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

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

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      How refugees have helped save these midwestern cities: ‘That’s really something we celebrate’

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      At a time in life when many are winding down, Gunash Akhmedova, aged 65, fulfilled a lifelong dream of opening her first business.A member of the Ahiska, or Meskhetian, Turk community who came to the US as a refugee from western Russia in 2005, Akhmedova opened Gunash’s Mediterranean Cusine two years ago on the site of a converted freight house alongside other international food vendors in a formerly industrial corner of Dayton, Ohio.Akhmedova is one of several thousand Ahiska Turks to have moved to Dayton over the past 15 years. In that time, the new community has bought and rebuilt dozens of homes in blighted parts of the city, turning them into thriving neighborhoods replete with Turkish restaurants, community centers and a wrestling club.While in Utah, where Akhmedova was first resettled by the US government, she found her opportunities were limited to dish washing and cooking at retirement homes and hospitals. Here in Ohio, her longstanding goals have been realized.“We Turkish people are all cooks, from a young age,” she says. “I saw that here, there is a lot of opportunities to do something that you like.”While cities such as New York, Miami and Los Angeles have long enjoyed the diversity of life and economic growth fueled by refugees and immigrants, recent years have seen smaller, more homogeneous towns in so-called “flyover states” transformed into vibrant, growing communities thanks to immigrants.Ohio’s foreign-born population has grown by 30% over the last decade, helping to offset a decades-long population decline that was fueled by the offshoring of manufacturing and the Great Recession of 2008. Neighboring Kentucky resettled more refugees per capita than any other state in 2023, where between 2021 and 2023 their numbers grew from 670 to 2,520.In places such as Springfield, Ohio; Logansport, Indiana; and beyond, refugees and immigrants have stepped in to fill critical entry-level jobs such as packaging and manufacturing, the demand for which locals find themselves unwilling or unable to meet.In Owensboro, a town of 60,000 people in western Kentucky, hundreds of Afghan refugees and humanitarian parolees have brought a diversity to the area not previously seen. There, three refugees ran a restaurant serving central Asian food for several years out of a diner whose owners allowed them to use their facilities. In 2023, the restaurant, called Pamir Afghan Cuisine and since closed, was voted the best international restaurant in town.In Lexington, nearly 2,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine and elsewhere have brought diverse vibrancy to a city formerly mostly known for horses and whiskey.Refugees are people unable or unwilling to return to their country of nationality due to the threat of persecution or war. According to the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, there are roughly 36.8 million refugees around the world, and despite the US being the world’s second-richest country based on purchasing power parity, the number of refugees being admitted has been falling since the beginning of the program, in 1980.Similar experiences are playing out in Indianapolis, a city that saw years of population and economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, it finds itself home to the largest Burmese community in the US, a haven for more than 30,000 immigrants from the south-east Asian country who have fled the Myanmar military regime’s decades-long crackdown on democracy activists and minority religions.“Indiana is at the crossroads of America, where a lot of logistics and manufacturing companies are located. Those jobs are readily available for refugees,” says Elaisa Vahnie, who heads the Burmese American Community Institute in Indianapolis, an organization helping refugees and immigrants from the country adapt to life in Indiana.“There’s also around 150 small businesses – insurance and real estate companies, restaurants, housing developers – run by Burmese people in central Indiana.”Since 2011, the Burmese American Community Institute has helped more than 17,000 people adjust to life in the midwest, and has even driven up college attendance rates among young Burmese Americans. About 40% of the community in Indiana was initially resettled elsewhere in the US but moved to the midwestern state due to family connections and job opportunities.Data from the US Census Bureau shows that 70% of Indiana’s population growth in 2024 was due to international immigration, driving the largest population growth the state has seen in nearly two decades.However, like in 2017, these communities find themselves facing a host of new immigration restrictions and controls introduced by the Trump administration.This month, the White House barred entry to the US by citizens of Myanmar, Afghanistan and 10 other countries, in order to, it claims, “protect the nation from foreign terrorist and other national security and public safety threats”.“We have heard that church pastors, family members, friends and those who have been planning to visit find themselves in a very sudden situation. The community here has been impacted already,” says Vahnie.A refugee who fled Myanmar due to persecution for his pro-democracy advocacy, Vahnie has recently been to Washington DC to canvass state department officials and congressional staffers to end the travel ban.“If this ban continues, the impact will not just be on Burmese Americans. The United States is a leader of global freedom, human rights and democracy. It’s in our best interest to invest in the people of Burma. We need to carefully think through this, and I hope the administration will consider lifting the ban as quickly as possible,” he says.Last year, more than 100,000 people entered the US as refugees. On 27 January, the newly inaugurated Trump administration suspended the country’s entire refugee program due to what the White House called the US’s inability “to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities”.But many community leaders don’t see it that way.“I respectfully disagree with the idea that we are not able to take legal migrants,” says Vahnie.“After 20 to 25 years of welcoming Burmese people here, they bring a high educational performance, economic contribution and diversity to enrich Indiana. That’s really something we celebrate.”Born in Uzbekistan, Akhmedova saw first-hand the ethnic violence that affected her community during the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. She and her family fled to the Krasnodar region of western Russia, where her community again faced attacks and discrimination.She moved from Utah to Dayton in 2017 to be nearer to family.“I was always dreaming about [opening a restaurant] to show my culture, my food, my attitude,” she says.“Ninety-nine per cent of people tell me they’ve never eaten this kind of food.” More

