PHOENIX — The Trump administration has begun work on a project to build a stretch of border wall in southern Arizona along part of a Native American tribe’s reservation, pushing ahead with one of its signature projects despite protests from the tribe.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the area is a dangerous smuggling route and that building the wall will close a longstanding security gap. But members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose membership spans both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, have accused the administration of trespassing and say the construction will damage land sacred to the tribe.
The wall segment is part of a $46 billion effort by the Trump administration to fill the border with 30-foot steel bollard walls, vehicle barriers, and technology designed to stop undocumented immigration and smuggling.
But as building efforts have ramped up, the administration has run into opposition from landowners, environmental groups, and Native American tribes who say construction is violating property rights and desecrating sacred Indigenous sites.
The Tohono O’odham Nation said in a statement Tuesday that about 20 Customs and Border Protection officers, working with contractors, went onto the tribe’s land early that morning to begin construction.
Drone videos published by nation officials show roughly 14 vehicles and an industrial drill at one of the sites.
A federal judge permitted the government to move forward with construction earlier this month, but the tribe says the contractors are violating tribal codes and trespassing to access the border wall site.
The Tohono O’odham Nation, which has 37,000 members including thousands who live in Mexico, sued the federal government in June in an attempt to block construction of the border wall. The tribe argued that the wall would cause “significant devastation” on the reservation, including the destruction of mountain peaks sacred to the tribe, and would alter boundaries of their nation.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, ruled in favor of the government, noting that the border wall would be built on a 60-foot wide buffer zone of federally owned land called the Roosevelt Reservation.
“Defendants have not yet articulated plans to construct outside the Roosevelt Reservation,” the judge wrote in his opinion.
The Tohono O’odham Nation said that even if construction were contained to the Roosevelt Reservation, driving onto tribal land to access the area still constitutes trespassing.
“The contractors, who are on the Nation illegally, were accompanied by agents as they worked on three separate locations near the border with drill trucks to conduct soil sampling and other activities,” tribal officials said in a statement.
The CBP agents were masked, armed, and set up a vehicle blockade to stop tribal police from removing the contractors, according to Tohono O’odham officials. The nation had set up “No Trespassing” signs before Tuesday.
So far, no physical confrontations between police or members of the Tohono O’odham Nation have been reported.
CBP defended the need for the wall in a statement Tuesday, saying the desert spanning the Tohono O’odham Nation is a corridor for drug smuggling.
“The project will close one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border: remote desert that has facilitated decades of drug loads, migrant deaths, and cartel activity,” said CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott.
Tribal officials said they’re exploring further legal actions in an effort to remove contractors.
SLSCO Ltd., the Texas-based construction company building the section in Arizona, has secured over $390 million in funding from the Department of Homeland Security to build the border wall since 2023.
Big-city mayors are giving poll workers panic buttons in case election skeptics question their work. County and state officials are gaming out responses to immigration raids near voting centers.
Lawyers for Democratic states and civic groups are pre-writing legal challenges to ballot seizures. And Democratic aides in Washington are preparing members of Congress to push back in the court of public opinion against any baseless claims of voter fraud in competitive districts.
Across California and the nation, civic organizations, voting rights advocates and Democratic leaders are preparing for a raft of potential actions by the Trump administration to interfere in, subvert or deny November’s midterm vote.
President Trump, an election denier for years, has without evidence described the U.S. election system as badly corrupted by fraud and dangerously vulnerable to both domestic and foreign interference.
He has said he would do “anything necessary” to have “honest elections,” and has tried since returning to office to unilaterally rewrite the rules for voting nationwide and wrest control of elections from the states through executive orders and other administrative measures.
Now, he has declined to rule out additional and unprecedented steps to force his will on the November election, including through emergency declarations and military deployments, and in February suggested Republicans should simply take over voting in blue states.
Election experts say there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in American elections, despite Trump’s allies searching for years.
A worker looks through ballots at a Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center on Monday, June 8, 2026 in City of Industry, CA. Counting continues on ballots cast for the state’s primary election held June 2.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
Much of the work to resist any Trump interference or power grab is being done quietly to avoid revealing too much of the strategy to the Trump administration or stoking unnecessary fear among voters.
It is designed to match what Trump’s opponents see as his three-part “interference playbook” — to “deceive” voters before the election, “disrupt” the vote itself and “deny” any unfavorable results after, said Justin Vail of Protect Democracy, a prominent litigant against the administration.
“The threats are real,” Vail said, “but the preparation is larger and more coordinated than ever before.”
The scenarios being planned for include the president deploying troops or immigration agents to polling sites to intimidate voters, fomenting unrest as a pretext to declare a national emergency, claiming fraud in the ballot counts of key congressional races or commanding the U.S. Postal Service to intervene in mail ballot delivery.
All told, the efforts amount to an unprecedented exercise to ensure the nation’s elections are safe from its own federal government.
They also reflect a deterioration in trust between states and counties overseeing elections, voting rights and pro-democracy advocates and a federal administration that has denigrated their work and tried to take control of voting away from states.
As public frustration with the economy mounts and Trump’s approval rating sinks, Democrats have become hopeful their party will retake power in Congress. Trump, meanwhile, has suggested that alleged election integrity problems will be the culprit if Republicans lose.
In California, 61% of voters recently identified federal inference in November as a “major concern,” according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by The Times.
“We are taking this threat really seriously,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who helped form a Senate task force to prepare. “Politically, I’m very optimistic about the midterms. But I’m also deeply concerned with the president’s willingness to interfere with them — and the fact that, unlike even in 2020, where there were at least some people around him to try to constrain what he was doing, all those people are gone.”
President Donald Trump is seen on a screen as his supporters cheer during a rally on the National Mall on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Trump supporters gathered in the nation’s capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election.
(Samuel Corum / Getty Images)
Much of the work is legal preparation among Democratic state attorneys general and lawyers with leading civic organizations. Nothing is being ruled out after Trump’s supporters, at his goading, violently attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, following his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
Other preparation is political, as members of Congress, mayors and other elected officials position themselves to use their bully pulpits and legislative powers to punch back. And grassroots campaigns are also unfolding, as community leaders recruit voters to defend their local elections, including online.
“This is an all-hands-on-deck task,” said Skye Perryman, president of the nonpartisan legal organization Democracy Forward. “We’re anticipating scenarios we haven’t seen before in the United States.”
Trump, who has never accepted his 2020 loss to Biden despite scores of reviews and audits confirming the result, has consistently sought to undermine Americans’ trust in elections, telling the nation in a prime-time speech last month that the voting system was “broken” and claiming that the SAVE America Act, a strict Republican-proposed voter ID and citizenship measure, is necessary to fix it.
The White House said it wouldn’t respond to hypothetical questions about the midterm election, but said anyone who breaks voting laws will be held accountable. Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, blamed “extreme liberal Democrats” for undermining U.S. confidence in elections by blocking the SAVE America Act, which Trump has failed to push through Congress.
Bis claimed voters support such changes, and said “President Trump is absolutely right: We fix this now, or we lose our country.”
Causes for concern
The fears of interference are driven by Trump’s long record of election denial; his recent insistence that the midterms are vulnerable to both domestic fraud and foreign interference; his success installing loyalists and fellow election deniers in powerful positions throughout his government; and his current administration’s many attempts to usurp control over state voting processes, including through executive orders, lawsuits and legislation.
Sen. Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) (C) departs after a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and Republican senators at the U.S. Capitol on June 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. President Trump is visiting Capitol Hill to attend a closed-door luncheon with the Republican Senate Steering Committee to push his SAVE America Act, which would impose strict voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements in federal elections.
(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
Some analysts saw Trump’s speech last month as laying the groundwork for greater intervention in November, and he raised further alarm this month by entertaining a suggestion from conservative radio host and election conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root that the president has “the right to declare a national security emergency” to unilaterally enforce new voting restrictions.
“Stranger things have happened,” Trump responded.
The White House has previously downplayed the likelihood of immigration agents being deployed to polling locations, but Trump has refused to rule it out. Legal experts say such a move would probably be swiftly blocked by courts, as would any unlawful deployment of military troops to polls.
Some voting experts said Trump’s efforts shouldn’t be blown out of proportion, particularly given federal courts’ dim view of them to date.
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, noted Trump’s executive orders on elections were blocked, the Justice Department is 0 for 23 in cases demanding state voter rolls, and the primaries have run smoothly with high turnout — showing the president is “having very little effect.”
Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, said it is “important that people be aware that there are threats, but to not let those threats be debilitating” or prevent them from voting.
Civic experts are urging regular voters to help debunk misinformation about voting within their communities. Democracy Forward has asked people to take one civic-minded action per day leading up to the election, while Indivisible, a progressive grassroots organization, is training volunteers nationwide to mount public push-back to any interference.
Coordination in Congress
A Senate aide who spoke with The Times on condition of anonymity said members of the Senate task force meet regularly to plan for as many potential forms of interference as possible — and that there is “no bottom” to what they’re considering.
Task force members are studying nuanced local election laws to understand how Congress members should respond to any federal interference in their home states, and working on “coordinated messaging” that all members can use in response to immigration raids or other broad interference, the aide said.
National Guard troops stand in the shade at The Park at LeDroit in Northwest on August 12, 2026 in Washington, DC. U.S. President Donald Trump is claiming credit for Washington’s dramatic crime decline a year after Trump sent thousands of National Guard troops to the nation’s Capitol, but the evidence shows crime was already falling before his federal intervention and the extent to which his policies accelerated that decline remains disputed.
(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
They are also reading “line by line” through recent legal decisions limiting National Guard deployments and other federal actions to identify any “loopholes” the administration might exploit.
They are paying particular attention to districts with competitive congressional races and where past problems have arisen. In California, they’ve studied the recent seizure of ballots by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and the criticism of slow ballot counting statewide, the aide said.
