WASHINGTON — Public health experts warned Tuesday that $600 million in cuts to federal public health funding announced by the Trump administration would endanger one of California’s main early-warning systems for HIV outbreaks, leaving communities vulnerable to undetected disease spread.

The grant terminations affect funding for a number of disease control programs in California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota, but the vast majority target California, according to congressional Democrats who received the full list of affected programs Monday. The move is the latest in the White House’s campaign against what it called “radical gender ideology” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“These cuts will hurt vital efforts to prevent the spread of disease,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “It’s dangerous, and it’s deliberate.”

Under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the CDC has increasingly turned away from evidence-backed HIV monitoring and prevention programs, claiming they “undermined core American values.”

The stoppage will derail $1.1 million slated for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s National HIV Behavioral Surveillance Project, according to the president’s budget office.

The program is a “critical” tool used to detect emerging HIV trends, prevent outbreaks before they spread and reduce HIV incidence, said Dr. Paul Simon, an epidemiologist at the UCLA Fielding School and former chief science officer for the county’s public health department.

“Without this program, we’re flying blind. The first step in addressing any public health threat is understanding what’s happening on the ground,” Simon said. “With HIV in particular, people often have no symptoms for years and can unknowingly spread the virus.”

The White House gave little explanation for the move but claimed the programs it targeted “promote DEI and radical gender ideology.”

Simon pushed back on the claim, calling the move “dangerous” and “shortsighted.”

“It’s particularly dangerous to put your head in the sand and pretend there’s not a problem,” Simon said. “The success we’ve had over the past decades comes from finding cases early. … By treating people early, we can prevent transmission.”

Several local front-line service providers were targeted for cuts including the Los Angeles LGBT Center, which is set to lose $383,000 in investments for community HIV prevention programs.

The LGBT Center has not received official notice of the elimination but said the cuts would disproportionately affect LGBTQ+ communities and other underserved populations.

“These decisions are not guided by public health evidence, but by politics — and the consequences are real,” LGBT Center Chief Executive Joe Hollendoner said in a statement. “Any reduction in funding directly affects our ability to provide care, prevention and lifesaving services to the people who rely on us.”

The Trump administration’s announced cuts are likely to face challenges from states and grant recipients.

The LGBT Center succeeded last year in blocking similar grant cancellations stemming from the president’s executive orders. A federal judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction ruling the administration could not use executive orders to “weaponize Congressionally appropriated funds” to bypass statutory funding obligations.

“We stand ready to bring more litigation against this administration if it is required in order to protect our community,” Hollendoner said.

The White House has repeatedly pushed to halt the flow of billions of dollars to California and other states led by Democrats, a strategy that has sharpened partisan tensions and expanded the scope of California’s legal fight against the administration.

In January, administration officials said they would freeze $10 billion in federal child care, welfare and social services funding for California and four other states, but a federal judge blocked the effort.

Trump later said he would begin blocking federal funds to “sanctuary” jurisdictions such as California and Los Angeles, which have long opposed cooperation with federal immigration agencies.

Last year, the administration made broad cuts to federal funding for minority-serving institutions, leaving California colleges scrambling to figure out how to replace or do without the money. Federal officials argued that such programs were racially discriminatory.

In June, California congressional Democrats demanded the release of $19.8 million in frozen HIV prevention grants to the L.A. County Department of Public Health. That freeze forced the county to terminate contracts with 39 community health providers and nearly shut down HIV testing and other services at the Los Angeles LGBT Center.

The administration reversed course after sustained pressure from Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Burbank) and 22 fellow House Democrats.

“These grants save lives,” Friedman said of recent terminations. “They connect homeless people to care, they support front-line organizations fighting HIV, and they build the public health infrastructure that protects my constituents. Just like I did last time the Trump Administration came after our communities, I won’t stop fighting back.”

In a letter to Kennedy last year, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) said that the Cabinet secretary has a history of peddling misinformation about the virus and disease.

Kennedy’s motivations are “grounded not in sound science, but in misinformation and disinformation you have spread previously about HIV and AIDS, including your repeated claim that HIV does not cause AIDS,” Garcia wrote.

Gov. Gavin Newsom called President Trump’s latest threats to public health funding “a familiar pattern,” and shed doubt on their long-term legal viability.

“The President publicly claims he will rip away public health funding from states that voted against him, while offering no details or formal notice,” Newsom said. “If or when the Trump administration takes action, we will respond appropriately. Until then, we will pass on participating in his attempt to chase headlines.”

By STEVE KARNOWSKI

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A former federal prosecutor who quit amid a dispute with the Trump administration is now representing former CNN host Don Lemon, who was one of nine people indicted for their alleged roles in disrupting a service at a Minnesota church where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official was a pastor.

NEW YORK — The Trump administration on Thursday will launch TrumpRx, a website it says will help patients buy prescription drugs directly from manufacturers at a discounted rate at a time when health care and the cost of living are growing concerns for Americans.

The government-hosted website is not expected to be a platform for buying medication but instead set up as a facilitator, pointing Americans to drugmakers’ direct-to-consumer websites where they can make purchases.

The site’s unveiling, set for Thursday evening, was announced by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who in a post on X called it “a state of the art website for Americans consumers to purchase low cost prescription drugs.”

She said President Donald Trump will make the announcement alongside Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and Joe Gebbia, director of Trump’s National Design Studio.

The president first teased TrumpRx in September while announcing the first of his more than 15 deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices to match the lowest price offered in other developed nations. He said in December the website would provide “massive discounts to all consumers” — though it’s unclear whether the prices available on drugmakers’ websites will routinely be any lower than what many consumers could get through their insurance coverage.

The website’s expected Thursday release comes after it faced multiple delays, for reasons the administration hasn’t publicly shared. Last fall, Oz told Trump the site would share prices for consumers before the end of the year. An expected launch in late January was also pushed back.

The president has spent the past several months seeking to spotlight his efforts to lower drug prices for Americans. He’s done that through deals with major pharmaceutical companies, including some of the biggest drugmakers like Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Merck, which have agreed to lower prices of their Medicaid drugs to so-called “most favored nations” pricing. As part of the deals, many of the companies’ new drugs will also be launched at discounted rates for consumer markets through TrumpRx.

Many of the details of Trump’s deals with manufacturers remain unclear, and drug prices for patients in the U.S. can depend on many factors, including the competition a treatment faces and insurance coverage. Most people have coverage through work, the individual insurance market or government programs like Medicaid and Medicare, which shield them from much of the cost.

Trump’s administration also has negotiated lower prices for several prescription drugs for Medicare enrollees, through a direct negotiation program created by a 2022 law.

WASHINGTON — Senate Republican Leader John Thune warned Thursday that Congress is not close to an agreement to fund the Department of Homeland Security, signaling that another short-term extension may be the only way to avoid a shutdown as Democrats demand “nonnegotiable” ICE reforms ahead of the Feb. 13 deadline.

The Republicans are increasingly looking to punt the full funding package a second time if negotiations collapse. Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, Thune said that such a move would not include any reforms lawmakers had previously negotiated, including body cameras for immigration agents.

“As of right now, we aren’t anywhere close to having any sort of an agreement that would enable us to fund the Department of Homeland Security,” he said. “If [Democrats] are coming to the table demanding a blank check or refusing to consider any measures but their own, they’re likely to end up with nothing.”

He spoke hours after House and Senate Democrats announced they were aligned behind a list of 10 demands they say must be passed before approving the Homeland Security funding package through September.

Democrats are pressing for statutory limits on immigration raids, new judicial warrant requirements, body-worn cameras, identification rules for agents and enhanced oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — reforms they say are necessary to rein in what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called an agency “out of control.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Democrats are planning to propose the legislation as soon as possible.

“We want our Republican colleagues to finally get serious about this, because this is turning America inside out in a way we haven’t seen in a very long time,” Schumer said.

The coordinated demands signal unity among House and Senate Democrats after a rocky week on Capitol Hill. In a slim vote, 21 House Democrats joined Republicans on Tuesday to end a partial government shutdown by temporarily extending Homeland Security funding through Feb. 13.

The two-week stopgap, called a “continuing resolution,” was meant to leave time for the two parties to debate how to rein in ICE after the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

But that truce has quickly unraveled. Republican leaders have little appetite for the full slate of reforms. Some have indicated openness to narrower changes, such as expanding body camera programs and training, but reject mask bans and the removal of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has already ruled out warrant requirements, which would limit immigration agents from entering private property without a court order. In remarks to reporters Wednesday, he also hinted at some interest in attaching voter ID and anti-sanctuary city policies to negotiations.

“It will be part of the discussion over the next couple of weeks, and we’ll see how that shakes out. But I suspect that some of the changes — the procedural modifications with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement — will be codified,” he said.

Johnson was confident the two sides could make a deal without further delays, adding that negotiations are largely between “the White House, Schumer and Senate Democrats.”

President Trump has privately supported the short-term extension to cool tensions while publicly defending immigration agents and expressing skepticism toward Democrats’ reform push, according to House leadership.

White House border policy advisor Tom Homan also announced a drawdown of 700 federal agents from Minneapolis this week as what officials framed as a goodwill gesture amid negotiations.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Thursday that the administration is willing to consider some of the demands Democrats have made, but said some of their requests are not “grounded in any common sense and they are nonstarters for this administration.”

Leavitt did not specify which reforms the administration was willing to consider. She did, however, say the president is committed to keeping the government open and supporting “immigration enforcement efforts in this country.”

The White House did not respond when asked if the president would support a short-term spending measure should negotiations stall.

Republicans continue to warn that a failure to reach a deal would jeopardize disaster response funding, airport security operations, maritime patrols, and increased security assistance for major national events, including the upcoming World Cup in Los Angeles.

“If we don’t do it by the middle of next week, we should consider a continuing resolution for the rest of the year and just put this all behind us,” said Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chair of the House Freedom Caucus.

Democrats, however, remain adamant that verbal assurances are no longer enough.

“These are just some of the commonsense proposals that the American people clearly would like to see in terms of the dramatic changes that are needed at the Department of Homeland Security before there is a full-year appropriations bill,” Jeffries said.

Times staff writer Ana Ceballos in Washington contributed to this report.

The Trump administration is moving to dismantle one of the world’s leading climate and weather research institutions, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., in a decision experts say will undermine U.S. scientific competitiveness and leave millions vulnerable to worsening climate hazards.

Russell Vought, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, made the surprise announcement in a Tuesday evening post on X.

“This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” Vought wrote. “A comprehensive review is underway & any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”

The news sent shock waves through the scientific community. The center’s work is used by governments, universities, emergency planners and the private sector for forecasts and disaster response planning. Its sophisticated Community Earth System Model underpins international climate assessments and much of U.S. policy. The federally funded research center employs about 830 staff, making it one of the largest consortia of scientists who study weather, climate and Earth systems using advanced models and supercomputers in the world.

“The Trump administration has put a bull’s-eye on one of the United States’ premier weather and climate research and modeling centers, threatening to destroy decades of public investment,” said Carlos Martinez, a former researcher at the center, now a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Deliberately dismantling an institution so central to weather forecasting and climate change prediction would not only undermine scientific research, it would leave people across the nation less prepared for the dangers of a warming world.”

A senior White House official confirmed the plan to The Times, saying the National Science Foundation, which funds the center, will be breaking up the facility to “eliminate Green New Scam research activities.” As the largest federal research program on climate change, the center serves as the “premier research stronghold for left-wing climate lunacy,” the official said.

Officials with the National Science Foundation on Wednesday said the agency is “reviewing the structure of the research and observational capabilities” at the center, and is exploring options to transfer stewardship of its Wyoming Supercomputing Center to “an appropriate operator.” The agency is also looking to divest two aircraft managed by the center and to “redefine the scope” of modeling and forecasting research and operations moving forward.

“NSF remains committed to providing world-class infrastructure for weather modeling, space weather research and forecasting and other critical functions,” the agency said. “To do so, NSF will be engaging with partner agencies, the research community, and other interested parties to solicit feedback for rescoping the functions of the work currently performed by NCAR.”

Although the White House official characterized the center’s work as “climate lunacy,” changes in the climate are coming faster than many scientists predicted. The basic science of climate change has been well-established through decades of research.

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, said it is hard to overstate the importance of the center. “There is no other institution like NCAR — not just in this country but really anywhere else in the world,” Swain said during a briefing Wednesday morning. He feared that no other global institution can absorb the entirety of its expertise.

Swain also described the administration’s decision as “nakedly politically partisan” in a manner that does not align with public interest. The center’s predictions “aren’t just helpful or convenient — they are life-saving and economy-saving,” he said, adding that shuttering the facility would be “an unbelievable, really genuinely shocking self-inflicted wound to American competitiveness.”

Indeed, the loss of the facility would leave millions of people vulnerable to worsening climate hazards such as wildfires, hurricanes, tropical cyclones and winter storms, Swain and other experts said. Its Wyoming Supercomputing Center provides massive computational resources to national and international scientists for running complex weather and climate models and simulations.

In California, many universities and state agencies use data and modeling from the center for air pollution monitoring, managing water, emergency planning and wildfire risk assessment, among many other uses.

Data and tools from the center are also used directly and indirectly by the private sector.

For instance, the center provides large amounts of atmospheric data, via the Climate Data Guide and Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble Numerical Simulation, that researchers, insurance companies and even AI data scientists can access and use to train models, gauge risk and make forecasts.

The aviation, energy and private weather forecasting industries all rely on data and tools developed by the center, including a technology product known as BoltAlert, which is used to predict lightning strikes and the Maintenance Decision Support System, which alerts snowplow and truck fleets about road conditions.

The $700-billion reinsurance industry also relies on the center’s data, tools and climate models to create financial instruments, such as catastrophe bonds, that are directly tied to weather or natural disaster risks. Such vehicles are dependent upon thorough and precise past data, as well as climate models for forecasting potential risk.

For instance, the reinsurance giant SwissRe credits the work of the center in the development of its proprietary forecasting tool known as the CatNet. In a press statement about their product, the company said its catastrophe experts partnered with the center to create globally validated hail predictions.

Bill Wadell, a spokesman for AccuWeather, said there was “no indication” that the announcement of the dismantling of the climate center would affect his company “at this time.” However, he said the American public and economy “are best served when all sectors of the U.S. weather enterprise” — public and private — work together toward “the common goal of best informing the public and protecting lives and property.”

The decision to close the facility follows other efforts from the Trump administration to shut down scientific research and change the public view of climate change. That includes laying off hundreds of staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration and slashing funding for its scientific research arm. Earlier this year, the Trump administration also fired hundreds of scientists working to prepare the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment and removed the website that housed previous assessments.

The announcement came as a surprise to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who said in a statement shortly after Vought’s announcement the state had “yet to receive information” about the plan.

“If true, public safety is at risk and science is being attacked,” Polis said. “Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families. If these cuts move forward, we will lose our competitive advantage against foreign powers and adversaries in the pursuit of scientific discovery.”

When asked why the administration is closing the facility, White House officials pointed to so-called “woke” programs at the center that they said “waste taxpayer funds” and “veer from strong or useful science,” such as its Rising Voices Center aimed at joining Indigenous knowledge and Earth science, and an art series that explored the human relationship with water.

They also cited the center’s research into wind turbines that sought to better understand the impact of weather conditions on offshore wind production. Trump has been vocal about his opposition to offshore wind and other forms of renewable energy.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s chief of staff is defending herself after granting an extraordinarily candid series of interviews with Vanity Fair in which she offers stinging judgments of the president and blunt assessments about his administration’s shortcomings.

The profile of Susie Wiles, Trump’s reserved, influential top aide since he resumed office, caused a scandal in Washington and prompted a crisis response from the White House that involved nearly every single figure in Trump’s orbit issuing a public defense.

In 11 interviews conducted over lunches and meetings in the West Wing, Wiles described early failures and drug use by billionaire Elon Musk during his time in government and mistakes by Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi in her public handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Wiles also acknowledged that Trump had launched a retribution campaign against his perceived political enemies.

“I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution,” Wiles told Chris Whipple, the Vanity Fair writer who has written extensively on past chiefs of staff, “but when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

Wiles also cited missteps in the administration’s immigration crackdown, contradicted a claim Trump makes about financier and convicted sex offender Epstein and former President Clinton and described Vice President JD Vance as a “conspiracy theorist.”

Within hours of the Vanity Fair tell-all’s publication Tuesday, Wiles and key members of Trump’s inner circle mounted a robust defense of her tenure, calling the story a “hit piece” that left out exculpatory context.

“The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history,” Wiles said in a post on X, her first in more than a year. “Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story.”

The profile was reported with the knowledge and participation of other senior staff, and illustrated with a photograph of Wiles and some of Trump’s closest aides, including Vance, Bondi and advisor Stephen Miller.

The profile revealed much about a chief of staff who has kept a discreet profile in the West Wing, continuing her management philosophy carried through the 2024 election when she served as Trump’s last campaign manager: She let Trump be Trump. “Sir, remember that I am the chief of staff, not the chief of you,” she recalled telling the president.

Trump has publicly emphasized how much he values Wiles as a trusted aide. He did so at a rally last week where he referred to her as “Susie Trump.” In an interview with Whipple, she talked about having difficult conversations with Trump on a daily basis, but that she picks her battles.

“So no, I’m not an enabler. I’m also not a bitch. I try to be thoughtful about what I even engage in,” Wiles said. “I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”

Despite her passive style, Wiles shared concern over Trump’s initial approach to tariff policy, calling the levies “more painful than I had expected.” She had urged him, unsuccessfully, to get his retribution campaign out of the way within his first 90 days in office, in order to enable the administration to move on to more important matters. And she had opposed Trump’s blanket pardon of Jan. 6 defendants, including those convicted of violent crimes.

Wiles also acknowledged the administration needs to “look harder at our process for deportation,” adding that in at least one instance mistakes were made when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested and deported two mothers and their American children to Honduras. One of the children was being treated for Stage 4 cancer.

“I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did,” she said.

In foreign policy, Wiles defended the administration’s attack on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and said the president “wants to keep on blowing up boats up until [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro cries uncle,” suggesting the goal is to seek a change of governments.

As Trump has talked about potential land strikes in Venezuela, Wiles acknowledged that such a move would require congressional authorization.

“If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress,” she said.

In one exchange with Whipple, she characterized Trump, who abstains from liquor, as having an “alcoholic’s personality,” explaining that “high-functioning alcoholics, or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink.”

He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” she said.

But Trump, in an interview with the New York Post, defended Wiles and her comments, saying that he would indeed be an alcoholic if he drank alcohol.

“She’s done a fantastic job,” Trump said. “I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer — purposely misguided.”

Wiles also blamed the persistence of the Epstein saga on members of Trump’s Cabinet, noting that the president’s chosen FBI director, Kash Patel, had advocated for the release of all Justice Department files related to the investigation for many years. Despite Trump’s claims that Clinton visited Epstein’s private island, Wiles acknowledged, Trump is “wrong about that.”

Wiles added that Bondi had “completely whiffed” on how she handled the Epstein files, an issue that has created a rift within MAGA.

“First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk,” Wiles said.

Wiles added that she has read the investigative files about Epstein and acknowledged that Trump is mentioned in them, but said “he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”

Vance, who she said had been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade,” said he had joked with Wiles about conspiracies in private before offering her praise.

“I’ve never seen Susie Wiles say something to the president and then go and counteract him or subvert his will behind the scenes. And that’s what you want in a staffer,” Vance told reporters. “I’ve never seen her be disloyal to the president of the United States and that makes her the best White House chief of staff that the president could ask for.”

Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget whom Wiles described to Whipple as a “right-wing absolute zealot,” said in a social media post that she is an “exceptional chief of staff.” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the “entire administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”

Wiles told Vanity Fair that she would be happy to stay in the role for as long as the president wanted her to stay, noting that she has time to devote to the job, being divorced and with her kids out of the house.

Trump had a troubled relationship with his chiefs of staff in his first term, cycling through four in four years. His longest-serving chief of staff, former Gen. John F. Kelly, served a year and a half.

DETROIT — Sixteen states and the District of Columbia are suing President Donald Trump’s administration for what they say is the unlawful withholding of over $2 billion dollars in funding for two electric vehicle charging programs, according to a federal lawsuit announced Tuesday.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington is the latest legal battle that several states are pursuing over funding for EV charging infrastructure that they say was obligated to them by Congress under former President Joe Biden, but that the Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration are “impounding.”

“The Trump Administration’s illegal attempt to stop funding for electric vehicle infrastructure must come to an end,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a release. “This is just another reckless attempt that will stall the fight against air pollution and climate change, slow innovation, thwart green job creation, and leave communities without access to clean, affordable transportation.”

The Department of Transportation did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The Trump administration in February ordered states to halt spending money for EV charging that was allocated in the bipartisan infrastructure law passed under the previous administration.

Several states filed a lawsuit in May against the administration for withholding the funding from the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program for a nationwide charging buildout. A federal judge later ordered the administration to release much of the funding for chargers in more than a dozen states.

Tuesday’s separate lawsuit addresses the withholding of funding obligations for two other programs: $1.8 billion for the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant program, as well as about $350 million in Electric Vehicle Charger Reliability and Accessibility Accelerator money.

Tuesday’s lawsuit is led by attorneys general from California and Colorado, joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia, and the governor of Pennsylvania.

The Trump administration has been hostile to EVs and has dismantled several policies friendly to cleaner cars and trucks that were put in place under Biden, in favor of policies that instead align with Trump’s oil and gas industry agenda.

Once in office a second time, President Trump immediately ordered an end to what he has called Biden’s “EV mandate.” While Biden targeted for half of new vehicle sales in the U.S. to be electric by 2030, policies did not force American consumers to buy or automakers to sell electric vehicles.

Biden did set stringent tailpipe emissions and fuel economy rules in an effort to encourage more widespread EV uptake, as the auto industry would have had to meet both sets of requirements with a greater number of EVs in their sales mix.

Under the Biden administration, consumers could also receive up to $7,500 in tax incentives off the price of an EV purchase.

The Trump administration has proposed rolling back both tailpipe rules and the gas mileage standards, cut the fines to automakers for not meeting those standards, and eliminated the EV credits.

Trump has also repeated incorrect information about the status of the federal charging programs; without all of the funds available, only a fraction of what was obligated has been spent so far.

“We had to have an electric car within a very short period of time, even though there was no way of charging them and lots of other things,” Trump said in a Dec. 3 press conference about the proposed weakened fuel economy rules. “In certain parts of the Midwest, they spent — to build nine chargers they spent $8 billion. So, that wasn’t working out too well.”

The lawsuit comes amid those regulatory changes and as the pace of EV sales have slowed in the U.S. as mainstream buyers remain concerned about both charging availability and the price of the vehicles.

New EVs transacted for an average of $58,638 last month, compared with $49,814 for a new vehicle overall, according to auto buying resource Kelley Blue Book.

Automakers, meanwhile, have responded to consumers accordingly.

Earlier this week, Ford Motor Co. announced it was pivoting away from its once-ambitious, multi-billion dollar electrification strategy in lieu of more hybrid-electric and more fuel-efficient gasoline-powered vehicles.

In the spring, Honda Motor Co. also said it would take a significant step back from its EV efforts.

Still, EVs are gaining traction in other areas around the world.

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Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.

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Read more of AP’s climate coverage.

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

California and a coalition of other states are suing the Trump administration over a policy charging employers $100,000 for each new H-1B visa they request for foreign employees to work in the U.S. — calling it a threat not only to major industry but also to public education and healthcare services.

“As the world’s fourth largest economy, California knows that when skilled talent from around the world joins our workforce, it drives our state forward,” said California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who announced the litigation Friday.

