Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for Friday. Here are some of the day’s developments:
Local reporters were barred from attending vice-president JD Vance’s news conference in Los Angeles, during his four and a half hour trip to the city.
Vance mistakenly called Alex Padilla, California’s first Latino senator, “Jose Padilla”, using the name of an American citizen who was accused of planning to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb in a major US city on behalf of al-Qaida.
Two hours after Donald Trump again said that his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was “wrong” to cast doubt on his claim that Iran could have a nuclear weapon within weeks she said that she agrees with the president.
A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking the administration’s efforts to keep Harvard University from admitting foreign students.
Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was released from US immigration detention, where he had been held for more than three months over his activism against Israel’s war on Gaza.
Vance excluded local reporters from Los Angeles news conference during very brief visit
Local reporters were barred from attending vice-president JD Vance’s news conference in Los Angeles on Friday, according to Elex Michaelson, the host Fox LA’s local evening news report.
“It’s disappointing” Michaelson wrote on X, that the vice-president “did not allow local reporters inside his Los Angeles press event. At this inflection point in L.A. history, they only took questions from national reporters.”
When a press aide to California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, asked Michaelson on the social network who the reporters allowed in were, since “the tone felt more like partisan influencer content than real journalism”, the anchor for the local Fox affiliate replied: “I wasn’t allowed inside so I don’t know who was there. I didn’t recognize those voices. Those were not questions that most of my colleagues would have asked.”
As we reported earlier, at least two of the partisan questions, inviting Vance to attack Democrats, were asked by Mary Margaret Olohan, a correspondent for the far-right Daily Wire, who was selected by the White House to be the official pool reporter traveling with Vance on Friday.
According to Olohan’s dispatches, Vance had very little time to evaluate the situation on the ground in the city. His flight from Washington on Air Force Two touched down at LAX at 1:35 pm local time. Vance’s motorcade arrived at the federal building in Westwood being guarded by active-duty marines at 2pm. He started the news conference at 3:11pm.
It is not clear exactly how much time Vance spent meeting marines, federal agents and officers from the Los Angeles Police Department and California highway patrol, but just after his fourteen minutes news conference ended, the Fox national correspondent Bill Melugin reported that he had managed to conduct an “exclusive” and “lengthy interview” with the vice-president during the 71 minutes Vance spent in the federal building before meeting the press he brought with him.
According to Olohan, a short time later, Vance departed the federal building for a Republican National Committee event. By 6:05pm, he was back on Air Force Two at LAX and ready for departure after just four and a half hours in the city.
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Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was released from US immigration detention, where he had been held for more than three months over his activism against Israel’s war on Gaza.
Khalil, the most high profile of the students to be arrested by the Trump administration for their pro-Palestinian activism, and the last of them still in detention, was ordered to be released by a federal judge on Friday afternoon from an Ice facility in Jena, Louisiana, where he has been held since shortly after plainclothes immigration agents detained him in early March in the lobby of his Columbia building.
The federal judge, Michael Farbiarz, said during the hearing on Friday that Khalil is not a flight risk, and “is not a danger to the community. Period, full stop.”
“It is highly, highly unusual to be seeking detention of a petitioner given the factual record of today,” Farbiarz also said during the hearing.
Farbiarz said that the government had “clearly not met” the standards for detention.
Later on Friday, Khalil was ordered to surrender his passport and green card to Ice officials in Jena as part of his conditional release. The order also stipulated that Khalil’s travel be limited to a handful of US states, including New York, as Louisiana, Michigan and New Jersey for court appearances.
A small handful of media organizations, including the Guardian, was present outside the detention center in the intense afternoon sun as many staff members began leaving for the day.
In Los Angeles, Vance accuses Newsom of 'endangering law enforcement'
After using the name of a convicted al-Qaida terrorist to refer to a Democratic senator from California, vice-president JD Vance was just invited, by a reporter for the far-right Daily Wire chosen to accompany him on his trip to Los Angeles, to move on to bashing California’s Democratic governor.
“Would you say say that Gavin Newsom is endangering law enforcement here in California, and what should he be doing if he was protecting them?” the conservative reporter asked, teeing up the partisan attack.
“Look, I would absolutely say that Gavin Newsom is endangering law enforcement” Vance replied. “The law enforcement officials themselves tell me as much.”
