WASHINGTON — Steve Bannon, a longtime ally of President Trump, on Monday won a Supreme Court order that is expected to lead to the dismissal of his criminal conviction for refusing to testify to Congress.
Prodded by the Trump administration, the justices threw out an appellate ruling upholding Bannon’s conviction for defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by a mob of Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol.
The move frees a trial judge to act on the Republican administration’s pending request to dismiss Bannon’s conviction and indictment “in the interests of justice.”
The dismissal would be largely symbolic. Bannon served a four-month prison term after a jury convicted him of contempt of Congress in 2022. A federal appeals court in Washington had upheld the conviction.
The justices also issued a similar order in the case of former Cincinnati Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld, who was pardoned by Trump last year.
Sittenfeld had served 16 months in federal prison after a jury convicted him of bribery and attempted extortion in 2022. The high court order allows a lower court to consider dismissing his indictment.
The Justice Department brought the case against Bannon during Democrat Joe Biden’s presidency, but it changed course after Trump took office again last year.
Bannon had initially argued that his testimony was protected by Trump’s claim of executive privilege. But the House panel and the Justice Department contended such a claim was dubious because Trump had fired Bannon from the White House in 2017 and Bannon was thus a private citizen when he was consulting with the then-president in the run-up to the Capitol riot.
Bannon separately has pleaded guilty in a New York state court to defrauding donors to a private effort to build a wall on the U.S. southern border, as part of a plea deal that allowed him to avoid jail time. That conviction is unaffected by the Supreme Court action.
Remember when our president attacked a female journalist for asking uncomfortable questions with a casual, sincere, “Quiet, piggy”?
That was five months ago, a lifetime in the chaos of the Trump administration, but it was a telling moment about how not just our president but those crafting his policy view women and their place in society. Hint: It’s not at the top.
While I have not a bit of pity or dismay that Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem — the former U.S. attorney general and the former secretary of Homeland Security, respectively — were given the ax by President Trump in recent days, it shouldn’t be lost that this is another “quiet, piggy” week in an administration that is increasingly openly hostile to women in power.
When democracies decay, and especially when movements like Christian nationalism rise, an erosion of women’s equality almost always comes first. Bondi and Noem are part of a U.S. erosion that should alarm us all, whatever your gender identity.
First, the obvious. Good riddance. Noem seemed to relish cruelty, and treated her job like a costume party, constantly mugging for cameras with guns and faux toughness as if the dismantling of lives and imprisoning even children was a game. Never mind the grift.
Bondi, meanwhile, always seemed like the football team’s third-favorite cheerleader, desperately vying for the attention of the jock-gods around her, even if it meant groveling for approval, even if it meant selling out all women with her ultimate censoring of the Epstein files.
But while Bondi and Noem were obviously incompetent, incompetence has never been a fire-able offense for Trump. Just ask Pete Hegseth, whose Thor fantasies are currently playing out in an all-to-real war. Or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has dismantled American science while glorifying beef tallow and workouts in jeans. Don’t even get me started on Kash Patel.
It’s no accident that women at the top of Trump’s administration are being purged. They were useful in the first days of the regime, while power was still being consolidated and shimmers of diversity were helpful. But as the sexist and racist nature of the MAGA machine has gained mainstream acquiescence if not acceptance, the need to keep up the appearance of diversity is less and less.
Take, for example, the far-right attacks on Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett after her pointed and skeptical questions recently on Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship.
This is the same Texas gentleman who went viral recently for proclaiming, “Women, shut up! Of course. It is literally an offense to God” for women to have influence in the governing of society.
He’s also part of a group of far-right religious leaders — including a pastor associated with Hegseth — who support ending women’s right to vote and replacing it with a single “household” vote cast by, you guessed it, men.
Bondi and Noem may be the most high-profile examples of how this misogyny is playing out in MAGA reality, but they aren’t the only women forced out of power by Trump and his cronies this year. It’s a push that is far more systematic and insidious than we are giving them credit for. Hegseth has all but wiped women out of the top ranks of the military — just recently personally knocking two women off a promotions list.
RFK Jr. and others, meanwhile, are busy pushing women out of science. The Washington Post pointed out that last year at this time, the feds purged women and people of color from the boards that review the science and research happening at the National Institutes of Health— 38 out of 43 experts that were fired were women and minorities.
A report out last month also found that all those attacks on universities last year, with the cutting of grants even in areas such as cancer research — disproportionately affected female scientists. Many of these female scientists, especially younger ones, will never recover from those quashed research projects and lost jobs in a field that demands results and published work, meaning we are looking at a generational loss of female scientific talent.
And let’s not forget Renee Nicole Good, shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis who, with as much casualness as Trump’s “quiet, piggy,” said “f—ing b—” after shooting her and walking away.
Bondi and Noem aren’t just unqualified villains shown the door. They are villainesses.
The Trump administration knows the difference, and so should we.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is arguing that a judge’s order to halt construction of a $400-million ballroom creates a security risk for President Trump as it asks a federal appeals court to pause the ruling.
In a motion filed Friday, National Park Service lawyers say that the federal judge’s order to suspend construction of the East Wing ballroom is “threatening grave national-security harms to the White House, the President and his family, and the President’s staff.”
“Time is of the essence!” the lawyers write, citing materials that will be installed to make a “heavily fortified” facility. The ballroom construction also includes bomb shelters, military installations and a medical facility, according to the filing. The ballroom is part of Trump’s plans to remake public buildings and institutions in Washington during his remaining years in office.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington on Tuesday ordered the temporary pause of the construction project that has included demolishing the East Wing of the White House. He concluded that unless Congress approves the project, the preservationist group suing to stop it is likely to succeed on the merits of its claims because “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have.”
The White House is owned by the federal government, not the president. Even the website of the National Park Service, which filed the motion, makes clear that “the White House is owned by the American people.”
The judge suspended enforcement of his order for 14 days, acknowledging that the administration would appeal his decision.
Leon’s ruling and the appeal come the same week a key agency tasked with approving construction on federal property in the Washington region gave final approval to the project.
In his ruling, Leon, who was nominated by Republican President George W. Bush, suspended enforcement of his order, recognizing that “halting an ongoing construction project may raise logistical issues.”
Leon also addressed national security in his ruling, saying that he reviewed information that the government privately submitted to him and concluded that halting construction wouldn’t jeopardize national security. He exempted any construction work that is necessary for the safety and security of the White House from the scope of the injunction.
Trump lashed out at the ruling, while noting that it would allow work on underground bunkers and other security measures around the White House grounds to continue — even though those will be paid for by taxpayers. Trump has pledged that he, along with private donors, will cover the costs for the ballroom itself.
But the National Park Service argues in its motion that the president has “complete authority to renovate the White House” and the current state of the grounds, which is an open construction site, make it harder to protect the White House.
“Canvas tents, which are necessary without a ballroom, are significantly more vulnerable to missiles, drones, and other threats than a hardened national security facility,” the motion says.
The Trump administration is asking the appeals court to make a decision on its request by Friday. It also asked that the 14-day suspension of Leon’s order be extended by two weeks so the case can be taken to the Supreme Court.
House Democrats will hold a pair of “shadow hearings” in California next week on the upcoming midterm elections — part of a broader party effort to defend state voting systems against mounting critiques and threats of intervention from the Trump administration.
Such hearings, similar to those recently held in Los Angeles on President Trump’s immigration raids, provide Democrats an opportunity to highlight issues their majority Republican counterparts won’t schedule for more formal hearings in Washington.
The hearings — scheduled for Los Angeles on Tuesday and San Francisco on Thursday — will feature testimony from voting and elections experts, and will be led by Rep. Joseph Morelle of New York, ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee with oversight of elections, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), the former House speaker.
Morelle, in a statement to The Times, said, “Democracy’s defenses are under attack” and must be defended.
“We will not let President Trump and House Republicans’ efforts to take over our elections prevail. We’re going to use every tool in our toolbox and that includes working with pro-democracy allies in communities across the country,” he said. “I look forward to hearing about the work being done in California to protect democracy as we fight on the ground and in Congress.”
Pelosi, in her own statement to The Times, said protecting democracy “demands vigilance, transparency, and action,” and the shadow hearings “will bring together voices on the front lines of election security, voting rights, and accountability to ensure that every American’s vote is protected and every institution earns the public’s trust.”
“At a time of rampant threats to our democratic system, we must strengthen and defend the integrity of our elections to reaffirm that our government is of, by, and for the people,” she said.
Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands), chair of the Democratic Caucus, and other Democrats from California are also expected to attend. Republican members of Congress are not expected to be there.
The hearings will be the first in a while to be led — at least in part — by Pelosi, 86, who gave up her position in party leadership and does not currently hold any committee assignments. She announced in November that she will not seek reelection.
Trump has alleged for years, without evidence, that U.S. elections are undermined and swayed by widespread voter fraud, and that such fraud cost him the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden. He and his personal attorneys have repeatedly argued as much in court, but always lost — in part because they could never produce any evidence to back their claims.
Since retaking the White House last year, Trump has continued pushing his baseless claims, and pushed his administration to attack voting systems — particularly in blue states where he has been unpopular.
In January, the FBI raided and seized 2020 election records from an elections office in Fulton County, Ga., that was the subject of Trump’s allegations of voter fraud in 2020.
In February, Trump said Republicans should “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” alleging that voting irregularities in what he called “crooked states” are hurting his party. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
This week, Trump issued an executive order purporting to give federal agencies control over ballot processing by the U.S. Postal Service.
Trump administration officials and allies have also raised concerns that they might send immigration agents to polling locations during the midterms, in part by refusing to rule out such a move in the wake of mass deployments of such agents into American cities to pursue Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Trump has framed his efforts to end voting by mail — which he recently did himself — and increase voter identification requirements as “common sense” steps to combat fraud that most Americans agree with. A vast majority of California voters cast ballots by mail, including nearly 90% in last year’s special election on Proposition 50, the state’s mid-decade redistricting measure.
