four days.

      A federal appeals court in San Francisco heard arguments on Tuesday in Trump v Newsom, to determine whether the Trump administration must return control of the California national guard troops deployed to Los Angeles by Trump to the state’s governor during protests over federal immigration raids.

      Bernie Sanders has endorsed the leftwing New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in the latest boost to his insurgent campaign.
      As Donald Trump publicly threatens to join Israel in attacking Iran, an unlikely coalition of lawmakers has moved to prevent the president from involving US forces in the conflict without Congress’s approval.On Tuesday, Republican congressman Thomas Massie, whose libertarian-tinged politics have often put him at odds with Trump, joined with several progressive Democrats to introduce in the House of Representatives a war powers resolution that would require a vote by Congress before Trump could attack Iran. Democrat Tim Kaine has introduced companion legislation in the Senate.“This is not our war. But if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our constitution,” Massie wrote on X in announcing the resolution. Democrats Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez replied “signing on” to the tweet, while Massie’s office later announced that several others, including chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Greg Casar, would also sponsor the resolution.The resolutions’ introductions came hours after Trump left a G7 summit in Canada early to return to Washington DC and demand Iran’s “unconditional surrender” following days of Israeli airstrikes that have targeted its top military leaders and nuclear facilities.The White House later denied media reports circulating that the US had decided to become involved in the conflict, with spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer saying:
      American forces are maintaining their defensive posture, and that has not changed. We will defend American interests.
      However, US military aircraft and sea vessels have moved into the Middle East, and Iran’s deepest nuclear facilities are thought to be penetrable only by a bunker-busting bomb possessed by the US alone.The Federal Reserve wraps up its two-day policy meeting later today, with most analysts expecting that the central bank will leave its benchmark borrowing rate alone for the sixth straight meeting.Traders are now largely betting on the possibility of just one or maybe two cuts to interest rates this year by the Fed if any. That’s down from expectations of potentially six cuts, AP reports.A Fed policy statement and projections are expected at 2pm, followed by press conference by its chair Jerome Powell at 2.30pm.For context, US president Donald Trump has been putting pressure on Powell to cut interest rates in a bid to ‘supercharge’ the economy after his tariffs.Israel’s war on Iran appeared to be approaching a pivotal moment on Tuesday night after five days of bombing and retaliatory Iranian missile strikes, as Donald Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and weighed his military options.Trump convened a meeting of his national security team in the White House situation room after a day of febrile rhetoric in which the president gave sharply conflicting signals over whether US forces would participate directly in Israel’s bombing campaign over Iran.He told journalists in the morning that he expected the Iranian nuclear programme to be “wiped out” long before US intervention would be necessary. Later he took to his own social media platform, Truth Social, to suggest that the US had Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in its bomb-sights, and could make an imminent decision to take offensive action.“We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” Trump said. “But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin.”In a post a few minutes later, Trump bluntly demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”.It was not just Trump’s all-caps threats that triggered speculation that the US might join offensive operations. They were accompanied by the sudden forward deployment of US military aircraft to Europe and the Middle East, amid a general consensus that Iran’s deeply buried uranium enrichment facilities could prove impregnable without huge bunker-busting bombs that only the US air force possesses.“If Iran does not back down, complete destruction of Iranian nuclear programme is on the agenda, which Israel cannot achieve alone,” German chancellor Friedrich Merz told ZDF television a day after meeting Trump at the G7 summit in Canada.A federal appeals court on Tuesday seemed ready to keep Donald Trump in control of California national guard troops after they were deployed following protests in Los Angeles over immigration raids.Last week, a district court ordered the US president to return control of the guard to Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, who had opposed their deployment. US district judge Charles Breyer said Trump had deployed the Guard illegally and exceeded his authority. But the administration quickly appealed and a three-judge appellate panel temporarily paused that order.Tuesday’s hearing was about whether the order could take effect while the case makes its way through the courts, including possibly the supreme court.It’s the first time a US president has activated a state national guard without the governor’s permission since 1965, and the outcome of the case could have sweeping implications for Trump’s power to send soldiers into other US cities. Trump announced on 7 June that he was deploying the guard to Los Angeles to protect federal property following a protest at a downtown detention center after federal immigration agents arrested dozens of immigrants without legal status across the city. Newsom said Trump was only inflaming the situation and that troops were not necessary.In a San Francisco courtroom, all three judges, two appointed by Trump in his first term and one by Joe Biden, suggested that presidents have wide latitude under the federal law at issue and that courts should be reluctant to step in.“If we were writing on a blank slate, I would tend to agree with you,” Judge Jennifer Sung, a Biden appointee, told California’s lawyer, Samuel Harbourt, before pointing to a 200-year-old supreme court decision that she said seemed to give presidents the broad discretion Harbourt was arguing against.Even so, the judges did not appear to embrace arguments made by a justice department lawyer that courts could not even review Trump’s decision.It wasn’t clear how quickly the panel would rule.Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller and a mayoral candidate, has lashed out at Donald Trump and “his fascist regime”, after he was arrested on Tuesday by masked federal agents while visiting an immigration court and accompanying a person out of a courtroom.Posting on X, Lander wrote:
      We will all be worse off if we let Donald Trump and his fascist regime undermine the rule of law.
      Lander was arrested, according to video footage of the incident, as he and his staff walked with an immigrant – who he later identified as “Edgardo” – who had their case dismissed pending appeal earlier in the day, per AMNY.Lander can be seen and heard in videos of the incident asking the immigration officials if they have a judicial warrant. Additional footage of the arrest shows Lander telling the officials:
      I’m not obstructing. I’m standing right here in the hallway. I asked to see the judicial warrant.
      In a statement to the Guardian, assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin from the Department of Homeland Security said Lander “was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer”.Upon his release, Lander said he “certainly did not” assault an officer.In an interview with CNN after his arrest, Lander said:
      All I was trying to do was the things I had done [in] the prior two weeks of just accompany people out to safety. That was my goal today. I sure did not go with any intention of getting arrested.
      Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is expected to meet Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, for talks today. The meeting is expected to take place in the White House cabinet room at 1pm Washington time.It comes after India’s prime minister Narendra Modi told Trump late on Tuesday that a ceasefire between India and Pakistan after a four-day conflict in May was achieved through talks between the two militaries and not US mediation.Trump had said last month that the nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours agreed to a ceasefire after talks mediated by the US, and that the hostilities ended after he urged the countries to focus on trade instead of war.“PM Modi told President Trump clearly that during this period, there was no talk at any stage on subjects like India-US trade deal or US mediation between India and Pakistan,” Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri said in a press statement, according to Reuters.More on both of these stories in a moment, but first, here are some other developments:

