politics

NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana’s attorney general has been indicted over accusations she threatened the jobs of New Orleans leaders who fought a Republican-led overhaul of local courts in the heavily Democratic city.

The 16-count indictment against Republican Liz Murrill, handed up Thursday by a New Orleans grand jury, charges Louisiana’s first female attorney general with intimidation and malfeasance.

At the center of the case are deepening rifts between state leaders in Louisiana, which is heavily Republican, and Democrats who control the state’s most prominent city.

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry promised a swift pardon, saying Murrill would not have her reputation tarnished by an “Orleans kangaroo court.” Mayor Helena Moreno, a Democrat, was among those who had accused the state’s top law enforcement official in May of making threats against public officials.

Murrill called the case against her “retaliatory, meritless, and unconstitutional.” Late Thursday, Murrill said she had filed for an emergency stay with the Louisiana Supreme Court.

“I will not back down. I will continue enforcing the law, fighting corruption, and doing the job the people of Louisiana elected me to do,” she wrote on X.

For months, political tensions intensified between Louisiana Republicans and New Orleans officials over a new law that abolished a court clerk office won by an exoneree, Calvin Duncan, who spent nearly three decades in prison. The change consolidated that job with another clerk’s office, which Republican supporters said would make the local judicial system more efficient.

The change was staunchly opposed by New Orleans leaders, and in May, the City Council set a special election that would have given Duncan a chance to win the newly combined job. Murrill responded by warning local officials in letters that they could lose their offices for violating state “usurper” laws, which forbid support for an unauthorized officeholder.

“We’re very interested in elected officials in New Orleans not being intimidated or threatened by letter or any other way,” special prosecutor Laurie White told reporters.

Bond for Murrill was set at $400,000 on Thursday, according to court records.

Landry said he was ordering state police to investigate what he called “alleged improprieties” of the grand jury and those who ran it.

“The criminal justice system is a circus at its finest in Orleans and we will not have any of that!” he wrote on X.

The Republican Attorneys General Assn. said that making statements to local officials — in writing — was simply “issuing a legal opinion and warning public officials about the law” as part of her official duties. It called the indictment “as outrageous as it is dangerous.”

Moreno, who was elected in January and was defiant after Murrill sent the letters, on Thursday called it a “matter for the courts” and did not directly address the allegations.

“My focus, as always, remains on fulfilling the responsibilities the people of New Orleans elected me to carry out,” Moreno said.

Duncan has said he believes state officials were retaliating against him in eliminating the job he won with 68% of the vote. Murrill and Landry have long refused to acknowledge his innocence, though he’s listed on the National Registry of Exonerations.

Republicans have said the change was not personal and supporters have noted that the offices of criminal and civil clerks of courts are combined in other parishes.

Duncan was a jailhouse lawyer who later graduated from law school. He founded a nonprofit dedicated to expanding incarcerated people’s access to the court system and was the driving force behind a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended nonunanimous jury convictions.

Duncan spent more than 28 years in prison over a fatal shooting during a robbery in 1981.

The night before a 2011 hearing to consider new evidence, prosecutors offered to reduce Duncan’s sentence to the time he’d already served in prison if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery. Duncan took the deal and was freed but didn’t give up on clearing his name.

In 2021, a judge agreed that Duncan had been unjustly convicted and vacated his sentence altogether. Landry and Murrill have pointed to the 2011 plea deal in objecting to Duncan calling himself exonerated.

Riddle and Hanna write for the Associated Press. Associated Press reporter Jack Brook in New Orleans contributed.

New Jersey is launching a new fee on companies whose workers have Medicaid health coverage instead of being covered by their employers. Other states are considering it, too.

Democratic lawmakers and governors see it as a way to help pay for the joint federal and state insurance program that covers low-income residents as federal policy changes are expected to make the program more expensive for states and may lead to a reduction in the number of people with coverage.

Proponents also say it’s about fairness because employers benefit from having some lower-income workers with taxpayer-funded health coverage.

Business groups object. So do some liberal policy organizations.

New Jersey is putting the fee in place

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a measure Tuesday night to charge employers that have at least 50 workers covered by Medicaid, and the state budget she approved earlier in the week counts on raising $145 million this year from the program.

Under the plan, companies will be billed for each employee and employees’ dependent receiving Medicaid, the joint state-federal insurance program.

The fees per person would start at $325 a year for companies with 50 to 249 Medicaid beneficiaries and top out at $725 annually for employers with at least 500 recipients.

A bill passed this week in California doesn’t impose a charge now, but it does direct the state administration to present lawmakers options for doing so next year.

Finishing the job would fall to the successor of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who is leaving office in January. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra has made an employer charge part of his election platform.

State Sen. John Laird, a Democrat who sponsored the California proposal, said the big tax and policy law President Trump signed a year ago was a major factor in the need for action because it could prompt the state to spend more on Medicaid to plug holes left by federal changes.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects more than 10 million people will be uninsured because of the law by 2034. It requires some beneficiaries to work, be in school or volunteer — and requires even more to document whether they meet the requirements.

Most employees at the bigger companies would not be at risk of losing Medicaid coverage as long as they’re working at least 20 hours a week.

Laird also said there’s an equity issue involved.

“If you’re a small business person in California, you are quite likely paying for health insurance for your employees. And through your taxes, you’re paying for health insurance for some of the biggest employers in California,” he said. “And that’s not fair.”

Legislation with similar intents passed one legislative chamber in both Colorado and Oregon this year, but neither made it to law. A measure was also introduced in Washington.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat who is seeking a third term in November’s election, has called for the same move there with the idea of making it a part of the state budget that would kick in two years from now.

Opposition comes from business and some liberal groups

It’s no surprise that business organizations have criticized the approach, which would add to their expenses.

“The fact remains that many job-creators are still going to be penalized for something they have no control over,” Christopher Emigholz, the chief government affairs officer at the New Jersey Business and Industry Assn., said in a statement. “If an employee declines an employer-provided health plan because they’d rather be on Medicaid, it is unfair to penalize the employer for that employee’s decision.”

Some left-leaning policy organizations also oppose the charges.

Gideon Lukens, who analyzes health policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that while the idea may be well-intentioned, it could lead companies to employ fewer people from low-income household or single parents. He said companies could also consider the policy in decisions about whom to hire or lay off — and also on where to locate or how many workers to employ.

And, he said, it could make employees — or potential employees — less likely to enroll in Medicaid knowing it would make them less attractive to employers.

“Usually, when I see a tax on something it’s going to discourage whatever being taxed,” he said in an interview.

New Jersey’s legislation tries to address some of the concerns. It would exempt temporary, seasonal and part-time employees. It would also bar employment decisions based on a workers’ Medicaid status.

Charging companies whose workers are covered by Medicaid isn’t a new idea. At least two states have previously enacted it, and it’s been proposed in Congress.

Massachusetts lawmakers in 2017 adopted a charge on employers up to $750 per nondisabled worker who was covered through Medicaid or a state-subsidized health exchange plan. The program began in 2018 was not renewed when it expired the next year.

An even earlier policy in Maryland, in 2006, immediately affected only Walmart. An industry group challenged it in court and won, stopping the fees.

The latest generation of proposals may avoid that legal pitfall by not referencing those health plans in the legislation.

Mulvihill writes for the Associated Press.

July 3 (UPI) — The Justice Department on Friday called on states to investigate whether businesses and individuals are artificially inflating gas prices amid complaints from President Donald Trump that costs are too high.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. along with Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson sent a letter to state attorneys general asking them to join federal investigators in probing potentially illegal practices.

“Recent volatility in crude oil prices does not suspend either the antitrust laws or state consumer protection laws, and it does not authorize companies to manipulate retail prices or collude with their competitors,” the letter read.

“We also encourage State Attorneys General to use all tools available under your state laws to investigate and prosecute any misconduct causing unjustified prices increases — particularly conduct that violates state antitrust and consumer protection statutes.”

Gas prices have been on the rise since late February when the United States and Israel began attacks on Iran. Tehran, in return, largely shut down the Strait of Hormuz to traffic, crippling the the transport of oil through the waterway. About one-fifth of the world’s gas supplies pass through the strait.

An agreement between the United States and Iran reopened the strait, but Trump took to Truth Social on June 23 to complain that gas prices had not dropped fast enough.

“The big Oil Companies are not dropping their price at the pump commensurate with the sharply lower prices they are paying for Oil,” he wrote. “Those prices are dropping like a rock! In other words, customers are being ‘gouged.’

“I have instructed the DOJ to immediately start looking into this. Gasoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!”

AAA reported Friday that the current national average gas price was $3.82 per gallon for regular gasoline, down from $4.26 a month prior. One year ago, it was $3.16 per gallon.

WASHINGTON — President Trump reshaped this year’s U.S. Senate map by sidelining some Republican incumbents and promoting loyalists to replace them. Now the question is whether he’ll put his money where his mouth is.

With four months to go until November’s elections, it’s still unclear how much MAGA Inc., the country’s largest political war chest, with $382 million in the bank as of last month, plans to spend on key races.

The silence has persisted even as Senate Republican leaders have urged Trump’s team, both privately and publicly, to pick up the tab for the president’s decisions.

Front and center is Texas, where Trump successfully endorsed fiery conservative Ken Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn, a choice that some Republicans grumble has turned a safe election into a toss-up that will drain resources away from other battlegrounds. Democratic nominee James Talarico, a state lawmaker, has made Paxton’s history of corruption allegations a central target of his campaign.

“The president picked Paxton, and he’s got $350 million,” Cornyn recently told Semafor. “I think he can spend his money.”

Another challenge has emerged in North Carolina, where Sen. Thom Tillis declined to run for reelection after feuding with Trump last year over healthcare spending.

Trump backed Michael Whatley, his former handpicked chair of the Republican National Committee, to run instead, and Democrats hope to flip the seat with former Gov. Roy Cooper.

Some in Republican campaign leadership are expecting MAGA Inc. to pitch in for Whatley in North Carolina, where the several metro media markets can be pricey.

Republicans will likely be able to count on generous support from well-funded official party committees, which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this week should be allowed to make unlimited direct contributions to candidates’ campaigns.

But even that sum falls short of what Trump has stockpiled in MAGA Inc. Even though the president is constitutionally barred from running again, he began raising money shortly after winning a second term, and he’s regularly held fundraisers at his resort properties where tickets cost $1 million per person.

James Blair, the former White House political director who left his government job to coordinate the president’s midterm efforts, was evasive in an interview with Sean Spicer, a former Republican spokesman who hosts a podcast.

“The president is going to expend substantial resources to win the midterms,” said Blair. “He cares deeply about the party winning.”

As a super PAC, MAGA Inc. can raise unlimited money from individuals and corporations. However, it is barred from coordinating with individual campaigns or national Republican committees, which adds to the sense of mystery surrounding its plans.