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      Trump’s tax bill seeks to prevent AI regulations. Experts fear a heavy toll on the planet

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      US Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world’s dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned.About 1bn tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry’s enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian.This 10-year timeframe, a period of time in which Republicans want a “pause” of state-level regulations upon AI, will see so much electricity use in data centers for AI purposes that the US will add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than Japan does annually, or three times the yearly total from the UK.The exact amount of emissions will depend on power plant efficiency and how much clean energy will be used in the coming years, but the blocking of regulations will also be a factor, said Gianluca Guidi, visiting scholar at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.“By limiting oversight, it could slow the transition away from fossil fuels and reduce incentives for more energy-efficient AI energy reliance,” Guidi said.“We talk a lot about what AI can do for us, but not nearly enough about what it’s doing to the planet. If we’re serious about using AI to improve human wellbeing, we can’t ignore the growing toll it’s taking on climate stability and public health.”Donald Trump has vowed that the US will become “the world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto” and has set about sweeping aside guardrails around AI development and demolishing rules limiting greenhouse gas pollution.The “big beautiful” reconciliation bill passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives would bar states from adding their own regulations upon AI and the GOP-controlled Senate is poised to pass its own version doing likewise.Unrestricted AI use is set to deal a sizable blow to efforts to tackle the climate crisis, though, by causing surging electricity use from a US grid still heavily reliant upon fossil fuels such as gas and coal. AI is particularly energy-hungry – one ChatGPT query needs about 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query.Carbon emissions from data centers in the US have tripled since 2018, with an upcoming Harvard research paper finding that the largest “hyperscale” centers now account for 2% of all US electricity use.“AI is going to change our world,” Manu Asthana, chief executive of the PJM Interconnection, the US largest grid, has predicted. Asthana estimated that almost all future increase in electricity demand will come from data centers, adding the equivalent of 20m new homes to the grid in the next five years.The explosive growth of AI has, meanwhile, worsened the recent erosion in climate commitments made by big tech companies. Last year, Google admitted that its greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 48% since 2019 due to its own foray into AI, meaning that “reducing emissions may be challenging” as AI further takes hold.Proponents of AI, and some researchers, have argued that advances in AI will aid the climate fight by increasing efficiencies in grid management and other improvements. Others are more skeptical. “That is just a greenwashing maneuver, quite transparently,” said Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. “There have been some absolutely nonsense things said about this. Big tech is mortgaging the present for a future that will never come.”While no state has yet placed specific green rules upon AI, they may look to do so given cuts to federal environmental regulations, with state lawmakers urging Congress to rethink the ban. “If we were expecting any rule-making at the federal level around data centers it’s surely off the table now,” said Hanna. “It’s all been quite alarming to see.”Republican lawmakers are undeterred, however. The proposed moratorium cleared a major hurdle over the weekend when the Senate parliamentarian decided that the proposed ban on state and local regulation of AI can remain in Trump’s tax and spending mega-bill. The Texas senator Ted Cruz, the Republican who chairs the Senate committee on commerce, science and transportation, changed the language to comply with the Byrd Rule, which prohibits “extraneous matters” from being included in such spending bills.The provision now refers to a “temporary pause” on regulation instead of a moratorium. It also includes a $500m addition to a grant program to expand access to broadband internet across the country, preventing states from receiving those funds if they attempt to regulate AI.The proposed AI regulation pause has provoked widespread concern from Democrats. The Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, a climate hawk, says he has prepared an amendment to strip the “dangerous” provision from the bill.“The rapid development of artificial intelligence is already impacting our environment, raising energy prices for consumers, straining our grid’s ability to keep the lights on, draining local water supplies, spewing toxic pollution in communities, and increasing climate emissions,” Markey told the Guardian.“However, instead of allowing states to protect the public and our planet, Republicans want to ban them from regulating AI for 10 years. It is shortsighted and irresponsible.”The Massachusetts congressman Jake Auchincloss has also called the proposal “a terrible idea and an unpopular idea”.“I think we have to realize that AI is going to suffuse in rapid order many dimensions of healthcare, media, entertainment, education, and to just proscribe any regulation of AI in any use case for the next decade is unbelievably reckless,” he said.Some Republicans have also come out against the provision, including the Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn and the Missouri senator Josh Hawley. An amendment to remove the pause from the bill would require the support of at least four Republican senators to pass.Hawley is said to be willing to introduce an amendment to remove the provision later this week if it is not eliminated beforehand.Earlier this month, the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene admitted she had missed the provision in the House version of the bill, and that she would not have backed the legislation if she had seen it. The far-right House Freedom caucus, of which Greene is a member, has also come out against the AI regulation pause. More