Democrats and many elections experts have rejected Trump’s election claims as baseless, defended state-run systems as safe and secure, and said his demands for stricter voter ID regulations would disenfranchise millions of U.S. citizen voters who lack the sort of documents he wants to mandate — including women who changed their name in marriage.
Voting experts say fraudulent votes, including by noncitizens, are rare, and that there is no evidence that fraud swings U.S. elections.
States including California have joined voting rights organizations in suing to block Trump’s various attempts to intervene in state-run elections, including his order last week and a previous one purporting to place new federal requirements on voter identification and proof of citizenship.
California officials and others have repeatedly noted that federal law gives states the right to administer elections as they see fit, and promised to fight any attempts by the president or his administration to infringe on state election powers.
Scheduled to participate in the hearings were experts from the UCLA Voting Rights Project, Loyola Law School, the League of Women Voters of California, Common Cause California, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF.
SACRAMENTO — Strong majorities of California voters believe American democracy is under attack and, in the wake of U.S. Supreme Court rulings narrowing federal protections, support enacting a new state Voting Rights Act to prohibit discrimination and efforts to suppress the ability to cast a ballot, a new poll showed.
The survey showed a sharp partisan divide over increasing voting rights protections, with Democrats and political independents overwhelmingly in favor and a majority of Republicans opposed. Fears that American democracy was either under attack, or at the very least being “tested,” were shared across political allegiances, according to a new poll released Thursday by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.
“I think that it suggests that the California voters, especially Democrats and independents, are very worried about some of what they’ve seen going on in Washington, both the court decisions and the Trump administration,” said Eric Schickler, the institute’s co-director. “They see it as threatening kind of core American values.”
That anxiety comes after years of baseless claims by President Trump that the 2020 election was stolen from him, as well as Republican-led efforts to restrict the use of mail-in ballots and impose new requirements for voters to show identification and proof of citizenship.
Trump earlier this week signed an executive order to place new federal controls on voting by mail in states such as California, an action that Democrats called unconstitutional and vowed to challenge in court.
Schickler said Republican concerns about the fate of American democracy may stem in large part from allegations about voter fraud hyped by Trump and his supporters, including unfounded claims that droves of undocumented immigrants are swaying elections.
The survey found that 67% of California voters believe American democracy is under attack, including 84% of Democrats, 40% of Republicans and 64% of voters registered as “no party preference” or with other political parties. An almost equal number of Republicans, 38%, believed democracy was being “tested” but not under attack, compared with 13% of Democrats and 26% of independents. The remainder of those surveyed said American democracy is in no danger.
The partisan divide was more pronounced when voters were asked if they wanted California to enact its own Voting Rights Act after decisions by the Supreme Court limited federal protections against discrimination and unequal access to ballots, the poll found.
Overall, 66% of California registered voters backed adopting new state voter protections, with 88% of Democrats supporting new laws compared with 25% of Republicans and 66% of voters who are political independents or belong to other parties. Support for new state laws was strongest among Black voters — 72% — who historically have been targeted with discriminatory voting policies, including Jim Crow-era laws such as literacy tests and poll taxes.
The federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned those policies, ensuring that the right to vote cannot be denied because of race. The law also ensured that Black Americans and other communities of color had the opportunity to participate in all parts of the political system and elect the leaders of their choosing, influencing how political districts are drawn. The act was reauthorized by Congress in 2006 by an overwhelming bipartisan majority.
“Now it has come to the point where the president has tried to convince people that somehow equal voting rights is bad, because, in his words, ‘The wrong people are voting right,’” said Matt Barreto, faculty director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project, referring to Trump. “You have super majorities, very large percentages of Californians, who want the state to do more to protect voting rights, I think, because of the very tenuous climate right now, with the president constantly going after states for vote by mail and trying to get their voter rolls and these other sorts of things.”
Recent rulings by the conservative-leaning Supreme Court also have rolled back federal protections under the Voting Rights Act. A pending case, Louisiana vs. Callais, which involves the drawing of congressional districts, may overturn some of the remaining protections, Barreto said.
“I think people should be extremely nervous this court has not shown a lot of support for voting rights, and that’s the reason why California has an opportunity to pass its own state laws,” he said.
Among the laws California legislators could adopt, Barreto said, would be protections for early voting, banning onerous requirements on voters to prove citizenship and provide identification, and ensuring that congressional and other political districts are created to allow minority groups to elect representatives of their choice.
The Berkeley poll also found widespread support among California voters for requiring that the top three financial backers supporting and opposing ballot measures be listed in official ballot voter guides. A majority of Californians also supported expanding access to translation and interpreter assistance for populations that make up at least 5% or 5,000 voters in a county.
The Berkeley IGS poll surveyed 5,109 California registered voters online in English and Spanish from March 9 to 15. The results are estimated to have a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points in either direction in the overall sample, and larger numbers for subgroups.
Funding for the poll was provided to IGS by the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, a private foundation based in San Francisco that aims to increase civic participation and improve the state’s democratic processes.
WASHINGTON — As President Trump assembled his Cabinet last week, he asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance to give an update on the Iran war.
Rubio, known for his hawkish views, gave an impassioned defense of the war, calling it “a favor” to the United States and the world.
Vance, who has long pushed for restraint in U.S. military intervention overseas, was more sedate. He said that the U.S. now has “options” it didn’t have a year ago and that it is important Iran does not get a nuclear weapon — before redirecting his remarks toward wishing the troops a happy Easter.
The exchange was a distillation of their diverging postures toward the war that their boss has launched in Iran. And it comes as some would-be Republican presidential candidates begin quietly courting officials in key states like New Hampshire in the early stages of the GOP’s next nomination fight.
With Vance and Rubio seen as the party’s strongest potential candidates in a 2028 primary, the two have to balance their roles in the Trump administration with their future political plans.
“It’s very obvious from the way that Rubio talks about Iran and the way that Vance talks about Iran that they are of different casts of mind,” said Curt Mills, the executive director of “The American Conservative” magazine and a vocal critic of the war. The Cabinet meeting episode was telling, he said, because it seemed as though Vance, discussing Easter, was “literally trying to talk about anything else other than the war.”
The White House addressed the Rubio-Vance relationship on Wednesday in an unsolicited statement after the initial publication of this article.
“President Trump has full confidence in both Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio, who continue to be trusted voices within the administration,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “He values both the vice president and the secretary’s opinions and wealth of expertise.”
It’s too soon to forecast how Republican voters might feel about the war next spring, when the 2028 contest is expected to begin in earnest, but the risks for both Vance and Rubio are acute. Rubio’s full-throated support for the war could come back to haunt him depending on how the conflict develops. Vance, meanwhile, would risk accusations of disloyalty if he were to stray too far from Trump, but struggles to square an appearance of support for the war with his past comments.
Vance, who served in the Marines in the Iraq war, has said that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, but he’s long been skeptical of foreign military interventions.
Trump seemed to allude that Vance may have held onto that position in private discussions about Iran, telling reporters that Vance was “philosophically a little bit different than me” at the outset of the conflict.
“I think he was maybe less enthusiastic about going, but he was quite enthusiastic,” Trump said.
Though Vance has been careful in how he speaks about the war, what he’s not saying has been conspicuous. On a March 13 trip to North Carolina, he was twice asked by reporters if he had concerns about the conflict. Each time, he said it was important that Trump could have conversations with advisers “without his team then running their mouths to the American media.”
A few days later at the White House, when Vance was again asked if he had concerns, he accused the reporter of “trying to drive a wedge between members of the administration, between me and the president.”
For Rubio, long before he became the country’s chief diplomat, he voiced support for muscular foreign policy and American intervention abroad.
Days into the war, he told reporters that it was “a wise decision” for Trump to launch the operation, that there “absolutely was an imminent threat” from Iran and that the operation “needed to happen.”
State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott pointed to last week’s Cabinet meeting as evidence that “the entire administration is in lockstep behind President Trump.”
“Secretary Rubio is proud to be on the team implementing President Trump’s policies, and he has a great relationship, both professionally and personally, with the entire team,” Pigott said.
Fractures are emerging in the GOP
The apparent split between Rubio and Vance on the Iran war is emblematic of the divide starting to cleave within the Republican Party. A recent survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found some divisions within the GOP on Iran, with about half of Republicans saying the U.S. military action has been “about right.” Relatively few Republicans, about 2 in 10, say military action has not gone far enough, while about one-quarter say it’s gone too far.
While some conservatives have described the war as a betrayal, many other Republicans have cheered on the president’s actions.
Alice Swanson, a 62-year-old who attended Vance’s event in North Carolina, said she wants Vance and Rubio to run together in 2028 but favors the vice president.
“I think he fully believes and supports exactly what his convictions are,” Swanson said.
Swanson acknowledged, nonetheless, that Vance has been an outspoken opponent of interventionist policy but has been quieter on the subject since the war. “I can see both sides,” Swanson said after expressing full support for Trump’s decisions.
Tracy Brill, a 62-year-old from Rocky Mount, spoke highly of Rubio, but declared, “I love JD Vance.”
She made it clear she sides with the president, calling the course he’s taken “spot on.” But she defended the vice president if he seems at odds with his past statements, noting politicians do it frequently. “They’ve all changed their positions at one point or another,” she said.
However, Joe Ropar, attending the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, said Rubio’s unequivocal support for the Iran war helped crystallize his preference for the secretary of state for 2028.
“I’m not looking at JD Vance for president, and it’s for stuff like that,” said Ropar, a 72-year-old retired military contractor from McKinney, Texas. “I don’t 100% trust him.”
Benjamin Williams, of Austin, Texas, said at CPAC that both Trump and Vance are “tied to this war.” The 25-year-old marketing specialist for Young Americans for Liberty is looking elsewhere for a candidate.
