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WASHINGTON — A trio of Senate Democrats is calling for the government to start refunding roughly $175 billion in tariff revenues that the Supreme Court ruled were collected because of an illegal set of orders by President Trump.
Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire are unveiling a bill on Monday that would require U.S. Customs and Border Protection to issue refunds over the course of 180 days and pay interest on the refunded amount.
The measure would prioritize refunds to small businesses and encourages importers, wholesalers and large companies to pass the refunds on to their customers.
“Trump’s illegal tax scheme has already done lasting damage to American families, small businesses and manufacturers who have been hammered by wave after wave of new Trump tariffs,” said Wyden, stressing that the “crucial first step” to fixing the problem begins with “putting money back in the pockets of small businesses and manufacturers as soon as possible.”
The bill is unlikely to become law, but it reveals how Democrats are starting to apply public pressure on a Trump administration that has shown little interest in trying to return tariff revenues after the Supreme Court announced its 6-3 ruling on Friday.
Because of the ruling, going into November’s midterm elections for control of Congress, Democrats have begun telling the public that Trump illegally raised taxes and now refuses to repay the money back to the American people.
Shaheen said that repairing any of the damage caused by the tariffs in the form of higher prices starts with “President Trump refunding the illegally collected tariff taxes that Americans were forced to pay.” Markey stressed that small business tend to have ”little to no resources” and a “refund process can be extremely difficult and time consuming” for companies.
The Trump administration has asserted that its hands are tied, because any refunds should be the responsibility of further litigation in court.
That message could put Republicans on the defensive as they try to explain why the government isn’t proactively seeking to return the money. GOP lawmakers had planned to try to preserve their House and Senate majorities by running on the income tax cuts that Trump signed into law last year, saying that tax refunds this year would help families.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNN on Sunday that it’s “bad framing” to raise the question of refunds because the Supreme Court ruling did not address the issue. The administration’s position is that any refunds will be decided by lawsuits winding their way through the legal system, rather than by a president who has repeatedly stressed to voters that he has the ability to act with speed and resolve.
“It is not up to the administration — it is up to the lower court,” Bessent said, stressing that rather than offer any guidance he would “wait” for a court opinion on refunds.
Trump has defended his use of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose broad tariffs on almost every U.S. trading partner, saying that his ability to levy taxes on imports had helped to end military conflicts, bring in new federal revenues and apply pressure for negotiating trade frameworks.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model released estimates that the refunds would total $175 billion. That’s the equivalent of an average of $1,300 per U.S. household. But determining how to structure reimbursements would be tricky, as the costs of the tariffs flowed through the economy in the form of customers paying the taxes directly as well as importers passing along the cost either indirectly or absorbing them.
The president has previously claimed that refunds would drive up U.S. government debt and hurt the economy. On Friday, he told reporters at a briefing that the refund process could be finished after he leaves the White House.
“I guess it has to get litigated for the next two years,” Trump said, later amending his timeline by saying: “We’ll end up being in court for the next five years.”
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide on shielding energy producers from dozens of lawsuits seeking to hold them liable for costs of global climate change.
In the past decade, dozens of cities, counties and states, including California, have joined state-based lawsuits that seek billions of dollars in damages, and they have won preliminary victories in state courts.
But the Trump administration and the energy producers urged the Supreme Court to throw out all of these suits on the grounds they conflict with federal law.
“Boulder Colorado cannot make energy policy for the entire country,” lawyers for Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil said in their appeal. They urged the court to rule that “state law cannot impose the costs of global climate change on a subset of the world’s energy producers chosen by a single municipality.”
The Biden administration had said the justices should stand aside while the lawsuits move forward in state courts, but the Trump administration filed a brief in September urging the court to intervene now.
They said the case has “vast nationwide significance,” and it should not be left to be decided state by state.
Lawyers for Boulder had urged the court against taking up the issue at an early stage of the litigation. “This is not the right time or the right case for deciding” whether municipalities can sue over the damage they have suffered.
But after weighing the issue for weeks, the court announced it will be hear the claims of the oil and gas industries.
SACRAMENTO — Every farmer knows there comes a time to thin the crop to allow the most promising plants to grow bigger and reach their potential.
The same is true in politics. And it‘s now time to cull some Democrats from the dense field of candidates for governor.
Put another way, it’s time for some lagging Democrats to step aside and provide more running room for swifter teammates in the race to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom.
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You’d think that Democratic candidates now plodding behind in the race — with little realistic hope of catching up — would want to avoid having that on their conscience. Party leaders, too.
Until recently, this nightmarish scenario for Democrats seemed inconceivable. After all, California hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office for 20 years. Roughly 45% of registered voters are Democrats. Only 25% are Republicans. About 23% are independents who lean left.
But do the math. There are nine Democrats running for governor with various degrees of seriousness. There are only two major Republican contenders, plus a third lagging practically out of sight.
Remember, California has a “top two” open primary. The top two vote-getters, regardless of their party, advance to the November election. And only the top two. Write-in candidates aren’t allowed.
It’s a matter of arithmetic.
In the primary, about 60% of voters will choose a Democrat, political data expert Paul Mitchell figures. That number of voters split among nine Democratic candidates could result in all sharing smaller pieces of the pie than what the top two Republicans receive. Mitchell estimates nearly 40% of voters will side with a Republican, with just two candidates splitting most of the smaller GOP pie.
Recent polls have shown three candidates — two Republicans and one Democrat — bunched closely near the top. They’re Republican former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton, Democratic U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell from the San Francisco Bay Area, and Republican Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County.
Another Democrat, former Rep. Katie Porter of Orange County, has been running close to the top three, followed by Democrat Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund investor.
It’s not likely that two Republicans will survive the primary and block a Democrat from reaching the general election. But it’s a legitimate possibility — and not worth the risk for the Democratic Party.
“How unlikely does it have to be for Democrats not to be worried?” asks Mitchell, who works primarily for Democrats. “Even if the chances are very small, the consequences could be catastrophic.”
He is constantly running primary election simulations. And last week he calculated the chances of two Republicans gaining the top slots at 18%. Most of his calculations have come out at around 10% to 12%, he says.
“I’m not trying to yell fire in a crowded theater,” Mitchell says. “But I’m trying to install a thermostat.”
He adds: “If there was ever a perfect storm when this could happen, we’re experiencing it now.”
The absence of a gubernatorial candidate heading the Democratic ticket in November, Mitchell says, would result in party damage far beyond the governor’s office.
It would lower Democratic voter turnout and probably cost the party congressional and legislative seats, and also affect ballot measures, Mitchell says.
In fact, it could jeopardize the Democrats’ chances of ousting Republicans and capturing control of the U.S. House.
So which candidates should drop out, not only to avoid embarrassment on election night but to save the party from possible disaster?
Four clearly should stay.
Swalwell has some momentum and is the leading Democrat in most polls, although his numbers are only in the teens. He’s relatively young at 45 and many voters are looking for generational change.
Porter is the leading female — with a chance to become the first woman elected California governor — and has been holding up in the polls despite showing a bad temper in a damaging TV interview last year.
Steyer has loads of his own money to spend on TV ads. But he needs a more coherent, simple message in the spots.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan just entered the race, but shows some promise. He’s a moderate with strong Silicon Valley tech support. And he also has youth at 43.
Five others should consider bowing out.
Xavier Becerra has a great resume: Former U.S. health secretary, former California attorney general and longtime congressman. But he hasn’t shown much fire. And his message is muted.
Antonio Villaraigosa also has an impressive resume: Former Los Angeles mayor and state Assembly speaker. He’s running with a strong centrist message. But at 73, voters seem to feel his time is past.
Former state Controller Betty Yee knows every inch of state government, but lacks voter appeal.
State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond hasn’t shined in his current job and has no traction in the governor’s race.
Former legislator Ian Calderon isn’t even a blip.
What causes some candidates to stay in a race against long, even impossible odds?
“Hope springs eternal,” says longtime Democratic strategist Darry Sragow. “History is replete with races that turned around on a dime.”
And many feel obligated to their donors and endorsers, he adds.
Also, consultants often “have a vested interest” financially in keeping their clients in the game, he acknowledges.
But currently, Sragow adds, “it’s time for the Democratic Party to get its act together and weed out the field.”
“Party leaders should start cracking the whip. There’s something to be said for decisions being made behind closed doors in a ‘smoke filled room.’ The difference today is that it’s in a smoke-free room.”
The filing deadline for officially becoming a candidate is March 6. After that, a name cannot be removed from the ballot. It’s stuck there — possibly drawing just enough votes to rob another Democrat of the chance to be elected governor in November.
DAKAR, Senegal — Being gay in Morocco is illegal and punishable by up to three years in prison. But it was the violence from her family that forced Farah, a 21-year-old gay woman, to flee the country.
After a long journey to the United States and a third-country deportation by the Trump administration, however, Farah said she is now back in Morocco and in hiding.
“It is hard to live and work with the fear of being tracked once again by my family,” she told the Associated Press, in rare testimony from a person deported via a third country despite having protection orders from a U.S. immigration judge. “But there is nothing I can do. I have to work.”
She asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of persecution. The AP saw her protection order and lawyers verified parts of her account.
Farah said that before she fled, she was beaten by her family and the family of her partner when they found out about their relationship. She was kicked out of the family home and fled with her partner to another city. She said her family found her and tried to kill her.
