Politics

Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation to his home country of El Salvador earlier this year has helped galvanize opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. His attorneys claim the administration is now manipulating the immigration system in order to punish him for successfully challenging that deportation.

A motion from the government filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland late on Friday says officials have received assurances from Liberia that Abrego Garcia would not face persecution or torture there. Further, it says an immigration officer heard Abrego Garcia’s claims that he feared deportation to the West African nation, but ruled against him.

His attorneys argue in a separate Friday filing that Abrego Garcia has already designated Costa Rica as a country where he is willing to be deported. They claim the government now must send him there. The fact that officials continue to pursue deportation to other countries is evidence that the process is retaliatory and violates due process protections, they argue.

The bill — which still needs to formally pass the Senate and House — would fund the government until late January, ending the longest shutdown in modern history, and it would roll back federal layoffs imposed during the shutdown and advance a handful of bills to fund parts of the government for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, 2026.

In exchange, Republicans have promised to hold a vote by next month on extending a set of enhanced health insurance tax credits that were passed during the Biden administration and are set to expire this year. Without an extension, many Americans who buy insurance on Affordable Care Act exchanges could face significantly higher premiums.

Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats, called the deal a "disaster" since there's no guarantee that the expiring health insurance subsidies will be extended. The senator was unimpressed by the promise to hold a vote.

An Illinois man said his US citizen family – including his one-year-old daughter – were pepper-sprayed in their car by federal immigration agents during a shopping trip in a Chicago suburb.

Video of the encounter outside a Sam’s Club in Cicero shows Rafael Veraza clutching at his face after he was allegedly sprayed through his open window by a cloudy substance fired by a masked agent from a pick-up truck traveling in the opposite direction.

Veraza, 25, told reporters his wife told him to stop their car because she, their daughter, and sister were also hit. The images show the aftermath of the episode with the girl in distress in her mother’s arms with her eyes streaming.

“My daughter was trying to open her eyes. She was struggling to breathe,” Veraza told reporters at a press conference Sunday, a day after an operation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the store.

Millions of Americans hoping for legislative action to prevent their health insurance premiums from skyrocketing will find no reprieve in the all-but-finalized deal to end the federal government shutdown.

The agreement, supported by eight Democratic senators with the tacit approval of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), includes nothing concrete regarding the enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits that help more than 20 million Americans afford health insurance.

The course, created in 2021, is an extension of Mercy Culture’s increasingly overt political activities that have included candidate endorsements. The church’s political nonprofit, For Liberty & Justice, houses Campaign University.

Campaign University builds on Mercy Culture’s growing political reach as Schatzline, a pastor at the church, joins President Donald Trump’s National Faith Advisory Board and as the course now is offered at other congregations across the country.

The lessons emphasize that would-be candidates don’t need to be experts in government or the Constitution to seek public office or a place in local government. They also train potential candidates to “stand for spiritual righteousness” and teach them how to build a platform and navigate the campaign trail while maintaining a strong family and church life.

At the core of Campaign University is the idea that there is no separation between what happens within the church and what happens in the government. Students are taught to interpret the First Amendment’s establishment clause on the separation of church and state as a protection against government involvement in religion, rather than vice versa.

President Donald Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to throw out a jury’s finding in a civil lawsuit that he sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll at a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s and later defamed her.

Trump’s lawyers argued in a lengthy filing with the high court that allegations leading to the $5 million verdict were “propped up” by a “series of indefensible evidentiary rulings” that allowed Carroll’s lawyers to present “highly inflammatory propensity evidence” against him.

Carroll, a longtime advice columnist and former TV talk show host, testified at a 2023 trial that Trump turned a friendly encounter in spring 1996 into a violent attack (rape) in the dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury retailer across the street from Trump Tower.

Finally found a good video. If you watch from the beginning, the change as to when he was announced is extreme. This is actual strong booing.

U.S. Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva is expected to be sworn in this week, ahead of the House vote on a government funding bill, Scripps News has confirmed.

Grijalva won a special election in Arizona's 7th congressional district in late September, but House Speaker Mike Johnson refused to swear her in. He said it was due to the House not being in session, which has been prolonged due to the government shutdown.

President Donald Trump has pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, his onetime chief of staff Mark Meadows and others accused of backing the Republican’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The “full, complete, and unconditional” pardon applies only to federal crimes, and none of the dozens of Trump allies named in the proclamation were ever charged federally over the bid to subvert the election won by Democrat Joe Biden. It doesn’t impact state charges, though state prosecutions stemming from the 2020 election have hit a dead end or are just limping along.

A document obtained by the House Judiciary Committee Democrats, and viewed by Politico, revealed the 63-year-old’s plan, which, if approved by President Donald Trump, could see her 20-year sentence reduced.

In a letter to her lawyer, Maxwell wrote that she would send application details through the prison warden.

“I am struggling to keep it all together as it is big and there are so many attachments,” she wrote in a message with the subject line: “RE: Commutation Application,” per Politico.

