New York mayoral candidate Brad Lander released after arrest sparks outcry – as it happened

While the world waits to see if he will decide to join Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack on Iran, Donald Trump has issued an urgent communiqué on social media, posting that the first item on his agenda for Wednesday will be “putting up two beautiful Flag Poles on both sides of the White House”.

“These are the most magnificent poles made” the redecorator-in-chief assures us. “They are tall, tapered, rust proof, rope inside the pole, and of the highest quality.”

The president has made no mention of Iran on his personal social media platform for several hours, since posting earlier on Tuesday his demand for that nation’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” in a war the United States is not officially involved in.

But another item on the president’s schedule for Wednesday suggests that he might have an extremely uncomfortable meeting over lunch if he does go to war with the Islamic Republic of Iran in the next hours.

That’s because the president is scheduled to have lunch, two hours after the flag poles are operational, with the chief of staff of the nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s army.

The army chief, Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, was described in the New York Times recently as “Pakistan’s most powerful man”.

Last week Pakistan’s United Nations ambassador told the security council that “Pakistan strongly condemns unjustified and illegitimate aggression by Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Pakistan stands in resolute solidarity with the brotherly people of Iran.”

Munir’s nominal boss, Pakistan’s defense minister Khawaja MAsif has been considerably less diplomatic in his language. Writing on the social media platform X on Monday, the defense minister mocked Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah of Iran, for saying that the people of Iran are “energized and motivated” for regime change.

“If Iranian people are energised and motivated according to you,” Pakistan’s defense minister wrote in reply to Pahlavi, who lives in comfortable exile, “show some balls and go back and lead them and remove the regime. Put your money where your arse is, bloody parasitical imperial whore.”

“Pahlavi stands with Netanyahu a genocidal maniac, all he deserves is contempt and nothing else” the defense minister added on Tuesday.

According to the Karachi daily Dawn, Field Marshal Munir is on a five-day official visit to the United States “aimed at reinforcing military and strategic ties” between the two countries.

Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate who was detained for over three hours by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Tuesday, told Chris Hayes on MSNBC that the agents who arrested and detained him were both immigrant New Yorkers.

One of them, Lander said, “is a Pakistani Muslim who lives in Brighton Beach”, a Brooklyn neighborhood, and the other, “an Indo-Guyanese guy” who lives in South Ozone Park, Queens.

That puts them, Lander noted, among the 40% of New Yorkers who were born outside the US. Half of the city’s residents, he added, live in mixed-status households, where at least one member of the family is an immigrant, “including 1 million children”.

The fact that New York is “an immigrant city”, Lander argued is what makes it important for it to have a mayor who will stand up for immigrants.

The US attorney for the southern district of New York “is continuing to investigate” Lander, a spokesperson told reporters, apparently by interpreting his initial refusal to let go of the immigrant he escorted from a hearing on Tuesday as a form of either assault of a federal officer or obstruction of an official proceeding.

A large number of the rioters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 were initially charged with obstructing an official proceeding, because they succeeded in delaying the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 election that day. Last year, however, the supreme court threw out those charges, ruling that the law applies only to evidence tampering, like the destruction of records or documents, in official proceedings.

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

The hearing comes after the ninth US circuit court of appeals granted an administration request last week to temporarily pause a lower court order that directed Trump to return control of the soldiers to Gavin Newsom, who filed suit over the deployment.

Judge Mark Bennett, who was nominated to the federal bench by Trump in 2018, opened the hearing by asking the federal government’s lawyer, Brett Shumate, whether the department of justice’s position is that the courts have no role in reviewing the president’s decision to call the national guard.

“No, there’s no role for the court to play in reviewing that decision,” Shumate responded.

“The statute says the president may call on federal service members and units of the guard of any state in such numbers that he considers necessary,” Shumate said, adding that the statute “couldn’t be any more clear”.

Shumate then cast the ongoing protests in Los Angeles as a dire threat to federal workers and property, despite the fact that the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, announced on Tuesday that she was lifting the curfew she had imposed on one neighborhood last week, saying acts of vandalism and violence had subsided.

The government’s lawyer insisted that the troops were still needed to protect federal buildings and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents making arrests.

If the appeals court allows the lower court order to go into effect, returning the guard to the governor’s control, Shumate said, “lives and property will be at risk”.

California’s lawyer, Samuel Harbourt, argued that the federal government failed to even inform Newsom of the decision to deploy the guard and could have taken “more modest measures” instead of “militarizing the situation”.