President Trump imposed the fee through a Sept. 19 proclamation, in which he said the H-1B visa program — designed to provide U.S. employers with skilled workers in science, technology, engineering, math and other advanced fields — has been “deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”

Trump said the program also created a “national security threat by discouraging Americans from pursuing careers in science and technology, risking American leadership in these fields.”

Bonta said such claims are baseless, and that the imposition of such fees is unlawful because it runs counter to the intent of Congress in creating the program and exceeds the president’s authority. He said Congress has included significant safeguards to prevent abuses, and that the new fee structure undermines the program’s purpose.

“President Trump’s illegal $100,000 H-1B visa fee creates unnecessary — and illegal — financial burdens on California public employers and other providers of vital services, exacerbating labor shortages in key sectors,” Bonta said in a statement. “The Trump Administration thinks it can raise costs on a whim, but the law says otherwise.”

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said Friday that the fee was “a necessary, initial, incremental step towards necessary reforms” that were lawful and in line with the president’s promise to “put American workers first.”

Attorneys for the administration previously defended the fee in response to a separate lawsuit brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Assn. of American Universities, arguing earlier this month that the president has “extraordinarily broad discretion to suspend the entry of aliens whenever he finds their admission ‘detrimental to the interests of the United States,’” or to adopt “reasonable rules, regulations, and orders” related to their entry.

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly confirmed that this authority is ‘sweeping,’ subject only to the requirement that the President identify a class of aliens and articulate a facially legitimate reason for their exclusion,” the administration’s attorneys wrote.

They alleged that the H-1B program has been “ruthlessly and shamelessly exploited by bad actors,” and wrote that the plaintiffs were asking the court “to disregard the President’s inherent authority to restrict the entry of aliens into the country and override his judgment,” which they said it cannot legally do.

Trump’s announcement of the new fee alarmed many existing visa holders and badly rattled industries that are heavily reliant on such visas, including tech companies trying to compete for the world’s best talent in the global race to ramp up their AI capabilities. Thousands of companies in California have applied for H-1B visas this year, and tens of thousands have been granted to them.

Trump’s adoption of the fees is seen as part of his much broader effort to restrict immigration into the U.S. in nearly all its forms. However, he is far from alone in criticizing the H-1B program as a problematic pipeline.

Critics of the program have for years documented examples of employers using it to replace American workers with cheaper foreign workers, as Trump has suggested, and questioned whether the country truly has a shortage of certain types of workers — including tech workers.

There have also been allegations of employers, who control the visas, abusing workers and using the threat of deportation to deter complaints — among the reasons some on the political left have also been critical of the program.

“Not only is this program disastrous for American workers, it can be very harmful to guest workers as well, who are often locked into lower-paying jobs and can have their visas taken away from them by their corporate bosses if they complain about dangerous, unfair or illegal working conditions,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a Fox News opinion column in January.

In the Chamber of Commerce case, attorneys for the administration wrote that companies in the U.S. “have at times laid off thousands of American workers while simultaneously hiring thousands of H-1B workers,” sometimes even forcing the American workers “to train their H-1B replacements” before they leave.

They have done so, the attorneys wrote, even as unemployment among recent U.S. college graduates in STEM fields has increased.

“Employing H-1B workers in entry-level positions at discounted rates undercuts American worker wages and opportunities, and is antithetical to the purpose of the H-1B program, which is ‘to fill jobs for which highly skilled and educated American workers are unavailable,’” the administration’s attorneys wrote.

By contrast, the states’ lawsuit stresses the shortfalls in the American workforce in key industries, and defends the program by citing its existing limits. The legal action notes that employers must certify to the government that their hiring of visa workers will not negatively affect American wages or working conditions. Congress also has set a cap on the number of visa holders that any individual employer may hire.

Bonta’s office said educators account for the third-largest occupation group in the program, with nearly 30,000 educators with H-1B visas helping thousands of institutions fill a national teacher shortage that saw nearly three-quarters of U.S. school districts report difficulty filling positions in the 2024-2025 school year.

Schools, universities and colleges — largely public or nonprofit — cannot afford to pay $100,000 per visa, Bonta’s office said.

In addition, some 17,000 healthcare workers with H-1B visas — half of them physicians and surgeons — are helping to backfill a massive shortfall in trained medical staff in the U.S., including by working as doctors and nurses in low-income and rural neighborhoods, Bonta’s office said.

“In California, access to specialists and primary care providers in rural areas is already extremely limited and is projected to worsen as physicians retire and these communities struggle to attract new doctors,” it said. “As a result of the fee, these institutions will be forced to operate with inadequate staffing or divert funding away from other important programs to cover expenses.”

Bonta’s office said that prior to the imposition of the new fee, employers could expect to pay between $960 and $7,595 in “regulatory and statutory fees” per H-1B visa, based on the actual cost to the government of processing the request and document, as intended by Congress.

The Trump administration, Bonta’s office said, issued the new fee without going through legally required processes for collecting outside input first, and “without considering the full range of impacts — especially on the provision of the critical services by government and nonprofit entities.”

The arguments echo findings by a judge in a separate case years ago, after Trump tried to restrict many such visas in his first term. A judge in that case — brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Assn. of Manufacturers and others — found that Congress, not the president, had the authority to change the terms of the visas, and that the Trump administration had not evaluated the potential impacts of such a change before implementing it, as required by law.

The case became moot after President Biden decided not to renew the restrictions in 2021, a move which tech companies considered a win.

Joining in the lawsuit — California’s 49th against the Trump administration in the last year alone — are Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.

WASHINGTON — Sophia Nyazi’s husband, Milad, shook her awake at 8 a.m. “ICE is here,” he told her.

Three uniformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were downstairs at the family’s home on Long Island, N.Y., on Tuesday, according to a video reviewed by The Times that she captured from atop the staircase.

Nyazi said the agents asked whether her husband was applying for a green card. They told her they would have to detain him because of the shooting of two National Guard members a week earlier in Washington, D.C.

“He has nothing to do with that shooting,” Nyazi, 27, recalled answering. “We don’t even know that person.”

Her protests didn’t matter. The Trump administration has put into motion a broad and unprecedented set of policy changes aimed at substantially limiting legal immigration avenues, including for immigrants long considered the most vulnerable.

Milad Nyazi, 28, was detained because, like the man charged in the shooting which left one National Guard member dead, he is from Afghanistan.

The administration has paused decisions on all applications filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, by people seeking asylum. The visa and immigration applications of Afghans, whom the U.S. had welcomed in 2021 as it pulled all troops from the country, have been halted.

Officials also froze the processing of immigration cases of people from 19 countries the administration considers “high-risk” and will conduct case-by-case reviews of green cards and other immigration benefits given to people from those countries since former President Biden took office in 2021.

Immigration lawyers say they learned that dozens of naturalization ceremonies and interviews for green cards are being canceled for immigrants from Haiti, Iran, Guinea and other countries on the list.

In a couple of cases, immigration officers told immigrants that they had been prepared to grant a green card, but were unable to do so because of the new guidance, said Gregory Chen, government relations director at American Immigration Lawyers Assn.

Although it is unclear exactly how many people could be affected by the new rules, 1.5 million immigrants have asylum cases pending with USCIS.

“These are sweeping changes that exact collective punishment on a wide swath of people who are trying to do things the right way,” said Amanda Baran, former chief of policy and strategy at USCIS under the Biden administration. “I worry about all the people who have dutifully filed applications and whose lives are now on hold.”

Administration officials called the Nov. 26 shooting a “terrorist attack” and defended the changes as necessary to protect the country. Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, faces charges stemming from the shooting that killed Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and critically wounded Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24.

“The protection of this country and of the American people remains paramount, and the American people will not bear the cost of the prior administration’s reckless resettlement policies,” Joseph Edlow, director of USCIS, said in a message posted Nov. 27 on X. “American safety is non-negotiable.”

Lakanwal pleaded not guilty last week and his motive remains under investigation. In Afghanistan, he served in a counterterrorism unit operated by the CIA.

Lakanwal entered the U.S. in 2021 through a Biden administration program that resettled nearly 200,000 Afghans in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, officials said. He applied for asylum in December 2024 and it was approved under the Trump administration in April, according to a statement by the nonprofit #AfghanEvac.

Afghans who worked with U.S. troops were believed to face danger if left behind under the Taliban-run government. Along with undergoing routine security screening, they submitted to additional “rigorous” vetting, which included biometric and biographic checks by counterterrorism and intelligence professionals, the Department of Homeland Security said at the time.

Two federal reports from 2024 and this year pointed to some failings of the screening, including data inaccuracies and the presence of 55 evacuees who were later identified on terrorism watch lists, though the latter report noted that the FBI had then followed all required processes to mitigate any potential threat.

It’s unclear exactly how the administration will carry out reviews of thousands of people who already live legally in the U.S. The federal government can’t easily strip people of permanent legal status. The threat of reopening cases, however, has sparked alarm in immigrant communities across the country.

About 58,600 Afghan immigrants call California home as of 2023, far more than any other state, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Interviews with a dozen local community advocates, immigration attorneys and family members of those detained paint an aggressive effort by the federal government to round up recent Afghan immigrants in the wake of the D.C. shooting.

“Unfortunately, I think the administration took this one very tragic incident and politicized it as a way to shut down even legal immigration. And it’s definitely gone much broader than the Afghan community,” said Sharvari Dalal-Dheini, the director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Assn.

Trump administration officials cited the shooting in a spate of policy changes last week.

On Friday, USCIS announced it had established a new center to strengthen screening with supplemental reviews of immigration applications, in part using artificial intelligence. The USCIS Vetting Center, based in Atlanta, will “centralize enhanced vetting of aliens and allow the agency to respond more nimbly to changes in a shifting threat landscape,” the agency said.

On Thursday, USCIS said work permits granted to immigrants would expire after 18 months, not five years. The change includes work permits for those admitted as refugees, with pending green card applications and with pending asylum applications.

In a memorandum Tuesday outlining the pause on asylum applications and the immigration cases of people from the 19 countries also subject to a travel ban, USCIS acknowledged that the changes could result in processing delays but had determined it was “necessary and appropriate” when weighed “against the agency’s obligation to protect and preserve national security.”

Immigrants already had been on high alert as the Trump administration canceled temporary humanitarian programs, cut back refugee admissions — except for a limited number of white South African Afrikaners — and increased attempts to send those with deportation orders to countries where they have no personal connection.

Before the Washington shooting, a Nov. 21 memo showed that the administration planned to review the cases of more than 200,000 refugees admitted under the Biden administration. Although asylum seekers apply after arriving in the U.S., refugees apply for admission from outside the country.

Nyazi questioned why Afghans are being singled out, noting that a white person allegedly assassinated Charlie Kirk, but “I don’t see any ICE agents going into white people’s houses.”

Asked why Milad Nyazi was detained, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant public affairs secretary for Homeland Security, called him a criminal, citing two arrests on suspicion of domestic violence.

“Under Secretary [Kristi] Noem, DHS has been going full throttle on identifying and arresting known or suspected terrorists and criminal illegal aliens that came in through Biden’s fraudulent parole programs and working to get the criminals and public safety threats OUT of our country,” McLaughlin said in a statement.

Nyazi said the charges, which did not stem from incidents of physical violence, were dropped and his record was later expunged.

She and her husband got engaged in 2019 in Afghanistan and applied for a fiance visa, because Nyazi is a U.S. citizen. Their application was approved in 2021. Soon after, with the Taliban takeover in full force, the U.S. government allowed Milad Nyazi to fly to the U.S. He has a pending green card application, Nyazi said.

On Tuesday, the couple’s 3-year-old daughter screamed and cried as her father was handcuffed and taken away. He has a court hearing this week.

Zahra Billoo, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and others say Afghans in various stages of their legal immigration process — not only those with deportation orders — have been targeted. She said at least 17 Afghans in the Bay Area have been detained since Monday.

Lawyers said many of the Afghans detained last week had arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, where they had sought asylum.

Paris Etemadi Scott, legal director of the Pars Equality Center in San José, said three of her clients, an Afghan mother and her two sons who are both in their early 20s, were detained Dec. 1 during a routine check-in with ICE. All have pending asylum applications, she said.

Rebecca Olszewski, managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, said her Afghan client, who also has a pending asylum case, reported for his monthly virtual check-in Friday and was told to show up in person the next day, where he was detained.

Since the shooting, administration officials and the president have used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants. In announcing the 19-country travel ban Dec. 1, Noem posted on X that she was recommending a “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

In a Cabinet meeting the next day, Trump referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” who “contribute nothing.” (A few days later, Noem said the administration would expand the travel ban to more than 30 countries.)

On Thanksgiving Day, Trump had said on his social media platform that he intends to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and deport those who are “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

In recent days, a ghostly quiet has overtaken Shafiullah Hotak’s regular haunts in North Sacramento, where the Afghan population in the city is especially dense. Hotak, 38, is an Afghan immigrant who served as a program manager at refugee resettlement organization Lao Family Community Development until layoffs due to federal cuts forced him out of work in May.

On Thursday, immigration agents banged on doors at an apartment complex on Marconi Avenue, where hundreds of Afghans have resettled. Just one employee sat in an Afghan-owned tax and bookkeeping business that was typically buzzing with clients. A nearby park, where teenagers kick around soccer balls and giggling packs of children roam after school, was empty. And the lines at a halal market known for its sesame-topped Afghan bread had disappeared.

“The situation we have in our community reminds me of when we used to go to work in Afghanistan,” Hotak said. “We had to take different routes every day because people who were against the U.S. mission in Afghanistan were targeting people. There were bombings and shootings.”

Hotak said “Kill the eyes,” is what the enemies of the U.S. in Afghanistan used to advise as to how to deal with local Afghans aiding the military, in order to blind their operations.

“But nowadays those ‘eyes’ are here in the U.S. and the U.S. government is looking to pick them up and put them in jail,” Hotak said.

Times staff writers Castillo reported from Washington and Hussain and Uranga from Los Angeles.

The Trump administration is proposing new fuel economy standards for vehicles that would roll back efficiency rules implemented under former President Biden.

Under the Transportation Department proposal, which was unveiled at a White House event on Wednesday, automakers would need to meet less stringent vehicle mileage requirements. 

Federal fuel economy rules are overseen by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) under what’s known as the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) Standards. Enacted by Congress in 1975, the regulations stipulate how many miles vehicles must be able to drive on a gallon of fuel, with specific standards for light-duty vehicles, as well as medium- and heavy-duty trucks. 

The rules aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help consumers save money on gas, according to the Transportation Department. Critics of the fuel standards have long argued they are costly for automakers, which must make technological improvements to reduce fuel usage, raising vehicle prices. 

The revamped fuel standards would reverse a Biden policy that “forced automakers to build cars using expensive technologies that drove up costs, drove up prices and made the car much worse,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday.

Rules would sharply lower mileage standard

If finalized, the plan would relax fuel economy standards by setting the industry average for light-duty vehicles at roughly 34.5 miles per gallon through the 2031 model year, lower than the 50 miles per gallon outlined by a Biden-era rule.

On Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the previous rules drove up the cost of new cars and were “completely unattainable” for automakers. He initially directed NHTSA to review the CAFE regulations in January.

The Transportation Department said the proposal is projected to save American families $1,000 on the average cost of a new vehicle and a total of $109 billion over the next five years.

NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison said the move to ease the mileage standards would make the nation’s roads safer. “Newer cars are safer cars and by reducing vehicle prices, more American families will be able to afford newer vehicles,” he said in a statement. 

Mr. Trump was joined at Wednesday’s event by senior auto industry executives. In a statement shared with CBS News, Stellantis CEO Antonioa Filosa expressed support for the proposed fuel efficiency rules, saying the initiative would realign the CAFE standards “with real-world market conditions as part of its wider vision for a growing U.S. automotive industry.”

General Motors also backed the proposed fuel economy standards, which would need to undergo an official rulemaking process before being adopted. 

“GM supports the goals of NHTSA’s proposed CAFE rule and its intention to better align fuel economy standards with market realities. We have long advocated for one national standard that upholds customer choice and provides the auto industry long-term stability,” a spokesperson for the automaker said in a statement.

The fuel economy proposal would roll back a rule finalized in June 2024 under the Biden administration aimed at raising the minimum gas mileage for passenger cars and light trucks by model year 2031.

At the time, NHTSA said the new regulations would save Americans $23 billion at the gas pump and reduce pollution. Burning gas for vehicles is a major contributor to carbon emissions, which scientists have linked to climate change. 

The rules were also intended to spur automakers to produce more electric vehicles, a key Biden administration priority for the nation’s transportation sector. 

Would new MPG rules ease car prices?

CarEdge CEO Zach Shefka described the Trump administration proposal as a win for automakers, but said consumers shouldn’t expect to see lower car prices right away. That’s because automakers work at least five years ahead in their product development, he said, meaning it would take a while before any redesigned cars make it onto the road.

If the proposal eventually does help lower vehicle prices, he said, “It will happen years from now, not in the coming weeks or months.”

The Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit organization that works to protect endangered species, said the Transportation Department proposal will increase the country’s oil consumption and undermine the competitiveness of U.S. automakers. 

“Trump’s action will feed America’s destructive use of oil, while hamstringing us in the green tech race against Chinese and other foreign carmakers,” said Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign.

Wednesday’s move is the latest effort by the Trump administration to reverse Biden-era policies that encouraged automakers to build cleaner-running cars and trucks, including electric vehicles. The administration scrapped EV tax credits in September and has also proposed rules to eliminate gas emission regulations.

Edited by

Alain Sherter

The Associated Press

contributed to this report.

The killing of Sarah Beckstrom, a 20-year-old serving her country in the National Guard to help pay for college, is horrific.

Her fellow soldier, Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains in a fight for his life.

Their alleged attacker, Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, is in custody and will likely face the federal death penalty.

It’s important that we stop for a moment and recognize the unacceptable terror of two people serving our country being gunned down in an apparently targeted attack just blocks from the White House a day before Thanksgiving. It’s also important we examine Lakanwal’s path to the United States to understand whether any red flags were missed.

But it’s equally important to stop pretending that Trump’s increasingly overt racism passes for sound immigration policy.

As infuriating and saddening as this crime is, it is not a remark on all immigrants. Yet, here he goes again.

“We don’t want those people,” he said Sunday night, speaking of refugees from Third World countries.

That was around the same time the official White House account posted a video of Trump reciting the civil rights song “The Snake” by Oscar Brown Jr.

“ ‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said that reptile with a grin,” Trump intoned over footage of immigration agents rounding up, you guessed it, brown people. “You knew damn well I was a snake before you brought me in.”

I mean, the Klan would blush at some of this stuff.

While we’ve seen it before, this time Trump’s attack on non-white immigrants seems like a move not to placate his MAGA voters but to marginalize them — an embrace of an increasingly powerful farther-right-than-MAGA contingent of his base that is open in its disdain for pluralism and equality.

Shortly after the tragedy in Washington, Trump vowed on social media to “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country.”

Please note that he completely dropped any charade of this being about violent criminals or even those who crossed the border illegally — the people MAGA (and many others) thought would be targeted in an immigration crackdown.

Instead, he seems to be cultivating support from younger, angrier Republican men who eschew traditional conservatism as weak and misguided. Sadly, there are a growing number of these small-tent conservatives who are open in their belief that America should be a white Christian nation governed by men.

The America First folks, led by Nick Fuentes, are the most high-profile of these types outside of the administration, but there are other groups, some affiliated and some openly hostile of one another, that are amassing power both within the Republican base and in its power structure. On the inside, one need look no further than the ranting of Stephen Miller for proof that racism is increasingly official Trump policy, stretching far beyond closing our borders or removing undocumented people.

Sound alarmist? Let’s let Trump finish.

He promised in a social media post a few days ago to “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization. These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations … Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation.”

Disruptive populations. Like U.S. citizens of Mexican origin? Indian Americans? Or maybe protesters? Or voters?

Before you hit the keyboard to tell me it’s just another Trump rant with no teeth, check out the official account of the Labor Department, which recently posted a picture of the Lincoln Memorial with the text (in a font associated with the Third Reich) that reads, “(t)he fight for Western Civilization has begun — and Americanism will Prevail.”

Or look at the Department of Homeland Security, which recently posted “Remigration now,” and has for months also been claiming we are in a battle for “Western civilization.”

That particular term, remigration, is used by far-right believers of the Great Replacement Theory for the idea that white-majority counties can only survive if they — peacefully or violently — remove non-white people.

“Give me your tired, your hungry, your blonde,” if you will. Keep your “shithole” residents.

In the lull of the holidays, with other issues on our minds, like how to pay for Christmas, many have felt a lessening of tension around this rogue administration. The Democrats seem to be gaining traction for the upcoming midterms, offering the hope of a Congress that isn’t supine.

The media have started referring to Trump as a “lame duck” on his way out, ignoring to the point of journalistic malpractice his groundwork to undermine or even rig the next election — whether the GOP candidate is a third-term Trump or a not-so-great-replacement like Vice President JD Vance.

But this is a moment of consequence, when the mask is off.

Funding is kicking in to supercharge the deportation machine to new levels. Literally billions of dollars will be devoted to rounding up and removing those here without proper papers, including people who have lived here for decades and done nothing but work hard and raise families.

That has left American immigrants, citizens or not, afraid. Our schools have lost students, our businesses are missing customers. We have pushed even legal immigrants into an underground, uncertain who or what is safe.

At the same time, the midterms are less than a year away, and the election deniers Trump has installed in key posts are already working to create systems that will likely make it harder for poor and marginalized Americans to vote. That involves curtailing mail-in ballots (leaving some to decide whether to take time off of work to vote) or imposing identification rules that could disenfranchise married women, foster kids, naturalized citizens and more.

This should be a moment for the nation to pay tribute to Beckstrom and pray for Wolfe. Profiles of Beckstrom describe her as a caring, public-spirited young woman who wanted to make a difference and serve her country. She never got the chance.

But it’s also a moment to be honest about what is happening. We have a president who is saying all brown and Black immigrants are a problem, even some who have earned citizenship.

It was never about the “worst of the worst,” but it is about being able to tell the difference between the snake and its victim.

The Trump administration plans to deploy another 500 members of the National Guard to the streets of Washington, D.C., Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday, hours after two service members were shot a few blocks away from the White House.

President Trump ordered the additional deployment, Hegseth told reporters in the Dominican Republic, where he was traveling Wednesday. A U.S. official confirmed to CBS News that the Army has received the request and will work to fulfill it quickly. 

The 500 additional service members will join roughly 2,200 troops who were deployed in D.C. as of Sunday morning. That includes around 900 members of the D.C. National Guard and more than 1,200 members of several states’ Guard forces, according to a press release from the military’s Joint Task Force – District of Columbia.

It’s not clear when the 500 additional troops will arrive in the nation’s capital, or whether they will come from the D.C. National Guard or from a state’s National Guard force.

Hegseth made the announcement after two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot in an attack in the capital. At a briefing, FBI Director Kash Patel said the two Guard members are in critical condition. Local police say a suspect is in custody and is being treated at a hospital.

“This will only stiffen our resolve to ensure that we make Washington, D.C., safe and beautiful,” Hegseth told reporters on Wednesday.

National Guard forces were initially deployed to the streets of D.C. in August, part of an anti-crime mission by the Trump administration that has also included federal law enforcement officers and local police. 

D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb has sued over the deployment, calling it illegal. A federal judge ruled last week that the deployment likely violates federal law, but delayed the ruling for 21 days as the Trump administration appeals. 