The political risks might not be known until the field fills out
Whether the war becomes a political problem for Vance and Rubio depends on who ultimately enters the GOP’s next presidential primary.
While Vance and Rubio are currently considered the overwhelming front-runners, former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu expects a half dozen high-profile Republicans to enter the contest.
Sununu and former RNC Committeewoman Juliana Bergeron told The Associated Press that multiple Republican presidential prospects have reached out to them in recent weeks to discuss the political landscape in the state that traditionally hosts the opening presidential primary; they declined to name them.
Republican strategist Jim Merrill, a top New Hampshire adviser for Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid, predicted that Iran would become a flashpoint in 2028 — just as the Iraq war was for Democrats in 2004 and 2008.
“If for some reason things don’t go as anticipated, there will be contrasts drawn,” he said.
Still, Sununu is doubtful that Iran would become a meaningful dividing line in a prospective Vance-Rubio matchup given their status as prominent members of the Trump administration. Both will likely take credit if the conflict ends well, and both would look bad if it does not, he predicted.
“They’re tied together with the success or failure of Iran. It doesn’t really separate one versus the other, at least I don’t think that’s how the electorate will see it,” Sununu said.
Price and Peoples write for the Associated Press. Peoples reported from New York. AP writers Matthew Lee in Washington, Bill Barrow in Rocky Mount, N.C., and Thomas Beaumont in Grapevine, Texas, contributed to this report.
A federal judge in Rhode Island ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration’s effort to dramatically change the criteria to get tens of millions of dollars in funding to aid homeless people was unlawful.
Several nonprofits filed a lawsuit last year accusing the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development of changing the rules for receiving $75 million to build housing for homeless families and individuals. The plaintiffs accused the Trump administration of issuing a new Notice of Funding Opportunity, or NOFO, for the Continuum of Care program to better align with its social policies.
U.S District Judge Mary McElroy, nominated by President Trump, said the department’s “slapdash imposition of political whims” was unlawful and she ordered it to scrap the new policy.
“Once again, this Court is faced with a case in which an executive agency has made a last-minute decision to make major, disruptive changes to grants within its purview, all for the express purpose of accomplishing the current administration’s policy objectives,” McElroy said in her ruling that the NOFO violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a law governing how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.
A spokesperson for HUD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Advocates for plaintiffs welcomed the ruling.
“For more than three decades, the federal government has supported housing providers and communities through HUD’s programs to help people experiencing homelessness move into stable housing,” Skye Perryman, president and chief executive of Democracy Forward, co-counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “We are pleased that the court has stopped the Trump-Vance administration from holding life-saving funding hostage to a political agenda.”
Ann Oliva, chief executive of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said the ruling was “a victory for people across this nation who have overcome homelessness and stabilized in HUD’s permanent housing programs.”
“Today’s news reinforces a fundamental truth: that the work to end homelessness is not partisan, and never should be interfered with for political means,” Oliva said in a statement.
Plaintiffs argued the Trump administration was aiming to upend polices in place for decades to satisfy its political considerations, including whether jurisdictions “support sanctuary protections, harm reduction practices, or inclusive policies for transgender people.”
The Alliance and the Women’s Development Corporation argued that HUD lacked the authority to make the changes, adding that the new award process was “shockingly unlawful” and would “irreparably injure qualified applicants for these funds and the communities they serve.”
In its court filings, HUD argued the new criteria was an effort “to ensure the availability of funding to protect our Nation’s most vulnerable individuals and families from the trauma of homelessness while simultaneously promoting self-sufficiency.”
“Defendants acted reasonably and prudently because the NOFO conditions, focusing on public safety, cooperation with law enforcement and prohibitions on illegal drug use, are sufficiently related to the funding goals of self-sufficiency and reduction of trauma,” HUD wrote.
WASHINGTON — Two-thirds of California voters disapprove of President Trump’s immigration policies and a majority believe those policies are discriminating against Latinos, according to a new poll.
Nearly half of the voters said they were concerned that they, a family member or a close friend could be detained because of Trump’s immigration policies.
The findings of the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, released Wednesday, show that most Californians haven’t budged on their thoughts about the president’s approach to immigration since he returned to office. A poll last August similarly showed strong disapproval of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement.
The poll, which was conducted for the Los Angeles Times, showed the usual division along party lines when voters were asked whether they trust the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whether agents should wear masks while on duty, and whether Latinos are being discriminated against.
“This suggests that a significant number of voters see ICE infringement on the individual rights of the undocumented as also potentially leading to broader infringements on citizens’ rights,” said G. Cristina Mora, co-director of the institute and a sociology professor at UC Berkeley who studies race and immigration.
“Latino voters also seem to particularly worry about the way that racism is motivating current immigration practices,” she said, which is likely tied to the Supreme Court’s approval of immigration agents detaining people on the basis of their perceived race, ethnicity, language or occupation.
The overall disapproval among voters of Trump’s immigration policies — 64% — was down a bit from the August poll, in which 69% of respondents said they disapproved of how immigration enforcement was being carried out in California.
Republicans appear to be more approving of immigration policies now, with 86% saying they approve of Trump’s immigration policies — up from 79% approval of enforcement in California last August.
Mora said the tilt among California Republicans toward the Trump administration could be due, in part, to the framing of the question, which asked about “President Trump’s immigration policies.”
Any time Trump’s name is included, Republicans are more likely to agree with him, she said. The same effect is seen when asking about other issues, such as the economy.
Another factor could be the timing, Mora said. Last summer, federal agents conducted widespread raids in Los Angeles before moving on to target other cities, such as Chicago and Minneapolis.
Now that the administration has shifted away from some tactics that resulted in escalations of violence, Republicans are “falling in line” again with the administration, she said.
“My hunch is it was shocking,” Mora said of the immigration raids last summer. “Things have normalized because the tension is somewhere else.”
Seeking to de-escalate after two protesters were shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, the president tapped his border advisor Tom Homan to take control of the immigration enforcement operation there.
Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said that’s why voters are more supportive.
“Tom Homan being in charge and publicly taking a much lighter touch and appearing reasonable to the average voter is why you’re seeing this turnaround,” he said.
But Democratic strategist Maria Cardona said that that’s wishful thinking and that ICE’s approach hasn’t substantially changed.
“It only went down five points,” she said, referring to the disapproval of Trump’s policies. “That’s not the American people being on the side of the administration — it’s that they’re not seeing American citizens murdered on their screens every day.”
One question saw strong division among Republicans: Should immigration agents be allowed to enter the homes of suspected undocumented immigrants without a judge-approved search warrant?
Among California Republicans, 45% said no, 38% said yes, and 17% said they have no opinion.
O’Connell said that’s because Republicans strongly value civil liberties, especially around property.
Republicans were more strongly in favor of a different policy, allowing ICE agents to wear masks while on duty. While 91% of Democrats opposed the policy, 68% of Republicans favored it.
In the August poll, 45% of Republicans said federal agents should be required to show clear identification when carrying out their work. That desire for identification doesn’t appear to extend to being fully identifiable by face.
O’Connell said Republicans understand the concern over agents increasingly being doxxed.
“The administration wants to find a happy medium there, whether it’s a nameplate or a badge number,” he said. “There is wiggle room.”
Nearly 7 in 10 respondents said they want state and local authorities to intervene when they witness unlawful detentions or excessive use of force by federal immigration agents.
Voters were also asked about their level of concern that they, a family member or a close friend could be detained because of Trump’s immigration policies. While 85% of Republicans said they are not too concerned or not concerned at all, 63% of Democrats said they are somewhat or very concerned.
Overall, nearly half of the respondents, 45%, said they are somewhat or very concerned. Among racial and ethnic groups, 62% of Latino voters, 46% of Black voters and 43% of Asian or Pacific Islander voters said they are somewhat or very concerned.
“The Latino community has always wanted to think the best of this country and they still do,” Cardona said. “Our positivism, our optimism, our hope in a better future is second to none. I think that’s what you’re seeing in those numbers, even as our community feels totally attacked.”
Mora said the high concern among Black residents is notable because, while most Black Californians aren’t immigrants themselves, Los Angeles has one of the largest concentrations of Blaxicans — the children of one Black parent and one Latino parent.
Beyond intermarriages, Black residents in California are also likely to have immigrant friends or neighbors, she said.
O’Connell took a different view: “I don’t think we can glean anything from it other than how one party focuses more on identity politics than the other.”
The Institute of Governmental Studies poll was completed online in English and Spanish from March 9 to 15 by 5,109 registered voters in California.
The Trump administration on Tuesday exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said environmentalists’ lawsuits against the industry threatened to hobble domestic energy supplies as the U.S. wages war against Iran.
Critics said the move by the government’s Endangered Species Committee could doom a rare whale species and harm other marine life. Nicknamed the “God Squad” by groups that say it can decide a species’ fate, the committee comprises several Trump administration officials and is chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
It met Tuesday for the first time in more than three decades amid global oil shocks and soaring energy prices brought on by the Iran war. The U.S. pumps more oil than any other nation, but that hasn’t insulated it from spiking prices: The national average for a gallon of gasoline topped $4 on Tuesday for the first time since 2022.
“Disruptions to Gulf oil production doesn’t hurt just us, it benefits our adversaries,” Hegseth told the committee. “We cannot allow our own rules to weaken our standing and strengthen those who wish to harm us. When development in the Gulf is chilled, we are prevented from producing the energy we need as a country and as a department.”
Environmental groups sought unsuccessfully to block Tuesday’s meeting and pledged to challenge the exemption. They say the exemption would speed the extinction of the rare Rice’s whale, which is found exclusively in the Gulf of Mexico. Government biologists say only about 50 of the animals remain.
“If Trump is successful here, he could be the first person in history to knowingly extirpate a species from the face of the Earth. That’s how precarious the condition of the Rice’s whale is,” said Patrick Parenteau, emeritus professor of law at Vermont Law School.
