A shrinking number of seats will determine control of the U.S. House after Republicans and Democrats spent much of the last year redrawing congressional maps to erase swing districts.
Even before Florida’s Legislature approved a new Republican-leaning map last week, just 16 seats were listed as “tossups” by the Cook Political Report, the nonpartisan newsletter that serves as an unofficial electoral scorekeeper. Another 16 districts are listed as leaning toward Democrats or Republicans, with the outcome all but predetermined for more than 400 seats.
This could make for the fewest competitive seats since political analyst Charlie Cook first published his race ratings in 1984. That means even if historical trends and current events favor Democrats heading into November, they’re likely to fall short of the 41 districts they picked up in the 2018 midterms during the first Trump administration.
“There aren’t really 40 seats on the board potentially right now just because of redistricting and that polarization,” said Carrie Dann, managing editor of the Cook Political Report.
That reality allows the two political parties to concentrate their resources. The Democratic House campaign operation lists 44 Republican districts in play, and the GOP equivalent is aiding 17 challengers hoping to unseat Democratic incumbents.
Those numbers can change after primary elections, but one Republican operative familiar with the party’s plans said the total number of contested seats is about half of what those the parties fought over in the last midterm election in 2022.
Republicans say the smaller map favors them. Before the most recent spate of map changes, only three Republican House members were elected in districts that Democrat Kamala Harris won in 2024 — compared with 13 Democrats defending seats that Donald Trump won.
Zach Parkinson, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said his party has better campaign infrastructure in place.
“Part of that right now is financial, but part of it is also we’re all very synced up with the president, the White House,” Parkinson said. “Everyone on our side institutionally is rowing in the same direction.”
But Democrats note that Republican efforts to aggressively gerrymander districts in Texas and Florida could leave them even more vulnerable if Democrats leverage the same kind of voter enthusiasm they did in 2018, when they won enough seats to take back the House majority.
John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said congressional districts in Texas and Florida were already designed to favor Republicans.
“So what you need to do in order to create a deeper gerrymander is make more Republican seats competitive,” he said. “As the Democratic advantage grows, the likelihood and opportunity for dummymanders increases.”
A dummymander happens when one party gerrymanders so aggressively that it spreads its majority too thin — making its seats more vulnerable if the other party performs better than expected.
Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikki Fried said that’s what Republicans did in her state last week when the Legislature pushed through a new map that GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis said will yield his party four more seats.
“I am not actually worried,” Fried said. “All of my congressional members will be reelected. They’re strong in their communities and I feel very bullish about their possibilities.”
Democrats have been overperforming in off-year and special elections by an average of 17 points over Trump’s margin of victory in 2024, and Fried said that trend suggests Democrats could pick up nine seats in Florida alone.
That seems unlikely. A Cook Political Report poll of its 36 most competitive districts as of April 6 — which Trump won by an average of 2 points in 2024 — found a six-point Democratic advantage.
Neither party has been able to solidify much of an advantage through mid-decade redistricting. What started with Republicans in Texas was countered by Democrats in California. Republicans could pick up two more seats from new maps in Missouri and North Carolina. Virginia’s new map could give Democrats as many as four more seats, a move matched by Republicans in Florida.
And it’s not over yet. The Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday limiting the use of the Voting Rights Act to create majority-Black or majority-Hispanic districts has unlocked the potential for Republicans to pick up seats in Louisiana and Tennessee.
Chris Harrington, managing director at travel transfer company hoppa, has outlined what to do to give yourself the best chance at recovering your valuables, or, at least, getting some compensation for the loss
There are seven essential steps to take if your luggage is mishandled(Image: Getty)
One of the most common travel nightmare scenarios tourists face is having their luggage go missing after a flight.
Mishandling checked-in bags costs airlines around £4.2 billion a year, according to aviation technology company SITA. If you’re one of the unlucky ones who ends up not finding your suitcase on the conveyor belt, here are the seven steps to take immediately, according to an expert.