It’s been more than two months since Blair, along with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, pollster Tony Fabrizio and political advisor Chris LaCivita huddled at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria to discuss MAGA Inc.’s strategy.

The huddle was focused on assembling teams of vendors, such as advertisers, canvassing providers and digital media company leaders who had worked with the Trump team in key states during previous elections and who would be dispatched once plans were in place.

The president has spent much of the year waging a war of retribution against Republicans who have crossed him. He viewed Cornyn as insufficiently loyal, held a grudge against Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana for voting to convict him in an impeachment trial and assailed Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky as the “worst Republican Congressman in history.”

All of them lost their primaries to Trump-backed challengers.

Cornyn’s loss weighs heavily on Senate Republicans, who suggest that Paxton could cost the party an extra $100 million to defend the seat.

Senate Leadership Fund, the principal super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, is still expected to spend money on advertising in Texas, but not to play a central role given its obligations elsewhere.

Democrats must net four seats to take the majority, and they see Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio as their best opportunities. The Senate Leadership Fund has already committed to spending $342 million across these four states, plus Iowa, Georgia, Michigan and New Hampshire.

When Paxton came to Washington after winning the nomination May 26, he had a cordial meeting with Thune focused on moving forward together, according to people with knowledge of the conversation who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Later that day, Thune suggested that Trump should be putting up money for a candidate whom Senate Republicans hadn’t asked for.

“We will do what we need to do to make sure the state stays red,” Thune told reporters. “But I’m certainly hopeful the president and the resources he can bring to bear will be engaged.”

“It’s going to be an expensive race,” he added.

Beaumont writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press White House correspondent Seung Min Kim contributed from Washington. Beaumont reported from Des Moines.

WASHINGTON — Festivities commemorating the 250th anniversary of American independence from Great Britain kick into higher gear across the United States on Friday as celebrations are balanced with efforts to stay safe as much of the country bakes under extreme heat.

President Trump will travel to South Dakota to deliver a speech and watch fireworks at Mt. Rushmore. And in a novel twist, there will be a ball drop in New York City’s Times Square at midnight to usher in the July Fourth holiday with much the same revelry that is typically reserved for New Year’s Eve.

The activity culminates in the main event Saturday, when fireworks will erupt in communities across the U.S., along with backyard cookouts and block parties. Trump will deliver another speech at the National Mall in Washington before what is being billed as a historically massive fireworks show.

But for all the celebrations, there are also serious safety considerations as potentially record heat grips much of the Midwest and East Coast. Officials have warned those celebrating the holiday to stay hydrated and take air-conditioned breaks as needed.

The heat has already affected some of the programming surrounding the holiday. In Washington, organizers of the Capitol Fourth concert banned the public from attending a Thursday rehearsal because of the heat.

The concert Friday, a staple of Washington’s Independence Day traditions, is on, but the gates will open to the public later than usual, at 7 p.m. EDT, an hour before the show. Organizers of celebrations in Washington on Saturday said they were adding water stations along with cooling resources and medical support.

From Boston to Norristown, Penn., and Gettysburg National Military Park, plans were shifting to accommodate the soaring temperatures. Amtrak canceled some trains in the Northeast due to excessive heat that could affect the tracks.

The holiday is unfolding at a unique time in the U.S. The anniversary has served as an opportunity for the country to reflect on its history while also reminding it of the political polarization of the moment.

Even the celebrations themselves have not quite escaped the divide.

Freedom 250, an organization aligned with the White House, has come to rival America250, a bipartisan group founded by Congress a decade ago. Freedom 250 has organized much of the activity in Washington, including the Great American State Fair, which has gained attention for the relatively small crowds it has attracted. America250 is behind the ball drops unfolding in many cities, including New York, and will host a concert in Los Angeles on Saturday.

About 4 in 10 U.S. adults feel “proud” about the country’s 250th anniversary, according to an April survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Roughly 3 in 10 said “excited” describes their emotions.

Sloan writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press writers John Hanna in Topeka, Kan., Michael Casey in Cambridge, Mass., and Calvin Woodward in Washington contributed to this report.

For nearly six months, Delcy Rodríguez’s interim government has tried to project a different image: less ideological, more administrative; less revolutionary, more technocratic. The earthquakes became the first real test of whether that transformation ran deeper than economic policy. It didn’t. Faced with the country’s worst humanitarian disaster in decades, the Venezuelan state reverted almost instinctively to the habits it had spent 25 years learning.

The earthquake handed Delcy Rodríguez something politics rarely does: a chance, however limited, to soften public perceptions of her government. Nobody expected it to prevent the earthquake or even manage it flawlessly. The bar was much lower than that. Venezuelans expected a government that communicated at least somewhat honestly, remained visible, welcomed help wherever it came from, and, above all, stayed out of the way of those trying to help. Instead, many of its decisions seemed almost designed to produce the opposite effect, leaving an already angry public even angrier.

For the crucial first hours after the earthquake, Venezuelan civil society largely filled the vacuum left by the state. By the time the government moved to reclaim the space it had forfeited, the nature of its response had become clear. The emphasis was no longer on expanding the rescue effort, but on reasserting control over it. The government’s administrative response had been slow. Its political reflexes were anything but that.

Why?

The obvious explanation is incompetence. Of which there was certainly plenty. But incompetence alone cannot explain why a government whose political identity has been built on the appearance of public support repeatedly embraced decisions that seemed to generate even greater public anger. Something deeper appears to have been at work.

Responding to earthquakes requires a very particular kind of approach. Unlike ordinary governance, disaster response cannot be centralized for long. Every collapsed building becomes its own command center. Every neighborhood develops different priorities. Every rescue team faces different engineering challenges. Governments do not succeed because they directly coordinate thousands of decisions. They succeed because they remove obstacles that allow thousands of other people to make good decisions simultaneously.

As civil society increasingly assumed functions the state could not perform, it also threatened to accumulate visibility, legitimacy, and influence outside government control.

During normal times, governments can afford to centralize decisions and insist that major initiatives pass through official channels. Earthquakes punish those instincts. Rescue operations cannot wait for permission, and civil society and the private sector suddenly become indispensable partners in the state’s response. The democratic governments (like the one overseeing Venezuela’s “transition”) that perform best recognize this early, spending the first critical hours empowering society rather than attempting to direct every aspect of the response themselves. For twenty-five years, chavismo taught its institutions almost the opposite lessons.

The government could not lead the humanitarian response with the effectiveness the moment demanded. Society therefore began leading significant parts of it instead. Volunteers organized rescue brigades. Churches became shelters. Journalists became emergency information networks. Engineers inspected damaged buildings. Diaspora organizations coordinated donations. Foreign rescue teams rapidly became the public face of many rescue operations. None of this was unusual. This is how major disasters are managed around the world.

What was unusual was the kind of state confronting the disaster.

Every major political crisis reinforced the same institutional lesson: autonomous organization reduced the state’s control over society. Independent organization was rarely viewed as something to harness, but was something to supervise. NGOs are suspected of serving foreign interests, until proven innocent. Independent journalists and universities are seen as political adversaries. Neighborhood networks are just three doritos away from becoming opposition structures. Enemies abound in the schizophrenic chavista view of societal organization. Because for a chavista state that has banked its continuous survival on complete, centralized control, such a degree of civil organization represents an extinction level threat.

Those lessons make sense for a political system primarily concerned with its own survival. They become profoundly maladaptive during natural disasters. Thus, the humanitarian response itself gradually became part of the government’s problem. As civil society increasingly assumed functions the state could not perform, it also threatened to accumulate visibility, legitimacy, and influence outside government control. Administratively, this strengthened Venezuela’s response. Politically, it displaced the government from the center of its own national emergency. Most democratic governments would welcome that trade-off. 

What authoritarian systems find difficult to tolerate is not civilian participation itself, but civilian participation they neither direct nor control. The rescue volunteers were not political activists. The churches distributing food were not organizing protests. The programmers building databases of missing persons were not preparing electoral campaigns. Yet institutions do not respond only to intentions; they respond to patterns. For a security apparatus that had spent years dismantling decentralized civic networks, from the humanitarian aid operation of 2019 to the comanditos of 2024, the potential may have mattered more than the differences.

Search-and-rescue operations have become increasingly militarized, with rescue crews at the Tahití building reportedly prevented by the military from reaching survivors for hours.

Seen through that lens, what initially looked like a series of political blunders begins to look more like institutional habit. Faced with a humanitarian emergency it lacked the capacity to fully manage, the government fell back on the institutions it trusted most: those responsible for regulating information, supervising autonomous actors, and maintaining political control. Much of the administrative state had long ceased to be valued primarily for its capacity to govern, functioning instead as an instrument of patronage and political management, while the coercive apparatus remained the regime’s principal institutional investment.

Faced with the limitations of both its own incompetence and the state it had spent decades constructing, havismo has increasingly resorted to the tactics with which it is most familiar. Survivors who expressed their anger at the government’s lackluster response, such as Wilmer Cruz, have reportedly been arrested. Search-and-rescue operations have become increasingly militarized, with rescue crews at the Tahití building (Caraballeda, La Guaira) reportedly prevented by the military from reaching survivors for hours. Intelligence agencies such as the DGCIM have been deployed to intimidate the families of victims, while, as the Sky News Trump 100 podcast reported, authorities have obstructed reporting from Caracas.

For months, the debate surrounding Venezuela’s transition has centered on whether chavismo was truly changing or merely adapting. The earthquake suggests the answer is both. Markets can be liberalized. Diplomatic priorities can shift. Revolutionary rhetoric can soften. Institutional instincts are far more resistant to change because they are built over decades of incentives, routines, promotions, and crises.

The earthquake did not create those instincts. It merely forced the government into a situation where it could no longer avoid relying on them.

Every state becomes good at what it repeatedly practices. The chavista regime spent twenty-five years investing in political control rather than disaster response; in supervising society rather than empowering it; in preserving power rather than preparing for catastrophe. When the country’s greatest humanitarian emergency in decades arrived, society responded with the institutions it had built to save lives. The state responded with the institutions it had built to preserve power. The earthquake did not force the Venezuelan state to choose between control and effective governance. That choice had been made long before the ground began to shake.

July 3 (UPI) — The Louisiana Supreme Court granted a stay on state Attorney General Liz Murrill’s indictment, less than 24 hours after a grand jury approved charges.

The New Orleans grand jury charged Murrill, a Republican, with 16 felony counts of malfeasance in office and public intimidation related to alleged threats contained in a letter she sent to Orleans Parish leaders in May.

The letter allegedly threatened recipients, including Democratic Mayor Helena Moreno and District Attorney Jason Williams, that they could lose their positions if they opposed a new law to combine New Orleans’ criminal and district clerks of court. The eliminates the position of newly-elected Clerk of Court Calvin Duncan, a Democrat.

The Louisiana Supreme Court halted the criminal proceedings Friday morning, citing potential conflicts of interest tied to special prosecutor Laurie White’s past actions representing Duncan.