Vance then claimed that border patrol officers told him that while they were trying to “arrest somebody, maybe a violent criminal who’s also an illegal alien” they were faced within minutes by protesters, “sometimes violent protesters who are in their face, obstructing them, preventing them from doing their job and endangering their lives”.
He then blamed local officials, including the governor, for egging on the protesters.
What Vance failed to say, and was not pressed to address by a reporter from an ideologically aligned news site, is data showing that the vast majority of people currently being detained by federal immigration officers are not violent criminals, but workers with no criminal records. Recent protests have also been sparked by the wrongful arrests of US citizens for simply objecting to the rough tactics of heavily armed, masked, plainclothes agents in unmarked vehicles.
As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, pointed out on social media, 65% of those arrested by immigration officers this year have no prior criminal convictions, and just under 7% have been convicted of violent crimes. As of 15 June, 30% of those arrested by Ice and sent to detention had no criminal record. At the start of this week, there were 11,763 people in immigration detention who had no criminal record and were arrested inside the country by Ice.
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In LA, Vance calls California senator Alex Padilla, 'Jose Padilla', confusing Democrat with convicted al-Qaida plotter
At a news conference in Los Angeles on Friday, JD Vance responded to a question from Mary Margaret Olohan of the far-right Daily Wire, about Democratic lawmakers getting placed in handcuffs, by attempting to make a joke about the California senator, Alex Padilla, who was forcibly detained by the FBI in the same location last week. The vice-president, however, mistakenly called California’s first Latino senator “Jose Padilla”, using the name of an American citizen who was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and accused of planning to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb in a major US city on behalf of al-Qaida.
Jose Padilla was initially designated an enemy combatant, placed in military custody, and denied access to a lawyer before being convicted in 2007 on charges of supporting al-Qaida and terrorism conspiracy. He was given a new prison sentence of 21 years in 2014, after a federal appeals court ruled his original 17-year sentence was too lenient.
Responding to the video, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, posted: “JD Vance served with Alex Padilla in the United States Senate. Calling him ‘Jose Padilla’ is not an accident.”
Katie Porter, a former Democratic member of congress who is running to succeed Newsom as governor commented: “Despicable—something you’d expect from an internet troll. If I heard my kids make a crack like this they would be grounded for the rest of their lives. JD Vance should honestly and sincerely apologize. But we all know he won’t. He’s a coward.”
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US intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard now backs Trump's claim Iran could have nuclear weapon in 'weeks'
Two hours after Donald Trump again said that she was wrong to cast doubt on his claim that Iran could have a nuclear weapon “within a matter of weeks”, his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, posted a statement on social media saying that she agrees with the president.
Twice this week, Trump was confronted by reporters with Gabbard’s testimony to Congress in March, in which she said that the US intelligence community, made up of 18 elements she oversees, “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.
On both occasions he dismissed what Gabbard had said, although it was not her assessment, but the consensus of US intelligence analysts.
Writing on X on Friday, after Trump told reporters, “She’s wrong”, Gabbard blamed what she called “dishonest media” for “taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division”.
She also shared video of a longer portion of her testimony on Iran, which included the statement that Iran had abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons 22 years ago.
In her testimony, Gabbard also said that the intelligence community “is closely monitoring if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program. In the past year, we have seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus. Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
Trump was reportedly irked by another recent social media post from Gabbard, a highly produced YouTube video uploaded to her personal account 10 days ago, in which she described a recent visit to Hiroshima, and warned of the “madness” of “a nuclear holocaust”.
The video featured images of Gabbard in Hiroshima (those images are uncredited, but she has returned from foreign travel in the past, for instance to Syria in 2017, with video shot by her husband, Abraham Williams, a cinematographer). It also included a section in which she described how much more powerful the current generation of nuclear warheads are by comparison.
As my colleague Hugo Lowell reported this week, some Pentagon officials believe that only a US nuclear weapon could be capable of destroying Iran’s underground enrichment facility at Fordow, near the city of Qom.
In response to that report, Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, pointed out that a potential US nuclear strike on Fordow could be carried out with “a strategic B61-11 nuclear earth penetrator with a yield of 300 or 400 kilotons”. The bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was 15 kilotons.
