Trump confirms $12bn in assistance for American farmers amid concerns over trade and high prices – as it happened

Twelve FBI agents who were fired earlier this year for kneeling during racial justice protests in 2020 are suing the bureau and its director, Kash Patel, alleging unlawful retaliation.

Agents were assigned to patrol Washington DC during a period of civil unrest prompted by George Floyd’s death, the lawsuit says. The agents, who lacked protective gear and extensive training in crowd control, became outnumbered by aggressive crowds they encountered and decided to kneel to the ground in an effort to defuse the tension, according to the lawsuit.

The tactic worked, and the crowds dispersed; no shots were fired, and the agents “saved American lives” that day, reads the suit.

The agents said their decision, days after Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, has been misinterpreted as a political expression.

The Brazilian-born mother of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew – who was recently detained by US immigration authorities – has rejected the Trump administration’s characterizations of her as an absentee parent.

Bruna Ferreira, who was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in November during a traffic stop in Massachusetts and was being held at a Louisiana detention center, said in an interview with the Washington Post that the White House’s statements that she had never lived with her son or spoken with Leavitt “in many years” were incorrect.

Ferreira, 33, had a relationship with Leavitt’s brother, 35-year-old Michael Leavitt. They had a son, Michael Leavitt Jr, now aged 11.

She said she was offended by the White House’s characterizations, calling them “disgusting”. She said she takes her son to Dave & Buster’s, a food and video games chain; ferries him to school, cheers at sports games; and fills his bedroom with “everything a young boy needs”.

Read the full story here:

The creator of the ICEBlock app, Joshua Aaron, is suing the Trump administration, alleging it abused government power and infringed on his free speech by asking Apple to remove ICEBlock from the App Store.

Aaron said that ICEBlock, which uses crowdsourcing to flag sightings of US immigration agents, represents constitutionally protected speech.

Aaron “believes that speech about publicly observed law and immigration enforcement activity – the expression enabled by ICEBlock – lies at the heart of the interests the first amendment was intended to protect”, according to the complaint.

The app, first launched in April, allows users to alert others when they see ICE agents within a 5-mile radius of their current location. In June, Kristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, said the app and its founder were “obstructing justice”.

ICEBlock had more than 1 million users at the time of its removal, according to the complaint.

The South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace condemned House Republican leadership in an opinion piece published in the New York Times on Monday.

“I came to Congress five years ago believing I could make a difference for my constituents, for South Carolina and for a country I love deeply. I was the first woman to graduate from the Citadel’s Corps of Cadets. I don’t scare easily,” Mace said.

She added: “But I’ve learned that the system in the House promotes control by party leaders over accountability and achievement. No one can be held responsible for inaction, so far too little gets done. The obstacles to achieving almost anything are enough to make any member who came to Washington with noble intentions ask: Why am I even here?”

Mace, who represents the state’s first congressional district, is running for governor.

David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is not giving up in its aggressive campaign to acquire Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), launching a hostile bid for the entertainment company despite the announcement on Friday that Netflix had agreed to buy its studio and streaming operation.

Netflix’s bid for WBD’s storied Hollywood movie studio, as well as its premier HBO cable network, valued the company at $82.7bn. But it did not agree to acquire WBD’s traditional television assets, including the news network CNN and the Discovery channel.

Paramount’s all-cash tender offer sent directly to shareholders on Monday morning would be for the entire company, and puts a total enterprise value of $108.4bn on WBD, a major premium to its stock price.

In making its case to shareholders, Paramount claimed its acquisition of the company provides significantly better value for shareholders, and would be much likelier to survive regulatory scrutiny. WBD said it would “carefully review and consider” the bid, and advise its shareholders on how to respond within two weeks.

David Ellison and his father, the billionaire tech mogul Larry Ellison, whose family is financially backing the offer, are both friendly with the Trump administration, which had previously indicated that it supported a Paramount purchase of WBD. Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, had even had early conversations with a senior Trump aide about what changes he might want to see at CNN.