Through a friend, she and her partner heard about the opportunity to get visas for Brazil and fly there with the aim of reaching the United States, where they had friends. From Brazil, she trekked through six countries for weeks to reach the U.S. border, where they asked for asylum.
“You get put in situations that are truly horrible,” she recalled. “When we arrived [at the U.S. border], it felt like it was worth the trouble and that we got to our goal.”
They arrived in early 2025. But instead of finding the freedom she envisioned, Farah said she was detained for almost a year, first in Arizona, then in Louisiana.
“It was very cold,” she said of detention. “And we only had very thin blankets.” Medical care was inadequate, she said.
She was denied asylum, but in August she received a protection order from a U.S. immigration judge, who ruled she cannot be deported to Morocco because that would endanger her life. Her partner, denied asylum and a protection order, was deported.
Farah said she was three days from a hearing on her release when she was handcuffed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and put on a plane to an African country she had never visited, and one where homosexuality is illegal: Cameroon. She was put in a detention facility.
“They asked me if I wanted to stay in Cameroon, and I told them that I can’t stay in Cameroon and risk my life in a place where I would still be endangered,” she said. She was flown to Morocco.
Most deportees had protection orders
She is one of dozens of people confirmed to be deported from the U.S. by the Trump administration to third countries despite being granted legal protection by U.S. immigration judges. The actual number is unknown.
The administration has used third-country deportations to pressure migrants who are in the U.S. illegally to leave on their own, saying they could end up “in any number of third countries.”
The detention facility in Cameroon’s capital of Yaounde, where Farah was held, currently has 15 deportees from various African countries who arrived on two flights, and none is Cameroonian, according to lawyer Joseph Awah Fru, who represents them.
Eight of the deportees on the first flight in January, including Farah, had received a judge’s protection orders, said Alma David, an immigration lawyer with the U.S.-based Novo Legal Group who has helped deportees and verified Farah’s case. The AP spoke to a woman from Ghana and a woman from Congo, who both said they had protection orders, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Another flight Monday brought eight more people. Three freelance journalists reporting on the deportations to Cameroon for the AP were briefly detained there.
Deporting people to a third country where they could be sent home was effectively a legal “loophole,” said David.
“By deporting them to Cameroon, and giving them no opportunity to contest being sent to a country whose government hoped to quietly send them back to the very countries where they face grave danger, the U.S. not only violated their due process rights but our own immigration laws, our obligations under international treaties and even DHS’ own procedures,” David said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security earlier confirmed there were deportations to Cameroon in January.
“We are applying the law as written. If a judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period,” it said, and asserted that the third-country agreements “ensure due process under the U.S. Constitution.”
Asked about the deportations to Cameroon, the U.S. State Department on Friday told the AP it had “no comment on the details of our diplomatic communications with other governments.” It did not reply to further questions.
Cameroon’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.
‘Impossible choices’
Farah was one of two women from the first group of deportees to return to Morocco.
“They were given two impossible choices,” David said, asserting that claiming asylum was not clearly presented as one of them. “This was before the lawyer had access to them.”
She said International Organization for Migration staff in the facility did not give them any indication that there was a viable option other than going back to their home countries.
Fru said he has not been granted access to the deportees. He said the assistant to the country director for the IOM, a U.N.-affiliated organization, told him he must apply to speak to them. Fru plans to do that Monday.
The IOM told the AP it was “aware of the removal of migrants from the United States of America to some African countries” and added that it “works with people facing difficult decisions about whether to return to their country of origin.” It said its role is providing accurate information about options and ensuring that “anyone who chooses to return does so voluntarily.”
The IOM said the facility in Yaounde was managed by the authorities in Cameroon. It did not respond to further questions.
African nations are paid millions
Cameroon is one of at least seven African nations to receive deported third-country nationals in a deal with the U.S. Others include South Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana and Equatorial Guinea.
Some have received millions of dollars in return, according to documents released by the State Department. Details of other agreements, including the one with Cameroon, have not been released.
The Trump administration has spent at least $40 million to deport about 300 migrants to countries other than their own, according to a report released last week by the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
According to internal administration documents reviewed by the AP, 47 third-country agreements are in various stages of negotiation.
In Morocco, Farah said, it was hard to hear U.S. officials refer to people like her as a threat.
“The USA is built on immigration and by immigrant labor, so we’re clearly not all threats,” she said. “What was done to me was unfair. A normal deportation would have been fair, but to go through so much and lose so much, only to be deported in such a way, is cruel.”
SAN FRANCISCO — While united against a common political enemy in the White House, the California Democratic Party remains deeply divided over how to address the state’s affordability crisis and who is best suited to lead the state in this turbulent era of President Trump.
Those fractures revealed themselves during the party’s annual convention in California’s liberal epicenter, San Francisco, where a slate of Democrats running to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom pitched very different visions for the state.
Former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter and wealthy financier Tom Steyer were among the top candidates who swung left, with Porter vowing to enact free childcare and tuition-free college and Steyer backing a proposed new tax on billionaires. Both candidates also support universal healthcare.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, the newest major candidate to enter the race, hewed toward partisan middle ground, chastising leaders in Sacramento for allowing the state budget to balloon without tangible improvements to housing affordability, homelessness and public schools.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin), a vociferous critic and constant target of the Trump administration, emerged from the convention with the greatest momentum after receiving the most votes for the California Democratic Party’s endorsement, with 24% of delegates backing him.
“The next governor has two jobs: one, to keep Donald Trump and ICE out of our streets and out of our lives, and two, to lower your costs on healthcare, on housing, on utilities,” Swalwell said. “Californians need a fighter and protector, and for the last 10 years, I’ve gone on offense against the worst president ever.”
Still, none of the top Democrats running for governor received the 60% vote needed to capture the endorsement, indicating just how uncertain the race remains just months away from the June primary.
Betty Yee, a former state controller and party vice chair, placed second in the endorsement vote with 17%; former U.S. Health and Human Services Sec. Xavier Becerra had 14%; and Steyer had 13%. The remaining candidates had single-digit levels of support from among the more than 2,300 delegates who cast endorsement votes.
Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) takes a selfie with supporters during the California Democratic Party’s annual convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on Saturday.
“We’re going to win the House. There’s absolutely no question we will win the House,” said former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) at a Young Dems event on Friday evening. “We’re going to protect the election, we’re going to win the election, and we’re going to tell people the difference that we will make.”
Thousands of delegates, party allies and guests attended the weekend California Democratic Party convention at Moscone Center in the South of Market neighborhood. The gathering included a tribute to Pelosi as she serves her final term.
Party leaders did coalesce behind one of the Democrats running to replace Pelosi, Scott Wiener, a liberal state senator who is vying be the first openly gay person to represent San Francisco in Congress.
The convention comes as party members and leaders continue to soul search after Trump’s second election. California remains a stronghold of opposition to the president, but its next governor will also have to face a growing cost-of-living crisis in a state where utility costs keep climbing and the median single-family home price is more than double what it is nationally.
Under growing pressure, the candidates for governor went on the offensive at the party gathering. Candidates sniped at each other — though rarely by name — for being too rich, too beholden to special interests or for voting in the past in support of ICE and border wall funding.
While largely panned by delegates who tend to lean further left than the typical California Democratic voter, Mahan has jolted the race by quickly raising millions from tech industry leaders and targeting moderate voters with a message of getting the state “back to basics.”
“We are at risk of losing the trust of the people of California if we don’t hold ourselves accountable for delivering better results on public education, home building, public safety,” Mahan said. “We’re not getting the outcomes we need for the dollars we’re spending.”
Mahan has raised more than $7.3 million since entering the contest in late January, according to campaign finance disclosures of large contributions. Many of the donors are tied to the tech industry, such as Y Combinator, Doordash, Amazon and Thumbtack. Billionaire Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso has also contributed the maximum allowed to Mahan’s campaign.
Technology businessman Dennis Bress, from Newport Beach, wears a pin supporting Planned Parenthood and a Yes on Proposition 50 shirt at the California Democratic Party convention at the Moscone Center on Friday in San Francisco.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Other candidates have raised concerns about the cash infusion, particularly Steyer, who has already dropped more than $37 million into his self-funded campaign and is pitching himself as a “billionaire who will take on the billionaires.”
“Here’s the thing about big donors: If you take their money, you have to take their calls,” Steyer said during his floor speech.
Delegates and party leaders said California’s next governor will have to continue leading the state’s aggressive opposition to Trump while dealing with the issues at home.
“I think people want a fighter,” said Rep. Dave Min (D-Irvine), who represents Porter’s former congressional district and has endorsed her in the governor’s race. “They want someone who’s going to stand up to Donald Trump but also fight to help average people who feel like they’re getting a raw deal in today’s America.”
Several of the candidates made the case that they could do both.
During her speech, Porter held up a whiteboard — her signature prop when grilling CEOs and Trump administration officials while she served in Congress — with “F— Trump” written on it.
“I’ll stand up to Trump and his cronies just like I did in Congress,” she said. “But this election for governor is about far more than defeating Trump.”
Porter, a law professor at UC Irvine, called on Democrats to “send a message about democracy by rejecting billionaires and corporate-backed candidates.” She also rolled out a long list of “true affordability measures” including free child care, free tuition at public universities, and single-payer healthcare, though she did not specify how she would pay for them.