The justices took up an appeal from Mississippi after a panel of three judges nominated by the Republican president on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that the state law allowing ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day to be counted violated federal law.

Mississippi is among 18 states and the District of Columbia that accept mailed ballots received after Election Day as long as the ballots are postmarked on or before that date, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The list includes swing states such as Nevada and states such as Colorado, Oregon and Utah that rely heavily on mail voting.

In anti-abortion Republicans’ latest attack on abortion pills, Florida’s attorney general is suing Planned Parenthood for allegedly misrepresenting the safety of the drugs—despite the fact that more than 100 scientific studies have shown they are safe and effective.

The 37-page lawsuit, announced by Attorney General James Uthmeier’s office on Thursday and filed in Florida’s First Judicial Circuit Court, alleges that Planned Parenthood “sells profitable abortions to vulnerable women by lying to them about abortion pills being safer than Tylenol.” Experts routinely make the comparison that use of the abortion pills—which include mifepristone, which blocks the pregnancy hormone progesterone, and misoprostol, which expels the pregnancy—are safer than Tylenol or even full-term pregnancy. Research shows that serious complications from medication abortion occur in less than half a percent of cases.

But Uthmeier’s lawsuit paints a far more dire picture. It’s riddled with familiar anti-abortion arguments and misinformation. For example, it cites openly anti-abortion sources, including the anti-abortion group Live Action, as well as a non-peer reviewed report from the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center that claimed to show higher rates of complication from the pills, but that experts say has a flawed methodology, as I have previously written. The Florida lawsuit also claims that all abortions “violate the Hippocratic Oath and deny the inalienable rights of all human beings.” Uthmeier is suing under the state’s deceptive marketing and racketeering laws, and is seeking more than $350 million in damages, attorneys’ fees, the dissolution of Planned Parenthood in Florida, and the revocation of its state licenses.

“I’ll tell you right, as God as my witness, if we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison,” Bannon told the crowd Wednesday at an awards event hosted by the Conservative Partnership Academy. This group offers training and certifications to aspiring right-wing ideologues working in politics and government.

“They’re not gonna stop,” Bannon said of Democrats and progressives aligned against Trump’s authoritarian push and Republican economic policies that have focused on lavishing ever-larger tax cuts for corporations and the rich while gutting government programs, including cuts to Medicaid, food assistance for the poor, devastating environmental policies, and dismantling of healthcare subsidies leading to a surge in monthly premiums for millions of families.

An immigration enforcement officer who shot a US citizen in Chicago last month bragged about the incident in texts afterwards, according to court documents filed in federal court on Wednesday. It’s just one of the latest examples of how, contrary to the Trump administration’s own narrative, the agents helping the supposedly terrified residents of American cities are posing a danger to residents themselves.

The texts were released in court at a hearing requested by the lawyer for the woman, Marimar Martinez, who is facing federal charges of assaulting an officer. According to the government’s account, Martinez allegedly rammed her car into a vehicle driven by Charles Exum, a supervisory Border Patrol agent, on October 4 in Chicago. When Exum got out of the car, Martinez allegedly drove her car “at” him, and the officer then fired five shots at her.

Martinez has pled not guilty, and contests the government’s allegations. In her account, Exum sideswiped her car, and fired the five gunshots at her “within two seconds” of exiting his vehicle, according to court documents filed by her lawyer. After driving about a mile from the scene, Martinez took an ambulance to a hospital, where she was treated for gunshot wounds and later arrested. She has been released from custody on $10,000 bond; a jury trial is scheduled for February.

The texts released Wednesday provide insight into how Exum addressed the incident in its aftermath. In one exchange, the agent sent an article from the Guardian describing the shooting, adding, “5 shots, 7 holes.” In another, he clarified that he was explaining his pride of his abilities as a marksman: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” (Reuters reported that, when asked about these messages at a court hearing on Wednesday, Exum said: “I’m a firearms instructor and I take pride in my shooting skills.”)

The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to enforce a policy blocking transgender and nonbinary people from choosing passport sex markers that align with their gender identity.

The decision is Trump’s latest win on the court’s emergency docket, and allows the administration to enforce the policy while a lawsuit over it plays out. It halts a lower-court order requiring the government to keep letting people choose male, female or X on their passport to correspond with their gender identity on new or renewed passports. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.

The high court has sided with the government in nearly two dozen short-term orders on a range of policies since the start of Trump’s second term, including another case barring transgender people from serving in the military.

As reported by the Washington Post on Thursday, new data from corporate outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that employers in October announced 153,000 job cuts, which marked the highest number of layoffs in that month since October 2003.

John Challenger, the CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told the Post that the huge number of October layoffs showed the economy was entering “new territory.”

“We haven’t seen mega-layoffs of the size that are being discussed now—48,000 from UPS, potentially 30,000 from Amazon—since 2020 and before that, since the recession of 2009,” he explained. “When you see companies making cuts of this size, it does signal a real shift in direction.”