Chris Harrington, managing director at travel transfer company hoppa, has outlined what to do to give yourself the best chance at recovering your valuables, or, at least, getting some compensation for the loss.
The most important thing, he says, is to act fast. He says: “Ultimately, the faster and more informed your response is, the better your chances of recovering your bag or at least getting clear updates on where it is.”
Chris advises heading straight to the airline’s service desk near baggage reclaim if you notice a missing bag – stressing that delays can reduce the chances of locating your bag quickly.
From then on, it’s important to have your baggage tag and flight details ready, as they will help staff begin tracking your suitcase straight away.
You should also be as specific as you can when describing the missing item. “Details matter. Think about the colour, size, brand, and any distinguishing features like stickers or tags. Even better, show photos if you have them,” Chris continued.
And once your case is all documented and reported, never forget to ask for a Property Irregularity Report, or PIR number, as it is “essential for tracking your luggage and for any future claims.”
In the meantime, most airlines try not to leave customers empty-handed. “Some carriers will provide an allowance for essentials like clothes and toiletries,” Chris notes. “If they don’t, keep every receipt, as you may be able to claim those costs back later.”
Another essential step is to contact insurance companies early on, since many policies include cover for delayed luggage after 12 to 24 hours, but the expert recommends being prepared and checking exactly what evidence they require. If, after several days, nothing is found, it’s crucial not to give up.
“You should be following up regularly,” Harrington advises, adding that “after 21 days, luggage is officially considered lost under international guidelines.”
Thats the stage in which travellers are encouraged to put forward a formal claim – according to the Montreal Convention, which sets out airline liability in such cases.
Chris highlights that passengers may then be entitled to compensation of up to around £1,300 if they provide the right documentation.
To claim that sum, “you’ll need proof of your luggage and what was inside it. The more evidence you have, the stronger your claim.”
WASHINGTON — When Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was questioned by senators during his confirmation hearing about his vision for implementing President Trump’s mass deportation agenda, he said his goal was to keep his department off the front pages of the news.
To some degree, he has. Gone are the social media video clips of now-retired Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino clashing with protesters. Mullin’s predecessor, Kristi Noem, made her first trip as secretary to New York City to make arrests with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In contrast, Mullin went to North Carolina to review hurricane recovery efforts.
The Republican administration appears to be recalibrating its approach to a centerpiece policy that helped bring Trump back to the White House, moving in many ways away from aggressive, public-facing tactics toward a quieter approach to enforcement. Despite that shift, the administration insists it is not backing down from its lofty deportation goals.
“Clearly they’ve stepped back from the, for want of a better word, the Bovinoist tactics of before,” said Mark Krikorian, the president of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for immigration restrictions. “But it’s not clear this means they’re actually stepping back from immigration.”
The Trump administration launched a series of immigration enforcement operations last year in mostly Democratic-led cities, which drove up arrests in large-scale sweeps. The crackdown sparked clashes between protesters and enforcement officers and led to the shooting deaths in Minneapolis of two U.S. citizens.
Since then, the president’s hard-line anti-immigration agenda has lost popularity with voters and there have been no new high-profile city-based operations launched, raising questions about the administration’s strategy.
“We’re still enforcing immigration laws. We’re still deporting illegals that shouldn’t be here. We’re still going after the worst of the worst — but we’re doing it in a more quiet way,” Mullin said in an interview April 16 with CNBC.
Immigration arrests have dropped, but deportation goals remain
ICE arrests have fallen in recent months, and the number of people in immigration detention has dropped from a high of roughly 72,000 in January to 58,000 this week, according to data obtained by The Associated Press.
But in a sign of its continued determination, ICE in budget documents says it plans to remove 1 million people this fiscal year and the next compared with roughly 442,000 people last year. The agency also has plenty of money to carry out its mission, with Congress granting the Department of Homeland Security more than $170 billion for Trump’s immigration agenda last year.
The administration aims to have enough space to detain roughly 100,000 people this fiscal year, which would more than double the average daily number held in ICE detention last year. The administration has already expanded its detention capacity with the purchase of 11 warehouses across the country.