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Judge in Newsom v. Trump to consider whether troops in LA are violating legal ban on use of US military for law enforcement
California’s effort to force Donald Trump to return control of the state’s National Guard to the governor, Gavin Newsom, returned to a federal courtroom in San Francisco on Friday.
Late Thursday, a federal appeals court temporarily blocked a lower court ruling by US district judge Charles Breyer a week ago that Trump had acted illegally by sending in troops, and 700 marines, to police protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles.
In an 11-minute hearing on Friday, Breyer asked lawyers for both sides in Newsom, et al v. Trump, et al to submit written briefings by noon Monday on the question of whether the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits troops from conducting civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil, is being violated in Los Angeles.
Newsom said in his complaint last week that “violation of the Posse Comitatus Act is imminent, if not already underway” but Breyer postponed considering that allegation.
National Guard troops have been accompanying federal agents on some immigration raids, and marines briefly detained a civilian on the first day they deployed to protect a federal building in LA.
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Just as mass protests against the Trump administration’s immigration raids are dying down in Los Angeles, JD Vance, the vice-president, has arrived in the city to visit federal agents.
Vance, a former marine who spent six months in Iraq in anon-combat role, as a public affairs officer, is expected to speak later. We will bring you updates on his remarks.
Trump dismisses US intelligence on Iran and misleads about his Iraq war stance
During a 10 minute news conference with reporters on the tarmac, en route to his golf club in New Jersey, Donald Trump was asked to explain how a potential US attack on Iran, based on disputed intelligence about the country’s nuclear program, differs from the 2003 US attack on Iraq, based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that country did not have.
“Well, there were no weapons of mass destruction, I never thought there were”, Trump said. “And that was somewhat pre-nuclear, you know, it was the nuclear age, but nothing like it is today.”
“And it looked like I’m right about the material that they’ve gathered, already, it’s a tremendous amount of material” Trump continued, apparently referring to Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, which the nation’s leaders say it is entitled to produce for peaceful energy-generating purposes.
“I think within a matter of weeks, or certainly within a matter months, they were going to be able to have a nuclear weapon, and we can’t have that”, the president said.
Trump was then asked what evidence he based that claim on, given that his own US intelligence community had said Iran abandoned its drive to make a nuclear weapon in 2003, as the US attacked Iraq, and never re-started it.
“Well, then my intelligence community is wrong. Who in the intelligence community said that?” Trump replied.
Informed that it was his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who testified to congress in March that the 18 US intelligence agencies she oversees “continue[s] to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
When it comes to his claims about having loudly opposed the war in Iraq, the facts show that Trump, for a decade, has been misstating his actual stance on Iraq at the time of the US invasion, when he first voiced tepid support for the war before it was launched, and then, after it went wrong, became a critic.
“I was very much opposed to Iraq”, Trump claimed on Friday. “I said it loud and clear, but I was a civilian, but I guess I got a lot of publicity, but I was very much opposed to the Iraq war, and I actually did say, ‘Don’t go in, don’t go in, don’t go in’, but I said, ‘If you’re going to go in, keep the oil’”.
In a radio interview on September 11, 2002, unearthed by Buzzfeed News in 2016, the comedian Howard Stern asked Trump if he was in favor of the US invading Iraq.
“Yeah, I guess so”, Trump responded.
As CNN reported in 2019, Trump came out against the Iraq war more than a year after it started, telling Howard Stern in April 2004: “Iraq is a terrible mistake.”
Three months later, Trump told Esquire magazine in July 2004: “it turns out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing!”
The final part of Trump’s claim about what he said on Iraq comes from a statement he first made not in 2003, but eight years later, in April 2011, when he was toying with a run to unseat Barack Obama and unveiled in an interview with the Fox host Bill O’Reilly his idea that the US should have kept Iraq’s oil.
“I’ve never said this before. This is a first, on your show” Trump said then. “In the old days, when you had wars, you win, right? You win. To the victor belong the spoils.”
You stay and protect the oil, and you take the oil and you take whatever is necessary for them and you take what’s necessary for us and we pay our self back $1.5 trillion or more. We take care of Britain, we take care of other countries that helped us, and we don’t be so stupid. You know, we’re the only country and if you look at wars over the years and I study wars, OK? My whole life is a war. You look at wars over the years. A country goes in, they conquer and they stay. We go in, we conquer, and then we leave. And we hand it to people that we don’t even know. … So, in a nutshell, we go in, we take over the second largest oil fields, and we stay.