Read the full story:

In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump threatened to add an extra 5% tariff on Mexico, alleging the country violated a water-sharing treaty.

“The U.S needs Mexico to release 200,000 acre-feet of water before December 31st, and the rest must come soon after. As of now, Mexico is not responding, and it is very unfair to our U.S. Farmers who deserve this much needed water,” Trump said on Monday.

He added: “That is why I have authorized documentation to impose a 5% Tariff on Mexico if this water isn’t released, IMMEDIATELY. The longer Mexico takes to release the water, the more our Farmers are hurt. Mexico has an obligation to FIX THIS NOW.”

Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, was asked to clarify the funding source for the $12bn farm aid package announced earlier today, to which she replied that the money will be coming from Commodity Credit Corporation funds.

“We are using CCC funds, so we have set aside 12bn,” Rollins told reporters on Monday. “We had to, kind of, you know, move some things around, but we’ve got that 12bn set aside. 11bn announced today, 1bn we’re holding back for specialty crops, but as the president said today, he’s open to more.”

Her remarks come after the administration announced one-time payments directed toward crop farmers in bridge payments.

Monday’s statement on the aid reads: “The $12bn in farmer bridge payments, including those provided through the FBA Program, are authorized under the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) Charter Act and will be administered by the Farm Service Agency (FSA).”

Lawmakers could withhold a quarter of defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget unless he provides unedited videos of military strikes on boats in the southern Caribbean and eastern Pacific, Politico reports.

The demand was subtly tucked into the final draft of the annual defense policy bill, which calls for “unedited video of strikes conducted against designated terrorist organizations in the area of responsibility of the United States Southern Command” to the House and Senate armed services committees.

Members of Congress have been demanding more information for weeks about the administration’s plans for Venezuela.

Donald Trump has said he has no problem releasing the video. But, despite the president’s statement, Hegseth did not commit to doing so over the weekend.

Since August, the Trump administration has put a $50m bounty on the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s head, launched the biggest naval deployment in the Caribbean Sea since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and carried out a series of deadly airstrikes on alleged drug boats that have killed more than 80 people.

I’ve been speaking with Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, about today’s supreme court arguments. He notes that while the court may side with the administration in Slaughter’s case, they “might not do that in a sweeping way, and take each independent agency as it comes to them”.

Tobias added that the justices seemed to acknowledge that the Federal Reserve “deserves unique treatment”, which is relevant in the case of governor Lisa Cook – who the president sought to fire this year. The supreme court said that Cook could remain on the Fed board while they prepare to hear her case in January.

Slaughter’s removal, and today’s arguments, ultimately “undermines” Congress as a co-equal branch of government, according to Tobias. “I don’t think we’re having a wholesale end of the modern administrative state, but each one of these is hopefully going to be taken up on its own merits,” he added.

As reported earlier, Crockett entered the Senate race in Texas after former Democratic representative Colin Allred announced he was dropping out.

Here’s what the former Dallas congressman said in a statement:

“In the past few days, I’ve come to believe that a bruising Senate Democratic primary and runoff would prevent the Democratic party from going into this critical election unified against the danger posed to our communities and our constitution by Donald Trump and one of his Republican bootlickers Paxton, Cornyn, or Hunt. That’s why I’ve made the difficult decision to end my campaign for the US Senate.”

Allred also expressed that he is “nowhere near done serving my community and our state” and that he is running in the new 33rd District, a Democratic seat that was redrawn by a Republican-led redistricting effort.

“The 33rd district was racially gerrymandered by Trump in an effort to further rig our democracy but it’s also the community where I grew up attending public schools and watching my mom struggle to pay for our groceries ... It’s the community where I was raised, and where Aly and I are now raising our two boys. It is my home,” Allred said.

Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas filed to run for US Senate, a move expected to shake up the race after rising to fame amid her fierce clashes with Republicans, especially during Texas’ controversial mid-decade redistricting effort.