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      A socialist underdog makes history in New York – podcast

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      Archive: CBS News, CBS New York, PBS Newshour, Eyewitness News ABC7NY, Fox 5 New York, MSNBC, NBC News, CNN, Newsweek, PIX11 News
      Here’s a link to Carter Sherman’s new book The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future
      Subscribe to the Guardian’s new narrative series Missing in the Amazon
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
      Help support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politcspodus More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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      Bill Moyers, Lyndon Johnson press chief and celebrated broadcaster, dies at 91

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      Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary who became one of television’s most honored journalists, masterfully using a visual medium to illuminate a world of ideas, died on Thursday at age 91.Moyers died in a New York City hospital, according to longtime friend Tom Johnson, the former chief executive of CNN and an assistant to Moyers during Lyndon B Johnson’s administration.Moyers’ son William said his father died at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York after a “long illness”.Moyers’ career ranged from youthful Baptist minister to deputy director of the Peace Corps, from Johnson’s press secretary to newspaper publisher, senior news analyst for CBS Evening News and chief correspondent for CBS Reports.But it was for public television that Moyers produced some of TV’s most cerebral and provocative series. In hundreds of hours of PBS programs, he proved at home with subjects ranging from government corruption to modern dance, from drug addiction to media consolidation, from religion to environmental abuse.In 1988, Moyers produced The Secret Government about the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, and simultaneously published a book under the same name. Around that time, he galvanized viewers with Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a series of six one-hour interviews with the prominent religious scholar. The accompanying book became a bestseller.His televised chats with poet Robert Bly almost single-handedly launched the 1990s Men’s Movement, and his 1993 series Healing and the Mind had a profound impact on the medical community and on medical education.In a medium that supposedly abhors “talking heads” – shots of subject and interviewer talking – Moyers came to specialize in just that. He once explained why: “The question is, are the talking heads thinking minds and thinking people? Are they interesting to watch? I think the most fascinating production value is the human face.”Demonstrating what someone called “a soft, probing style” in the native Texas accent he never lost, Moyers was a humanist who investigated the world with a calm, reasoned perspective, whatever the subject.From some quarters, he was blasted as a liberal thanks to his links with Johnson and public television, as well as his no-holds-barred approach to investigative journalism. It was a label he didn’t necessarily deny.“I’m an old-fashion liberal when it comes to being open and being interested in other people’s ideas,” he said during a 2004 radio interview. But Moyers preferred to term himself a “citizen journalist” operating independently, outside the establishment.Public television (and his self-financed production company) gave him free rein to throw “the conversation of democracy open to all comers”, he said in a 2007 interview with the Associated Press.“I think my peers in commercial television are talented and devoted journalists,” he said another time, “but they’ve chosen to work in a corporate mainstream that trims their talent to fit the corporate nature of American life. And you do not get rewarded for telling the hard truths about America in a profit-seeking environment.”Over the years, Moyers was showered with honors, including more than 30 Emmys, 11 George Foster Peabody awards, three George Polks and, twice, the Alfred I duPont-Columbia University Gold Baton award for career excellence in broadcast journalism. In 1995, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.Born in Hugo, Oklahoma, on 5 June 1934, Billy Don Moyers was the son of a dirt farmer-truck driver who soon moved his family to Marshall, Texas. High school led him into journalism.“I wanted to play football, but I was too small. But I found that by writing sports in the school newspaper, the players were always waiting around at the newsstand to see what I wrote,” he recalled.He worked for the Marshall News Messenger at age 16. Deciding that Bill Moyers was a more appropriate byline for a sportswriter, he dropped the Y from his name.He graduated from the University of Texas and earned a master’s in divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was ordained and preached part time at two churches but later decided his call to the ministry “was a wrong number”.His relationship with Johnson began when he was in college; he wrote to the then senator offering to work in his 1954 re-election campaign. Johnson was impressed and hired him for a summer job. He was back in Johnson’s employ as a personal assistant in the early 1960s and for two years, he worked at the Peace Corps, eventually becoming deputy director.On the day John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Moyers was in Austin helping with the presidential trip. He flew back to Washington on Air Force One with newly sworn-in President Johnson, for whom he held various jobs over the ensuing years, including press secretary.Moyers’ stint as presidential press secretary was marked by efforts to mend the deteriorating relationship between Johnson and the media. But the Vietnam war took its toll and Moyers resigned in December 1966.Of his departure from the White House, he wrote later: “We had become a war government, not a reform government, and there was no creative role left for me under those circumstances.” More