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      Several people arrested at anti-Ice protest outside NYC immigration court

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      Several protesters outside New York City’s 26 Federal Plaza government building were arrested on Friday for disorderly conduct, with demonstrators accusing the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency of operating a covert detention facility there, according to several reports.Protesters marched to the largest federal immigration courthouse in Manhattan on Friday morning and chanted outside the building. Demonstrators demanded access to the site, which was denied, and they later held a sit-in outside the courthouse, according to ABC7.Within a few minutes the New York City police department moved in to arrest some of the protesters for disorderly conduct, according to reports, as activists could be seen blocking the street.“No fear, no hate, no Ice in our state!” chanted demonstrators during their march to the site, where Ice agents routinely detain immigrants after immigration court proceedings, in a move that goes against previously normal practice.Demonstrators allege detainees are being held in overcrowded conditions without many basic amenities or legal access at 26 Federal Plaza’s 10th floor, where the agency denies it detains people, and are demanding unrestricted access for elected officials, journalists and faith leaders. Friday’s protest was one of several in the city this week.Last month, footage from inside 26 Federal Plaza shared by the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) showed two dozen men in bare rooms, some lying on the floor with emergency blankets and with few basic provisions.“Just to be a presence, we’re here to say that the American people are opposed to these kinds of policies. And for Ice agents, maybe that will lead some of them to reconsider their career choice,” Jeffrey Courter, the chair of the Justice Ministries Committee of the Presbytery of New York City, told ABC7.Authorities insist the facility is only a processing center.Lawmakers have been denied access to the site. In June, Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, was arrested while escorting an immigrant from a hearing.Several groups, including the grassroots protest movement known as 50501 and NYIC, as well as faith-based groups, were present at the protest.Courthouse detentions have become a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown, which aims to arrest 3,000 people daily. Reports from cities including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Chicago and El Paso, Texas, describe routine court appearances devolving into tense encounters. A newly filed class-action lawsuit seeks to ban the practice of making Ice arrests at immigration courthouses. More

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      US court tosses judge’s contempt order over Trump’s El Salvador deportations

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      An appeals court on Friday tossed out a judge’s finding of contempt against the Trump administration in a case over the notorious deportations of Venezuelans from the US to an El Salvador prison without due process.The decision from a divided three-judge panel based in the nation’s capital vacates a finding from US district judge James Boasberg.Boasberg found in April there was probable cause to hold Donald Trump’s administration in criminal contempt of court for willfully disregarding his 15 March order barring the deportations to El Salvador of more than 250 Venezuelans from immigration detention in the US to a brutal prison in the Central American country, under an agreement with the Salvadorian leadership, without the chance to challenge their removals. The Trump administration appealed.On Friday, Washington DC circuit judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both of whom were nominated by Trump in his first term in the White House, concurred with the unsigned majority opinion. Judge Cornelia Pillard, who was appointed by Barack Obama when he was president, dissented.View image in fullscreenBoasberg had accused Trump administration officials of rushing deportees out of the country under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act before they could challenge their removal in court and then willfully disregarding his order that planes already in the air should return to the US.The Republican administration has denied violating his order.“The district court’s order raises troubling questions about judicial control over core executive functions like the conduct of foreign policy and the prosecution of criminal offenses,” circuit judge Katsas wrote in an opinion.The Trump administration claimed that all the Venezuelans it removed to El Salvador outside the normal constitutional process were violent gang members, which many of the deportees denied and critics said, regardless of any of the individuals’ criminal guilt or innocence, did not justify denying them due process in the US.The episode has been one of the most high-profile of the second Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda, in addition to widespread raids and arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers in communities across the country.“The district court’s order attempts to control the Executive Branch’s conduct of foreign affairs, an area in which a court’s power is at its lowest ebb,” Rao wrote.Pillard dissented. “The majority does an exemplary judge a grave disservice by overstepping its bounds to upend his effort to vindicate the judicial authority that is our shared trust,” she wrote.The 250 migrants have since been released back to their home country in a prisoner swap with the US after months at the mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot).The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, celebrated the appeals court ruling, calling it a “MAJOR victory defending President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act” in a social media post and vowing to “continue fighting and WINNING in court”.Lee Gelernt, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who represented the migrants, said there was “zero ambiguity” in Boasberg’s order about the planes.“We strongly disagree with today’s decision regarding contempt and are considering all options going forward,” he said.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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      The more James Gunn’s Superman is a hit, the more the right will want its own Dean Cain of steel