Fighting back against Trump is “the floor,” said 29-year-old Gregory Hutchins, an academic labor researcher from Riverside. “We need to go higher than the floor — what can you do for the people of California? We all recognize that this is a beautiful and wonderful state, but it is very difficult to afford living here.”
Even some delegates — often the most politically active members of a party — have yet to make up their minds in the governor’s race. Nearly 9% opted not to endorse a particular candidate at the convention.
“You want that perfect candidate. You want that like, yes, this is the person,” said Sean Frame, a school labor organizer from Sacramento who is running for state Senate. “And I don’t feel like there is one candidate for me that fits all that.”
For all the focus on affordability, there were undertones of growing frustration from even reliable Democratic allies over a lack of tangible results in a state where the median home price is more than $823,000. SEIU California president David Huerta said workers have “been deferring our power to elected leadership” for too long.
“I think we need to be the ones who set the agenda and hold them accountable to that agenda,” Huerta said. “And they need to be leading from the direction of working people.”
It’s a constant battle with Democrats at state and local levels to get fair pay, said Mary Grace Barrios, who left a career in insurance to take care of her disabled adult daughter.
Barrios makes $19 an hour as an in-home caregiver to other clients in Los Angeles County. When Newsom signed a law to raise wages for most healthcare workers to $25 an hour by 2030, in-home support staff like Barrios were not included.
“It’s so important that we be given the respect and pay we need to live because we can’t live on that amount,” she said, adding that it feels like a “constant attack by people in our own party that we supported, that forgot us.”
“As citizens, you get what you vote for, right? So we have to do it. We have to make the change.”
TOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas is set to invalidate about 1,700 driver’s licenses held by transgender residents and roughly as many birth certificates under a new law that goes beyond Republican-imposed restrictions in other states on listing gender identities in government documents.
The new law takes effect Thursday. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the measure, but the Legislature’s GOP supermajorities overrode it last week as Republican state lawmakers across the U.S. have pursued another round of measures to roll back transgender rights.
The bill prohibits documents from listing any sex other than the one assigned birth and invalidates any that reflect a conflicting gender identity. Florida, Tennessee and Texas also don’t allow driver’s licenses to reflect a trans person’s gender identity, and at least eight states besides Kansas have policies that bar trans residents from changing their birth certificates.
But only Kansas’ law requires reversing changes previously made for trans residents. Kansas officials expect to cancel about 1,700 driver’s licenses and issue new birth certificates for up to 1,800 people.
“It tells me that Kansas Republicans are interested in being on the vanguard of the culture war and in a race to the bottom,” said Democratic state Rep. Abi Boatman, a transgender Air Force veteran appointed in January to fill a vacant Wichita seat.
Kansas’ new law enjoyed nearly unanimous GOP support. It is the latest development in what has become an annual effort to further roll back transgender rights by Republicans in statehouses across the U.S., bolstered by policies and rhetoric from President Trump’s administration.
Trump and other Republicans attack research-backed conclusions that gender can change or be fluid, which they frame as radical “gender ideology.” GOP lawmakers in Kansas regularly describe transgender girls and women as male, and say that in doing so they are protecting women.
Like other Republicans, Kansas Senate Majority Leader Chase Blasi said Trump’s reelection and other GOP victories in 2024 show that voters want “to return to common sense” on gender.
“When I go home, people believe there are just two sexes, male and female,” Blasi said. “It’s basic biology I learned in high school.”
Kelly supports transgender rights, but GOP lawmakers have overridden her vetoes three of the last four years. Kansas bans gender-affirming care for minors and bars transgender women and girls from female sports teams, kindergarten through college.
Transgender people can’t use public restrooms, locker rooms or other single-sex facilities associated with their gender identities, though there was no enforcement mechanism until this year’s law added tough new provisions.
Transgender people have said carrying IDs that misgender them opens them to intrusive questions, harassment and even violence when they show it to police, merchants and others.
In 2023, Republicans halted changes in Kansas birth certificates and driver’s licenses by enacting a measure ending the state’s legal recognition of trans residents’ gender identities. Though the law didn’t mention either document, it legally defined male and female by a person’s “biological reproductive system” at birth.
However, a lawsuit led to state court decisions that permitted driver’s license changes to resume last year.
Legislators in at least seven other states are considering bills to prevent transgender people from changing one or both documents, according to a search using the bill-tracking software Plural.
But none would reverse past changes.
The extra step by Kansas legislators reinforces a message “that trans people aren’t welcome,” said Anthony Alvarez, a transgender University of Kansas student who works for an LGBTQ+ rights group.
Kansas is likely to notify transgender residents by mail that their driver’s licenses are no longer valid and they need to go to a local licensing office to get a new one, said Zachary Denney, spokesperson for the agency that issues them.
The Legislature hasn’t earmarked funds to cover the cost, so each person will be charged for it — $26 for a standard license.
Alvarez already has had four IDs in four years as he’s changed his name, changed his gender marker and turned 21.
He’s always planned to stay in his native Kansas after receiving his history degree this spring.
But, he said, “they’re just making it harder and harder for me to live in the state that I love.”
NEW YORK — The Transportation Security Administration said Sunday that its PreCheck program would remain operational despite an earlier announcement from the Department of Homeland Security that the airport security service was being suspended because of the partial government shutdown.
“As staffing constraints arise, TSA will evaluate on a case by case basis and adjust operations accordingly,” the agency said in a statement.
Airport lines seemed largely unaffected through midday Sunday, with security check line wait times listed as under 15 minutes for most international airports, according to TSA’s mobile app.
Amy Wainscott, 42, flew from the Destin-Fort Walton Beach airport in Florida to Dallas Love Field on Sunday and said she didn’t hear about the announced suspension until she had already gone through TSA’s PreCheck.
“When we got to the airport this morning everything was working like usual,” she said. “It didn’t seem like anything had changed.”
Jean Fay, 54, said she had no issues going through TSA PreCheck at the Baltimore airport for her 6 a.m. Sunday flight back home to Texas. She didn’t hear about the suspension announcment until she was changing planes in Austin on her way to Dallas Love Field.
“When I landed in Austin I started getting the alerts,” she said.
It was not immediately clear whether Global Entry, another airport service, would be affected. PreCheck and Global Entry are designed to help speed registered travelers through security lines, and suspensions would probably cause headaches and delays.
Since starting in 2013, more than 20 million Americans have signed up for TSA PreCheck, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and millions of those Americans also have overlapping Global Entry memberships. Global Entry is a U.S. Customs and Border Protection program that allows preapproved, low-risk travelers to use expedited kiosks when entering the United States from abroad.
The turmoil is tied to a partial government shutdown that began Feb. 14 after Democrats and the White House were unable to reach a deal on legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats have been demanding changes to aggressive federal immigration operations, central to President Trump’s deportation campaign, which have been widely criticized since the shooting deaths of two people in Minneapolis last month.
The security disruptions come as a major winter storm hit the East Coast from Sunday into Monday. Nine out of 10 flights going out of John F. Kennedy International Airport, LaGuardia Airport and Boston Logan Airport on Monday have been canceled.
Homeland Security previously said it was taking “emergency measures to preserve limited funds.” Among the steps listed were “ending Transportation Security Administration (TSA) PreCheck lanes and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Global Entry service, to refocus Department personnel on the majority of travelers.”
“We are glad that DHS has decided to keep PreCheck operational and avoid a crisis of its own making,” said Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Assn.
Before announcing the PreCheck shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement Saturday night that “shutdowns have serious real world consequences.”
One group of fliers will definitely be affected, according to TSA.
“Courtesy escorts, such as those for Members of Congress, have been suspended to allow officers to focus on the mission of securing America’s skies,” the agency said.
Airlines for America, a trade group representing major carriers, said Saturday night that “it’s past time for Congress to get to the table and get a deal done.” It also criticized the announcement, saying it was “issued with extremely short notice to travelers, giving them little time to plan accordingly.”
“A4A is deeply concerned that TSA PreCheck and Global Entry programs are being suspended and that the traveling public will be, once again, used as a political football amid another government shutdown,” the organization said.
Democrats on the House Committee on Homeland Security criticized the Department of Homeland Security’s handling of airport security after the initial announcement Saturday night. They accused the administration of “kneecapping the programs that make travel smoother and secure.”
Sen. Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat, said Noem’s actions are part of an administration strategy to distract from other issues and shift responsibility.
“This administration is trying to weaponize our government, trying to make things intentionally more difficult for the American people as a political leverage,” he said Sunday on CNN. “And the American people see that.”
An armed man drove into the secure perimeter of Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s resort in Florida, as another vehicle was exiting before being shot and killed early Sunday morning, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service.
The man, who was in his early 20s and from North Carolina, had a gas can and a shotgun, according to Anthony Guglielmi, the Secret Service spokesman. The man had been reported missing by his family a few days ago, and investigators believe he headed south and picked up the shotgun along the way.
Guglielmi said a box for the weapon was discovered in the man’s vehicle after the incident, which took place around 1:30 a.m.
The man killed was identified by investigators as 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation.
Trump has faced threats to his life before, including two assassination attempts during the 2024 campaign. Although the president often spends weekends at his resort, he and First Lady Melania Trump were at the White House when the breach at Mar-a-Lago occurred.
After entering near the north gate of the property, the man was confronted by two Secret Service agents and a Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy, according to Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw.
“He was ordered to drop those two pieces of equipment that he had with them. At which time he put down the gas can, raised the shotgun to a shooting position,” Bradshaw said at a news conference. The two agents and the deputy “fired their weapons to neutralize the threat.”