Schiff said the scenario he is “most concerned” about is one in which the president or his allies “seed” unrest in big cities to “give the president a pretext, Reichstag fire-like, to call out the military or invoke the Insurrection Act or call out ICE or Border Patrol.”
The Reichstag fire erupted in the German parliament four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor in 1933, and was used to justify a sweeping crackdown on political opponents and the suspension of civil liberties — ushering in Nazi rule.
Schiff said lawsuits will be a necessary but “very imperfect remedy” in such a scenario, and Democrats will need to develop a more robust response combining “litigation with mobilization” and legislative oversight.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which has election oversight, is helping to create an election observer program for hotly contested races, and has warned his colleagues that he will call a vote on any election-related emergency Trump declares, so that they must co-sign or resist it.
Separately in the House, staffers have been building their own “road map” for how to deal with a laundry list of “terrible things that bad-faith actors who seek to subvert the election could do,” with a principal focus on any ways they might disrupt the Jan. 3 swearing in of new Congress members, said a House aide involved in the preparations there, who spoke with The Times on the condition of anonymity.
The U.S. Capitol, on July 20, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Tom Brenner / Getty Images)
House staffers are also looking at how court imposed limits on Trump’s emergency powers might be “exploited, weaponized [or] ignored” by the administration, including the Justice Department.
A Justice Department spokesperson said the department is “working diligently” to fulfill the demands of Trump’s election-related executive order purporting to “strengthen the integrity of our elections,” which courts have blocked, and has “statutory authority to enforce our nation’s election laws, including through requesting state voter rolls,” which courts have also blocked.
Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the department’s civil rights division and has threatened local elections officials with legal consequences if they don’t comply with her voter roll demands, said her division “has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration.”
State and local preparations
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said attorneys from his office and similar Democratic ones across the country are “hard at work planning, preparing, strategizing, researching, getting ready for all the different ways the Trump administration can break the law.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, right, holds a press conference at the Ronald Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, May 14, 2026.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
That includes any attempts to seize ballots, deploy federal law enforcement or the military, or command the U.S. Postal Service to interfere with mail ballots, he said. “The right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow. It’s fundamental. We need to protect it.”
Dean Logan, registrar-recorder and county clerk for Los Angeles County, said he has a responsibility to ensure that “election operations remain secure and uninterrupted” no matter the threat, and is taking steps to do so, though he declined to address potential acts by Trump. Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said big cities are also preparing, including to prevent harassment of voters or election workers.
“Cities are where we host vote centers. It’s where the volunteers come from, where people go with their questions,” Richardson said. “We have to pay attention to national rhetoric. We have to be aware of anxiety that might — tensions that may — arise.”
WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is allowing the White House to continue construction on President Trump’s $400 million ballroom project for now.
Roberts signed a temporary order on Friday allowing work to continue while the court considers an emergency appeal from the Trump administration.
Lower courts had ordered a halt to the project, finding that it must have congressional approval. That ruling was set to take effect on Friday. Roberts signed the order because he oversees appeals of Washington-based cases.
The case comes before the nation’s highest court as Trump, a Republican, exercises unparalleled assertions of presidential power and increasingly seeks to mold the capital in his own image.
The Trump administration has scored a series of victories on the high court’s emergency docket, though the justices have ruled against some of the president’s signature policies after fuller review.
The administration has argued that the president has total authority to renovate the White House and other federal buildings as he sees fit and that the ballroom project must be completed due to national security concerns.
When Trump first announced the plans for a new ballroom, he did not emphasize national security. He said the project would be funded by private donations, including from himself.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation argues that Trump has no unilateral authority to undertake the work, which has included demolishing the East Wing. Lawyers for the preservation group accused the White House of trying to “outrun the courts” by accelerating construction.
The Trump administration says 65% of work has already been completed on the planned 90,000-square-foot (8,400-square-meter) ballroom, where the East Wing stood before the president ordered its demolition. Crews are working 20 hours a day, seven days a week on the project, where about $200 million in private donations has been spent or committed, Justice Department attorneys said in court documents.
A district court judge ordered a stop to aboveground construction of the planned ballroom in April in a ruling that was suspended before being upheld by an appeals court panel. The order from U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington allows belowground work on bunkers and military installations to continue. Leon was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican.
Two appeals-court judges appointed by Democratic presidents found the project was for Congress to decide and “not a matter for Executive self-help.” A third judge, appointed by Trump, found that the preservationist group that challenged the project had no legal right to sue.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer picked up on that argument, calling the decision halting the work “extraordinary and unlawful.” He said the completion of the project was “vitally required by national security.”
Whitehurst and Kunzelman write for the Associated Press.
LOS ANGELES — U.S. immigration officials worked with Iran to deport Iranians in 2025, newly released emails show, revealing a working relationship between the U.S. and Iranian governments despite tensions mounting between the countries.
Hundreds of emails exchanged between U.S. immigration officials, which were obtained by the National Iranian American Council and made public Tuesday, offer the most transparent play by play yet of how the two countries worked together to arrange for more than 100 Iranians to be flown back to Iran on three separate immigration flights in September and December 2025 and January 2026.
The emails show that Iranian officials had some influence over which Iranian immigrants in the U.S. were sent back to their home country, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials apparently heeded some last-minute changes to deportation lists at the request of Iran.
“Per request from the Iran Embassy I added a few cases,” one unnamed ICE official wrote in late August, a month before the first deportation flight in September. Just over a week later, someone with the same job title moved to make another, unspecified change to the deportation list after they said they met with the “Director at the Iranian Embassy.”
“Iran has requested that I amend the previous manifest and expedite the removal process,” the official wrote.
In a Sept. 26 email, just three days before the deportation flight left U.S. soil, an ICE official said in an email that the Iranian Embassy was still making requests for three additional Iranians on the flight. It’s not clear who ended up on the flight, which ended up being much smaller than initially planned. Iranian officials were still making requests the day the flight departed, although one official wrote that those requests were denied.
Coordination of the flights remained a high priority even as ICE officials acknowledged internally that Iranians were fleeing Iran amid the deadly 12-day war with the U.S. and Israel in June 2025, emails show. The flights departed just months after the U.S. and Israel agreed to a ceasefire with Iran.
The new emails highlight a clear departure from a decades-long practice by the U.S. of welcoming Iranian dissidents, exiles and others since the 1979 Islamic Revolution forced a large number of Iranians to flee.
The deportation of Iranians to a country whose government has a pattern of violent persecution against women, religious minorities and political dissidents has drawn significant criticism from human rights activists.
The Department of Homeland Security did not offer comment in response to an emailed request sent Tuesday afternoon.
Some deportees were handpicked by Iranian officials, emails show
Iranian officials acknowledged in September 2025 that as many as 400 Iranians could be returned under an agreement with the Trump administration. They said most of the Iranians had crossed into the U.S. from Mexico illegally, while some faced other immigration issues.
It is not clear from the emails how frequently U.S. immigration officials had direct contact with the Iranian government. Sometimes messages were conveyed through Qatari officials, who helped charter the deportation flights through Doha, but other times officials reference regular meetings with the “Iranian delegation,” the “Director at the Iranian Embassy” and other unnamed Iranian officials.
It is not clear whether the people Iran put on the list had volunteered to repatriate or if they were forced. Previous reporting from The New York Times revealed that asylum-seekers were among those deported to Iran, while others said they were deported against their will.
At least one person was deported who wasn’t supposed to be, emails showed.
“An Iranian not included on the final manifest we sent to the Qatari MOI was boarded on the flight,” an unnamed U.S. official wrote.
In response, another unnamed U.S. official wrote, “I have no idea how the case/person got through on the plane.”
U.S. prioritized deportation efforts during war
Emails suggest that pressure to carry out the Iranian deportations came from the highest levels of the Trump administration, even when U.S. and Israel were exchanging strikes with Iran in a 12-day conflict between June 13 and June 24, 2025.
Just days after Trump’s June 16 warning on social media that “Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” the former acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, called the repatriation of Iranian immigrants a “priority” in an email sent to the agency’s head of removal operations Marcos Charles and a number of unnamed staff.
Shortly after Lyon’s email, Charles forwarded the message to a group of officials whose names are redacted. An unnamed ICE official responded, warning that “removal will prove difficult” amid the ongoing conflict because Iran wasn’t issuing the travel documents for Iranians eligible for deportation. On top of that, the Iranian airspace was closed to all flights during the bombings and Iranians were fleeing the country.
Charles was unfazed, telling staff in a subsequent email to make a plan to deport 58 Iranians with final removal orders in ICE custody at the time.
“We need a plan forward ASAP,” Charles wrote. Another official, who name was redacted, urged colleagues to “identify a solution for this White House priority.”
Jamal Abdi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, said the emails undermine Trump’s assertions that the U.S. is at war with Iran to save ordinary Iranians from a repressive regime.
“It demonstrates that the top priority here was to kick out as many people as possible by whatever means necessary,” Abdi said.
Iranian officials had access to immigration detainees
On several occasions, the emails show ICE officials arranging for Iranian officials to meet for unspecified reasons with people detained in the U.S., echoing testimony from Iranian asylum-seekers in an unrelated lawsuit filed by an unaffiliated Iranian interest group in July.
Eleven Iranians in immigration detention said they were forced to meet with Iranian government officials while in ICE detention. Those Iranian authorities knew intimate details about their asylum claims, according to the sworn declarations filed in a Washington, D.C., court in July.
The lawsuit alleges that U.S. immigration agencies have been illegally sharing confidential information about Iranian asylum-seekers with the Iranian government.
The U.S. government is allowed to work with government officials of foreign countries to coordinate deportation logistics. However, federal regulations passed in the late 1990s prohibit the government from sharing information that could reveal that the person getting deported applied for asylum.
DHS vehemently disputed the lawsuit’s allegations.
“These allegations that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government are FALSE,” DHS said in a statement in July.