“There’s World A, where federal authorities like Ice officials are enforcing the law as they prefer, and then World B; they encounter any obstacle and then the president can immediately reach for the most extreme option on the table, which is federalizing the national guard,” Harbourt added.

US district judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco ruled last week that the guard deployment was illegal and exceeded Trump’s authority. He granted Newsom a temporary restraining order to take control of the guard while the lawsuit proceeds. It applied only to the national guard troops and not the marines, who were deployed to LA after the state filed suit.

Harbourt told the panel that not upholding Breyer’s ruling would “defy our constitutional traditions of preserving state sovereignty, of providing judicial review for the legality of executive action, of safeguarding our cherished rights to political protest and of keeping the military”.

At Tuesday’s hearing, the appeals panel appeared skeptical of the state’s arguments and seemed inclined to stay Breyer’s order.

Newsom’s lawsuit accused Trump of inflaming tensions, breaching state sovereignty and wasting resources just when guard members need to be preparing for wildfire season. He also called the federal takeover of the state’s national guard “illegal and immoral”.

Breyer ruled the Trump violated the use of Title 10, which allows the president to call the national guard into federal service when the country “is invaded”, when “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government”, or when the president is unable “to execute the laws of the United States”.

Breyer, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, said the definition of a rebellion was not met.

“The protests in Los Angeles fall far short of ‘rebellion,’,” he wrote. “Individuals’ right to protest the government is one of the fundamental rights protected by the First Amendment, and just because some stray bad actors go too far does not wipe out that right for everyone.”

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

US district judge Julia Kobick issued a preliminary injunction that expanded an earlier order she issued in April that had stopped the US state department from enforcing the policy in the case of six people, after finding the order was likely unconstitutional.

The judge’s new order means that all trans citizens will be able to update their gender markers on their passports as the case against Trump’s order proceeds.

After Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his term in January, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”, the US state department announced that it would “no longer issue U.S. passports or Consular Reports of Birth Abroad (CRBAs) with an X marker. We will only issue passports with an M or F sex marker that match the customer’s biological sex at birth.”

“While this is good news”, the ACLU said in a statement, “we will continue fighting until this executive order is blocked permanently.”

“Effective today, I am lifting the curfew in downtown Los Angeles,” the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon. “As we continue to adapt quickly to the chaos coming out of Washington, I’m prepared to reinstate it if necessary. The safety and stability of LA remains my top priority.”

“The curfew has been an effective tool in helping us maintain public safety in the downtown Los Angeles area and deter those looking to exploit peaceful protests for criminal activity” the chief of the Los Angeles police department, Jim McDonnell, added. “The LAPD will maintain a strong presence in the area and continue to monitor conditions closely to protect lives, uphold the right to lawful assembly, and safeguard property.”

In a brief news conference outside the federal building in lower Manhattan, Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate who was detained by federal immigration officers earlier, expressed shock when a reporter told him that a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that he had been arrested for putting his hands on a federal officer.

“Seriously?” Lander said.

It remains unclear whether any charges will actually be filed, but New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, told reporters: “To my knowledge … there are no charges; the charges have been dropped; he walks out of there a free man.”

Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate who was detained by federal agents while attempting to escort a man out of immigration court in lower Manhattan on Tuesday, was just asked to comment on the claim, from a homeland security spokesperson, that he was attempting to create a viral moment.

He explained that he was simply attending immigration court hearings to support the due process rights of immigrants who were following the law and was escorting people out of the building after their hearings.

“My goal was to walk Edgardo out of the building,” he said, in reference to the person Lander was escorting out of the immigration courtroom when Ice agents seized both of them.

Lander also said that the same spokesperson’s claim, that he had assaulted a federal officer, was obviously false, and urged people to watch video of the incident. “I was simply asking them to show me the judicial warrant,” Lander said.

He will be speaking shortly at a rally in Foley Square.

New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was just released from federal custody and was seen leaving the federal building in lower Manhattan with his wife, Meg Barnette, and New York governor Kathy Hochul. He is now addressing the media outside.

Lander says he’s fine, the non-profit newsroom The City reports. “I will be fine but Edgardo will not be fine,” he says in reference to the man taken by Ice outside an immigration courtroom earlier. Lander was detained for insisting that the Ice agents show a judicial warrant authorizing that immigrant’s arrest

Although a homeland security spokesperson said Lander was arrested for allegedly assaulting a federal officer, he said he has not been charged at this point.