      Israel’s war on Iran appeared to be approaching a pivotal moment on Tuesday night after five days of bombing and retaliatory Iranian missile strikes, as Donald Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and weighed his military options. Trump convened a meeting of his national security team in the White House situation room after a day of febrile rhetoric in which the president gave sharply conflicting signals over whether US forces would participate directly in Israel’s bombing campaign in Iran.

      An unlikely coalition of lawmakers has moved to prevent the president from involving US forces in the conflict without Congress’s approval. Republican congressman Thomas Massie, whose libertarian-tinged politics have often put him at odds with Trump, joined several progressive Democrats to introduce in the House of Representatives a war powers resolution that would require a vote by Congress before Trump could attack Iran. Democrat Tim Kaine has introduced companion legislation in the Senate.

      “Effective today, I am lifting the curfew in downtown Los Angeles,” the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon.

      A federal judge in Boston ruled that transgender and intersex people can obtain passports that align with their gender identity during litigation that seeks to overturn Trump’s executive order that US passports must conform to the sex citizens were assigned at birth.

      Ukrainian diplomats have been left frustrated – and in some cases embittered – at Donald Trump’s refusal to make Ukraine a priority after Volodymyr Zelenskyy flew 5,000 miles to the G7 conference in Canada only for the US president to return home the night before the two leaders were due to meet. Trump said he needed to focus on the Israel-Iran conflict.

      Donald Trump has abandoned his brief immigration and customs enforcement (Ice) reprieve for farm and hotel workers, ordering the agency’s raids in those sectors to resume after hardliners crushed a pause that lasted just four days.

      A federal appeals court in San Francisco heard arguments on Tuesday in Trump v Newsom, to determine whether the Trump administration must return control of the California national guard troops deployed to Los Angeles by Trump to the state’s governor during protests over federal immigration raids.