WASHINGTON — As the year’s midterm primaries draw to a close, Tuesday’s results in Florida, Wyoming and Alaska continued to underscore an unpredictable election season marked by unreliable polls, intra-party divides and surprise showings by political outsiders.
In one high-profile surprise, democratic socialist state Rep. Angie Nixon’s easily defeated former Army intelligence officer Alexander Vindman in Florida’s U.S. Senate primary, despite Vindman having raised 16 times as much money as the new Democratic nominee, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks campaign finance.
According to Florida Politics, a digital media outlet, a now-deleted Change Research poll showed Vindman leading Nixon by 10 points. At that time, 41% of Democrats polled were still undecided.
In the race for a Senate seat Democrats hope to flip, former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola outpolled incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, with another Republican Dan Sullivan — this one a retired teacher — also making the cut for the four-person, ranked-choice general election in November.
The results from Tuesday night also show that President Trump’s influence on his party’s base may be dwindling. Three of his endorsed candidates in Wyoming and Florida, both safe red states, were defeated.
Here are four takeaways from Tuesday’s results:
Democratic socialist overcame a huge cash disadvantage
Nixon, who recently joined the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party, won in a massive upset against Vindman, a moderate selected to run by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Nixon will face Republican incumbent Sen. Ashley Moody in November in a special election to serve the final two years of former Sen. Marco Rubio’s term. Moody was appointed to the seat by Gov. Ron DeSantis when Rubio became secretary of State.
Through a highly coordinated grassroots campaign, Nixon overcame a $15-million fundraising deficit against Vindman in a state where affordability, high property insurance costs and public infrastructure strain were top concerns for many voters.
Although Vindman had the support of the Democratic establishment his lack of profile in Florida — where he has lived for just three years — was a clear detriment, said Susan MacManus, a political analyst at the University of South Florida.
“Angie Nixon was extremely well known in Democratic circles,” MacManus said. “There’s a battle here in Florida: Do you want a Democratic candidate who’s a fighter, or do you want someone more in line with the establishment? … Nixon had no money, but she had a presence.”
But Nixon still faces a steep battle against Moody, MacManus said. According to state data, Florida has 1.5 million more Republicans than Democrats, meaning that Nixon will have to win over most of the independents — and perhaps convert a few Republicans — to have a shot in the general election.
Florida redistricting had a big effect on House races
In May, DeSantis’ office rearranged districts for the second time this decade to secure more safe-Republican seats in the House of Representatives, shortly after the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of the Voting Rights Act.
In Florida’s 25th District, a newly drawn coastal area north of Miami, incumbent Rep. Jared Moskowitz defeated democratic socialist and activist Oliver Larkin.
The redistricting increased the number of Jewish voters in the district, which likely hurt Larkin’s candidacy because of his openly anti-Israel stance, said Jonathan Cervas, an assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology.
Moskowitz will face the former mayor of Boca Raton, Scott Singer, in the general election.
In Florida’s Black-majority 20th District, which was redrawn this year, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz finished ahead of four Black rivals in a crowded field, and will face Brent Andersen, an insurance broker, in November. Black leaders criticized Wasserman Schultz, a white 11-term congresswoman, for running in the district.
“She won against a crowded field, but she didn’t win with 50% of the vote,” said Kareem Crayton, vice president of the Brennan Center’s Washington office. “The open question remains: Is she the preferred candidate of African Americans? We’ll see in the general.”
Although these two districts lean slightly blue, data suggest that Republicans will be more competitive in these areas than they were in the 2024 congressional races, Cervas said. He added that this shows Florida’s redistricting efforts were mostly a success, likely adding at least one or two seats in the general election.
Alaska was more competitive than Democrats thought
Some Democratic Party leaders had initially ranked Alaska behind other states with the potential to flip a Senate seat. But they likely will make the Alaska race a higher priority after a strong showing Tuesday by former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, who topped the field in the primary against incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan. It has been 11 years since Alaska last had a Democratic senator.
According to the New York Times, the Alaska Survey Research poll shows Peltola with a two-point lead heading to the general election.
Peltola has run as a centrist Democrat, attacking the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce and lack of resource development in Alaska, which is likely to have wide appeal in a state that Trump won in 2016, 2020 and 2024, but that has suffered in recent months from rising costs and job losses.
Three Trump endorsements fell short
Trump-endorsed incumbent Rep. Cory Mills — the subject of a House Committee Ethics probe stemming from accusations of assault by two women — lost his primary race in Florida’s 7th District to former television reporter Ryan Elijah, making him the 10th Trump-backed candidate to lose in a primary this year.
After the results were known, the president wrote in a Truth Social post: “I told Congressman Cory Mills of Florida, a friend of mine, to get out of the Race, but he wouldn’t listen. He thought he could win, so who can blame him?”
Trump had picked Catalina Lauf to replace Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, only to see her lose to Jim Schwartzel, a businessman-turned-politician. Donalds is the Republican nominee for governor, where he will face Democrat David Jolly, a former Republican House member.
Trump’s pick for Wyoming governor, Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, was defeated handily by Republican state Sen. Eric Barlow.
WASHINGTON — Federal regulators have given preliminary approval for a cryptocurrency venture tied to President Trump and his family to operate a digital-asset bank, a decision that has drawn immediate condemnation from Senate Democrats who are now pushing legislation to bar such an action.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, and nine other Senate Democrats introduced a bill Saturday that would bar the president, the vice president, their immediate family members and other senior government officials from owning or controlling banks.
The measure was proposed a day after the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — which is part of the Trump administration — granted conditional approval for World Liberty Trust Co. to become a trust bank. The firm was founded in 2024 by two of Trump’s sons and the sons of Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East.
If the firm gets final approval, it would not act like a conventional bank and take deposits or make loans. Instead, the chartered bank would be able to issue and manage cryptocurrencies and digital assets. But the move would grant new financial powers to the Trump family’s crypto business, which has already shown to be profitable for the president in his first year back in the White House.
Trump’s financial disclosures show the president has earned more than $1.2 billion from crypto-related projects as he has pushed to deregulate the digital-asset industry. He hauled in more than $500 million from his World Liberty Financial business selling new crypto products and is a significant owner of the firm through an entity called DT Marks DEFI LLC, which holds about a 38% stake.
Aside from World Liberty Financial, Trump last year took in more than $600 million from sales of souvenir-type “meme” coins stamped with his likeness.
Trump’s crypto windfall has lately fueled Democrats’ argument that the president stands to personally gain from the same regulatory apparatus he oversees, and has led to acrimonious negotiations in Capitol Hill over how to regulate the industry.
The White House said Tuesday “there are no conflicts of interest.” But the recent decision by federal regulators in relation to World Liberty Financial is now giving more ammunition to Democrats, who have pushed for more ethical guardrails to crack down on the Trump family’s crypto ventures.
“This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen — and Congress cannot allow it to stand,” Warren said in a statement. “The Ending Presidential Corruption in Banking Act will close the door on this kind of unprecedented corruption.”
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) said the decision to allow a Trump-linked crypto firm to charter its own bank is “injecting risk into our financial system and fueling the Trump family’s business endeavors.”
“It is Congress’ responsibility and duty now to rein in this corruption and ensure that bank charters, deposit insurance, and other banking licenses cannot be handed out to entities influenced or controlled by any President’s family,” Alsobrooks said in a statement.
David Wachsman, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, disputed the criticism, saying the preliminary approval is “great news for consumer and investor protection advocates and for the American financial services industry.”
“Critics are missing the point: World Liberty Financial is running towards regulation and continuous oversight, not away from it,” Wachsman said in a statement. “World Liberty Trust Company’s national charter will ensure robust and permanent regulatory supervision from the OCC, a federal banking regulator, that will outlast the Trump administration.”
Wachsman said World Liberty will be required to provide weekly reports about its operations that will be subject to independent reviews. He added that federal banking laws such as anti-money-laundering rules and consumer protection statutes will be “directly applicable and enforceable.”
The White House did not comment directly about the administration’s involvement with the World Liberty application to charter a bank. But in a statement, the White House disputed claims that the president’s decisions in office have financially benefited him and his allies.
“All of President Trump’s investment holdings are in held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “The President only acts in the best interests of the American public — which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media.”
Kelly added: “There are no conflicts of interest.”
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration says it is temporarily pausing construction of a controversial border construction project in the Big Bend National Park while the head of the agency tasked with building the wall visits Texas to do an “on-the-ground evaluation.”
The project through the national park in southern Texas has faced fierce bipartisan opposition by critics who say that it is marring a pristine environmental area and that the region’s rugged and remote terrain already serves as a deterrent to migrants and smugglers.
Rodney Scott, who heads Customs and Border Protection, which is tasked with building the wall, announced on X that he was visiting Texas to do an evaluation.
“CBP is pausing all construction activity in Big Bend National Park while I visit and conduct a personal, on-the-ground evaluation,” Scott said.
Congress gave the Trump administration $46 billion last summer to build a wall from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, and the administration has been racing ahead and waiving numerous regulations in an effort to swiftly build the wall.
Scott has said that he expects that they will build the first layer of the wall by the end of next year.
But they have run into fierce opposition in Texas especially when it comes to construction in and near Big Bend National Park and a state park to the west.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge has refused to block the Trump administration from taking steps to build 62 miles of international border wall along part of a Native American tribe’s reservation without its consent.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington denied the Tohono O’odham Nation’s request for a court-ordered halt to border wall construction on its 2.8-million-acre reservation. Leon ruled Friday that the tribe hasn’t established that a border wall will change its reservation boundaries without congressional authority.
The judge also rejected the tribe’s claim that the planned border wall would illegally trespass on its reservation.
“And in any event, I find that the Government’s interests in securing the border, enforcing immigration laws, and ensuring public safety outweigh any surviving irreparable harms at this juncture,” Leon wrote.
The tribe released a statement late Friday strongly disagreeing with the decision.