President Trump has made increased fossil fuel production a central focus of his second term. He wants to open new areas of the gulf off the Florida coast to drilling and has proposed sweeping rollbacks of environmental regulations disliked by industry.
Hegseth had notified Burgum on March 13 that an Endangered Species Act exemption for oil and gas drilling in the gulf was “necessary for reasons of national security.”
Hegseth told committee members Tuesday that Iran’s efforts to block shipping through the world’s busiest oil route, the Strait of Hormuz, underscored the national security imperative of having robust domestic oil production. He said the energy industry is under threat from pending litigation from environmental groups challenging government approvals for drilling.
Industry observers said the Endangered Species Act exemption could have significant implications for energy companies by streamlining approvals of new projects and impeding opponents’ ability to derail drilling plans.
“Serial litigation from activist groups targeting a lawful, well-regulated industry should not be allowed to indefinitely obstruct projects of clear national importance,” said Erik Milito with the National Ocean Industries Assn., which represents offshore developers.
The Gulf of Mexico is one of the nation’s top oil regions, producing 2 million barrels a day. It accounts for almost 15% of crude pumped annually in the U.S., plus a small share of domestic natural gas production.
But the gulf also has been the scene of environmental disasters such as BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010, which killed 11 workers and spilled 134 million gallons of oil. A spill in the gulf earlier this month spread 373 miles, contaminating at least six species and polluting seven protected natural reserves.
The Trump administration in mid-March approved BP’s new $5-billion ultra-deepwater drilling project in the Gulf of Mexico.
A 2025 National Marine Fisheries Service analysis determined the gulf oil and gas program was likely to harm several species of whales, sea turtles and gulf sturgeon that face potential harm from ship strikes, oil spills and other impacts.
The Endangered Species Committee was established in 1978 as a way to exempt projects from the Endangered Species Act, which makes it illegal to harm or kill species on a protected list, if no alternative would provide the same economic benefits in a region or if it was in the nation’s best interest.
Before this week, the panel had convened just three times in its 53-year history and issued only two exemptions. The first was in 1979 to allow construction on a dam on the Platte River in Wyoming, home to the whooping crane. It last met in 1992, allowing logging in northern spotted owl habitats in Oregon. That exemption request was later withdrawn.
Its latest meeting follows a federal judge’s ruling on Monday that struck down attempts during Trump’s first term to weaken rules regarding endangered species.
The panel’s members include the secretaries of Agriculture, Interior and the Army, the chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisors, and the administrators of both the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They all voted in favor of Hegseth’s request for an exemption.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to suspend its construction of a $400 million ballroom where it demolished the East Wing of the White House, barring construction work from proceeding without congressional approval.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington granted a preservationist group’s request for a preliminary injunction that temporarily halts President Trump’s White House ballroom project.
Leon, who was nominated to the bench by Republican President George W. Bush, concluded that the National Trust for Historic Preservation is likely to succeed on the merits of its claims because “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have.”
“The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” the judge wrote.
Leon suspended enforcement of his order for 14 days, acknowledging that the case “raises novel and weighty issues, that halting an ongoing construction project “may raise logistical issues.” He also recognized that the administration is likely to appeal his decision.
The judge ruled that any construction work that’s necessary to ensure the safety and security of the White House is exempt from the scope of the injunction. Leon said he reviewed material that the government privately submitted to him before concluding that halting construction wouldn’t jeopardize national security.
Trump, in a social media post, criticized the trust for suing him over a project that he said is being built at no cost to taxpayers. “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?” he wrote.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
The preservationists sued to obtain an order pausing the ballroom project until it undergoes multiple independent reviews and receives congressional approval.
The White House announced the ballroom project over the summer. By late October, Trump had demolished the East Wing to make way for a ballroom that he said would fit 999 people. The White House said private donations, including from Trump himself, would pay for the planned construction of a 90,000-square-foot ballroom.
Trump proceeded with the project before seeking input from a pair of federal review panels, the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts. Trump has stocked both commissions with allies.
On Feb. 26, Leon rejected the preservationist group’s initial bid to temporarily halt the ballroom’s construction. He said the privately funded group had based its challenge on a “ragtag group” of legal theories and would have a better chance of success if it amended the lawsuit, which it did.
The administration has said above-ground construction on the ballroom would begin in April.
“We are two weeks away,” plaintiffs’ attorney Thaddeus Heuer said during a March 17 hearing. “The imminence is now imminent.”
During the hearing, Leon sounded skeptical of what he referred to as the government’s “shifting theories and shifting dynamics” for its arguments in the case.
“I don’t think it’s a new theory,” Justice Department attorney Jacob Roth told the judge.
Leon expressed frustration at Roth’s attempts to equate the massive ballroom project with relatively modest construction work at the White House under previous administrations.
“This is an iconic symbol of this nation,” the judge said.
The administration argued that other presidents didn’t need congressional approval for previous White House renovation projects, large and small.
“Many of those projects were highly controversial in their time yet have since become accepted — even beloved — parts of the White House,” government attorneys wrote.
Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance on Friday held the inaugural meeting of a new anti-fraud task force he’s leading as the Trump administration seeks to show it’s cracking down on potential misuse of social programs.
Vance, speaking Friday before the task force held a closed-door meeting, said that the federal government for decades had not taken the issue of fraud seriously and that it needed to be tackled with “a whole-government approach.”
“This is not just the theft of the American people’s money,” Vance said. “It is also the theft of critical services that the American people rely on.”
President Trump, a Republican, has made a crackdown on fraud part of his chief domestic focus as voters have said they’re concerned about affordability ahead of November’s midterm elections. That effort comes after allegations of fraud involving day-care centers run by Somali residents in Minneapolis prompted a massive immigration crackdown in the Midwestern city, resulting in widespread protests.
Vance cited some of the Minnesota allegations on Friday. Last month, he held a news conference to announce a temporary halt of some Medicaid funding until the state took actions that federal officials said would address their concerns.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat who faced Vance as a vice presidential candidate in 2024, has called it a “campaign of retribution” and said the Trump administration was “weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota.”
The task force is also the most visible assignment to date that Trump has given to Vance, who is seen as a potential 2028 presidential candidate.
Vance and the task force, which includes about half the president’s Cabinet, the leader of a new Justice Department division focused on prosecuting fraud and Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson, are set to meet regularly to look at rooting out potential fraud and waste in federal benefit programs.
Ferguson, who is vice chair of the task force, cast the issue of fraud as a dire crisis facing the country and said it “shreds the social trust on which these programs and our entire nation depend.”
“This fraud crisis is thus existential,” he said. “If we fail to address it, the fabric of our nation will swiftly unravel.”
Joining the task force was Colin McDonald, a top aide to the Justice Department’s second in command. He was recently confirmed as the assistant attorney general overseeing the new division at the department focused on prosecuting fraud.
The Justice Department has long prosecuted fraud nationally through its Criminal Division, but the Trump administration says the new division is needed to crack down on rampant fraud.
ATLANTA — Attorneys for Georgia’s Fulton County and President Trump’s administration squared off in court Friday over the county’s demand that the FBI return seized ballots and other materials from the 2020 election.
Abbe Lowell, an attorney representing Fulton County, noted that the January raid was “unusual” because it involved an old election and allegations that have already been investigated in the years since Trump, a Republican, lost the county and the state to Joe Biden, a Democrat.
Lowell contended that the Trump administration seized the materials because it grew impatient with litigation the Justice Department filed to obtain them last year. “There’s abundant law that the left hand of the department needs to know what the right hand is doing,” Lowell told U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee.
Michael Weisbuch, representing the federal government, replied that the separate civil litigation wasn’t “relevant in any respect.” He said the administration has already provided Fulton County with digital copies of everything taken and needs to retain physical copies to carry out its own investigation.
Boulee wrote in a scheduling order that the hearing was needed after the two sides failed to reach an agreement in court-ordered mediation.
Trump’s actions alarm Democrats and election officials
The Jan. 28 seizure from a warehouse near Atlanta targeted the elections hub in Georgia’s most populous county, which is heavily Democratic and includes most of Atlanta. Fulton County has been at the center of unfounded claims by Trump and his allies that widespread election fraud cost him reelection.
The FBI’s move was among several actions by the Trump administration that have alarmed Democrats and many election officials who are concerned it’s using law enforcement to pursue the president’s personal grievances and is planning ways to interfere in this year’s midterm elections. The FBI also used a subpoena earlier this month to obtain records related to an audit of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County in Arizona, another battleground state Trump lost that year.
At the same time, the Justice Department is fighting numerous states in court for access to voter data that includes sensitive personal information. Election officials, including some Republicans, have said handing over the information would violate state and federal privacy laws.
Justice Department says it’s investigating 2020 ‘irregularities’
Lawyers for Fulton County argued in a court filing that the seizure of its documents was “improper and unjustified” and demonstrates “callous disregard” for the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. The Justice Department seeks to “set a precedent that would grant the federal government unchecked power to interfere with the local administration of elections,” it wrote.
Justice Department attorneys argued that preparing a detailed affidavit and presenting it to a judge “is the exact opposite of ‘callous disregard’” for those constitutional rights. “Their goal to disrupt an ongoing federal criminal investigation is clear,” they wrote of Fulton County officials.
The Justice Department said it is investigating “irregularities that occurred during the 2020 presidential election in the County” and identified two laws that might have been violated. One requires election records to be maintained for 22 months, while the other prohibits procuring, casting or tabulating false, fictitious or fraudulent ballots.
The filing said the FBI is looking into whether Fulton County properly retained ballot images; whether some ballots were scanned and counted multiple times; whether unfolded, unmailed ballots were counted as mail-in absentee ballots; and potential irregularities concerning tabulator tapes from the scanners used to count ballots.
Fulton County’s lawyers wrote that the “deficiencies” or “defects” in the county’s handling of the 2020 election cited in the affidavit are the kinds of human errors that commonly occur without any intentional wrongdoing and cannot establish probable cause.