The New York Comptroller’s office is now streaming live video of Lander’s comments on X, here:

Former New York governor and controversial frontrunner in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary Andrew Cuomo has weighed in, calling Brad Lander’s arrest “the latest example of the extreme thuggery of Trump’s Ice out of control”.

Cuomo, who is seeking to rehabilitate his political career after leaving office amid sexual harassment allegations, wrote on X:

This is the latest example of the extreme thuggery of Trump’s ICE out of control -- one can only imagine the fear families across our country feel when confronted with ICE. Fear of separation, fear of being taken from their schools, fear of being detained without just cause. This is not who we are. This must stop, and it must stop now.

In a second post, he added:

Make no mistake: this kind of conduct is the direct result of @ericadamsfornyc handing the keys of our great City over to Donald Trump.

“It’s bullshit,” New York governor Kathy Hochul has been quoted as saying on the arrest of Brad Lander by federal agents today.

The governor said she will call him when he’s out of Ice detention, adding:

But what about all the people who don’t have that high profile position?

She added:

Brad Lander has been a guiding help, and this is what happens to him? What the hell is happening to this country?

New York attorney general Letitia James has condemned the arrest of NYC mayoral candidate Brad Lander as “grotesque”, “profoundly unacceptable” and “a shocking abuse of power”.

This is profoundly unacceptable. Arresting Comptroller Lander for the simple act of standing up for immigrants and their civil rights is a shocking abuse of power. No one should face fear and intimidation in a courthouse, and this is a grotesque escalation of tensions. The administration’s rampant targeting of New Yorkers only makes our communities less safe.

A crowd of supporters were gathered at the corner of the federal immigration building chanting “free Brad lander” and “ICE out of the courts”. Protesters held up placards saying “fascist minion” and “immigrants are New York”.

The protesters were surrounded by a tight cordon of police and metal barricades. Public entrance to the building was closed despite it being a public building.

On the arrest of New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin told the Guardian Lander had been arrested for “assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer”.

McLaughlin said:

New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer.

Our heroic ICE law enforcement officers face a 413% increase in assaults against them — it is wrong that politicians seeking higher office undermine
law enforcement safety to get a viral moment.

No one is above the law, and if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences.

The “proud” son of immigrants from Mexico, and the first Latino elected to the senate from California, the US state with the largest population of immigrants – documented and undocumented – US senator Alex Padilla has been a champion for immigrant communities.

On Tuesday, he warned that Trump was once again scapegoating immigrants to “justify his undemocratic crackdowns and his authoritarian power grabs”.

“I refuse to let immigrants be political pawns on his path towards fascism,” Padilla said.

He warned that what was happening to immigrants in California was just a “test case” for what Trump could do to any American anywhere in the country.

It’s time to wake up.

If Donald Trump can bypass the governor and activate the national guard to put down protests on immigrant rights, suppress your rights too.

If he can deploy the marines to Los Angeles without justification, he can deploy them to your state too.

And if you can ignore due process, strip away first amendment rights and disappear people to foreign prisons without their day in court, he can do it to you too.

He urged Americans to keep peacefully protesting and speaking out.

No one’s going to liberate Los Angeles but Angelenos. No one will redeem America but Americans.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called the arrest of Brad Lander “political intimidation”.

The Democratic congresswomen wrote on social media:

ICE just arrested Brad Lander, the NYC Comptroller and one of the leading candidates for Mayor, without grounds. He was conducting routine immigration court work, escorting individuals from hearings. He asked ICE for their warrant - well within his legal rights. This is political intimidation.

While we were reporting on the arrest of mayoral candidate Brad Lander in New York, an emotional Alex Padilla took to the Senate floor to recount, for the record, the shocking moment when he was restrained and forcibly removed by federal agents as he tried to ask a question at a press conference held by homeland security secretary Kristi Noem in Los Angeles last week.

The US senator from California said he was at the federal building to receive a briefing from the US Northern Command’s General Gregory Guillot on the deployment of marines to the city as part of the administration’s attempt to quell protests against Ice raids. Padilla said he was met at the entrance by a national guardsmen and an FBI agent and was escorted through a security screening and into the conference room where the briefing would take place.

When he learned Noem was holding a press conference “literally down the hall” – and that it was the reason his own briefing was delayed – he said he asked to attend. He and his Democratic senate colleagues had submitted several informational requests to DHS that had gone unanswered and he thought he might learn something new from Noem.