On Nov. 14 the faculty and staff of the University of California won a significant victory over President Trump in his effort to fine UCLA $1.2 billion for resisting his efforts to bend the university to his ideological demands.

Finding that the plaintiffs submitted “overwhelming evidence” that Trump and his cabinet members pursued a campaign of cutting off government funding with the goal of “bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune,” federal Judge Rita Lin of San Francisco blocked the fine and nearly $600 million in funding cuts. She ordered the money to start flowing again.

Lin’s ruling resembles those by other federal judges who blocked Trump’s funding cutoffs. Faculty and staff representatives, with the American Assn. of University Professors as the lead plaintiff, justly celebrated the UC injunction, even though it’s likely that the government will appeal.

But two entities with an interest in the case’s outcome have been silent: the state of California and UC itself. Neither joined the AAUP lawsuit, which was filed in September, and neither has commented since.

It’s not as though the state and the university are blind to the potential impact of Trump’s funding cutoff. When Trump’s demands and threats were made public in August, Gov. Newsom termed them “extortion” and threatened to sue. UC President James B. Milliken said the announced cuts would be a “death knell for innovative work that saves lives, grows our economy and fortifies our national security.”

Addressing the UC Board of Regents at its meeting Wednesday, Milliken stated that the university system still faces the loss of more than $1 billion in federal research funding, but didn’t mention the AAUP lawsuit.

UC reportedly has continued negotiations with the White House. A UC spokesperson wouldn’t comment on any such talks, even to confirm them. A spokesman for Gov. Newsom said he’s closely watching the numerous court cases challenging Trump’s funding threats, and “he’s pleased with the recent court rulings affirming that Trump’s assault on California’s world-class research institutions was reckless and illegal.”

Let’s keep in mind what’s at stake in this battle. The University of California is the premier public university system in the nation. It’s the second-largest employer in the state and one of the most important providers of healthcare. The productivity of its research is spectacular. Much of the universities’ work is supported by the government — $17 billion a year, including matching Medicaid and Medicare funding and student aid.

“We were hopeful that the UC system would defend itself legally,” says Veena Dubal, a law professor at UC Irvine and general counsel to the AAUP. After UCLA published the administration’s 27-page list of demands in August, she says, the AAUP decided it couldn’t wait any longer: “We couldn’t not sue, they were so outrageous.”

The demands included bans on diversity programs, public demonstrations across much of the campus and provisions for transgender students. UCLA also would be required to refuse admission to foreign students “likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions,” and to comply with Trump’s ban on “gender ideology” — that is, defining males and females as anything other than the sex they were assigned at birth.

The state and the UC system haven’t entirely avoided legal jousting with Trump. California led seven other states into federal court to challenge the Dept. of Education’s termination of $65 million in grants funding programs that included diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. They won at the trial level, but the Supreme Court stayed that ruling on grounds that the case may have been brought in the wrong federal court.

The regents also joined a lawsuit brought by the Assn. of American Universities and 13 other universities challenging the Dept. of Health and Human Services limit on reimbursements for overhead costs on government-funded research, which would cost universities billions of dollars. They won at the trial level, but the government appealed that ruling. The state also sued Trump or participated in lawsuits on other topics.

One can understand, even sympathize with, the reluctance of UC to pursue a courtroom fight over Trump’s demands. UC faces the same quandary as other institutions that have tried to reach accords with the administration.

Trump has almost unlimited tools at his discretion to harass his adversaries for years to come through endless “investigations” of purported statutory violations, among other things. Courtroom battles take time and money, resources that may never be recovered. Plus with a pro-Trump majority on the Supreme Court, ultimate victory is nothing like a certainty.

And while Trump’s term won’t last beyond January 2029, at which point his anti-university campaign might end, that may be cold comfort for institutions facing an immediate financial crisis.

“It may be hard for an educational institution to ride this out until 2029,” says Dan Schnur, a veteran political consultant on the faculty of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies. “For an institution that budgets on an annual basis, three years is a long time, and for a student, it’s three-fourths of an undergraduate experience.”

That brings us to the case the UC faculty and staff made in court. It’s as clear and concise a description of the noxious campaign Trump has conducted against American higher education that one will find anywhere. It was accepted almost in its entirety by Judge Lin.

The administration consistently has portrayed the funding cutoffs as a response to what it claims to be pervasive antisemitism at UCLA and other targeted campuses. Yet as federal Judge Allison D. Burroughs of Boston found in September when she blocked Trump’s grant terminations against Harvard, it’s “difficult to conclude anything other than that [the government] used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

Indeed, the UC plaintiffs show that the funding cutoffs were motivated purely by ideology, and flagrantly infringed on free speech rights. Just a week after Trump’s inauguration, the White House issued an order suspending all financial disbursements that involved “DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.” (“DEI” refers to programs aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion, a favored target of the right.)

The faculty lawsuit quotes Leo Terrell, an assistant attorney general for civil rights and a named defendant, telling Fox News, “The academic system in this country has been hijacked by the left, has been hijacked by the Marxists.” He said, “We’re gonna bankrupt these universities. We’re gonna take away every single dollar.” In an interview he said he had “targeted 10 schools. Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, UCLA, USC… We’re going to take away [their] funding.”

The lawsuit positions the administration’s campaign against UCLA against its similar attacks on funding at Columbia, Brown and Harvard. It also points to the folly of trying to settle with Trump out of court.

Columbia was among the first universities to settle with Trump — it agreed in March to a $221-million payment and to give the government extraordinary oversight of its hiring, pedagogical and social policies in order to free up $400 million in blocked funding and restore access to billions of dollars in current and future federal grants.

But the capitulation didn’t yield those results. Instead, Trump blocked a further $1.2 billion in funding until Columbia agreed to additional demands in July.

As Judge Lin described the government campaign against UCLA and other universities launched by the White House, it starts when “one or more … agencies open civil rights investigations into a university…. Before the investigations are concluded, Funding Agencies cancel large amounts of federal funding.” Then the Justice Department offers to settle with the targets “in exchange for further burdening faculty, staff, and student speech.”

It’s theoretically possible that the Trump administration could make its funding cutoffs stick if it follows the procedures enshrined in law for terminating federal grants (and it may yet prevail in appeals to the Supreme Court).

The rules require government agencies to issue a notice of possible violation and attempt to negotiate a settlement and hold a hearing, then file a report with the House and Senate specifying “the circumstances and grounds for such action” and wait at least 30 days more before canceling any funding. The cancellations can apply only to the specific program deemed to be violating the law.

The goal of these safeguards, Lin observed, is to protect grant recipients from “‘vindictive’ or ‘punitive’” actions by the government. In these cases, the government followed none of the mandated procedures.

The administration‘s defense, in part, is that the funding cutoffs are entirely within its discretion and can’t be reviewed by a judge, assertions Lin specifically rejected. The administration also stated that the August demand letter to UCLA was merely an “opening settlement offer” in ongoing “confidential settlement negotiations” with the university.

Given the findings from federal judges that Trump has flouted the legal safeguards against abrupt and arbitrary grant cancellations in favor of illicit bullying, the question facing universities trying to negotiate their way out is: What is there to negotiate? The record so far indicates that no settlement will fully satisfy Trump or his anti-woke warriors; only judges can bring the campaign to a halt.

It’s certainly true that in the short run, Trump’s targets will suffer great pain. He knows well that they’re vulnerable to blunt force. “With every day that passes,” Lin observed, “UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratcheting up [the government’s] pressure campaign.”

In the long run, however, there are limits to how much an educational institution can concede.

One is tempted to recall what Michael Corleone said in “The Godfather Part II” when he was being bullied by the corrupt Sen. Pat Geary into paying a bribe: “My offer is this,” he said. “Nothing.”

It may not be so easy for even powerful universities to take such an uncompromising stand. But it may be necessary.

WASHINGTON — On the campaign trail, Donald Trump was unapologetic about putting America first. He promised to secure the nation’s borders, strengthen the domestic workforce and be tough on countries he thought were taking advantage of the United States.

Now, 10 months into his second term, the president is facing backlash from some conservatives who say he is too focused on matters abroad, whether it’s seeking regime change in Venezuela, brokering peace deals in Ukraine and Gaza or extending a $20-billion currency swap for Argentina. The criticism has grown in recent days after Trump expressed support for granting more visas to foreign students and skilled immigrant workers.

The cracks in the MAGA movement, which have been more pronounced in recent weeks, underscore how Trump’s once impenetrable political base is wavering as the president appears to embrace a more global approach to governing.

“I have to view the presidency as a worldwide situation, not locally,” Trump said this week when asked to address the criticism at an Oval Office event. “We could have a world that’s on fire where wars come to our shores very easily if you had a bad president.”

For backers of Trump’s MAGA movement, the conflict is forcing some to weigh loyalty to an “America first” ideology over a president they have long supported and who, in some cases, inspired them to get involved in the political process.

“I am against foreign aid, foreign wars, and sending a single dollar to foreign countries,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who in recent weeks has become more critical of Trump’s policies, said in a social media post Wednesday. “I am America First and America Only. This is my way and there is no other way to be.”

Beyond America-first concerns, some Trump supporters are frustrated with him for resisting the disclosures about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his network of powerful friends — including Trump. A group of Republicans in the House, for instance, helped lead an effort to force a vote to demand further disclosures on the Epstein files from the Justice Department.

“When they are protecting pedophiles, when they are blowing our budget, when they are starting wars overseas, I’m sorry, I can’t go along with that,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said in a CNN interview. “And back home, people agree with me. They understand, even the most ardent Trump supporters understand.”

When asked to respond to the criticism Trump has faced in recent weeks, the White House said the president was focused on implementing “economic policies that are cutting costs, raising real wages, and securing trillions in investments to make and hire in America.”

Mike Madrid, a “never Trump” Republican consultant, believes the Epstein scandal has sped up a Republican backlash that has been brewing as a result of Trump deviating from his campaign promises.

“They are turning on him, and it’s a sign of the inviolable trust being gone,” Madrid said.

The MAGA movement was not led by a policy ideology, but rather “fealty to the leader,” Madrid said. Once the trust in Trump fades, “everything is gone.”

Criticism of Trump goes mainstream

The intraparty tension also has played out on conservative and mainstream news outlets, where the president has been challenged on his policies.

In a recent Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham, Trump was pressed on a plan to give student visas to hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, a move that would mark a departure from actions taken by his administration this year to crack down on foreign students.

“I think it is good to have outside countries,” Trump said. “Look, I want to be able to get along with the world.”

In that same interview, Trump said he supports giving H-1B visas to skilled foreign workers because the U.S. doesn’t have workers with “certain talents.”

“You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory where we’re going to make missiles,’” Trump argued.

Trump in September imposed a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas for skilled workers, a move that led to confusion among businesses, immigration lawyers and H-1B visa holders. Before Trump’s order, the visa program had exposed a rift between the president’s supporters in the technology industry, which relies on the program, and immigration hard-liners who want to see the U.S. invest in an American workforce.

A day after Trump expressed support for the visa program, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem added fuel to the immigration debate by saying the administration is fast-tracking immigrants’ pathway to citizenship.

“More people are becoming naturalized under this administration than ever before,” Noem told Fox News this week.

Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and close ally of Trump, said the administration’s position was “disappointing.”

“How is that a good thing? We are supposed to be kicking foreigners out, not letting them stay,” Loomer said.

Polling adds on the heat

As polling shows Americans are growing frustrated with the economy, some conservatives increasingly blame Trump for not doing enough to create more jobs and lower the cost of living.

Greene, the Georgia Republican, said on “The Sean Spicer Show” Thursday that Trump and his administration are “gaslighting” people when they say prices are going down.

“It’s actually infuriating people because people know what they’re paying at the grocery store,” she said, while urging Republicans to “show we are in the trenches with them” rather than denying their experience.

While Trump has maintained that the economy is strong, administration officials have begun talking about pushing new economic policies. White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett said this week that the administration would be working to provide consumers with more purchasing power, saying that “we’re going to fix it right away.”

“We understand that people understand, as people look at their pocketbooks to go to the grocery store, that there’s still work to do,” Hassett said.

The acknowledgment comes after this month’s elections in key states — in which Republicans were soundly defeated — made clear that rising prices were top of mind for many Americans. The results also showed Latino voters were turning away from the GOP amid growing concerns about the economy.

As Republicans try to refocus on addressing affordability, Trump has continued to blame the economic problems on former President Biden.

“Cost, and INFLATION, were higher under the Sleepy Joe Biden administration, than they are now,” Trump said in a social media post Friday. He insisted that under his administration costs are “tumbling down.”

States administering a federal food aid program serving about 42 million Americans faced uncertainty Monday over whether they can — and should — provide full monthly benefits during an ongoing legal battle involving the U.S. government shutdown.

President Donald Trump’s administration over weekend demanded that states “undo” full benefits that were paid under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program during a one-day window between when a federal judge ordered full funding and a Supreme Court justice put a temporary pause on that order.

A federal appeals court now is considering whether to impose a longer halt to the full benefits. And Congress is considering whether to fund SNAP as part of a proposal to end the government shutdown.

Some states are warning of “catastrophic operational disruptions” if the Trump administration does not reimburse them for those SNAP benefits they already authorized. Meanwhile, other states are providing partial monthly SNAP benefits with federal money or using their own funds to load electronic benefit cards for SNAP recipients.

Trump’s administration initially said SNAP benefits would not be available in November because of the government shutdown. After some states and nonprofit groups sued, two judges each ruled the administration could not skip November’s benefits entirely.

The administration then said it would use an emergency reserve fund to provide 65% of the maximum monthly benefit. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell said that wasn’t good enough, and ordered full funding for SNAP benefits by Friday.

Some states acted quickly to direct their EBT vendors to disburse full monthly benefits to SNAP recipients. Millions of people in those states received funds to buy groceries before Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put McConnell’s order on hold Friday night, pending further deliberation by an appeals court.

Millions more people still have not received SNAP payments for November, because their states were waiting on further guidance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP.

Trump’s administration has argued that the judicial order to provide full benefits violates the Constitution by infringing on the spending power of the legislative and executive branches.

On Sunday, the Trump administration said states had moved too quickly and erroneously released full SNAP benefits after last week’s rulings.

“States must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025,” Patrick Penn, deputy undersecretary of Agriculture, wrote to state SNAP directors. He warned that states could face penalties if they did not comply.

Wisconsin, which was among the first to load full benefits after McConnell’s order, had its federal reimbursement frozen. As a result, the state’s SNAP account could be depleted as soon Monday, leaving no money to reimburse stores that sell food to SNAP recipients, according to a court filing submitted by those that had sued.

Some Democratic governors vowed to challenge any federal attempt to claw back money.

In Connecticut, Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont said “those who received their benefits should not worry about losing them.”

“No, Connecticut does not need to take back SNAP benefits already sent to the 360,000 people who depend on them for food and who should have never been caught in the middle of this political fight,” Lamont said. “We have their back.”

___

Associated Press writers Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin; John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas; and Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.

A federal judge in Rhode Island has temporarily ordered the Trump administration to continue funding benefits for SNAP, the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.  

“The court is orally at this time, ordering that USDA must distribute the contingency money timely, or as soon as possible, for the November 1 payments to be made,” said U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. 

After an hour-long emergency hearing, Judge McConnell ruled that the suspension of SNAP funding is arbitrary and likely to cause irreparable harm, citing the “terror” felt by Americans who are scrambling to meet their basic nutritional needs. 

“There is no doubt, and it is beyond argument, that irreparable harm will begin to occur — if it hasn’t already occurred — in the terror it has caused some people about the availability of funding for food for their family,” he said.

The decision comes one day before the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which runs the SNAP program, was scheduled to freeze SNAP payments due to the ongoing government shutdown. SNAP generally requires $8.6 billion in funding every month to provide 41 million Americans benefits and administer to the program. 

Despite the ruling, it’s not immediately clear how the judge’s decision will be implemented, and if it will take effect in time to help millions of Americans who rely on the funding.

Judge McConnell ordered the Trump administration to continue paying for the program using emergency funds, and to notify the court by Monday how SNAP will be funded.

Ruling that stopping SNAP funding violated the Administrative Procedure Act because the funding decision was arbitrary and capricious, Judge McConnell said, “There has been no explanation, legitimate or otherwise that’s consistent with the APA as to why the contingency funds should not be used.”

A coalition of local governments, nonprofits, small businesses, and workers’ rights organization filed suit Thursday to challenge the pause in funding, arguing that the Trump administration has “needlessly plunged SNAP into crisis” by suspending benefits beginning Friday, despite having emergency funds that could be tapped. 

“Americans will not be able to feed their families, food pantries will be overwhelmed, organizations will be forced to divert resources from core programs to accommodate those in need of assistance, and small businesses will lose substantial revenue that is critical to maintaining their labor force and supplier relationships,” they wrote in their lawsuit. 

The administration has argued that the lapse of funding will cause irreparable harm and violates a federal law that prohibits arbitrary government actions. 

The ruling came as a federal judge in Boston, in a separate case, ruled that the Trump administration’s attempt to suspend SNAP funding is “unlawful,” but declined to immediately order that the program be funded. 

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani reserved judgment about whether to issue a temporary restraining order, instead asking the Trump administration to advise the court whether they would authorize reduced SNAP benefits for November.

She ordered the Trump administration to answer her question about reduced SNAP funding by Monday. 

“For the reasons stated below, Plaintiffs have standing to bring this action and are likely to succeed on their claim that Defendants’ suspension of SNAP benefits is unlawful,” she wrote. 

“Where that suspension of benefits rested on an erroneous construction of the relevant statutory provisions, the court will allow Defendants to consider whether they will authorize at least reduced SNAP benefits for November, and report back to the court no later than Monday, November 3, 2025,” Judge Talwani said.

The Trump administration was expected to appeal both of Friday’s rulings.

On an overcast morning in September, Hector Alessandro Negrete left his beloved Los Angeles — the city he was brought to at 3 months old — and headed down Interstate 5 to Mexico, the only country where he held a passport.

It was a place that, to him, had “always felt like both a wound and a possibility.”

Negrete, 43, sat in the passenger seat as a friend steered the car south and two more friends in another car followed. He had condensed his life to three full suitcases and his dachshund mix, Lorca.

They pulled over at the beach in San Clemente. Angel Martinez, his soon-to-be former roommate, is deeply spiritual, and his favorite prayer spot is the ocean, so he prayed that Negrete would be blessed and protected — and Lorca too — as they began a new stage in their lives.

On the near-empty beach, the friends embraced and wiped away tears. Martinez handed Negrete a small watermelon.

As instructed, Negrete walked to the edge of the water, said his own prayer and, as a gift of thanks to the cosmos, plopped it into a crashing wave.

Negrete doesn’t call it self-deportation.

“Self-repatriation,” he said. “I refuse to use this administration’s language.”

President Trump had been in office just over a month when Negrete decided he would return to Mexico. Methodical by nature, he approached the decision like any other — by researching, organizing and planning.

Negrete secured three forms of Mexican identification: his voter credential, a renewed passport and a card akin to a Social Security ID.

He registered Lorca as an emotional support animal, paid for a vaccine card and a certificate of good health, and crate-trained her in a TSA-approved carrier.

He announced his decision to leave in June on his Substack newsletter: “If you’re thinking, ‘Alessandro’s giving up,’ look deeper. I am choosing freedom. For the first time, I feel unshackled from the expectations of waiting.”

Negrete had grown tired of wishing for immigration reform. He had built his career advocating for immigrants such as himself, including stints as statewide coordinator for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, and as executive director for the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance.

He said his work had helped legalize street vending in Los Angeles and he assisted the office of then-California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris in securing the release of a young woman from immigration detention. He was the first openly undocumented and LGBTQ+ person on the Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council.

Under previous administrations, Negrete’s political work had felt like a shield against deportation. Even during Trump’s first term, Negrete had marched at rallies denouncing his immigration policies.

But that was before the new Immigration and Customs Enforcement patrols that tore into Southern California during Trump’s second term. On June 6, as anti-ICE protesters took to the streets, Negrete rushed to downtown Los Angeles when fellow activists told him street medics were needed.

“One of my homies said, ‘Hey fool, what are you doing here?’” he recalled. Seeing Los Angeles police officers advancing on the crowd, he realized that no amount of public support could protect him.

He fled. “Thank God I left.”

In mid-August, Negrete hosted a yard sale and going away party. The flier was tongue-in-cheek: “Everything must go! Including me!”

His red T-shirt stated plainly, “I AM UNDOCUMENTED,” and his aviator sunglasses hid the occasional tears. Tattoos dotted his extremities, including an anchor on his right leg with the words “I refuse to sink.”

“I think it hit me when I started packing my stuff today,” he told a former colleague, Shruti Garg, who had arrived early.

“But the way you’ve invited everyone to join you is so beautiful,” she replied.

One table held American pop-culture knickknacks — sippy cups with Ghostface from the movie “Scream,” collectible Mickey Mouse ears, a Detective Batman purse shaped like a comic book, another purse shaped like the locker from the ‘90s cartoon “Daria.”

Negrete said the items reminded him of his youth and represented the gothic, quirky aspects of his personality.

“I was born in Mexico, but I don’t know Mexico,” he said. “So I’m leaving the American parts of me that are no longer going to serve me.”

The back yard slowly filled with loved ones from Negrete’s various social circles. There was his mostly queer softball team — the Peacocks — his running group, his chosen family and his blood family.

Negrete’s close friend Joel Menjivar looked solemn.

“I’m scared it’s going to start a movement,” he said. “Undocumented or DACA friends who are talented and integral to the fabric of L.A. might get ideas to leave.”

Another friend, Mario Mariscal, said he took Negrete’s decision the hardest, though at first he didn’t believe Negrete was serious. More than once he asked, “You really want to give up everything you’ve built here for a new start in Mexico?”

Eventually, Negrete had to tell Mariscal that his questions weren’t helpful. During a deeper conversation about his decision, Negrete shared that he was tired of living with the constant fear of getting picked up, herded into an unmarked van and taken away.

“I just kept telling him, ‘That’s not going to happen to you,’” Mariscal said. “But the more this administration keeps doing it, the more it’s in our face, the more we’re seeing every horror story about that, it became clear that, you know what, you do have a point. You do have to do what’s right for you.”

Negrete is cognizant of the privilege that makes his departure different from that of many other immigrants. He is white-passing, fluent in Spanish and English, and moved with $10,000 in savings.

In June, he was hired as executive director of a U.S.-based nonprofit, Old School Hub, that works to combat ageism around the world. The role allowed him to live wherever he wanted.

He decided to settle in Guadalajara, a growing technology hub, with historic buildings featuring Gothic architecture that he found beautiful. It also helped that Guadalajara has one of the country’s most vibrant LGBTQ+ scenes and is a four-hour drive from Puerto Vallarta, a renowned queer resort destination.

As Negrete began his new job while still in L.A., he picked a moving date — Sept. 4 — and booked a two-week Airbnb near the baseball stadium.

That Guadalajara’s team, the Charros de Jalisco, wore Dodger blue felt like a good omen.

On the drive toward the border, messages poured into Negrete’s phone.

“I’m sending you all my love Alessandro,” one read. “Cuídate. [Take care.] Know that even though you’re far away from home, you carry us with you.”

“Todo te va a salir bien,” read another. Everything will go well for you, it said. “Spread your wings and flyyyyy.”

Afraid of being stopped and detained at the airport, as has happened to other immigrants attempting to leave the country, Negrete preferred to drive to Tijuana and then fly to Guadalajara.

Negrete’s driver, his friend Jorge Leonardo, turned into a parking lot at the sign reading “LAST USA EXIT.”

Negrete put on his black felt tejana hat and called Iris Rodriguez, who was in the companion car. He asked her to cross on foot with him.