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      It’s almost impossible to divide superheroes along political lines. Captain America might seem like a patriotic, commie-bashing lunatic, as he was in the 1950s comics during the McCarthy era, until you remember that he has also spent much of his fictional career telling corrupt government agencies to shove it. And, in the Marvel Comic Universe, at least, he went on the run rather than sign up for an authoritarian superhero registry. Superman was once the square-jawed poster boy for US exceptionalism, cheerfully posing on propaganda comic covers urging readers to buy war bonds, but he’s also been written as a Kansas farm boy so suspicious of concentrated power that in one storyline he renounced his citizenship to avoid being used as a pawn of US foreign policy.Bar a few outliers – Iron Man cheerleading the military-industrial complex in his earliest comics springs to mind – trying to pin a superhero to one side of the political spectrum is like trying to staple fog: most of DC and Marvel’s big beasts will drift wherever the story, or the writer’s mortgage payments, takes them. Which is why it’s been so bizarre watching the right’s disgust as a vaguely woke man of steel drives all before him at the summer box office.James Gunn’s Superman passed the half-billion-dollar mark globally this week, which hardly means we’re looking at a film to mirror the success of the early comic book movie era – Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice somehow made $874m, for chrissakes – but does at least indicate that audiences quite like this new, down-to-earth, kindly and human take on Kal-El. Gunn is now producing next Wonder Woman.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, on the dystopian side of the news cycle, Dean Cain has declared himself primed and ready to join Donald Trump’s Ice agency. Cain (Kal-El in 90s TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman) only recently declared his horror at how “woke” the new David Corenswet Supes has turned out to be. Are these two things connected? Is Cain trying to make the point that a real “superman” would be standing at America’s borders, demanding paperwork from asylum seekers and Frisbeeing their lunch into the nearest bin, rather than attempting to stop evil invaders from terrorising a rival nation (as Corenswet does in Superman)?It’s almost as if, in the absence of the kind of superhero movies Cain would like to see muscle their way into multiplexes, the actor sees it as his patriotic duty to bring hard-border fiction into reality. If the 74 million who voted for Trump don’t want these woke Marvel and DC superhero movies, and would really rather see films in which caped crusaders defend gated communities against suspiciously accented delivery drivers, isn’t Hollywood missing a trick? Isn’t there – somewhere – a gap in the market, or perhaps an alternative reality – Earth 45? Earth-Fox News? – where filmgoers queue around the block to watch Captain Constitution and the Stand Your Ground Squad, and the Hollywood trades wax lyrical about a new blockbuster era of paranoia and punitive zoning laws?The right has tried this already, of course. Cain was also pretty upset about Disney’s recent “woke” Snow White remake, perhaps because the princess didn’t spend the runtime pining for a man or whistling while she ironed. And so was conservative media outfit the Daily Wire, which at the height of the backlash against Rachel Zegler’s casting made a trailer for a then-forthcoming rival film titled Snow White and the Evil Queen.Plot details were thin on the ground, but presumably involved the heroine abandoning woodland animals for a concealed-carry permit and learning the value of hard work by running her own small business into the ground without government subsidies. We’ll never really know because the film appears to have been quietly cancelled, leaving a potential audience of millions bereft of the chance to see what happens when you trade magic mirrors for voter ID checkpoints.View image in fullscreenPerhaps the lesson here is that it’s just really difficult to make dreamy-eyed fantasy flicks that double as Breitbart comment threads. And it’s not just superhero movies that would creak under the strain. Imagine Star Wars if rebellions were built not on hope but on stricter border controls and mandatory midichlorian checks. Would The Lord of the Rings have really been quite the same if all those ’orrible orcs and trolls had been replaced on the battlefield by desperate migrants trying to reach the Shire, being enthusiastically biffed by an over-xcited Aragorn and Gimli counting down the number of “illegals” they just tonked?Sooner or later, someone’s going to make a superhero film or TV series that gives the Maga crowd everything: a caped crusader who fights windfarms, sues the Daily Planet for libel and pays for everything in gold bullion or crypto. (The Boys got close at times: Homelander is basically what happens when you cross Captain America with a Trump rally and a gallon of unpasteurised milk, but he was hardly a hero – and perhaps that’s the point.)Until then, the culture warriors will have to settle for grumbling about woke elves and lady Thor while the rest of us watch Superman save the world from the nastiest supervillains in the universe without checking anyone’s passport. More