“Too many critical issues were not adequately addressed, such as inevitable impacts construction will have on the Nation’s land and the permanent destruction of sacred sites,” Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Verlon M. Jose said. “The Nation will consider all possible options for moving forward, as this issue is simply too important to the O’odham.”
The O’odham reservation in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona abuts 62 miles of the Mexico border. The tribe has more than 37,000 members, including thousands who live in Mexico.
“It would fray the ties between O’odham communities and families on opposite sides of the border, interfere significantly with O’odham religious rituals and practices, and destroy plant and animal resources sacred to the O’odham,” the lawyers wrote.
In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation reserving a 60-foot strip of public land along the U.S.-Mexico border for a buffer zone dubbed the “Roosevelt Reservation,” which was formed a decade before the reservation’s establishment.
Tribe attorneys say it is “fanciful at best” to suggest that border wall construction can be confined to a 60-foot-wide corridor.
During a July 22 hearing, Leon appeared to be skeptical that U.S. laws tip in favor of the tribe’s bid for a preliminary injunction, calling it an “extraordinary” request. Leon, who was nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, said he couldn’t find a previous court ruling under comparable circumstances.
“This is a novel case with novel issues,” the judge said.
For almost 40 years, a stamp of approval from Oprah Winfrey has been the ultimate status symbol, and a near-guarantee of commercial success — just ask Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil.
Winfrey’s talk show launched in 1986 and became a sensation. The talk show raked in Daytime Emmy awards, and the host’s sway with the audience was undeniable. Winfrey’s influence was, and still is, so potent that marketing pros called the boost in sales following an endorsement “the Oprah Effect.” Books have shot to the top of bestseller lists, brands such as Spanx and Ugg have become household names and multiple television personalities have been launched, including two controversial health professionals whose endorsements from Winfrey haven’t exactly aged well for some fans.
During a recent interview with the Television Academy’s Emmy Magazine, Winfrey addressed her ties with the conservative TV personalities, saying “People criticize me for Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz, because of their politics or their views.”
In the ’90s, Phil McGraw was a licensed psychologist who co-founded a trial consulting firm and was hired to help Winfrey when she was sued in Texas for questioning the safety of beef on her show amid a mad cow disease epidemic happening in the U.K. According to disgruntled cattlemen, the “Oprah Effect” doesn’t just have the power to boost sales, it can drop them too.
Winfrey won the case in 1998, and was so impressed by McGraw that she invited him onto her show and he subsequently landed a weekly segment. A few years later, he launched his own talk show with Winfrey’s backing.
“Dr. Phil, he was so practical, so down to earth, so real. And he would ride in the car with me every morning on the way to trial, where I’m literally sitting on trial for six weeks. I felt that he was so instrumental in helping me. I thought, ‘Oh, you could help a lot of people. You should come on my show,’” she told the outlet.
Dr. Oz came into the fold, Winfrey said, by way of introduction from her best friend, fellow television personality and news anchor Gayle King.
“He explained practical things like colon cancer and bowel movements,” Winfrey told Emmy Magazine. “I thought he had the language for explaining medical things in a way that was helpful to me. I thought it would be helpful to many other people. And that is how they ended up on the show.”
Dr. Mehmet Oz made his debut on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2004, and in the next few years he made more than 60 appearances, offering health advice to viewers. In 2009, he followed in Dr. Phil’s footsteps and launched his own talk show, with Winfrey’s production company backing the venture.
In recent years, Dr. Phil has aligned himself with MAGA, and in October 2024 he spoke at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden presidential campaign rally. Last year, he embedded with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials during raids, including in Chicago, where he and his crew taped arrests.
In 2020, when Dr. Phil celebrated a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he thanked Winfrey in his speech, saying she has mentored him and moved him forward in life. “No doubt about it… You cannot understand the power of the O factor,” he said. “There would be no Dr. Phil without Oprah, so blame her if you’re going to blame somebody.”
Similarly, Dr. Oz aligned himself with the MAGA and Make America Healthy Again movements. He ran for senate in Pennsylvania in 2022 with an endorsement from Trump. After losing, he joined the Trump administration as the administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Since McGraw and Oz became vocal allies of the Trump administration, news stories involving them have spawned a thread of replies and reposts with comments pointing the finger at Winfrey for platforming the men many moons ago.
“Oprah spun off Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and gave oxygen to Suzanne Somers’ and Jenny McCarthy’s toxic messages. Her impact on the public discourse around medical advice was pretty uniformly terrible. I am not a fan,” reads one post on X.
“If it weren’t for Oprah, this quack Dr. Phil would be a nobody. Oprah has a lot to answer for,” reads another.
And, “Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz are the two worst things Oprah ever foisted on the public.”
Winfrey may have platformed the men decades ago, but her stance is clear today: “Everybody has their own path in life, and it has not one thing to do with me, and I don’t have one thing to do with them. At the time, the reason and intention behind me giving them their breaks was I thought they had valuable information to share that had been meaningful to me.”
The Trump administration has moved heavy-duty construction equipment into Big Bend National Park and started work on a border security project despite bipartisan concern about damage to the environmentally sensitive area of west Texas.
Bulldozers and other machinery appeared last week in the remote park, which sits about 300 miles southeast of El Paso and includes one of the least crossed stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Laiken Jordahl, a national public lands advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, which has sued the Biden and Trump administrations seeking to halt border-wall construction.
Jordahl said he and other activists watching the work have seen bulldozers plowing through vegetation “clearing a path for the barriers, the wall or whatever is going in.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection “is building an access road, improving existing roads, installing detection technology and placing vehicle barriers in limited, strategic locations,” Commissioner Rodney Scott, the agency’s top official, said in an email Thursday. “We are securing this park to protect its legacy — keeping it safe, secure, and pristine so American families can enjoy the beauty of our country, free from fear of cartel activity.”
The Trump administration is moving ahead with the project over the objections of not just environmental activists and others opposed to the crackdown on immigration, but also local residents, many of them Republicans who otherwise support President Trump, as well as retiring GOP Sen. John Cornyn. They note that the rugged terrain — mostly desert with steep ravines and scrubland covered in creosote bushes and prickly pear cactus — serves as a natural barrier from anyone trying to cross from Mexico, making the infrastructure unnecessary.
They say the construction and equipment will mar the landscape and imperil the animals who live in the park, including javelinas, ringtails, mountain lions and desert bighorn sheep.
In June, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin formally waived all environmental laws and reviews that could otherwise slow any work in the park.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office has said he supports using every tool available to help deter illegal immigration, including deploying technology in rugged and isolated areas such as Big Bend.
Trump has long pledged to build a wall along all of the roughly 2,000-mile U.S. border with Mexico, though Customs and Border Protection has repeatedly said it wouldn’t build his preferred 30-foot barrier in the environmentally sensitive park.
Earlier this year, the administration issued a $1.7-billion contract for the project in Big Bend. The vehicle barriers set to be installed are typically 5-foot steel posts set a few feet apart and intended to block cars or trucks from crossing.
The park is part of the Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector, which has for decades been one of the least crossed areas along the whole of the border. In June, agents there made 148 arrests. Since Oct. 1, the start of the government’s fiscal year, agents have made 1,509 arrests, about 1.5% of all apprehensions along the Mexican border, according to Customs and Border Patrol arrest data.
Brandon Herrera, the GOP candidate for a House district that includes the park, met with White House and Department of Homeland Security officials in March to pitch a less-invasive “alternative solution.”
In a letter this month, Cornyn asked Mullin to meet with local officials who have voiced concerns over the project, citing complaints about its effect on the region’s natural beauty, wildlife, cultural sites and economy. Cornyn wrote that his “constituents believe that the 1,000-foot riverbank cliffs and remote Big Bend terrain offers its own source of deterrence for any illegal migrants crossing into the United States.”
James Talarico, a Democratic state representative running to succeed Cornyn in the U.S. Senate, echoed the Republican’s concerns and called the project irresponsible spending.
“This monument to corruption represents wasteful, irresponsible government spending that no Texan asked for, enriching wealthy contractors without making Texans one bit safer,” he said.
Texas’ Big Bend region relies on tourism as an economic driver, with more than 568,000 visitors to the national park in 2025. Local businesses in Terlingua, a small gateway town west of the park, have revolted against the proposed wall, with workers at one restaurant wearing shirts that read “No Al Muro” — No to the Wall.
The Trump administration again on Wednesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene — and fast — to save President Trump’s plan for the U.S. Postal Service to place new nationwide limits on mail voting ahead of the November midterms.
It did so after a lower court judge blocked the Postal Service plan from moving forward for a second time on Tuesday.
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer wrote to the high court that if it does not act quickly to lift both of the lower court’s “erroneous” rulings blocking the plan, those orders “will effectively run out the clock on the government’s ability to implement” the changes in time for the November election, “thereby causing irreparable harm to the federal government, the public, and election integrity.”
Sauer’s latest argument was filed in an emergency case already before the Supreme Court, in which the Trump administration is challenging a June decision blocking the Postal Service’s rule changes by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani.
Talwani, an appointee of President Obama, ruled in favor of California and 22 other states that had challenged the new rules as coming far too late in the election year to be implemented without causing significant disruptions and harming voters. That decision, which was upheld by an appellate court in July, had barred the new measures from being implemented in the states that sued, but not elsewhere.
However, Sauer filed his latest argument in response to a second ruling by Talwani in a separate case Tuesday, in which she sided with the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups to block the Postal Service plans from moving forward nationwide.
“That it is now less than 90 days before the November 3, 2026 midterm elections underscores the critical need for an injunction to prevent Defendants from changing election rules on the eve of the election,” Talwani wrote.
The court battle follows an executive order Trump issued in March, in which he called on the Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security to ensure “citizenship verification and integrity in federal elections” by compiling their own state-by-state lists of citizens who are eligible to vote and then using those lists to restrict who may vote by mail in each state.