The FBI asked residents who live near Mar-a-Lago to check any security cameras they may have for video that could help investigators.
Investigators are working to compile a psychological profile, and a motive is still under investigation. Asked whether the individual was known to law enforcement, Bradshaw said, “Not right now.”
The incident comes as the country has been rocked by spasms political violence.
Trump survived an assassination attempt during a 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pa. The gunman fired eight shots, one grazing Trump’s ear, before being killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper.
A few months later, a man tried to assassinate Trump while he played golf at his West Palm Beach club, a few miles from Mar-a-Lago. A Secret Service agent spotted that man, Ryan Routh, aiming a rifle through the shrubbery before Trump came into view. Officials said Routh aimed his rifle at the agent, who opened fire and caused Routh to drop his weapon.
Routh was found guilty last year and sentenced this month to life in prison.
The White House referred all questions to the Secret Service and FBI.
There have been other recent incidents of political violence as well.
In the last year, there was the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk; the assassination of the Democratic leader in the Minnesota state House and her husband and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife; and an arson attack at the official residence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
Five days ago, a Georgia man armed with a shotgun was arrested as he sprinted towards the west side of the U.S. Capitol.
And on Jan. 6, 2021, a violent pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol and tried to stop Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.
Price writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Alanna Durkin Richer contributed to this report.
RICHMOND, Calif. — New bumper stickers reading “Jesse Jackson/Dan Boatwright” appeared recently in this heavily black and economically struggling industrial city across the bay from San Francisco.
“Can you believe that?” state Senate candidate Sunne McPeak grumbled. “It makes it appear that Jesse Jackson has endorsed Dan Boatwright. He hasn’t. And Boatwright hasn’t endorsed Jackson. It’s misleading.”
McPeak, for 10 years a Contra Costa County supervisor, is challenging Sen. Daniel E. Boatwright, a white, 16-year veteran of the Legislature, in the hottest state Senate contest in the June 7 primary election.
On the same day the Jackson/Boatwright bumper stickers showed up, McPeak, who also is white, trumpeted the endorsement of her candidacy by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley as she walked black precincts in the 7th Senate District, which includes most of Contra Costa County.
Boatwright, widely regarded as a conservative Democrat who said he has not endorsed any candidate for President but will support the party’s nominee, denies that the bumper stickers are misleading. He asserts, while denying any contradiction, that they merely are intended “to get Jesse Jackson and me elected.”
In a tight election, the black vote–which Boatwright said makes up 15% of the Democratic registration–could be pivotal.
McPeak and Boatwright seem to share the same conservative political philosophy on many issues. Both fiercely oppose export of additional water from Northern to Southern California without ironclad guarantees that water supplies in their home base of Contra Costa County will not be degraded or diminished.
McPeak gained statewide attention in 1982 when she spearheaded a successful referendum that overturned a law that would have built the controversial Peripheral Canal, a project strongly supported by Southern California water interests and opposed by Northerners.
McPeak, 39, a former health care consultant, is the mother of two school-age children. An attorney, Boatwright, 58, is the father of three grown sons.
The Democratic winner in June will face Republican William Pollacek, a Martinez city councilman who is unopposed in the GOP primary. Although declining in numbers, Democrats still hold a big registration advantage in the district, 53.7% to 35.1% over Republicans. So the Democratic primary winner is a heavy favorite to emerge victorious in November.
The fast-growing region is a bedroom for San Francisco and includes some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the Bay Area, as well as some of the poorest. Ethnically diverse, Anglos account for roughly 71% of the district’s population, blacks 10%, Latinos 9%, Asians 5% and others 5%. But since blacks register heavily in the Democratic Party, they represent a much larger voter bloc in Democratic primaries than they do in general elections.
Boatwright’s casual manner masks an explosive temper and the tenacity of a pit bull. He delights in characterizing himself as “tough as a cob” and still speaks in a slight drawl that lingers from his boyhood in Arkansas
In legislative skirmishes, he has been known to invoke his experience as a combat infantryman in Korea and once told a reporter: “I’ve never seen anybody around that I couldn’t lick. And if I can’t do it with my fist, I’ll still do it.”
But the tough-talking Boatwright also writes poetry. In a sentimental poem printed in a campaign brochure, Boatwright talks of soaring “like a magic machine” with Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Boatwright unabashedly boasts of his fondness for dipping into the “pork barrel” of public projects and delivering them to his constituents, including the expansion of Mt. Diablo State Park and authorization for a new state university campus at Concord.
“See that ridge up there?” he said, pointing to an undeveloped saddle of land as he wheeled his sedan through a scenic valley en route to a meeting with constituents to discuss creating a new bay-side park. “We saved that for open space.”
Last year, Boatwright carried a major bill for his district that proposed massive rehabilitation of deteriorating levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. But he got into a feud with fellow Democratic Sen. Ruben S. Ayala of Chino, chairman of the Senate Water Committee, and Ayala sent the bill back to his committee, never to re-emerge.
This left Boatwright open to political attack that he had failed his constituents. But pressure continued for a levee repair bill and in December, environmentalists, farmers, Southern California water interests, Deukmejian Adminstration water officials, Ayala and Boatwright agreed to a virtually identical measure.
Boatwright’s name was attached to the new bill as its author and it became law in March.
“Boatwright needed a substantial bill to run with in his district,” observed a Senate Democratic staff source.
McPeak, still active in water affairs, contends that the compromise would never have occurred without “pressure” from herself and others.
Now, Boatwright has proposed drought-spawned legislation that would require the installation of water meters in Sacramento, one of the few major population centers in California where water rates are not tied to water usage. Boatwright maintains that 25% of water used in Sacramento is wasted and if metering forced water conservation, his downstream district would benefit. Similar measures have failed in the past.
In her quest to unseat Boatwright, who concedes that this reelection race is his toughest, McPeak goes from door to door telling voters that “the incumbent has been in the Legislature for 16 years. I think it’s time for a change. Don’t you?”
For Boatwright, it is the first time since his election to the Senate in 1980 that he is spending his Saturdays walking precincts and knocking on doors in search of votes. His support includes Senate staff employees from Sacramento who “volunteer” to walk.
McPeak decided to take on Boatwright against the advice of the Democratic Establishment, including Senate leader David A. Roberti of Los Angeles, who last year perceived Boatwright as conspiring to topple him as president pro tem of the Senate.
As a result, Roberti fired Boatwright as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, one of the Senate’s most prestigious posts. Later, Roberti softened the punishment and appointed Boatwright as a member of the committee.
Lukewarm to Candidacy
Some Senate sources have suggested that Roberti is privately only lukewarm to Boatwright’s candidacy. But in keeping with Senate’s clubby tradition of standing by their own, Roberti has publicly pledged to provide “whatever is necessary” in campaign contributions to secure Boatwright’s renomination. Although he may be a rebel at times, Boatwright still is a member of the Senate Democratic fraternity.
Boatwright, who coasted to victory in previous reelection campaigns, estimated his primary election budget at $500,000, a substantial sum for an established incumbent. McPeak estimated her spending at $300,000, with most contributions coming from residents and organizations within the county, many of them developers.
McPeak, endorsed by some labor unions who had been urged by Roberti to remain neutral in the primary, portrays herself as an outsider, striking out against the “power brokers, the bosses, the political dictators” in Sacramento who counseled her not to run.
However, delegates to a recent convention of the California Democratic Party endorsed her over Boatwright, who became the only incumbent Democrat to not receive the endorsement of his party.
Although Boatwright did not seek the endorsement, giving it to McPeak rankled him. “I resent the state Democratic Party injecting itself into my race,” he said. “They don’t know how I vote in the Senate, and they shouldn’t be telling people in my district how they should vote.”
Stirs Controversy
Virtually from his first election to the Assembly in 1972, Boatwright has stirred controversy. He has been the subject of investigations by a local district attorney, state attorney general, Fair Political Practices Commission and the FBI. In each case, no charges were filed.
Additionally, he was sued by a citizen watchdog organization for allegedly failing to accurately disclose the value of two shares of stock he owned in a Walnut Creek shopping center. He purchased them for $24,000 in 1973 but the lawsuit charged their actual value exceeded $300,000. Boatwright won in court.
Later, the Internal Revenue Service claimed that Boatwright and his former wife owed $112,800 in back taxes and penalties on income from that stock allegedly not reported in 1976. Boatwright sued the IRS and the agency dropped the action, a Boatwright aide said.
McPeak said she does not intend to hit Boatwright about the investigations but will concentrate on his legislative record.
“We won’t get into that,” she said. “We are focusing on issues that affect the future. We are talking about his voting record. . . . We think that is sufficient.”
But Boatwright is skeptical. “She can’t get me on my record,” he asserted. “She is going to have to start attacking me personally. She is going to get down and dirty. She has to.”
At a recent meeting of California’s high school sports governing board, two seniors from Arroyo Grande High School spoke out against a transgender peer competing on their track and field team and allegedly “watching” them in the girls’ locker room.
One of the Central Coast students said she is “more comfortable” changing in her car now. The other cited a Bible verse about God creating men and women separately, and accused the California Interscholastic Federation of subjecting girls to “exploitative and intrusive behavior that is disguised through transgender ideology.”
“Our privacy is being compromised and our sports are being taken over,” she said.
During the same meeting, Trevor Norcross, the father of 17-year-old transgender junior Lily Norcross, offered a starkly different perspective.