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      Stephen Colbert on JD Vance’s water level raising: ‘Insane spoiled baby emperor move’

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      Late-night hosts took aim at JD Vance over his unusual birthday demand and Donald Trump over his disastrous tariffs.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert called it “a significant day for our economy” with Trump’s controversial tariffs finally kicking in. He said it’s a day to “set your clocks back to more expensive” with import taxes now the highest they’ve been since the Great Depression.Colbert said it’s “never a great sign to be compared to the worst thing ever”.Tariffs on certain countries are lower if negotiations have been successful or “if the president’s mad at you they can be much higher”.This week saw Apple announce $100bn worth of additional investment in the US, but there is a smaller pool of American workers with the skills necessary to make an iPhone. “I believe America’s children can do anything!” Colbert joked.The company’s CEO, Tim Cook, was filmed this week in the Oval Office giving Trump a gift which was partly made of 24-carat gold. Colbert called it “lavish corporate bottom-smooching”.In the same press opportunity, Trump again slammed Colbert for having “no talent” but did concede that he has better ratings than Kimmel or Fallon, whom he said also had no talent. “We’re all equally untalented,” Colbert said, before adding: “Thank you for watching, sir.”Colbert said that while we are “plunging headfirst into techno-feudalism”, the Secret Service is busy raising the water level of an Ohio river for Vance’s family boat trip to celebrate his birthday. He called it an “insane spoiled baby emperor move”.Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers said that Trump “clearly has no interest in doing the job of president” and doesn’t “know or care what his own administration is doing on a daily basis”.He is too busy renovating the White House with plans revealed this week for a new $200m ballroom decked out in gold. Trump has said it’s important as there hasn’t been a president like him who has been good at ballrooms before.Meyers commented that it’s “never been a problem that our presidents weren’t good at ballrooms”.To show how little Trump knows about the day-to-day, he played a clip just after the US illegally bombed Iran in which he was told by a reporter that the intelligence community said it had no evidence that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon, which the president called false.This week when he was asked about Robert F Kennedy Jr’s decision to cancel $500m in contracts for vaccine development, he also appeared confused. “For a guy who watches cable news all day, you sure seem caught off-guard by the news,” Meyers said.There are also plans to put a nuclear reactor on the moon, a decision bragged about on Fox News with claims that “Trump doesn’t play by the rules”. Meyers admitted that this is true as at Nasa, rule No 1 is “don’t blow up the moon”.Ignoring the inflation that’s ballooning thanks in part to Trump’s tariffs, the administration is instead having to deal with the fallout of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump “flew into a rage again” after being asked about it this week.It’s still proving to be “explosive for Trump and his Maga base” and so this week a dinner was planned on Epstein strategy involving high-ranking loyalists. Nothing like a “secretive cabal” of powerful people to settle the conspiracy theorists, Meyers noted.It was reportedly planned by Vance, whom Trump threw under the bus when he was asked about it this week. “No matter how much you try to appease Trump or suck up to him, he’s eventually going to betray you,” he said. More

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      What could the Cotswolds possibly offer JD Vance? I suggest a swim in one of its rivers | Marina Hyde