Election tech expert cites problems in the affidavit
To support their claims, Fulton County officials submitted a sworn declaration from Ryan Macias, an election technology and security expert who advised the county during the 2020 election. He said the affidavit contains “a multitude of false or misleading statements and omissions” and offered explanations for the alleged “deficiencies.”
Investigations by the Georgia secretary of state and independent reviews contradict the core allegations of the affidavit, which is “rife with statements from witnesses lacking credibility, with extraordinary and undisclosed biases,” Fulton’s lawyers argued.
Georgia’s votes in the 2020 presidential race were counted three times, including once by hand, and each count affirmed Biden’s win.
Federal government lawyers rejected the idea that the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit “intentionally or recklessly misled” the judge, writing that “the supposed misrepresentations and omissions flagged by Petitioners are illusory and/or immaterial.” They also asserted that a lapse of the statute of limitations on the potential crimes does not negate probable cause.
The Justice Department also noted that a federal magistrate judge reviewed the FBI affidavit and signed off on the search warrant. Fulton County sought to have the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit testify at Friday’s hearing, but the Justice Department objected and the judge sided with the federal government.
Brumback writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — A lead attorney for the Department of Homeland Security suggested that federal agents should have “just started hitting the rioters and arresting everyone that couldn’t get away” during an anti-ICE protest in Los Angeles last June, internal emails show.
The note was in an email chain obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight through the Freedom of Information Act and shared exclusively with The Times.
In it, attorneys for Homeland Security appear to be discussing the June 9 lawsuit filed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom over President Trump’s deployment of thousands of California National Guard troops to Los Angeles.
Under the subject line “California DOD Lawsuit,” officials coordinated legal filings defending the Trump administration and included a draft declaration by the Los Angeles field office director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement supporting the deployment of military forces.
The final email in the thread was from Joseph Mazzara, then-acting DHS general counsel, and he appears to be referring to an incident in which protesters tried to breach a protective line at a federal building.
On June 11, he wrote: “Every time I read about the battering ram incident I’m just floored at how wild that is.”
Referring to law enforcement as “they,” he continued: “They should have, when they brought the line in, just started hitting the rioters and arresting everyone that couldn’t get away from them. No one likes being hit by a stick, and people tend to run when that starts happening in earnest.”
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Mazzara was later appointed deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Politico reported that Mazzara is among 10 staffers who followed former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to the State Department after she was fired this month from DHS and given a new role as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas.
The battering ram incident Mazzara referred to is detailed in court documents for the lawsuit.
A June 19 order from a panel judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals states that Trump administration attorneys presented evidence of protesters interfering with federal officers. The protesters threw objects at ICE vehicles, “pinned down” several Federal Protective Service officers and threw “concrete chunks, bottles of liquid, and other objects,” the order said.
Protesters also “used ‘large rolling commercial dumpsters as a battering ram’ in an attempt to breach the parking garage of a federal building,” the order states.
Mazzara’s comment in the email thread with other Homeland Security attorneys was given to American Oversight with a watermark showing the agency had intended to withhold it. American Oversight also received a version of the documents with that statement redacted.
Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, said it’s no wonder the administration wanted to keep Mazzara’s comments hidden.
“They reveal a level of hostility toward protesters that is deeply at odds with the government’s obligation to protect civil liberties — and there’s no FOIA exemption that justifies hiding them,” she said.
Kerry Doyle, the former top ICE attorney during the Biden administration, said Mazzara’s comments show a shocking carelessness about the potential for harm against both the general public and the officers he was employed to protect.
The email, she said, “seems to encourage, or, at the very least, support constitutional violations by the operators that are supposed to be getting legal counsel from him to avoid violating the law.” Plus, commenting on operational strategy is outside the scope of his responsibilities, she said.
“He’s doing a disservice to the people that are on the front line, that rely on him and his colleagues to give them the parameters of what they can and can’t do,” Doyle added. “If you give them bad legal advice, you are setting them up for liability.”
Noem’s removal came amid backlash against an escalation of violence during Trump’s crackdown on immigration, including the shooting deaths of U.S. citizen protesters by immigration agents.
Doyle said part of the secretary’s job is to set the tone for the agency so the rank and file know what is expected of them. Mazzara’s comments, she said, show how that tone has permeated all facets of the agency.
After the U.S. Supreme Court cast doubt on the Trump administration’s legal theory for using troops in domestic law enforcement operations, the president in December began removing the National Guard from Los Angeles and other Democratic-led cities.
The protests last summer caused significant property damage in a small section of downtown Los Angeles. But grand juries refused to indict many demonstrators accused by federal prosecutors of attacking agents, and a Times review of alleged assaults found that most incidents resulted in no injuries.
The U.S. can continue to detain immigrants without bond, an appeals court ruled on Wednesday, handing a victory to the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.
The opinion from a panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis overturned a lower court ruling that required that a native of Mexico arrested for lacking legal documents be given a bond hearing before an immigration judge.
It’s the second appeals court to rule in favor of the administration on this issue. The 5th Circuit in New Orleans ruled last month that the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to deny bond hearings to immigrants arrested across the country was consistent with the Constitution and federal immigration law.
Both appeals court opinions counter recent lower court decisions across the country that argued the practice is illegal.
In November, a district court decision in California granted detained immigrants with no criminal history the opportunity to request a bond hearing and had implications for noncitizens held in detention nationwide.
Under past administrations, most noncitizens with no criminal record who were arrested away from the border had an opportunity to request a bond hearing while their cases wound through immigration court. Historically, bond was often granted to those without criminal convictions who were not flight risks, and mandatory detention was limited to recent border crossers.
In the case before the 8th Circuit, Joaquin Herrera Avila of Mexico was apprehended in Minneapolis in August 2025 for lacking legal documents authorizing his admission into the United States. The Department of Homeland Security detained Avila without bond and began deportation proceedings.
He filed a petition seeking immediate release or a bond hearing. A federal judge in Minnesota granted the petition, saying the law authorized detention without bond when a person seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to being admitted. The judge found this was not the case for Avila because he had lived in the country for years without seeking naturalization, asylum or refugee status and thus wasn’t “seeking admission.”
Circuit Court Judge Bobby E. Shepherd wrote for the majority in a 2-1 opinion that the law was “clear that an ‘applicant for admission’ is also an alien who is ‘seeking admission,’” and so Avila couldn’t petition on these grounds.
Circuit Court Judge Ralph R. Erickson dissented, saying that Avila would have been entitled to a bond hearing during his deportation hearings if he had been arrested during the past 29 years. Now, he wrote, the Circuit Court has ruled that Avila and millions of others would be subject to mandatory detention under a novel interpretation of “alien seeking admission” that hasn’t been used by the courts or five previous presidential administrations.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Avila, didn’t immediately return an email message seeking comment.
Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi hailed the ruling, writing in a social media post: “MASSIVE COURT VICTORY against activist judges and for President Trump’s law and order agenda!”
At question is the issue of whether the government is required to ask a neutral judge to to determine whether it is legal to imprison someone.
It’s based on the habeas corpus, which is a Latin legal term referring to the constitutional right for people to legally challenge their detention by the government.
Immigrants have filed more than 30,000 habeas corpus petitions in federal court alleging illegal detention since Trump took office, according to a tally by the Associated Press. Many have succeeded.
NEW YORK — Wellness influencer Dr. Casey Means’ nomination to be U.S. surgeon general is stalled a month after senators of both major political parties grilled her on vaccines and other health topics during a tense confirmation hearing, deepening doubts about her ability to secure the votes she needs for the role.
The nomination has languished despite ongoing efforts from the White House and Make America Healthy Again activists, revealing how intractable rifts over health policy can be even when Congress has shown deference to President Trump. It’s become the latest snag in Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda after two legal setbacks last week.
Means, a 38-year-old Stanford-educated physician who became disillusioned with traditional medicine and did not finish her surgical residency program, has faced scrutiny for her lack of experience and potential conflicts. Another sticking point has been her close alignment with Kennedy, whose efforts to dramatically pull back vaccine recommendations have been slammed by lawmakers and medical groups.
To advance to a full Senate vote, Means likely needs every Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to support her nomination. But after last month’s hearing, two of them — Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine — told reporters they still had questions for her.
Murkowski told reporters Tuesday that “I’m just in the same spot” when it comes to those hesitations. Collins and Republican committee chairman Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician from Louisiana who interrogated Means about vaccines during the hearing, didn’t respond to multiple inquiries about the delay.
White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement that the Trump administration has been having “productive conversations with the Senate” to advance Means. He added that her “elite academic credentials, research background and advocacy on America’s chronic disease epidemic will make her a critical asset for President Trump’s push to Make America Healthy Again.”
Kennedy spokesman Andrew Nixon reinforced the Republican administration’s support for Means and praised her message calling for healthier lifestyle choices rather than “sick care.”
Contentious hearing set the stage for a tough path to confirmation
Means promotes ideas popular with the MAHA movement, including that Americans are overmedicalized and that diet and lifestyle changes should be at the center of efforts to end widespread chronic disease.
But she’s been criticized for having an inactive medical license, for sometimes failing to disclose financial relationships with brands she promotes and for some of her past health-related comments.
Senators asked her during her hearing about how she would speak to the public about vaccines.
Murkowski and Cassidy pressed Means about her past doubts about the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped recommending for all children late last year in a move later temporarily blocked by a federal judge. Means called the hepatitis B vaccine important and lifesaving but said parents should make their own decisions with their doctors.
Cassidy also asked Means whether she would advise Americans to vaccinate against the flu and measles amid outbreaks across the country. She didn’t make that commitment, instead emphasizing the importance of informed consent.
Collins asked Means about her past advocacy for the therapeutic use of psychedelic mushrooms. Means, who has spoken positively of her own experience with the drugs, said she wouldn’t recommend psychedelics for the American public.