“Bathrooms and locker rooms are the most dangerous place for trans students, and when they are at their most vulnerable,” he said. “Our daughter goes to extreme lengths to avoid them. Unfortunately, sometimes you can’t.”
Lily Norcross with her parents, Trevor and Hilary Norcross.
(Owen Main / For The Times)
Norcross said Lily’s teammates had for months been misrepresenting a single moment from the year prior, when Lily had to use the restroom after a full day of avoiding it, chose to use the one in the locker room because it is monitored by an adult and safer for her than others, and briefly stopped to chat with a friend on her way out.
“There’s always more to the story,” he said.
The conflicting testimony reflected an increasingly charged debate over transgender athletes participating in youth sports nationwide. Churches, anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, cisgender athletes and their conservative families are organizing to topple trans-inclusive policies, while liberal state officials, queer advocacy groups, transgender kids and their families are trying to preserve policies that allow transgender kids to compete.
The battle has been particularly pitched in California, which has some of the nation’s most progressive statewide athletic policies and liberal leaders willing to defend them — including from the Trump administration, which has attacked transgender rights and is suing the California Department of Education and the CIF, alleging their trans-inclusive sports policies violate the civil rights of cisgender athletes.
Along with a pending U.S. Supreme Court decision on the legality of policies banning transgender athletes from competing in states such as Idaho and West Virginia, the Trump administration’s lawsuit against California could have sweeping implications for transgender athletes — with a state loss potentially contributing to their being sidelined not just in conservative states, but nationwide.
For the handful of transgender California teens caught in the middle of the fight, it has all been deeply unnerving — if strangely motivating.
“I have to keep doing it, because if I stop doing sports, they won,” Lily Norcross said. “They got what they wanted.”
A coordinated effort
The movement to overturn California’s trans-inclusive policies is being coordinated at the local, state and national levels, and has gained serious momentum since several of its leaders joined the Trump administration.
At the local level, cisgender athletes, their families and other conservative and religious allies have expressed anger over transgender athletes using girls’ facilities and resentment over their allegedly stealing victories and the spotlight from cisgender girls.
In 2024, two girls at Martin Luther King High School in Riverside filed a lawsuit challenging the participation of their transgender track and field teammate Abigail Jones, arguing her participation limited their own in violation of Title IX protections for female athletes. A judge found insufficient evidence of that, and recently dismissed the case.
Last year, Jurupa Valley High School track star AB Hernandez won several medals at the CIF State Track and Field Championships despite President Trump personally demanding she be barred from competing. Critics argued Hernandez’s wins were unfair, despite CIF having changed its rules so that her cisgender competitors received the medals they would have received had she not competed.
AB Hernandez competed for Jurupa Valley High School in the long jump at the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships.
(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
The challenges to Abigail, AB and Lily competing have all been driven in part by a network of conservative organizations working across California and beyond to oust transgender girls from sports, including by coordinating with evangelical churches, pushing social media campaigns, lining up speakers for school board meetings and working with cisgender athletes to hone their messages of opposition.
Shannon Kessler, a former PTA president and church leader who is now running for state Assembly, has worked within the wider network. In March 2025, Kessler founded the group Save Girls’ Sports Central Coast, and the next month distributed fliers at Harvest Church in Arroyo Grande that called on parishioners to challenge Lily’s participation on the track and field team.
Kessler said the two seniors on Lily’s team, who did not respond to a request for comment, had initially asked if she would “speak on their behalf,” so she did, but she has since let the girls “take the lead.”
“They took the initiative to speak and wrote their own speeches,” Kessler said, of their remarks at the recent CIF meeting.
Norcross said the effort to sideline his daughter has clearly been coordinated by outsiders from the start. He blames Kessler, Harvest Church and the state’s wider network of conservative activists for stirring up baseless fears about transgender athletes, exposing his family to danger and leaving them no choice but to defend themselves publicly.
“It’s not a fair position to be in,” he said.
Tied up in court
Within months of Trump issuing his February 2025 executive order calling for transgender athletes to be barred from competition nationwide, two leaders within the California conservative network turned Trump administration officials — Harmeet Dhillon, who is now assistant attorney general for civil rights, and former state Assemblyman Bill Essayli, who is now in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles — quickly moved to bring the state to heel.
They launched an investigation into California’s trans-inclusive sports policies, ordered its school districts to comply with Trump’s order in defiance of state law, and then sued the Department of Education and the CIF when they refused — alleging the state’s policies illegally discriminate against cisgender girls under Title IX by ignoring “undeniable biological differences between boys and girls, in favor of an amorphous ‘gender identity.’”
Neither Dhillon nor the Justice Department responded to a request for comment. Essayli’s office declined to comment.
Assistant Atty. Gen. for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon arrives for a news conference at the Justice Department in September.
(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
The Department of Education and the CIF have called for the lawsuit to be dismissed, arguing that Title IX regulations “do not require the exclusion of transgender girls” and that the Justice Department had provided no evidence that the state’s policies left cisgender girls unable to compete.
The CIF said in a statement that it “provides students with the opportunity to belong, connect, and compete in education-based experiences in compliance with California law,” but it and the Department of Education said they do not comment on pending litigation. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office has slammed the Trump administration’s efforts, and filed its own lawsuit to block them.
Separate from the California litigation, there is a major case on transgender youth athletes before the U.S. Supreme Court.
After athletes successfully challenged West Virginia and Idaho bans on transgender competition in lower federal courts, the states appealed. During arguments last month, the high court’s conservative majority sounded ready to uphold the state bans — but not necessarily in a way that would topple liberal state laws allowing such athletes to compete.
Pressure and resolve
Lily, AB and Abigail — all of whom are referenced anonymously in the federal lawsuit against California — agreed, with their parents, to be identified by The Times in order to share how it has felt to be targeted.
Abigail, 17, graduated early and is preparing to start college but hasn’t stopped being an advocate for transgender high school athletes, continuing to show up to CIF and school board meetings to support their right to compete.
“This is a part of my life now, whether I like it or not,” she said.
Speaking can be intimidating, Abigail said, but it has also become familiar — as has the cast of anti-transgender activists who routinely show up to speak as well. “It’s always the same people,” she said.
Abigail Jones participates in a protest against President Trump and his attacks on transgender people in April in Riverside.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
AB, also 17, said last year — when everyone, including Trump, seemed to be talking about her — was “just so much — too much.”
She felt she had to constantly “maintain an image,” including among her peers, that she was “not bothered by anything and just confident,” which was exhausting, she said. “There were a lot of times I just didn’t go to school, because I felt like I couldn’t keep up that image and I didn’t want them to see me down.”
It still can be overwhelming if she looks at all the vitriol aimed her way online, she said, but “off the internet, it’s a completely different story.”
AB was nervous headed into last year’s championships, but a couple of other competitors reached out with their support and the meet ended up being “a blast,” she said. At track practice this year, she’s surrounded by friends — one of her favorite things about being on the team.
For Lily, the last year has been “different and interesting, in not really a good way.”
She has had slurs lobbed at her and been physically threatened. She sometimes waits all day to use the toilet, nearly bursting by the time she gets home. When she has to use a school restroom, she times herself to be in and out in under three minutes. She took P.E. courses over the summer in part because she felt there would be fewer students around, but faced harassment anyway. Like AB, she feels as though she’s under a constant spotlight.
And yet, Lily said she is also “a lot happier with who I am” than she ever was before transitioning a couple of years ago. She said she’s enjoying her classes and her school’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance, where LGBTQ+ kids gather at lunch to swap stories, and is optimistic about the future — even if things aren’t great right now.
Her dad said watching her come out and transition has been gratifying, because “the smile came back, the light in her eyes came back.” Watching her navigate the current campaign against her, he said, has been “really hard,” because “she has been forced to grow up too quickly — she has been forced to defend herself in a way that most kids don’t.”
Mostly, though, he’s just proud of his kid.
“We had our fears as parents, as any parent would, that, OK, this is a different path than we thought our kid was going to be on, and we are worried about her safety and her future in this world,” he said. “But she is amazingly strong — amazingly courageous.”
SAN FRANCISCO — It was speed dating: Eight suitors with less than four minutes each, pitching the woo to thousands of Democratic Party faithful.
The race for California governor has been a low-boil, late-developing affair, noteworthy mostly for its lack of a whole lot that has been noteworthy.
That changed a bit on a sunny Saturday in San Francisco, the contest assuming a smidgen of campaign heat — chanting crowds, sign-waving supporters, call-and-response from the audience — as the state party held its annual convention in this bluest of cities.
No candidate came remotely close to winning the required 60% support.
That left the contestants, sans Mahan, to offer their best distillation of the whys and wherefore of their campaigns, before one of the most important and influential audiences they will face between now and the June 2 primary.
Former state Controller Betty Yee told how she shared a bedroom with four siblings. Katie Porter, the single mom of three kids, said she knows what it’s like to push a grocery cart and fuel her minivan and watch helplessly as prices “go up and up” while dollars don’t stretch far enough.
Michele Reed of Los Angeles cheers at the state Democratic Party convention.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
When it came to lambasting Trump, the competition was equally fierce.
“His attacks on our schools, our healthcare and his politics of fear and bullying has to stop now,” Villaraigosa said.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) called him “the worst president ever” and boasted of the anti-Trump battles he’s fought in Congress and the courts. Xavier Becerra, a former California attorney general, spoke of his success suing the Trump administration.