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      I don’t have access to the employment contract, but find myself increasingly intrigued by a question: how many days annual leave does a vice-president of the United States get? In the past five months alone, JD Vance has been on a skiing holiday, then a family trip to Disneyland, then a kayaking jaunt in Ohio – and now, he’s about to pitch up for an extended summer stay in the Cotswolds. More on all those in a bit. But let’s face it: if Vance were a politician in this country, he’d have been fitted with an unflattering holiday-related nickname months ago, and no one would take him remotely seriously.Still, time for another well-earned rest for Vacay Vance/the right honourable member for the Sun Lounger. And something of a break in tradition with recent times, in which he has preferred to holiday in national parks where the Trump administration has cut half the jobs, perhaps reasoning that if his security can successfully upend the infrastructure to assist his recreation during his stay, then those jobs were never really essential anyway. Only last weekend, the VP and family were holidaying near Caesar Creek Lake in Ohio, where his Secret Service team had the army corps of engineers change the outflow of a lake. Depending on who you believe, this was either to “support safe navigation” of his huge, heavy-boated security detail, or to create “ideal kayaking conditions” for Vance, who was certainly pictured in a canoe over the period. Listen, sometimes JD just wants a lazy river, other times he wants rushing rapids. It’s called public service: look it up.Anyway, he’s just about to kick off a holiday in some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years – namely, Britain. Thanks for being in us, sir! As a point of order, though, over here we wouldn’t dream of allowing a politician to reroute one of our rivers. Instead, we allow the water companies to reroute sewage into them. Feel free to take a kayak out as often as possible during your stay. In fact, we insist on it.As for why Vance has picked the Cotswolds, it’s possibly a smart move to holiday somewhere filled with so many of the absolute worst people in the country. In the modern-era Cotswolds, JD is unlikely to even be the ghastliest person in the village. And he has, unfortunately, been the target of heckling and protest on recent trips. March found him skiing en famille at Sugarbush ski resort in Vermont, forced to run a gauntlet of placard-wielding objectors before reportedly opting to move location. Again: should have gone to Courchevel, where he wouldn’t even make the top 100 of the Most Hideous People on the Chairlift at Any Given Moment poll.View image in fullscreenThen last month it was Disneyland, against the backdrop of widespread Ice raids on undocumented immigrants across California, where his presence drew a sarcastic welcome from its governor, Gavin Newsom. “Hope you enjoy your family time, @JDVance,” this ran. “The families you’re tearing apart certainly won’t.” Vance responded by posting: “Had a great time, thanks.” A review not wholly borne out from fellow park users’ video footage, which showed the boos and protests continuing even as he trotted towards the Autopia ride and lunched furtively at the Pirates of the Caribbean restaurant.But look, the Vance family’s Cotswolds accommodation promises to be far more agreeable, and is not even made of fibreglass. In fact, according to the Daily Mail, it’s an 18th-century manor house in six sprawling acres of grounds that include a tennis court. Whether they also contain a swimming pool is unclear – as is whether Vance swims in a T-shirt when he’s alone with his family, like he famously does at hotels. Either way, the property has reportedly been crawling with Secret Service agents all week. Amenity-wise, it’s supposedly extremely close to Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Squat empire, setting up a potentially compelling episode for the next season of Clarkson’s Farm, should Vance care to call in on a temporary neighbour who recently described him as a “bearded God-botherer” and “twat” with “no clue about history”.The Vances won’t be tied to that one property, we learn, with a visit to hang out with David Lammy and his family at the foreign secretary’s country residence, Chevening, also planned for this coming weekend. Lammy has made so much of the two men’s shared Christian bond that you’d imagine he might squire the whole gang along to church on Sunday morning. Parts of the local St Botolph’s church date back to the 11th century – not quite as old as the Sleeping Beauty Castle in Anaheim, to be sure, but certainly able to hold its own with the Autopia ride. Also on the agenda, finally, is a trip to London, which Vance recently described as “not English any more”. Well, nor is the US, but that doesn’t seem to put him off.For the lucky British people, meanwhile, the Vance holiday serves as a mere amuse bouche to the main meal – the unprecedented second state visit next month of Donald Trump, who will make landfall on 17 September for a run of dates that conveniently occurs during parliamentary recess, thus avoiding the controversial spectacle of the president addressing the house. But if Trump’s last state visit was anything to go by, it’ll be three days of remorseless rolling news wank about the “pageantry”, intense grandstanding by embarrassing politicians keen to suck up to him/define themselves against him, and 958 talking heads droning cluelessly on about how both sides have “got what they want out of it”. We’ll be positively begging to go back to these low-key days of the Vance vacance, so let’s enjoy them while we can.

      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump, Sydney Sweeney and the ‘war on woke’ – podcast

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      Archive: Fox News, ITV News, Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro, Sky News Australia, the Independent, TikTok @midwesterngothic, WHAS11, NBC News
      Watch The Oath here
      Watch the latest Anywhere but Washington report out of Florida
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
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      Secret Service request to raise river level made ‘without knowledge’ of JD Vance, his office says