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Trump told reporters that he is looking at immigration policy steps that would allow farms to “take responsibility” for the people they hire.
“We’re looking at doing something where, in the case of good, reputable farmers, they can take responsibility for the people that they hire and let them have responsibility, because we can’t put the farms out of business,” Trump said.
He added that “at the same time, we don’t want to hurt people that aren’t criminals”, despite his repeated false claims that the majority of immigrants are criminals.
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Trump said today that Europe would not be of much help in the war between Iran and Israel.
“Europe is not going to be able to help with this one,” Trump said. The president also said that his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was wrong in suggesting that there is no evidence of Iran building a nuclear weapon.
European foreign ministers have urged Iran to engage with Washington over its nuclear program after talks in Geneva aimed at opening negotiations for a new nuclear deal ended with little sign of progress
Trump claims he is close to deal with Harvard
Trump says he is very close to making a deal with Harvard just moments after a federal judge ruled that the administration be blocked from preventing the university from hosting international students.
Trump wrote on Truth Social:
“Many people have been asking what is going on with Harvard University and their largescale improprieties that we have been addressing, looking for a solution. We have been working closely with Harvard, and it is very possible that a Deal will be announced over the next week or so. They have acted extremely appropriately during these negotiations, and appear to be committed to doing what is right. If a Settlement is made on the basis that is currently being discussed, it will be “mindbogglingly” HISTORIC, and very good for our Country. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
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Judge blocks Trump effort to keep Harvard from hosting foreign students
A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration’s efforts to keep Harvard University from hosting international students.
The order from US district judge Allison Burroughs preserves the ability of Harvard to host foreign students while the case is decided. It marks another victory for the Ivy League school as it challenges multiple government sanctions amid a battle with the White House.
California’s challenge of the Trump administration’s military deployment on the streets of Los Angeles returned to a federal courtroom today in San Francisco after an appeals court handed Donald Trump a key procedural win in the case.
Friday’s hearing comes a day after the ninth circuit appellate panel allowed the president to keep control of national guard troops he deployed in response to protests over immigration raids.
The appellate decision halted a temporary restraining order from US district judge Charles Breyer, who found Trump acted illegally when he activated the soldiers over opposition from California’s governor, Gavin Newsom.
Despite the appellate setback, California’s attorneys are expected to ask Breyer for a preliminary injunction returning control of the troops in Los Angeles to Newsom.
The US supreme court has declined to speed up its consideration of whether to take up a challenge to Trump’s sweeping tariffs before the lower courts have ruled in the dispute.
The supreme court denied a request by a family-owned toy company, Learning Resources, that filed the legal challenge against Trump’s tariffs to expedite the review of the dispute by the court.
The company previously won a court ruling in May that said Trump cannot unilaterally impose tariffs using the emergency legal authority he had cited for them. That ruling is currently on hold, leaving the tariffs in place for now.
Learning Resources asked the supreme court to take the rare step of immediately hearing the case to decide the legality of the tariffs, effectively skipping over the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington, where the case is pending.
Two district courts have ruled that Trump’s tariffs are not justified under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the law that Trump cited for them. Both of those cases are now on appeal. No court so far has backed the sweeping emergency tariff authority Trump has claimed.
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Judge orders Mahmoud Khalil be freed from detention
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to release Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil from immigration detention, a ruling that would end his three-month detention.
Judge Michael Farbiarz made the ruling from the bench in federal court in New Jersey today. Lawyers for the Columbia graduate had asked a federal judge to immediately release him on bail from a Louisiana jail, or else transfer him to New Jersey, where he can be closer to his wife and newborn son.
The same judge had ruled earlier that the government can continue to detain the legal US resident based on allegations that he lied on his green card application. Khalil disputes the accusations that he wasn’t forthcoming on the application.
Trump presided over a national security meeting about Iran with top aides at the White House today, a US official told Reuters.
The official also said US special envoy Steve Witkoff was in regular contact with the Iranians, both directly and indirectly, with Qatar acting as an intermediator.