Kennedy’s supporters put pressure on hesitant senators
Once it appeared Murkowski and Collins were undecided, MAHA activists orchestrated a push to support Means’ bid by surging phone calls to the two senators.
“Please call both of them. Call them time after time. Get your friends to call them,” Tony Lyons, head of the Kennedy-aligned group MAHA Action, told supporters earlier this month.
Others have loudly opposed Means’ nomination. Dr. Jerome Adams, Trump’s first-term surgeon general, has repeatedly called her unqualified for her lack of an active medical license. He said in an interview that Republicans in Congress and in the Trump administration have told him they disapprove of the pick but see it as Kennedy’s choice.
“What I keep hearing from folks is, ‘This is what Bobby wants,’” he said.
While surgeons general aren’t mandated by law to have an active medical license, they are required to be part of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, a group of health professionals that says members should have up-to-date licenses.
Means said during her confirmation hearing that she had voluntarily made her Oregon medical license inactive, and that Adm. Brian Christine, who runs the Commissioned Corps, had testified that she was eligible to serve.
Even if Means advances out of committee, she might have difficulty securing confirmation by the full 100-member Senate. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who isn’t seeking another term, told the Associated Press that he’s leaning against voting for Means.
“Her resume already puts me on alert — and then I don’t think she did herself any favors in the hearing,” Tillis said.
Means’ confirmation delay is unusually long
At nearly 300 days since her nomination in May, Means’ confirmation process has taken almost twice as long as the average presidential pick in Trump’s second term, according to data from the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. The group found that in the first 400 days, the average time between nomination and confirmation for Trump’s nominees was 157 days.
Sometimes the process has gone far more quickly. Markwayne Mullin, the new Department of Homeland Security secretary sworn in Tuesday, had his confirmation hearing, floor vote and swearing-in all within a weeklong period.
One reason for Means’ drawn-out nomination is the birth of her son, which happened last October on the day of her initially scheduled confirmation hearing.
But Chris Piper, manager of public policy and stakeholder engagement at the Partnership for Public Service, said the length of time that has passed since Means’ rescheduled confirmation hearing also is unusual. He said candidates are often voted out of committee within a week of their hearing.
“A monthlong delay following a hearing is atypical for most nominations, particularly at this level of position,” he said.
Swenson writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Joey Cappelletti and Stephen Groves in Washington contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court on Tuesday to rule that it may block migrants from applying for asylum at ports of entry along the southern border.
The administration’s lawyers argued that the right to asylum, which arose in response to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, does not extend to those who are stopped just short of a border post in California, Arizona or Texas.
They pointed to part of the immigration law that says a non-citizen who “arrives in the United States … may apply for asylum.”
“You can’t arrive in the United States while you’re still standing in Mexico. That should be the end of this case,” Vivek Suri, a Justice Department attorney, told the court.
Immigration rights advocates called this claim “perverse” and illogical. They said such a rule would encourage migrants to cross the border illegally rather than present themselves legally at a border post.
The justices sounded divided and a bit uncertain over how to proceed. But the conservative majority is nonetheless likely to uphold the administration’s broad power over immigration enforcement.
Several of the justices noted, however, the Trump administration is not currently enforcing a “remain in Mexico” policy.
Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned why the court would make a major decision on immigration and asylum with no immediate, practical impact.
The case posed a fundamental clash between the government’s need to manage surges at the border and the moral and historic right to offer asylum to those fleeing persecution.
In 1939, more than 900 Jewish refugees who were fleeing Nazi Germany aboard the MS St. Louis were turned away by Cuba and the United States. They were forced to return to Europe and more than 250 of them died in the Holocaust.
The worldwide moral reckoning spurred many nations, including the United States, to adopt new laws which offer protection to those fleeing persecution.
In the Refugee Act of 1980, Congress said that non-citizens either “physically present in the United States” or “at a land border or port of entry” may apply for asylum.
To be eligible for asylum, a non-citizen had to demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country due to their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.
Only a small percentage of applicants win their asylum claims, and only after years of litigation.
But faced with overwhelming surge of migrants, the Obama administration in 2016 adopted a “metering” policy that required people to wait on the Mexican side of the border.
The Trump and Biden administrations maintained such policies for a time.
In a 2-1 decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in 2024.
“To ‘arrive’ means ‘to reach a destination,’” Judge Michelle Friedland wrote for the appeals court. “A person who presents herself to an official at the border has ‘arrived.’”
The Trump administration appealed.
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said the “ordinary meaning of ‘arrives in’ refers to entering a specific place, not just coming close to it. An alien who is stopped in Mexico does not arrive in the United States.”
On Tuesday, the Justice Department attorney said the court should reverse the 9th Circuit and uphold the government’s broad power to block migrants approaching the border.
“I can’t predict the next border surge,” Suri said.
“For more than 45 years, Congress has guaranteed people arriving at our borders the right to seek asylum, consistent with our international treaty obligations,” said Kelsi Corkran, Supreme Court director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, who argued the case. “Yet this administration believes that Congress gave it discretion to completely ignore those requirements, and turn back those who are seeking refuge from persecution at its whim.”
“The people turned away at our border are fleeing rape, torture, kidnapping, and death threats. You cannot tell families running for their lives to go back and wait in danger because their suffering is inconvenient,” said Nicole Elizabeth Ramos, border rights project directo at Al Otro Lado which was the plaintiff in the case. “We brought this case because the United States made a legal and moral commitment to protect people fleeing persecution.”
WASHINGTON — Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration on Tuesday for access to evidence they say they need to independently investigate three shootings by federal officers, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
The lawsuit claims that the federal government reneged on its promise to cooperate with state investigations after the surge of federal law enforcement in Minneapolis, and are seeking a court order demanding that the Trump administration comply.
“We are prepared to fight for transparency and accountability that the federal government is desperate to avoid,” Hennepin County Atty. Mary Moriarty told reporters.
The lawsuit marks an escalation in the clash between Minnesota leaders and the Trump administration over the investigations into the high-profile shootings by federal officers that sparked public outcry and protests. The Trump administration has suggested that Minnesota officials don’t have jurisdiction to investigate, but state officials insist they need to conduct their own probes because they don’t trust the federal government to investigate itself.
“There has to be an investigation any time a federal agent or a state agent takes the life of a person in our community,” Moriarty said.
The administration sent thousands of officers to the Minneapolis and St. Paul area for the immigration crackdown as part of President Trump’s national deportation campaign. The Department of Homeland Security considered its largest immigration enforcement operation ever a success but was staunchly criticized by Minnesota’s leaders who raised questions over officers’ conduct.
There continues to be fallout from Operation Metro Surge in the form of a Homeland Security shutdown, as Democrats in Congress hold up funding in an effort to secure restraints on Trump’s immigration agenda.
Minnesota’s lawsuit said the federal government is not permitted to “withhold investigative evidence for the purpose of shielding law enforcement officers from scrutiny where a State is investigating serious potential violations of its criminal laws, targeting its citizens, within its borders.”
Moriarty said Tuesday that the federal government “has adopted a policy of categorically withholding evidence,” calling the practice unprecedented and alarming. She said the lawsuit followed formal demands for evidence after the federal government blocked Minnesota investigators from accessing evidence related to the shootings.
In addition to the Pretti and Good cases, the lawsuit demands access to evidence in the case of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, who was shot and wounded in his right thigh by a federal agent in January.
Federal officials initially accused Sosa-Celis and another man of beating an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel. But federal prosecutors later dropped all charges against the men and authorities opened a criminal investigation into whether two immigration officers lied under oath about the shooting.
Emails seeking comment were sent to DHS and the Justice Department.
The Justice Department in January said it was opening a federal civil rights investigation into Pretti’s killing but has said a similar federal probe was not warranted in the killing of Good. The decision in Good’s case marked a sharp departure from past administrations, which moved quickly to investigate shootings of civilians by law enforcement officials for potential civil rights offenses.
Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche has said that the department’s Civil Rights Division does not investigate every law enforcement shooting and that there have to be circumstances and facts that “warrant an investigation.”
Moriarty has said a lack of confidence in the federal government’s review of these incidents makes the state’s independent investigations into the shootings, as well as officers’ actions during the immigration enforcement operation altogether, especially important. The county office received over 1,000 tips from the public on the shootings of Good and Pretti via an online portal they opened to collect evidence. Earlier this month, Moriarty initiated a second portal and said her office was investigating a number of incidents of potentially unlawful action by officers over the course of the immigration enforcement operation.
Fingerhut and Richer write for the Associated Press. Fingerhut reported from Des Moines, Iowa.
Nearly 600 immigrant children were held in a Texas family detention center in recent months without enough food, medical care or mental health services, as their time inside stretched beyond court-mandated limits, according to court documents.
Children and families held at the detention facility in Dilley, where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father were sent this year, also faced virus outbreaks and lasting lockdowns in December and January, although the total number of children held there has fallen in recent weeks, according to the attorney reports and site visits.
The case of Liam, a preschooler who was wearing a blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack when he was picked up in Minnesota by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, stoked protests over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, including among detainees who gathered and held up signs in the yard behind the Dilley facility’s chain-link fences.
Last week about 85 children remained detained at the Dilley facility, but concerning conditions continued, said Mishan Wroe, directing attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, who visited in mid-March. In early February, a legal advocate for the children observed about 280 children.
The filings Friday cited numerous poignant cases, including that of a 13-year-old girl held at Dilley who tried to take her own life after staff withheld prescribed antidepressants and denied her request to join her mother, as reported by the Associated Press. The government reported there had been “no placements on suicide watch,” according to the filing. The AP obtained Dilley facility discharge documents that described a “suicide attempt by cutting of wrist” and “self-harm.”
The filings were submitted in a lawsuit launched in 1985 that led to the creation in 1997 of court-ordered supervision of standards and eventually established a 20-day limit in custody. The Trump administration seeks to end the Flores settlement, as it is known.