“I don’t want to go alone,” he said.

“We’re still on American soil,” Leonardo said. “You can still change your mind.”

Negrete ignored him.

“See y’all on the other side,” he said as he hopped out of the car.

He and Rodriguez stopped for photos in front of a sign with an arrow pointing “To Mexico.” Around a corner, the border came into full view — a metal turnstile with layers of concertina wire above it.

The line for Mexicanos was unceremoniously quick. The immigration agent barely glanced at Negrete’s passport before waving him through.

On the other side, a busker sang “Piano Man” by Billy Joel in perfect English.

“Welcome to the motherland,” Rodriguez told him. Negrete let out a deep breath.

Negrete’s immediate family members, and almost all of his extended family, live in the U.S.

He was born in Manzanillo, Colima, in 1982. Three months later, the family relocated to Los Angeles, where his parents had two more children.

At 17, Negrete was one of two students in his graduating class at Roosevelt High School to get into UC Berkeley. That’s when he found out he didn’t have papers.

His parents had divorced and his father married a U.S. citizen, obtaining a green card when Negrete was at Roosevelt. They began the legalization process for Negrete in 1999, he said, but two years later he came out to his family as gay.

His father was unsupportive and refused to continue seeking to adjust his immigration status. By the time they mended their relationship, it was too late. Negrete had aged out of the pathway at 21.

In 2008, Negrete said, he was arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol. Four years later, President Obama established the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program to protect immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. Negrete failed to qualify because of the DUI.

He said he got his record expunged in 2016, but — again — it was too late.

The following year, Trump began unwinding DACA, shutting out new generations of recipients, including Negrete.

Negrete waited until his last night in the U.S. to tell his mother, who now lives in Colorado, that he was leaving. He had grown tired of friends and other family members begging him to change his mind.

He had partially hinged his decision on the fact that his mom was in remission from her third bout with cancer and had just obtained legal residency. With life more stable for her, he could finally seek stability for himself.

“You taught me to dream,” Negrete recalled telling her. “This is me dreaming. I want to see the world.”

She cried and scolded him, promising to visit and repeating what she had said when he came out to her all those years before: “I wish you told me sooner.”

At a hotel in Tijuana, Negrete’s emotions finally caught up with him.

The day after Negrete and his three friends left L.A., three more friends surprised him by arriving in Tijuana for a final Friday night out together. One of them presented a gift he had put together with help from Negrete’s entire social circle — a video with loved ones sharing messages of encouragement.

In Negrete’s hotel room, as he and his friends watched, the mood grew sentimental.

“You’re basically the one that formed the family friend tree,” one friend said in her clip. “Friendships do not die out in distance.”

Negrete sobbed. “Yes! Friendships don’t have borders,” he said.

“Every single one of you has said this hasn’t hit y’all, like it’s a mini vacation,” he said. “I want to think of it as an extended vacation.”

“This isn’t goodbye, this is we’ll see each other soon,” he continued.

Off his soapbox, Negrete then chided his friends for making him cry before heading to a drag show.

Negrete had a habit of leaving social gatherings abruptly. His friends joked that they would refer to him as “catch me on the 101” because every time he disappeared during a night out, they would open Apple’s Find My app and see him on the freeway heading home.

“We’re not gonna catch him on the 101 no more,” Martinez said.

On the flight to Guadalajara, Negrete’s heart raced and he began to hyperventilate. The anxiety attack caught him off guard.

Negrete had worked hard to show his friends and family that he was happy, because he didn’t want them to think he had doubts — and he had none. But he began to worry about the unknown and to mourn his former dreams of gaining legal status and running for public office.

“It hit me all at once,” he recounted. “I am three hours away from a whole new life that I don’t know. I left everything and I don’t know what’s next.”

Many deep breaths by Negrete later, the plane descended through the clouds, revealing vibrant green fields and a cantaloupe-hued sunset.

Inside the Airbnb, he was surprised to find a clothesline instead of a dryer. Noticing the blue 5-gallon jug of water in the kitchen, he remarked that he would have to remember tap water wasn’t safe to cook with. But alongside the new was something familiar: The view from his 11–story apartment showed off a sprawling metropolis dotted with trees, some of them palms.

The next day started off like any Sunday, with a trip to Walmart and drag brunch.

Negrete marveled at the cost of a large carton of egg whites ($1) and was shocked to see eggs stored at room temperature, liquid laundry detergent in bags and only single-ply toilet paper. He treated himself to a Darth Vader coffee mug and a teapot featuring characters from “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

After brunch, it was time to play tourist. Negrete was accompanied by Rodriguez, who stayed with him for the first two weeks, and a new friend, Alejandro Preciado, whom he had met at Coachella in April and happened to be a Guadajalara local.

Their first stop was the city’s Spanish Renaissance cathedral, where Negrete said a quick prayer to the Virgin Mary at his mother’s request. Negrete treated his friends to an electric carriage ride around the historic buildings, where he excitedly pointed out the Gothic architecture, then they bought aguas frescas and walked through an open-air market, chatting in an English-heavy Spanglish.

“I’m trying to look at how people dress,” Negrete said, suddenly self-conscious about his short shorts. “I’m pretty sure I stand out.”

After dinner, Negrete was booking an Uber back to his Airbnb when a message popped up: “We’ve detected unusual activity.”

The app didn’t know he had moved.

Before he arrived in Guadalajara, Negrete had already joined an intramural baseball team and a running club. Practices began days after his arrival.

Within a month, he moved into an apartment, visited Mexico City and reconnected with aunts in Mexico City and Guadalajara he hadn’t seen in decades.

He reflected on the small joys of greeting neighborhood señoras on morning dog walks, discovering the depths of Mexican cuisine and the peace of mind that came with no longer feeling like a target — though he’ll still freeze at the sight of police lights.

Still, Negrete remained glued to U.S. politics. In late September, the federal government detailed plans to begin processing initial DACA applications for the first time in four years. Had Negrete stayed in the U.S., he would have finally qualified for a reprieve.

He isn’t regretful.

His new dreams are wide-ranging. He wants to buy a house in Rosarito, where friends and family from L.A. could visit him. He wants to travel the world, starting with a trip to Spain. And he wants to help U.S. organizations build resources for other immigrants who are considering repatriating.

The goal isn’t to encourage people to leave, he said, but to show them they have agency.

“I actually did it,” he said. “I did it, and I’m OK.”

Now, he said, Mexico feels like an estranged relative that he’s getting to know again.

WASHINGTON — President Trump faces the most important international meeting of his second term so far on Thursday: face-to-face negotiations with Xi Jinping, who has made China a formidable economic and military challenger to the United States.

The two presidents face a vast agenda during their meeting in Seoul, beginning with the two countries’ escalating trade war over tariffs and high-tech exports. The list also includes U.S. demands for a Chinese crackdown on fentanyl, China’s aid to Russia in its war with Ukraine, the future of Taiwan and China’s growing nuclear arsenal.

Trump has already promised, characteristically, that the meeting will be a major success.

“It’s going to be fantastic for both countries, and it’s going to be fantastic for the entire world,” he said last week.

But it isn’t yet clear that the summit’s concrete results will measure up to that high standard.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that the two sides have agreed to a “framework” under which China would delay implementing tight controls on rare earth elements, minerals crucial for the production of high-tech products from smartphones and electric vehicles to military aircraft and missiles. He said China has also agreed to resume buying soybeans from U.S. farmers and to crack down on fentanyl components.

In return, Bessent said, the United States will back down from its stinging tariffs on Chinese goods.

Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador in Beijing under then-President Biden, said that kind of deal would amount to “an uneasy trade truce rather than a comprehensive trade deal.”

“That may be the best we can expect,” he said in an interview Monday. Still, he added, “it will be a positive step to stabilize world markets and allow the continuation of U.S.-China trade for the time being.”

But U.S. and Chinese officials have been close-mouthed on what, if anything, has been agreed on regarding Xi’s other big trade demand: easier U.S. restrictions on high-tech exports to China, especially advanced semiconductor chips used for artificial intelligence.

Burns said the two superpowers’ technology competition is “the most sensitive … in terms of where this relationship will head, which country will emerge more powerful.”

Giving China easy access to advanced semiconductors “would only help [the Chinese army] in its competition with the U.S. military for power in the Indo-Pacific,” he warned.

Other former officials and China hawks outside the administration have said, even more pointedly, that they worry that Trump may be too willing to trade long-term technology assets for short-term trade deals.

In August, Trump eased export controls to allow Nvidia, the world leader in AI chips, to sell more semiconductors to China — in an unusual deal under which the U.S. company would pay 15% of its revenue from the sales to the U.S. Treasury.

Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s top China advisor in his first term, protested in a recent podcast interview that the deal risked trading a strategic technology advantage “for $20 billion and Nvidia’s bottom line.”

Underlying the controversy over technology, some China watchers warn, is a basic mismatch between the two presidents: Trump is focused almost entirely on trade and commercial deals, while Xi is focused on displacing the United States as the biggest economic and military power in Asia.

“I don’t think the administration has a strategy toward China,” said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “It has a trade strategy, not a China strategy.”

“The administration does not seem to be focused on competition with China,” said Jonathan Czin, a former CIA analyst now at Washington’s Brookings Institution. “It’s focused on deal making. … It’s tactics without strategy.”

“We’ve fallen into a kind of trade and technology myopia,” he added. “We’re not talking about issues like China’s coercion [of smaller countries] in the South China Sea. … China doesn’t want to have that bigger, broader conversation.”

It isn’t clear that Trump and Xi will have either the time or inclination to talk in detail about anything other than trade.

And even on the front-burner economic issues, this week’s ceasefire is unlikely to produce a permanent peace.

“As with all such agreements, the devil will be in the details,” Burns, the former ambassador, said. “The two countries will remain fierce trade rivals. Expect friction ahead and further trade duels well into 2026.”

“Buckle up,” Czin said. “There are likely more sudden moves from Beijing ahead.”

In the long run, Trump’s legacy in U.S.-China relations will rest not only on trade deals but on the larger competition for economic and military power in the Pacific Rim. No matter how this week’s meetings go, those challenges still lie ahead.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has posted a notice on its website saying federal food aid will not go out Nov. 1, raising the stakes for families nationwide as the government shutdown drags on.

The new notice comes after the Trump administration said it would not tap roughly $5 billion in contingency funds to keep benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as SNAP, flowing into November. That program helps about 1 in 8 Americans buy groceries.

“Bottom line, the well has run dry,” the USDA notice says. “At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats.”

The shutdown, which began Oct. 1, is now the second-longest on record. While the Republican administration took steps leading up to the shutdown to ensure SNAP benefits were paid this month, the cutoff would expand the impact of the impasse to a wider swath of Americans — and some of those most in need — unless a political resolution is found in just a few days.

The administration blames Democrats, who say they will not agree to reopen the government until Republicans negotiate with them on extending expiring subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. Republicans say Democrats must first agree to reopen the government before negotiation.

Democratic lawmakers have written to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins requesting to use contingency funds to cover the bulk of next month’s benefits.

But a USDA memo that surfaced Friday says “contingency funds are not legally available to cover regular benefits.” The document says the money is reserved for such things such as helping people in disaster areas.

It cited a storm named Melissa, which has strengthened into a major hurricane, as an example of why it’s important to have the money available to mobilize quickly in the event of a disaster.

The prospect of families not receiving food aid has deeply concerned states run by both parties.

Some states have pledged to keep SNAP benefits flowing even if the federal program halts payments, but there are questions about whether U.S. government directives may allow that to happen. The USDA memo also says states would not be reimbursed for temporarily picking up the cost.

Other states are telling SNAP recipients to be ready for the benefits to stop. Arkansas and Oklahoma, for example, are advising recipients to identify food pantries and other groups that help with food.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., accused Republicans and Trump of not agreeing to negotiate.

“The reality is, if they sat down to try to negotiate, we could probably come up with something pretty quickly,” Murphy said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We could open up the government on Tuesday or Wednesday, and there wouldn’t be any crisis in the food stamp program.”

When millions of demonstrators took to the streets in June for “No Kings Day” — depicting President Trump as a wannabe monarch intent on violating American democratic norms — it was still fairly early in his administration.

The immigration raids in Los Angeles were just getting under way and Trump had deployed military troops to the city to clamp down on protests.

But four months later, many Americans feel Trump’s threats and norm-shattering actions have only gotten more intense as protesters prepare to take part Saturday in more than 2,700 “No Kings” demonstrations scheduled across the country.

In that period, the Trump administration has ramped up immigration raids across L.A. and Chicago and deployed National Guard troops to Washington D.C. It has also pressured universities to comply with his agenda or lose funding, fired government officials he deems insufficiently loyal and embarked on an aggressive sweep of prosecutions of political opponents.

“We’re seeing an escalation, right?,” said Hunter Dunn, a spokesman for 50501, one of the “No Kings” coalition’s core organizing partners. “We are watching as ICE’s mass deportation program is speeding up and becoming even more aggressive than it was. What happened in Los Angeles is now happening in Memphis, in D.C., in Chicago.”

But the second “No Kings” protest comes with some existential questions for organizers who trying to mount a sustained protest movement. What is the most effective way to challenge Trump? And how do you make noise without playing into the president’s hands?

Saturday’s revival of the massive series of demonstrations — organized around the slogan “No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings” — will voice left-wing concerns that the Trump administration is embracing authoritarian tactics and unraveling U.S. democracy. But it will also include a broader range of issues, including rising prices and rollbacks of environmental protections.

For Dunn, a 22-year-old organizer in Los Angeles County who is part of a coalition of thousands of groups, the threat Trump poses goes beyond immigration. Trump, he noted, had used the Federal Communications Commission to try to silence broadcasters he does not like, brought “spurious” charges against protesters and demonstrators outside of ICE facilities and signed a so-called “big, beautiful bill” that Dunn said had funneled trillions of dollars from the average American to billionaires who supported the Trump regime.

“We’re seeing the Trump administration repeatedly try and fail to shake the pillars of democracy, and in doing so, escalate the threat level,” Dunn said.

The June 14 event inspired more than five million people to rally against Trump. One test will be whether they can increase that number on Saturday.

In both Los Angeles and Chicago, Trump has tried to use protests — many of them peaceful — to claim that the streets are unsafe and in need of military troops. Trump pushed back against the underlying premise of the protest in an interview with Fox News Friday.

“They’re referring to me as a king,” he said. “I’m not a king.”

Protesters also face increasing attacks from Trump’s allies on the right, some of whom are branding their demonstrations as anti-American.

“We call it the ‘hate America’ rally,” U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday at a news conference. “Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you you’ll see Hamas supporters, I bet you’ll see Antifa types, I bet you’ll see the Marxists on full display, the people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.”

Organizers expect a broad and diverse group of Americans to attend Saturday’s “No Kings” demonstrations. About 600 more events are scheduled than the 2,100 demonstrations that took place in June, and slightly more people have signed up, even though the organization is discouraging registrations.

David S. Meyer, a professor of sociology at UC Irvine who studies social movements, said that people’s opinions about the Trump administration have not changed too much since June. Rather, he argued, people felt a higher level of urgency about the danger of the Trump administration.

“What’s increased is the willingness of people to take more action, to do something,” he said. “I think there’s a hunger for action.”

Meyer said he was surprised to see key GOP leaders falling into line with Trump and pushing the idea that “No Kings” is anti-American.

“There are plenty of presidents who’ve encountered protests against their policies,” Meyer said. “That’s part of what America is all about. And usually presidents say, ‘I have to represent everybody and do what I think is best for the country. And I understand that there are other Americans who disagree with me.’”

In an attempt to broaden the scope of “No Kings,” Meyer noted, organizers are appealing to Americans upset over the rising cost of living, gutting of environmental protections, sweeping overhauls of federal agencies and the government shutdown over looming healthcare cuts. These issues, Meyer argued, are connected to the theme of American democracy.

“Trump doesn’t consult with people who disagree with him … and the people surrounding him, and this is by design, are explicitly chosen because of their loyalty rather than their specific competencies,” Meyer said. “The strategy of the ‘No Kings’ organizers is to provide a kind of large and inclusive bucket for all the grievances to fit into and for people with all kinds of different gripes to show up.”

Another reason “No Kings” touches on so many issues, Dunn said, is in response to the Republican tactic — articulated by Trump’s former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon as “flooding the zone” — of overwhelming the public with a barrage of information, disinformation and controversy.

“Republicans’ strategy is to worsen the economy for everyone, to worsen the cost of living for the average American… to try to weaken the American people and make it harder for them to stand up against this administration’s abuses,” Dunn said. “So that’s why we’re standing up on all those fronts, because we have to meet them at every front that they’re using to harm the American people.”

The goal of “No Kings” goes beyond just getting Americans out on the streets together in solidarity against Trump. They want to connect people who are upset and frustrated with the Trump administration to local organizing groups.

“Getting involved in those groups, making those face to face connections and joining them will have a much larger impact over the next few days, the next few weeks, next few months, the next few years, than just one day of protest,” Dunn said.

Going forward, Dunn said, one of the key questions facing the Trump resistance movement is how to pressure leading Democratic elected officials to get on board.

While legislators such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Chris Van Hollen had done a lot to resist the Trump administration, he said, he wanted to put more pressure on mainstream Democrats across the country.

“How do we get support from what is supposed to be the opposition party?”

Dunn said he was not worried about the prospect of violence Saturday when millions take to the streets. The rallies and demonstrations that took place on the June demonstrations were overwhelmingly peaceful, he noted. Organizers put a major emphasis on de-escalation and protest safety, bringing in community and faith leaders and training tens of thousands of volunteers across the country in de-escalation. He scoffed at the idea extremists might hijack any of the demonstrations.

“The biggest threat to safety at every protest I’ve ever been at — unless law enforcement gets involved — is always dehydration and heat exhaustion,” Dunn said.

Olivia Negron, 73, an organizer with Studio City Rising who has protested in that L.A. neighborhood every weekend since April, said she was alarmed not just by the president’s rhetoric, but by the Trump administration’s actions against immigrants through the courts and in the streets.

“The president doesn’t know what it is to be American,” said Negron, a Latina and the child of a U.S. Navy officer. “The American dream is about inclusivity and making sure that immigrants are welcomed into the United States.”

Negron, who marched against the war in Vietnam, said she felt the people in power have taken away what it means to be American and made it difficult to fly the American flag. But she said she was hopeful that the Trump administration’s actions since the last “No Kings” day would push more people to protest.

“We need to turn the ship of state around and get this democracy heading in the right direction,” Negron said. “Absolutely more inclusion, more equity, more diversity. Diversity is our strength and empathy is our superpower.”

In the early days of President Trump’s second term, the U.S. appeared keen to cooperate with Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader. Special envoy Ric Grenell met Maduro, working with him to coordinate deportation flights to Caracas, a prisoner exchange deal and an agreement allowing Chevron to drill Venezuelan oil.

Grenell told disappointed members of Venezuela’s opposition that Trump’s domestic goals took priority over efforts to promote democracy. “We’re not interested in regime change,” Grenell told the group, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

But Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of State, had a different vision.

In a parallel call with María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia, two leaders of the opposition, Rubio affirmed U.S. support “for the restoration of democracy in Venezuela” and called González “the rightful president” of the beleaguered nation after Maduro rigged last year’s election in his favor.

Rubio, now also serving as national security advisor, has grown closer to Trump and crafted an aggressive new policy toward Maduro that has brought Venezuela and the United States to the brink of military confrontation.

Grenell has been sidelined, two sources told The Times, as the U.S. conducts an unprecedented campaign of deadly strikes on suspected Venezuelan drug boats — and builds up military assets in the Caribbean. Trump said Wednesday that he has authorized the CIA to conduct covert action in the South American nation, and that strikes on land targets could be next.

“I think Venezuela is feeling the heat,” he said.

The pressure campaign marks a major victory for Rubio, the son of Cuban emigres and an unexpected power player in the administration who has managed to sway top leaders of the isolationist MAGA movement to his lifelong effort to topple Latin America’s leftist authoritarians.

“It’s very clear that Rubio has won,” said James B. Story, who served as ambassador to Venezuela under President Biden. “The administration is applying military pressure in the hope that somebody inside of the regime renders Maduro to justice, either by exiling him, sending him to the United States or sending him to his maker.”

In a recent public message to Trump, Maduro acknowledged that Rubio is now driving White House policy: “You have to be careful because Marco Rubio wants your hands stained with blood, with South American blood, Caribbean blood, Venezuelan blood,” Maduro said.

As a senator from Florida, Rubio represented exiles from three leftist autocracies — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — and for years he has made it his mission to weaken their governments. He says his family could not return to Cuba after Fidel Castro’s revolution seven decades ago. He has long maintained that eliminating Maduro would deal a fatal blow to Cuba, whose economy has been buoyed by billions of dollars in Venezuelan oil in the face of punishing U.S. sanctions.

In 2019, Rubio pushed Trump to back Juan Guaidó, a Venezuelan opposition leader who sought unsuccessfully to topple Maduro.

Rubio later encouraged Trump to publicly support Machado, who was barred from the ballot in Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election, and who last week was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her pro-democracy efforts. González, who ran in Machado’s place, won the election, according to vote tallies gathered by the opposition, yet Maduro declared victory.

Rubio was convinced that only military might would bring change to Venezuela, which has been plunged into crisis under Maduro’s rule, with a quarter of the population fleeing poverty, violence and political repression.

But there was a hitch. Trump has repeatedly vowed to not intervene in the politics of other nations, telling a Middle Eastern audience in May that the U.S. “would no longer be giving you lectures on how to live.”

Denouncing decades of U.S. foreign policy, Trump complained that “the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”

To counter that sentiment, Rubio painted Maduro in a new light that he hoped would spark interest from Trump, who has been fixated on combating immigration, illegal drugs and Latin American cartels since his first presidential campaign.

Going after Maduro, Rubio argued, was not about promoting democracy or a change of governments. It was striking a drug kingpin fueling crime in American streets, an epidemic of American overdoses, and a flood of illegal migration to America’s borders.

Rubio tied Maduro to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan street gang whose members the secretary of State says are “worse than Al Qaeda.”

“Venezuela is governed by a narco-trafficking organization that has empowered itself as a nation state,” he said during his Senate confirmation hearing.

Meanwhile, prominent members of Venezuela’s opposition pushed the same message. “Maduro is the head of a narco-terrorist structure,” Machado told Fox News last month.

Security analysts and U.S. intelligence officials suggest that the links between Maduro and Tren de Aragua are overblown.

A declassified memo by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found no evidence of widespread cooperation between Maduro’s government and the gang. It also said Tren de Aragua does not pose a threat to the U.S.

The gang does not traffic fentanyl, and the Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that just 8% of cocaine that reaches the U.S. passes through Venezuelan territory.

Still, Rubio’s strategy appears to have worked.

In July, Trump declared that Tren de Aragua was a terrorist group led by Maduro — and then ordered the Pentagon to use military force against cartels that the U.S. government had labeled terrorists.

Trump deployed thousands of U.S. troops and a small armada of ships and warplanes to the Caribbean and has ordered strikes on five boats off the coast of Venezuela, resulting in 24 deaths. The administration says the victims were “narco-terrorists” but has provided no evidence.

Elliott Abrams, a veteran diplomat who served as special envoy to Venezuela in Trump’s first term, said he believes the White House will carry out limited strikes in Venezuela.

“I think the next step is that they’re going to hit something in Venezuela — and I don’t mean boots on the ground. That’s not Trump,” Abrams said. “It’s a strike, and then it’s over. That’s very low risk to the United States.”