The order said the Postal Service “shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual unless those individuals have been enrolled on a State-specific list.”
The order was immediately slammed by Democratic attorneys general and independent voting rights groups as a ploy by the Trump administration to get its hands on state voter rolls, which it has failed to secure in separate legal challenges, and severely limit mail voting, which Trump has without evidence alleged is a major source of voter fraud.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta helped lead the states’ lawsuit challenging Trump’s order, and has praised Talwani’s orders blocking it from taking effect. Bonta has said the law is clear that states control elections, not the federal government, and that Trump’s order is an illegal and dangerous power grab ahead of a pivotal election in which the president’s party is poised to lose power.
A spokesperson for Bonta’s office said it was aware of Sauer’s filing and considering “next steps” Wednesday.
The Trump administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court is limited in scope, in that it hinges on a technical argument that the challenges to the new rules are premature — and that the Postal Service should be allowed to continue preparing for the new rules to be implemented while the legal battle over their legality continues.
Sauer reiterated that argument in his filing Wednesday, asking the high court to not only issue its order soon, but to make clear in it that not one but both of Talwani’s orders are premature.
He wrote that courts cannot block the implementation of an executive order “that merely instructs agencies to pursue a proposed policy in a manner that is consistent with law,” particularly before those agencies “actually take concrete actions that injure” the groups suing to block the order.
Therefore, Sauer wrote, it would be “prudent” for the high court to make clear that it was halting Talwani’s first order “based on the uncertainty concerning the government’s future actions, not anything specific to the individual plaintiffs” — or, in other words, on grounds that would apply to her second order, too.
He wrote that it was “critical” that the court “act promptly.”
The states have asked the high court to block Trump’s order, which they said would deny mail ballots to “many of the millions of voters who rely on mail voting — especially voters with disabilities and those in rural areas.”
The League of Women Voters hailed Talwani’s order Tuesday as a win for voters and for the U.S. Constitution, which it said makes clear the president does not have the authority to rewrite election rules.
“Millions of Americans, including seniors, military voters, voters with disabilities, rural voters, and citizens living overseas, rely on voting by mail to participate in our democracy,” said Marcia Johnson, the group’s chief of activation and justice. “Today’s decision reaffirms that the rules governing our democracy must be set by the Constitution and the law, not by executive overreach.”
When the high court will rule is unclear, though the emergency nature of the appeal calls for a prompt response.
President Trump touched down in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening and headed directly to his Rancho Palos Verdes golf course to headline a fundraiser for the Republican Party.
Though the visit was for a standard campaign benefit in the run-up to November’s elections, it was not without drama.
While the President was en route to California, authorities announced the arrest of an armed man who had been spotted suspiciously documenting security preparations at the golf course Sunday.
Sheriff’s deputies discovered the man had brought a gun and ammunition to the golf course. On Monday, they uncovered an alarming weapons stash, including an illegally modified AR-style rifle, a .45-caliber pistol and high-capacity magazines, at his Downey residence.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday afternoon, a group of more than two dozen protesters gathered outside the Trump National Golf Club entrance in anticipation of the president’s arrival.
The demonstrators chanted “Impeach Trump”and waved signs with slogans such as “Save our democracy” and “Pretti good time to resist,” referencing ICU nurse Alexander Pretti, who was fatally shot by federal agents in January, as passing cars periodically honked in approval.
“There are so many things that have happened [during the Trump administration] that are so disgusting, and I’m so worried for my children, my grandchildren and future generations,” said Redondo Beach resident Jeanette Boston. “They deserve better.”
A smaller group of around 10 counter-protesters gathered along Palos Verdes Drive wearing MAGA gear and American flag clothing. Several yelled “We love you Trump” as Marine One landed at the golf course carrying Trump just after 5 p.m.
The campaign fundraiser was closed to members of the media. However, a White House spokesperson said Trump would use the event to tout his administration’s achievements and “draw a sharp contrast between his commonsense agenda and the radical policies of Democrats like Gavin Newsom.”
Tuesday marked Trump’s second visit to Los Angeles during his second term in office. He last visited the region in January 2025, when he toured the fire damage in the Pacific Palisades and signed an executive order intended to expedite rebuilding efforts.
Since then, there has been a standoff between California leaders and the Trump administration over federal disaster aid.
California has submitted more than $1.5 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency reimbursement claims for emergency response and infrastructure repairs stemming from the Eaton and Palisades fires, but only $37 million in funding has been approved thus far, according to the governor’s office.
“Donald Trump is coming to Los Angeles to raise money while wildfire survivors are still waiting for the federal recovery funding he promised 18 months ago,” Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for the governor, said in a statement. “Californians deserve a President focused on helping families rebuild — not raising money for himself at his golf course.”
Trump, for his part, ignored criticism around the wait for wildfire relief on Tuesday and instead took to social media to promote what he sees as his administration’s economic achievements.
He wrote in a Truth Social post that investments in the U.S. economy and more “factory activity” were evidence of how well the country was doing.
“The Fake News and the Dumocrats are doing everything they can to distract people’s thoughts from these MASSIVE Successes, but it’s getting harder and harder for them to do,” Trump wrote. He added: “This is the GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA, and we’re just getting started.”
On Wednesday, Trump will head to Las Vegas to deliver a speech at a casino focused on the economic achievements of his administration. While his California visit is focused on replenishing campaign coffers, the Nevada stop is more closely tied to election strategy as the swing state could play a key role in deciding who controls Congress after the November midterms.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Tuesday that his office has protected more than $200 billion in federal funding for the state, defended core civil rights and removed military forces from Los Angeles streets by suing the Trump administration about once a week.
“Since President Trump returned to office, California has been under attack — and has led the way in fighting back,” Bonta said.
Bonta said his office has filed 82 lawsuits against the administration since Trump’s inauguration last year, in addition to 122 amicus briefs supporting lawsuits against the administration by other parties and 112 comment letters in response to federal actions.
That work has saved the state an estimated $207.1 billion, Bonta said, including $168 billion — equal to a third of the state’s annual budget — that was threatened when the Trump administration tried to freeze trillions of dollars in federal funding to the states last year. Billions in threatened cuts to transportation, emergency preparedness, education and family assistance funding were also prevented, Bonta said.
The work has also protected birthright citizenship for the U.S.- born children of immigrants, ensured that National Guard troops are not deployed in major California cities against the wishes of local leaders, lifted multiple sets of tariffs driving up costs for American consumers and repeatedly blocked administration efforts to interfere in California’s elections, Bonta said.
“We’ve protected funding that keeps our communities safe, feeds hungry families, and ensures our kids get the education they deserve. We’ve gone all the way to the Supreme Court to defend constitutional rights — and won. We’ve protected our elections and stopped the militarization of our cities. We’ve defended our right to prioritize public safety over assisting with the President’s inhumane immigration agenda,” Bonta said.
As it has done in the past, the White House on Tuesday derided Bonta’s lawsuits as misguided.
“Instead of bragging about filing frivolous lawsuits against the Trump Administration, the California AG should focus on addressing problems in his own state — like the countless criminal illegal aliens the Newscum Administration allows to roam free and terrorize communities,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson in a statement to The Times.
The White House has previously said Trump is “trying to restore American Greatness” and that Californians would be “infinitely better off” if Bonta got out of the president’s way.
Bonta’s office is required to report annually to the state Legislature on its work fighting the Trump administration as part of a 2025 special session measure delivering it an extra $25 million to fund such litigation. His office published its latest report to lawmakers Tuesday.
The report said the office had received $19.2 million of the special session funding through July 30, which had “contributed to — but in no way has been sufficient to cover — the costs of the litigation.”
Bonta’s office has also received regular appropriations to fund such litigation in each of the state’s last two budgets, of $14.2 million last fiscal year and $23.9 million this fiscal year. The office’s overall budget is about $1.4 billion.
At a morning news conference with other state leaders, Bonta said his office has spent close to $30 million on its “federal accountability work” overall since Trump took office, and argued that investment has been “paying off in droves” given the billions saved.
Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón (D-Goleta) and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister), standing with Bonta, agreed.
Limón said she was proud to have worked with Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom to form a “collective backstop” against the Trump administration, while Rivas said the funding provided to Bonta’s office “may be one of the smartest investments that this legislature has ever made.”
Of the 82 lawsuits, 66 remain active, according to the report. Despite that, Bonta said his office has won 45 orders providing some early relief from the Trump administration’s actions, and 21 final orders in its favor. In eight cases, he said, the administration “backed down” in advance of a trial.
Bonta’s office has lost arguments made against the Trump administration, including on behalf of other litigants, particularly on issues related to transgender rights and the scope of Trump’s executive power to reshape government and federal immigration policy.
However, Bonta claimed his office has won in 83% of the court orders issued in cases brought by the state and praised his team for having “worked around the clock on behalf of Californians, pulling countless all-nighters along the way” to make it possible.
Bonta, who is up for reelection in November, is campaigning in part on his willingness to stand up to Trump — which polling and voting has suggested many Californians want their elected officials to do.
Xavier Becerra, the Democratic candidate for California governor, is running on a similar message. Before he was the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, Becerra had Bonta’s job and sued the first Trump administration more than 120 times, often successfully.
Bonta said he expects Becerra will be an “incredible partner” in the fight moving forward.
Republicans Michael Gates, who is running against Bonta, and Steve Hilton, who is running against Becerra and is endorsed by Trump, have said they would work collaboratively with the Trump administration to ensure the needs of Californians are met, rather than fighting it at every turn.
“I would be wanting to work with the administration to help Californians,” Hilton has said. Gates has called Bonta’s campaign against Trump “out of touch.”
Many of the lawsuits Bonta’s office has brought against the administration have been filed as part of a multistate coalition of Democratic attorneys general. As presidents of both parties have flexed more executive power in recent decades, state attorneys general have become more collaborative and litigious in fighting back — and that has been especially true under Trump.