Crockett, one of Congress’ most outspoken Democrats, entered the race on the final day of qualifying in Texas. The 44-year-old is running for the Senate seat held by Republican John Cornyn, who is seeking reelection in the GOP-dominated state.

Crockett’s announcement came hours after former representative Colin Allred ended his own campaign for the Democratic nomination in favor of attempting a House comeback bid.

She faces a 3 March primary against Democratic state representative James Talarico, a former teacher with a rising national profile fueled by viral social media posts challenging Republican policies such as private school vouchers and requiring the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

Read the full story here:

In another back and forth with Scott – this time on the topic of Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of this year – the president was forthright that he wants to “pay the people”.

“I want the money to be paid to the people to go out and buy their own healthcare instead of paying to the you know, the insurance companies,” he said.

If the tax credits do lapse, it will mean that premium payments would more than double, according to an analysis from KFF.

The president repeatedly derided ABC News’ Rachel Scott today. After she asked Trump whether he would order defense secretary Pete Hegseth to release the video of a “double-tap” strike on a suspected drug vessel from 2 September, the president said that “whatever [Hegseth] decides is OK with me”.

When Scott followed up on Trump’s explanation about the alleged drug-trafficking boats, the president snapped back. “Let me just tell you, you are an obnoxious, a terrible, actually, a terrible reporter, and it’s always the same thing with you,” he said.

Donald Trump continued to blame the Biden administration for inheriting high prices when he returned to office in January.

“I think the prices are going to be going down already. I mean, the prices are way down,” he said at the White House today. “Now inflation is essentially gone. We have it normalized, and it’ll go down even a little bit further. You don’t want it to be deflation either. You have to be careful.”

The president and Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, just went back and forth as she explained that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) will be dispensing $11bn to Farmer Bridge Assistance program, and “holding back” $1bn for some “speciality crops”.

Donald Trump went on to say that “this money would not be possible without tariffs”. However, the assistance program is not using tariff revenue, but funding from USDA.

In a short while we’ll hear from Donald Trump at the White House. He’s set to appear at a roundtable alongside the treasury secretary and agriculture secretary to unveil a new $12bn support package for American farmers. We’ll bring you the key lines here.

Liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also expressed doubt that more presidential firing power is better for democracy.

“You seem to think that there’s something about the president that requires him to control everything as a matter of democratic accountability, when, on the other side, we have Congress saying we’d like these particular agencies and officers to be independent of presidential control for the good of the people,” she told Sauer.

Jackson also emphasized that centering so much power under presidential control would undermine issues that Congress decided should be handled by non-partisan experts in independent agencies.

So having a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States.

And to expand on liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor’s comments that we reported earlier, she said independent agencies have existed throughout US history, and challenged Sauer to explain why the court should make such a drastic change to the structure of government.

Neither the king, nor parliament nor prime ministers in England at the time of the founding [of the United States] ever had an unqualified removal power.

You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that a government is better structured with some agencies that are independent.

Earlier, liberal justice Elena Kagan said the court should not ignore “the real-world realities” of what its decisions do. She told Sauer:

The result of what you want is that the president is going to have massive, unchecked, uncontrolled power – not only to do traditional execution, but to make law through legislative and adjudicative frameworks.

What you are left with is a president ... with control over everything, including over much of the lawmaking that happens in this country.

Sauer countered that the impact would be the president “having control over the executive branch, which he must and does have under our constitution”.

Issuing his brief rebuttal, the administration’s lawyer, solicitor general D John Sauer, encourages the court to overturn the nearly century-old decision protecting board members from removal, calling it a “decaying husk”, and to “restore the separation of powers to our government”.

He says that if the justices construe the president’s powers narrowly, “then we have a situation where Congress could erect virtual, reconstruct, virtually the entire executive branch outside the president’s control.

“And that is not even a republican form of government,” he adds. “But that is the logic of the position that’s being advanced here. That is the parade of horrible as the court ought to consider.”