      Bernie Sanders has endorsed the leftwing New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in the latest boost to his insurgent campaign. More

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      Appeals court likely to keep Trump in control of national guard deployed in LA

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      A federal appeals court on Tuesday seemed ready to keep Donald Trump in control of California national guard troops after they were deployed following protests in Los Angeles over immigration raids.Last week, a district court ordered the US president to return control of the guard to Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, who had opposed their deployment. US district judge Charles Breyer said Trump had deployed the Guard illegally and exceeded his authority. But the administration quickly appealed and a three-judge appellate panel temporarily paused that order.Tuesday’s hearing was about whether the order could take effect while the case makes its way through the courts, including possibly the supreme court.It’s the first time a US president has activated a state national guard without the governor’s permission since 1965, and the outcome of the case could have sweeping implications for Trump’s power to send soldiers into other US cities. Trump announced on 7 June that he was deploying the guard to Los Angeles to protect federal property following a protest at a downtown detention center after federal immigration agents arrested dozens of immigrants without legal status across the city. Newsom said Trump was only inflaming the situation and that troops were not necessary.In a San Francisco courtroom, all three judges, two appointed by Trump in his first term and one by Joe Biden, suggested that presidents have wide latitude under the federal law at issue and that courts should be reluctant to step in.“If we were writing on a blank slate, I would tend to agree with you,” Judge Jennifer Sung, a Biden appointee, told California’s lawyer, Samuel Harbourt, before pointing to a 200-year-old supreme court decision that she said seemed to give presidents the broad discretion Harbourt was arguing against.Even so, the judges did not appear to embrace arguments made by a justice department lawyer that courts could not even review Trump’s decision.It wasn’t clear how quickly the panel would rule.Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, opened the hearing by asking whether the courts have a role in reviewing the president’s decision to call up the national guard. Brett Shumate, an attorney for the federal government, said they did not.“The statute says the president may call on federal service members and units of the Guard of any state in such numbers that he considers necessary,” Shumate said, adding that the statute “couldn’t be any more clear”.Shumate made several references to “mob violence” in describing ongoing protests in Los Angeles. But mayor Karen Bass lifted a curfew for downtown Los Angeles Tuesday, saying acts of vandalism and violence that prompted her curfew a week ago had subsided.“It is essential that this injunction be stayed, otherwise, lives and property will be at risk,” Shumate said.Harbourt argued that the federal government didn’t inform Newsom of the decision to deploy the guard. He said the Trump administration hasn’t shown that they considered “more modest measures to the extreme response of calling in the national guard and militarizing the situation”.Harbourt told the panel that not upholding Breyer’s ruling would “defy our constitutional traditions of preserving state sovereignty, of providing judicial review for the legality of executive action, of safeguarding our cherished rights to political protest”.Breyer’s order applied only to the national guard troops and not the marines, who were also deployed to LA but were not yet on the streets when he ruled.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNewsom’s lawsuit accused Trump of inflaming tensions, breaching state sovereignty and wasting resources just when guard members need to be preparing for wildfire season. He also called the federal takeover of the state’s national guard “illegal and immoral”.Newsom said in advance of the hearing that he was confident in the rule of law.“I’m confident that common sense will prevail here: the US military belongs on the battlefield, not on American streets,” Newsom said in a statement.Breyer ruled the Trump violated the use of title 10, which allows the president to call the national guard into federal service when the country “is invaded”, when “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government,” or when the president is unable “to execute the laws of the United States”.Breyer, an appointee of former president Bill Clinton, said the definition of a rebellion was not met.“The protests in Los Angeles fall far short of ‘rebellion,’” he wrote. “Individuals’ right to protest the government is one of the fundamental rights protected by the First Amendment, and just because some stray bad actors go too far does not wipe out that right for everyone.”The national guard hasn’t been activated without a governor’s permission since 1965, when President Lyndon B Johnson sent troops to protect a civil rights march in Alabama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. 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      New York City mayoral candidate Brad Lander arrested at immigration court