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Trump administration lays off hundreds of Voice of America employees
The Trump administration sent layoff notices today to more than 600 employees at Voice of America, a federally funded news organization that provides independent reporting to countries with limited press freedom, the New York Times reports.
The layoffs will reduce the staff at the agency to fewer than 200, around one-seventh of its total at the start of 2025. The notices put journalists and support staff on paid leave until they are officially let go on 1 September.
In March, Donald Trump accused Voice of America of spreading “anti-American” and partisan “propaganda” and called it “the voice of radical America”. He later signed an executive order that effectively called for the dismantling of the agency and put nearly all Voice of America reporters on paid leave.
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A fresh wave of violent threats and incidents targeting elected officials broke out in the US this week, prompting more urgent calls for increased security measures just days after the killing of a Minnesota state legislator and the shooting of another.
Amid a series of attacks involving federal and local officials, the latest incidents included death threats against Zohran Mamdani, a New York mayoral candidate; a purported road rage attack on Max Miller, the Ohio congressman; and an alleged kidnapping attempt targeting Paul Young, the mayor of Memphis.
The New York police department (NYPD) hate crimes taskforce is investigating multiple death threats against Mamdani, a Muslim democratic socialist candidate in the final stretch of his campaign who is endorsed by national figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The intimidation included threats to blow up his car and Islamophobic voicemails left at Mamdani’s office in the city’s Queens borough.
“The violent and specific language of what appears to be a repeat caller is alarming and we are taking every precaution,” his campaign said on Thursday, blaming the threats on “dehumanizing, Islamophobic rhetoric designed to stoke division and hate”.
For the full story, click here:
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Donald Trump has once again brought up his baseless claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent, this time saying in a Truth Social post that he wants a “special prosecutor” to investigate the election.
Writing on his social media platform on Friday, Trump lashed out at his predecessor, saying:
“Biden was grossly incompetent, and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD! The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING. A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America! Let the work begin!”
Trump’s latest attempts at reviving his longstanding grievance against Biden comes as his administration faces the critical decision of whether to involve the US in the Iran-Israel conflict, a question that many foreign policy experts have likened to the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
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Elizabeth Warren has confronted the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, over reports that the state department is considering redirecting $500m from USAID to the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
In a letter addressed to Rubio and USAID’s acting administrator, Kenneth Jackson, the Massachusetts senator argued that the GHF, a self-proclaimed aid organisation that is backed by the Israeli and US governments, “marks an alarming departure from the professional humanitarian organizations that have worked on the ground, in Gaza and elsewhere, for decades”.
“The questions surrounding GHF – its funding sources and connection to the Trump Administration, its use of private contractors, its ability to serve and be seen as a neutral entity, its abandonment by its founders, and its basic competence in providing aid – must be answered before the State Department commits any funding to the organization,” Warren wrote in the letter, a copy of which was provided exclusively to the Guardian.
For the full story, click here:
222 Mexican nationals detained in US since LA Ice raids began, Sheinbaum says
At least 222 Mexican nationals have been detained in the US since a series of immigration raids in Los Angeles and subsequent protests against them started up in recent weeks, Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said today.
She did not clarify where they had been apprehended or what their legal status was.
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Vance travels to LA to meet with marines
JD Vance is traveling to Los Angeles today to meet with marines and visit various federal command centers.
The vice-president is expected to tour a multiagency Federal Joint Operations Center and a Federal Mobile Command Center. Vance’s office did not release a topic of discussion for his visit, but it is speculated to be related to the protests against the Trump administration’s mass deportation operations.
Trump deployed national guard troops to downtown LA earlier this month in response to the protests. The state sued for a temporary injunction to stop the deployment, but a federal appeals court ruled in the president’s favor on Thursday night while that legal challenge continues.
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A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from withholding billions of dollars in transportation funds from states that don’t agree to participate in some immigration enforcement actions.
Twenty states sued after they said the US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, threatened to cut off funding to states that refused to comply with President Trump’s immigration agenda. US district judge John McConnell Jr has barred federal transportation officials from carrying out that threat before the lawsuit is fully resolved.
An attorney for the Department of Transportation had argued that the department had the legal discretion to set conditions on states receiving the congressionally appropriated funds.