Agarwal says he absolutely accepts the interpretation of the vesting clause of Article II that established a general default presidential removal power, “but the constitutional text clearly delineates the boundary between the president’s power and Congress’s power with respect to removal”.

In addition, Agarwal highlights the vast historical scholarship that indicates the original understanding “that significant governmental authority absolutely could be vested in commissions that were not subject to plenary presidential control, that every single member was not subject to presidential control”.

Agarwal cites historical evidence that “affirm a rich body of recent historical scholarship that supports the conclusion that the history surrounding this issue is at a minimum contestable”.

And there is a whole lot of history that supports the proposition that the first president of the United States and the first Congress did not believe that the president always and everywhere had to have absolute, illimitable, indefeasible power to fire every single head of any kind of commission exercizing any significant governmental authority.

He says he’s asking the court to give effect not just to the decision of 1789, but also to the decision of 1790.

The other side wants a “maximalist interpretation” of the 1790 decision, he says. That decision settled the question of whether the Senate should be able to interfere with presidential removals, he agrees, but everything else is highly contestable at a minimum.

“That is all the more reason for this court to be cautious in developing heavy-handed constitutional rules that don’t have a clear basis in constitutional text,” he says.

Justice Sotomayor says that most of the original powers of the FTC when Humphrey’s was decided are the same powers that exist today. She points out that the district judge outlined this as well.

The only power she’s identified that might be different is that the FTC’s cease-and-desist orders now have binding effect immediately, she says.

“So I think your point in response to Justice Alito is, if there’s a power that the FTC is wielding now that trenches inappropriately, the answer is not to do away with the ‘for cause’ removal; the answer is to eliminate that individual power,” she says. “So that should be the answer if there’s been an expansion of the powers inappropriately.”

Agarwal says that is correct and that is their position.

A quick reminder that, in September, the supreme court granted a justice department request to block a lower court’s order that shielded Rebecca Slaughter, from being dismissed from the consumer protection and antitrust agency before her term expires in 2029. She will remain fired until the court issue their decision.

While answering questions from justices today, Agarwal said that the “real world danger” if the administration is successful, is that “everything is on the chopping block”.

He added that there was “absolutely no principled basis” for “carving out” independent agencies from Congress’s purview.

“We’re talking about more than two dozen traditional independent agencies that have been established by statutes enacted by the people’s elected representatives and signed into law, all of them by democratically elected presidents,” Agarwal said.

Justice Jackson is now pushing back against the administration’s claims that these independent agencies aren’t answerable to Congress – which delegates their creation, oversight, budgets and laws.

“Part of your argument seemed to revolve around this notion that there’s some kind of thing happening with the independent agency that the reason why the president needs to control it is because they don’t answer to anybody,” she said.

“What I don’t understand from your overarching argument is why that determination of Congress, which makes perfect sense given its duty to protect the people of the United States, why that is subjugated to a concern about the president not being able to control everything.”

As he responds to questions from justices today, Sauer has repeatedly argued that independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are a “headless fourth branch” with limited government oversight.

When responding to questions from justice Brett Kavanaugh, the solicitor general said that these agencies exercise “a great deal of control over individuals and business” but “ultimately do not answer to the president”.

Speaking now is the third liberal justice on the bench, Elena Kagan.

She says that what the administration is asking for would give the president “massive, unchecked, uncontrolled power” over independent agencies. It’s a role that Congress, with its Article I power, has controlled for 9o years.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, also pushed back on the administration’s premise – in line with justice Sotomayor’s line of questioning.

“I appreciate that Article II has some language in it that you’re pointing to, but as Justice Sotomayor pointed out, the constitution does not speak specifically to removal,” she said. “I don’t know why we’d make that inference when the power to create agencies and set everything up lies with Congress.”

She went on to probe the solicitor general as to why he thought that Congress was “somehow less democratically accountable” for the way in which it constructs agencies and determines the terms of its officers.