“For years, the Flores consent decree has been a tool of the left that is antithetical to the law and wastes valuable U.S. taxpayer funded resources,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. “Being in detention is a choice.”
Attorneys for detainees highlighted the government’s data showing longer custody times for immigrant children, and also cited worms in food and poor access to medical care or sufficient legal counsel as reported by families and monitors at federal facilities.
“Dilley remains a hellhole,” said Leecia Welch, the chief legal director at Children’s Rights, who visits the center regularly to ensure compliance. “Although the number of children has decreased, the suffering remains the same.”
The Homeland Security spokesperson said the Dilley facility is retrofitted for families, who receive basic necessities including adequate food and water while in detention, and the Trump administration is working to quickly deport detainees.
A report from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed that about 595 immigrant children were held in custody for more than the 20-day limit in December and January, with some stretching into months, per the court filings.
“Approximately 265 of these children were detained for more than 50 days and a shocking 55 children were detained more than 100 days,” the filings state.
That is up from a previous government disclosure late last year that showed that from August to September, 400 children had been held at the Dilley facility beyond the 20-day limit. Homeland Security did not respond to questions seeking comment on the data.
Chief U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee of the Central District of California is scheduled to hold a hearing on the case later this month.
This is the April 21, 2021, edition of the Essential Politics newsletter. Like what you’re reading? Sign up to get it in your inbox three times a week.
Outgoing presidents often leave decisions for their successors to take on.
Over the last two decades, and four presidents, how to end America’s longest war — in Afghanistan — has been among the largest open questions. President Biden inherited it from President Trump, who inherited it from President Obama, who took it from President George W. Bush. Unpopular, seemingly unending and unwinnable, the war is a case study in how the choices of one administration echo into the next.
Last week, Biden formally announced a deadline of Sept. 11 — the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that provoked the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan — to end military involvement in the country.
“War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” he said.
The prospective exit also has been years in the works. Obama promised to scale back U.S. involvement, but first he sent a surge of troops. Trump vowed several times to withdraw all troops, making chaotic progress that stopped short of a full exit. Biden is now the third president to make a similar commitment.
Whether he will follow through remains to be seen. My colleagues David S. Cloud and Tracy Wilkinson have extensively covered the American involvement in Afghanistan, from Trump’s growing tensions with the Pentagon over withdrawal to the lives of Afghanistan’s youngest generation, which was born into U.S. occupation.
Taken together, their work over the last few years reveals the deep roots of Biden’s promise, and the complicated history that will color his path forward.
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The long path to leaving
January 2017: A president who promised peace leaves office after eight years of war
During his first presidential campaign, Obama pledged to end the war in Afghanistan, as well as in Iraq. He ended his presidency as the first two-term president to see U.S. forces at war for all eight years.
Experts saw his legacy as mixed. He did reduce the number of troops in Afghanistan, cutting their ranks to 8,400, and his administration reduced American deaths — if not Afghanis’ — by relying on diplomacy and on drones to launch airstrikes. Yet intelligence officials said the U.S. faced more threats in more places than the country had seen since the Cold War. “We’re now wrapped up in all these different conflicts, at a low level and with no end in sight,” one expert told The Times.
August 2017:Trump presides over a stalemate and negotiated settlement
Trump the candidate ran as a tough-on-the-Taliban leader, promising a hard-fought and fast victory to end U.S. engagement. But Trump the president softened when it came time to reveal formal plans, Cloud and Wilkinson wrote with former Times reporter W.J. Hennigan. Fighting continued — to show U.S. forces could not be pushed out — while Trump promised that the 16-year war might end “some day” in a negotiated settlement. It was an acknowledgment that victory would elude a president who loved to win and refused to concede defeat.
“This entire effort is intended to put pressure on the Taliban, to have the Taliban understand you will not win a battlefield victory,” then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said. “We may not win one, but neither will you. So at some point, we have to come to the negotiating table and find a way to bring this to an end.”
By February 2018, the Trump administration proposed a defense budget that increased spending in Afghanistan by almost $2 billion, for a total of $48.9 billion in the next fiscal year.
December 2018:Trump presses for peace talks and announces a withdrawal of half of troops
That month, a series of announcements signaled Trump’s growing dissatisfaction with involvement in Afghanistan. Increased Taliban attacks had caused hundreds of Afghan civilian and military casualties a month, prompting Trump administration officials to press for a cease-fire agreement, but with dim prospects, Cloud wrote.
Less than two weeks later, administration officials announced a drastic plan: withdraw up to half of the 14,000 American troops serving in Afghanistan, potentially by summer. The backlash was swift from U.S. lawmakers, allies and even the Pentagon. Defense Secretary James N. Mattis was so furious that Trump would abandon allies in Syria and Afghanistan that he resigned in protest, as Cloud reported.
February-May 2020: A truce and a landmark agreement to withdraw
With 12,000 troops still in Afghanistan, the Trump administration brokered a temporary deal with the Taliban to reduce violence for a week in February, Wilkinson reported. The test was a success, and on Feb. 29, U.S. and Taliban officials signed an accord to end the war. The Taliban would prevent Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups from using Afghan territory to threaten the U.S., without renouncing its terrorist ties. In return, the U.S. would withdraw its troops within 14 months, setting a deadline of May 1, 2021.
The plan again drew backlash, from former Trump and Obama administration officials, who warned a complete withdrawal could backfire, Cloud, Wilkinson and Stefanie Glinksi reported. Even as conflict continued between the Taliban and the Afghan government into May, the Trump administration remained committed to removing troops.
November 2020: Hopes of exiting before the election dashed
Trump, hoping that a full exit in 2020 would boost his reelection prospects, made clear to advisors that he cared little about conditions in Afghanistan, Cloud and Wilkinson reported. He wanted out, period. By July, the number of troops on the ground had shrunk to 8,600.
But as the peace talks the U.S. hoped to broker struggled to get off the ground, administration officials said about 4,000 troops would have to remain into November. The Pentagon said too rapid a withdrawal would doom the talks, invite violence and cause American forces to have to abandon valuable equipment. Trump said he wanted a withdrawal by the end of his term in January, and in November — as he refused to concede his loss to Biden — he ordered troop levels reduced in Iraq and Afghanistan, to 2,500 in each country.
Trump’s relationship with Congress further deteriorated in December, in part over the bipartisan pushback to his withdrawal plans. It was among the reasons he cited in vetoing the annual National Defense Authorization Act, Cloud and Jennifer Haberkorn wrote.
April 2021: Biden says it’s “time to end the forever war.”
When Biden took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2,500 troops remained in Afghanistan. But the new president faced the decision of whether to honor Trump’s May 1 deadline for withdrawing them — the final exit from the war, Cloud wrote. Once again, Defense Department officials pressured the president to delay a full withdrawal as the deadline the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban approached.
On April 14, Biden made his decision public: The drawdown would proceed, but not so quickly. The U.S. would fully exit by Sept. 11, Cloud and David Lauter wrote.
“I am now the fourth United States president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan. Two Republicans. Two Democrats,” Biden said. “I will not pass this responsibility onto a fifth.”
The top half of the front page of the Los Angeles Times on Oct. 9, 2001.
(Los Angeles Times)
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— The conviction of former Police Officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd reenergized a push for sweeping criminal justice reform by President Biden and leading Democrats, who said Tuesday’s verdict was just the first step on the path to national healing, report Evan Halper, Eli Stokols and Sarah D. Wire.
— Anticipating an uproar, Facebook said it would crack down on violent content, hate speech and harassment ahead of the Chauvin verdict. But as Brian Contreras reports, critics are wondering why the platform doesn’t take those precautions all the time.
The latest on the environment
— China, Japan and South Korea are the world’s biggest funders of coal-fired power plants around the globe — and the Biden administration is looking to win their agreement to deep cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade, write Anna M. Phillips and Wilkinson.
— Biden will convene leaders from around the world on Thursday and Friday as he marks the United States’ return to the global fight against climate change, Chris Megerian writes. Three people with knowledge of the White House plans say Biden will pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions at least in half by 2030.
— Solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars will go far in helping California and the Biden administration meet their aggressive climate goals — but not far enough. As time runs short, scientists and government officials say the moment to break out the giant vacuums has arrived, Halper writes.
More from Washington
— Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to North Carolina on Monday to talk about economic opportunities and electric school buses as part of the Biden administration’s efforts to promote its roughly $2-trillion infrastructure, clean energy and jobs plan, Noah Bierman writes.
— The Supreme Court is weighing whether immigrants granted temporary protected status can get green cards — and if the Biden administration will make that decision, David G. Savage reports.
— The Justice Department has brought charges against hundreds of people who stormed the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot, but one of its most pivotal potential cases involves a man who never set foot inside the building, writes Del Quentin Wilber.
— After Jan. 6, many of the nation’s largest corporations pledged that they would suspend donations to elected officials who opposed the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, hindered the peaceful transfer of power or incited violence. The vast majority kept their word, report Seema Mehta, Maloy Moore and Matt Stiles.
— What is there left to say about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Plenty, it turns out. In a new biography, Pelosi dishes on chiding Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and using the nickname “Moscow Mitch,” writes Wire.
NEW YORK — In a strongly worded decision this week, a federal judge ordered that the Voice of America — an international broadcaster with the mission to provide news for countries around the world that was largely shut down for the last year by the Trump administration — come roaring back to life.
Whether or not that actually happens is uncertain.
The government filed notice Thursday to appeal U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth’s order two days earlier to put hundreds of VOA employees who have been on paid leave the last year back to work. Lamberth had ruled on March 7 that Kari Lake, President Trump’s choice to oversee the bureaucratic parent U.S. Agency for Global Media, didn’t have the authority to reduce VOA to a skeleton.
The Voice of America was established as a news source in World War II, beaming reports to many countries that had no tradition of a free press. Before Trump took office again last year, Voice of America was operating in 49 different languages, heard by an estimated 362 million people.