Bonta said Trump will be remembered in part for his “repeated attacks on California, on Californians, on our Constitution, and on our democracy,” but California will be remembered for fighting back.
“Are these trying times? 100%. Absolutely, yes,” Bonta said. “But we shouldn’t be helpless, because we’re not helpless.”
The Trump administration wants to make sure that the Mexican train crews who haul freight over the border can understand key safety information in English and that the common practice of using foreign crews to cross into America doesn’t threaten U.S. jobs.
Two major rail unions praised the proposed rule announced Friday that would also strengthen the standards for certifying that crews can safely operate a train.
The government had concerns after inspecting two Texas rail yards near the border last fall on the two railroads directly affected by these restrictions on Mexican crews — Union Pacific and Canadian Pacific Kansas City, or CPKC. Union Pacific didn’t immediately respond but CPKC and the Assn. of American Railroads trade group declined to comment while they study the rule.
The Federal Railroad Administration sent letters to both CPKC and Union Pacific in December after inspections found that train crews often had trouble understanding English during focused inspections. The government urged those railroads to reexamine their practices and make sure that Mexican crews can speak English and don’t operate a train more than 10 miles inside the United States.
Last fall, federal inspectors found numerous problems in Union Pacific’s Eagle Pass rail yard and CPKC’s facility in Laredo where train crews were having a hard time understanding English-language operating bulletins and U.S. regulations. Information about hazardous materials and emergency responses are required to be in English.
Both Union Pacific and CPKC have pledged to make sure they were following the existing rules, including that the Mexican crews do not travel more than 10 miles into the United States. But now the federal government wants to strengthen the rules “because railroad crews must be able to communicate fully and accurately when crossing into the United States, most notably with dispatchers and emergency responders during a crisis, as a safety-critical function.”
This rail safety effort aligns closely with the Transportation Department’s efforts to ensure that truck drivers can understand English, so they can read road signs and warnings and communicate with first responders after an accident or during an inspection. The government has tried to withhold millions of dollars in highway funding from New York and California because it isn’t satisfied with the steps those states have taken to make sure the commercial driver’s licenses they issue are valid.
Mark Wallace, the national president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union, has been raising concerns about this practice of using Mexican train crews for several years because of safety, security and job concerns.
The union has said that the handoffs used to happen right at the border, but now Union Pacific and CPKC routinely ask Mexican crews to bring trains several miles over the border to one of their rail yards where the crew switches can be done more safely. But the firm 10-mile restriction in this rule will prevent the railroads from expanding this practice to rail yards farther into the United States. The union said Union Pacific was considering this type of expansion in New Mexico.
Wallace said the language barrier would pose a hazard in the event of issues such as a derailment.
But the railroads have said that this practice of using Mexican train crews to bring the trains into rail yards in America was developed in 2018 with the approval of the first Trump administration to address smuggling concerns. When trains are stopped at the border, smugglers often try to conceal drugs or other contraband aboard them and immigrants might jump aboard to get into the United States.
It is also routine for Canadian crews to bring trains a few miles over the northern border with the United States before handing off to American crews.
The SMART-TD union that represents conductors and other rail workers also said the provisions of the rule that will prohibit train crews from using a system that’s similar to cruise control when they take their certification tests will help ensure they can operate a train safely.
“Railroad certifications should represent proven ability, not simply possession of a certificate,” said Jared Cassity, who is SMART-TD’s top safety expert. “When lives are on the line, the FRA must know that an engineer can safely operate a train, not just supervise a computer doing it.”
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dealt another blow to the Trump administration’s mass deportation project Thursday, ruling alongside the 7th Circuit that most immigrants cannot be held without bond while fighting to remain in the U.S.
The rulings will apply to jurisdictions that stretch across much of the southern border, affecting states where large numbers of immigrant detainees are held in federal custody. Unless immigrants are caught while crossing the border or soon after, they will now be entitled to a bond hearing, where a judge will decide whether there is enough evidence to justify their indefinite detention.
The twin decisions come little more than a year after the Department of Homeland Security ordered “mandatory detention” for all immigrants picked up by its agents — a policy that had previously only applied to those caught at the border.
The policy shift sowed chaos in federal courts, as thousands of immigrants began suing for bond hearings that had long been automatic. California’s district judges were overrun with emergency petitions for writs of habeas corpus, a legal maneuver rarely used outside death row appeals.
“Versions of this case have played out in federal courts across the country,” Judge Daniel A. Bress wrote for the 9th Circuit on Thursday. “The vast majority of the district courts to confront the issue have concluded that [mandatory detention] is limited to the border.”
Those district court battles have grown increasingly heated as caseloads have swelled.
This spring, Eastern District of California Chief Judge Troy Nunley took the rare step of sanctioning a government lawyer over failing to tell the court if and when a man he’d ordered released had actually gone free.
The attorney told Nunley he was drowning in nearly identical cases and had fallen behind with the paperwork. In an interview, Nunley said he and other judges were “up all night” ruling on emergency petitions and ensuring those orders were followed.
The sanction was later transferred from the lawyer to the U.S. attorney’s office, though Nunley warned that he would issue more if he didn’t see proof immigrants had been set free as ordered.
“A pattern of unchecked and unaddressed mistakes in complying with court orders will be viewed as a deliberate and strategic choice,” he wrote in his order.
The majority of appellate courts have now also sided against the administration. As of Thursday, two circuits have affirmed the government’s position and six opposed it, teeing up what experts call an inevitable Supreme Court challenge.
Both of Thursday’s decisions invoked the high court’s future stake in the case. The 9th Circuit wagered that only two justices were likely to side with the administration, while the 7th merely implored the high court to weigh in.
“At this point, only the Supreme Court can bring uniformity and settle this question once and for all. I anticipate that it will do so soon,” Judge Diane S. Sykes wrote in her dissent.
“We share the dissent’s hope that the Supreme Court will settle this matter,” Judge Joshua P. Kolar wrote for the majority.
WASHINGTON — The American Dream may not be dead for many Black Americans, but it is further away than at any point since the Civil Rights Movement, warns a report by the National Urban League.
Released on Thursday, the annual “State of Black America” report grimly describes Black Americans ‘ economic and political prospects as having worsened due to policy changes from President Trump’s administration, according to a copy obtained by the Associated Press.
The report contends that the challenges it highlights for Black communities are warning signs for the prosperity of all Americans.
“It may be the focus is us, but the impact is not just us,” said Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League. “While they have targeted and focused on Black Americans, these attacks are going to impact broadly working Americans, poor Americans, aspirational middle-class Americans, and this is what this report points to.”
Tracing the arc of American history, the Urban League describes Black Americans’ struggle for emancipation from slavery and equal economic and political rights as a gruesome but optimistic part of the American story.
Now, the report says, the Trump administration is at odds with the goals and achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, citing the overhaul of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well as the president’s focus on overhauling voting laws through the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, as examples of rollbacks of long-sought civil rights policies.
The report’s authors offer policy and strategy recommendations for civil rights groups aiming to combat the Trump administration.
“The civil rights community must consolidate its legal resistance and turn courtroom wins into durable policy,” the report says. “The movement must build economic infrastructure that doesn’t depend on the goodwill of any one administration.”
The AP reached out to the White House for comment on the report.
Report contributors include a potential Democratic presidential contender
This year’s report includes contributions from members of Congress, and policy and legal experts, as well as some media personalities.
U.S. Senators Angela Alsobrooks, Lisa Blunt Rochester and Raphael Warnock all contributed to the report, as well as Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey contributed a video message to the report.
Moore, who is widely viewed as a potential 2028 presidential contender, submitted an essay focused on closing the racial wealth gap and Black Americans’ history of economic advancement in the face of adversity.
“With wisdom and grit, my mom was able to lift me and my family to a higher rung on the economic ladder. But too often wisdom and grit aren’t enough,” Moore wrote.
He later called closing the racial wealth gap “a matter of moral clarity” but cautioned that “government alone cannot close the racial wealth gap. It’s going to take all of us,” referencing the private sector and civil society.
Report blasts ‘economic assault’ on Black Americans
Whether corporate America and major nonprofits are still willing to participate is an open question. The report condemns the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back diversity initiatives and economic advancement projects in the private sector, and expresses frustration with companies that cooperated with an “economic assault” on Americans, especially Black Americans.
“This has been a campaign of coercion and oppression directed at these institutions who have been out here working hard to, if you will, change America,” Morial said. “The important thing about companies is that every company has not bent the knee. Some may have done some cosmetic changes. Some have been in full and complete retreat.”
The DEI rollbacks are a jarring reversal for the Urban League, which held sway in the Biden White House on economic and social policies. The report lauds President Biden’s administration for signing a sweeping COVID-19 stimulus package, as well as laws supporting minority small businesses and a bipartisan infrastructure bill.
“Not every promise was kept, and the current administration is pushing to roll our wins back, but these wins serve as a blueprint for what is possible through sustained advocacy and a clear vision,” the authors write. The agenda, the Urban League declares, was “the most consequential federal investments in Black America since the Great Society.”
The organization and its civil rights allies now find themselves in a strikingly different political environment under the Trump administration.
“Looking at our current political landscape, the calls for racial healing and righting of this nation’s wrongs in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd feel like a fever dream,” the report reads.
But the study also acknowledges that Black Americans have overcome more dire and discriminatory moments.
Latest Black America report is the Urban League’s 50th edition
The Urban League’s inaugural 1976 report on the state of Black America was described by the New York Times at the time as “a profoundly depressing document” that laid out the persistent disparities between the economic outlooks of Black and white Americans, a decade after the Civil Rights Movement’s crowning achievements were signed into law.
The report was established as a response to that year’s State of the Union address by President Ford and the Democratic response, neither of which mentioned the economic outlooks for Black Americans. The report offered policy recommendations on crime, education, housing, social services and general economic policy.