He continued: “Now, would it be nice if that kind of activity spurred a colonel to lead a coup? Yeah, it would be nice. But the administration is never going to say that.”

Even if Trump refrains from a ground invasion, there are major risks.

“If it’s a war, then what is the war’s aim? Is it to overthrow Maduro? Is it more than Maduro? Is it to get a democratically elected president and a democratic regime in power?” said John Yoo, a professor of law at UC Berkeley, who served as a top legal advisor to the George W. Bush administration. “The American people will want to know what’s the end state, what’s the goal of all of this.”

“Whenever you have two militaries bristling that close together, there could be real action,” said Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at the think tank Chatham House. “Trump is trying to do this on the cheap. He’s hoping maybe he won’t have to commit. But it’s a slippery slope. This could draw the United States into a war.”

Sabatini and others added that even if the U.S. pressure drives out Maduro, what follows is far from certain.

Venezuela is dominated by a patchwork of guerrilla and paramilitary groups that have enriched themselves with gold smuggling, drug trafficking and other illicit activities. None have incentive to lay down arms.

And the country’s opposition is far from unified.

Machado, who dedicated her Nobel Prize to Trump in a clear effort to gain his support, says she is prepared to govern Venezuela. But there are others — both in exile and in Maduro’s administration — who would like to lead the country.

Machado supporter Juan Fernandez said anything would be better than maintaining the status quo.

“Some say we’re not prepared, that a transition would cause instability,” he said. “How can Maduro be the secure choice when 8 million Venezuelans have left, when there is no gasoline, political persecution and rampant inflation?”

Fernandez praised Rubio for pushing the Venezuela issue toward “an inflection point.”

What a difference, he said, to have a decision-maker in the White House with family roots in another country long oppressed by an authoritarian regime.

“He perfectly understands our situation,” Fernandez said. “And now he has one of the highest positions in the United States.”

Linthicum reported from Mexico City, Wilner from Dallas and Ceballos from Washington. Special correspondent Mery Mogollón in Caracas contributed to this report.

There are few laws President Trump name-checks more frequently than the Insurrection Act.

A 200-year-old constellation of statutes, the act grants emergency powers to thrust active-duty soldiers into civilian police duty, something otherwise barred by federal law.

Trump and his team have threatened to invoke it almost daily for weeks — most recently on Monday, after a reporter pressed the president about his escalating efforts to dispatch federalized troops to Democrat-led cities.

“Insurrection Act — yeah, I mean, I could do that,” Trump said. “Many presidents have.”

Roughly a third of U.S. presidents have called on the statutes at some point — but history also shows the law has been used only in moments of extraordinary crisis and political upheaval.

The Insurrection Act was Abraham Lincoln’s sword against secessionists and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s shield around the Little Rock Nine, the young Black students who were the first to desegregate schools in Arkansas.

Ulysses S. Grant invoked it more than half a dozen times to thwart statehouse coups, stem race massacres and smother the Ku Klux Klan in its South Carolina cradle.

But it has just as often been wielded to crush labor strikes and strangle protest movements. The last time it was invoked, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was in elementary school and most U.S. soldiers had not yet been born.

Now, many fear Trump could call on the law to quell opposition to his agenda.

“The Democrats were fools not to amend the Insurrection Act in 2021,” said Kevin Carroll, former senior counsel in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term. “It gives the president almost untrammeled power.”

It also precludes most judicial review.

“It can’t even be challenged,” Trump boasted Monday. “I don’t have to go there yet, because I’m winning on appeal.”

If that winning streak cools, as legal experts say it soon could, some fear the Insurrection Act would be the administration’s next move.

“The Insurrection Act is very broadly worded, but there is a history of even the executive branch interpreting it narrowly,” said John C. Dehn, an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

The president first floated using the Insurrection Act against protesters in the summer of 2020. But members of his Cabinet and military advisors blocked the move, as they did efforts to use the National Guard for immigration enforcement and the military to patrol the border.

“They have this real fixation on using the military domestically,” Carroll said. “It’s sinister.”

In his second term, Trump has instead relied on an obscure subsection of the U.S. code to surge federalized soldiers into blue cities, claiming it confers many of the same powers as the Insurrection Act.

Federal judges disagreed. Challenges to deployments in Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., and Chicago have since clogged the appellate courts, with three West Coast cases before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and one pending in the 7th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Illinois.

The result is a growing knot of litigation that experts say will fall to the Supreme Court to unwind.

As of Wednesday, troops in Oregon and Illinois are activated but can’t be deployed. The Oregon case is further complicated by precedent from California, where federalized soldiers have patrolled the streets since June with the 9th Circuit’s blessing. That ruling is set to be reheard by the circuit on Oct. 22 and could be reversed.

Meanwhile, what California soldiers are legally allowed to do while they’re federalized is also under review, meaning even if Trump retains the authority to call up troops, he might not be able to use them.

Scholars are split over how the Supreme Court might rule on any of those issues.

“At this point, no court … has expressed any sympathy to these arguments, because they’re so weak,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor at Yale Law School.

Koh listed the high court’s most conservative members, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., as unlikely to push back against the president’s authority to invoke the Insurrection Act, but said even some of Trump’s appointees — Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — might be skeptical, along with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

“I don’t think Thomas and Alito are going to stand up to Trump, but I’m not sure that Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Roberts can read this statute to give him [those] powers.”

The Insurrection Act sidesteps those fights almost entirely.

It “would change not only the legal state of play, but fundamentally change the facts we have on the ground, because what the military would be authorized to do would be so much broader,” said Christopher Mirasola, an assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

Congress created the Insurrection Act as a fail-safe in response to armed mobs attacking their neighbors and organized militias seeking to overthrow elected officials. But experts caution that the military is not trained to keep law and order, and that the country has a strong tradition against domestic deployments dating to the Revolutionary War.

“The uniformed military leadership in general does not like getting involved in the domestic law enforcement issue at all,” Carroll said. “The only similarities between police and military is that they have uniforms and guns.”

Today, the commander in chief can invoke the law in response to a call for help from state leaders, as George H.W. Bush did to quell the 1992 Rodney King uprising in L.A.

The statute can also be used to make an end-run around elected officials who refuse to enforce the law, or mobs who make it impossible — something Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy Jr. did in defense of school integration.

Still, modern presidents have generally shied from using the Insurrection Act even in circumstances with strong legal justification. George W. Bush weighed invoking the law after Hurricane Katrina created chaos in New Orleans but ultimately declined over fears it would intensify the already bitter power struggle between the state and federal government.

“There are any number of Justice Department internal opinions where attorneys general like Robert Kennedy or Nicholas Katzenbach said, ‘We cannot invoke the Insurrection Act because the courts are open,’” Koh said.

Despite its extraordinary power, Koh and other experts said the law has guardrails that may make it more difficult for the president to invoke it in the face of naked bicyclists or protesters in inflatable frog suits, whom federal forces have faced down recently in Portland.

“There are still statutory requirements that have to be met,” said Dehn, the Loyola professor. “The problem the Trump administration would have in invoking [the law] is that very practically, they are able to arrest people who break the law and prosecute people who break the law.”

That may be why Trump and his administration have yet to invoke the act.

“It reminds me of the run-up to Jan. 6,” Carroll said. “It’s a similar feeling that people have, a sense that an illegal or immoral and unwise order is about to be given.”

He and others say an invocation of the Insurrection Act would shift widespread concern about military policing of American streets into existential territory.

“If there’s a bad faith invocation of the Insurrection Act to send federal troops to go beat up anti-ICE protesters, there should be a general strike in the United States,” Carroll said. “It’s a real break-the-glass moment.”

At that point, the best defense may come from the military.

“If a really unwise and immoral order comes out … 17-year generals need to say no,” Carroll said. “They have to have the guts to put their stars on the table.”

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge blocked the Trump administration Wednesday from firing thousands of government workers based on the ongoing federal shutdown, granting a request from employee unions in California.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston issued the temporary restraining order after concluding that the unions “will demonstrate ultimately that what’s being done here is both illegal and is in excess of authority and is arbitrary and capricious.”

Illston slammed the Trump administration for failing to provide her with clear information about what cuts are actually occurring, for repeatedly changing its description and estimates of job cuts in filings before the court, and for failing — including during Wednesday’s hearing in San Francisco — to articulate an argument for why such cuts are not in violation of federal law.

“The evidence suggests that the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, and the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, have taken advantage of the lapse in government spending and government functioning to assume that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them anymore,” Illston said — which she said was not the case.

She said the government justified providing inaccurate figures for the number of jobs being eliminated under its “reduction in force” orders by calling it a “fluid situation” — which she did not find convincing.

“What it is is a situation where things are being done before they are being thought through. It’s very much ready, fire, aim on most of these programs,” she said. “And it has a human cost, which is really why we’re here today. It’s a human cost that cannot be tolerated.”

Illston also ran through a string of recent comments made by President Trump and other members of his administration about the firings and their intentionally targeting programs and agencies supported by Democrats, saying, “By all appearances, they’re politically motivated.”

The Trump administration has acknowledged dismissing about 4,000 workers under the orders, while Trump and other officials have signaled that more would come Friday.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said Wednesday on “The Charlie Kirk Show” that the number of jobs cut could “probably end up being north of 10,000,” as the administration wants to be “very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy, not just the funding,” and the shutdown provided that opportunity.

Attorneys for the unions, led by the American Federation of Government Employees, said that the figures were unreliable and that they feared additional reduction in force orders resulting in more layoffs, as promised by administration officials, if the court did not step in and block such actions.

Illston, an appointee of President Clinton, did just that.

She barred the Trump administration and its various agencies “from taking any action to issue any reduction in force notices to federal employees in any program, project or activity” involving union members “during or because of the federal shutdown.”

She also barred the administration from “taking any further action to administer or implement” existing reduction notices involving union members.

Illston demanded that the administration provide within two days a full accounting of all existing or “imminent” reduction in force orders that would be blocked by her order, as well as the specific number of federal jobs affected.

Elizabeth Hedges, an attorney for the Trump administration, had argued during the hearing that the order should not be granted for several procedural reasons — including that the alleged harm to federal employees from loss of employment or benefits was not “irreparable” and could be addressed through other avenues, including civil litigation.

Additionally, she argued that federal employment claims should be adjudicated administratively, not in district court; and that the reduction in force orders included 60-day notice periods, meaning the layoffs were not immediate and therefore the challenge to them was not yet “ripe” legally.

However, Hedges would not discuss the case on its actual merits — which is to say, whether the cuts were actually legal or not, which did not seem to sit well with Illston.

“You don’t have a position on whether it’s OK that they do what they’re doing?” Illston asked.

“I am not prepared to discuss that today, your honor,” Hedges said.

“Well — but it’s happening. This hatchet is falling on the heads of employees all across the nation, and you’re not even prepared to address whether that’s legal, even though that’s what this motion challenges?” Illston said.

“That’s right,” Hedges said — stressing again that there were “threshold” arguments for why the case shouldn’t even be allowed to continue to the merits stage.

Danielle Leonard, an attorney for the unions, suggested the government’s positions were indefensible and directly in conflict with public statements by the administration — including remarks by Trump on Tuesday that more cuts are coming Friday.

“How do we know this? Because OMB and the president relentlessly are telling us, and other members of the administration,” Leonard said.

Leonard said the harm from the administration’s actions is obvious and laid out in the union’s filings — showing how employees have at times been left in the dark as to their employment status because they don’t have access to work communication channels during the shutdown, or how others have been called in to “work without pay to fire their fellow employees” — only to then be fired themselves.

“There are multiple types of harm that are caused exactly right now — emotional trauma. That’s not my word, your honor, that is the word of OMB Director Vought. Let’s cause ‘trauma’ to the federal workforce,” Leonard said. “And that’s exactly what they are doing. Trauma. The emotional distress of being told you are being fired after an already exceptionally difficult year for federal employees.”

Skye Perryman, president and chief executive of Democracy Forward, which is co-counsel for the unions, praised Illston’s decision in a statement after the hearing.

“The statements today by the court make clear that the President’s targeting of federal workers — a move straight out of Project 2025’s playbook — is unlawful,” Perryman said. “Our civil servants do the work of the people, and playing games with their livelihoods is cruel and unlawful and a threat to everyone in our nation.”

Illston asked the two parties to confer on the best date, probably later this month, for a fuller hearing on whether she should issue a more lasting preliminary injunction in the case.

“It would be wonderful to know what the government’s position is on the merits of this case — and my breath is bated until we find that,” Illston said.

After the hearing, during a White House news conference, Trump said his administration was paying federal employees whom “we want paid” while Vought uses the shutdown to dismiss employees perceived as supporting Democratic initiatives.

“Russell Vought is really terminating tremendous numbers of Democrat projects — not only jobs,” Trump said.

Technology company Oracle is among a consortium of firms that would enable TikTok to continue operations in the U.S. if a framework deal between the United States and China to take over the social media company is finalized, sources with knowledge of the negotiations tell CBS News. 

The precise structure of the final deal was unclear Monday night, but will include multiple companies, the sources said. It’s not clear what level of involvement Chinese firms — including TikTok’s current parent company ByteDance — will have in the deal, and who will control TikTok’s powerful recommendation algorithm. Presidents Trump and Xi are expected to talk on Friday.

The deal includes a blend of new investors, including Silver Lake, a private equity firm based in California, and existing investors, the sources said. 

Mr. Trump on Tuesday morning declined to say which companies are purchasing TikTok, but said they will be announcing that soon. 

“We have a group of very big companies that want to buy it,” Mr. Trump said. “And, you know, the kids wanted it so badly. I had parents calling me up. They don’t want it for themselves. They want it for their kids. They say, if I don’t get it done, they’re in big trouble with their kids.”

Oracle declined to comment. A TikTok spokesperson declined to comment. A spokesperson for Silver Lake didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The Chinese Embassy in Washington responded on Tuesday morning that China will “firmly defend its national interests, the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies, and will carry out technology export approvals according to relevant laws and regulations.” 

The statement continued that the Chinese government “also fully respects the will of enterprises and supports them in conducting business negotiations on an equal footing in accordance with market principles.” 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday in Madrid after meetings with Chinese officials on a range of issues, including TikTok, that the commercial terms had been agreed upon.

Oracle — the tech company co-founded by billionaire Larry Ellison — has long been seen as a possible buyer if the U.S. government forced a TikTok sale. Mr. Trump has described Ellison as a friend. (Larry Ellison’s son, David Ellison, is the chairman & CEO of Paramount Skydance, which is the parent company of CBS. The Ellison Family owns a controlling interest in Paramount Skydance.)

In 2020, Mr. Trump endorsed a deal that would see Oracle and Walmart taking a 20% stake in a U.S.-based entity called TikTok Global. And in recent years, as TikTok has sought to regain trust with American users and regulators, it has partnered with Oracle to route U.S. TikTok users’ activity through the Texas-based company’s servers.

Mr. Trump was circumspect about a deal with reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “We may let it die, or we may, I don’t know, it depends. Up to China. It doesn’t matter too much. I’d like to do it for the kids. They like it.”

Last year, Congress passed and then-President Joe Biden signed a bill that essentially gave TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, an ultimatum: either divest from TikTok or face a ban in the U.S. The Supreme Court upheld the law in a unanimous 9-0 decision. But Mr. Trump has issued a series of orders unilaterally delaying its enforcement. The latest came in June, when he pushed back the deadline for enforcing the measure until this Wednesday.

The president’s orders have directed the Justice Department not to take action or impose penalties against tech companies such asApple and Google for failing to comply with the law by offering the TikTok app on their platforms.

The TikTok divestiture law was passed in 2024 after years of bipartisan concern over possible national security risks posed by the ultra-popular video app. Those include worries that the Chinese government could force ByteDance to divulge information on U.S.-based users or manipulate the platform’s algorithm to control what Americans see. TikTok has long denied that the Chinese authorities exert any influence on the platform.

The concerns stretch back to Mr. Trump’s first term. The president signed an executive order to ban TikTok in the U.S. in 2020 on national security and data privacy grounds, but the move was blocked by a judge. Four years later, Mr. Trump  changed his view and expressed support for the app, which he has credited for his improved performance among younger voters in last year’s election.

Caitlin Yilek and

Melissa Quinn

contributed to this report.

President Trump has often locked horns with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, with the once left-leaning court putting a persistent drag on his first-term agenda.

And now, even after remaking the bench with his own appointees, the president is still tangling with the West Coast’s federal appellate court — a situation poised to boil over as the circuit juggles multiple challenges to his use of the National Guard to police American streets.

“I appointed the judge and he goes like that — I wasn’t served well,” Trump told reporters Sunday, lashing out at U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut of Portland, Ore., after she temporarily blocked the deployment of federalized troops.

“To have a judge like that, that judge ought to be ashamed of himself,” Trump said, referring to Immergut, who is a woman.

The president has long railed against judges who rule against him, calling them “monsters,” “deranged” and “radical” at various points in the past.

Trump has also occasionally sniped at conservative jurists, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., whom he called “disgraceful” after the Supreme Court rejected his bid to overturn the 2020 election.

But this weekend’s spat marked a shift in his willingness to go after his own appointees — a turn experts say could become much sharper as his picks to the appellate bench test his ambition to put boots on the ground in major cities across the U.S.

“The fact that a pretty conservative judge ruled the way she did is an indication that some conservative judges would rule similarly,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and a constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute.

The 9th Circuit handed the administration an early victory in the troop fight this spring, finding that courts must give “a great level of deference” to the president to decide whether facts on the ground warrant military intervention.

That ruling is set to be reviewed by a larger appellate panel, and could ultimately be reversed. The circuit is also now set to review a September decision barring federalized troops in California from aiding in civilian law enforcement, as well as Immergut’s temporary restraining order blocking the deployment over the weekend.

Gov. Gavin Newsom rebuked the National Governors Assn. on Monday for remaining silent “in the face of the Trump Administration’s onslaught against democratic norms,” including federalizing state National Guard troops.

In a letter addressed to fellow governors, Newsom accused the association of abandoning its bipartisan values by failing to defend the constitutional authority of governors. He cited Trump’s decision to send Texas National Guard troops to Illinois and Oregon over those states’ objections as a dangerous precedent.

He called on fellow governors to “denounce this infringement of state sovereignty.”

“If the National Governors Association cannot coalesce around this, I will have no choice but to withdraw California’s membership,” Newsom wrote. “And I would also call on others to do the same.”

In the meantime, the 9th Circuit’s June decision has served as a guidepost for states seeking to limit what Oregon called a “nationwide campaign to assimilate the military into civilian law enforcement.”

“That decision is binding, and it does require a substantial degree of deference on the factual issues,” Somin said. “[But] when what the president does is totally divorced from reality, that limit is breached.”

Immergut appeared to agree, saying in her ruling that circumstances in Portland this fall were significantly different than those in L.A. in the spring. While some earlier protests did turn violent, she wrote, recent pickets outside Portland’s ICE headquarters have featured lawn chairs and low energy.

“Violence elsewhere cannot support troop deployments here, and concern about hypothetical future conduct does not demonstrate a present inability to execute the laws using nonmilitary federal law enforcement,” the judge wrote, addressing the 9th Circuit decision.

“The President is certainly entitled ‘a great level of deference,’” Immergut continued. “But ‘a great level of deference’ is not equivalent to ignoring the facts on the ground. … The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.”

But exactly where the appellate court may draw the line on presidential fact-finding is tricky, experts said.

“How much deference is owed to the president? That’s something we’re all talking about,” said John C. Dehn, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

Whether courts can review the president’s judgment at all is a matter that splits even some of the president’s most conservative judicial picks from his current Justice Department attorneys.

So far, Trump has relied on an esoteric subsection of the U.S. Code for the authority to send soldiers on immigration raids and to control crowds of protesters.

Dehn and others have characterized that reading of the code as semantic and divorced from its legal context.

“They’re looking at the words in a vacuum and arguing the broadest possible meaning they can think of,” Dehn said. “The administration is not engaged in good faith statutory interpretation — they’re engaged in linguistic manipulation of these statutes.”

Immergut agreed, quoting Supreme Court precedent saying “[i]nterpretation of a word or phrase depends upon reading the whole statutory text.”

For some conservative legal scholars, Trump appointees’ willingness to push back on repeated deployments could signal a limit — or a dangerous new escalation in the administration’s attacks on jurists who defy them.

“It’s obvious the administration is trying to do this on a bigger scale,” Somin said. “Ideally we would not rely on litigation alone to deal with it.”

Times staff writer Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report.

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily halted a Trump administration plan to reduce disaster relief and anti-terrorism funding for states with so-called sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants.

U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy granted the temporary restraining order curtailing the cuts at the request of California, 10 other states and the District of Columbia, which argued in a lawsuit Monday that the policy appeared to have illegally cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.

The states said they were first notified of the cuts over the weekend. McElroy made her decision during an emergency hearing on the states’ motion in Rhode Island District Court on Tuesday afternoon.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta cheered the decision as the state’s latest win in pushing back against what he described as a series of unlawful, funding-related power grabs by the Trump administration.

“Over and over, the courts have stopped the Trump Administration’s illegal efforts to tie unrelated grant funding to state policies,” Bonta said. “It’s a little thing called state sovereignty, but given the President’s propensity to violate the Constitution, it’s unsurprising that he’s unfamiliar with it.”

Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the funding and notified the states of the cuts, immediately responded to a request for comment Tuesday.

Sanctuary policies are not uniform and the term is imprecise, but it generally refers to policies that bar states and localities — and their local law enforcement agencies — from participating in federal immigration raids or other enforcement initiatives.

The Trump administration and other Republicans have cast such policies as undermining law and order. Democrats and progressives including in California say instead that states and cities have finite public safety resources and that engaging in immigration enforcement serves only to undermine the trust they and their law enforcement agencies need to maintain with the public in order to prevent and solve crime, including in large immigrant communities.

In their lawsuit Monday, the states said the funding being reduced was part of billions in federal dollars annually distributed to the states to “prepare for, protect against, respond to, and recover from catastrophic disasters,” and which administrations of both political parties distributed “evenhandedly” for decades before Trump.

Authorized by Congress after events such as Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina, the funding covers the salaries of first responders, testing of state computer networks for cyberattack vulnerabilities, mutual aid compacts between regional partners and emergency responses after disasters, the states said.

Bonta’s office said California was informed over the weekend by Homeland Security officials that it would be receiving $110 million instead of $165 million, a reduction of its budget by about a third. The states’ lawsuit said other blue states saw even more dramatic cuts, with Illinois seeing a 69% reduction and New York receiving a 79% reduction, while red states saw substantial funding increases.

Bonta on Tuesday said the administration’s reshuffling of funds based on state compliance with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement priorities was illegal and needed to be halted — and restored to previous levels based on risk assessment — in order to keep everyone in the country safe.

“California uses the grant funding at stake in our lawsuit to protect the safety of our communities from acts of terrorism and other disasters — meaning the stakes are quite literally life and death,” he said. “This is not something to play politics with. I’m grateful to the court for seeing the urgency of this dangerous diversion of homeland security funding.”

Homeland Security officials have previously argued that the agency should be able to withhold funding from states that it believes are not upholding or are actively undermining its core mission of defending the nation from threats, including the threat it sees from illegal immigration.

Other judges have also ruled against the administration conditioning disaster and public safety funding on states and localities complying with federal immigration policies.

Joining California in Monday’s lawsuit were Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia.

Journalists who cover the Pentagon and the Trump admnistration are in a standoff about new rules that limit the access of the media to most areas within the Pentagon and appear to condition overall entry to the building on an agreement to restrictions in reporting.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s team characterizes the changes as an effort to protect national security and the safety of those who work at the Pentagon, while many in the press see it as an effort to exert control and avoid embarrassing stories.