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      Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller and a mayoral candidate, was arrested on Tuesday by masked federal agents while visiting an immigration court and accompanying a person out of a courtroom.In a statement to the Guardian, assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin from the Department of Homeland Security said Lander “was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer”.Upon his release, Lander said he “certainly did not” assault an officer.Lander appeared at 26 Federal Plaza to observe immigration hearings involving individuals marked for potential deportation.He told an Associated Press reporter that he was there to “accompany” some immigrants out of the building. Tuesday’s trip to an immigration court was Lander’s third over the last month.He was arrested, according to video footage of the incident, as he and his staff walked with an immigrant – who Lander later identified as “Edgardo” – who had their case dismissed pending appeal earlier in the day, per AMNY.Lander can be seen and heard in videos of the incident asking the immigration officials if they have a judicial warrant. Additional footage of the arrest shows Lander telling the officials: “I’m not obstructing. I’m standing right here in the hallway. I asked to see the judicial warrant.Lander appears to be holding on to Edgardo’s shoulder as the officials move him towards an elevator.“I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant,” says Lander. The officials, two of whom were wearing masks, then pinned Lander to a wall and put him in handcuffs.“You don’t have the authority to arrest US citizens asking for a judicial warrant,” Lander can be heard saying.Immigration lawyers told the New York Times that officials do not need judicial warrants to make arrests in immigration courts because they are public spaces.Lander’s wife posted an update on her husband’s Twitter/X account less than an hour after the incident.“Hi, this is Meg Barnette, Brad’s wife,” she wrote, adding: “While escorting a defendant out of immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza, Brad was taken by masked agents and detained by ICE. This is still developing, and our team is monitoring the situation closely.”In a news conference after the arrest, Barnette said she was “extraordinarily proud” of her husband and called the ordeal “shocking and unacceptable”.Masked agents from several federal agencies were seen lining the halls of 26 Federal Plaza on Tuesday morning, including Ice, Enforcement and Removal Operations, the FBI and the treasury department, according to reporters on the scene from the City.Video and news of the arrest made the rounds on social media.Zohran Mamdani, a mayoral candidate who also cross-endorsed Lander, called out the arrest on X: “This is fascism and all New Yorkers must speak in one voice. Release him now.”Julia Salazar, a New York state senator, called the arrest “more evidence that Ice agents are flagrantly breaking the law”.“[Lander] knows his rights, and he was speaking up for the rights of others. Ice agents responded by unlawfully arresting him and refusing to answer basic questions,” she said.Andrew Cuomo, former New York governor and Lander’s mayoral opponent, wrote on X that the arrest is “the latest example of the extreme thuggery of Trump’s ICE out of control – one can only imagine the fear families across our country feel when confronted with ICE. Fear of separation, fear of being taken from their schools, fear of being detained without just cause. This is not who we are. This must stop, and it must stop now.”Mamdani also appeared at the aforementioned pop-up press conference that Barnette spoke at, telling the crowd: “We have to be clear that, in [Lander’s] ask and in their response, we saw that Icehas no interest in the law, it has no interest in order.“[Ice] only has an interest in terrorizing people across this country. In this exact moment, New Yorkers and Americans are looking to leaders to meet this moment, to showcase the courage that is necessary,” he said, before adding:“This is not about an election. This is about ensuring that we protect the city and the country that we love. This is about ensuring that immigrant New Yorkers who come here for regular check-ins do not need to fear being separated from their families in the most brutal and cruel ways imaginable. We know that today’s arrest is but one example of what Ice is doing every single day across this country.”A demonstration broke out outside 26 Federal Plaza on Tuesday afternoon, with a crowd of supporters shouting “free Brad Lander”.Protesters held up placards saying “fascist minion” and “immigrants are New York” while surrounded by a tight cordon of police and metal barricades. Public entry to the building was closed despite it being a public building.New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, called the arrest “bullshit” on social media and to reporters. She later said in a news conference that the charges against Lander had been dropped late on Tuesday afternoon.“To my knowledge, there are no charges. The charges have been dropped. He walked out of there a free man,” she said.Upon his release, Lander said at the same news conference that he was “just fine” and only “lost a button”. He went on to add that this was not the case for Edgardo, the man who’s arrest he was challenging.“Edgardo is in Ice detention and he’s not going to sleep in his bed tonight. So far as I know, he has no lawyer. He has been stripped of his due process rights,” Lander said, later adding: “We are normalizing family separation. We are normalizing due process rights violations. We are normalizing the destruction of constitutional democracy, and we’re not going to stand by and let it happen.”Lander’s arrest comes as federal immigration officials continue to make arrests outside immigration courtrooms across the US. As the Guardian reported on Sunday, between early January, right before the inauguration, and June, there has been an 807% increase in the arrest of immigrants with no criminal record.The arrest also bore similarities to that of Alex Padilla, a Democratic California senator and vocal critic of the Trump administration’s immigration polices, who was forcibly removed and handcuffed as he attempted to ask a question at a press conference held by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, in Los Angeles last week.Much like the criticism of Lander’s arrest, Padilla’s arrest was widely lambasted, with Kamala Harris, the former vice-president, calling the incident “a shameful and stunning abuse of power”.Lander’s arrest was also just one week before the Democratic primary for mayor. His opponents include Cuomo, Mamdani, Adrienne Adams, Scott Stringer, Michael Blake and others. Along with Mamdani, Hochul, Stringer, Blake and Adams showed up to support Lander at the site where he was arrested.Hochul was later seen inside 26 Federal Plaza seeking answers from Ice about the arrest.“How long is this going to take, I don’t think he has a long rap sheet,” she reportedly said to agents.Ed Pilkington contributed reporting More