“The Court finds that the States have demonstrated they will face irreparable and continuing harm if forced to agree to Defendants’ unlawful and unconstitutional immigration conditions imposed in order to receive federal transportation grant funds,” wrote McConnell, adding that the states are “being put in a position of relinquishing their sovereign right to decide how to use their own police officers” and are “at risk of losing the trust built between local law enforcement and immigrant communities”.
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What is Donald Trump’s plan for Iran? Is he about to break his campaign pledge of “no more wars”? And if he does, could this be the moment he loses some of his most loyal Maga supporters?
The Guardian’s Rachel Leingang and Andrew Roth discuss in the latest episode of the Politics Weekly America podcast.
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US supreme court rules fuel firms can challenge California’s emission limits
Fossil fuel companies are able to challenge California’s ability to set stricter standards reducing the amount of polluting coming from cars, the US supreme court has ruled in a case that is set to unravel one of the key tools used to curb planet-heating emissions in recent years.
The conservative-dominated supreme court voted by seven to two to back a challenge by oil and gas companies, along with 17 Republican-led states, to a waiver that California has received periodically from the federal government since 1967 that allows the state to set tougher standards than national rules limiting pollution from cars. The state has separately stipulated that only zero-emission cars will be able to be sold there by 2035.
Although states are typically not allowed to set their own standards aside from the federal Clean Air Act, California has been given unique authority to do so via a waiver that has seen it become a pioneer in pushing for cleaner cars. Other states are allowed to copy California’s stricter standard, too.
But oil and gas companies, as well as Republican politicians, have complained about the waiver, arguing that it caused financial harm.
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Trump calls for special prosecutor for 2020 election results and repeats unfounded claim of fraud
Donald Trump is once again repeating unfounded claims that the results of the 2020 presidential election were fraudulent, saying that the evidence is “massive and overwhelming” but not providing any of it. The president called for a special prosecutor to be appointed to the case.
He wrote on Truth Social this morning:
“Zero Border crossings for the month for TRUMP, verses 60,000 for Sleepy, Crooked Joe Biden, a man who lost the 2020 Presidential Election by a ‘LANDSLIDE!’ Biden was grossly incompetent, and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD! The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING. A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America! Let the work begin! What this Crooked man, and his CORRUPT CRONIES, have done to our Country in 4 years, is grossly indescribable! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
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California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, accused Trump of “playing politics with people’s lives”, citing a report that details how the administration could make the state’s upcoming wildfire season more dangerous than previous years due to budget cuts.
He wrote in a post on X:
“Donald Trump isn’t just threatening CA’s disaster aid, he’s also pushing for dangerous cuts ahead of wildfire season –
A 63% REDUCTION in the U.S. Forest Service’s budget. A 30% REDUCTION in workforce – 10,000 employees. The agency is the nation’s largest firefighting entity. It oversees more than half of the state’s forestland.
He is literally playing politics with people’s lives.”
More than 400 AmeriCorps staff and volunteers were deployed following the January megafires around southern California that destroyed thousands of homes and businesses and killed 30 people. They helped 26,000 households affected by the fires and packed 21,000 food boxes. But in April, the agency placed about 90% of its staff on immediate leave.
The cuts were among the harshest carried out by Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge). But AmeriCorps is just one of several agencies involved in the response to emergencies such as the LA fires that have seen drastic reductions as the president has sought to slash costs across the federal government and shift disaster preparedness on to state and local governments.
Read more about how Trump’s cuts threaten California’s wildfire recovery efforts here:
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This is President Trump’s schedule for the day, according to the White House:
11am – Trump will attend a national security meeting in the Oval Office
2pm – He will travel to Bedminster, New Jersey
7.30pm – Trump will attend a dinner for the Super pac Maga Inc at his golf course
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Trump fails to mark Juneteenth
Donald Trump failed to mark Juneteenth, commemorating the ending of slavery in the US, until he posted on Thursday night that there are “too many non-working holidays” in the country.
The US president has put out statements previously as president and even tried to take credit for boosting awareness of the significance of June 19 before it became a federal holiday under the Biden administration.
But on this year’s Juneteenth holiday on Thursday, the garrulous president kept silent on all platforms about a day of particular importance to Black Americans until his late post.
Without mentioning Juneteenth by name, Trump complained on Truth Social about “too many non-working holidays” and said it is “costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed”. But most retailers were open on Juneteenth.