Journalists who want to hold on to badges that permit access to the Pentagon were told on Sept. 19 they must sign a letter acknowledging the new rules by this Tuesday or the badge “will be revoked.” The new policy says that Defense Department information “must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if unclassified.” Classified material faces even tighter restrictions.

That level of control immediately alarmed journalists and their advocates.

“Asking independent journalists to submit to these kinds of restrictions is at stark odds with the constitutional protections of a free press in a democracy, and a continued attempt to throttle the public’s right to understand what their government is doing,” said Charles Stadtlander, spokesman for The New York Times.

In a subsequent letter to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Hegseth aide Sean Parnell suggested that journalists misunderstood some of the new rules. He said, for example, that the restriction against releasing unclassified information is the policy that Pentagon officials must follow — not something the journalists must abide by.

“It should come as no surprise that the mainstream media is once again misrepresenting the Pentagon’s press procedures,” Parnell said in a post on X. “Let’s be absolutely clear: Journalists are not required to clear their stories with us. That claim is a lie.”

However, the new policy says that journalists who encourage Pentagon officials to break the rules — in other words, ask sources for information — could be subject to losing their building access.

While it appeared that Parnell sought to soften some of the hard edges of his policy in response to questions raised by the reporters’ committee, there’s still enough confusion to merit a meeting to clear things up, said Grayson Clary, a lawyer for RCFP. There’s some wariness among news organizations about what they would be agreeing to if they sign the letter, and it’s not clear how many people — if any — have done so.

The new rules continue a tense relationship between the press and the Hegseth team, which had already evicted some news outlets from their regular workspaces in favor of friendlier outlets and limited the ability of reporters to roam around the Pentagon. Hegseth and Parnell seldom hold press briefings.

Parnell did not respond to a request for comment by The Associated Press.

“It’s control, just 100% control,” said Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine. Goldberg, who is not stationed at the Pentagon, wrote the most embarrassing story of Hegseth’s tenure so far when he was inadvertently included in a Signal group chat where Hegseth and other national officials discussed an imminent attack on Houthis in Yemen. The brouhaha became widely known as “Signalgate.”

Pentagon leadership was also reportedly unhappy over a story that said Elon Musk was to get a briefing on military strategy for China, leading President Donald Trump to stop it, and other stories about initial assessments of damage in the military strike against Iran.

No American reporter accredited to the Pentagon that he knows is interested in subverting national security or putting anyone in the military in harm’s way, Goldberg said.

In his own case, Goldberg did not report on what he learned until after the attack was over. He said he contacted officials in the group chat to ask if there was anything he learned that was harmful to the country in any way. He did not include in his story the name of a CIA official mentioned in the messages who was technically still undercover, he said.

“The only people in Signalgate who were putting American troops in harm’s way were the national leadership of the United States by discussing on a commercial messaging app the launch times of strikes on a hostile country,” he said.

Access to officials in the Pentagon has been invaluable in helping reporters understand what is going on, said Dana Priest, a longtime national security reporter at The Washington Post who is now a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. With the exception of a few areas, reporters are not permitted under the new rules to walk through the Pentagon without an official escort.

Priest said the corridors of the Pentagon were like areas around Congress where reporters buttonhole politicians. Priest recalled staking out military officials waiting for them to come out of a bathroom.

“They know the goal of the media is to get around the official gobbledygook and get out the truth,” Priest said. “They may not help you. But some of them want to help Americans know what is going on.”

Experienced national security reporters know there are many ways to get information, including through other channels of government and people in the private sector. “The Pentagon is always very well versed in the advantages of controlling the story, so they always try to do that,” she said. “The reporters know that. They’ve known that for decades.”

Reporters who don’t follow the new rules won’t necessarily be expelled immediately, Parnell told the reporter’s committee. But access will be determined by Hegseth’s team.

While reporters already stationed in the Pentagon were given until Sept. 30 to sign, they were allowed to request an additional five days for legal review.

Although the Times, Washington Post and Atlantic all put out statements against the Pentagon’s plan, none of the publications would say what they have recommended that their reporters do — perhaps an indication that they consider negotiations potentially fruitful.

President Donald Trump hasn’t hesitated to fight the media when he thinks he’s been wronged, launching lawsuits against CBS News, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal and the Times. Yet he’s also frequently accessible to the press, more so than many of his predecessors, and there has been some uncertainty in the White House about the Pentagon’s policy.

When a reporter asked, “should the Pentagon be in charge of deciding what reporters can report on?” the president replied, “No, I don’t think so. Listen, nothing stops reporters. You know that.”

Goldberg noted that it’s more than just an issue for reporters. “The American people have a right to know what the world’s most powerful military does in their name and with their money,” he said. “That seems fairly obvious to me.”

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David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social

WASHINGTON — President Trump has harnessed the weight of his office in recent days to accelerate a campaign of retribution against his perceived political enemies and attacks on 1st Amendment protections.

In the last week alone, Trump replaced a U.S. attorney investigating two of his political adversaries with a loyalist and openly directed the attorney general to find charges to file against them.

His Federal Communications Commission chairman hinted at punitive actions against networks whose journalists and comedians run afoul of the president.

Trump filed a $15-billion lawsuit against the New York Times, only to have it thrown out by a judge.

The acting U.S. attorney in Los Angeles asked the Secret Service to investigate a social media post by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office.

The Pentagon announced it was imposing new restrictions on reporters who cover the U.S. military.

The White House officially labeled “antifa,” a loose affiliation of far-left extremists, as “domestic terrorists” — a designation with no basis in U.S. law — posing a direct challenge to free speech protections. And it said lawmakers concerned with the legal predicate for strikes on boats in the Caribbean should simply get over it.

An active investigation into the president’s border advisor over an alleged bribery scheme involving a $50,000 payout was quashed by the White House itself.

Trump emphasized his partisan-fueled dislike of his political opponents during a Sunday memorial service for conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who he said “did not hate his opponents.”

“That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” Trump said. “I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them.”

It has been an extraordinary run of attacks using levers of power that have been seen as sacred arbiters of the public trust for decades, scholars and historians say.

The assault is exclusively targeting Democrats, liberal groups and establishment institutions, just as the administration moves to shield its allies.

Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney in Virginia, resigned Friday after facing pressure from the Trump administration to bring criminal charges against New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James over alleged mortgage fraud. In a social media post later that day, Trump claimed he had “fired” Siebert.

A few hours later, on Saturday, Trump said he nominated White House aide Lindsey Halligan to take over Siebert’s top prosecutorial role in Virginia, saying she was “tough” and “loyal.”

Later that day, Trump demanded in a social media post addressed to “Pam” — in reference to Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi — that she prosecute James, former FBI Director James Comey and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump wrote. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s remarks, saying Monday that the president is “rightfully frustrated” and that he “wants accountability for these corrupt fraudsters who abuse their power, who abuse their oath of office, to target the former president and then candidate for the highest office in the land.”

“It is not weaponizing the Department of Justice to demand accountability for those who weaponize the Department of Justice, and nobody knows what that looks like more than President Trump,” Leavitt told reporters.

As the president called for prosecution of his political opponents, it was reported that Tom Homan, the White House border advisor, was the subject of an undercover FBI case that was later shut down by Trump administration officials. Homan, according to MSNBC, accepted $50,000 in cash from undercover agents after he indicated to them he could get them government contracts.

At Monday’s news briefing, Leavitt said that Homan did not take the money and that the investigation was “another example of the weaponization of the Biden Department of Justice against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters.”

“The White House and the president stand by Tom Homan 100% because he did absolutely nothing wrong,” she said.

Some see the recent actions as an erosion of an expected firewall between the Department of Justice and the White House, as well as a shift in the idea of how criminal investigation should be launched.

“If the Department of Justice and any prosecution entity is functioning properly, then that entity is investigating crimes and not people,” said John Hasnas, a law professor at Georgetown University.

The Trump administration has also begun a military campaign against vessels crossing the Caribbean Sea departing from Venezuela that it says are carrying narcotics and drug traffickers. But the targeted killing of individuals at sea is raising concern among legal scholars that the administration’s operation is extrajudicial, and Democratic lawmakers, including Schiff, have introduced a bill in recent days asserting the ongoing campaign violates the War Powers Resolution.

Political influence has long played a role with federal prosecutors who are political appointees, Hasnas said, but under “the current situation it’s magnified greatly.”

“The interesting thing about the current situation is that the Trump administration is not even trying to hide it,” he said.

Schiff said he sees it as an effort to “try to silence and intimidate.” In July, Trump accused Schiff — who led the first impeachment inquiry into Trump — of committing mortgage fraud, which Schiff has denied.

“What he wants to try to do is not just go after me and Letitia James or Lisa Cook, but rather send a message that anyone who stands up to him on anything, anyone who has the audacity to call out his corruption will be a target, and they will go after you,” Schiff said in an interview Sunday.

Trump campaigned in part on protecting free speech, especially that of conservatives, who he claimed had been broadly censored by the Biden administration and “woke” leftist culture in the U.S. Many of his most ardent supporters — including billionaire Elon Musk and now-Vice President JD Vance — praised Trump as a champion of free speech.

However, since Trump took office, his administration has repeatedly sought to silence his critics, including in the media, and crack down on speech that does not align with his politics.

And in the wake of Kirk’s killing on Sept. 10, those efforts have escalated into an unprecedented attack on free speech and expression, according to constitutional scholars and media experts.

“The administration is showing a stunning ignorance and disregard of the 1st Amendment,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School.

“We are at an unprecedented place in American history in terms of the targeting of free press and the exercise of free speech,” said Ken Paulson, former editor in chief of USA Today and now director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University.

“We’ve had periods in American history like the Red Scare, in which Americans were to turn in neighbors who they thought leaned left, but this is a nonstop, multifaceted, multiplatform attack on all of our free speech rights,” Paulson said. “I’m actually quite stunned at the velocity of this and the boldness of it.”

Bondi recently railed against “hate speech” — which the Supreme Court has previously defended — in an online post, suggesting the Justice Department will investigate those who speak out against conservatives.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened ABC and its parent company, Disney, with repercussions if they did not yank Jimmy Kimmel off the air after Kimmel made comments about Kirk’s alleged killer that Carr found distasteful. ABC swiftly suspended Kimmel’s show, though Disney announced Monday that it would return Tuesday.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, said it will require news organizations to agree not to disclose any information the government has not approved for release and revoke the press credentials of those who publish sensitive material without approval.

Critics of the administration, free speech organizations and even some conservative pundits who have long criticized the “cancel culture” of the progressive left have spoken out against some of those policies. Scholars have too, saying the amalgam of actions by the administration represent a dangerous departure from U.S. law and tradition.

“What unites all of this is how blatantly inconsistent it is with the 1st Amendment,” Chemerinsky said.

Chemerinsky said lower courts have consistently pushed back against the administration’s overreaches when it comes to protected speech, and he expects they will continue to do so.

He also said that, although the Supreme Court has frequently sided with the president in disputes over his policy decisions, it has also consistently defended freedom of speech, and he hopes it will continue to do so if some of the free speech policies above reach the high court.

“If there’s anything this court has said repeatedly, it’s that the government can’t prevent or stop speech based on the viewpoint expressed,” Chemerinsky said.

Paulson said that American media companies must refuse to obey and continue to cover the Trump administration and the Pentagon as aggressively as ever, and that average Americans must recognize the severity of the threat posed by such censorship and speak out against it, no matter their political persuasion.

“This is real — a full-throttle assault on free speech in America,” Paulson said. “And it’s going to be up to the citizenry to do something about it.”

Chemerinsky said defending free speech should be an issue that unites all Americans, not least because political power changes hands.

“It’s understandable that those in power want to silence the speech that they don’t like, but the whole point of the 1st Amendment is to protect speech we don’t like,” he said. “We don’t need the 1st Amendment to protect the speech we like.”

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration moved Thursday to shut down a Miami organ donation group, calling it “failing” because of underperformance, unsafe practices and paperwork errors.

The Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency is one of 55 organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, nonprofit agencies around the country that coordinate the recovery of organs from deceased donors and help match them to patients on the nation’s transplant waiting list.

The administration cited an investigation that found a 2024 case where an unspecified mistake led a surgeon to decline a donated heart for a patient awaiting surgery.

In a news briefing, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said problems included would-be donations that went unrecovered, sending some donated organs to the wrong place and a lack of staff.

Life Alliance, a division of the University of Miami Health System, can appeal the decision. If it is shut down, it would mark the first time the federal government has decertified an OPO.

Life Alliance didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

More than 100,000 Americans are on the transplant list and thousands die waiting because there aren’t enough donations to go around. Last year there were more than 48,000 transplants, a record, the vast majority from deceased donors.

Changes to the transplant system have been underway for years to increase donations, reduce waste of potentially usable organs and address other concerns. They include some new safeguards after complaints last year that a different OPO didn’t stop donation preparations quickly enough when some patients showed signs of life, prompting some people to opt out of donor registries. Organ donation can proceed only after a hospital has declared someone dead — and by law, OPOs cannot be involved in that decision.

On Thursday, Oz sought to reassure would-be donors.

“Congress has thoughtfully and aggressively pursued some horrifying stories that have chilled some Americans’ enthusiasm for donating organs. We are here today to tell you this system is safe. It’s rigorously being addressed,” he said, adding later, “I want to applaud the OPOs that are doing a great job because most are.”

—-

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is ending the federal government’s annual report on hunger in America, stating that it had become “overly politicized” and “rife with inaccuracies.”

The decision comes two and a half months after President Donald Trump signed legislation sharply reducing food aid to the poor. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the tax and spending cuts bill Republicans muscled through Congress in July means 3 million people would not qualify for food stamps, also known as SNAP benefits.

The decision to scrap the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Household Food Security Report was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

In a press release Saturday, the USDA said the 2024 report, to be released Oct. 22, would be the last.

“The questions used to collect the data are entirely subjective and do not present an accurate picture of actual food security,” the USDA said. ”The data is rife with inaccuracies slanted to create a narrative that is not representative of what is actually happening in the countryside as we are currently experiencing lower poverty rates, increasing wages, and job growth under the Trump Administration.”

The Census Bureau reported earlier this month that the U.S. poverty rate dipped from 11% in 2023 to 10.6% last year, before Trump took office.

Critics were quick to accuse the administration of deliberately making it harder to measure hunger and assess the impact of its cuts to food stamps.

“Trump is cancelling an annual government survey that measures hunger in America, rather than allow it to show hunger increasing under his tenure,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said on social media. “This follows the playbook of many non-democracies that cancel or manipulate reports that would otherwise show less-than-perfect news.”

___

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is ending the federal government’s annual report on hunger in America, stating that it had become “overly politicized” and “rife with inaccuracies.”

The decision comes two and a half months after President Donald Trump signed legislation sharply reducing food aid to the poor. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the tax and spending cuts bill Republicans muscled through Congress in July means 3 million people would not qualify for food stamps, also known as SNAP benefits.

The decision to scrap the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Household Food Security Report was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

In a press release Saturday, the USDA said the 2024 report, to be released Oct. 22, would be the last.

“The questions used to collect the data are entirely subjective and do not present an accurate picture of actual food security,” the USDA said. ”The data is rife with inaccuracies slanted to create a narrative that is not representative of what is actually happening in the countryside as we are currently experiencing lower poverty rates, increasing wages, and job growth under the Trump Administration.”

The Census Bureau reported earlier this month that the U.S. poverty rate dipped from 11% in 2023 to 10.6% last year, before Trump took office.

Critics were quick to accuse the administration of deliberately making it harder to measure hunger and assess the impact of its cuts to food stamps.

“Trump is cancelling an annual government survey that measures hunger in America, rather than allow it to show hunger increasing under his tenure,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said on social media. “This follows the playbook of many non-democracies that cancel or manipulate reports that would otherwise show less-than-perfect news.”

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The Trump administration is adding $100,000 to the existing fee for H-1B visa applications, taking aim at a program that is used to attract highly skilled workers to the U.S. 

President Trump signed a proclamation late Friday adding the new visa application fee and barring H-1B workers from entering the U.S. unless they had made the $100,000 payment. 

“We’re going to be able to keep people in our country that are going to be very productive people, and in many cases these companies are going to pay a lot of money for that, and they’re very happy about it,” Mr. Trump said.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson clarified to CBS News in an email Saturday that the fee “does not apply to anyone who has a current visa,” and “only applies to future applicants in the February [2026] lottery who are currently outside the U.S. It does not apply to anyone who participated in the 2025 lottery.”

“The Proclamation does not impact the ability of any current visa holder to travel to/from the U.S.,” Jackson said.

A White House official told CBS News Saturday that the $100,000 is a one-time fee that only applies to new visas and is not an annual payment. It does not apply to renewals or current visa holders, the official said.

This comes after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had told reporters Friday that the fee was “annual.” 

“President Trump promised to put American workers first, and this commonsense action does just that by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down wages,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told CBS News in a statement Saturday. “It also gives certainty to American businesses who actually want to bring high-skilled workers to our great country but have been trampled on by abuses of the system.”

The additional charge would impact employers including technology giants such as Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Google, which have relied on the program to hire foreign workers. 

The plan was reported earlier by Bloomberg News.

H-1B visas are already expensive, with the cost ranging from about $1,700 to $4,500, depending on whether the visa is expedited. The fees are typically considered a business expense for the employer. 

The new fee comes amid a debate over the H-1B visa, which some critics say enables companies to hire foreign applicants at lower salaries than American workers. Some employers also award H-1Bs for entry-level roles rather than for senior positions with greater skill requirements, detractors of the program say.

Tech companies have been among the primary beneficiaries of the visa program. Amazon received the most H1-B visas of any business in 2024, Department of Labor data shows. This year, the online retailer remains the leading recipient of the visas, with more than 10,000 awarded, followed by Tata Consultancy, Microsoft, Apple and Google.

“This will ensure that the people they’re bringing in are actually very highly skilled and that they’re not replaceable by American workers. So it’ll protect American workers, but ensure that companies have a pathway to hire truly extraordinary people and bring them to the United States,” a White House aide said.

Still, Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research group, said the plan could backfire if it incentivizes U.S. companies to shift jobs overseas, especially in specialized areas like research and development.

“The second impact will further decrease the number of international students who have an interest in coming to study in the U.S. If there’s no opportunity work in the U.S., it’s much less likely they’ll enroll in U.S. programs,” Anderson told CBS News.

Last year, the most popular type of job for H-1B visas was software developer. To receive an H-1B visa, which is awarded by lottery, an applicant needs to have at least a bachelor’s degree in their field and have been offered a temporary job by a U.S. company.

President Trump plans to order the Labor Secretary to start a new rule-making process that would update wage levels for the program, Bloomberg reported. Currently, U.S. companies must offer the prevailing wage or the actual wage of similarly qualified workers, whichever is higher, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The program is capped at 65,000 new visas each year, although an additional 20,000 can be issued for employees with a master’s degree or higher, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The cap and higher-degree exemption quota is already filled for fiscal year 2026, according to the USCIS. 

The H-1B program is already the most restrictive visa program in the U.S., with about 20% of applications resulting in approved workers, according to a March study from the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy. 

— With reporting by Aaron Navarro.

Grace Kazarian,

Jennifer Jacobs and

The Associated Press

contributed to this report.

BOSTON — A U.S. appeals court panel on Thursday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to block Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood while legal challenges continue.

A federal judge in July ruled Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide must continue to be reimbursed for Medicaid funding as the nation’s largest abortion provider fights Trump’s administration over efforts to defund the organization in his signature tax legislation.

Medicaid is a government health care program that serves millions of low-income and disabled Americans. Nearly half of Planned Parenthood’s patients rely on Medicaid.

A provision in Trump’s tax bill instructed the federal government to end Medicaid payments for one year to abortion providers that received more than $800,000 from Medicaid in 2023, even to those like Planned Parenthood that also offer medical services like contraception, pregnancy tests and STD testing.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its member organizations in Massachusetts and Utah filed a lawsuit in July against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“While the Trump administration wants to rip away reproductive freedom, we’re here to say loud and clear: we will not back down,” Dominique Lee, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts said in a statement. “This is not over.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services didn’t immediately respond to an online request for comment.

Planned Parenthood said Thursday’s ruling means that more than 1.1 million patients can’t use their Medicaid insurance at its health centers. That also puts as many as 200 of those health centers at risk of closure, Planned Parenthood said in a statement.

Planned Parenthood says it is the nation’s leading provider and advocate of affordable sexual and reproductive health care, as well as the nation’s largest provider of sex education.

By MIKE STOBBE

NEW YORK (AP) — Federal health officials intend to award a contract to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to investigate whether there is a link between vaccinations and autism, according to a government procurement notice.

The Trump administration asked a federal appeals court Thursday to lift a ruling that blocked President Trump from firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, in time for a crucial meeting next week when Fed officials will decide whether to lower interest rates.

Mr. Trump moved to fire Cook from the Federal Reserve’s powerful Board of Governors last month, accusing her of falsely claiming two different homes as her principal residence in mortgage documents. U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb blocked the firing on Tuesday, concluding that the president “has not stated a legally permissible cause for Cook’s removal.” Under federal law, Fed board members serve for 14-year terms and can only be removed “for cause.”

On Thursday, the Trump administration asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to stay that ruling while the government appeals it. The Justice Department argued that the president has broad discretion to remove federal officials, including to decide whether “cause” exists, and courts have — at most — extremely narrow authority to review those decisions.

“Here, the evidence—which Cook has yet to offer contrary explanation for—was that she applied for two loans for her personal benefit, and was able to obtain favorable interest rates by misrepresenting where she lived,” the government argued Thursday. “Regardless of whether that misconduct occurred before or during office, it indisputably calls into question Cook’s trustworthiness and whether she can be a responsible steward of the interest rates and economy for the whole Nation.”

Those allegations surfaced in a letter from Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, a Trump appointee who cited mortgage papers for homes that Cook bought in Georgia and Michigan in 2021. Abbe Lowell, an attorney representing Cook, called the government’s accusations “unsubstantiated and vague.”

The government requested that the appeals court act by the end of the day on Monday, noting that the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, is set to meet on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Cook’s attorneys asked the appellate court to deny the Trump administration’s request, calling it “wholly unwarranted.”

“An administrative stay would threaten Governor Cook’s participation in next week’s meeting and potentially plunge the FOMC’s vote into turmoil,” Cook’s attorneys wrote in court papers. “In addition, it has the real potential of impacting domestic and foreign markets. The Government has provided no justification for such a grave disruption of the status quo.”

Why does the Fed committee matter?

The Federal Open Market Committee — which includes Cook, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and 10 other top central bank officials — is responsible for setting the Fed’s interest rate targets, which have a major impact on economic growth, inflation and borrowing costs. The panel typically acts independently, with little input from elected officials.

The committee has voted to leave interest rates relatively high so far this year, but investors and economists widely expect it to reduce rates at next week’s meeting. Rate cuts could lead to stronger economic growth, but at the risk of causing inflation to heat up.

Mr. Trump has tangled with the Fed for months over its decision to keep rates steady, nicknaming Powell “Mr. Too Late” and arguing the rate-setting committee should overrule him. Powell’s term ends in May.

Amid that pressure, Mr. Trump moved to fire Cook in late August. A Biden appointee, Cook’s term on the Fed’s seven-member Board of Governors is set to end in 2038. The allegations against Cook are not related to Mr. Trump’s push against the Fed, but if she is removed from the board, the president could pick her replacement, giving him more influence over the central bank.