The court’s ruling also questioned reports of incidents during the grand jury proceedings, including allegations that journalists were forcibly removed from the proceedings in handcuffs.

“While the record before this Court is undeveloped, there is considerable support for the view that the Attorney General is likely to succeed on the merits of a motion to quash this indictment on either a legal basis or due to apparent procedural irregularities,” The Hill quoted the ruling as stating.

“The Attorney General makes a compelling argument concerning the disturbing defects in the grand jury proceedings and in the trial court’s handlings of those proceedings. This indictment appears to turn the law on its head and flows from what appear to be extraordinary procedural defects and improprieties.”

Murrill praised the development in a statement posted to social media.

“I’m grateful to the Louisiana Supreme Court for swiftly issuing a stay in this matter. The constitution and laws of Louisiana impose a wide swath of duties on the Attorney General. I will continue to carry out those duties to the best of my ability,” she wrote. “This matter is not over. I will still need to file the necessary motions to seek a dismissal, which will be forthcoming.”

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, R, had earlier pledged to pardon Murrill.

“I would like to inform the great citizens of Louisiana who care about the rule of law, that our fabulous Office of the Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill will not have to worry about having her reputation tarnished by this kangaroo grand jury or the Orleans Kangaroo court as I will pardon her as fast as the law allows. The criminal justice system is a circus at its finest in Orleans and we will not have any of that,” he wrote on social media.

WASHINGTON — Small towns across America had big plans to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial this weekend. Local historical societies scheduled town square readings of the Declaration of Independence, hired bands to play patriotic tunes, organized parades and set up themed baking contests.

But many of their most ambitious plans were scrapped after the Trump administration cut $100 million in federal funding for humanities nonprofits and state councils at the start of its term. The decision severely hampered local planning for America’s 250th anniversary, disrupting history projects, museums and educational programs nationwide.

Instead, the Trump administration funneled tens of millions in federal dollars to Event Strategies, the firm behind Trump’s infamous rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, to organize anniversary events throughout the nation’s capital centered on President Trump.

The result, historians say, has become a centralized, more politicized spectacle, marking the national milestone as a celebration of an imperial presidency rather than a revolution from kingly rule.

The spectacular show that Americans will see features Trump at its center, culminating a year of concerted efforts by the president to put his face on passports and currency, national park passes and government buildings.

Members of the Dance4Life studio in Claymont, Del., prepares to march ahead of the Red, White, & Blue To-Do Pomp & Parade on July 2, 2026, in Philadelphia.

(Al Drago / Getty Images)

Yet, beyond the noise of the nation’s capital, historians and teachers, docents and curators, archivists, tour guides and reenactors have sustained the messy, organic discourse of the American story, less funded but no less vocal in their patriotism.

“The way history has been argued since Trump returned to office has been a reminder that governments and political figures have remarkable power to shape a society’s historical memory,” said David Ekbladh, a history professor at Tufts University and author of “Look at the World: The Rise of an American Globalism in the 1930s.”

Trump’s effort to control the anniversary narrative has reminded Ekbladh of one of George Orwell’s most famous quotes: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“The administration’s clear signals that it can and will restrict funding to institutions seems to have muted the way many institutions, like museums and universities, have approached the anniversary,” Ekbladh added. “With this said, Trump’s own direct, personal use of the 250th has been less about articulating a clear view of the nation’s history than using the moment itself to keep attention on him.”

The White House has taken a more active role in the festivities than initially planned, setting up its own Freedom 250 project to supplement America250, a bipartisan congressional effort to celebrate the occasion.

Fencing is seen around the Great American State Fair on the National Mall on Thursday.

(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

The Trump administration has directed funding to events centered on the president’s attendance, primarily around Washington, and partnered with conservative organizations such as PragerU and Hillsdale College to present the country’s founding story through a conservative Christian lens.

Historians are in broad agreement that this year’s celebration has garnered far less attention than the bicentennial, marked in 1976, which generated blanket media coverage and widespread national excitement.

Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College and author of “The New Imperial Presidency,” attributed the lack of enthusiasm this time in part due to a more fragmented media landscape than existed 50 years ago, denying the country a “core curriculum” and a shared story.

“I don’t think it’s a lack of patriotism, so much as a determination that no presidential administration should be able to center itself as the focus of that patriotism,” Rudalevige said.

“There’s a lot to celebrate in the text of the declaration. But that’s not where the focus of the Freedom 250 efforts has been,” Rudalevige said. “It would have been interesting to see what the bipartisan America250 initiative could have come up with if its funding and energies had not been diverted.”

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is fenced off in preparation for Fourth of July fireworks.

(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

Trump has scheduled little national travel around the anniversary, visiting North Dakota this week for an event that allowed him to debut a new version of Air Force One, donated by Qatar and outfitted to the president’s tastes. Trump intends to keep the plane after leaving office for his personal use.

The jet will fly over the National Mall alongside the Defense Department’s most impressive equipment on Saturday, before the president delivers a speech in what is forecast to be a blistering heat wave. The evening will end, according to administration officials, with the largest fireworks display in U.S. history.

“The fundamental challenge that we face now is the fight between the historians — people who have been studying the past and who have been thinking about how to tell that story to the public — and government leaders over who gets to control that story,” said Peter Kastor, chair of the history department at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The people who are really on the front lines are museum professionals, the operators of historic sites and schoolteachers,” he said. “They face the responsibility for explaining the past to a general audience on a day-to-day basis, and they are the ones who most often face the backlash from people who want the story to be told differently.”

ROME — President Trump’s attacks on Italy’s premier have had an unintended consequence.

After Trump questioned Italy’s reliability as a wartime ally and claimed Giorgia Meloni had groveled for his attention, European leaders rallied to Meloni’s side, thawing what had been a frosty relationship over her hard-right political roots.

It is the latest example of how the often divisive American president is helping to draw Europe closer together.

European leaders are finding more reasons to coordinate on defense, tariffs and foreign policy as they confront wars in Ukraine and Iran, a ballooning trade deficit with China, and threats from Russia. That leaves Trump, who has often preferred to negotiate with European countries individually, with less ability to do so, analysts say.

“Most of the mainstream leaders realize that Europe is getting squeezed between China and America, and so, if not now, then when?” said Sudha David-Wilp, vice president at the German Marshall Fund. “They need to act as a bloc in order to maintain Europe’s place in the world.”

This newfound European unity could be tested next week at a NATO summit in Turkey.

European leaders rally around Meloni

Meloni’s spat with Trump has helped her strengthen ties with European leaders once wary of her party’s post-fascist roots.

A pivotal moment came in March when she wouldn’t allow U.S. bombers headed to the Middle East to use a base in Sicily without parliamentary approval.

For years before then, France and Germany often kept Meloni outside the small-group talks that helped shape Europe’s response to major foreign policy crises. That persisted into 2026 amid disagreements over the Russian war on Ukraine, including Meloni’s rejection of a proposal by Britain and France to send European troops there following a possible ceasefire.

But Trump’s escalating attacks on Meloni — who called Trump’s criticism of Pope Leo “unacceptable” — helped shift the dynamic, prompting European leaders to rally around her.

After all, they, too, have been on the receiving end of Trump’s barbs.

Meloni was firmly in the fold at a late June meeting in Berlin with the leaders of Germany, France, Britain and Poland. And she met the next day with French President Emmanuel Macron in southern France — the first bilateral summit since the pandemic.

Europe’s nationalist parties are adjusting

Even nationalist parties across the continent once aligned with Trump are recalibrating their stances because his trade policies and war with Iran are proving unpopular with voters.

In France, far-right leader Jordan Bardella recently blasted U.S. actions as “foreign interference” and described Trump as “erratic” and “extremely unsteady.” Bardella had previously welcomed Trump’s brand of nationalism as a “wind of freedom.”

In Germany, leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany party have criticized the U.S. military campaign against Iran. The co-leader of the party, Tino Chrupalla, said in March he was “extremely disappointed” with Trump, whom he had viewed as a politician who would avoid new conflicts.

The changing rhetoric comes as elections approach, putting more focus on domestic issues.

“This pushes everyone to consider a European horizon more than an international one,” said Lorenzo Castellani, a political analyst and professor at Rome’s LUISS University,

Beyond Europe’s biggest powers

These dynamics are playing out beyond the European Union, from the Arctic Ocean to the Balkans.

When Trump threatened to take Greenland by force, protests erupted in its capital, Nuuk, and in the Danish capital of Copenhagen. Leaders across the political spectrum bristled at the threatened infringement of European sovereignty and feared it could shatter the already stressed NATO military alliance.

In Albania, a luxury development being planned that is linked to Trump’s family business has become a major political issue, drawing protests in June.

The political risks of close alignment with Trump were perhaps most clearly illustrated in Hungary. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — long regarded as Trump’s closest ally in the European Union — was voted out of office in April despite support from the U.S. president and prominent figures in the MAGA movement.

An analysis by the consultancy Maplecroft suggested that negative perceptions of the Trump administration may have weighed on Orbán politically.

Meloni’s balancing act

Though Meloni remains closely aligned with Trump on issues like immigration and security, she has long diverged from him on Ukraine. Her steadfast support for Kyiv made her more palatable for European leaders and has been a key factor in forging a more united European front toward the U.S.

During their public spat last month, Meloni said her friendship with Trump came with a heavy political cost.

In her response to his accusation that she had “begged” to be photographed with him while at the recent G7 summit in France, she wrote on social media: “As for my popularity, being your friend has certainly not helped it, nor does it depend on my relationship with you.”

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that Trump is deeply unpopular in Italy. According to the survey, 83% of Italians have no confidence in Trump’s ability to do the right thing regarding foreign affairs. His handling of a range of issues — including Iran, tariffs, and U.S. immigration policies — received a low level of support.

With a national election due by 2027 — and possibly as early as next spring — Meloni faces mounting political pressures, including fallout from the unpopular Iran war and her former ties to Trump.

Voters across Europe could hold their own politicians accountable for the actions of an American president beyond their control, said Castellani, the political analyst.

“At a certain point, when voters see the price of gasoline rising because of a war perceived as distant, they ask Meloni for the bill, not Trump.”

Zampano and McNeil write for the Associated Press. McNeil reported from Brussels. AP writers Sylvie Corbet in Paris, Geir Moulson in Berlin, and Justin Spike in Budapest, Hungary, contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The head of the FBI’s Chicago field office is abruptly leaving his position, according to a resignation message he sent to colleagues and multiple people familiar with the situation who said he was told to retire.

Douglas DePodesta has served as special agent in charge in Chicago, one of the FBI’s largest offices, for nearly two years and has been with the bureau since 2002.

He told colleagues that his last day would be Monday, according to a message seen by the Associated Press. Multiple people familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel move, said DePodesta had been pushed to retire.