“It is a document that does not attempt to cover up the seriousness of the situation black people find themselves in,” the authors wrote at the time. Several of its recommendations were later taken up by President Carter, who was elected to the White House months after the report’s release.
This year’s 50th anniversary document echoes the frustration found in the inaugural report. While Morial acknowledged that the Urban League’s assessments may lead to pessimism, he urged Americans concerned about civil rights and economic progress to respond at the ballot box and with their pocketbooks.
“We cannot be dejected. We cannot be cynical. We must act,” Morial said. “We have to fight to make sure that those that are really trying to kill the essence of the American dream don’t win.”
The fate of hundreds of clean energy projects hangs in the balance after court documents revealed that the Trump administration targeted California and other blue states solely for political reasons when it slashed funding for the initiatives last year.
Large companies, startups, utilities, universities and other nonprofits were among those that lost out on $7.6 billion in clean energy funding terminated by the White House in October. They include the University of California, the California Energy Commission, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and California’s nascent hydrogen hub, the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems, or ARCHES.
At the time, Trump administration officials said the grants were terminated because they “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”
But in court documents filed as part of a lawsuit challenging the cuts, the Department of Energy states the selection of grants was “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.”
It also concedes that neither the inclusion of ARCHES, nor any other grants in the October tranche, was “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.”
California and the 15 other states that lost funding did not vote for Trump in the 2024 election.
Legal experts said such an action is unheard of.
“The government has stipulated that grants were cut off to states that voted against Trump. As far as I know, this blatant politics in cutting off grants is unprecedented. It also is illegal,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School and co-counsel in the lawsuit.
More projects were cut in California than any other state, about 79 out of nearly 300. They were all for clean energy, many to address climate change, and include investments in new battery plants, upgrades for the electrical grid and initiatives to take carbon out of the air. About $1.2 billion was slated for the hydrogen hub.
Money was also to go to West Biofuels in Woodland, CALSTART in Pasadena, Charge Bliss in Aliso Viejo, Rejoule in Signal Hill, Southern California Edison, the Imperial Irrigation District and Aera Federal LLC, among many others.
The lawsuit was brought by a group of faculty members and researchers at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, who were among those to lose research grants. A separate lawsuit was filed by California and a coalition of 13 other states in February.
The acknowledgment of political motivation is “startling — and it is particularly so when the administration has had these larger narratives about how they’re canceling grants that are about waste, fraud and abuse,” said Claudia Polsky, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at UC Berkeley and initiating counsel in the university case. “If they want to favor oil, coal and nuclear, and disfavor clean energy innovation, that’s their prerogative as the executive. But here we have stipulations saying that none of those things were true for these staggeringly consequential DOE grants.”
The lawsuit alleges that the government’s actions violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which prevents arbitrary discrimination, as well as the 1st Amendment in that it is targeting researchers for how their state voted.
“None of it was about a change in priorities,” Polsky said, noting that similar grants in red states were not canceled. “None of it was about fiscal stringency. None of it was about anything except punishing people who didn’t vote for Trump.”
Judge Rita F. Lin could order the federal funding to be reinstated, and indeed has already done so through some temporary preliminary injunctions. But many of the grantees are now in “purgatory” as the case proceeds toward a final ruling, Polsky said.
Many of the projects are complex, multi-year efforts that involve a hodgepodge of agencies, experts and partnerships, such as ARCHES, the state’s billion-dollar hydrogen hub awarded under President Biden. Officials with ARCHES could not immediately be reached for comment.
News of the funding cuts first broke last fall in a post on X from Russell Vought, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.
“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” Vought wrote. “The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”
At a House hearing in June, however, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said decisions were not made based on politics.
The Energy Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Secretary Wright looked me in the eye, under oath, insisting the decision to cancel California’s clean energy projects was ‘not political,’” Sen. Alex Padilla said in a statement to The Times on Monday. “The Administration’s own court filings tell a different story. These decisions jeopardize good-paying jobs, undermine American energy innovation, and drive up costs.”
Padilla is among 30 California lawmakers, including Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San José), who separately challenged the funding cuts as unlawful — writing in an October letter to the Energy Department’s independent Office of the Inspector General that the decision targeted blue states “for their perceived lack of support for President Trump.” The office subsequently launched an investigation into the claims.
“Any Trump official who lied and told the nation these clean energy grant cancellations had nothing to do with politics should resign,” Schiff said in a post on X after the latest court filings were revealed. “As the administration has now been forced to concede — these cancellations had everything to do with politics. Of the worst kind.”
A final ruling is expected in early November.
Times staff writer Jaweed Kaleem contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court on Monday to lift a judge’s order and clear the way for state-by-state lists of citizens who are eligible to vote by mail.
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer filed an emergency appeal and said judges in Boston had wrongly intervened too soon.
In March, Trump ordered the U.S. Postal Service to direct states to compile a list of citizens who are eligible to vote. This list would limit who may receive a mail ballot.
He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to “compile and transmit state-specific lists of individuals who are citizens and will be 18 years of age or older at the time of an upcoming election,” Sauer said.
Lawyers for California and 22 other Democratic-led states sued, arguing the states, not the federal government, have the constitutional authority to set the rules for voting and elections.
In June, they won before a federal judge in Boston who blocked Trump’s order from going forward, at least in the 23 states which had sued. Her decision was upheld over the weekend by the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.
In his appeal, Trump’s solicitor general focused on a procedural question, not the issue of whether the president has the legal authority to impose national rules on state-run elections.
Sauer said the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security had not issued final specific plans to comply with Trump’s directive.
“Courts cannot enjoin implementation of Executive Orders that leave open material issues that still need to be resolved by agencies,” he wrote.
He asked the court to lift or stay the “premature injunctions.”
Time is running short, he said.
“Absent a stay … there will not be sufficient time to obtain appellate relief before the November election,” Sauer said. “That is especially true because implementation efforts for any USPS rule or DHS policy will need to begin well before November … particularly given that absentee and mail-in voting begin (in some States) several weeks prior to Election Day.”
The justices asked for a response from the 23 Democratic states by Aug. 3.
WASHINGTON — In its latest move to restrict the legal immigration system, the Trump administration announced a sweeping change Monday that could lead to the deportations of thousands of asylum seekers.
The change from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services allows asylum officers to bypass the need to interview certain applicants and instead refer them directly to immigration judges for removal proceedings.
The agency estimates that up to a third, or 444,000 of the more than 1.4 million asylum cases in its backlog, could be affected by the rule.
The administration framed the move as an effort to streamline the process and reduce the backlog of cases. The interim final rule takes effect Tuesday and is subject to a 60-day public comment period.
“For far too long the asylum system has been exploited for purposes of delay and work authorization, not legitimate claims of protection,” USCIS Director Joseph Edlow said in a news release.
“America’s asylum system exists to protect individuals who genuinely fear persecution and this rule will help ensure that resources are directed to the timely adjudication of those claims instead of to those seeking to use the system as a loophole,” Edlow added.
But advocates for immigrants said the change leaves asylum seekers who tried to follow the law vulnerable to deportation.
Migrants can apply for asylum two ways: affirmatively or defensively.
Those who entered the country legally, such as on a visa, and still have lawful status apply with USCIS and have their cases decided by an asylum officer. Those who crossed the border illegally or who are undocumented can apply after being placed into removal proceedings, where they make their case to an immigration judge.
Immigration courts are not an independent system — they are housed under the Department of Justice and judges are federal employees.
That shift is significant because the Trump administration has fired more than 100 immigration judges and replaced them with military lawyers and former prosecutors for the Department of Homeland Security. Many of the fired judges were appointed during the Biden administration or previously worked as lawyers representing immigrants.
In recent months, immigration courts have approved a dwindling percentage of asylum claims as judges face pressure to approve more deportations. After immigration agents began arresting people in courthouses, many immigrants grew wary of showing up for court proceedings, which has aided the increase in removal orders.
USCIS refers thousands of cases to immigration courts each year, federal data shows. During the first half of this fiscal year, the agency transferred 31,454 cases to immigration courts — a number that was already on track to be higher than the 2025 yearly total of 40,932. The highest yearly total was 61,729 cases in 2019, during Trump’s first presidency.
USCIS said the current policy, which requires an asylum officer to first interview an applicant before deciding whether to send the case to an immigration judge, “essentially allows an alien to get a second chance at asylum.”
Todd Schulte, president of the immigrant advocacy organization FWD.us, noted that the rule change comes just after the Trump administration terminated temporary legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and others, many of whom entered the U.S. legally and applied for asylum the “affirmative” way. On X, Schulte called the move “a terrible harbinger.”
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has acknowledged in court documents that it canceled $7.6 billion in grants for hundreds of clean energy projects “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state,” including California and 15 other states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
The statement, included in a court filing last week in a lawsuit over the canceled funding, contradicts repeated assertions by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and other officials that the projects were canceled because they did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs or had other problems that made them a poor investment of taxpayer dollars.
The Department of Energy said in the filing Wednesday that “DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants … was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State. DOE will not contend that it looked beyond the prime grantee(s) to consider the political identity or geographic distribution of downstream beneficiaries of the grant funds.”
The agency also said that it “accepts that the differential treatment resulting in the October 2025 termination of Blue State grants and the non-termination of non-Blue State grants was not based on a rational connection between the recipient’s location and/or place of performance and DOE’s past or current agency priorities.”
Democrats and environmental groups seized on the court filing, saying the administration had “weaponized” the federal government to kill good jobs and punish working families because of their political views.
A ‘corrupt abuse of power’
“This administration has now admitted in court what has long been obvious: it terminated nearly 300 cost-cutting energy projects for no reason other than the fact that the states they were in did not vote for the president in the 2024 election,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state said in a joint statement. Both are high-ranking Democrats on the House and Senate appropriations committees, respectively.
“Weaponizing the federal government like this is outright un-American, and it’s hardworking families already struggling with sky-high costs who are suffering the consequences of this corrupt abuse of power,” Kaptur and Murray said.