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      A spokesperson for JD Vance said he and his staff were unaware that the Secret Service decided earlier this month to ask military engineers to raise the water level of the Little Miami River ahead of a family boating trip, which took place on his birthday.“The Secret Service often employs protective measures without the knowledge of the vice-president or his staff, as was the case last weekend,” the spokesperson said.The statement followed the publication of a Guardian report on Wednesday that revealed the US Army Corp of Engineers (USACE) in Louisville, Kentucky, had been asked by the Secret Service to raise the outflow of a lake to accommodate Vance’s boating excursion. The USACE had said on Wednesday the decision was made to “support safe navigation” of Vance’s security detail.The Secret Service provided additional information on Thursday, emphasizing in a “revised” statement to the Guardian the vice-president’s office was “not involved in the decision” and that it had been “operationally necessary” to adjust the water levels to accommodate motorized watercraft, local law enforcement and emergency responders.“These decisions were made solely by agents during our standard advance planning process and did not involve the Office of the Vice President,” the Secret Service said in a statement. A public safety boat is also alleged to have run aground during a joint scouting mission with the Secret Service ahead of the trip, prompting the Secret Service’s decision to seek an elevation in the water level.Vance’s office had not initially responded to the Guardian’s request when asked about the water level change in connection to his boating excursion. But the publication of the Guardian’s story generated some controversy.Marcy Kaptur, a Democratic congresswoman from Ohio, posted a tweet demanding more information about the USACE move, saying: “Outrageous! Must be why he wasn’t available to meet about his Big Bonanza for Billionaires Bill which will devastate Ohio manufacturing jobs and our rural hospitals. The Army Corp of Engineers should share records with relevant committee of jurisdiction in Congress.”The news also elicited comparisons to an embarrassing episode for another vice-president, Al Gore, who faced scrutiny in 1999 after a local utility poured millions of gallons of water into the Connecticut River to keep him from running aground during a canoe trip.It is not unprecedented for the USACE to modify outflows to accommodate public use – for example, for use in community river events and training for emergency responders.USACE regulations regarding requests for so-called “deviations” – or any changes to normal practices – require approval and documentation that demonstrates why the deviation is justified. This process also ensures that risks associated with any deviation – including a flood risk or other environmental impact – is detailed.The USACE said in a statement on Wednesday that the Secret Service request “met the operational criteria outlined in the Water Control Manual for Caesar Creek Lake and did not require a deviation from normal procedures”.

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      Trump administration doubles reward for arrest of Venezuela’s president to $50m

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      The Trump administration is doubling to $50m a reward for the arrest of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, accusing him of being one of the world’s largest narcotraffickers and working with cartels to flood the US with fentanyl-laced cocaine.“Under President Trump’s leadership, Maduro will not escape justice and he will be held accountable for his despicable crimes,” Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said on Thursday in a video statement announcing the reward.Maduro was indicted in Manhattan federal court in 2020, during the first Trump presidency, along with several close allies on federal charges of narcoterrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. At the time, the US offered a $15m reward for his arrest. That was later raised by the Biden administration to $25m – the same amount the US offered for the capture of Osama bin Laden in 2001, after the September 11attacks.Despite the big bounty, Maduro remains entrenched after defying the US, the European Union and several Latin American governments who condemned his 2024 reelection as a sham and recognized his opponent as Venezuela’s duly elected president.Last month, the Trump administration struck a deal to secure the release of 10 Americans jailed in Caracas in exchange for Venezuela getting home scores of migrants deported by the United States to El Salvador under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Shortly after, the White House reversed course and allowed US oil producer Chevron to resume drilling in Venezuela after it was previously blocked by US sanctions.The prisoner swap sparked controversy, as one of the Americans freed in the exchange is an ex-US soldier who was convicted of killing three people in Spain in 2016. Dahud Hanid Ortiz, found guilty in Venezuela last year, was flown to Texas alongside the other nine freed Americans, whom rights groups had deemed “political prisoners”.Bondi said the justice department has seized more than $700m in assets linked to Maduro, including two private jets, and said 7m tons of seized cocaine had been traced directly to the leftist leader.Maduro’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.In her announcement, Bondi repeated claims linking Maduro to Tren de Aragua (TdA), the Venezuelan gang, saying: “Maduro uses foreign terrorist organizations like TdA … to bring deadly violence to our country … He is one of the largest narcotraffickers in the world and a threat to our national security.”Some experts have cast doubts on the Trump administration’s claims that TdA is “invading America”. The narrative that TdA is a state-sponsored terrorist group wreaking havoc on the US has been used to fuel the president’s aggressive and broad attacks on Venezuelan immigrants, with policies that advocates say have trampled on people’s due-process rights. In one high-profile case, Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay asylum seeker, was expelled to El Salvador after the US claimed his tattoos were proof he was a TdA member and “security threat”.Experts have noted that the Venezuelan government had previously protected TdA, but it was unlikely the gang was acting “at the direction” of the Maduro regime, as the White House has claimed.The Washington Post reported in April that a National Intelligence Council assessment concluded there were some low-level contacts between the Maduro government and TdA, but said the gang was not commanded by Venezuela’s leader.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More