Porter may have outdone them all, at least in the use of profanity and props, by holding up one of her famous whiteboards and urging the crowd to join her in a chant of its inscription: “F—- Trump.”
Porter was also the most extravagant in her promises, pledging to deliver universal healthcare to California — a years-old Democratic ambition — free childcare, zero tuition at the state’s public universities and elimination of the state income tax for those earning less than $100,000.
Unstated was how, precisely, the cash-strapped state would pay for such a bounty.
Former Assemblyman Ian Calderon offered a more modest promise to provide free child care to families earning less than $100,000 annually and to break up PG&E, California’s largest utility, “and literally take California’s power back.” (Another improbability.)
Becerra, in short order, said he was “not running on inflated promises” but rather his record as a congressman, former attorney general and health secretary in President Biden’s cabinet.
Rachel Pickering, right, vice chair of the San Luis Obispo County Democratic Party, stands with others wearing pins supporting Democratic causes at the party’s state convention.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
It was one of several jabs that could be heard if one listened closely enough. (No candidate called out any other by name.) “You’re not going to vote for a Democrat who voted for the border wall, are you?” Thurmond demanded, a jab at Porter who supported a major funding bill that included money for Trump’s pet project.
“You’re not going to vote for a Democrat who praises ICE, are you?” Thurmond asked, a poke at Swalwell, who thanked the department for its work last year in a case of domestic terrorism.
“You’re not going to vote for a Democrat who made money off ICE detention centers,” Thurmond went on, targeting Tom Steyer and his former investment firm, which had holdings in the private prison industry.
Yee seemed to take aim at Mahan and his rich Silicon Valley backers, suggesting grassroots Democrats “will not be pushed aside by the billionaire boys club that wants to rule California.”
“Here’s the thing about big donors,” Steyer said. “If you take their money, you have to take their calls. And I don’t owe them a thing. In a world where politicians serve special interests, I can’t be bought.”
There were no breakout moments Saturday. Nothing was said or done in the roughly 35 minutes the candidates devoted to themselves that seemed likely to change the dynamic or trajectory of a race that remains stubbornly ill-defined and, to an unprecedented degree in modern times, wide open.
And there was certainly no sign any of the gubernatorial candidates plan to give up, bowing to concerns their large number could divide the Democratic vote and allow a pair of Republicans to slip through and emerge from California’s top-two primary.
But for at least a little while, within the confines of San Francisco’s Moscone Center, there was a glimmer of a life in a contest that has seemed largely inert. That seemed a portent of more to come as the June primary inches ever closer.
SOCORRO, Texas — In a Texas town at the edge of the Rio Grande and a tall metal border wall, rumors swirled that federal immigration officials wanted to purchase three hulking warehouses to transform into a detention center.
As local officials scrambled to find out what was happening, a deed was filed showing the Department of Homeland Security had already inked a $122.8-million deal for the 826,000-square-foot warehouses in Socorro, a bedroom community of 40,000 people outside El Paso.
“Nobody from the federal government bothered to pick up the phone or even send us any type of correspondence letting us know what’s about to take place,” said Rudy Cruz Jr., the mayor of the predominantly Latino town of low-slung ranch homes and trailer parks, where orchards and irrigation ditches share the landscape with strip malls, truck stops, recycling plants and distribution warehouses.
Socorro is among at least 20 communities across the U.S. whose large warehouses have become stealth targets for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s $45-billion expansion of detention centers.
As public support for the agency and President Trump’s immigration crackdown sags, communities both red and blue are objecting to mass detentions and raising concerns that the facilities could strain water supplies and other services while reducing local tax revenue.
In many cases, mayors, county commissioners, governors and members of Congress learned about ICE’s ambitions only after the agency bought or leased space for detainees, leading to shock and frustration even in areas that have backed Trump.
“I just feel,” said Cruz, whose wife was born in Mexico, “that they do these things in silence so that they don’t get opposition.”
Communities scramble for information
ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, has purchased at least seven warehouses in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Texas, signed deeds show. Other deals have been announced but not finalized, though buyers scuttled sales in eight locations.
Homeland Security objected to calling the sites warehouses, emphasizing in a statement that they would be “very well structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.”
The process has been chaotic at times. ICE last week acknowledged that it made a “mistake” when it announced warehouse purchases in Chester, N.Y., and Roxbury, N.J. Roxbury then announced Friday that the sale there had closed.
Homeland Security has confirmed that it is looking for more detention space but hasn’t disclosed individual sites ahead of acquisitions. Some cities learned only through reporters that ICE was scouting warehouses. Others were tipped off by a spreadsheet circulating online among activists whose source is unclear.
It wasn’t until Feb. 13 that the scope of the warehouse project was confirmed, when the governor’s office in New Hampshire, where there is backlash to a planned 500-bed processing center, released an ICE document showing the agency plans to spend $38.3 billion to boost detention capacity to 92,000 beds.
Since Trump took office, the number of people detained by ICE has increased to 75,000 from 40,000, spread across more than 225 sites.
ICE could use the warehouses to consolidate and to increase capacity. The document describes a project that includes eight large-scale detention centers, capable of housing 7,000 to 10,000 detainees each, and 16 smaller regional processing centers. The document also refers to the acquisition of 10 existing “turnkey” facilities.
The project is funded through Trump’s massive tax and spending cuts law enacted last year that nearly doubled the Homeland Security budget. To build the detention centers, the Trump administration is using military contracts.
Those contracts allow for a high degree of secrecy and enable Homeland Security to move quickly without following the usual processes and safeguards, said Charles Tiefer, a professor emeritus of law at the University of Baltimore Law School.
Socorro facility could be among the largest
In Socorro, the ICE-owned warehouses are so large that 4½ Walmart Supercenters could fit inside, in contrast to the remnants of the austere Spanish colonial and mission architecture that define the town.
At a recent City Council meeting, public comments stretched for hours. “I think a lot of innocent people are getting caught up in their dragnet,” said Jorge Mendoza, an El Paso County retiree whose grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico.
Many speakers invoked concerns about three recent deaths at an ICE detention facility at the nearby Ft. Bliss Army base.
Communities fear a financial hit
Even communities that backed Trump in 2024 have been caught off-guard by ICE’s plans and have raised concerns.
In rural Pennsylvania’s Berks County, commissioner Christian Leinbach called the district attorney, the sheriff, the jail warden and the county’s head of emergency services when he first heard ICE might buy a warehouse in Upper Bern Township, three miles from his home.
No one knew anything.
A few days later, a local official in charge of land records informed him that ICE had bought the building — promoted by developers as a “state-of-the art logistics center” — for $87.4 million.
“There was absolutely no warning,” Leinbach said during a meeting in which he raised concerns that turning the warehouse into a federal facility would mean a loss of more than $800,000 in local tax money.
ICE has touted the income taxes its workers would pay, though the facilities themselves will be exempt from property taxes.
A Georgia center
In Social Circle, Ga., which also strongly supported Trump in 2024, officials were stunned by ICE’s plans for a facility that could hold 7,500 to 10,000 people after first learning about it through a reporter.
The city, which has a population of 5,000 and worries about the infrastructure needs for such a detention center, heard from the Homeland Security Department only after the $128.6-million sale of a 1-million-square-foot warehouse was completed. Like Socorro and Berks County, Social Circle questioned whether the water and sewage system could keep up.
ICE has said it did due diligence to ensure the sites don’t overwhelm city utilities. But Social Circle said the agency’s analysis relied on a yet-to-be built sewer treatment plant.
“To be clear, the City has repeatedly communicated that it does not have the capacity or resources to accommodate this demand, and no proposal presented to date has demonstrated otherwise,” the city said in a statement.
And in the Phoenix suburb of Surprise, officials sent a scathing letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after ICE without warning bought a massive warehouse in a residential area about a mile from a high school. Arizona Atty. Gen. Kris Mayes, a Democrat, raised the prospect of going to court to have the site declared a public nuisance.
Crowds wait to speak in Socorro
Back in Socorro, people waiting to speak against the ICE facility spilled out of the City Council chambers, some standing beside murals paying tribute to the World War II-era bracero program that allowed Mexican farmworkers to be guest workers in the U.S. The program stoked Socorro’s economy and population before the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s began mass deportations aimed at people who had crossed the border illegally.
Eduardo Castillo, formerly an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, told city officials that it is intimidating but “not impossible” to challenge the federal government.
“If you don’t at least try,” he said, “you will end up with another inhumane detention facility built in your jurisdiction and under your watch.”
Hollingsworth and Lee write for the Associated Press and reported from Kansas City, Mo., and Socorro, respectively. AP writers Holly Ramer in Concord, N.H., and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pa., contributed to this report.
When Tom Steyer was running a hedge fund in 2000, he wrote a letter telling some wealthy investors their money would soon flow through an offshore company that would shield their gains from U.S. taxes.
It was routine in finance, but could prove toxic in politics.
Now that the San Francisco billionaire has joined the crowd of Democrats running for president, much of what he did to build his personal fortune, including a stint at Goldman Sachs in the 1980s, could turn off voters. His fund’s investments in coal mining and private prisons are two of the biggest hazards.
Part of Steyer’s challenge is timing. Wall Street’s reputation is in tatters in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Many Democrats are upset about growing income inequality. And billionaires — President Trump first among them — are routinely demonized by the party’s left wing.