By MATTHEW BROWN, Associated Press

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Wednesday proposed canceling a public land management rule that elevated the importance of conservation, as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to open more taxpayer-owned tracts to drilling, logging, mining and grazing.

The rule was a key part of efforts under former President Joe Biden to refocus the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, which oversees about 10% of land in the U.S. Adopted last year, it allowed public property to be leased for restoration in the same way that oil companies lease land for drilling.

Industry and agriculture groups were bitterly opposed to the Biden rule and had lobbied Republicans to reverse it. States including North Dakota, where Burgum served as governor before joining Trump’s Cabinet, pursued a lawsuit hoping to block the rule.

Wednesday’s announcement comes amid a flurry of actions since Trump took office aimed at boosting energy production from the federal government’s vast land holdings, which are concentrated in Western states including Alaska, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

Interior officials said the Biden rule had sidelined people who depend on public lands for their livelihoods and imposed unneeded restrictions.

Burgum said in a statement that it would have prevented thousands of acres from being used for energy and mineral productions, grazing and recreation. Overturning it “protects our American way of life and gives our communities a voice in the land that they depend on,” Burgum said.

“The previous administration’s Public Lands Rule had the potential to block access to hundreds of thousands of acres of multiple-use land – preventing energy and mineral production, timber management, grazing and recreation across the West,” Burgum said.

Environmentalists had largely embraced the rule that was finalized in April 2024. Supporters argued that conservation was a long-neglected facet of the land bureau’s mission under the 1976 Federal Lands Policy Management Act.

“The administration cannot simply overthrow that statutory authority because they would prefer to let drilling and mining companies call the shots,” said Alison Flint, senior legal director at The Wilderness Society.

While the bureau previously issued leases for conservation purposes in limited cases, it never had a dedicated program for it.

The all-purpose adage offering optimism — and sometimes pessimism — to those confronting a crisis head-on is: “This too shall pass.”

One gets the impression that this is a crutch favored by some major institutions that have capitulated to Donald Trump’s demands — such as universities that have committed to fines and payouts stretching out several years, beyond the end of Trump’s current (and final) term and law firms that have made nebulous commitments to represent Trump’s favored litigants in cases that may not even be brought until after the 2028 elections.

Some institutions and services that have suffered major cuts in government funding may be tempted to hunker down, covering what they think may be a temporary shortfall in the expectation that a subsequent administration will restore the withheld funding and cover their interim losses. Recovery, however, may be tougher than they think.

I reached out to some of my most trusted contacts in science, medicine, labor and other fields, hoping to hear encouragement that the current situation will be fleeting and it isn’t too soon to look ahead; Trump’s presidential term, after all, is finite.

I ended up with a string of the gloomiest conversations in my long career — and I’ve covered two foreign civil wars and more stock market crashes and economic slumps than I can count. (Well, let’s say more than a dozen.)

“We’re still in free fall and people are still in a ‘shock and awe’ phase,” says vaccinologist Peter Hotez, who has written to defend sound science throughout Trump’s terms. “What’s happening right now is continuing to evolve, and we don’t really know where it’s going. It’s important not to take the attitude of ‘this too will pass,’ hunker down for a couple of years and then it will go back to the way it was.”

The administration’s cuts in biomedical research funding, the “continuing ascendance of the MAHA movement” — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s disdain for accepted science in favor of pseudoscience — betokens a dark period ahead, Hotez told me. “Even if these things stop tomorrow, you’ve got a pretty demoralized physician and scientific workforce. What this administration has done has given being a scientist an unsavory element — it’s no longer a noble profession.”

Of particular concern is the administration’s injection of partisan ideologies into the scientific grant-making process, shattering applicants’ confidence that their submissions are considered fairly. The scoring of grant applications by professional panels used to be the key element in the process.

“Now, even if you get a fundable score,” Hotez says, “there’s still somebody behind the curtain who still could nix it for ideological reasons. And even if your first year is funded there’s no guarantee for out years.”

The uncertainty that injects could hamstring scientific research for a generation, or longer.

“How easy is it to rebuild a lab that’s been hit by cuts?” says John P. Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College, where labs have been hobbled by the administration’s toying with grants. “The answer is it’s very difficult, once you lose key members of a research group, who are often the senior technicians who have institutional memory and keep a program going day to day. At a certain point, a freeze or a termination is not reversible.”

Moore also points to the consequences of a loss of foreign-born scientists. “America is now not a welcoming country for immigrants, period. Scientists who are here on short-term visas are realizing that their future is not in this country. Other countries are seeking to suck up talent that otherwise would have come here. That’s going to have an impact over time, and it’s not going to be easy to reverse.”

In my conversations with scientists, one name kept coming up: Trofim Lysenko, the charlatan whose reign over Soviet science during Stalin’s regime from the 1930s to the 1960s and whose promotion of an anti-science ideology, especially a campaign against genetics research, encompassed repeated crop failures and famines costing some 7 million lives. I made the connection between Lysenkoism and Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services in November.

“The Soviet Union did everything they could to invest back in science and genetics and molecular biology, but it was still stagnant,” says Angela Rasmussen, a leading American virologist now working in Canada. “But despite the attempts to rebuild what Lysenko had torn down, they were never able to compete with people everywhere else because they had lost so much by shutting down all genetics research during that time.”

Three factors could be lasting obstacles: Trump’s undermining of federal employment, of the law and of the economy.

Trump has systematically demoralized the workforce responsible for enforcing the regulations that remain. That’s the observation of David Weil, a labor expert at Brandeis University whose nomination by President Biden for a top-level post at the Department of Labor was sidelined by conservative opposition in 2022.

The law has been a thin reed to lean on, Weil observes. A key example is the attack by Elon Musk’s SpaceX on the National Labor Relations Board, which garnered an opinion from the notoriously right-wing 5th Circuit Court of Appeals last month finding that the NLRB’s structure “violates the separation of powers” established by the Constitution. That’s a remarkable finding, given that the NLRB was established 90 years ago, in 1935.

“If the Supreme Court upholds the 5th Circuit, “ Weil told me, “that’s the end of the NLRA,” the act that established the board, “and we go back to a system where there’s no federal statutory method for protecting private sector workers.”

What Weil finds especially disquieting is the Supreme Court’s practice of allowing Trump to continue challenged policies while the underlying issues are litigated. “Instead of letting the status quo to prevail until we adjudicate the issues, they’re letting Trump prevail until they adjudicate. That, to me, is a formula for destruction. How do you rebuild then?”

The court has done this by lifting the stays on Trump policies imposed by lower courts, pending further rulings. That’s what happened as recently as Monday, when the court overturned a Los Angeles federal judge’s order that had barred “roving patrols” of immigration officers from snatching people off Southern California streets based on how they look, what language they speak, what work they do or where they happen to be.

One issue casting a shadow over all others is the future course of Trump’s economy. At this moment, the warning signs are all flashing red. Inflation is on the rise — core inflation as measured by the personal consumption index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred metric, rose in July to an annualized rate of 2.9%, the highest rate since February; economists expect the rate to keep rising as businesses pass through more of their tariff-related costs to consumers.

Meanwhile, new hiring has ground to a screeching halt, according to the latest government statistics. The unemployment rate notched up to 4.3% in July, not the direction Trump would like to see. The rate hasn’t been this high since the pandemic year of 2021.

Trump also has remade the government’s relationship with industry, extracting a fee from the AI chipmaker Nvidia of 15% of its revenue from selling chips to China and taking a 9.9% equity stake in the faltering chipmaker Intel. That’s not the first time the government has owned a piece of a public company — it owned most of GM during the Great Recession, but later sold its stake; Trump is talking about making a habit of these buy-ins through a sovereign wealth fund, an idea that’s far from universally favored by political leaders and economists.

Trump’s rampage through government agencies, especially those devoted to science, health and the economy, has left some so severely damaged that fixing what’s broken might require the establishment of a Cabinet-level post to oversee the repair job.

Consider the state of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where five top officials resigned or were forced out late last month — including CDC Director Susan Monarez, who was fired after less than a month on the job after tangling with Health and Human Affairs Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Anyone tasked by a future administration with rebuilding the CDC, which once set the global gold standard for public health, will have to be told: “You know you’ll be starting from scratch, right?”

It’s only fair to say that the GOP hasn’t had a monopoly on philistine attacks on scientific research. The pioneer of such cocksure philistinism was Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.), who started issuing his “Golden Fleece” awards in 1975. Proxmire became addicted to the fawning press attention he got from caricaturing serious scientific research as ludicrous. His know-nothing rabble-rousing appalled progressives who otherwise admired him for his principled stands against the Vietnam War and in favor of campaign finance reform.

But its more lasting and destructive effect was to render political attacks on scientific research acceptable. Proxmire’s goal was personal aggrandizement. The goal of the current attackers is more sinister — they’re engaged in an anti-science campaign for strictly ideological purposes.

“The best-case scenario is that we limp along for the next three and a half years,” says Jonathan Howard, a neurologist at New York University and a practiced debunker of the pseudoscience that contaminated efforts to fight the pandemic. “Good people stay on and do good work the best they can and we get a reprieve in three and a half years and the amount of damage they’re able to do is limited in that time. But that’s just a hope.”

WASHINGTON — Facing viral rumors of his imminent death, President Trump emerged in the Oval Office on Tuesday alive and scowling. Core tenets of his economic policies were under strain. Flashy diplomatic overtures to Moscow appeared to be backfiring. And a scandal over a notorious sexual abuser that has fixated his base was roaring back to life in Washington.

It was a challenging week for the president, whose aggressive approach to his second term has begun to hit significant roadblocks with the public and the courts, and overseas, with longstanding U.S. adversaries Trump once hoped to coax to his will.

The president called for an expedited Supreme Court review of an appellate court ruling that he had exceeded his authority by issuing sweeping global tariffs last spring — a decision that, if left standing, could upend the foundation of his economic agenda. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued jobs numbers showing a contraction of the labor market in July, a first since the depths of the pandemic in 2020.

New art lining a hallway in the West Wing features photographs of Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, where Trump said the Russian president had agreed to meet with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to discuss an end to the war. Yet, three weeks on, Russia had launched its most intense bombardment of Kyiv in years, and Putin traveled to Beijing for a military parade hosted by Xi Jinping, which Russian state media used to mock the U.S. president.

During an appearance in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon, Trump said reaching a deal to end the war between Russia and Ukraine has turned out to be “a little bit more difficult” than he initially thought.

And a rare spree of bipartisanship broke out on Capitol Hill — in opposition to Trump’s causes.

A tense hearing at the Senate Finance Committee with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. laid bare concern over the direction of federal vaccination policy and public health recommendations under his leadership across party lines.

Trump declined to stand behind him wholeheartedly after the hearing. “He’s got some little different ideas,” Trump told reporters, adding: “It’s not your standard talk.”

On Wednesday, moments after a group of more than 100 women pleaded for Trump’s help from the steps of the Capitol seeking transparency over the investigation of their alleged abuser, Jeffrey Epstein, Trump dismissed the matter as a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats.

“The Department of Justice has done its job, they have given everything requested of them,” Trump repeated on Truth Social on Friday. “It’s time to end the Democrat Epstein Hoax.”

Trump was close friends with Epstein for more than a decade. But his base has repeatedly called for the release of thousands of files in his case — and some of Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress are set to vote against his wishes for a discharge petition directing the Justice Department to do so in the coming days.

A far-right political activist released hidden camera footage this week of a Justice Department official claiming the agency would redact the names of Republicans, but not Democrats, identified in the files. In the video, the DOJ official also suggested that Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell was recently moved to a lower-security prison as part of a deal to keep her quiet.

Public support for Trump has appeared stable since July, with roughly 42% of Americans approving of his job performance across a series of high quality polls. But the end of the August recess in Washington — and the oncoming flu and COVID-19 season — could return public attention to subjects that have proved politically perilous for the president this week.

Polls show that a majority of the president’s Republican voters support vaccines. They oppose Putin and increasingly support Ukraine. And across the political spectrum, Americans want the Epstein files released, unredacted and in full.

A string of court losses

The president’s agenda suffered several setbacks this week, as federal judges across the country ruled his administration had broken the law in various instances.

In San Francisco, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of military troops in Los Angeles was illegal and barred soldiers from aiding immigration arrests in California in an order set to take effect next week.

In Boston, a federal judge said the Trump administration broke the law when it froze billions of dollars in research funds awarded to Harvard University. In another court ruling, a judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting dozens of unaccompanied migrant children to Guatemala.

And on Friday afternoon, a federal judge stopped the Trump administration from taking away the deportation protections under Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and Haitians living in the United States.

While the court decisions represent a snag for key portions of the administration’s agenda, the cases continue to play out in court — and could ultimately turn in favor of Trump.

Legal experts are closely watching those decisions. In the case of the military troop deployments, for instance, some fear a reversal on appeal could ultimately hand the president broader power to send troops to American cities.

Trump has floated additional federal deployments — to Chicago, Baltimore and New Orleans — in recent days.

Trump reacts to a bad week

Trump greeted the waves of bad news with a characteristic mix of deflection, finger-pointing and anger.

He warned that losing his appeal on tariff policy at the Supreme Court would render the United States a “third world country,” telling reporters, “if we don’t win that case, our country is going to suffer so greatly.” And he said he was “very disappointed” in Putin.

After the parade in Beijing — which was also attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a longstanding U.S. ally now ostracized by Trump’s tariffs — drew widespread media attention, Trump wrote on social media that the countries were conspiring together against the United States.

“We’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China,” he wrote.

In another lengthy social media post on Friday, Trump accused Democrats of fueling the Epstein “hoax” as a means to “distract from the great success of a Republican President.”

Days earlier, survivors of Epstein’s sexual abuse publicly pressured lawmakers to back a legislative measure to force the release of the sex trafficking investigation into the late financier.

“This is about ending secrecy wherever abuse of power takes root,” said Anouska De Georgiou, who was among the Epstein victims who held a news conference on Capitol Hill.

A few high-profile Republicans also broke with Trump on the Epstein issue, calling for more transparency on the investigation. Trump ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said she is willing to expose those who are tied to Epstein’s sex trafficking case.

On a phone call with Trump on Wednesday morning, Greene suggested he meet with Epstein’s victims at the White House while they were gathered in town. He was noncommittal, the congresswoman told reporters.

The survivors left town without a meeting. At the direction of the White House, Republican leadership continues to press Republican members to oppose efforts to release the files.

The Trump administration has moved to lay off more than 500 employees who work for the federally funded network Voice of America, which provides global reporting in places with restricted press freedom.

In March, Trump officials first attempted to close down some of the organization’s newsrooms. But Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia called for the network’s restoration last April, citing a law that requires the Voice of America broadcast to be continued.

Despite the ruling, Kari Lake, the acting chief executive of Voice of America’s oversight agency, posted on social media on Friday evening that 532 government positions were eliminated.

Before the downsizing, Voice of America was responsible for broadcasting news in 49 languages to 360 million people every week, including in Russia and China. Now, the network airs programming in four languages: Persian, Mandarin, Dari and Pashto.

The layoffs “will likely improve [the agency’s] ability to function and provide the truth to people across the world who live under murderous Communist governments and other tyrannical regimes,” wrote Lake on X.

Most of the 1,300 Voice of America journalists had already been fired or remained on paid leave prior to these layoffs. Only 100 journalists and other staff members remain employed by the organization.

After being asked by the remaining employees to ensure the administration was in line with his April ruling, Lamberth found that they appeared to be noncompliant.

Earlier this week, he ordered Lake to provide sworn testimony at a deposition and threatened to hold her in contempt for going against court orders. He also blocked the administration from firing Voice of America director, Michael Abramowitz, the day before these layoffs were announced.

The Trump administration is proposing a new rule that would bar people with outstanding college loans from relief on that debt if their employers were found to be “undermining national security and American values through illegal means.”

The proposed rule, announced Monday by the Department of Education, would restrict people from participating in the federal Public Student Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program if the organization they work for is found to be engaging in certain illegal activities. 

“President Trump has given the Department a historic mandate to restore the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program to its original purpose — supporting public servants who strengthen their communities and serve the public good, not benefiting businesses engaged in illegal activity that harm Americans,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in a statement.

The loan program, which was launched in 2007 under President George W. Bush, is aimed at helping public employees such as teachers and police officers shed student loan debt. 

The proposed rule lists some examples of what sorts of activities would be considered illegal, potentially resulting in an organization’s workers being excluded from the public service loan program. Those include assessments that an organization is aiding and abetting terrorism, violations of immigration laws, and what the rule describes as the “chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children.”

If an individual with outstanding student loans works for an employer deemed ineligible for the PSLF, the person could still participate in the program but would have to switch to an eligible employer, according to the proposed rule. 

President Trump spurred the new rulemaking process in March by issuing an executive order that directed the Secretary of Education to revise the public service loan forgiveness program. The Education Department is soliciting public comments on the proposed rule until September 17.

The White House and the Education Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The Department of Education said the proposed regulations are necessary to preserve the original intent of the Public Student Loan Forgiveness program, which is to reward public service. The agency also said it wants to protect Americans to ensure their tax dollars do not support organizations engaged in “unlawful activity.”

“The proposed rules would halt PSLF benefits to employees of organizations that are undermining national security and American values through illegal means, and therefore not providing a public service,” the Education Department said in a statement.

Critics of the draft regulation said it would allow Education Department officials to improperly exclude some public servants from loan relief under the federal program. The Student Borrower Protection Center, an advocacy group, said in a July blog post that the rule would give the Education Department broad authority to restrict funding to groups whose work conflicts with the Trump administration’s agenda.

“To be clear, if implemented this proposal would allow the secretary [of education] to disqualify from PSLF any employees of school systems that accurately teach the U.S.’ history of slavery, of health care providers who offer gender-affirming care and of legal aid organizations that represent individuals against unlawful deportations,” Winston Berkman-Breen, legal director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, said in a June 30 public hearing on the proposal. 

Introduced as part of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007, the public service loan program cancels outstanding debt for borrowers who make 120 monthly payments, or 10 years worth of payments. Currently, the program provides benefits to all government employers and all qualifying 501(c)(3) employers.

D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed a lawsuit Friday against the Trump administration and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the federal takeover of the district’s police. Department of Justice reporter Jake Rosen has been following this closely.

President Trump struck an unusual deal with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices that allows the companies to sell certain chips to China in exchange for giving the U.S. government a 15% cut of those sales.

But the unprecedented agreement also has raised concerns from politicians and legal experts over whether the deal is legal and would pose a national security threat.

Questions also linger about exactly how the deal, which was announced Monday, would work because the U.S. Constitution bars taxes on exports, although some experts said Trump could find a workaround.

The U.S. government might receive $3 billion from the revenue split if China’s demand for Nvidia’s H20 chip — which is less powerful than the company’s highest-end artificial intelligence chip — reaches $20 billion, according to a note from Bernstein Research.

“It ties the fate of this chip manufacturer in a very particular way to this administration that is quite rare,” said Julia Powles, a professor and executive director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy.

Trump’s agreement with the world’s most valuable company could put pressure on other tech companies and major exporters to strike similar deals with the U.S. government, but it’s still unclear what the implications will be internationally, she said.

The deal is the latest example of how tech companies are seeking to curry favor with the Trump administration, which has threatened to impose tariffs on semiconductor companies that don’t commit to investing in the United States.

Apple faced potential tariffs as well, but committed to investing $100 billion more in U.S. manufacturing after Trump criticized the company for expanding iPhone production in India.

Trump also placed restrictions in April around the export of certain AI chips, including Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308, over national security concerns.

He’s called for the resignation of Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan, who has faced scrutiny over his reported investments in Chinese companies, but changed his tune after meeting the executive this week.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have criticized the idea that tech companies should split their sales with the U.S. government in exchange for export licenses that allow them to resume chip sales in China.

“Export controls are a frontline defense in protecting our national security, and we should not set a precedent that incentivizes the Government to grant licenses to sell China technology that will enhance its AI capabilities,” Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), the chair of the House Select Committee on China, said in a statement.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, (D-Ill.), a ranking member of that committee, said in a statement that the deal raises questions about its legality and how the funds will be used.

“The administration cannot simultaneously treat semiconductor exports as both a national security threat and a revenue opportunity,” he said. “By putting a price on our security concerns, we signal to China and our allies that American national security principles are negotiable for the right fee.”

The White House didn’t answer questions about the agreement. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday that “the legality of it, the mechanics of it, is still being ironed out by the Department of Commerce.”

On Monday, Trump defended the deal with Nvidia, stating that the H20 chips are “obsolete” and less powerful than the company’s more high-end Blackwell chip. At a news conference, Trump said he met with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and initially asked for a 20% revenue split but they came down to 15%.

“We negotiate a little deal,” Trump said. “So he’s selling a essentially old chip.” Trump’s remarks came after a report from the Financial Times over the weekend that Nvidia and AMD would pay 15% of their China chip revenue to the U.S. government. AMD didn’t respond to a request for comment.

An Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement that the company hasn’t shipped H20 chips to China for months but it hopes that easing export restrictions will “let America compete in China and worldwide.”

“America cannot repeat 5G and lose telecommunication leadership. America’s AI tech stack can be the world’s standard if we race.”

For Nvidia, the stakes are high. Huang said in a May interview with Stratechery, a newsletter and podcast, that the Chinese market is about $50 billion a year. Restricting H20 chip sales means that the company is walking away from profits that could be used to compete with China in the race to dominate AI.

Taylar Rajic, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said she’s skeptical that legal concerns would halt the arrangement because it’s unclear who would sue.

“I can’t identify who would bring that suit forward,” she said. “It wouldn’t be Nvidia because they’re the ones who negotiated this deal.”

Meanwhile, Chinese officials have their own fears that Nvidia’s chips could have location tracking or remote shutdown capabilities, though the company has denied those accusations.

“China obviously has its own concerns and its own national security considerations that it wants to take into account,” Rajic said. “It just depends on whether or not they want to buy it from us too.”

The federal government told Harvard University on Friday it could take control of the school’s patents stemming from federally funded research — the latest in a months-long feud between the Trump administration and the Ivy League college.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is launching an “immediate comprehensive review” of whether Harvard has complied with federal laws around patents, he said in a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber.

The patents in question could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a senior administration official said, and in his letter, Lutnick threatened to grant third-party licenses to Harvard’s patents or take the titles to any patents where Harvard has failed to comply with government title and disclosure requirements.

Lutnick ordered the Massachusetts-based school to provide information on all patents that it obtained through federally funded research.

“We believe that Harvard has failed to live up to its obligations to the American taxpayer and is in breach of the statutory, regulatory, and contractual requirements tied to Harvard’s federally funded research programs and intellectual property arising therefrom,” Lutnick said.

He gave Harvard until Sept. 5 to respond and prove it’s complying with the Bayh-Dole Act. Under that legislation, universities receiving federal research grants have to show that inventions issuing from that funding are being used to benefit Americans. 

The Trump administration wants Harvard to provide a list of all the patents it has that stem from federal grants, how the patents are currently being applied and details about licensing agreements, including whether they mandate “substantial U.S. manufacturing” and the identities of the licensees.  

A Harvard spokesperson called the move “yet another retaliatory effort targeting Harvard for defending its rights and freedom.” 

“Technologies and patents developed at Harvard are life-saving and industry-redefining. We are fully committed to complying with the Bayh-Dole Act and ensuring that the public is able to access and benefit from the many innovations that arise out of federally funded research at Harvard,” the spokesperson said.

The Trump administration has paused or cut off billions in federal research funding to Harvard, accusing the university of failing to deal with campus antisemitism. Harvard has sued over the funding freezes, alleging the government is illegally punishing the school for First Amendment-protected activity and trying to “force Harvard to submit to the Government’s control over its academic programs.”