The events leading up to his departure were not immediately clear, but DePodesta alluded in his farewell note to a conflict that he suggested had precipitated it.

“I’ve never backed down from a fight, as long as it meant our personnel could continue serving the FBI’s mission,” DePodesta wrote in the message. “Unfortunately, that has proved unpopular over time and my departure is a consequence of that.”

The move is part of a broader upheaval in the FBI’s workforce as Director Kash Patel has sought to force out line agents and supervisors alike who are perceived as not supporting the Trump administration’s agenda. It also comes amid prolonged tumult in the law enforcement community in Chicago, whose top federal prosecutor, Andrew Boutros, described this week a sweeping review of more than 1,000 grand jury presentations made by Illinois prosecutors following the dismissal of a high-profile case over misconduct.

The FBI declined to comment Thursday, but the bureau’s “rapid response” social media account on X responded to a separate post about DePodesta’s departure by saying: “It’s simple: Anyone who is not on board with THIS FBI under the leadership of President Trump — which has achieved the lowest murder rate ever — is free to leave.”

DePodesta also quoted in his note from a farewell message from Patel’s predecessor, former Director Chris Wray, who reminded the workforce that “you have been who the American people have turned to in their darkest moments” and praised them for having “stayed true to the values that define who we are, and to the qualities for which we stand: Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity.”

DePodesta joined the FBI in Chicago in 2002 and worked drug investigations. He later held senior roles at FBI headquarters in Washington and in Detroit and Memphis before being named top agent in Chicago in August 2024.

Tucker and Richer write for the Associated Press.

On June 25, the United States Supreme Court decision allowed President Donald Trump and his administration to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians, paving the way for their legal immigration status to be removed.

Trump has pushed to end TPS for several groups, as part of his efforts to restrict immigration into the US.

But lawmakers from both political parties have argued that stripping Haitians of their TPS status could create a caregiving crisis, given their presence in key industries like healthcare.

“Of the 350,000+ lawful Haitian TPS holders, roughly 1/3 work in our healthcare system. Immediately shutting off TPS will create a crisis in our hospitals, nursing homes, and in the [intellectual disabilities] community,” Republican Representative Mike Lawler wrote on the social media platform X.

Democratic Representative Ayanna Pressley echoed that sentiment in a statement.

“Seniors will lose their caregivers when we already have a caregiving crisis, and seniors will lose their ability to age in community with much-needed assistance,” she wrote.

The Temporary Protected Status programme allows nationals from countries experiencing crises, such as natural disasters or armed conflict, to live in the United States for up to 18 months. The federal government had previously renewed the designations, making them effectively permanent, before President Trump took office for a second term in 2025.

Lawler’s estimates about how many Haitians with TPS work in the US healthcare system are within the range of what the data show.

The Trump administration decision — and Supreme Court ruling — affect about 330,000 Haitians whose TPS-related work authorisations expire on July 10. They face deportation unless they qualify for another status. The ruling also applies to Syrians and Venezuelans.

About 158,000 Haitians in Florida have TPS, the majority of whom are in South Florida. The Sunshine State has the largest population of TPS recipients in the US: nearly 404,000 people. More than half are from Venezuela and about one-third are from Haiti, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

With an ageing population and an existing caregiver shortage, healthcare experts say the end of TPS for Haitians will have a significant effect on the US healthcare industry.

Of the 330,000 Haitian TPS holders, about 13,000 work daily as nursing assistants, caring for 65,000 patients, The Boston Globe found. Another 8,000 Haitian caregivers serve 12,000 children and ageing people, according to Americans for Immigrant Justice, a Miami-based nonprofit law firm that provides free representation to low-income immigrants.

Experts said the TPS healthcare workforce exodus will be felt most acutely in New York, Massachusetts and Florida.

With its high populations of older people and immigrants, Florida is expected to be particularly hard-hit.

David Grabowski, a Harvard Medical School healthcare policy professor, said the decision will “have a major impact on nursing homes, assisted living facilities and home care agencies”.

What will happen if most Haitians with TPS are deported?

Healthcare researchers say deporting Haitian recipients of Temporary Protected Status will add pressure on a strained system.

Immigrants who have TPS are more likely to work in healthcare, with one 2025 study finding that recipients represent 15 percent of all noncitizen healthcare workers. (TPS recipients make up about 2.1 percent of the total immigrant population.)

Immigrants make up a large share of direct care workers — people who are home health aides, personal care aides and nursing assistants.

There is already a national shortage of home health aides, personal care aides, nursing assistants and other long-term care and eldercare workers, but the US will need even more in the future. The US 65-and-up population is expected to rise from 58 million to 82 million by 2050 — a 42 percent increase.

Nearly half of US nursing homes report limiting admissions due to staffing shortages, and 19 percent recently met the minimum staffing levels set by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. In 2023, shortages of nurses and other employees caused about two-thirds of US hospitals to operate below capacity.

“People who run nursing homes, chronic care hospitals and home care agencies – they are all saying this is a crisis,” said Dr Steffie Woolhandler, a distinguished professor of public health at City University of New York’s Hunter College. “There has long been a shortage of folks who are willing to do direct care work as nursing aides, and there’s still a shortage now, so, of course, if the US deports them all, it’s just going to make it worse.”

Drishti Pillai, the director of immigrant health policy at the research nonprofit KFF, said, “The long-term care industry is already facing shortages prior to these immigration policy changes, so I think it’s accurate to say that this is going to further exacerbate the situation.”

Why do so many Haitians with TPS work in caregiving?

Healthcare experts pointed to several reasons for TPS holders’ high numbers in direct care, including job availability, an easier certification process compared with other healthcare jobs, and prior experience caring for family members.

“We do not have sufficient native-born workers to fill all the caregiving jobs,” Grabowski, the healthcare policy professor, said.

These positions also typically have lower barriers to entry for licensure, or no English language requirements, experts said. Refugee settlement organisations often recommend the work to immigrants for those reasons.

The positions are “extremely difficult to fill” because they’re physically and emotionally demanding, with low pay and with little or no employee benefits, said Priya Chidambaram, senior policy manager with KFF’s programme on Medicaid and the uninsured.

Some Haitians also have experience caring for sick family members in their homes, given the lack of nursing home infrastructure in their home country.

In the end, experts said there will be many more people who need this care than people who will be able to provide it.

“This was true before the ruling,” Chidambaram said. “Now, the impact will only be worse.”

The administration of United States President Donald Trump has announced felony charges against a former Olympic athlete for allegedly harming the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.

At a news conference on Thursday, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro accused professional canoeist David Hearn, 67, of deliberately vandalising the pool.

“Today, a grand jury has returned a felony indictment against a defendant, David Hearn, for felony destruction of property, for which he faces 10 years in prison,” Pirro, a Trump appointee, said.

She proceeded to call the destruction of national monuments “one of the most offensive images” she has ever seen.

“This unchecked vandalism and civil disorder turns into criminal behaviour, and that’s why we’re here today,” Pirro said. “They are an affront to the dignity of our shared history.”

But in media interviews, Hearn has denied any vandalism, saying that, like many Americans, he was simply curious about the Reflecting Pool when he visited on June 19.

The Reflecting Pool had been the subject of a renovation effort Trump began in April, as part of a wider initiative to reshape Washington, DC, through controversial construction and maintenance projects.

Trump awarded a no-bid contract to a firm to seal and resurface the granite pool in a colour he dubbed “American flag blue”. But observers noted that, as soon as the pool reopened in early June, it suffered an algae bloom, and blue paint began to peel from its bottom.

Faced with criticism about the $13.1m renovation contract, Trump countered that vandals had sabotaged the Reflecting Pool.

At least seven people, including Hearn, have been arrested on allegations they may have harmed the pool’s blue-painted bottom.

Hearn has maintained his innocence. He says he was cycling by the Reflecting Pool when he stopped to look at the peeling paint, and he reached in the water to feel it. He denies removing any part of the pool.

Pirro, however, described a different scene. She said National Park Service employees observed Hearn “forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands”, damaging roughly 2 square feet — or around 0.18 square meters — of pool sealant.

“A parks employee actually told Hearn to stop his behaviour and stop what he was doing. Hearn reacted by shouting at that parks employee,” Pirro alleged.

Reporters confronted Pirro with questions about whether charging Hearn with a felony was disproportionately punitive, since similar cases have been considered misdemeanour offences.

One journalist asked Pirro if her decision to seek a felony indictment was influenced by Trump, who wrote on Truth Social that a 10-year prison sentence should “be fully enforced” for any attempted damage to the Reflecting Pool.

“I didn’t charge anything harshly. I charge according to the evidence,” Pirro replied. She argued that Hearn caused damage exceeding $1,000, thereby necessitating a felony charge.

She also dismissed comparisons with the millions of dollars in damage caused by Trump supporters during the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Nearly all of those defendants were pardoned on the first day of Trump’s second term.

“Are you really talking about January 6th? I’m not,” Pirro told one reporter. A hearing in Hearn’s case is scheduled for July 9.

On Thursday, preparations for the July 4 fireworks show began at the Reflecting Pool, with large nets spread across the entire structure.

According to a police officer on the site, the nets are intended to catch the debris that could fall into the pool during the show. The site remains fenced off to visitors.

Still, many have come to look at the pool and see the controversial renovations firsthand.

Brian Williams, a 31-year-old from Roscoe, Georgia, praised Trump for his efforts to beautify the city. He said that algae was normal for a pool full of still water in the heat of summertime.

“I don’t think people have any business vandalising anything,” Williams added. “If you have something that you dislike about the president, don’t take it out on the people’s pool.”

But others were more sceptical of Trump’s claims. Jon Delgado, a 40-year-old Navy veteran from Collierville, Tennessee, expressed frustration at seeing the Reflecting Pool in its current state.

“I came here with my wife and my family to show them the beauty of America, the spirit of what we fought for,” he said. “To see it trashed like this, it just makes me angry.”

Delgado called Trump’s accusations about vandalism at the site “really crazy”.

“We have just got to ask ourselves: Is this where we’re at, in the state of America, that we’re believing something like this? You can look for yourself: This thing has pond scum all in it, and it stinks. There’s no vandalism,” he said.

WASHINGTON — President Trump and his fellow Republicans are reviving a line of attack against Democrats heading into the midterm elections: They’re communists.

In just the past week, Trump has issued dark warnings that members of the Democratic Party’s ascendant left are communists who want to “completely destroy the traditional American way of life” and even engage in assassinations. Vice President JD Vance has similarly called out communism as a political shift that is “something we haven’t seen in the U.S.” House Speaker Mike Johnson has decried “radical candidates” who are “self-described, self-identifying Marxists.”

The GOP’s ideological focus conflates democratic socialism, which often centers on securing universal healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy and stricter corporate regulation, with communism, under which private ownership is largely eliminated. It has been building since Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor last year.