Trump’s team contended that government-run news sources, which also include Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, were an example of bloated government and that it wanted news reporting more favorable to the current administration. With a greatly reduced staff, VOA currently operates in Iran, Afghanistan, China, North Korea and in countries with a large population of Kurds.
Lamberth, in his decision, said Lake had “repeatedly thumbed her nose” at laws mandating VOA’s operation.
Time to turn the page at VOA?
VOA director Michael Abramowitz said legislators in both parties understand the need for a strong operation and have set aside enough funding for the job to be done. “It is time for all parties to come together and work to rebuild and strengthen the agency,” he said.
Don’t expect that to happen soon. “President Trump was elected to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse across the administration, including the Voice of America — and efforts to improve efficiency at USAGM have been a tremendous success,” said White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly. “This will not be the final say on the matter.”
Patsy Widakuswara, VOA’s White House bureau chief and a plaintiff in the lawsuit to bring it back, said that “restoring the physical infrastructure is going to take a lot of money and some time, but it can be done. What is more difficult is recovering from the trauma that our newsroom has gone through.”
It’s an open question whether the administration wants a real news organization or a mouthpiece, said David Ensor, a former Voice of America director between 2010 and 2014. “We don’t know — maybe no one does at the moment — what the future holds,” he said.
The administration’s efforts over the last year to bolster friendly outlets and fight coverage that displeases Trump offer a clue, even though Congress has required that Voice of America be an objective and unbiased news source. This week it was announced that Christopher Wallace, an executive at the far-right network Newsmax who had previously spent 15 years at Fox News Channel, will be the new deputy director at VOA. Abramowitz didn’t know he was getting a new deputy until it was announced.
Widakuswara wouldn’t comment on what Wallace’s appointment might mean. “I’m not going to pass judgment before seeing his work,” she said.
While Lamberth ordered more than a thousand employees on leave to go back to work, it’s not clear how many of them moved on to other jobs or retired in the last year. The judge also said he did not have the authority to bring back hundreds of independent contractors who were terminated.
One employee who left is Steve Herman, a former White House bureau chief and national correspondent at VOA and now executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation at the University of Mississippi. Despite the court decisions, he questions whether the Trump administration would oversee a return to what the organization used to be.
“I’m a bit of a pessimist,” Herman said. “I think it’s going to be very difficult.”
An administration loath to admit defeat
Besides fighting to shut it down, Trump is loath to admit defeat. The White House recently nominated Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of State for public diplomacy, to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, putting it more firmly within the administration’s control. Her nomination requires Senate approval.
“Is Marco Rubio’s State Department going to allow objective journalism in 49 languages?” Herman asked. “I don’t think so. I would want that to happen, but that’s a fairy tale.”
In the budget bill passed in February, Congress set aside $200 million for Voice of America’s operation. While that represents about a 25% cut in the agency’s previous appropriation, it sent a bipartisan message of support, said Kate Neeper, VOA’s director of strategy and performance evaluation. Besides being a plaintiff with Widakuswara in the lawsuit to restore the agency, she has helped some of her colleagues deal with some of their own problems over the past year, including immigration issues.
“There is a lot of enthusiasm for going back to work,” she said. “People are eager to show up on Monday.”
The hunger for information from Voice of America in Iran when he was director was a clear example of what the organization meant, Ensor said. Surveys showed that between a quarter and a third of Iran’s households tuned in to VOA once a week, primarily on satellite television. Occasionally the government would crack down and confiscate satellite dishes, but Iranians could usually quickly find replacements, he said.
“I believe in Voice of America as a news organization and as a voice of America,” Ensor said. “It was important, and it can be again.”
WASHINGTON — A federal judge agreed Friday to block the Trump administration from enforcing a policy limiting news reporters’ access to the Pentagon, agreeing with The New York Times that key portions of the new rules are unlawful.
U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman in Washington sided with the newspaper and ruled that the Pentagon policy illegally restricts the press credentials of reporters who walked out of the building rather than agree to the new rules.
The Times sued the Pentagon and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in December, claiming the credentialing policy violates the journalists’ constitutional rights to free speech and due process.
The current Pentagon press corps is comprised mostly of conservative outlets that agreed to the policy. Reporters from outlets that refused to consent to the new rules, including from the Associated Press, have continued reporting on the military.
Friedman, who was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Bill Clinton, said the policy “fails to provide fair notice of what routine, lawful journalistic practices will result in the denial, suspension, or revocation” of Pentagon press credentials. He ruled that it violates the First and Fifth amendment rights to free speech and due process.
“In sum, the Policy on its face makes any newsgathering and reporting not blessed by the Department a potential basis for the denial, suspension, or revocation of a journalist’s (credential),” he wrote. “It provides no way for journalists to know how they may do their jobs without losing their credentials.”
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
It has argued that the policy imposes “common sense” rules that protect the military from the disclosure of national security information.
“The goal of that process is to prevent those who pose a security risk from having broad access to American military headquarters,” government attorneys wrote.
Times attorneys claim the policy is designed to silence unfavorable press coverage of President Trump’s administration.
“The First Amendment flatly prohibits the government from granting itself the unbridled power to restrict speech because the mere existence of such arbitrary authority can lead to self-censorship,” they wrote.
Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department filed a new lawsuit Friday against Harvard University, saying its leadership failed to address antisemitism on campus, creating grounds for the government to freeze existing grants and seek repayment for grants already paid.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, is another salvo in a protracted battle between the administration of President Trump and the elite university.
“The United States cannot and will not tolerate these failures,” the Justice Department wrote in the lawsuit. It asked the court to compel Harvard to comply with federal civil rights law and to help it “recover billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution.”
The lawsuit also asks a judge to require that Harvard call police to arrest protesters blocking parts of campus and to appoint an “independent outside monitor,” approved by the government, to ensure it complies with court orders.
Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit comes after negotiations appear to have bogged down in the months-long battle with the Trump administration that has tested the boundaries of the government’s authority over America’s universities. What began as an investigation into campus antisemitism escalated into an all-out feud as the Trump administration slashed more than $2.6 billion in research funding, ended federal contracts and attempted to block Harvard from hosting international students.
In a pair of lawsuits filed by the university, Harvard has said it’s being unfairly penalized for refusing to adopt the administration’s views. A federal judge agreed in December, reversing the funding cuts and calling the antisemitism argument a “smokescreen.”
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, a major association of colleges and universities, accused the administration of launching a “full scale, multi-pronged” attack on Harvard. Friday’s lawsuit, he said, is just the latest attempt to pressure Harvard to agree to changes favored by the administration.
“When bullies pound on the table and don’t get they want, they pound again,” Mitchell said.
The Trump administration began investigating allegations of discrimination against Harvard’s Jewish and Israeli students less than two weeks after the president took office. The allegations focus on Harvard’s actions during and after pro-Palestinian demonstrations during the Israel-Hamas war.
Officials concluded Harvard did not adequately address concerns raised about antisemitism that drove some students to conceal their religious skullcaps and avoid classes. During protests of the war, Trump officials said, Harvard permitted students to demonstrate against Israel’s actions in the school library and allowed a pro-Palestinian encampment to remain on campus for 20 days, “in violation of university policy.”
In its lawsuit Friday, the Justice Department also accused Harvard of failing to discipline staff or students who protested or tacitly endorsed the demonstrations, such as by canceling or dismissing classes that conflicted with protests.
“Harvard University has failed to protect its Jewish students from harassment and has allowed discrimination to wreak havoc on its campus,” White House press secretary Liz Huston said Friday on X. “President Trump is committed to ensuring every student can pursue their academic goals in a safe environment.”
Despite their bitter dispute, Harvard and the Trump administration have held some negotiations, and the two sides have reportedly been close to reaching an agreement on multiple occasions. Last year, the administration and the university were reportedly approaching a deal that would have required Harvard to pay $500 million to regain access to federal funding and to end the investigations. Almost a year later, Trump upped that figure to $1 billion, saying that Harvard has been “behaving very badly.”
At the same time, the administration was taking steps in a civil rights investigation that had the potential to jeopardize all of Harvard’s federal funding.
In June, the Trump administration made a formal finding that Harvard tolerated antisemitism.
In a letter sent to Harvard, a federal task force said its investigation had found the university was a “willful participant” in antisemitic harassment of Jewish students and faculty. The task force threatened to refer the case to the Justice Department to file a civil rights lawsuit “as soon as possible,” unless Harvard came into compliance.
When colleges are found in violation of federal civil rights law, they almost always reach compliance through voluntary agreements. When the government determines a resolution can’t be negotiated, it can try to sever federal funding through an administrative process or, as the Trump administration has done, by referring the case to the Justice Department through litigation.
Such an impasse has been extraordinarily rare in recent decades.
Last summer, Harvard responded that it strongly disagreed with the government’s investigative finding and was committed to fighting bias.
“Antisemitism is a serious problem and no matter the context, it is unacceptable,” the university said in a statement. “Harvard has taken substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism in its community.”
In a letter last spring, Harvard President Alan M. Garber told government officials that the school had formed a task force to combat antisemitism, which released a detailed report of what unfolded on campus after Hamas militants stormed Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people and abducting 251 others. Israel retaliated with an offensive that killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and displaced around 90% of Gaza’s population — prompting pro-Palestinian demonstrations at colleges around the country.
After the demonstrations at Harvard, Garber said the university had hired a new provost and new deans and that it had reformed its discipline policies to make them “more consistent, fair and effective.”
Since he took office, Trump has targeted elite universities he believes are overrun by left-wing ideology and antisemitism. His administration has frozen billions of dollars in research grants, which colleges have come to rely on for scientific and medical research.
Several universities have reached agreements with the White House to restore funding. Some deals have included direct payments to the government, including $200 million from Columbia University. Brown University agreed to pay $50 million toward state workforce development groups.
Balingit and Casey write for the Associated Press.