Several House Republicans have reportedly heard from the Department of Justice (DOJ) that the unreleased Jeffrey Epstein documents are especially compromising for President Donald Trump.

That's according to reporting from former MSNBC, CNN and Fox News reporter David Shuster, who posted to his X account on Wednesday that there is "speculation/rumors sweeping through [the] GOP caucus" about the details of the Epstein files.

"A few GOP house members say they’ve heard from FBI/DOJ contacts that the Epstein files (with copies in different agencies) are worse than Michael Wolff’s description of Epstein photos showing Trump with half naked teenage girls," Shuster wrote.

According to Shuster, Republicans' anxiety about the contents of the Epstein files is compounded by "more than 100+ Republicans" who are reportedly planning to vote for the bipartisan discharge petition by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), which only needs one more signature in order to force a floor vote. Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz), who won a late September special election to fill the seat vacated by her late father, promised to be the 218th and final signature on the discharge petition, though she has yet to be sworn in.

More than 2,000 flights in the US are cancelled or delayed on Friday after airlines were told to cut traffic during the government shutdown

Airports have been grappling with air traffic controller shortages, who are either calling in sick or taking side jobs as they work without pay during the federal government shutdown

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says reductions will start at 4% of internal flights before rising to the full 10% by the end of next week - it warns up to 4,000 flights per day could be affected

Several of the largest US airlines are assuring customers they'll be able to get full refunds for the cancelled flights - here's what some, including United and Delta, are saying

In case you’re wondering how the Senate was able to vote on this during a government shutdown, it’s because the Congressional Review Act remains a legislative function during a funding lapse.

The USFWS first introduced the plan under Biden, but the Trump administration is supporting it under pressure from loggers who argue that scrapping the plan could affect existing land-use plans, thus jeopardizing GOP efforts to increase logging, Politico reports.

The Senate vote on October 29 revealed an unusual divide between the Trump administration and certain Republicans. According to The Guardian, officials had encouraged Kennedy and other GOP members to support the proposal. And yet, the majority of votes in favor of Kennedy’s resolution were Republican, C-SPAN reports.

Activists have been similarly split on the issue. Some say the barred owl cull is a necessary measure to prevent extinction of the northern spotted owl, while others argue the plan is cruel and impractical and could have unintended consequences for the ecosystem.

A pharmaceutical executive collapsed in the Oval Office Thursday as members of the Trump administration were announcing a new deal for weight-loss medications.

The representative from one of the pharmaceutical companies was standing behind the president during the event when, suddenly, his knees buckled from underneath him.

Customs and Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore told the jury the snack "exploded all over him" and he "could smell the onions and mustard" on his uniform.

Neither side disputes that Sean Dunn, 37, did in fact lob obscenities and a deli-style sandwich at officers deployed by President Donald Trump to patrol the nation's capital in August. But Mr Dunn's lawyer argues it was not a criminal act.

The incident was captured on video and went viral, making Mr Dunn a symbol of opposition in Washington DC to Trump.

Government prosecutors initially tried to secure felony charges against Mr Dunn, but a grand jury declined to indict him. Prosecutors have instead charged him with a lower-level misdemeanour assault.

They overwhelmingly approved a map for congressional districts that could help Democrats win five more seats in the U.S. House. The ballot language itself referred to Texas, where Trump convinced Republican leaders to draw new lines this summer aimed at turning five seats for his party.

So far, the GOP has gained an edge in five seats in Texas, one in Missouri, one in North Carolina and a potential net gain of one to two in Ohio.

That means the GOP could pick up nine or so seats in the midterms next year, with the potential to pick up another four or five if Republicans in Indiana, Kansas, Florida or Louisiana decide to redistrict. But that scenario could change if court challenges prevail, among other factors.

A Spanish-language immersion daycare in a leafy residential neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago was raided by federal immigration agents on Wednesday and a teacher was taken away, panicking school administrators and parents of infants, toddlers and pre-kindergarten children at the center, a staff worker at the daycare told Reuters.

Footage obtained by local WGN-TV showed two men, one in a balaclava, dragging a woman out of the colorfully decorated front doors of Rayito de Sol daycare center as she screamed. The men wore vests that said "Police" but no other agency markings were visible.

"White House press briefings engage the American people on important issues affecting their daily lives — in recent months, war, the economy, and healthcare, and in recent years, a global pandemic," U.S. District Judge Amir Ali wrote in issuing a preliminary injunction on Tuesday. "The exclusion of deaf Americans from that programming, in addition to likely violating the Rehabilitation Act, is clear and present harm that the court cannot meaningfully remedy after the fact."

The White House stopped using live ASL interpreters at briefings and other public events when President Trump began his second term in January.

The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) and two deaf men filed the lawsuit against Trump and Leavitt in May. The suit also names White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, along with the offices for president and vice president. It alleges the White House's failure to provide ASL violates Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The law prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in programs conducted by the federal government. The suit also claims the White House is in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments, which protect free speech and provide for due process, respectively.