But it’s kicked into a higher gear recently after democratic socialists won several New York City congressional primaries last week. The primary victory on Tuesday by another democratic socialist, Melat Kiros, for a Denver congressional seat suggested the trend may extend beyond Manhattan liberalism.

“The Democrats are making this easy for us,” Rep. Richard Hudson, the North Carolina Republican who leads the House GOP’s strategy and fundraising arm, said in an interview. “They’re nominating extreme liberals, leftists who are out of touch even with mainstream Democrats.”

Republicans are holding onto slim majorities

The messaging effort comes as Republicans scramble to hold onto threadbare congressional majorities in the November midterms. It risks overlooking public frustration, particularly among younger voters, with unfettered capitalism at a time of growing income inequality and rising costs.

But it also gives Republicans a much-needed opportunity to shift the conversation back to territory that is more comfortable for them after their party has spent much of the year on defense over the fallout from Trump’s decision to launch a war against Iran, which contributed to widespread price spikes.

Ralph Reed, the longtime conservative activist who hosted Trump last week at a Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, acknowledged that Republicans are facing steep headwinds this year. But the recent string of wins by democratic socialists, he said, allows Republicans to present a contrast between “common sense and crazy.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks during a Get Out the Vote (GOTV) rally at Kings Theater on June 18, 2026 in New York City. Sanders joined Mayor Zohran Mamdani ahead of next week’s primary, and the start of early voting on Saturday, as the pair campaigned for Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who are challenging incumbents in Democratic primary contests.

(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

Democrats are uncertain over the party’s direction

The renewed push could tug at tensions among Democrats who are largely united in their loathing of Trump but are divided over the party’s direction. This year’s primaries are shaping up as a referendum between centrists who are eager to course correct from what they see as progressive overreach earlier in the decade and a left-wing pushing for even more sweeping change.

“A lot of this anger has been boiling under the surface,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, which was founded by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats. “It’s coming to the fore in this moment in a very powerful way.”

But Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a centrist New Jersey Democrat, called the victories in Colorado and New York “aberrations.”

“We’ve got to fight like hell to keep our party from being hijacked by socialists,” he said. “Most of them are bomb throwers, not problem solvers.”

Nevada Atty. Gen. Aaron Ford easily dispatched a more progressive rival earlier this year in his Democratic bid for governor in a state Trump carried in 2024. As he eyes a general election challenge to Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, he insisted candidates like those who won in New York don’t represent all Democrats.

He said the Democratic Socialists of America “is not the face of our party.”

Rep. Suzan DelBene, a Washington Democrat who chairs the House Democratic campaign committee, said in a statement that Republicans were “resorting to desperate attacks that aren’t actually about the pocketbook issues.”

Trump risks overreaching with communism argument

Trump and fellow Republicans risk missing the mark when the public’s embrace of capitalism might not be as strong as it was decades ago.

About half of U.S. adults, 54%, have a positive view of capitalism, according to an August poll from Gallup, a slight decline from 61% in 2010. Democrats have driven some of the shift, but favorable opinions of capitalism have fallen among independents as well.

Only 42% of Democrats viewed capitalism favorably, while 66% had a positive view of socialism. The poll found that both younger and older Democrats have warmed slightly on socialism since 2010, but Democrats under age 50 are much less likely to view capitalism favorably. Democrats age 50 or older didn’t shift meaningfully.

“Young voters, who I would argue are driving a lot of the electoral energy that we’re seeing, came of age politically in a post-Soviet world,” Geevarghese said. “The attacks don’t land in the same way when Donald Trump was politically of age.”

Hudson, who is running the House GOP campaign committee, acknowledged the communism line might not resonate in the same way with all voters, particularly younger people. That’s why, he said, it’s important for Republicans to tailor their message to the needs of individual districts.

“I’ve never run cookie-cutter campaigns where we just say one thing over and over everywhere,” he said.

Still, the argument was high on Trump’s mind again on Wednesday as he visited the newly built Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota. He called the former president a “ferocious opponent of a thing called communism.”

“It’s the biggest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, September 11,” he said. “It’s a bigger threat, potentially a bigger threat than that, because it’s like a cancer that spreads, and you better stop it fast.”

Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale University who has written on the rise and fall of Sen. Joe McCarthy, said earlier eras of anti-communism politics took hold because there was a large and active Communist Party in the U.S. and the Soviet Union was the country’s primary foe. But she said Trump’s focus on the issue is notable given his ties to Roy Cohn, a onetime confidant of Trump who earlier worked for McCarthy.

“It’s not very many steps to get from McCarthy to Roy Cohn to Donald Trump,” she said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a potential Democratic presidential candidate, shrugged off Trump’s communism focus as “bunk.” In an interview, he said the direction of the party isn’t all that different from the dynamics he’s navigated for decades in California politics.

“I governed in an environment where the DSA was otherwise known as progressives,” he said. “This dialectic is so deeply familiar to me, and I don’t over read any of it.”

Sloan writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 10,000 people over a five-day period at the end of June, marking a major push by the agency tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s mass deportations agenda.

The arrest numbers, obtained from a person familiar with the information who spoke anonymously to discuss data that has not been publicly released, comes after the agency shifted its approach from high-profile arrest sweeps in major American cities to quieter ways to reach President Trump’s deportation goals.

The figures indicate that while the administration is no longer cracking down on individual cities, the arrests continue and are surging.

The total number of arrests during the five-day period starting Friday and ending Tuesday translates to roughly 2,000 arrests per day. It was not clear where the arrests had taken place.

The spike in arrests was first reported by The New York Times.

“Since Day One, DHS law enforcement has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists,” said the Department of Homeland Security in a statement. “Our message is clear: if you come to our country illegally, we will find you, we will arrest you, and we will deport you.”

The arrests news also comes as the number of people entered into ICE detention facilities climbed in June to roughly 39,000 after hovering near 30,000 per month since February, according to information obtained by the Associated Press.

ICE doesn’t publicly release arrest data, making exact comparisons with previous periods difficult. But according to data provided to UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project and analyzed by The Associated Press, 2,000 arrests per day would mark a sharp increase over previous periods.

December had the most ICE arrests since the beginning of the Trump administration, and that month only averaged 1,283 arrests per day nationwide.

In January, at a time when the administration flooded the streets of Minneapolis and surrounding regions with hundreds of immigration enforcement officers, arrests averaged about 1,212 per day across the country.

But that proved to be a turning point in the Trump administration’s mass deportations agenda after two American citizens were killed by immigration officers while protesting the crackdown in Minneapolis.

Border advisor Tom Homan started drawing down the number of officers in Minnesota as the agency stepped back from the flashy surge operations that had been common during the tenure of then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Operations under Noem, headed by former Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino, were marked by frequent clashes between immigration enforcement officers and protesters in footage that was often splashed across the Department’s social media channels.

In February, immigration arrests fell to 1,057 a day, according to information from the Deportation Data Project. The Project sued through the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the ICE arrests data, and it is only current through February.

After Noem was fired, her successor at Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, suggested he’d be taking a more low-profile approach to immigration enforcement and he aimed to get the department out of the headlines. But Mullin was expected to adopt Trump’s priorities on immigration.

Santana writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — A former Olympian was indicted Thursday on a felony charge in what President Trump has called vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where a renovation project he launched has been riddled with problems.

David Hearn, a former Olympic canoe racer, was indicted on a single count of property destruction in a Washington, D.C. court.

District of Columbia U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro said Hearn ripped up recently installed sealant on the pool in “a deliberate act” that caused more than $1,000 in damage. She accused him of “forcefully and violently” pulling up the bottom liner “with both hands” and acting belligerently toward an employee who told him to stop.

“This is a case with tremendous evidence,” she said, adding that authorities have made about six other misdemeanor arrests.

In a statement, Democracy Defenders Fund co-founder Norm Eisen and Mary Dohrmann, senior counsel at Washington Litigation Group, said that they represented Hearn and that the charges were “outrageous and should be alarming to every American.” Eisen and Dohrmann construed the case as representative of “the misuse of government power against an ordinary citizen based on a concocted narrative.”

Hearn didn’t immediately return a phone call seeking comment. He previously told the Associated Press that he reached into the pool on June 19 to examine the newly peeled coating. He said he briefly touched a chunk that was still attached to the side of the pool, then let go shortly after a park worker told him to.

“I’m a curious citizen,” Hearn said in a telephone interview last month. “I reached down to see what it felt like. It was very rubbery.”

Hearn, 67, of Bethesda, Md., owned a company that made composite materials used to build watercraft.

Saying that he stopped by the pool during a 64-mile bike ride, Hearn said he was detained by National Guard troops and U.S. Park Police for five hours before being released.

Trump said last month that federal authorities made “multiple arrests” of people he accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool as he struggled to explain why the $16-million rehabilitation project he launched for the nation’s 250th anniversary seemingly backfired. Without providing any substantiation, he also said vandals dumped fertilizer into the pool and slashed the coating with a box cutter.

In subsequent days, National Guard members and the park police patrolled the deck around the Reflecting Pool as Trump’s administration faced a self-imposed deadline to fix a botched renovation before the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration. Contractors and federal workers used chemicals and ozone nanobubbles to combat an algae bloom, and Trump has said that the problems probably require draining the pool again for liner repairs.

Whitehurst and Kinnard write for the Associated Press. Kinnard reported from Columbia, S.C.

WASHINGTON  — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. led a fractured Supreme Court this year that both expanded a president’s power to run the government and dealt major defeats to President Trump.

In Trump’s second year back in the White House, Roberts and the court punctured his claim to have power with no limits.

The justices struck down his worldwide tariffs, ruling these import taxes are a matter for Congress, not the president.

They also threw out his executive order that would end the principle of birthright citizenship. The Constitution wrote this promise into law, Roberts said, and the president may not change it.

The court also ruled in December that the president did not have the power to put National Guard troops on the streets of Chicago.

The three decisions came over fierce dissents from conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. and with Neil M. Gorsuch in two of them.

The three liberal justices dissented angrily when the court ruled the administration may end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians.

They did the same when the court ruled the president may replace the top appointees of semi-independent agencies.

But they joined Roberts in a 5-4 ruling that affirmed the independence of the Federal Reserve and blocked Trump’s move to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

Trump has won on most immigration fronts because Roberts and the conservatives believe Congress put the enforcement power in the hands of the administration. They point to the law authorizing temporary protection which says there shall be “no judicial review” of the decision to end the protection.

Roberts is a solid conservative who also tries to keep the court on a middle course. It’s an approach that rarely wins plaudits from the right and almost never from the left.

This year the chief justice prevailed with different coalitions.

This week, the court ruled by a 5-4 vote against the Republican National Committee and upheld state laws that allow for counting late-arriving mail ballots. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined with Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Barrett also joined the chief justice in the rulings on tariffs and birthright citizenship.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. speaks to the Georgetown Law School graduating class in 2025.

(Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)

This week, the court also limited the power of police to use cellphone data to look for crime suspects. This too came on a 5-4 vote when Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined Roberts and the three liberals.

Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus, who has been a friend of Roberts’ since their time in law school, said the chief justice “is clearly working very hard” to put together majorities.

“It is not easy to formally preside over a court in which five of its members (Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch on the right and Justices Sotomayor and Jackson on the left) deride the kind of efforts at moderation that is the chief’s preferred signature and harshly condemn him when he strays from their own views.”

Washington attorney Roman Martinez, a former clerk for Roberts, said the court is “clearly right of center” but the decision on tariffs was the most important of the year.

“It is a huge deal for the court to say ‘no’ to the president on his major policy initiative,” he said.

Stanford law professor Michael McConnell agreed. “It’s hard to claim the court is in Trump’s pocket when he lost the major cases,” he said.

Trump responded to the tariff defeat by calling the justices in the majority a “disgrace to our nation” and “disloyal to the Constitution.”

They “sicken me,” he said of Justices Barrett and Gorsuch, his two appointees who joined Roberts in the 6-3 majority.

Trump went to the court in April to hear his top attorney defend his executive order on birthright citizenship. He left after an hour of mostly skeptical questions.

On the term’s last day, Roberts issued a clear and eloquent 26-page opinion setting out America’s history of according citizenship to children who were born in this country, without regard to their parents.

This view came from England “and crossed the Atlantic with the colonists — and was adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution,” he wrote. “Nothing is better settled,” Justice Joseph Story wrote in 1830.

But it was unsettled by the fight over slavery.

“In the odious decision of Dred Scott v. Sandford, this Court imposed the Southern States’ beliefs onto the Nation” and decreed Blacks could not become citizens, Roberts wrote.

Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were among the many who condemned the court’s decision, he said.

“It took more than a decade — and the addition of names such as Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chancellorsville to our national canon — but Douglass’s vision of ‘our common humanity’ would be fulfilled,” he wrote.

The Reconstruction Congress wrote this rule into the 14th Amendment and said “All persons born” here are citizens by birth.

The principle of birthright citizenship had been upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898, the chief justice wrote, and it had gone unchallenged until Trump returned to the White House last year.

But Thomas filed a 91-page dissent arguing that immigrants must be “domiciled” here before their children may become citizens.

Alito filed a separate 39-page opinion branding the Roberts opinion a “serious mistake.”

On that note, the court adjourned for its summer recess.

Story and pictures by Erick Franco

A short drive along the Playa Grande coastal boulevard provides a glimpse of the scale of the disaster, 100 hours after the June 24 earthquakes. Businesses burned due to gas leaks, while the limited police presence began to give way to theft and looting throughout La Guaira’s commercial district. Along the 8.8-kilometer stretch between the Playa Grande Caribe Hotel and Calle Real de Mare, vacation and residential buildings from the mountainside collapsed onto the roadway, blocking much of the route and making access to Playa Verde extremely difficult. Once there, the damage to the smaller beachfront buildings becomes immediately apparent. As night falls, makeshift shelters appear along the coastline, high-voltage power lines lie across the roads, and damaged buildings continue to shed debris.

By 8:00 am of June 26, after the first 36 hours following the tragedy, the upper areas of Playa Grande and Playa Verde reveal an even more devastating reality. Daylight exposes nearly three kilometers of destruction, from Playa Grande’s Main Avenue to South CV Avenue, now reduced to ruins. Near the César Nieves Stadium, one resident helps distribute water throughout the community while telling us that he lost his three daughters, ages 7, 11, and 14. Despite his unimaginable loss, he says he must keep going because his mother is still alive.

Local residents report that about 40 people were inside the Chipi’s Beach Hotel when the building collapsed, but only two managed to escape alive. Using only their own resources, community members worked to rescue 10 people whose cries could still be heard beneath the rubble. Finally, after more than 30 hours without assistance, firefighters arrived following an appeal made by volunteer students from the Central University of Venezuela.

Next to Chipi’s Beach is the home of Mary, who has spent the past two days beside the body of her mother. As they attempted to flee during the earthquake, her mother became trapped in the narrow passage between the hotel’s exterior wall and the wall of their home. Mary explained that a forensic team determined her mother died instantly and without suffering after a structural column fell across her torso. University volunteers spent two hours attempting to recover her body, but were unsuccessful.

The same scene repeats itself on Fifth Street in Playa Grande, where residents and volunteers at the Residencias Malecón buildings recover three bodies from the rubble. At the same time, paramedics and rescue teams from El Salvador gradually arrive to assist in rescuing a children’s dance group trapped inside the Aguja Azul building.

Venezuelan military personnel, volunteer rescue teams from El Salvador, Venezuelan firefighters, and police officers began to experience the physical toll caused by the odors, dust, and debris in the La Páez area of Catia La Mar. Cases of diarrhea, nasal allergies, and back pain were treated by volunteer medical personnel. Family members gathered at Block 3 of La Páez, where 13 people had been rescued alive, while search teams used probe technology in an effort to locate additional survivors.

These first 100 hours after the earthquake revealed the complete collapse of an entire sector and the social abandonment of the affected communities by government institutions. Residents remained outside hospitals hoping to receive medication, surviving through donations, supplies, and the generosity of others while conducting physically demanding rescue efforts with little training and driven only by the hope of finding their loved ones.

One week after the tragedy, access to water remains limited, the smell of decomposition permeates the entire Catia La Mar area, the businesses that could provide food and essential supplies remain closed, telephone coverage is still incomplete, and power service is being restored only gradually.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has spent months waging an unusually aggressive campaign to reshape how states run elections, leveraging federal agencies in ways no previous president has attempted.

He has pushed the Department of Homeland Security to compile a list of citizens in each state to help determine voter eligibility. He is seeking to give the Postal Service a role in deciding who can receive mail ballots. He has threatened to withhold federal funding from states unless they phase out electronic voting machines. And he is pressuring Republican lawmakers to overhaul voting laws, claiming without evidence that elections are being rigged.

The efforts have run into resistance in court and within his own party. They have also left postal workers and local election officials bracing for an election cycle marked by deepening doubts about election integrity, and uncertainty about how the federal government may challenge the post-election results.

“It’s an unprecedented power grab to reshape how our elections work so that he and his allies can maintain and expand power,” said Eric Kashdan, director of federal advocacy at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan government ethics organization.

The White House defends the effort as fulfilling a campaign promise, and argues the administration is “lawfully enacting the agenda President Trump was elected to enact.”

One of Trump’s defining efforts to assert some federal control over state elections has been his insistence on passing the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide proof of citizenship when they register, require Americans to show identification when casting a ballot and require states to send voter data to the Department of Homeland Security.

His relentless push for the measure has prompted him to derail a bipartisan housing bill and threaten to forgo signing any piece of legislation unless the voting measure is approved. He says he considers the matter a “national emergency.” Despite the pressure campaign, Senate Republican leaders maintain there is not enough support to pass the measure.

The political stakes ahead of the midterms have been laid out more bluntly by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), whose chamber has approved the SAVE America Act. Last month, Johnson warned conservatives gathered at the Faith & Freedom Coalition that if Democrats win back control of the House, they will “go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors, friends,” and supporters.

“I run the protection program,” Johnson said. “I will take care of you.”

Setbacks in court

The administration’s ambitions have hit numerous snags in court in the last month, with judges reaffirming in many cases that the Constitution gives states — not the federal government — primary authority over elections.

In one case, U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, who was appointed by President Biden, went further.

She said a federal immigration database the Department of Homeland Security was compiling to determine voter eligibility violated privacy laws. She added that the database has resulted in states actively removing U.S. citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

James Percival, the general counsel for Homeland Security, said the ruling was the latest example of “how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist.”

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority this week also dealt a blow to the GOP and upheld state laws that allow for counting mail ballots that are postmarked by election day but arrive late.

The decision left Trump fuming. He said it was a “a little bit surprising” to see the court’s decision, claiming without evidence that the result will inevitably give “people more time to vote illegally.”

Democrats, in turn, saw the ruling as a necessary check on the Trump administration’s efforts.

“While we continue to see unprecedented efforts to interfere with elections from the Trump administration, it is a relief to see federal courts make clear that these attacks on mail and absentee voting are clearly illegal and unconstitutional,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Los Angeles) said in a statement after the ruling.

Trump is still eyeing changes to voting by mail. In March, he issued an executive order that seeks to limit who can receive mail ballots. Under the proposed rule, the Postal Service would not deliver mail ballots to states that don’t turn over sensitive voter data to the federal government, Postmaster General David Steiner told a Senate panel last month.

The admission drew immediate condemnation from Democratic lawmakers. They argued the regulation is an illegal attempt to coerce states into handing over their voter rolls.

“Please push back on being a pawn in this authoritarian playbook,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) told Steiner. “The Postal Service is one of the most important institutions in our country. Don’t taint it with the obsession of this one man.”

A day after that back-and-forth, U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, who was nominated by President Obama, blocked those plans — at least for now.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” the judge wrote, while adding that the Postal Service does not have the legal authority to determine who can vote by mail and how.

The White House said Wednesday that the administration remains confident the executive order will be in place by the November election.

Taken together, the administration’s efforts are unprecedented, UCLA law professor Rick Hasen said. That’s because the Constitution puts control over elections in the hands of the states and grants Congress the ability to pass laws, he said.

“The president really only has authority through federal statutes that have already been passed,” Hasen said. “It’s not surprising that many courts have struck down or stopped him from doing things to try to interfere with how elections are being run.”

Postal workers waiting for clarity

The legal setback for the Postal Service proposed rule was welcome news to the union representing postal workers.

“We believe that what we’re being asked to do is in violation of the oath that we took,” said Jonathan Smith, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents more than 200,000 postal workers.

Following the ruling, the union called on the agency to abandon the rule, arguing it “will crush mailers’ trust in the Postal Service” and undermine “one of the most important functions the Postal Service and postal workers perform in service of the United States and its remarkable democracy.”

In several states, the union has run ads promoting mail voting as safe and a needed option for Americans. The ads were planned before Trump signed his executive order in March seeking to limit who can receive mail ballots, Smith said.

Now, the ads are taking a different meaning. Smith argued that “sometimes God works in mysterious ways.”

“The ad was then and is now intended as a piece to educate America about how good vote by mail is, how much it has been working out,” Smith said. “It’s an educational piece, not a response to the White House.”

Ahead of the election, Smith said postal workers are waiting for clarity on how their duties may change. But right now, he says, there isn’t much.

Orange County Registrar Bob Page said his office is monitoring any changes to existing federal and state election laws to ensure any changes, if needed, are implemented without disruptions. But he acknowledged the timing crunch could create some hurdles the closer the election gets.

“In many ways, any change to how California voters cast their ballots made between now and election day would create a challenge and may even be disruptive,” Page said.