“They are working on really building a juggernaut of a system,” said Doris Meissner, who headed the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, a predecessor to ICE, during President Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration and is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said there had been no change to Trump’s strategy.
“President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities,” Jackson said.
ICE did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Stripping away legal protections to ramp up deportations
Advocates for immigrants are bracing for the Trump administration to turn its attention more intently to stripping away protections for migrants with temporary legal status to remain in the U.S. while their cases are being adjudicated.
In one example of this, the number of green cards approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services dropped by half over the course of a year under the Trump administration, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute, which supports immigration into the U.S. Humanitarian visas for refugees or people who qualified for asylum saw the biggest declines.
USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler said the drop was due to increased vetting of applicants by the administration.
The Trump administration has also pushed to strip Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of people, with a key case weighing whether it’s overstepped its power to do so being heard at the Supreme Court this week.
Advocates see it as a way to send a chilling message to immigrant communities and make more people vulnerable to deportation. It also enables the department to operate without the public spectacle of workplace raids or home arrests.
ICE has also focused over the past year on creating agreements with jurisdictions around the country that allow local and state law enforcement to carry out an expanding array of immigration enforcement tasks, ranging from checking the immigration status of people in their jails to incorporating immigration checks during routine traffic stops.
These agreements, known as 287g, have grown from 135 in 20 states before Trump took office to more than 1,400 in 41 states and territories now.
Some states, most noticeably Florida and Texas, have mandated various forms of cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE.
Meissner, from MPI, said Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, is likely to prioritize further discussions about how cities and states can cooperate with ICE.
“At the end of the day, some of this may very well succeed in increasing the numbers,” Meissner said.
Calls to enforce work restrictions
Conservatives who want more deportations say the only way to truly crack down on illegal immigration is to make it so difficult for the migrants to work that they’ll leave on their own.
The Trump administration has already taken steps to make life harder for people in the country illegally including limiting who can live in public housing by immigration status, sharing Medicaid information with ICE and requiring people in the country illegally to register with the federal government.
Krikorian, of the Center for Immigration Studies, said the Social Security Administration could send out letters alerting employers when an employee’s name doesn’t match their Social Security number. Authorities could repeatedly and consistently carry out audits of I-9 forms, which companies are supposed to fill out and submit to the federal government showing that new hires are legally able to work. And they could require banks to collect citizenship information on customers.
Whatever the strategy going forward, the administration is facing heavy pressure not to back away from its goals.
“The numbers are too low,” said Mike Howell, part of the Mass Deportation Coalition, which launched a playbook for how the administration can actually get to a million deportations a year by using tactics such as worksite enforcement.
“The deportation numbers are just too low,” Howell said, “and they need to be much higher, and they can be much higher.”
Santana writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Lisa Mascaro and Will Weissert contributed to this report.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Former FBI Director James Comey appeared in court on Wednesday, kick-starting a criminal case against him that legal experts say presents significant hurdles for the prosecution and will likely be a challenge for the Justice Department to win.
Comey, who didn’t enter a plea, was indicted in North Carolina on Tuesday on charges of making threats against President Trump related to a photograph he posted on social media last year of seashells arranged in the numbers “86 47.” The Justice Department contends those numbers amounted to a threat against Trump, the 47th president. Comey has said he assumed the numbers reflected a political message, not a call to violence against the Republican president, and removed the post as soon as he saw some people were interpreting it that way.
The indictment is the second against Comey, a longtime adversary of Trump dating back to his time as FBI director, over the past year. The first one, on unrelated false-statement and obstruction charges, was tossed out by a judge last year. Now prosecutors pursuing the threats case face their own challenge of proving that Comey intended to communicate a true threat or at least recklessly discounted the possibility that the statement could be understood as a threat.
The indictment accuses Comey of acting “knowingly and willfully,” but its sparse language offers no support for that assertion. Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche declined to elaborate at a news conference on what evidence of intent the government has. But broad 1st Amendment protections for free speech, Supreme Court precedent and Comey’s public statements indicating that he did not intend to convey a threat will likely impose a tall burden for the government.