“You seem to think that there’s something about the president that requires him to control everything as a matter of democratic accountability, when on the other side, we have Congress saying we’d like these particular agencies and officers to be independent of presidential control for the good of the people,” Jackson said.

My colleague, Jakub Krupa, is covering the latest out of Europe, particularly the London meeting between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and several Nato allies – France’s Emmanuel Macron, UK prime minister Keir Starmer, and Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Jakub notes:

The sombre tone of the opening remarks was highly telling: it’s clear that this was not merely another photo opportunity designed to merely convey solidarity with Zelenskyy, but they face urgent – increasingly so – issues that need to be resolved soon.

A reminder that Donald Trump Jr warned that his father may walk away from the Ukrainian war in a lengthy tirade against the purpose of continued fighting in Ukraine, as he also claimed Ukraine’s “corrupt” rich had fled their country leaving “what they believed to be the peasant class” to fight the war.

Meanwhile, the president said on Sunday that Russia is “fine” with the peace proposal (although he didn’t elaborate if this was the same framework that Moscow seemed initially unhappy with during Steve Witkoff’s visit). Trump added: “But I’m not sure that Zelenskyy’s fine with it. His people love it. But he isn’t ready.”

A quick update, a White House official confirms to the Guardian that the president’s roundtable will be to unveil an assistance package for American farmers. He’ll be joined by treasury secretary Scott Bessent and agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins.

Donald Trump is in Washington today. At 2pm ET he’ll host a roundtable event at the White House. Bloomberg reports that he will unveil a much-anticipated $12bn support package for American farmers who have been hit by the president’s sweeping tariff policies. We’re waiting from confirmation from the White House, but will bring you the latest lines as they come in.

More than 2,000 national guard soldiers have been in Washington since Donald Trump’s initial deployment in August, part of the president’s contentious immigration and crime crackdown targeting Democratic-led cities.

In what was seen by many as an example of federal overreach, the president federalised DC’s Metropolitan police department for the first time in its history over the summer.

Trump said he was declaring a public safety emergency and putting the police under the control of the attorney general, Pam Bondi.

This was despite violent crime in Washington DC actually having fallen sharply since 2023.

Republicans in Texas, North Carolina and Missouri have passed new maps that could add as many as seven GOP-friendly seats, as my colleagues report in this story.

Democrats have countered that effort with new maps in California – where Republicans and the Trump justice department are suing to overturn the map – and in Virginia, which could offset those gains.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has authorised a sweeping system of mass arrests, incarcerations and deportations under the banner of an illegal immigration clampdown.

Human rights experts, however, have raised serious concerns about the detention of children with their parents and the arrest of people without charge or due process.

The activities of ICE agents is causing fear and anxiety across American cities, with many immigrant communities, and people of colour born in the US, terrified of being racially profiled and swept up in the raids.

My colleague Lucy Campbell has this report shedding light on the collective trauma inflicted on the immigrant communities of New Orleans. Here is a video showing the strength of feeling against the ICE crackdown in a combative New Orleans city council meeting:

In other news, New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has explained people’s right to refuse to speak to or comply with agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In a video posted to social media yesterday, he vowed to protect the city’s three million immigrants and the constitutional and legal rights of every New Yorker.

Mamdani, who will take office on 1 January, said ICE agents cannot enter into private spaces – like homes and schools – without a judge-signed judicial warrant and people have the right to keep their door closed if there no such warrant is presented.

He said:

ICE is legally allowed to lie to you, but you have the right to remain silent. If you’re being detained, you may always ask, am I free to go repeatedly until they answer you.

You are legally allowed to film ICE as long as you do not interfere with an arrest. It is important to remain calm during any interaction with Ice or law enforcement. Do not impede their investigation, resist arrest, or run.

Mamdani’s video comes a week or so after a raid by federal immigration authorities on the edge of Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, which was thwarted by about 200 protesters.

You can read the National Defense Authorization Act in full here.