He said many counties have ordered outgoing and return ballot envelopes for the election to ensure envelopes for more than 23 million California voters are ready to use by the Oct. 5 mailing deadline. Any change to how ballots should be prepared or mailed could present an issue.

“Our office has received calls from voters asking about potential changes to vote-by-mail procedures usually tied to media coverage about proposed changes,” he said. “We inform these voters that our procedures have not changed because the law has not changed and that we will mail their 2026 General Election ballots by Oct. 5.”

L.A. County prepares for possible voting changes

In Los Angeles County, election officials are also in a battle to bring clarity to the process as the administration ushers in a series of proposed changes to the election.

Dean Logan, the head of the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office, said his office is fighting to contain a wave of election misinformation, including some that is amplified by the White House.

“It’s not something that we’ve seen happen before, and certainly not at the level we’ve seen,” Logan said.

Rather than respond to every claim, Logan says his office picks its battles, intervening only when a falsehood appears likely to reach a wide audience. Even then, the office tries to avoid engagement with whoever is spreading it.

If the administration imposes a new rule closer to the election, Logan said his office is ready to follow the law.

“It’s really been about finding this balance of staying alert and prepared for the possibility [of change] but also not getting sucked into the political distraction,” he said.

Last month, Trump claimed without evidence that Democrats have cheated to win California’s primary elections, and boasted about federal prosecutors in Los Angeles investigating the matter.

Trump has also continued to claim Democrats are trying to rig or cheat in the upcoming election, remarks that have faced rebukes from members of his own party.

“I think it is ironic that we control the House, Senate, Supreme Court and the White House and we are yelling election fraud. I mean, we won all the damn elections,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told reporters last month.

At the national level, Senate Democrats have said they plan to send election observers to polling places on behalf of Congress in reaction to Trump’s efforts.

“We are not waiting for chaos to arrive,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said last month. “We are preparing now.”

Times staff writer Justine McDaniel contributed to this report from Washington.

PHOENIX — For decades, all that separated the U.S. from Mexico was barbed wire.

Now, after a massive infusion of cash from Congress, President Trump’s administration is swiftly building what it has dubbed a “smart wall,” a combination of 30-foot-tall steel fencing and an array of sophisticated technology like sensors, cameras and towers allowing Border Patrol to surveil the territory.

The wall is under heavy scrutiny for the billions of dollars being dedicated to it when border crossings are at their lowest in decades. Critics say the U.S. is militarizing the border as it increasingly deploys sophisticated surveillance technology to the area, impacting local communities.

“We are seeing a massive expansion of surveillance and surveillance technology across the borderlands,” said Ricky Garza, border policy counsel at the Southern Border Communities Coalition, an advocacy group. “The wall in all its forms is harmful to communities.”

Officials say the technology is complementary to the physical wall and frees up agents for other tasks.

“It’s a smart wall. It’s not just a barrier,” Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said during recent congressional testimony. “It maximizes the use of our most valuable resource, which is our agents.”

Contracts for hundreds of miles of wall already inked

The wall has been a top priority for Trump, a Republican, since he first ran for president.

During the administration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, the border emerged as a flashpoint, with thousands of people seeking to cross into the country each day. Those numbers started to taper off shortly before Trump returned to office last year and then slowed to a trickle, with his broader immigration crackdown serving as a deterrent for would-be migrants.

Flush with $46 billion to finish the wall after an infusion by Congress for immigration enforcement, CBP is inking tens of billions of dollars in contracts to build the wall and push along the president’s signature project.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said recently that a preliminary part of the wall will be finished by “this time next year.” Scott said his agency is putting up 6 miles of wall a week.

Hundreds of miles had already been built before Trump returned to office. As of mid-June 2026, CBP has erected another 74 miles and aims to build hundreds more. There is no wall planned for roughly 535 miles of the roughly 2,000-mile-long border, because rugged terrain already serves as a barrier. Ground sensors and towers will be used instead.

CBP is also going back to hundreds of miles of already built wall and adding more technology, lights and roads. Along the long stretches of river in Texas that mark the border with Mexico, they’re deploying 12- to 15-foot-long cylinder-shaped buoys meant to keep migrants or smugglers from crossing the border.

More technology being deployed on the border

Technology is playing a greater role in the Trump administration’s effort to make illegal crossings along the border more difficult, part of a broader transformation of CBP in the years since Sept. 11, 2001, into an intelligence operation with a mass surveillance network whose reach extends far beyond the nation’s frontiers, according to reporting by The Associated Press.

And critics say the border technology poses a threat.

The Southern Border Communities Coalition says surveillance technologies can push migrants into more dangerous routes to avoid being detected.

Garza, the group’s policy counsel, warned that surveillance technology infringes on the privacy rights of border residents and that locals have found ground sensors used to detect smuggler or migrant traffic placed on their property without their consent.

Nayda Alvarez and her relatives own land along the Rio Grande roughly 125 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. She has found cameras placed on her family’s land, and just last week she spotted a surveillance tower about a quarter of a mile down the river from her house.

“Are we expecting a war or something?” she said. “It doesn’t make me feel safer.”

Dave Maass, director of investigations for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on civil liberties related to digital technology, said the technology has made the border area “a hostile environment” for locals and would-be migrants.

The foundation has published a guide on the various types of surveillance towers in use along the southern border designed to help local residents.

These can range from fixed towers with video, infrared and radar technologies that have a range of roughly 8 miles to remote video surveillance systems that have cameras and a spotlight fixed on top. Some are mounted on the backs of trucks so agents can drive them to different parts of the border.

Increasingly, these towers are autonomous. They can scan an area, analyze what they’re seeing using artificial intelligence and alert Border Patrol agents to something suspicious. Proponents say this helps keep Border Patrol agents out in the field instead of sitting in front of computer screens watching for activity. But it also increases AI decision-making along the border when experts have warned about the technology’s potential for bias or other problems.

The big GOP tax cuts and spending bill passed by Congress last summer requires that CBP buys only the autonomous towers, and the department is deploying an additional 95.

Underground, buried fiberoptic cables can sense movement, capturing data that is also then analyzed by AI.

“We follow the contour of the land. We go through trees. We go down into the river banks. We can go absolutely everywhere,” said Magnus McEwen-King, CEO of Sintela, which has a contract with CBP to install the cables. He spoke at a recent border security expo in Phoenix, where some of the technology was on display.

CBP also uses ground sensors and trail cameras to detect smuggling routes.

Concerns over cost and future plans

The nonpartisan watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense has questioned both the huge amounts of money for the wall-building and whether taxpayers are getting their money’s worth.

In 2011, under Democratic President Obama, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano pulled the plug on a project to build a “virtual wall” of integrated technology like radars, sensors and cameras across the entire border after it ran over budget, faced technological glitches and was behind schedule.

Josh Sewell, director of research and policy at Taxpayers for Common Sense, said the organization would like to see more “robust evaluation” of the technologies being used to avoid similar scenarios. And he criticized the Trump administration for lack of oversight on how the money is being spent, a charge CBP has denied, citing “oversight mechanism.”

In the Big Bend area of southern Texas, opposition to the department’s wall-building plans gathered strong bipartisan support especially in the most sensitive areas that run through a state and national park and a wildlife area.

CBP now says it is not planning to build a 30-foot-high bollard wall in those areas. Its recently announced plans include installing patrol roads and some barriers designed to stop cars and using detection technologies.

Clara Benson, who is one of the founders of the No Big Bend Wall coalition, says bright lights in the area designed to illuminate the border could pollute the skies in an area renowned for having some of the best views of the stars. Even without a 30-foot-tall steel wall running through the land, there is concern about CBP’s plans.

“There’s still a lot of fear and dread that the plan is still going to be quite damaging,” she said.

Santana writes for the Associated Press.

July 2 (UPI) — Outgoing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer apologized in person Thursday to women and some of their children who were caught up in a historic forced adoptions scandal in England and Wales dating back to the 1950s through the 1970s.

Stamer issued a formal apology on behalf of the British state, calling the taking of an estimated 185,000 babies from unmarried women, railroaded into allowing their children to be put up for adoption, a “stain on our history.”

The shame is not yours. The shame was never yours. The shame is ours,” he said in a statement to the House of Commons after earlier hosting a group of survivors in Downing Street.

“Mothers, many young, vulnerable, and without support were coerced, bullied, or misled into feeling that they had no choice but to have their children taken away from them. What a thing to do,” he said.

Speaking as some of those whose lives were severely impacted watched on from the public gallery, Starmer said that what happened to them and to tens of thousands of mothers, children and families “should never have happened.”

“It is a stain on our history,” he said.

Starmer said the victims had “very powerfully” relayed to him the “gut-wrenching” shame they were made to feel and how it was drummed into them that they were immoral young women whose children would be better off without them.

The experiences stayed with them through their lifetimes, while their children grew up believing they were unwanted, he said.

“We are deeply and profoundly sorry to the mothers who were told they were unfit, who were prevented from caring for the children they desperately wanted to help and to keep, and who have carried this loss for decades,” said Starmer.

Starmer acknowledged that the practice was deliberate and widespread, particularly between 1949 and 1976 when it was, he said, “embedded within systems across local authorities, across voluntary and faith-based institutions, and in health and social care services,” including parts of what is now the National Health Service.

“All institutions that operated with power over people’s lives, yet they did so without compassion, without consent, and without dignity or proper safeguards,” said Starmer.

He said some women, including those placed in Mother and Baby Homes and other institutions, were prevented from seeing their families and partners, denied education and job opportunities and kept in harsh living conditions.

Some of the treatment meted out to the women was tantamount to manipulation and abuse, said Starmer.

Mothers and adoptees campaigned for years for the state to acknowledge wrongdoing but no offer of compensation was forthcoming, although the government has announced a $5.3 million fund to improve access to adoption records and assist family reunions.

Survivor Ann Keen, whose baby son was adopted in 1966 after she was sent to a mother and baby home in Swansea in Wales at the age of 17, told the BBC she had “no say” in the decision.

The former Member of Parliament in the ruling Labour Party, told BBC Radio ahead of Starmer’s statement to lawmakers that she was eagerly anticipating the moment she would finally be “released from my shame.”

Last week, the U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior expanded the situations in which their firefighters are allowed to wear N95 masks.

Starting in September, the federal government began allowing firefighters to wear the masks, but not when they were working on the fire line, only at times such as in camp and sitting in vehicles. Now they’ll be allowed to wear them during some work battling wildfires, including patrolling for areas where the blaze has jumped past fire lines and putting out smoldering remains after a fire is contained.

Masks are still prohibited during firefighters’ most grueling tasks — digging lines to stop fires and directly attacking flames. And the masks they’re using, N95s, do not protect against all of the toxic substances in wildfire smoke.

Nonetheless, health experts applauded the move as a step in the right direction.

Here’s why it took so long to get here:

Research has linked wildfire smoke to a range of long-term health issues, including respiratory problems, cardiovascular diseases and cancers.