“Here, ‘86’ is ambiguous — it doesn’t necessarily threaten violence and the fact that it was the FBI Director posting this openly and notoriously on a public social media site suggests that he didn’t intend to convey a threat of violence,” John Keller, a former senior Justice Department official who led a task force to prosecute violent threats against election workers, wrote in a text message.
The case was charged in the Eastern District of North Carolina, the location of the beach where Comey has said he found the shells. He is set to make his first court appearance Wednesday at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., the state where he lives.
What the law says on threats
The Supreme Court has held that statements are not protected by the 1st Amendment if they meet the legal threshold of a “true threat.”
That requires prosecutors to prove, at a minimum, that a defendant recklessly disregarded the risk that a statement could be perceived as threatening violence. In a 2023 Supreme Court case, the majority held that prosecutors have to show that the “defendant had some subjective understanding of the threatening nature of his statements.”
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has found that hyperbolic political speech is protected. In a 1969 case, the justices held that a Vietnam War protester did not make a knowing and willful threat against the president when he remarked that “If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J,” referring to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The court noted that laughter in the crowd when the protester made the statement, among other things, showed it wasn’t a serious threat of violence.
Regarding the current case, Merriam-Webster, the dictionary used by the Associated Press, says 86 is slang meaning “to throw out,” “to get rid of” or “to refuse service to.” It notes: “Among the most recent senses adopted is a logical extension of the previous ones, with the meaning of ‘to kill.’ We do not enter this sense, due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.”
Comey deleted the post shortly after it was made, writing: “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence” and “I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”
What the government will try to prove
John Fishwick, a former U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia, said the government will likely try to prove that Comey should have known better as a former FBI director.
“I think they’re going to try to circumstantially say that you were head of the FBI, you knew what these terms meant and you said them out to the whole world as a threat to the president,” Fishwick said, though he noted that such an argument would be challenging in light of Comey’s obvious 1st Amendment defenses.
Comey was voluntarily interviewed by the Secret Service last year, and the fact that he was not charged with making a false statement suggests that prosecutors do not have evidence that he lied to agents, Fishwick said.
Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, wrote in an opinion piece published Tuesday that “despite being one of Comey’s longest critics, the indictment raises troubling free speech issues. In the end, it must be the Constitution, not Comey, that drives the analysis and this indictment is unlikely to withstand constitutional scrutiny.”
“If it did,” he added, “it would allow the government to criminalize a huge swath of political speech in the United States.”
Tucker, Richer and Kunzelman write for the Associated Press. Kunzelman reported from Alexandria, Va.
WASHINGTON — When families flocked to Yosemite National Park during their recent spring breaks, some met two-hour waits at the entrance gates. At a lakeside spot in the North Cascades in Washington state, there hasn’t been enough staff to open the visitors center. And in Death Valley, water was shut off at two campgrounds.
National parks staff and advocates fear that such issues could only worsen this summer, as the park system faces the busy season with a dramatically reduced staff. At Yosemite, concerns are compounded by the National Park Service’s recent elimination of the park’s timed-entry reservation system, which led to the long spring-break lines.
“We’re definitely really nervous and anxious about the upcoming season, especially with the staff shortage we already have,” said a National Federation of Federal Employees union member at Yosemite who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
The National Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its staff to buyouts, early retirements and other departures since the Trump administration took office last year, according to an estimate by the National Parks Conservation Assn. This month, the administration proposed cutting nearly 3,000 more positions in its 2027 budget. It also offered a recent new round of buyouts.
The push to cut the park system even further — ahead not only of peak season but of America’s 250th birthday, which the Trump administration has promoted in relation to national parks — has underscored ongoing questions about how smoothly parks can operate as warm weather and summer vacations draw tourists.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum defended the budget proposal on Capitol Hill last week, telling senators that the visitor experience to parks can be improved even while spending and staff reductions are made.
He said the agency plans to hire 5,500 seasonal workers and asked Congress to approve funding for those employees to work for nine-month stints rather than six months.