Steyer is the founder of Farallon Capital Management, one of America’s largest hedge funds, the high-risk investment pools for big investors. He left Farallon in 2012 after running the San Francisco firm for 26 years.
He did not mention his experience there when asked by The Times what qualified him to serve as president. He focused instead on his work fighting climate change and big corporations over the last decade.
Attacks by Steyer’s opponents have been mild so far, but that will change if he starts gaining support.
“He will have to answer for his involvement in anti-climate-control activities, his relationship to the coal industry, and his relationship to Wall Street, which young people particularly find abhorrent,” said Democratic ad maker Hank Sheinkopf, who is unaligned in the presidential race.
“In a political campaign, there is no past tense and there is no future tense. Everything in your life you’ve ever done, thought of and said is in present tense.”
In written responses to questions sent by email, Steyer expressed remorse over some of Farallon’s investments.
A key liability is Farallon’s 2005 investment of $34 million in Corrections Corp. of America, which runs migrant detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many of the roughly two dozen Democrats in the presidential race have denounced profits from incarceration as immoral.
“I deeply regret that Farallon made that investment, and I personally ordered the investment in CCA to be sold because it did not accord with my values then or now,” Steyer said.
More troublesome for Steyer’s public image is the fund’s history of investing in fossil fuel projects, including a giant coal mine in Australia that generates vast quantities of carbon emissions.
The owners overcame protests by environmentalists and won permission to clear 3,700 acres of forest that served as a koala habitat and mine 12 million tons of coal per year. Steyer’s critics have long seen his past personal stake in coal mining as hypocritical.
The hedge fund led by Tom Steyer invested in an Australian coal mine that drew protesters in Sydney.
(Saleed Khan / AFP/Getty Images)
“If you’re running as a liberal, idealistic candidate, as Tom Steyer is, it’s a serious problem when the story you’re trying to tell uses words like private prisons and coal,” said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor. “It just goes directly against the rainbows and sunshine and clean air and better tomorrow narrative he’s trying to paint.”
Steyer said he left Farallon in part because of its holdings in fossil fuels. “I wish I’d made the move away from fossil fuels sooner,” he said.
Steyer, 62, muscled his way onto the public stage by becoming one of the Democratic Party’s top donors over the last decade. He put $74 million into the 2018 midterm election. He has carefully crafted his political profile around his spending to promote liberal causes, most visibly the fight against global warming and the drive to impeach President Trump.
Some of Steyer’s record has yielded bad publicity over the years as he weighed runs for elected office in California. But his entry into the presidential race on Tuesday and his vow to spend $100 million of his own money on his campaign will draw fresh scrutiny to the means he used to amass what Forbes estimates to be his net worth of $1.6 billion.
Steyer, who grew up on Manhattan’s East Side, started his career on Wall Street in the late 1970s at Morgan Stanley and worked later on mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs. In 1986, he opened Farallon, which grew from $9 million to $36 billion on his watch, according to Steyer.
Some Democrats say Steyer has atoned for his sins. RL Miller, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party’s environmental caucus, was perplexed by his candidacy and said his money would be better spent advancing other Democrats.
“I do feel he has demonstrated substantial good faith in that yes, he made a lot of money from bad places, but he’s been very, very open about the fact that he’s turned over a new leaf and is no longer taking money from those bad places and is instead spending to do good,” Miller said.
The business records of wealthy candidates are often weaponized by rivals. Former President Obama cast GOP challenger Mitt Romney in 2012 as a ruthless plutocrat who made millions of dollars on corporate takeovers that put thousands of Americans out of work. Romney co-founded Bain Capital, a private equity firm.
Mitt Romney’s career running a private equity firm was criticized by President Obama in the 2012 presidential campaign.
(Erik S. Lesser / EPA-Shutterstock)
Gray Davis won California’s Democratic primary for governor in 1998 after portraying rival Al Checchi as a tycoon who pillaged Northwest Airlines, firing thousands and forcing thousands more to take pay cuts.
“When these wealthy, self-financing first-time candidates want to throw their hat in the ring, whether they’re Democrat or Republican, they have to be prepared for a complete drill-down on how it is they made those millions of dollars,” said Garry South, who was Davis’ chief strategist.
As for Steyer, South said, “It’s pretty hard for me to see a billionaire on the Democratic side credibly take on the whole issue of wealth inequality.”
Within hours of Steyer’s announcement, two of his opponents took shots at him.
“I’m a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power,” Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont told MSNBC.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is competing with Sanders for progressive voters, tweeted, “The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they’re funding super PACs or funding themselves.”
In an email seeking donations on Thursday, she said, “We need our candidates to compete to have the best ideas — not just to write themselves the biggest checks.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren says the Democratic presidential primary should not be decided by billionaires.
(Brynn Anderson / Associated Press)
Both Sanders and Warren, who frequently rail at what they see as unfair advantages for the super-rich, have declined to take money from Wall Street donors.
Steyer’s wealth will enable him to run more television ads than most of his opponents can afford. He is already spending $1.4 million on advertising over the next two weeks on national cable news networks and in the first four states to hold a primary or caucus.
“Maybe he feels he can overwhelm these questions by spending a lot of money telling his story the way he wants to tell it,” said David Axelrod, the architect of Obama’s campaigns. “The problem is in the presidential race, the coverage is so intense and social media such a big piece of that, these kinds of vulnerabilities get shared virally very readily, and I’m not sure you can overwhelm that, even with hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Steyer could also face questions about spending that much money on himself. “Does all that spending help in the end of the day or does it become an emblem of excess and self-aggrandizement?” Axelrod said.
Asked about his letter to Farallon investors on the British Virgin Islands company that was going to help them avoid federal taxes, Steyer did not address his past actions, but called for new taxes on the rich to reduce inequality.
“I use no offshore tax havens and pay all U.S. taxes in full,” he said. “I believe we should have a much simpler and fairer tax code and get rid of all loopholes.”
NEW YORK — JPMorgan Chase acknowledged for the first time that it closed the bank accounts of Donald Trump and several of his businesses in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol, the latest development in a legal saga between the president and the nation’s biggest bank over the issue known as “debanking.”
The acknowledgment came in a court filing submitted this week in Trump’s lawsuit against the bank and its leader, Jamie Dimon. The president sued for $5 billion, alleging that his accounts were closed for political reasons, disrupting his business operations.
“In February 2021, JPMorgan informed Plaintiffs that certain accounts maintained with JPMorgan’s CB and PB would be closed,” JPMorgan’s former chief administrative officer Dan Wilkening wrote in the court filing. The “PB” and “CB” stands for JPMorgan’s private bank and commercial bank.
Until now, JPMorgan has never admitted it closed the president’s accounts in writing after Jan. 6. The bank would only speak hypothetically about when the bank closes accounts and its reasons for closing accounts, citing bank privacy laws.
A spokeswoman for the bank declined to comment beyond what the bank said in its legal filings.
Trump originally sued JPMorgan in Florida state court, where the president’s primary residence is now located. The filings this week are part of an effort by JPMorgan Chase to have the case moved from state to federal court and to have the jurisdiction of the case moved to New York, which is where the bank accounts were located and where Trump kept much of his business operations until recently.
Trump originally accused the bank of trade libel and violating state and federal unfair and deceptive trade practices.
In the original lawsuit, Trump said he tried to raise the issue personally with Dimon after the bank sent him notices that JPMorgan would close his accounts, and that Dimon assured Trump he would figure out what was happening. The lawsuit alleges Dimon failed to follow up with Trump.
Further, Trump’s lawyers allege that JPMorgan placed the president and his companies on a reputational “blacklist” that both JPMorgan and other banks use to keep clients from opening accounts with them in the future. The blacklist has yet to be defined by the president’s lawyers.
“If and when Plaintiffs explain what they mean by this ‘blacklist,’ JPMorgan will respond accordingly,” the bank’s lawyers said in a filing.
JPMorgan has previously said that although it regrets that Trump felt the need to sue the bank, the lawsuit has no merit.
The issue of debanking is at the center of the case. Debanking occurs when a bank closes the accounts of a customer or refuses to do business with a customer in the form of loans or other services. Once a relatively obscure issue in finance, debanking has become a politically charged issue in recent years, with conservative politicians arguing that banks have discriminated against them and their affiliated interests.
“In a devastating concession that proves President Trump’s entire claim, JPMorgan Chase admitted to unlawfully and intentionally de-banking President Trump, his family, and his businesses, causing overwhelming financial harm,” the president’s lawyers said in a statement. “President Trump is standing up for all those wrongly debanked by JPMorgan Chase and its cohorts, and will see this case to a just and proper conclusion.”
Debanking first became a national issue when conservatives accused the Obama administration of pressuring banks to stop extending services to gun stores and payday lenders under “Operation Choke Point.”
Trump and other conservative figures have alleged that banks cut them off from their accounts under the umbrella term of “reputational risk” after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump was impeached on a charge of inciting insurrection on Jan. 6, though not convicted in the Senate; and he was criminally indicted for his role in the riot and his attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat, but that case was dismissed after he won the 2024 election.
Since Trump came back into office, the president’s banking regulators have moved to stop any banks from using “reputational risk” as a reason for denying service to customers.
This is not the first lawsuit Trump has filed against a big bank alleging that he was debanked. The Trump Organization sued credit card giant Capital One in March 2025 for similar reasons and allegations. The case is ongoing.