“I didn’t just stand up and go. I asked and was escorted by the national guardsmen and the FBI agent into the press conference. They opened the door for me,” Padilla said. “They accompanied me into the press briefing room, and they stood next to me as I stood there for a while listening.”

Padilla said he listened until Noem claimed that the Trump administration was determined to “liberate” Los Angeles. At that point, he said he could no longer remain silent and interrupted with a question.

“I was compelled, both as a senator and as an American, to speak up,” Padilla said. “But before I could even get out my question, I was physically and aggressively forced out of the room, even as I repeatedly announced I was a United States senator, and I had a question for the secretary, and even as the National Guardsmen and the FBI agent who served as my escorts brought me into that press briefing room, stood by silently, knowing full well who I was.”

“If this administration is this afraid of just one senator, with a question,” Padilla said in closing, “imagine what the voices of 10s of millions of Americans peacefully protesting can do.”

Democratic New York state senator Gustavo Rivera has called Brad Lander’s arrest “another example of fascist overreach from Ice”.

Democratic representative Greg Casar, of Texas, called Lander’s arrest illegal and “outrageous” and called for his immediate release.

Fellow New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has called the arrest of Brad Lander because he asked to see a judicial warrant “fascism” and called for his immediate release.

New York City’s comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander has been arrested by masked federal agents while visiting an immigration court.

Lander’s campaign spokesperson confirmed to Fox5NY that Lander was indeed arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at immigration court.

On Tuesday, Lander appeared at 26 Federal Plaza to observe immigration hearings involving individuals marked for potential deportation.

He was arrested, according to video footage of the incident, as he and his staff walked with an immigrant who was being seized by federal agents. Earlier in the day, the immigrant had their case dismissed pending appeal, per AMNY.

Donald Trump has said that the US has “complete and total control of the skies over Iran” and is aware of the location of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khameini, but “we are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now”.

“We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding,” Trump said on Truth Social. “He is an easy target, but is safe there.” The US president added that his “patience is wearing thin” and called for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” from Iran, repeating his warning that Iran should not shoot missiles at civilians or American soldiers.

He wrote on Truth Social:

We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran. Iran had good sky trackers and other defensive equipment, and plenty of it, but it doesn’t compare to American made, conceived, and manufactured “stuff.” Nobody does it better than the good ol’ USA.

He added:

We know exactly where the so-called “Supreme Leader” is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there - We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now. But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

In a third post, he said:

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!

Just hours into Trump Mobile’s Monday launch touting American-made smartphones, the venture pulled its coverage map after users noticed that the body of water south of Texas was labeled as the Gulf of Mexico instead of the Trump-preferred name, Gulf of America.

The name of the international body of water has been a hot-button issue after Donald Trump signed an executive order early in his second term, renaming it the Gulf of America, a name other countries have rejected.

He has since barred the Associated Press news agency from certain White House events, triggering a lawsuit, as AP continues to use the international name, Gulf of Mexico.

The Trump family licensed its name to the US mobile service, the latest venture aiming to cash in on the president’s political and cultural influence.

A Reuters review of the website’s code shows Trump Mobile appears to have used T-Mobile’s network data for its coverage map. The telecom operator’s coverage map labels the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico.

The map stirred up chatter across social media before being removed, with numerous users posting screenshots of the old map. As of late this morning, a link to Trump Mobile’s coverage map returned an error, saying the page could not be found.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment on the coverage map being taken down from the website.

Tina Smith, a Minnesota senator confronted Mike Lee, a Utah senator, on Monday to tell him directly that his social media posts fueled ongoing misinformation about a shooting that killed her friend.

Lee’s posts, which advanced conspiracies that a Minnesota assassin was a “Marxist” and blamed the state’s governor for Melissa Hortman’s death, were among many threads of false or speculative claims swirling online after the killings.

Smith told Lee his posts were “brutal and cruel,” according to CNN. “He should think about the implications of what he’s saying and doing. It just further fuels this hatred and misinformation,” she said. She wanted him to hear from her directly how painful it was to see his words after the brutality her state endured. Lee didn’t say much, according to Smith, and seemed surprised to be confronted.

Within hours of the shootings, rightwing social media accounts with millions of followers manufactured false conspiracy theories about the suspect and his motives, falsely portraying the man whose friends say he is an evangelical Christian Trump supporter as a radical leftwing assassin and attempting to paint him as a political ally of Tim Walz, the Democratic governor and former vice-presidential candidate.