“All of that’s going to help us get this thing in shape, even with an overall reduction,” Burgum said Wednesday.
He was met with skepticism by Democrats, who confronted him over the spending proposal.
“That is just a recipe for disaster,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told Burgum.
Congress will have the final say on the proposed cuts, but in the meantime, the reductions that have already occurred presented challenges last season and appear likely to do so again, said Cheryl Schreier, a retired superintendent of Mount Rushmore National Memorial and chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
Whether the parks will get enough qualified candidates to hire the number of seasonal workers needed is also “a really big concern,” she said. “It’s really important to have all of those individuals to be able to operate a park in a good fashion.”
Campers prepare food in Yosemite Valley last December. 9, 2025 in Yosemite, CA.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
The lower staffing has prompted worry about parks’ capacity for emergency response, protection of the natural landscape and custodial maintenance. Fewer rangers could mean, for instance, fewer people to reach dehydrated, stranded or lost hikers, said Chance Wilcox, California desert director for the National Parks Conservation Assn.
A park service spokesperson said Friday that staffing decisions are made based on local conditions at each park and that the agency is “focused on ensuring parks remain open, accessible, and safe for visitors.”
About 323 million people visit America’s national parks annually, according to the Interior Department. While the parks can expect heavy traffic, a drop in international tourism and the rise in gas prices has injected additional uncertainty into the tourism industry this year.
The number of Canadians visiting the United States has dropped since Trump took office, according to the Canadian government — with the number of Canadians making car trips to the United States this March declining by 35% compared with March 2024.
The Interior Department also instituted a new $100-per-person fee for non-Americans entering 11 of the most popular parks, a move to raise money for the parks but an extra squeeze for Canadians coming across the border and other international visitors.
At the Senate and House hearings on the Interior budget, Burgum presented a vision of the national parks system as one where most employees should be working at a park and interacting with visitors, and said he was more focused on filling those roles than jobs in regional offices.
“Our goal is to have more people actually working in the parks,” he told senators.
An Interior Department spokesperson said the agency was “advancing high-priority improvements” across the system.
“Secretary Burgum has been clear that resources should be prioritized toward visitor-facing services, public safety, maintenance, and projects that improve the experience for the American people,” an Interior Department spokesperson said in a statement Friday.
Critics say that strategy displays a misunderstanding of how the 109-year-old agency functions. Employees who work on contracts, human resources, IT, communications and other organizational and administrative jobs are essential to keeping the parks running, Wilcox said.
“If everything were visitor- or front-facing, the entire agency would collapse from behind,” said Wilcox, of the National Parks Conservation Assn.
The decision to discontinue the reservation system at Yosemite — as well as at Arches and Glacier national parks — is another part of Interior’s mission to bring more people into the parks. The concept was “designed to expand public access” this summer, the park service said in announcing the policy in February. It kept the timed-entry reservation system in Rocky Mountain National Park for the peak season.
Visitors take pictures while walking through Muir Woods National Monument on July 24, 2025 in Muir Woods National Monument, California.
(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
In addition to causing long lines, cramming too many people into the parks at once could lead to environmental damage, particularly if people park cars in natural areas, said Don Neubacher, a retired Yosemite superintendent and member of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
“It’s going to be mass chaos,” he said.
On a Saturday at the end of March, Jon Christenson of Coarsegold, Calif., drove to the park with his 38-year-old son. They were surprised to encounter a two-hour wait to get into the park, plus at least a half-hour hunt for parking after they made it through the gates, he said.
“It was almost like Disneyland. It was really uncomfortable from the standpoint of just so many people,” said Christenson, 82. “It’s kind of troubling to see that they’ve opened up the floodgates and now it’s kind of ruining the experience for everybody.”
Rangers there are doing multiple jobs, and last summer they helped clean bathrooms in the absence of custodial staff, the Yosemite union member said. Now they, too, are concerned about the potential for gridlock.
The worker asked summer visitors to bring patience: “The folks at the National Park Service … they will be grateful for any compassion and empathy.”