Before the funding cutoff, the administration demanded that Harvard agree to changes — including an external audit of certain academic departments, an end to DEI programs and stricter disciplinary policies — if it wants to maintain its “financial relationship” with the federal government. Harvard rejected the demands.

President Trump has also pushed the Internal Revenue Service to review Harvard’s tax-exempt status. And he directed his administration to bar most foreign students from traveling to the U.S. to study at Harvard, though a judge blocked that move.

Mr. Trump has suggested he’s open to making a deal with Harvard. Some other Ivy League schools that faced funding freezes have cut deals with the administration, with Columbia University and Brown University making various concessions to the federal government.

The Trump administration on Thursday petitioned the Supreme Court to free up its mass deportation efforts across Southern California, seeking to lift a ban on “roving patrols” implemented after a lower court found such tactics likely violate the 4th Amendment.

The restrictions, initially handed down in a July 11 order, bar masked and heavily armed agents from snatching people off the streets of Los Angeles and cities in seven other counties without first establishing reasonable suspicion that they are in the U.S. illegally.

Under the 4th Amendment, reasonable suspicion cannot be based solely on race, ethnicity, language, location or employment, either alone or in combination, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of Los Angeles found in her original decision.

The Trump administration said in its appeal to the high court that Frimpong’s ruling, upheld last week by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, “threatens to upend immigration officials’ ability to enforce the immigration laws in the Central District of California by hanging the prospect of contempt over every investigative stop.”

Lawyers behind the lawsuits challenging the immigration tactics immediately questioned the Trump administration’s arguments.

“This is unprecedented,” said Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, part of the coalition of civil rights groups and individual attorneys challenging cases of three immigrants and two U.S. citizens swept up in chaotic arrests. “The brief is asking the Supreme Court to bless open season on anybody on Los Angeles who happens to be Latino.”

The move comes barely 24 hours after heavily armed Border Patrol agents snared workers outside a Westlake Home Depot after popping out of the back of a Penske moving truck — actions some experts said appeared to violate the court’s order.

If the Supreme Court takes up the case, many now think similar aggressive and seemingly indiscriminate enforcement actions could once again become the norm.

“Anything having to do with law enforcement and immigration, the Supreme Court seems to be giving the president free rein,” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law and a prominent scholar of the country’s highest court. “I think the court is going to side with the Trump administration.”

The Department of Justice has repeatedly argued that the temporary restraining order causes “manifest irreparable harm” to the government. Officials are especially eager to see it overturned because California’s Central District is the single most populous in the country, and home to a plurality of undocumented immigrants.

In its Supreme Court petition, the Justice Department alleged that roughly 10% of the region’s residents are in the U.S. illegally.

“According to estimates from Department of Homeland Security data, nearly 4 million illegal aliens are in California, and nearly 2 million are in the Central District of California. Los Angeles County alone had an estimated 951,000 illegal aliens as of 2019 — by far the most of any county in the United States,” the petition said.

President Trump made mass deportations a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, and has poured billions in federal funding and untold political capital into the arrest, incarceration and removal of immigrants. Though Justice Department lawyers told the appellate court there was no policy or quota, administration officials and those involved in planning its deportation operations have repeatedly cited 3,000 arrests a day and a million deportations a year as objectives.

District and appellate courts have stalled, blocked and sometimes reversed many of those efforts in recent weeks, forcing the return of a Maryland father mistakenly deported to Salvadoran prison, compelling the release of student protesters from ICE detention, preserving birthright citizenship for children of immigrant parents and stopping construction of “Alligator Alcatraz.”

But little of the president’s immigration agenda has so far been tested in the Supreme Court.

If the outcome is unfavorable for Trump, some observers wonder whether he will let the justices limit his agenda.

“Even if they were to lose in the Supreme Court, I have serious doubts they will stop,” Segall said.

Donald Trump has it in for public education.

Don’t be fooled by last week’s release of DOE billions for the coming school year. Education Secretary Linda McMahon claimed that since the surprise decision in late June to withhold the funding, the government vetted all the programs to make sure they met President Trump’s approval. In reality, the White House was inundated by protests from both sides of the aisle, from teachers, parents and school superintendents all over the country. A week earlier, 24 states had filed suit against the administration for reneging on already appropriated education funding.

The reprieve will be temporary if the president has his way. Shuttering the Department of Education, and its funding priorities, was a marquee Trump campaign promise.

Already, about 2,000 DOE staff members have been fired or quit under duress. That’s half the agency’s personnel. On July 14, the Supreme Court lifted an injunction against the firings as lawsuits protesting the firings work their way through the courts. In essence, the ruling gives Trump a green light to destroy the department by executive fiat now, even if the Supreme Court later decides only Congress has that power.

The high court majority did not spell out its reasoning. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, deplored the “untold harm” that will result from the ruling, including “delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended.”

McMahon touts what she considers her agency’s “final mission”: ending federal funding for school districts that cannot prove that they have eliminated diversity, equity and exclusion initiatives, or what Trump calls “critical race theory and transgender insanity.” The stakes are high: What’s at issue is the withdrawal of nearly $30 billion in aid.

The DEI threat rejects a 60-year bipartisan understanding — based on Title 1 of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act to the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act — that Washington should invest federal taxpayer dollars in closing the achievement gap that separates privileged youth from poor and minority students and children living in poverty.

Those funds support smaller classes, after-school programs and tutoring. Research shows that Title 1 can claim credit for disadvantaged students’ improved performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — NAEP — the nation’s K-12 report card, which the administration is also targeting. The most innovative programs, including the Harlem Children’s Zone preschool, charter schools and after-school and summer-vacation programs and one-on-one, face-to-face learning through Tutoring Chicago, have recorded especially dramatic results.

Support for students with disabilities would also become history, along with the requirement that schools deliver “free and appropriate education” to youngsters with special needs. That would have a disastrous impact on these students, historically dismissed as hopeless, because needs-focused special education can change the arc of their lives.

In demanding that districts “prove” they have eliminated DEI as a condition for receiving federal funds, McMahon claims that focusing exclusively on “meaningful learning,” not “divisive [DEI] programs,” is the only way to improve achievement.

She’s flat-out wrong. DEI initiatives, while sometimes over the top, have generally proven to boost academic outcomes by reducing discrimination. That’s logical — when students feel supported and valued, they do better in school. Wiping out efforts designed to promote racial and economic fairness is a sure way to end progress toward eliminating the achievement gap.

Clearly, the studies that show the gains made by DEI programs are irrelevant to an administration whose decisions are driven by impulse and ideology. Its threats to the gold standard test of American education, NAEP — an assessment that’s about as nonpartisan as forecasting the weather — gives the game away. If you don’t know how well the public schools are doing, it’s child’s play to script a narrative of failure.

Tucked into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act is a nationwide school voucher program, paid for by a 100% tax deduction for donations of up to $1,700 to organizations that hand out educational scholarships. There’s no cap on the program, which could cost as much as $50 billion a year, and no expiration date.

The voucher provision potentially decimates public schools, which will lose federal dollars. Since private schools can decide which students to admit and which to kick out, the gap between the haves and haves-less will widen. Students with special needs, as well as those whose families cannot afford to participate, will be out of luck.

What’s more, vouchers don’t deliver the benefits the advocates promise. Studies from Louisiana, where “low-quality private schools” have proliferated with the state’s blessing, as well as the District of Columbia and Indiana, show that students who participate in voucher plans do worse, especially in math, than their public-school peers.

Michigan State education policy professor Joshua Cowen, who has spent two decades studying these programs, reached the startling conclusion that voucher plans have led to worse student outcomes than the COVID pandemic.

Vouchers “promise an all-too-simple solution to tough problems like unequal access to high-quality schools, segregation and even school safety,” Cohen concludes. “They can severely hinder academic growth — especially for vulnerable kids.”

The defenders of public education are fighting back. Twenty states have gone to federal court to challenge the Department of Education’s demand that they eliminate their DEI programs. “The Trump administration’s threats to withhold critical education funding due to the use of these initiatives are not only unlawful, but harmful to our children, families, and schools,” said Massachusetts Atty. Gen. Andrea Joy Campbell, announcing the lawsuit.

The White House may well lose this lawsuit. But litigation consumes time, and the administration keeps finding ways to evade judicial rulings, sometimes with the help of the Supreme Court. It could be years before the judges reach final decisions in these cases, and by then the damage will have been done.

That’s why it is up to Congress to do its job — to represent its constituents, who have consistently supported compensatory education programs and special education programs in public schools, resisting the siren song of vouchers — and to insist that the administration obey the dictates of legislation that’s been on the books for decades.

Will a supine Congress rouse itself to protect public education? After all, that’s what the rule of law — and public education — requires.

David Kirp is professor emeritus at the Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books on education, including “The Sandbox Investment,” “Improbable Scholars” and “The Education Debate.”

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — More than 20 mostly Democratic-led states sued the Trump administration Tuesday over its efforts to cut Medicaid payments to the nation’s largest abortion provider — Planned Parenthood.

The move comes in response to the package of tax breaks and spending cuts Trump signed earlier this month. A portion of the new cuts are focused on services such as cancer screenings and tests, birth control and treatment for sexually transmitted infections — by ending Medicaid reimbursements for a year for major providers of family planning services.

The cuts apply to groups that received more than $800,000 from Medicaid in 2023. The goal was to target Planned Parenthood, but the legislation also affected a major medical provider in Maine.

California, New York, Connecticut, other states and Washington, D.C. argue in a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts that the provision’s language is unclear about which groups it applies to. They also say it retaliates against Planned Parenthood for advocating for abortion access, violating the free speech clause of the First Amendment.

The states are asking that the portion of the law be blocked and deemed unconstitutional.

The cuts threaten health care access for many low-income Americans, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a news conference.

“This attack isn’t just about abortion,” the Democrat said. “It’s about denying vulnerable communities access to care they rely on every day.”

But the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, named a defendant in the suit, defended the provision.

“States should not be forced to fund organizations that have chosen political advocacy over patient care,” spokesperson Andrew G. Nixon said in an email. “It is a shame that these democrat attorney generals seek to undermine state flexibility and disregard longstanding concerns about accountability.”

Maine Family Planning, which operates 18 clinics offering a range of services across the state, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America filed separate lawsuits earlier this year challenging the cuts. Planned Parenthood said although it is not specifically named in the law, the provision was meant to affect its nearly 600 centers in 48 states. About a third of those clinics risk closure because of the legislation, which would strip care from more than 1 million patients, the group argues.

A federal judge on Monday ruled Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide must continue to receive Medicaid reimbursements.

Maine Family Planning said it had enough in its reserves to keep seeing patients covered by Medicaid without reimbursements only through October. About half of the group’s patients not seeking abortions are enrolled in Medicaid.

The states’ suit filed Tuesday argues that by pushing Planned Parenthood clinics to close or cut services, it could increase the states’ medical care costs in the long term. Otherwise the cuts will make states use their own funds to keep health centers open.

“Either we have to comply and violate Planned Parenthood’s constitutional rights and then push people to alternative providers that don’t exist, who don’t have the capacity to pick up the slack, or we have to spend upwards of $6 million or more to cover (those services),” said William Tong, Connecticut’s Democratic attorney general.

Federal law already bars taxpayer money from covering most abortions, but some conservatives argue abortion providers use Medicaid money for other health services to subsidize abortion.

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Associated Press writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut, contributed to this report.

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Austin is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Austin on X: @sophieadanna

By JANIE HAR and JAIMIE DING, Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge ruled on Thursday against the Trump administration’s plans and extended Temporary Protected Status for 60,000 people from Central America and Asia, including people from Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Temporary Protected Status is a protection that can be granted by the Homeland Security secretary to people of various nationalities who are in the United States, preventing from being deported and allowing them to work. The Trump administration has aggressively been seeking to remove the protection, thus making more people eligible for removal. It’s part of a wider effort by the administration to carry out mass deportations of immigrants.

An Israeli settler who Israeli officials say is suspected of shooting and killing a Palestinian activist tied to the Oscar-winning film “No Other Land” had been sanctioned by the Biden administration for alleged violence against Palestinians — sanctions lifted by the Trump administration.

Yinon Levi, the alleged shooter according to Israeli officials, faced financial sanctions imposed last year under then-President Joe Biden after being cited for allegedly inciting violence against Palestinian civilians and burning farmland.

Speaking to ABC News Chief International Correspondent James Longman last year following Biden’s sanctions, Levi and his wife, Sapir, denied the accusations cited in the sanctions and said they initially thought the sanctions were a “joke.”

“We are here and we have to defend ourselves and nothing more,” Sapir Levi told Longman.

Shortly after taking office in January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order lifting the sanctions and removing Levi’s name, among others, from the U.S. “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.”

Levi’s name appears at the very top of the list of those who had sanctions lifted, released by the Treasury Department in January.

Local officials confirmed that 31-year-old Awdah Hathaleen was shot dead in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair on Monday.

The father of three was an activist who worked on the film, “No Other Land,” which tells the story of a West Bank community through the lens of a Palestinian activist. The movie won an Oscar in March for best documentary feature film.

According to the Palestinian Education Ministry, Hathaleen was also a teacher who taught at the Al-Saray’a Secondary School.

In a video posted on X, the director of “No Other Land,” Yuval Abraham, called Hathaleen a “friend” and said he was “shot in the upper body.”

According to Israel police, “Palestinians threw stones at civilian vehicles that were lawfully conducting work in the area” and a firearm was discharged. A total of five Palestinians and two foreigners were detained by Israel Defense Forces “on suspicion of involvement,” police said.

Initially unnamed, the suspect was questioned for “reckless conduct resulting in death and unlawful use of a firearm,” Israel police said in a statement. They added that that a court had ordered the person to be released to house arrest until Friday, denying a police request to extend his detention.

ABC News has confirmed that Levi was taken into custody following Monday’s incident, per Israeli officials. It is unclear if Levi has been charged and if he has publicly commented.

During a press briefing Tuesday, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce deflected questions about the allegations against Levi and lifting the sanctions, instead deferring to the Israeli government to investigate.

“We decry the loss of life everywhere — that has been the hallmark of the work that this administration is doing,” she said. “We don’t comment on investigations that belong to another government.”

In a statement Tuesday, Rep. John Garamendi, a California Democrat, slammed Israeli settler violence in the West Bank and demanded answers about Hathaleen’s death.

“Lifting sanctions on the very individuals who perpetrate these unacceptable acts only emboldens violent settlers and sends a signal that the United States won’t hold violent actors accountable,” Garamendi said.

ABC News’ James Longman, Will Gretsky and Tom Soufi Burridge contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The Senate on a party-line vote on Tuesday confirmed Emil J. Bove, President Trump’s defense lawyer and loyal ally atop the Justice Department, to a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. The vote was 49 to 50.

Bove, 44, was a highly controversial judicial nominee, not because of his legal views, but because he led a purge of prosecutors and FBI agents who had worked on cases growing out of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Before this year, the Justice Department held to a tradition of keeping politics out of law enforcement. But Bove and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi saw their missions as carrying out the wishes of President Trump, including his plans for retribution against the prosecutors and investigators who brought charges against him or the 1,500 Trump allies who stormed the Capitol and fought with police.

In the first weeks of Trump’s second term, Bove served as the acting head of the Justice Department before Bondi was confirmed by the Senate.

Bove also ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop bribery and corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams. The move prompted several of them to resign over what they saw as an unethical deal to win the mayor’s cooperation in the administration’s plan to round up immigrants who are in the country illegally.

Bove also played a key role in the new administration’s clash with a federal judge over deporting Venezuelans to a brutal prison in El Salvador. A former Justice Department attorney-turned-whistleblower said Bove told government lawyers they should ignore orders from the judge who sought to halt the deportations.

When Bove appeared before a Senate committee as a judicial nominee, he said he had been misunderstood and unfairly criticized.

“I am not an enforcer” or “anybody’s henchman,” he said.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, who partnered with Bove in defending Trump last year, said he had been smeared by unfair criticism.

“Emil is the most capable and principled lawyer I have ever known,” he wrote in a Fox News opinion column.

Democrats said Bove did not deserve a promotion to the federal courts.

Sen. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) described Bove as a partisan loyalist who served Trump as “the instrument of his vengeance.”

“When Trump wanted to purge the department of prosecutors who had proved to juries beyond a reasonable doubt that the violent offenders who attacked police officers that day did so to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power, Emil Bove was there to punish not the criminals, but the prosecutors,” Schiff said in opposing the nomination.

On Tuesday, Bove was called a “diligent, capable and fair jurist” by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), according to the Associated Press.

Bove is not likely to have much influence on the 3rd Circuit Court. Its 14 judges hear appeals from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Bove has no experience as a judge and has not written on legal or constitutional issues.

However, if Justices Clarence Thomas or Samuel A. Alito were to retire in the next three years, Trump could nominate him to the Supreme Court.

His nomination drew unusually broad opposition from the legal community.

In a July 15 letter to the Senate, 80 former and retired judges said confirming Bove to a life-term judgeship undercuts the rule of law and respect for the federal courts. They said his “egregious record of mistreating law enforcement officers, abusing power and disregarding the law itself disqualifies him for this position.”

More than 900 former Justice Department attorneys signed a letter to the Senate saying “it is intolerable to us that anyone who disgraces the Justice Department would be promoted to one of the highest courts in the land.”

Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, became the first Republican to declare her opposition to his nomination.

“We have to have judges who will adhere to the rule of law and the Constitution and do so regardless of what their personal views may be,” she said in a statement. “Mr. Bove’s political profile and some of the actions he has taken in his leadership roles at the Department of Justice cause me to conclude he would not serve as as impartial jurist.”

Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were the only Republicans to vote against Bove.

A child developed a rash after he was prevented from changing his underwear for four days. A little boy, bored and overcome with despair, began hitting himself in the head. A child with autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder was forced to go without his medication, despite his mother’s pleas. 

“I heard one officer say about us ‘they smell like sh–,'” one detained person recounted in a federal court filing. “And another officer responded, ‘They are sh–.'”

Attorneys for immigrant children collected these stories, and more, from youth and families detained in what they called “prison-like” settings across the U.S. from March through June, even as the Trump administration has requested a federal district court judge terminate existing protections that mandate basic rights and services — including safe and sanitary conditions — for children held by the government. 

The administration argues that the protections mandated under what is known as the Flores Settlement Agreement encourage immigration and interfere with its ability to establish immigration policy. U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee, who is in California, is expected to issue a ruling on the request after an Aug. 8 hearing.

With the Flores agreement in place, children are being held in “unsafe and unsanitary” U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities such as tents, airports, and offices for up to several weeks despite the agency’s written policy saying people generally should not be held in its custody longer than 72 hours, according to the June court filing from immigrants’ attorneys. In addition to opposing the U.S. Department of Justice’s May request to terminate the Flores consent decree, the attorneys demanded more monitoring for children in immigration detention.

“The biggest fear is that without Flores, we will lose a crucial line of transparency and accountability,” said Sergio Perez, executive director of the California-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. “Then you have a perfect storm for the abuse of individuals, the violation of their rights, and the kind of treatment that this country doesn’t stand for.”

The Flores agreement has set minimum standards and oversight for detained immigrant children since 1997, when it brought an end to a decade-long lawsuit filed on behalf of unaccompanied immigrant minors who had been subjected to poor treatment in unsafe and unsanitary conditions without access to medical care. It is named for Jenny Lisette Flores, a 15-year-old from El Salvador who was taken into U.S. custody in the mid-1980s, subjected to strip searches, and housed alongside unrelated men.

The agreement established national standards for the protection of immigrant children detained by federal authorities, with requirements for safe and sanitary detention facilities, access to clean water, appropriate food, clothing, bedding, recreational and educational opportunities, sanitation, plus appropriate medical and mental health care. Children in immigrant detention range from infants to teens.

In 2015, Gee ruled that the agreement includes children accompanied by adults.

The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, which includes both the Customs and Border Protection agency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declined to answer questions about the administration’s intent to end the Flores agreement or about the conditions in which kids are detained. In a May court filing, government attorneys argued, among other points, that the agreement improperly directs immigration decisions to the courts, not the White House. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi also has said that the Flores agreement has “incentivized illegal immigration,” and that Congress and federal agencies have resolved the problems Flores was designed to fix.

ICE detention facilities have the “highest standards,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email to KFF Health News. “They are safe, clean, and hold illegal aliens who are awaiting final removal proceedings.”

Immigration lawyers and researchers have pushed back on the idea that the Flores agreement encourages migration, arguing that the conditions in people’s homelands are driving them to move.

President Trump is not the first president to seek to modify, or end, the agreement.

In 2016, President Barack Obama’s administration unsuccessfully sought to exempt accompanied minors from the Flores agreement, arguing that an influx of immigrants from Central America had overwhelmed the system.

In 2019, following a policy that caused family separation, the first Trump administration announced it would replace Flores with new regulations to expand family detention and eliminate detention time limits. The courts rejected that plan, too.

In 2024, President Joe Biden’s administration successfully requested to remove the Department of Health and Human Services from the agreement after the Office of Refugee Resettlement incorporated some Flores standards into agency regulations.

Allegations of unsafe conditions under the agreement also predate this latest immigration crackdown under Mr. Trump. One court filing from 2019 said that attorneys visiting two Texas detention centers found at least 250 infants, children, and teens, some of whom had been held at the facility for nearly a month. “Children were filthy and wearing clothes covered in bodily fluids, including urine,” the filing said.

Seven children are known to have died while in federal custody from 2018 to 2019, according to media reports.  

And in 2023, 8-year-old Anadith Danay Reyes Alvarez became sick and died while in Customs and Border Protection custody in Texas for nine days. Her parents had turned over medical records detailing the girl’s medical history, including diagnoses of sickle cell disease and congenital heart disease, upon their detention. Yet her mother’s repeated pleas for emergency medical care were ignored. 

Her family filed a wrongful death claim in May.

Advocates attributed the deaths partly to prolonged detention in increasingly crowded facilities and delayed medical care. Officials have said they increased medical services and acknowledged failures in the wake of the deaths. 

But with the Trump administration’s unprecedented push to detain and deport migrants — including families — the threat to the health of children caught up in those sweeps is alarming child advocates.

“Very rarely do you have spikes in populations of detained folk that you don’t see a drastic decrease in the quality of their medical care,” said Daniel Hatoum, a senior supervising attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, one of the groups that filed the wrongful death claim for Anadith’s family.

Recent reports from court-appointed monitors cite continued lack of access to appropriate medical care; temperature extremes; few outside recreational opportunities; lack of appropriate food and clothing; and an inability to dim lights to sleep. 

Terminating the Flores agreement would remove all outside oversight of immigration detention facilities by court-ordered monitors and attorneys. The public would have to depend on the government for transparency about the conditions in which children are held.

“Our system requires that there be some oversight for government, not just the Department of Homeland Security, but in general,” Hatoum said. “We know that. So, I do not believe that DHS could police itself.”

In the months after Mr. Trump took office and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency began cuts, the administration shuttered DHS’ Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which were intended to add a layer of oversight. After a lawsuit, the Trump administration reversed action and noted the offices would remain open, but it is unclear how those offices have been affected by shifts in policy and cuts in staffing.

Leecia Welch, an attorney with the legal advocacy group Children’s Rights, said the Flores agreement itself, or efforts to hold the government responsible for abiding by its requirements, are not rooted in partisan politics. She said she raised concerns about conditions during Biden’s administration, too.

“These are not political issues for me,” Welch said. “How does our country want to treat children? That’s it. It’s very simple. I’m not going to take it easy on any administration where children are being harmed in their care.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.