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The Trump administration is moving to keep open two Michigan coal plants that emit about 45% of the state’s greenhouse gas pollution, which opponents say is an indication of how the US president plans to wield his controversial national energy emergency executive order.
Already, the US Department of Energy (DoE) has ordered the JH Campbell coal plant on Lake Michigan to remain open beyond its 31 May closure date, while the administration is expected to prolong the life of the Monroe power plant on Lake Erie, currently scheduled to begin closing in 2028.
Opponents say the order has little support in Michigan, could cost ratepayers hundreds of millions of dollars, and is ideologically driven. The state’s utilities have said they did not ask for the plants to stay online, and the Trump administration did not communicate with stakeholders before the order, a spokesperson for the Michigan public service commission (MPSC), which regulates utilities and manages the state’s grid, told the Guardian.
“The unnecessary recent order … will increase the cost of power for homes and businesses in Michigan and across the midwest,” the chair of the MPSC, Dan Scripps, said in a statement. “We currently produce more energy in Michigan than needed. As a result, there is no existing energy emergency in either Michigan or [the regional US grid].”
The massive and ageing facilities also release high levels of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter into the air. Meanwhile, their coal ash ponds leach arsenic, lead, lithium, radium and sulfate into local drinking water and the Great Lakes. The Monroe power plant is responsible for more arsenic water pollution than any other power plant in the US.
DHS moves to restrict lawmaker visits to detention centers
The US Department of Homeland Security is now requiring lawmakers to provide 72 hours of notice before visiting detention centers, according to new guidance.
The guidance comes after a slew of tense visits from Democratic lawmakers to detention centers amid Donald Trump’s crackdowns in immigrant communities across the country. Many Democratic lawmakers in recent weeks have either been turned away, arrested or manhandled by law enforcement officers at the facilities, leading to public condemnation towards Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (Ice) handling of such visits.
Lawmakers are allowed to access DHS facilities “used to detain or otherwise house aliens” for inspections and are not required “to provide prior notice of the intent to enter a facility”, according to the 2024 Federal Appropriations Act.
Previous language surrounding lawmaker visits to such facilities said that “Ice will comply with the law and accommodate members seeking to visit/tour an Ice detention facility for the purpose of conducting oversight,” CNN reported.
However, in the new guidance, the DHS updated the language to say that Ice “will make every effort to comply with the law” but “exigent circumstances (eg operational conditions, security posture, etc) may impact the time of entry into the facility”.
The new guidance also attempts to distinguish Ice field offices from Ice detention facilities, noting that since “Ice field offices are not detention facilities” they do not fall under the visitation requirements laid out in the Appropriations Act.
The Guardian has contacted Ice for comment.
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Amid controversial dismissals for independent advisers and staff at health agencies, alongside lackluster responses to the bird flu and measles outbreaks, experts fear the US is now in worse shape to respond to a pandemic than before 2020.
H5N1, which has received less attention under the Trump administration than from Biden’s team, is not the only influenza virus or even the only variant of bird flu with the potential to spark a pandemic. But a subpar response to the ongoing US outbreak signals a larger issue: America is not ready for whatever pathogen will sweep through next.
“We have not even remotely maintained the level of pandemic preparedness – which needed a lot of work, as we saw from the Covid pandemic,” said Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “But now, we essentially have no pandemic preparedness.”
“I’m concerned on a number of fronts,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health.
Those concerns include a lack of quality information from officials, weakened virus monitoring systems, and public health reductions at the federal, state and local levels.
Donald Trump has denied a report in the Wall Street Journal that he has approved US plans to attack Iran, saying that the news outlet has “no idea” what his thinking is concerning the Israel-Iran conflict.
He also confirmed, later on Thursday, via his press secretary, that he’d be making a decision within the “next two weeks”.
The Journal reported late on Wednesday that Trump told senior aides a day earlier that he had approved attack plans but was delaying on giving the final order to see if Tehran would abandon its nuclear program. The report cited three anonymous officials.
On Thursday, Trump responded to the report, posting on Truth Social: “The Wall Street Journal has No Idea what my thoughts are concerning Iran!”
But Trump’s decision is dependent on whether the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) would destroy the Fordow uranium enrichment site, a US official told Axios. Fordow, which is built into a mountain south of Tehran, is a target of Israel’s, but they lack the “bunker-buster bombs” and aircraft needed to destroy it; the US has access to both.