Fewer than 10% of immigrants arrested by Ice this fiscal year have serious criminal convictions like rape, murder, assault or robbery CNN reports. Three-quarters had no criminal convictions beyond immigration or traffic offenses.

Per CNN’s story:

As the Trump administration has ramped up raids in Los Angeles and around the country, top officials have highlighted the capture of immigrants convicted of crimes like murder, assault and rape — describing them as “barbaric” criminals who “reigned terror” on American communities.

But internal government documents obtained by CNN show that only a fraction of migrants booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since October have been convicted of serious violent or sexual crimes.

Public Ice data released by the administration shows that most immigrants currently in the agency’s custody do not have a prior criminal conviction. But the internal data reviewed by CNN goes deeper, making clear that even among those convicted of crimes, a substantial percentage faced only relatively minor charges.

The internal data covers the more than 185,000 immigrants who have been booked into Ice custody during the last months of the Biden administration and first months of the Trump administration, including those detained by Ice agents and those detained by Customs and Border Protection who were then placed in Ice custody.

The records show a stark contrast with the Trump administration’s public messaging. In the last month, almost all of the detained or deported immigrants named or specifically identified in Ice or DHS press releases were convicted or accused of crimes aside from immigration violations. Nearly two thirds were characterized as convicted or accused of serious crimes.

The NAACP said it will not invite Donald Trump to its annual convention next month, the first time the 116-year-old civil rights organization has not asked a sitting US president to attend its convention.

Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, accused the president of working against the group’s mission.

“This has nothing to do with political party,” Johnson said in a statement on Monday. “Our mission is to advance civil rights, and the current president has made clear that his mission is to eliminate civil rights.”

Johnson said Trump has undermined American democracy by trying to consolidate power, has signed unconstitutional executive orders that oppress and undo federal civil rights protections and has turned the US military against communities.

The group, which is nonpartisan, has invited presidents from both the Republican and Democratic parties since Harry Truman in 1946, it said.

“But right now, it’s clear — Donald Trump is attacking our democracy and our civil rights. He believes more in the fascist playbook than in the US Constitution. This playbook is radical and un-American,” Johnson said.

The NAACP said it also will not invite vice-president JD Vance to its national convention 12-16 July in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The civil rights group has filed several lawsuits against the Trump administration over diversity, equity and inclusion programs and voting rights.

Hurricane season is here, and a CBS News investigation has found that cuts to Fema’s storm preparation program by the Trump administration have hammered communities that voted for the president.

In particular, red state politicians are up in arms over the cancellation of the infrastructure program – known as Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC.

The $4.6bn initiative was launched under the first Trump administration, and CBS’s analysis of Fema data revealed that two-thirds of the counties awarded grants voted for Trump over former Kamala Harris during the 2024 election.

Trump administration officials said they will claw back about $3.6m that has already been awarded but not yet spent, sending it back to the Treasury.

Fema said in a statement to CBS that the program was being scaled back for being “wasteful and ineffective” and “more concerned with climate change” than providing help to Americans affected by storms.

Per CBS’s story:

Projects that are now stalled as a result range from a plan to elevate six buildings on the main street in Pollocksville, North Carolina - population less than 300 - to a $50m project to prevent flash flooding in New York City.

The data suggests the elimination of the BRIC program will especially deprive vulnerable communities across the Southeast. In Florida, 18 of the 22 counties that stood to benefit from nearly $250 million in grants voted for Trump. Elsewhere in North Carolina, grants were canceled in areas ravaged by Hurricane Helene last year.

The scale of the cuts in ruby-red Louisiana - 34 grants totalling $185m - prompted the state’s Republican senior senator, Bill Cassidy, to publicly condemn the decision to cancel the program.

“We passed BRIC into law and provided funds for it,” said Cassidy in a speech on the Senate floor in April. “To do anything other than use that money to fund flood mitigation projects is to thwart the will of Congress.”

Last month, Cassidy joined more than 80 members of Congress in writing a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, begging the administration to reinstate the program and arguing that not doing so “will only make it harder and more expensive for communities to recover from the next storm”.

In the letter, the bipartisan group of lawmakers cited research that showed every dollar invested in disaster mitigation can save up to $18 in response and recovery expenditures after a storm hits.