“The fire service knows that,” said Rachael Jones, professor and chair of environmental health sciences at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. “They all have stories” of lung damage or cancer, either their own or their coworkers’.

But this wasn’t always common knowledge.

“The verbiage was that wildland smoke was benign,” one firefighter told Jones’ colleagues for a recent study on firefighters’ thoughts on mask use. “It was like sitting around a campfire.”

Even as scientists and fire officials came to terms with the very real long-term health risks, some firefighters still had concerns that masks could muffle communication, make it hard to breathe and interfere with other equipment. That slowed adoption.

Missing crucial orders because a voice is muffled, or struggling to pull out an emergency fire shelter because a mask is in the way, could be the difference between life and death.

“These are not trivial things when the fact is that they reflect life safety outcome,” Jones said.

Deciding on the right type of mask or respirator has slowed adoption too. There are no commercially available respirators that protect against all of the dangerous pollutants in wildfire smoke.

Scientists have not even fully determined which pollutants pose the greatest risks to firefighters, further complicating a choice.

N95s filter for solid particles in the air but not dangerous gases. Heavy smoke or sweat can cause them to clog.

Half-face respirators — often gray rubber with pink canisters — offer different filters for different gases, but none can filter all of the concerning gases in wildfire smoke. The masks and backup canisters are also much bulkier to carry around than N95s.

Respirators that can filter out all of the “literally hundreds” of concerning compounds in smoke “just simply don’t exist,” said Matt Rahn, research director for the Wildfire Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting firefighters.

The result: “In our pursuit for perfection in finding the best respiratory devices for firefighters, we’ve basically fallen into a decision paralysis of doing nothing,” Rahn said. “It’s been that way for years.”

The federal government acknowledges the limitations of N95s in its educational material for firefighters. In a statement to The Times, the Forest Service said it will begin studying different respirators in a small pilot program to “determine if their use will be suitable for the wildland fire environment.”

The Forest Service said that N95s are already “readily available” to its firefighters and that it has more than 30,000 of them.

More recent wildfire news

Many in the western United States will have to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday with fewer fireworks due to heightened wildfire risk. Utah’s governor restricted fireworks statewide through July 5 as multiple wildfires raged in the state and the National Weather Service issued a rare “Particularly Dangerous Situation” warning, Kathy McCormack reports for the Associated Press. California officials, meanwhile, warned of zero tolerance for illegal fireworks, with some local governments recently increasing fines, Kassia Bonesteel reports for CBS News.

Three federal wildland firefighters were killed and two were injured by the fast-moving Knowles fire in Colorado on Saturday. As a ground crew began some of the first attacks on the fire, an order came over the radio to “get out of there now,” CNN reported. Within minutes, the crew was forced to deploy their emergency shelters, a desperate last line of defense when escape is impossible. Firefighters lined the streets of Grand Junction, Colo., on Sunday in a procession for their fallen colleagues.

Much of the western U.S. is facing above normal fire potential after one of the hottest and driest winters in recent years. Coastal Southern California, conversely, is facing average wildfire potential, fire weather analysts say, thanks to monsoon breezes bringing damp air from the tropics.

A few last things in climate news

A pair of hazardous chemical crises in Greater Los Angeles — at an aerospace facility in Garden Grove and a warehouse in Boyle Heights — have left Californians questioning why environmental and public health agencies such as the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health failed to address known risks, a team from CalMatters and the LA Local reports.

The Boyle Heights warehouse fire coincided with a spike in emergency room visits for smoke inhalation and throat pain, my colleague Hayley Smith found. Meanwhile, the water used to fight the toxic blaze ended up in the Los Angeles River, The Times’ Mack Baysinger reports. Local organizers collected water samples for testing as L.A. County public works deployed floating barriers to contain the runoff.

The headwaters of the Colorado River, a vital source of water for 35 million people and 5 million acres of farmland, is drier than anyone can remember, my colleague Ian James reports. As seven U.S. states and Mexico remain gridlocked in complex debates over use of the river, it’s a stark reminder that the climate of the 21st century will leave less for everyone.

Europe is facing its second major heat wave of the year, with France recording its hottest day ever, Lauren Dalban reports for Inside Climate News. As residents struggled to handle the extreme heat, worsened by climate change, so did climate infrastructure championed to combat it. Trains were halted as the heat risked buckling tracks and nuclear reactors were slowed or powered off as the cooling water they discharged became too hot, the New York Times’ Chico Harlan reported.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more wildfire news, follow @nohaggerty on X and @nohaggerty.bsky.social on Bluesky.

WASHINGTON — As America’s 250th birthday arrives this weekend, President Trump’s mark is clearly visible on Washington.

Visitors to the nation’s capital are being met with cranes hanging over the White House and construction at the site of the demolished East Wing. Fences crisscrossing the National Mall to hem in the Great American State Fair have blocked the famed sightline from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.

Some fountains newly sparkle as a result of Trump’s renovations. National Guardsmen patrol the sidewalks. The partisan flavor of the Trump-aligned Freedom 250 organization’s events is on display, and the fireworks show Saturday will feature a rally-style speech from Trump, with fireworks reportedly pushed back to 11 p.m.

President Trump examines the maintenance work Wednesday on the exterior of the White House.

(Alex Wong / Getty Images)

The memorial’s Reflecting Pool, where fireworks will be set off Saturday, was barricaded from the public earlier than usual after onlookers flocked last week to see the algae and peeling paint that followed Trump’s renovation, and Trump accused vandals of tampering with it.

“You don’t have a sense of ‘land of the free’ here,” said Melissa McFarlane, 61, standing along the fencing on the Mall. She said she was born in Silver Spring, Md., and she grew up watching July 4 fireworks on the Mall with her parents.

She recalled the nation’s 200th anniversary celebrations as “open and inviting” but said this year’s “heavy-duty fencing” and the presence of National Guardsmen made it feel different.

“It’s majorly disorganized, which is weird for our country,” McFarlane added.

A sign outside Lafayette Park near the White House.

(Julia Demaree Nikhinson / Associated Press)

Trump has fixated on making changes to the nation’s capital in his second term, declaring in an early executive order that his administration would make the district “safe and beautiful.” Some of the renovations have been successful; fountains are running anew, including the long-dormant cascading water feature at the city’s popular Meridian Hill Park.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Sunday on “Fox & Friends” that more than 50 parks and circles have been restored and 22 fountains, along with repairs to lights on the National Mall.

“President Trump should be thanked for all he is doing to leave things better than he found them for the good of our great nation,” an Interior Department spokesperson said in a statement. “D.C. residents and visitors are experiencing working fountains, clean parks and safe streets across the district for the first time in decades, all thanks to President Donald J. Trump.”

But Trump’s growing slate of projects has drawn legal challenges from preservationist groups and raised questions about the cost to taxpayers. The $14.7-million repainting of the Reflecting Pool became particularly controversial last month after algae overtook the renovated pool and the new paint appeared to peel off.

On Sunday, the president took a tour of some of his construction sites, walking through Lafayette Park with Burgum before traveling to the East Potomac golf club he plans to renovate, which sits on federal land. Trump walked part of the property and inspected blueprints in view of reporters; he was then driven by the site where he wants to erect a marble arch.

Over the weekend, he posted on Truth Social about his improvements to the city in a post about D.C. mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George, casting it as a “Safe and Prestigious Community” that is now at risk of being “destroyed” by Lewis George.

“I have worked too hard to make Washington, D.C., the Envy of the World, with almost No Crime, and a Beautification process that has been second to none,” Trump wrote.

Construction crews build scaffolding outside the Kennedy Center on June 13 before removing President Trump’s name from the venue’s exterior.

(Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images)

Involvement by presidents in the city’s plan goes back to George Washington, said Matthew J. Bell, an architecture professor at the University of Maryland. That is not unusual, nor is it strange for cities, including Washington, to change over time, he said.

“It’s probably more a matter of timing in terms of inconvenience for people coming for the Fourth,” Bell said of the ongoing construction. “If there had been a more coordinated plan for some of these things … it probably could’ve been managed better.”

At the National Mall, the fencing design for the state fair drew head shakes and confusion from some tourists. Visitors are corralled into a walkway by the Freedom 250-branded fencing on one side and low metal barriers on the other.

It’s normal for fencing to be used to control foot traffic for events on the mall, said Charles A. Birnbaum, chief executive of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, but he perceived the problem as slapdash placement, including of the Ferris wheel, which was put on the mall’s axis.

“Things are being plopped down,” said Birnbaum, whose organization sued the administration over the repainting of the Reflecting Pool. “It speaks to what Trump is doing at the ballroom, what he’s proposed [with] the arch — he’s just plopping these things down in major view sheds that have major historical and cultural significance.”

People walk past the Ferris wheel at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall.

(Jen Golbeck / Associated Press)

The fountains in Lafayette Park are running again near the White House on June 23.

(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

The state fair itself has drawn relatively few crowds, though some attendees have been enthusiastic.

On Monday, McFarlane and two friends were outside the fencing, leaning against the metal barriers in front of the Department of Agriculture, which faces the National Mall.

“It’s a little too secure,” said one of them, John, 60, who was visiting from Burbank and declined to give his last name.

He gestured over the barrier to a manicured plot with shady benches. “Here’s the People’s Garden,” he said, reading its sign, “and we can’t go in.”

A construction crane works on the White House ballroom on Monday.

(Julia Demaree Nikhinson / Associated Press)

Visitors take photos Tuesday of a model of President Trump’s proposed marble arch at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall.

(Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press)

Early-morning joggers observer the refilling of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 5.

(John McDonnell / Associated Press)

The anniversary celebrations also come on the heels of the reflecting pool controversy. Last week, after chunks of paint were spotted in the water, Trump blamed vandals for tampering with the pool and said people had been arrested at the site. Two dead ducks were found in a pond about 250 feet away from the pool.

The area last week was surrounded by surveillance cameras and patrolled by National Guardsmen as lifelong resident John Cates strolled the area.

“It’s kind of creepy,” Cates said about the security cameras mounted around the pool. “It is unnecessary that we have to have this pond deemed a high security risk. That is weird.”

The area was fenced off at the end of last week. Fencing normally occurs in preparation for the July 4 fireworks show, but it went up “a couple days early to protect the pool,” Burgum said in the Fox News interview. He said seven people had been arrested in connection with the pool.

Tom Ayers, 34, was disappointed to find the fences already up on Monday. He traveled with his father from Wisconsin for the 250th, but they were finding it difficult to get around the Mall and they were upset to see the East Wing gone.

When they reached Lafayette Park, where the fencing had yet to be removed, they were again disappointed by the obscured view of the White House. Ayers’ father recalled a different scene in 1976, when he visited as a child for the nation’s bicentennial.

“I was kind of hoping for a summer similar to that,” Ayers said, “but overall, it seems nowhere close.”

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