They called on congressional Republicans to join them in holding the Trump administration “accountable for the President’s failure to look out for all Americans.”
The Energy Department announced in October that 321 funding awards across 223 projects were terminated, saying that after review, they “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs or were not economically viable.”
The cuts, part of broader attacks from President Trump on climate programs and clean energy funding, slashed federal support for projects to build battery plants, develop hydrogen technology, upgrade the electric grid and capture carbon dioxide emissions.
Russell Vought, the White House budget director, highlighted the cutbacks in a social media post, saying that money “to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.”
The Energy Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Projects from many states were cut
Projects that were cut were located in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. All 16 targeted states supported Harris, but Wright said the cuts were “business decisions” based on whether the projects were a good use of taxpayer money or not.
The cuts were immediately challenged in court, and more than two dozen Democratic members of Congress, led by California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, wrote a letter to the Energy Department’s acting inspector general requesting a formal investigation. The department’s internal watchdog launched an investigation in December.
Government lawyers had previously confirmed in a court filing late last year that the selection of grants in fact “was influenced by whether a grantee’s address was located in a State that tends to elect … Democratic candidates in state and national elections (so-called ‘Blue States’).”
That filing came in a separate suit filed by clean-energy groups and the city of St. Paul, Minn., over the canceled funding. The most recent admission came in a case called Thakur vs. Trump that’s been ongoing since spring 2025. Federal lawyers acknowledged that they used keywords related to diversity, gender and COVID-19 to screen for projects that ran afoul of the Trump administration’s priorities.
Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, said the latest court filing shows “the Trump administration is brazenly admitting to a vindictive approach to cancelling much-needed energy infrastructure that ignores the job losses, air pollution and increasing bills that people are experiencing everywhere.”
Instead of “building the energy projects we desperately need,” billions of American taxpayer dollars are “going to line the pockets of a small handful of fossil fuel company CEOs,” Bender said, citing nearly $3 billion pledged by the Trump administration to cancel offshore wind projects in favor of fossil fuel projects such as natural gas and coal.
For more than a quarter-century, a lawsuit settlement from a case brought in Los Angeles federal court has dictated conditions for children held in immigration detention.
But now, the long-standing settlement — which set minimum standards for housing, education and medical care for migrant kids in federal custody, while strictly limiting how long they can remain there — hangs in the balance in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals after a challenge by the Trump administration.
At the same time, the federal judge in L.A. who presides over the agreement appears poised to appoint a powerful new enforcer to uphold it.
President Trump has long sought to scrap the Flores settlement, which dates back to the Clinton era. In recent months, the Trump administration has waged a legal battle to cancel the agreement, while also pleading with the district court not to order an independent monitor to boost its compliance.
“[Flores] is the only thing standing between them and indefinite detention of families,” said Leecia Welch, chief legal director at Children’s Rights, a plaintiff in the case.
Last month, Assistant Atty. Gen. Brett A. Shumate pressed the 9th Circuit court to give the administration “the thumbs-up or thumbs-down” on its bid to tear up the settlement and end what he called “judicial micromanagement” of federal immigration policy.
“The Flores consent decree is an agreement which goes well above the constitutional floor,” Shumate told the court during oral arguments in June. “We’re asking that [the Department of Homeland Security’s] compliance with the law be assessed based on the law, not a 30-year-old settlement agreement.”
The three-judge panel sharply questioned the Justice Department’s legal claims, saying little had changed since the government last petitioned the court to have the agreement dissolved in 2020 — a request that was rejected.
The judges also pressed Trump administration lawyers to respond to evidence from scores of declarations filed in district court since last summer, in which detainees describe struggling to sleep in freezing, brightly lit rooms, vomiting from eating spoiled food, and begging for diapers, baby formula and asthma inhalers.
“You’ve said a lot of the reason you’re doing this is to discourage families from coming in the first place, so you’re basically punishing children because their parents brought them here,” Judge Marsha S. Berzon said.
Berzon, a Clinton appointee who issued a fiery dissent last year in a case that challenged the administration’s use of armed troops in immigration enforcement operations, asked: “You’re saying there’s no constitutional problem there?”
“I understand the detention of children at the border is a controversial policy issue, but that’s a policy decision,” Shumate said.
Just a day earlier, Chief U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee scolded a pair of government attorneys from her bench in Los Angeles, signaling she would probably appoint a new special master to force compliance with the settlement agreement.
“We’re talking about 11 years of this,” Gee said during the June 1 status conference. “None of these issues are new to me. These are all issues on which I have issued orders. I am very displeased about the fact that my orders are being disregarded and are not being complied with, not in good faith.”
“Both sides seem to be operating in different planes of reality,” Gee said.
The disputed settlement emerged from a 1985 lawsuit over the fate of 15-year-old Jenny Flores, a Salvadoran refugee who was picked up by federal immigration enforcement and left to languish in detention in Pasadena. At the time, there was little awareness that children were among the tens of thousands of migrants fleeing civil war and state collapse in Central America — with virtually no U.S. government infrastructure to protect them.
“It was a surprise,” said Benjamin Roth, a professor at the University of South Carolina College of Social Work and an expert on the agreement. “There was no thought then that there were kids in this mix.”
The current court fight centers on an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, run by the private prison company CoreCivic, where the vast majority of children and families in immigration custody are held.
In court filings earlier this month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it has “maintained core Flores-related services” at Dilley and argued its length-of-stay numbers were skewed by a small number of families it was forced to keep because they are considered “national security risks.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection likewise boasted its July 1 report “shows our highest level of compliance to date.”
Immigrant rights advocates called those claims “a fiction.”
“We see the same sorts of problems and concerns and misery that we’ve been seeing for the last 15 months,” said Welch, the Children’s Rights attorney.
In dozens of declarations collected as part of the court record, detainees recounted broccoli full of worms, diapers doled out one at a time, and staff tearing up children’s drawings.
One mother said medical staff laughed off her 8-year-old’s broken arm. Another said she was denied treatment for hepatitis B, even after doctors told her she could develop liver cancer and pass the infection on to her unborn daughter.
Still others described unexplained rashes, outbreaks of diarrhea and infestations of lice, among a host of other maladies for which many said they were offered only Tylenol or allergy medication. Even Christmas brought misery in the form of an ICE agent dressed up as Santa, who shoved away children trying to hug him, according to the detainee declarations submitted to the court.
“What happened on Christmas Day can only be described as an atrocity,” one mother recalled. Children “dropped everything, ran up to him, begged for candy and wanted to take pictures. Some children even cried and begged him for their freedom. Santa himself acted very indifferent.”
The Department of Justice argued that immigrant kids could still sue over poor conditions if the Flores settlement is unwound. But experts say existing protections would collapse without the legal architecture of the consent decree to support them.
“[Under the settlement], the federal government has built out a very efficient system to provide temporary care for kids,” Roth said. “If Flores is dissolved, it’s not going to be easy to stand up this same set of programs.”
If the Trump administration loses before the 9th Circuit, the fight over Flores could soon escalate to the Supreme Court.
“I’d be shocked if the 9th Circuit rules for the government, and I’d be shocked if the Trump administration doesn’t appeal,” said Eric J. Segall, a law professor at Georgia State University and an expert on the high court.
But consent decrees are legally and politically complicated, and the treatment of migrant children further tangles the situation. Given the legal and political complexity, the Supreme Court could rule to keep the settlement in place, or decline to take the case at all, experts said.
“It’s more likely than not the court would stay away from this,” Segall said.
For now, both the district judge and the 9th Circuit panel appear fed up.
“I think my patience has come to an end,” Gee said during the recent hearing in her Los Angeles courtroom.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and other Democratic attorneys general are suing the Trump administration over imposing what they contend are “unlawful” conditions on federal grants intended to help states prepare and respond to disasters.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Rhode Island on Thursday, argues that the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency have been using their control over billions of dollars in federal grants to operate what the attorneys general see as an aggressive “campaign of coercion” to adopt the Trump administration’s preferred voting and immigration policies, according to the complaint.
“Congress never gave DHS or FEMA authority to rewrite state election law, require cooperation with federal immigration agents, or terminate federal funding streams at any time and for any reason,” the lawsuit stated. The legal action was filed by a coalition of 24 attorneys general and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, both Democrats.
A spokesperson for the White House did not respond to a request for comment.
At the crux of their legal complaint are two federal programs: the Homeland Security Grant Program, which was established by Congress as a response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the Emergency Management Performance Grant Program, which helps states pay for emergency management staff who plan for and respond to natural disasters and mass casualty events, as well as software programs used by state emergency operations centers.
For the homeland security grant, the Trump administration has attached “radical” new terms based on Trump’s preferred policies, the states contend.
These terms include verifying the citizenship of all individuals in state voter databases, transitioning their voting systems to equipment that reads hand-marked paper ballots and conducting post-election audits “according to nonexistent guidelines to be set by the Secretary of Homeland Security,” according to the complaint.
And the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA have threatened to make states “promise to devote their scarce resources to the federal government’s own task of civil immigration enforcement” in order to receive both the homeland security and the emergency management grants, according to the complaint.
At a news conference Thursday, Bonta laid out the stakes.
“These grants help communities prepare for emergencies before disaster strikes,” he said. “They support emergency management personnel, strengthen disaster response capabilities, improve coordination among first responders, and help protect our residents when they need government the most.”
The Trump administration restrictions would mean “our communities would have fewer resources to prepare for wildfires, earthquakes, floods, terrorist threats, and other emergencies,” Bonta stated.
“Time after time, courts have told Trump’s corrupt administration that it can’t coerce California into doing its bidding by threatening to withhold public safety funding,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “Yet, they’re coming back for more. This time they’re demanding states rewrite their own election laws to access money that pays for public safety readiness and response, and that Congress already approved. We simply won’t allow it.”