As Donald Trump considers a direct intervention in Israel’s conflict with Iran, another war has broken out in Washington between conservative hawks, calling for immediate US strikes on uranium enrichment facilities, and Maga isolationists, who are demanding Trump stick to his campaign pledge not to involve the US in new overseas wars.

At stake is whether the US could target the mountain redoubt that is home to the Fordow fuel enrichment plant, a key uranium enrichment site hidden 80 to 90 metres underground that cannot be targeted directly by Israeli jets – although they can attack some of the infrastructure that allows the plant to operate.

A direct strike would require the US Air Force’s 30,000-pound class GBU-57/B massive ordinance penetrators and the US B-2 Stealth Bombers capable of carrying them, making Washington’s sign-on a key goal for Israeli officials.

“Mr Trump posted on social media Sunday that ‘we can easily get a deal done’ to end the war,” read a Wall Street Journal editorial this week. “But that prospect will be more likely if he helps Israel finish the military job.

“If Mr Trump won’t help on Fordow, Israel will need more time to achieve its strategic goals,” it went on. “A neutral US means a longer war.”

But the escalating conflict – and America’s possible role in it – has already led to a schism among vocal Trump supporters.

Some of Trump’s most powerful allies, including his vice-president, JD Vance, have called for the US to restrain itself from sending its troops to fight wars overseas. Powerful pundits like Tucker Carlson have condemned the potential for US involvement in a war in Iran.

The schism among Trump officials also runs through the Pentagon. Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, is among the most prominent of a group of “prioritisers” who had hoped to focus US resources away from Europe and the Middle East towards the growing threat from China. The Pentagon has denied there are any disagreements on policy within the department.

With Trump rushing back to Washington from a G7 meeting in Canada to an emergency national security council meeting, the potential for a strike against Iran appeared as high as at any time since the beginning of the crisis.

“What’s happening here is some of the isolationist movement led by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are distressed we may be helping the Israelis defeat the Iranians,” Mitch McConnell, the former Senate Republican leader, told CNN. “I would say it’s been kind of a bad week for the isolationists.”

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

Mamdani, a democratic socialist like Sanders, is the main rival to the campaign of the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who is seeking to rehabilitate his political career after leaving office amid sexual harassment allegations.

Cuomo, 67, began the race as a dominant favorite but Mamdani, 33, has surged in recent weeks, netting the key endorsement of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. One poll even showed him edging into the lead.

Sanders, a senator from Vermont and a powerful figure on the Democratic party’s progressive left, said:

At this dangerous moment in history, status quo politics isn’t good enough. We need new leadership that is prepared to stand up to powerful corporate interests & fight for the working class.

Mamdani replied on X:

As for so many across this country, @BernieSanders has been the single most influential political figure in my life. As Mayor, I will strive to live up to his example by fighting for the working class every day and hopefully make Brooklyn’s own proud.

The Democratic primary election to lead one of the biggest cities in the US will be held on 24 June, after early voting began on 14 June. The election will use ranked-choice voting, allowing voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference.

New York’s current mayor, Eric Adams, who ran as a Democrat in 2021, is seeking re-election as an independent candidate and has been widely attacked by Democrats for his close relationship with Donald Trump.

The general mayoral election is set for 4 November.

Over 48 hours after a Minnesota state lawmaker was killed and another injured in a “politically motivated assassination”, Donald Trump is still refusing to call the state’s governor, Tim Walz, as a president usually would under the circumstances.

Trump told reporters on Air Force One of Walz, who was Kamala Harris’s running mate:

I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I’m not calling him.

Why would I call him? I could call and say, ‘Hi, how you doing?’ The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess. So I could be nice and call, but why waste time?

Here’s the clip.

Donald Trump has said he is not seeking a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Iran but instead wants to see “a real end” to Iran’s nuclear programme, with Tehran abandoning it “entirely”.

The US president predicted Israel would not let up in its bombing campaign and suggested a decisive moment in that campaign was imminent, though he made clear he expected Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities without US help.

“You’re going to find out over the next two days … Nobody’s slowed up so far,” he told CBS News, after abruptly abandonning a G7 summit in the Canadian Rockies, saying he was returning to the White House to deal with the conflict.

Speaking to reporters on the way back to Washington, Trump said he was seeking “an end, a real end, not a ceasefire”.

That would involve a “complete give-up” by Iran, he said. Trump’s negotiating position before the Israeli attack was that Iran should stop uranium enrichment entirely, and he blamed Tehran for not accepting that proposal.