In a typical election year, the interest in the down-ballot race for California insurance commissioner musters modest interest at best.
That all changed on Jan. 7, 2025, when wildfires swept through L.A. County, damaging or destroying more than 18,000 homes and killing at least 31 people.
The resulting anger directed at the insurance industry over how it has handled claims has helped draw four Democrats into the race, who will be vying this weekend for a critical endorsement at the party’s annual convention in San Francisco ahead of the June 2 primary election.
“We haven’t seen this level of competition and, frankly, choice on the Democratic side since it first became an elected office in 1990,” said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, a Los Angeles insurance advocacy group. “They represent wide-ranging views and a broad diversity of candidates.”
Up for endorsement are state Sen. Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica), whose district includes the Palisades fire zone; former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim; former state Sen. Steven Bradford; and San Francisco businessman Patrick Wolff, who has not held elective office.
Three Republicans have declared their candidacies, but that party’s convention isn’t until April. The filing deadline to file for the race is March 6.
The GOP field includes businessman Robert Howell, who lost by 20 points in the 2022 general election to current Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara. Also running are insurance agent Stacy Korsgaden from Grover Beach, and attorney Merritt Farren, whose Pacific Palisades home burned down.
Peace and Freedom Party candidate Eduardo Vargas, a Los Angeles school teacher, is on the ballot too.
The race also follows Lara’s two troubled terms in office, during which he has been accused of cozying up to and receiving money from the insurance industry for his first campaign and conferences abroad.
Lara has denied any wrongdoing, and all the Democratic candidates have vowed not to accept insurance industry donations.
“For me and maybe for many survivors, it’s not a position that we ever thought much about, but now with many of our lives devastated by our dealings with insurers I think many survivors will be watching much more closely this time around,” said Joy Chen, executive director of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, a community group that has accused Lara of being soft on insurers and has called for his resignation.
Allen was perceived by some as the leading candidate for the party’s nomination when he announced his candidacy in September. He has held his seat for more than a decade and is the only sitting legislator in the race. He said he would not be running if not for the wildfire that struck his district.
“The fire certainly was a searing experience, helping hundreds of people get their claims paid right, but it kind of begs the question of why should you have to call your state senator to get treated right,” he said.
Allen’s platform includes a number of ideas to ensure policyholders are treated better, including requiring insurers to clearly explain claim denials. But also key to his campaign is stabilizing an insurance market that over the last several years has seen insurers drop policyholders by the hundreds of thousands, especially in fire-prone neighborhoods.
That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort. It’s rolls grew even more since the January fires and the insurer has been sued by fire victims over its claims practices. Allen wants to build insurer confidence in the market by having insurer requests for rate hikes reviewed in months, rather than the year or more they can drag out now.
He also points to his legislative record, especially his authorship of Proposition 4, which was approved by voters in 2024 and set aside $10 billion in general obligation bonds to fund climate resiliency and environmental protection projects — an important part, he said, of lowering insurance risks.
Allen has drawn a key endorsement from California Sen. Adam Schiff and as of Dec. 31 had about $1 million in the bank, more than any other candidate. But the race was shook up last month when progressive politician Kim declared her candidacy. She boasted an endorsement from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for whom she worked as his California political director during the 2020 presidential campaign.
She also has drawn attention for a plan to create a state-run disaster insurance policy for Californians.
Residents would continue to buy regular home insurance from the commercial market but would buy coverage for wildfires and other disasters from the state, similar to plans in some other countries.
The idea has come under sharp criticism from Court, who said it will shift the risk of costly disasters to taxpayers while allowing insurers to make profits from more predictable perils such as water and roof damage.
“We have to explore some different models, because the current system is not working. It’s too expensive and a market failure,” said Kim, adding that the plan could evolve.
Bradford, who represented communities in south L.A County and the South Bay in the Legislature, has been endorsed by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass. He said he’s running as a pragmatist and unifier.
“What we’ve been doing for far too long has been a whole lot of finger pointing and doing the blame game,” he said.
Bradford wants insurers to open their pricing books and give homeowners “real, guaranteed” premium discounts for upgrading their property.
He also is proposing a public–private partnership that shares the risk for insurers who write policies in fire-prone neighborhoods.
Wolff, a political newcomer, is a Chartered Financial Analyst, real estate investor and former hedge manager who cites his experience building a home and auto insurance brokerage for financial services firm Capital One.
“I spent the first half of 2025 really deeply studying the commissioner’s role and the history, and the race — the politics of everything. And after really doing that deep dive, I decided to step forward,” said Wolff, who wrote his campaign a $500,000 check and loaned it another $100,000.
He also thinks rate hikes sought by insurers need to be reviewed more quickly but wants the insurance department to publish annual reports on how specific companies handled claims.
“The insurance industry has basically lobbied to keep that data anonymous at the company level, and I think it’s really important to make that information public,” Wolff said.
Under California’s open primary system, the top two candidates will move on to the Nov. 3 general election, which means two Democrats could run up against each other if a Republican isn’t able to consolidate the GOP vote.
Steve Maviglio, a longtime political consultant currently working for State Treasure Fiona Ma, who is seeking the office of lieutenant governor, said that the race is wide open.
“This is a statewide election with millions of people with candidates they’ve never heard of,” he said.
With multiple candidates seeking the endorsement, it may be hard for any single one to reach the 60% threshold of delegate votes needed.
“If no one is endorsed, somebody is going to have to be the breakout candidate, and the way you do that is with money or organization,” Maviglio said. “Until I see that happen, it’s totally up in the air.”
WASHINGTON — For a few hours on Friday, congressional Republicans seemed to get some relief from one of the largest points of friction they have had with the Trump administration. It didn’t last.
The Supreme Court struck down a significant portion of President Trump’s global tariff regime, ruling that the power to impose taxes lies with Congress. Many Republicans greeted the Friday morning decision with measured statements, some even praising it, and GOP leaders said they would work with Trump on tariffs going forward.
But by the afternoon, the president made clear he had no intention of working with Congress and would continue to go it alone by imposing a new global import tax. He set the new tax at 10% in an executive order, announcing Saturday he planned to hike it to 15%.
Trump is enacting the new tariff under a law that restricts the import taxes to 150 days and has never been invoked this way before. Though that decision is likely to have major implications for the global economy, it might also ensure that Republicans will have to keep answering for Trump’s tariffs for months to come, especially as the midterm elections near. Opinion polls have shown most Americans oppose Trump’s tariff policy.
“I have the right to do tariffs, and I’ve always had the right to do tariffs,” Trump said at a news conference Friday, contending that he doesn’t need Congress’ approval.
Tariffs have been one of the only areas where the Republican-controlled Congress has broken with Trump. Both the House and Senate at various points had passed resolutions intended to rein in the tariffs imposed on key trade partners such as Canada. It’s also one of the few issues about which Republican lawmakers, who came of age in a party that largely championed free trade, have voiced criticism of Trump’s economic policies.
“The empty merits of sweeping trade wars with America’s friends were evident long before today’s decision,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the former longtime Senate Republican leader, said in a statement Friday, noting that tariffs raise the prices of homes and disrupt other industries important to his home state.
Democrats’ approach
Democrats, looking to win back control of Congress, intend to make McConnell’s point their own. At a news conference Friday, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump’s new tariffs “will still raise people’s costs and they will hurt the American people as much as his old tariffs did.”
Schumer challenged Republicans to stop Trump from imposing the new global tariff. Democrats on Friday also called for refunds to be sent to U.S. consumers for the tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court.
“The American people paid for these tariffs and the American people should get their money back,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said on social media.
The remarks underscored one of the Democrats’ central messages for the midterm campaign: that Trump has failed to make the cost of living more affordable and has inflamed prices with tariffs.
Small and midsize U.S. businesses have had to absorb the import taxes by passing them along to customers in the form of higher prices, employing fewer workers or accepting lower profits, according to an analysis by the JPMorganChase Institute.
Will Congress act?
The Supreme Court decision Friday made it clear that a majority of justices believe that Congress alone is granted authority under the Constitution to levy tariffs. Yet Trump quickly signed an executive order citing the Trade Act of 1974, which grants the president the power to impose temporary import taxes when there are “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits” or other international payment problems.
The law limits the tax to 150 days without congressional approval to extend it. The authority has never been used and therefore never tested in court.
Republicans at times have warned Trump about the potential economic fallout of his tariff plans. Yet before his “Liberation Day” of global tariffs last April, GOP congressional leaders declined to directly defy the president.
Some GOP lawmakers cheered on the new tariff policy, highlighting a generational divide among Republicans, with a mostly younger group fiercely backing Trump’s strategy. Rather than heed traditional free trade doctrine, they argue for “America First” protectionism, which they argue will revive U.S. manufacturing.
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, an Ohio freshman, slammed the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday and called for GOP lawmakers to “codify the tariffs that had made our country the hottest country on Earth!”
A few Republican opponents of the tariffs, meanwhile, openly cheered the Supreme Court’s decision. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a critic of the administration who is not seeking reelection, said on social media that “Congress must stand on its own two feet, take tough votes and defend its authorities.”
Bacon predicted there would be more Republican resistance coming. He and a few other GOP members were instrumental this month in forcing a House vote on Trump’s tariffs on Canada. As that measure passed, Trump vowed political retribution for any Republican who voted to oppose his tariff plans.
Groves writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Matt Brown, Joey Cappelletti and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.