“We’re going to be ready to strike Iran. We’re not convinced yet that we’re necessary. And we want to be unnecessary, but I think the president’s just not convinced we are needed yet,” a US official told the outlet.
The Los Angeles Dodgers said on Thursday they denied US immigration enforcement agents access to the parking lot at Dodger Stadium earlier in the day.
“This morning, ICE agents came to Dodger Stadium and requested permission to access the parking lots,” the baseball team said in a post on X.
“They were denied entry to the grounds by the organization. Tonight’s game will be played as scheduled.”
But Ice said in a response to the Dodgers’ tweet that its agents “were never there”, and Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the DHS, said in a statement that “this had nothing to do with the Dodgers. CBP vehicles were in the stadium parking lot very briefly, unrelated to any operation or enforcement.”
The back and forth only added to anxiety in a city left on edge by frequent and brazen immigration enforcement actions.
The homeland security presence came as immigrant communities in LA are on high alert as federal agents have raided workplaces, parking lots and a swap-meet in search of undocumented immigrants.
Since the department stepped up enforcement in the region, there have been persistent rumors that the stadium of the Dodgers, a team which has a large Latino fanbase, may be a target.
Court lets Trump keep control of California national guard for now
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and will be bringing you the news over the next few hours.
We start with the news that a US appeals court let Donald Trump retain control on Thursday of California’s national guard while the state’s Democratic governor proceeds with a lawsuit challenging the Republican president’s use of the troops to quell protests in Los Angeles.
Trump’s decision to send troops into Los Angeles prompted a national debate about the use of the military on US soil and inflamed political tension in the country’s second most-populous city.
On Thursday, a three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit court of appeals extended its pause on U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer’s 12 June ruling that Trump had unlawfully called the national guard into federal service.
Trump probably acted within his authority, the panel said, adding that his administration probably complied with the requirement to coordinate with Governor Gavin Newsom, and even if it did not, he had no authority to veto Trump’s directive.
“And although we hold that the president likely has authority to federalize the national guard, nothing in our decision addresses the nature of the activities in which the federalized national guard may engage,” it wrote in its opinion.
Newsom could still challenge the use of the national guard and U.S. Marines under other laws, including the bar on using troops in domestic law enforcement, it added. The governor could raise those issues at a court hearing on Friday in front of Breyer, it said.
In a post on X after the decision, Newsom vowed to pursue his challenge.
“The president is not a king and is not above the law,” he said. “We will press forward with our challenge to President Trump’s authoritarian use of US military soldiers against our citizens.”
Trump hailed the decision in a post on Truth Social. “This is a great decision for our country and we will continue to protect and defend law-abiding Americans,” he said.
“This is much bigger than Gavin, because all over the United States, if our cities, and our people, need protection, we are the ones to give it to them should state and local police be unable, for whatever reason, to get the job done.”
In other news:
The Los Angeles Dodgers said they blocked US immigration enforcement agents from accessing the parking lot at Dodger Stadium on Thursday and got into public back-and-forth statements with Ice and the Department of Homeland Security, which denied their agents were ever there.
The Department of Homeland Security is now requiring lawmakers to provide 72 hours of notice before visiting detention centers, according to new guidance. The guidance comes after a slew of tense visits from Democratic lawmakers to detention centers amid Trump’s crackdowns in immigrant communities across the country.
A federal judge on Thursday blocked Trump’s administration from forcing 20 Democratic-led states to cooperate with immigration enforcement in order to receive billions of dollars in transportation grant funding. Chief US district judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, granted the states’ request for an injunction barring the Department for Transportation’s policy, saying the states were likely to succeed on the merits of some or all of their claims.
The office of the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, requested “a passive approach to Juneteenth messaging”, according to an exclusive Rolling Stone report citing a Pentagon email. The messaging request for Juneteenth – a federal holiday commemorating when enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free – was transmitted by the Pentagon’s office of the chief of public affairs. This office said it was not poised to publish web content related to Juneteenth, Rolling Stone reported.
Depending on who you ask, between 4 and 6 million people showed up to last weekend’s “No Kings” protests. Now the real number is becoming clearer, with one estimate suggesting that Saturday was among the biggest.