Trump also stressed that any Iranian attack on Americans or US bases, something that Iran has threatened, would be met with overwhelming force, saying “we’ll come down so hard, it’d be gloves off.”

Read the full report here:

A federal appeals court will hear arguments on Tuesday on Donald Trump’s authority to deploy the national guard and marines to Los Angeles amid protests and civil unrest, days after a lower court ruled that the president unlawfully called the national guard into service, Reuters reports.

The lower court’s ruling last Thursday was put on hold hours later by the San Francisco-based 9th US circuit court of appeals, which will consider the Trump administration’s request for a longer pause during its appeal.

US district judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco had ruled that the Republican president unlawfully took control of California’s national guard and deployed 4,000 troops to Los Angeles against the wishes of Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom. Trump also ordered 700 US marines to the city after sending in the national guard, but Breyer has not yet ruled on the legality of the marines’ mobilisation.

Breyer said Trump had not complied with the law that allows him to take control of the national guard to address rebellions or invasions, and ordered Trump to return control of California’s national guard to Newsom, who sued over the deployment.

Trump’s decision to send troops into Los Angeles sparked a national debate about the use of the military on US soil and inflamed political tensions in a city in the midst of protest and turmoil over Trump’s immigration raids.

A journalist who lost his job at ABC News after describing top White House aide Stephen Miller as someone “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” has said he published that remark on social media because he felt it was “true”.

“It was something that was in my heart and mind,” the network’s former senior national correspondent Terry Moran said Monday on The Bulwark political podcast. “And I would say I used very strong language deliberately.”

Moran’s comments to Bulwark host Tim Miller about standing by his remarks came a little more than a week after he wrote on X that Stephen Miller – the architect of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies – “eats his hate”.

“His hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,” Moran’s post read, in part. He added that the president “is a world-class hater. But his hatred [is] only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification”.

You can read the full report here:

The Trump administration has shelved, in recent weeks, an inter-agency working group it had set up to formulate strategies for pressuring Russia into speeding up peace talks with Ukraine, according to three US officials, Reuters reports.

The effort, which was established earlier in the spring, lost steam in May as it became increasingly clear to participants that Donald Trump was not interested in adopting a more confrontational stance toward Moscow, said the officials.

Despite pledging during his campaign to end the war in Ukraine on the first day of his presidency, Trump in recent months has grown increasingly frustrated that his push has yielded no breakthroughs. He has begun saying that the United States may abandon its efforts to broker peace altogether.

In light of that threat, the working group’s task seemed increasingly irrelevant, added those officials, who requested anonymity.

“It lost steam toward the end because the president wasn’t there. Instead of doing more, maybe he wanted to do less,” one of the officials said.

Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he had not reached out to Iran for peace talks, “in any way, shape, or form”.

Iran “should have taken the deal that was on the table”, Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

He added: “This is just more HIGHLY FABRICATED, FAKE NEWS! If they want to talk, they know how to reach me.”

Good morning and welcome to our blog covering US politics today with the news that Donald Trump has left the G7 summit in Canada early.

The US president said his departure had “nothing to do with” working on a deal between Israel and Iran, refuting comments made by French President Emmanuel Macron who said the US had initiated a ceasefire proposal.

“Wrong! He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform late on Monday.

As Reuters reports, he had earlier urged residents to flee the Iranian capital. “Iran should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign. What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social media platform on Monday.

Axios reported the White House is discussing with Iran the possibility of a meeting this week between US envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox News that Trump was still aiming for a nuclear deal with Iran, while adding the US would defend its assets in the region.

As he arrives back in Washington, Trump will be facing competing calls between conservative hawks, seeking immediate US strikes on uranium enrichment facilities, and Maga isolationists, who are demanding he stick to his campaign pledge not to involve the US in new overseas wars.

You can read my colleague Andrew Roth’s analysis here:

The Iran-Israel crisis is likely to dominate the agenda today, but in other developments:

• Trump and the UK’s PM, Keir Starmer, have signed off a UK-US trade deal at the G7 summit in Canada, with the US president saying Britain would have protection against future tariffs “because I like them”. The deal covers aerospace and the auto sector but Trump brushed off reporters’ questions about steel.

• Ukraine on Tuesday slammed the lack of an “adequate reaction” from the world to Russia’s deadly strikes on its soil, after an attack on Kyiv killed at least 14 people. The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenksyy had been hoping to speak with Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada.