Trumps

Nov. 18 (UPI) — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Tuesday rebuffed the idea of the U.S. military intervening within her country’s borders to combat drug trafficking despite recent remarks from President Donald Trump.

Sheinbaum made the comments during a press conference Tuesday as the Trump administration pursues its increasingly militarized approach to drug trafficking.

Sheinbaum said Trump had offered during multiple phone conversations to send troops to Mexico to help authorities combat criminal groups. While Sheinbaum said she was willing to share information and work with the United States, she would not accept a foreign government intervening in her country.

“We don’t want intervention from any foreign government,” said Sheinbaum in Spanish. She noted that Mexico lost half its territory the last time the United States had a military presence in her country, a reference to the U.S.-Mexico war of the 19th century.

She added she was open to “collaboration and coordination without subordination” to the United States and had communicated the same message to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The Trump administration has launched a series of strikes targeting boats allegedly carrying drugs across the Pacific to the United States. Military officials have justified the strikes as legally permissible after the U.S. government designated drug traffickers as “terrorist organizations.”

Speaking to reporters Monday, Trump said the strikes had significantly reduced drug trafficking across waterways and prevented U.S. citizens from fatal overdoses. When asked if he was open to military strikes against Mexico, Trump indicated he was open to the idea, citing “big problems” in Mexico City.

“So let me just put it this way, I am not happy with Mexico,” he said.

WASHINGTON — When President Trump doesn’t like someone, he knows how to show it. In just the last few days, he’s described Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as a traitor, mocked Rep. Thomas Massie’s second marriage after his first wife died and demanded that comedian Seth Meyers get fired from his late-night television show.

But he had nothing bad to say about two people roiling his party: white nationalist Nick Fuentes and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. The former Fox News host recently hosted Fuentes for a friendly interview, where he declined to challenge his guest’s bigoted beliefs or a remark about problems with “organized Jewry in America.”

Asked about the controversy that has been rippling through Republican circles for weeks, Trump did not criticize Fuentes and praised Carlson for having “said good things about me over the years.”

The president’s answer echoes his longstanding reluctance to disavow — and sometimes, his willingness to embrace — right-wing figures who have inched their way from the political fringe to the Republican mainstream.

“We are disappointed in President Trump,” said Morton Klein, president of the conservative Zionist Organization of America, adding that he should “rethink and retract” his comments.

The threat of antisemitism, which has percolated across the political spectrum, will likely be a recurring political issue in the coming year, as Democrats and Republicans battle for control of Congress in the midterms. Although Trump has targeted left-wing campus activism as a hive of anti-Jewish sentiment, Fuentes’ influence is a test of whether conservatives are willing to accommodate bigots as part of their political coalition.

A top conservative group faces antisemitism controversy

The turmoil has already engulfed the Heritage Foundation, a leading think tank whose president Kevin Roberts initially refused to distance himself from Carlson. A member of Heritage’s board of trustees, Robert George, announced his resignation Monday, which followed a recent decision by an antisemitism task force to sever its ties with the organization.

Although Roberts has apologized, George said “we reached an impasse” because he didn’t fully retract his original support for Carlson.

“I pray that Heritage’s research and advocacy will be guided by the conviction that each and every member of the human family, irrespective of race, ethnicity, religion, or anything else, as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, is ‘created equal’ and ‘endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights,’” George wrote on Facebook, quoting the Declaration of Independence.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore, an evangelical conservative activist and film producer, joined Heritage’s antisemitism task force in June but stepped away when Roberts refused to resign.

“If we aren’t solid on condemning antisemitism, shame on us,” she said Monday.

Cardoza-Moore praised Trump’s record on supporting Israel but said he fell short on Sunday while talking about Carlson and Fuentes.

“We can all agree — and I wish — that he would have gone further,” she said.

It’s unclear what kind of pressure Trump will face despite his previous dalliance with Fuentes, who had dinner with the past-and-future president at his Mar-a-Lago club in between his two terms.

“I don’t think President Trump during his first or second term could be acting more strongly to prevent antisemitism,” said Matthew Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He noted Trump’s first-term relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and, more recently, the president’s handling of the war in Gaza.

This is not the first time Trump has shied away from criticizing fringe elements on the right. During his first campaign for president, Trump initially declined to disavow support from white nationalist David Duke, saying, “I just don’t know anything about him.”

He claimed there were “very fine people on both sides” during racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. While running for reelection, he told the extremist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

Trump’s unwillingness to condemn either Fuentes or Carlson has the potential to prolong a rift within the Republican Party. On Sunday, as he prepared to fly back to Washington from a weekend in Florida, Trump praised Carlson and said “you can’t tell him who to interview.”

“If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him — but if he wants to do it, get the word out,” Trump said. “People have to decide.”

Fuentes liked what he heard, posting “Thank you Mr. President!” on social media.

Trump’s remarks run counter to a wave of objections that have flowed from key Republicans. The issue will be the focus of a planned gathering of pro-Israel conservative leaders on Tuesday in Washington called “Exposing and Countering Extremism and Antisemitism on the Political Right.”

The event features U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Ralph Reed of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, and Klein, of the Zionist Organization of America.

Perkins said the event has been discussed for some time. “But with recent comments by folks like Tucker, there was an urgency to go ahead and hold the conference,” he said.

The recent annual summit of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas was similarly focused on condemning antisemitism within the party, a shift from the original plans to celebrate the ceasefire in Gaza and the return of Hamas-held hostages.

Brooks said at the time, “We are at this point in what I consider sort of the early stages of an undeclared civil war within the Republican Party, as it relates to Israel, and antisemitism and the Jewish community.”

“And it’s really going to be our challenge going forward to combat that before it has a chance to grow and metastasize in the Republican Party,” Brooks said.

During one part of the conference, college students waved red signs that read, “Tucker is not MAGA.”

Trump addressed the summit by prerecorded video, using his time to promote his administration’s support for Israel. He did not mention the controversy that had dominated the conference.

Megerian and Beaumont write for the Associated Press. Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Adriana Gomez Licon in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. contributed to this report.

US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse sharply criticised President Donald Trump for previously attempting to block a House vote on the release of files related to Epstein. Trump on Sunday dropped his opposition and the measure now is expected to overwhelmingly pass.

When US President Donald Trump declared that South Africa “should not even be” in the G20 and then took to Truth Social on November 7 to announce that no American official would attend this year’s summit in Johannesburg on account of a so-called “genocide” of white farmers in the country, I was not surprised. His outburst was not an exception but the latest expression of a long Western tradition of disciplining African sovereignty. Western leaders have long tried to shut down African agency through mischaracterisations, from branding Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba a “Soviet puppet” to calling anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela a “terrorist”, and Trump’s assault on South Africa falls squarely into that pattern.

As Africa pushes for a stronger voice in global governance, the Trump administration has intensified efforts to isolate Pretoria. South Africa’s growing diplomatic assertiveness, from BRICS expansion to climate finance negotiations, has challenged conservative assumptions that global leadership belongs exclusively to the West.

On February 7, Trump signed an executive order halting US aid to South Africa. He alleged that the government’s land expropriation policy discriminates against white farmers and amounts to uncompensated confiscation. Nothing could be further from the truth. South African law permits expropriation only through due process and compensation, with limited exceptions set out in the Constitution. Trump’s claims ignore this legal reality, revealing a deliberate preference for distortion over fact.

Soon after, the administration amplified its rollout of a refugee admissions policy that privileged Afrikaners, citing once again discredited claims of government persecution. What is clear is that Washington has deliberately heightened tensions with Pretoria, searching for any pretext to cast South Africa as an adversary. This selective compassion, extended only to white South Africans, exposes a racialised hierarchy of concern that has long shaped conservative engagement with the continent.

Yet, for months, South African officials have firmly rejected these claims, pointing to judicial rulings, official statistics, and constitutional safeguards that show no evidence of systematic persecution, let alone a “genocide” of white farmers. Indeed, as independent experts repeatedly confirmed, there is no credible evidence whatsoever to support the claim that white farmers in South Africa are being systematically targeted as part of a campaign of genocide. Their rebuttals highlight a basic imbalance: Pretoria is operating through verifiable data and institutional process, while Washington relies on exaggeration and ideological grievance.

At the same time, as host of this year’s G20 Summit, Pretoria is using the platform to champion a more cooperative and equitable global order. For South Africa, chairing the G20 is not only symbolic, but strategic, an attempt to expand the influence of countries long excluded from shaping the rules of global governance.

Trump’s G20 boycott embodies a transnational crusade shaped by Christian righteousness. Trump’s rhetoric reduces South Africa to a moral backdrop for American authority rather than recognising it as a sovereign partner with legitimate aspirations. The boycott also mirrors a wider effort to discredit multilateral institutions that dilute American exceptionalism.

This stance is rooted in a long evangelical-imperial tradition, one that fused theology with empire and cast Western dominance as divinely sanctioned. The belief that Africa required Western moral rescue emerged in the nineteenth century, when European missionaries declared it a Christian duty to civilise and redeem the continent. The wording has changed, but the logic endures, recasting African political agency as a civilisational error rather than a legitimate expression of sovereignty. This moralised paternalism did not disappear with decolonisation. It simply adapted, resurfacing whenever African nations assert themselves on the world stage.

American evangelical and conservative Christian networks wield significant influence inside the Republican Party. Their political and media ecosystem, featuring Fox News and the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), routinely frames multilateral institutions, global aid, and international law as subordinate to American sovereignty and Christian civilisation. These networks shape not only rhetoric but policy, turning fringe narratives into foreign policy priorities.

They also amplify unproven claims of Christian persecution abroad, particularly in countries such as Nigeria and Ethiopia, to legitimise American political and military interference. Trump’s fixation with South Africa follows the same script: a fabricated crisis crafted to thrill, galvanise, and reassure a conservative Christian base. South Africa becomes another stage for this performance.

In this distorted narrative, South Africa is not a constitutional democracy acting through strong, independent courts and institutions. Instead, Africa’s most developed country is stripped of its standing and portrayed as a flawed civilisation in need of Western correction. For conservative Christian nationalists, African decision-making is not autonomous agency but a supervised privilege granted only when African decisions align with Western priorities.

By casting South Africa as illegitimate in the G20, invoking false claims of genocide and land seizures, and penalising Pretoria’s ICJ case with aid cuts, Trump asserts that only the West can define global legitimacy and moral authority, a worldview anchored in Christian-nationalist authority. Trump’s crusade is punishment, not principle, and it seeks to deter African autonomy itself.

On many occasions, I have walked the streets of Alexandra, a Johannesburg township shaped by apartheid’s spatial design, where inequality remains brutally vivid. Alexandra squeezes more than one million residents into barely 800 hectares (about 2,000 acres). A significant portion of its informal housing sits on the floodplain of the Jukskei River, where settlements crowd narrow pathways and fragile infrastructure. Here, the consequences of structural inequality are unmistakable, yet they vanish entirely within Trump’s constructed crisis.

These communities sit only a few kilometres from Sandton, a spacious, leafy, and affluent suburb that is home to some of the country’s most expensive properties. The vast and entrenched gulf between these adjacent lands is essentially a living symbol of the profound inequality Trump is willing to overlook and legitimise as a global norm, built on selective moral outrage and racialised indifference.

In Alexandra, the struggle for dignity, equality, and inclusion is not a religious American fantasy, but a practical quest for the rights that apartheid and wider global injustice sought to deny. Their struggle mirrors the wider global fight against structures that concentrate wealth and power in a few hands. They, too, deserve better.

This is the human condition Trump’s pseudo-morality refuses to acknowledge. This is why South Africa’s global leadership matters.

Earlier this year, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa commissioned a landmark G20 Global Inequality Report, chaired by Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. It found that the world’s richest 1 percent have captured more than 40 percent of new wealth since 2000 and that more than 80 percent of humanity now lives in conditions the World Bank classifies as high inequality.

The Johannesburg G20 Summit seeks to reform multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank, to confront a global financial system that sidelines developing countries and perpetuates economic injustice. While South Africa turns to recognised multilateral tools such as the ICJ and G20 reform, the US has moved in the opposite direction.

Under Trump, Washington has sanctioned the International Criminal Court, abandoned key UN bodies, and rejected scrutiny from UN human rights experts, reflecting a Christian-nationalist doctrine that treats American power as inherently absolute and answerable to no one.

South Africa offers an alternative vision rooted in global cooperation, shared responsibility, equality, and adherence to international law, a vision that unsettles those invested in unilateral power. The US recasts decolonisation as sin, African equality as disruption, and American dominance as divinely ordained. Trump’s attacks reveal how deeply this worldview still shapes American foreign policy.

Yet the world has moved beyond colonial binaries. African self-determination can no longer be framed as immoral. Human rights are universal, and dignity belongs to us all.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

At a White House event on Nov. 6 announcing price cuts for those blockbuster weight-loss drugs, Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz made an astonishing claim.

Because the price cuts would vastly improve access to the prescription drugs, Oz said, by next year’s midterm elections in November, “Americans will lose 135 billion pounds.”

As though to make sure nobody missed the magnitude of the achievement, Oz hit the word “billion” with all its plosive force: “135 BILLION pounds.”

Well, that would be some achievement. The U.S. population is just over 340 million. Do the math, and Oz’s figure works out to an average weight loss of 347 pounds for every man, woman and child in America.

Oz called the calculation “our estimate based on company numbers,” referring to Lilly and Novo Nordisk, the makers of the most popular drugs in the category. His figure was a vast improvement over what he said was his agency’s original estimate of 125 million pounds.

Perhaps Oz just misspoke; it’s certainly not uncommon for people to substitute “billions” for “millions” in quotidian speech. (More on that shortly.) But his casual retailing of obviously bogus arithmetic points to a broader issue with the numbers the Trump White House routinely injects into its policy statements.

The administration’s suspect arithmetic is in many respects deliberately aimed at portraying some condition as better than the real numbers show.

It’s also reliant, however, on people’s proverbial dislike, even fear, of math — whether we’re talking about calculating the tip at a restaurant or the statistical risk of dying from a lightning strike or in a terrorist attack. The mathematician John Allen Poulos described this phenomenon as “innumeracy,” the title of his classic 1989 book on the topic.

As is the case in all hierarchical organizations, the problem starts at the top. President Trump loves to define his ostensible political achievements and goals with big numbers. For example, he claimed in August to have cut prescription drug prices “by 1,200, 1,300 and 1,400, 1,500%.”

To an unwary listener, that sounds like another major achievement. In mathematical terms, though, it’s impossible: A 1,500% reduction would mean reducing a $100 drug bill to negative $1,400, meaning that the drug company would be paying you to use its product.

In recent weeks, Trumpian innumeracy has cropped up in official dispatches not only in relation to healthcare, but also home mortgages and (especially) inflation. The partisan value of mathematical deception is manifest. But it’s also dangerous.

“One rarely discussed consequence of innumeracy is its link with pseudoscience,” Poulos wrote. That’s at the core of the anti-vaccine movement and the doubts sown by partisan actors in the science of COVID-19‘s origins — specifically, the evidence-free assertions that the virus was concocted in a Chinese laboratory.

Let’s examine the most recent displays of bogus math from the Trump administration.

Healthcare math: Oz employed his weight-loss conjecture to dress up the effect of Trump’s price negotiations with Lilly and Novo Nordisk. The figure he offered as the administration’s initial estimate of 125 million pounds lost by next November’s election was not especially impressive, as it implied an average loss of about one-third of a pound per capita.

If we adjust these stats to cover the 12% of American adults who have taken the drugs — about 3.12 million users — that’s a loss of 40 pounds per user, which is at the very high end of per-user weight loss experiences. A 2023 study found that about one-third of users lost more than 5% of their body weight after about 18 months; for a 250-pound user, that’s a loss of about 12.5 pounds in a year and a half.

I asked the Department of Health and Human Services, Oz’s parent agency, to clarify his statement but didn’t receive a reply. I also asked Novo Nordisk and Lilly what “company numbers” he might have been referring to. Lilly didn’t reply, and Novo Nordisk emailed me to say it had nothing to say on the matter.

Mortgage math: As an ostensible solution to the diminishing affordability of home ownership, the administration advanced the idea of giving homebuyers the option of 50-year mortgages. That’s a big departure from the standard 30-year, fixed-rate home loan, the most popular option.

Trump endorsed this fundamentally unserviceable idea with a Truth Social post in which he depicted himself as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s equal as a “great American President” — indeed, as going one better than FDR, to whom he attributed the introduction of the 30-year mortgage.

(Actually, under FDR the standard mortgage, a three-to-five-year loan with interest-only payments ending in a balloon payment and required refinancing, gave way to fully amortized loans that would be paid off in 15 years; the 30-year mortgage didn’t become the standard until the 1950s.)

What makes the 50-year mortgage such a chuckleheaded product? Let’s do the math.

Here’s a nugget of truth about it: The monthly payment on the same size mortgage at the same rate would be lower on a 50-year term than on a 30-year term. On a $400,000 loan at 6%, the interest and principal payment would be $2,106 for the former versus $2,398 on the latter, an apparent savings of $292 a month. For borrowers living on the edge, that’s a sizable difference.

Here are the catches, however. First, over the life of the loan, borrowers will pay much more in interest for the longer loan — in our examples, the total in interest on the 50-year loan comes to about $650,000, versus $461,000 over 30 years.

Moreover, it’s almost certain that lenders will charge a higher rate for the longer-term loan. No one is quite sure how much higher, but Adam Levitin of Georgetown Law conjectures that it might be higher by a percentage point or more. The monthly payment on a 50-year, $400,000 loan at 7% would be $2,407 — higher than the payment on the shorter loan at the lower rate — and the total interest paid over the term rises to about $774,500.

It’s true that very few borrowers pay off their entire mortgage; Americans stay in their homes an average of 12 years, real estate experts say. That brings the issue of home equity into play.

This is important because a home is the largest single investment for most Americans, with the growth of home equity the financial holy grail of home ownership. Yet equity grows much more slowly under the longer-term loan. At the beginning, most of the monthly payment goes to pay down interest, not principal.

After 12 years of payments, the holder of a 30-year, $400,000 loan at 6% would have accumulated nearly $84,000 in home equity. The holder of a 50-year loan would have accumulated only about $22,000 in equity. (If that loan were at 7%, the gain would be even less — only about $16,500.)

“Homeowners are not building much wealth with a 50-year mortgage,” economist Dean Baker observes.

The 50-year mortgage idea reportedly was sold to Trump by Bill Pulte, the real estate scion serving as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who’s best known as the instigator of the mortgage fraud accusations against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James, and other Trump critics.

After his idea was pilloried by sources including the Wall Street Journal, Pulte stated in a tweet that it was one of “a wide arsenal of solutions” to housing costs. The only solutions he mentioned were assumable mortgages and portable mortgages. The first are loans that can be assumed by new buyers of existing homes, the second are loans that borrowers can apply to their own new homes.

These are pigs in a poke. Mortgage lenders generally are averse to carrying existing loans over to new borrowers or new properties, at least without new appraisals, credit checks and other paperwork. No one in the administration can wave a wand and make them happen. I asked Pulte’s agency to explain his thinking but received no reply.

That brings us to the White House’s inflation math.

On Nov. 10, after the government shutdown rendered the monthly inflation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics missing in action (perhaps permanently), the White House issued a statement asserting, “President Trump has tamed inflation.”

The statement drew heavily from a report on the consumer economy issued last week by the gig delivery company DoorDash, principally its Breakfast Basics Index, which showed a decline in breakfast prices of 14% from March through September. The index measures price movements for three eggs, a glass of milk, a bagel and an avocado.

A couple of points about this: First, the company acknowledges that the driver of the index decline was the price of eggs; those for the other commodities were stable. Second, Trump has had nothing to do with the price of eggs. They’ve come down sharply since March because of the passing of the avian flu epidemic, which devastated flocks and accordingly the supply of fresh eggs. Finally, the price of eggs bottomed out in early October .

The White House tried to take credit for ending bird flu. “Egg prices are down because the Trump administration implemented a robust plan to tackle bird flu and increase egg production,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told me by email. “The bird flu crisis did not magically disappear.”

Nope, it didn’t: After a lull in cases this summer, bird flu is again on the rise, after a marked increase in infections in October. And — surprise! — that’s when egg prices started heading higher too. Anyway, Desai insisted that “the Trump administration’s policies have cooled inflation.”

DoorDash told me that although its report was published this month, its data collection ended in September. But the company’s full report shows price increases over the last year in baked, canned and jarred goods, and automotive supplies and clothing. The average price of a cheeseburger, soda and fries, it says, rose by 3.8% in the year through September.

The White House still is trying to hide the effects of its economic policies on inflation — especially its tariffs. Just last week, Trump moved to roll back tariffs on coffee, beef, bananas and other foodstuffs to bring prices down.

Despite Trump’s insistence that foreign exports pay the tariffs, his move is an implicit admission that U.S. consumers are paying the price. Desai explained Trump’s tariff climb down as demonstrating Trump’s “nimble, nuanced, and multi-faceted strategy on trade and tariffs.”

The bottom line is that one shouldn’t trust the math coming from this White House. If you do the calculations for yourself, you’ll see why.

The UN Security Council has adopted the US’s 20-point Gaza ceasefire plan, approving an international stabilisation force and a ‘board of peace’ with extensive powers to oversee Gaza’s governance and reconstruction.

Republicans in California have diverging opinions on President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies, according to a study published by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute on Monday.

The Trump administration has deployed a sweeping crackdown on immigration, launching ICE raids across the country and removing legal barriers in order to make deportations faster. The study found that while Democrats were largely consistent in their opposition to these immigration policies, Republican sentiment varied more, especially by age, gender and ethnicity.

“At least some subset of Republicans are seeing that these immigration strategies are a step too far,” said G. Cristina Mora, a sociology professor and co-director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which administered the poll. The polling data were collected from nearly 5,000 registered voters in mid-August. Just over 1,000 of those surveyed were registered Republicans.

Latino Republicans, with whom Trump made historic gains during the 2024 elections, showed the highest levels of disagreement with the party’s aggressive stance on immigration. Young people from 18 to 29 and moderate women in the Republican Party also more significantly diverged from Trump’s policies.

The majority of Republican respondents expressed approval of Trump’s immigration strategy overall. However, the study found respondents diverged more from Trump’s policies that ignore established legal processes, including due process, birthright citizenship and identification of federal agents.

“On these legalistic issues, this is where you see some of the bigger breaks,” Mora said.

Of those surveyed, 28% disapproved of the end of birthright citizenship, which Trump is pushing for, and 45% agreed that ICE agents should show clear identification. Four in 10 Republican respondents also support due process for detained immigrants.

Young people, who make up about 15% of the party in California, were on average also more likely to break from Trump’s policies than older Republicans.

The analysis also found that education level and region had almost no impact on respondents’ beliefs on immigration.

Latinos and women were more likely to disagree with Trump on humanitarian issues than their demographic counterparts.

Nearly 60% of moderate Republican women disagree with deporting longtime undocumented immigrants, compared with 47% of moderate men. 45% of women believe ICE raids unfairly target Latino communities.

The political party was most split across racial lines when it came to immigration enforcement being expanded into hospitals and schools. Forty-four percent of Latinos disagreed with the practice, compared with 26% of white respondents, while 46% of Latino respondents disagreed with deporting immigrants who have resided in the country for a long time, compared with just 30% of their white counterparts.

Trump had gained a significant Latino vote that helped him win reelection last year. Democratic candidates, however, made gains with Latino voters in elections earlier this month, indicating a possible shift away from the GOP.

The data could indicate Latino Republicans “are somewhat disillusioned” by the Trump administration’s handling of immigration, Mora said. “Latinos aren’t just disagreeing on the issues that we think are about process and American legal fairness. They’re also disagreeing on just the idea that this is cruel.”

Mora said the deluge of tense and sometimes violent encounters posted online could have an impact on Republican opinion surrounding immigration. A plainclothes agent pointed his gun at a female driver in Santa Ana last week, and two shootings involving ICE agents took place in Southern California late last month.

“You now have several months of Latinos being able to log on to their social media and see every kind of video of Latinos being targeted with or without papers,” Mora said. “I have to believe that that is doing something to everybody, not just Latino Republicans or Latino Democrats.”

In an interview—with Fox News on November 11, 2025—US President Donald Trump defended the H1B Visa, saying that the US needed foreigners with special skills and talents that US workers did not possess.

Said Trump

“You don’t have certain talents… And people have to learn, you can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, I’m going to put you into a factory. We’re going to make missiles.” 

In September 2025, the Trump administration had announced a massive hike in H-1B visa application fees. The revised fees for the H-1B Visa were fixed at $100,000. This decision had caused a lot of concern within several Information Technology (IT) companies and also among IT professionals already working in the US (Indian professionals account for 70% of H-1B visas issued in 2024).

 Later, some clarifications were made by the Trump administration. The first was that this was a one-time visa fee that needed to be paid only by new applicants, and the second was that those already on F-1 or L1 visas would not need to pay this fee (this new fee was applicable only to applicants who were based outside of the United States). While these clarifications were important, the decision to raise the H-1B application fees had already created an atmosphere of uncertainty.

In the same interview with Fox News, the US president also said that while he did not want international students, they were essential for the US economy. Said Trump:

“We take in trillions of dollars from students. You know, the students pay more than double when they come in from most foreign countries. I want to see our school system thrive… It’s not that I want them, but I view it as a business.”

International Students in the US

International students make a significant contribution towards the US economy and also help in creating jobs in the US. In 2023-2024 there were well over 1.5 million international students, and they contributed over $40 billion to the US economy. A significant percentage of international students were from China and India (in 2024, India accounted for well over 1/4th of the total international student community). August 2025 witnessed a significant dip in the inflow of international students into the US, and this is likely to cause a significant dent to the US economy, according to estimates. Certain top US universities also witnessed significant budget cuts and layoffs.

Trump, while speaking at the White House earlier this month, also said that he is keen to welcome 600,000 Chinese students to the US.

Several international students, especially from India, have begun to look at alternatives to the US. There has been a rise in the number of Indian students going to Germany, Finland, and the UAE.

Reaction to Trump’s comments

Both comments of Trump—pertaining to H1B visas as well as international students—are likely to annoy the MAGA camp within the Republican party. Steve Bannon, a former aide of Trump, while criticizing the US President’s statements, said:

“This is Davos in a red tie! Telling American engineers and factory workers we lack talent? Then flooding campuses with CCP-linked students? It’s a gut-punch to every voter who bled for this movement. Wake up, Mr. President—this isn’t MAGA; it’s Chamber of Commerce betrayal.”

Significantly, in an interview with Fox TV, Nalin Haley, the son of Nikki Haley—former US Ambassador to the United Nations (UN)—had criticized H1B visas and said that US workers were suffering because of the same.

Trump’s statements reiterate the point that while not just the US — but other countries in the Anglosphere have legitimate concerns vis-à-vis illegal immigration — it is important to have a nuanced approach towards immigration issues and not view the issue from simplistic binaries. It remains to be seen if the US president sticks to this current stand.

NEW YORK — When he first came to the United States after escaping civil war in Sierra Leone and spending almost a decade in a refugee camp, Dauda Sesay had no idea he could become a citizen. But he was told that if he followed the rules and stayed out of trouble, after some years he could apply. As a U.S. citizen, he would have protection.

It’s what made him decide to apply: the premise — and the promise — that when he became a naturalized American citizen, it would create a bond between him and his new home. That he would have rights as well as responsibilities, like voting, and that as he was making a commitment to the country, the country was making one to him.

“When I raised my hand and took the oath of allegiance, I did believe that moment the promise that I belonged,” said Sesay, 48, who arrived in Louisiana more than 15 years ago and now works as an advocate for refugees and their integration into American society.

But in recent months, as President Trump reshapes immigration and the country’s relationship with immigrants, that belief has been shaken for Sesay and other naturalized citizens. There’s now fear that the push to drastically increase deportations and shift who can claim America as home, through things such as trying to end birthright citizenship, is having a ripple effect.

What they thought was the bedrock protection of naturalization now feels more like quicksand.

What happens if they leave?

Some are worried that if they leave the country, they will have difficulties when trying to return, fearful because of accounts of naturalized citizens being questioned or detained by U.S. border agents. They wonder: Do they need to lock down their phones to protect their privacy? Others are hesitant about moving around within the country, after stories like that of a U.S. citizen accused of being here illegally and detained even after his mother produced his birth certificate.

Sesay said he doesn’t travel domestically anymore without his passport, despite having a Real ID with its stringent federally mandated identity requirements.

Immigration enforcement roundups, often conducted by unidentifiable masked federal agents in places including Chicago and New York City, have at times included American citizens in their dragnets. One U.S. citizen who says he was detained by immigration agents twice has filed a federal lawsuit.

Adding to the worries, the Justice Department issued a memo this summer saying it would ramp up efforts to denaturalize immigrants who’ve committed crimes or are deemed a national security risk. At one point during the summer, Trump threatened the citizenship of Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist mayor-elect of New York City, who naturalized as a young adult.

The atmosphere makes some worried to speak about it publicly, for fear of drawing negative attention to themselves. Requests for comment through several community organizations and other connections found no takers willing to go on the record other than Sesay.

In New Mexico, state Sen. Cindy Nava says she’s familiar with the fear, having grown up undocumented before getting DACA protections — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals is the Obama-era program that protected from deportation people brought to the U.S. illegally as children — and gaining citizenship through her marriage. But she hadn’t expected to see so much fear among naturalized citizens.

“I had never seen those folks be afraid. … Now the folks that I know that were not afraid before, now they are uncertain of what their status holds in terms of a safety net for them,” Nava said.

What citizenship has meant, and who was included, has expanded and contracted throughout American history, said Stephen Kantrowitz, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said that while the word “citizen” is in the original Constitution, it is not defined.

“When the Constitution is written, nobody knows what citizenship means,” he said. “It’s a term of art, it comes out of the French revolutionary tradition. It sort of suggests an equality of the members of a political community, and it has some implications for the right to be a member of that political community. But it is … so undefined.”

American immigration and its obstacles

The first naturalization law passed in 1790 by the new country’s Congress said citizenship was for any “free white person” of good character. Those of African descent or nativity were added as a specific category to federal immigration law after the ravages of the Civil War in the 19th century, which was also when the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution to establish birthright citizenship.

In the last years of the 19th century and into the 20th century, laws were passed limiting immigration and, by extension, naturalization. The Immigration Act of 1924 effectively barred people from Asia because they were ineligible for naturalization, being neither white nor Black. That didn’t change until 1952, when an immigration law removed racial restrictions on who could be naturalized. The 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act replaced the previous immigration system with one that portioned out visas equally among nations.

American history also includes times when those who had citizenship had it taken away, such as after the 1923 Supreme Court ruling in U.S. vs. Bhagat Singh Thind. That ruling said that Indians couldn’t be naturalized because they did not qualify as white, leading to several dozen denaturalizations. At other times, it was ignored, as in World War II, when Japanese Americans were forced into incarceration camps.

“Political power will sometimes simply decide that a group of people, or a person or a family, isn’t entitled to citizenship,” Kantrowitz said.

In this moment, Sesay says, it feels like betrayal.

“The United States of America — that’s what I took that oath of allegiance, that’s what I make commitment to,” Sesay said. “Now, inside my home country, and I’m seeing a shift. … Honestly, that is not the America I believe in when I put my hand over my heart.”

Hajela writes for the Associated Press.

When millions of European immigrants came to the United States in the 19th century only to be scorned by mainstream society, it was the Catholic Church that embraced them, taught that keeping the customs of one’s native lands was not bad and created systems of mutual aid and education for the newcomers that didn’t rely on the government.

The 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, an Irish American Catholic, showed that the U.S. was ready to expand its definition of who could become president. Labor organizers like Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day and Mother Jones pushed for the dignity of workers while frequently citing the woke words of Jesus — the Sermon of the Mount and the Beatitudes among the wokest — as the fuel for their spiritual fire.

Catholicism is the faith I was baptized in, the one I embraced as a teen and that’s the bedrock for my moral code of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. My work desk covered with statues and devotional cards of Jesus, Mary and the saints is a physical testament to this.

But I’m also one of the 72% of U.S. Catholics that a Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year. found don’t attend weekly Mass, which we’re obligated to do.

I stopped going early on in my adulthood because the Church became something I didn’t recognize.

The bishops and cardinals who preached we should follow Jesus’ admonition we should tend to the least among us presided over a child sex abuse scandal in the 1990s and 2000s that cost parishioners billions of dollars in legal settlements and their ethical high ground. The obsession that too many of those same church leaders had over abortion and homosexuality — which Christ never talked about — over social justice matters during the Obama administration left me disappointed. Their continual condemnation of pro-choice Catholic Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden for taking Communion while staying silent about Donald Trump’s constant violations of the Ten Commandments was rank hypocrisy.

The Pew Research Center found 55% of my fellow faithful voted for Trump. Key Catholics have blessed Trump’s uglier tendencies: A majority of them rules over our revanchist Supreme Court while the president’s team features a vice president who’s a convert and a rogue’s gallery of influential insiders that bear surnames from previous generations of Catholic diasporas — Kennedy, Rubio, Bovino, Homan among the worst of the worst.

Yet I remain a Catholic because you shouldn’t turn your back so easily on institutions that formed you and you don’t cede your identity to heretics. The election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American to head the Holy See, to succeed Pope Francis stirred in me the sense that things might change for the better as our country worsens.

Now, without naming him, the U.S. Catholic hierarchy has rebuked Trump on his signature issue and one close to my heart in a way that shows my hope hasn’t been in vain.

Clergy attend the 2021 Fall General Assembly meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore, Md.

(Julio Cortez/Associated Press)

This week the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a so-called “special message” to blast Trump’s deportation Leviathan, decrying its “vilification of immigrants” “the, indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and how hundreds of thousands of residents have “arbitrarily lost their legal status.” Citing passages from across the Bible — the Gospel, the Old Testament, the Letters of Paul — to argue for the human worth of the undocumented and the holy mandate that we must care about them, it was the first time since 2013 that American bishops collectively authored such a statement.

Even as a majority of U.S. Catholics have gone MAGA, support for the special message was overwhelming: 216 bishops voted in favor, 5 against, and there were 3 abstentions. Their missive even concluded with a shout-out to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the brown, pregnant apparition of the Virgin Mary who’s the patroness of the Americas for Catholics.

Talk about someone who would get deported if la migra saw Her on the street.

The cruelty this administration has shown throughout its deportation campaign — families torn apart as easily as the Constitution; U.S. citizens detained; wanton federal violence that a federal judge in Chicago described as “shock[ing] the conscience” — has become one of the most pressing moral issues of our times. The call by Catholic bishops to oppose this wrong is important — so like a voice crying in the wilderness, the church must set an example for the rest of the country to follow.

This example already is being set in parishes across Southern California.

Priests and deacons have marched at rallies and prayed for those detained and deported from Orange County to downtown L.A. and beyond. Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights has let local activists stage know-your-rights workshops since Trump won last November. While L.A archbishop José H. Gomez and Diocese of Orange bishop Kevin Vann, the two most senior Catholic prelates in the region, have spoken out forcefully against immigration raids, some of their local brother bishops have pushed harder.

Diocese of San Bernardino Bishop Alberto Rojas has allowed Catholics who are afraid of la migra to skip Mass since July after immigration agents detained migrants on church property, arguing “such fear constitutes a grave inconvenience” for his flock. In San Diego, Bishop Michael Pham — who’s been in his seat for only four months — helped launch a program encouraging religious leaders to accompany migrants to immigration court to bear witness to the injustices inside and has participated himself.

Expect to hear gnashing of the teeth from the conservative side of church pews about how everyone should respect the rule of law and to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s as if there ever was a Pope Donald. Already, Trump border czar Tom Homan has cried that the bishops are “wrong” for issuing their pro-immigrant letter and suggested they focus on “fixing the Catholic Church.”

But Homan’s dismissal and that of his fellow travelers doesn’t make the bishop’s admonition against Trump’s policies any more prophetic. The president’s immigration dictates are out of Herod — no less an authority than Pope Leo described them in October as “inhuman,” told a delegation of American bishops that “the church cannot remain silent” on those outrages and stated in a separate speech that such abuse was “not the legitimate exercise of national sovereignty, but rather grave crimes committed or tolerated by the state.”

The Catholic Church never will be as progressive as some want it to be. Even as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released its message, the group elected as its next president Diocese of Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley, whose public politics have so far mostly aligned with those of his deep-red state. But on the issue of dignity for immigrants during the Trump era, U.S. bishops have been on the right side of history — and God. They criticized Trump’s Muslim ban and his move to separate undocumented parents from their children during his first administration and have kept a watch on his attempt to cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows some people who came to this country as children to legally remain in the U.S.

We’re about to enter the Christmas season, a holiday based on the story of a poor family seeking shelter in an era when their kind was rejected by the powers that be and ultimately had to flee home. It’s the story of the United States as well, one too many Americans have forsaken and that Trump wants all of us to forget.

May Catholics remind their fellow Americans anew of how powerful and righteous standing up for the stranger is.

NEW YORK — Acceding to President Trump’s demands, U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said Friday that she has ordered a top federal prosecutor to investigate sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Trump political foes, including former President Clinton.

Bondi posted on X that she was assigning Manhattan U.S. Atty. Jay Clayton to lead the probe, capping an eventful week in which congressional Republicans released nearly 23,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate and House Democrats seized on emails mentioning Trump.

Trump, who was friends with Epstein for years, didn’t explain what supposed crimes he wanted the Justice Department to investigate. None of the men he mentioned in a social media post demanding the probe has been accused of sexual misconduct by any of Epstein’s victims.

Hours before Bondi’s announcement, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he would ask her, the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate Epstein’s “involvement and relationship” with Clinton and others, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and LinkedIn founder and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.

Trump, calling the matter “the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans,” said the investigation should also include financial giant JPMorgan Chase, which provided banking services to Epstein, and “many other people and institutions.”

“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” the Republican president wrote, referring to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged Russian interference in Trump’s 2016 election victory over Bill Clinton’s wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Big names in Epstein’s emails

Trump, Bill Clinton, Summers and Hoffman were all mentioned in the documents released this week — a collection of emails Epstein exchanged with friends and business associates, news articles, book excerpts, legal papers and other material.

Epstein kept in touch with Summers and Hoffman via email, according to the documents, and wrote to other people about Trump and Clinton being in his company at various times over the years — though nothing in the messages suggested any wrongdoing on the men’s part.

Clinton has acknowledged traveling on Epstein’s private jet but has said through a spokesperson that he had no knowledge of the late financier’s crimes. Neither Clinton nor Trump has been accused of wrongdoing by any of the women who say Epstein abused them.

Summers, who served in Clinton’s Cabinet and is a former Harvard University president, previously said in a statement that he has “great regrets in my life” and that “my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgment.”

Messages seeking comment were left for Hoffman through his investment firm, Greylock, and with a spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase.

After Epstein’s sex trafficking arrest in 2019, Hoffman said he’d had only a few interactions with Epstein, all related to his fundraising for MIT’s Media Lab. He nevertheless apologized, saying that “by agreeing to participate in any fundraising activity where Epstein was present, I helped to repair his reputation and perpetuate injustice.”

None of Epstein’s victims has accused Hoffman of misconduct.

Bondi, in her post, praised Clayton as “one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country” and said the Justice Department “will pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people.”

Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term, took over in April as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York — the same office that indicted Epstein and won a sex trafficking conviction against Epstein’s longtime confidante, Ghislaine Maxwell, in 2021.

Trump changes course on Epstein files

Trump has raised questions about Epstein’s death in jail a month after his arrest and suggested while campaigning last year that he’d seek to open up the government’s case files.

But Trump has changed course in recent months — blaming Democrats and painting the matter as a “hoax” — amid questions about his own friendship with Epstein and what knowledge he may have had about Epstein’s years-long exploitation of underage girls.

On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three Epstein email exchanges that referenced Trump, including one from 2019 in which Epstein said the president “knew about the girls” and another from 2011 in which he said Trump had “spent hours” at his house with a sex trafficking victim.

The emails did not say what Trump knew and did not give any details of what Trump did while at Epstein’s house. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt accused Democrats of having “selectively leaked emails” to “create a fake narrative to smear President Trump.”

Soon after, Republicans on the committee disclosed what they said was an additional 20,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate. Among them were emails Epstein wrote, including many where he commented — often unfavorably — on Trump’s rise in politics and corresponded with journalists.

Other emails show Epstein keeping up friendly relationships with academic and business leaders, including Summers and Hoffman, well after he pleaded guilty in 2008 and served 13 months in jail for procuring a person under 18 for prostitution.

Epstein and Summers discussed politics, arranged calls with each other and spoke on more intimate matters, according to the emails, including about a woman Summers had interactions with. Epstein’s advice to him: “You care very much for this person. You might want to demonstrate that.”

Sisak and Bedayn write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON —  A slow drip of revelations detailing President Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein that have burdened the White House all year has turned into a deluge after House lawmakers released reams of documents that imply the president may have intimate knowledge of his friend’s criminal activity.

The scope of Epstein’s interest in Trump became clear Thursday as media organizations combed through more than 20,000 documents from the convicted sex offender’s estate released by the House Oversight Committee, prompting a bipartisan majority in the House — including up to half of Republican lawmakers — to pledge support for a measure to compel the Justice Department to release all files related to its investigation of Epstein.

In one email discovered Thursday, sent by Epstein to himself months before he died by suicide in federal custody, he wrote: “Trump knew.” The White House has denied that Trump knew about or was involved in Epstein’s years-long operation that abused over 200 women and girls.

The scandal comes at a precarious political moment for Trump, who faces a 36% approval rating, according to the latest Associated Press-NORC survey, and whose grip on the Republican Party and MAGA movement has begun to slip as his final term in office begins winding down leading up to next year’s midterm elections.

Attempts by the Trump administration to quash the scandal have failed to shake interest in the case from the public across the political spectrum.

The records paint the most expansive picture yet of Trump’s relationship with Epstein, the subject of unending fascination and conspiracy theories online, as well as growing bipartisan interest in Congress.

In several emails, Epstein, a disgraced financier who maintained a close friendship with Trump until a falling-out in the mid-2000s, said that the latter “knew about the girls” involved in his operation and that Trump “spent hours” with one in private. Epstein also alleged that he could “take him down” with damaging information.

In several exchanges, Epstein portrayed himself as someone who knew Trump well. Emails show how he tracked Trump’s business practices and the evolution of the president’s political endeavors.

Other communications show Epstein closely monitoring Trump’s movements at the beginning of his first term in office, at one point attempting to communicate with the Russian government to share his “insight” into Trump’s proclivities and thinking.

White House officials attempted to thwart the effort to release the files Wednesday, holding a tense meeting with a GOP congresswoman in the White House Situation Room, a move the administration said demonstrated its willingness “to sit down with members of Congress to address their concerns.”

But House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York accused the White House and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) of “running a pedophile protection program” for trying to block efforts to release the Epstein files.

The legislative effort in the House does not guarantee a vote in the Senate, much less bipartisan approval of the measure there. And the president — who has for months condemned his supporters for their repeated calls for transparency in the case — would almost certainly veto the bill if it makes it to his desk.

Epstein died in a federal prison in Manhattan awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking in 2019. His death was ruled a suicide by the New York City medical examiner and the Justice Department’s inspector general.

As reporters sift through the documents in the coming days, Trump’s relationship with Epstein is likely to remain in the spotlight.

In one email Epstein sent to himself shortly before his imprisonment and death, he wrote that Trump knew of the financier’s sexual activity during a period where he was accused of wrongdoing.

“Trump knew of it,” he wrote, “and came to my house many times during that period.”

“He never got a massage,” Epstein added. Epstein paid for “massages” from girls that often led to sexual activity.

Trump has blamed Democrats for the issue bubbling up again.

“Democrats are using the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax to try and deflect from their massive failures, in particular, their most recent one — THE SHUTDOWN!” the president wrote Wednesday in a social media post, hours after the records were made public.

Trump made a public appearance later that day to sign legislation ending the government shutdown but declined to answer as reporters shouted questions about Epstein after the event.

Trump comes up in several emails

The newly released correspondence gives a rare look at how Epstein, in his own words, related to Trump in ways that were not previously known. In some cases, Epstein’s correspondence suggests the president knew more about Epstein’s criminal conduct than Trump has let on.

In the months leading up to Epstein’s arrest on sex trafficking charges, he mentioned Trump in a few emails that imply the latter knew about the financier’s victims.

In January 2019, Epstein wrote to author Michael Wolff that Trump “knew about the girls,” as he discussed his membership at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s South Florida private club and resort.

Trump has said that he ended his relationship with Epstein because he had “hired away” one of his female employees at Mar-a-Lago. The White House has also said Trump banned Epstein from his club because he was “being a creep.”

“Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever,” Epstein wrote in the email to Wolff.

One of the employees was Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s survivors who died by suicide this year. Giuffre said in a civil case deposition that she never witnessed Trump sexually abuse minors in Epstein’s home.

Republicans in the House Oversight Committee identified Giuffre as one of the victims whose names are redacted in an April 2011 email.

In that email, Epstein wrote to Ghislane Maxwell, a former associate who was later sentenced for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors, that Trump was “the dog that hasn’t barked.”

“[Victim] spent hours at my house with him,” Epstein wrote. “He has never once been mentioned.”

“I have been thinking about that…,” Maxwell replied.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday that the emails “prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.”

News over the summer that Trump had penned a lewd birthday card to Epstein, drawing the silhouette of a naked woman with a note reading, “may every day be another wonderful secret,” had sparked panic in the West Wing that the files could have prolific mentions of Trump.

After enduring others teeing off on her for two weeks, Kai Trump was finally able to set a golf ball on a tee and swing away in an LPGA Tour event.

President Trump’s eldest granddaughter shot a 13-over 83 Thursday in the first round of the Annika at Pelican Golf Club in Belleair, Fla. The high school senior and University of Miami commit bogeyed the first five holes before registering a par, totaling 42 on her front nine and 41 on the back.

Critics among and beyond her nearly nine million social media followers were relentless in noting the 18-year-old’s obvious privilege for securing a sponsor invitation. Dan Doyle Jr., owner of Pelican Golf Club, cheerfully admitted that Trump’s inclusion had little to do with ability and a lot to do with public relations.

“The idea of the exemption, when you go into the history of exemptions, is to bring attention to an event,” Doyle told reporters this week. “You got to see her live, she’s lovely to speak to.

“And she’s brought a lot of viewers through Instagram, and things like that, who normally don’t watch women’s golf. That was the hope. And we’re seeing that now.”

Trump attends the Benjamin School in Palm Beach and is ranked a distant No. 461 by the American Junior Golf Assn. She also competes on the Srixon Medalist Tour on the South Florida PGA. Her top finish was a tie for third in July.

On the eve of the Annika, Trump got a boost from a chat with Tiger Woods, who is dating her mom, Vanessa Trump. More privilege, sure, but what did he tell her?

“I mean, he is the best golfer in the entire world. I would say that. And an even better person,” Kai Trump told reporters. “He told me to go out there and have fun and just go with the flow. Whatever happens, happens.”

What happened was far from flawless. With Allan Kournikova — younger brother of tennis star Anna Kournikova and a lifelong friend — as her caddie, Trump bogeyed the first four holes before registering her first par.

She will play again Friday and is the longest of shots to make the cut for the final two rounds over the weekend after finishing the first round in 108th — and last — place.

It’s been an eventful week for Trump. She played nine holes of a pro-am round Monday with tournament host Annika Sorenstam, who empathized with the difficulty of handling an intense swirl of criticism and support.

“I just don’t know how she does it, honestly,” Sorenstam said. “To be 18 years old and hear all the comments, she must be super tough on the inside. I’m sure we can all relate what it’s like to get criticism here and there, but she gets it a thousand times.”

Sorenstam recalled her own exemption for the Bank of America Colonial in 2003 when she became the first woman to play in a men’s PGA Tour event in 58 years. She made a 14-foot putt at the 18th green to save par and end her round of 74, giving her a 36-hole total of five-over 145. She hurled her golf ball into the grandstand, wiped away tears and was hugged by her husband, David Esch.

“That was, at the time, maybe a little bit of a controversial invite,” Sorenstam said. “In the end, I certainly appreciated it. It just brings attention to the tournament, to the sport and to women’s sports, which I think is what we want.”

Attention was temporarily diverted Wednesday from Trump to WNBA star Caitlin Clark and her Indiana Fever teammate Sophie Cummingham at the Annika pro-am. Clark, paired with defending tournament champion Nelly Korda, went viral by sinking a long putt from off the green.

“I actually grew up playing a little bit. I remember for one of my birthdays, I got this cute little set of pink golf clubs,” Clark said. “Then, I kind of stopped playing and then during COVID, I picked it back up.”

Cunningham’s moment was less majestic. After Clark hit her tee shot on the 10th hole down the middle of the fairway, Cunningham sliced hers into the crowd. She yelled “Happy Gilmore,” drawing laughs from the gallery.

Trump, for her part, swished a basket from beyond the free-throw line of an outdoor court near the first tee while waiting to begin the pro-am.

Sponsor invitations have long been used to attract attention to a tournament through a golfer who is from a well-known family or, in recent years, has a strong social media presence. Trump qualifies on both counts.

Her nine million followers combined on Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube and X include teens, golf fans and members of her grandfather’s administration such as Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

In addition to posting what she does on and off the course, Trump creates videos of playing golf with her grandpa and chronicled their visit to the Ryder Cup. She also recently launched her own sports apparel and lifestyle brand, KT.

“Kai’s broad following and reach are helping introduce golf to new audiences, especially among younger fans,” said Ricki Lasky, the LPGA‘s chief tour business and operations officer.

Beth Ann Nichols, a senior writer a Golfweek, has gone from believing Trump receiving a sponsor into the Annika as a “terrible idea” to a supporter of it. She wrote that her first reaction was that “her game isn’t ready for this kind of spotlight; there’s too much on the line at the season’s penultimate event to have a circus break out.”

But once the week unfolded she changed her mind, believing the President’s grandaughter is good for women’s golf.

“Between the presence of Caitlin Clark in the pro-am and President Donald Trump’s granddaughter in the 108-player field, this might become one of the most talked-about LPGA events in the tour’s 75-year history,” Nichols wrote. “For those who understand how painstakingly tough it is for women’s golf to break through the golf world, let alone the sports world and beyond, these opportunities don’t come often.”

Trump will need to improve her game to become more than a novelty. She finished last among a field of 24 at 52-over par in the Junior Invitational at Sage Valley in March. Her performance Thursday illustrated that while she is strong off the tee, her short game needs to develop.

“I don’t think anybody here is thinking that she will be the one holding the trophy on Sunday,” Sorenstam said. “I spoke to her a little bit yesterday. You know, just make the most out of this week. There will be lessons learned. Take them to the future and learn.”

The oldest of the president’s 11 grandchildren, Kai became known nationally when she made a speech in support of her grandfather’s campaign at the 2024 Republican National Convention. Her parents, Donald Trump Jr. and Vanessa Trump, divorced in 2018, and her mother has been dating Woods for about a year.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The next city bracing for the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is Charlotte, North Carolina, which could see an influx of federal agents as early as this weekend, a county sheriff said Thursday.

Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden said in a statement that two federal officials confirmed a plan for U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents to start an enforcement operation on Saturday or early next week in North Carolina’s largest city. His office declined to identify those officials. McFadden said details about the operation haven’t been disclosed, and his office hasn’t been asked to assist.

Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin declined to comment, saying, “Every day, DHS enforces the laws of the nation across the country. We do not discuss future or potential operations.”

President Trump has defended sending the military and immigration agents into Democratic-run cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and even the nation’s capital, saying the unprecedented operations are needed to fight crime and carry out his mass deportation agenda. Charlotte is another such Democratic stronghold, and the state will have one of the most hotly contested U.S. Senate races in the country next year.

Activists, faith leaders, and local and state officials in the city had already begun preparing the immigrant community, sharing information about resources and attempting to calm fears. A call organized by the group CharlotteEAST had nearly 500 people on it Wednesday.

“The purpose of this call was to create a mutual aid network. It was an information resource sharing session,” said City Councilmember-Elect JD Mazuera Arias.

“Let’s get as many people as possible aware of the helpers and who the people are that are doing the work that individuals can plug into, either as volunteers to donate to or those who are in need of support can turn to,” said CharlotteEAST executive director Greg Asciutto.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department also sought to clarify its role, saying it “has no authority to enforce federal immigration laws,” and is not involved in planning or carrying out these enforcement operations.

Mazuera Arias and others said they had already begun receiving reports of what appeared to be plainclothes officers in neighborhoods and on local transit.

“This is some of the chaos that we also saw in Chicago,” state Sen. Caleb Theodros, who represents Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, said Thursday.

Theodros was one of several local and state officials who issued a statement of solidarity this week.

“More than 150,000 foreign-born residents live in our city, contributing billions to our economy and enriching every neighborhood with culture, hard work, and hope,” it read, adding: “We will stand together, look out for one another, and ensure that fear never divides the city we all call home.”

Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who led Customs and Border Protection’s recent Chicago operation and was also central to the immigration crackdown in Los Angeles, had been coy about where agents would target next.

The Trump administration’s so-called “ Operation Midway Blitz ” in the Chicago area was announced in early September, over the objections of local leaders and after weeks of threats on the Democratic stronghold.

It started as a handful of arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the suburbs but eventually included hundreds of Customs and Border Protection agents whose tactics grew increasingly aggressive. More than 3,200 people suspected of violating immigration laws have been arrested across Chicago and its many suburbs dipping into Indiana.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both immigration agencies, has offered few details on the arrests, aside from publicizing a handful of people who were living in the U.S. without legal permission and had criminal records.

The group Indivisible Charlotte and the Carolina Migrant Network will be conducting a training for volunteers on Friday.

“Training people how to recognize legitimate ICE agents, versus obviously those who don’t look legitimate,” said Tony Siracusa, spokesman for Indvisible Charlotte. “They’re not always wearing vests that say ‘ICE.’ And what your rights are.”

The groups will also discuss areas where they can conduct “pop up protests.”

“Obviously, we’re not doing anything that is going to encourage people to go get arrested by federal agents,” he said.

Siracusa said locals are “not freaking out, but very definitely concerned. Nobody asked for this help. Nobody asked for this, at least no one of any official capacity.”

Breed and Verduzco write for the Associated Press. Breed reported from Wake Forest, N.C. AP writer Sophia Tareen in Chicago contributed to this report.

The poll also shows 44 percent of Democrats were ‘very enthusiastic’ about voting in the 2026 midterm elections.

The approval rating for United States President Donald Trump remains at its lowest level since he began his second term in January, according to a new poll.

But Thursday’s survey, conducted by the news agency Reuters and the research firm Ipsos, found a jump in the share of respondents who said they disapproved of his performance.

His disapproval rating increased from 52 percent in mid-May to 58 percent in November. His approval rating, meanwhile, stayed at approximately 40 percent, roughly the same as it was in May.

The online poll, conducted over six days this month, surveyed 1,200 US adults nationwide about their opinions on top political figures and who they planned to vote for in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.

It found that Democrats appeared to be more enthusiastic about next year’s midterms than their Republican counterparts, a result perhaps influenced by key Democratic victories this month.

Approximately 44 percent of registered voters who called themselves Democrats said they were “very enthusiastic” about voting in the 2026 elections, compared with 26 percent of Republicans.

Some 79 percent of Democrats said they would regret it if they did not vote in the midterm races, compared with 68 percent of Republicans.

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives will be up for grabs next year, as will 35 seats in the 100-member Senate. Republicans currently control both chambers of Congress.

But Democrats have recently been buoyed by wins on November 4, during the off-year elections.

The party won resounding victories in governor’s races for Virginia and New Jersey, and in New York City, a closely watched race mayoral race saw Zohran Mamdani sweep to victory over his centrist and right-wing competitors.

Voters in California also passed a ballot measure that will redraw its congressional districts to favour the Democrats, in response to Trump-inspired gerrymandering in Republican states.

The Reuters-Ipsos poll closed on Wednesday, just before Congress voted to end the longest government shutdown in US history.

The new spending bill, which extends federal funding until January 30, passed in the House of Representatives by a margin of 222 to 209, with six Democrats joining the Republican majority to reopen the government.

Trump signed a federal government spending bill late on Wednesday, ending the 43-day shutdown, which caused tumult for federal workers, families in need and air travel.

The bill had previously passed the Senate on Monday, after seven Democrats and one independent agreed to support it.

While Democrats appeared more “enthusiastic” than Republicans in the Reuters-Ipsos poll, the survey noted that the two parties appeared to be evenly matched in voter intention moving forward.

When poll respondents were asked whom they would vote for if congressional elections were held today, 41 percent of registered voters said they’d pick the Democratic candidate, while 40 percent chose the Republican candidate.

The narrow difference in those results fell well within the poll’s 3-percentage-point margin of error.

During the last government shutdown six years ago, the main narrative when it came to public lands was the damage caused by unsupervised visitors. Trash cans and toilets overflowed with waste. Tourists reportedly mowed down Joshua trees to off-road in sensitive areas of Joshua Tree National Park.

This time around, national parks were directed to retain the staff needed to provide basic sanitation services, as I reported in a recent article with my colleague Lila Seidman. But meanwhile, something bigger and more coordinated was unfolding behind the scenes, said Chance Wilcox, California Desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association.

“We’re not seeing Joshua trees getting knocked down, things getting stolen, damage to parks by the American people, but we are seeing damage to parks by this presidential administration on an even larger scale,” Wilcox told me last week before lawmakers struck a deal to reopen the government.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Wilcox and other public lands advocates allege that President Trump’s administration used the shutdown to expedite an agenda that prioritizes extraction while slashing resources dedicated to conservation and education. What’s more, they fear the staffing priorities that came into sharp relief over the past 43 days offer a preview of how these lands will be managed going forward, especially in the aftermath of another potential mass layoff that could see the Interior Department cut 2,000 more jobs.

When I asked the Interior Department about its actions during the shutdown, a spokesperson responded via email that the administration “made deliberate, lawful decisions” to protect operations that sustain energy security and economic stability. “Activities that continued were those necessary to preserve critical infrastructure, safeguard natural resources, and prevent disruption to key supply chains that millions of Americans rely on,” the spokesperson wrote.

As a resident of the Mojave Desert on the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park, I’ve taken particular interest in this topic. Out here, summer days can top 110 degrees, a trip to the grocery store is an hours-long excursion and there are rattlesnakes. Lots of rattlesnakes. But one huge bonus is the proximity to public lands: We’re surrounded by the park, the Mojave National Preserve and hundreds of miles of Bureau of Land Management wilderness.

These spaces not only provide endless entertainment for residents like my 3-year-old daughter, who would rather be turned loose in a boulder field than a jungle gym, but they play a key role in drawing visitors from around the world who support the stores, restaurants and other establishments that underpin our local economy.

Sentinel Rock in Hidden Valley, Joshua Tree National Park.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

In short, the health of our community depends on the health of these landscapes. Now, their future seems increasingly uncertain.

During the shutdown, roughly 64% of National Park Service employees were furloughed, according to a Department of the Interior contingency plan. At Joshua Tree National Park, those sidelined included Superintendent Jane Rodgers, along with most of the staff responsible for scientific research, resource management and educational and interpretive programs, according to a source at the park who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation.

Over at the BLM, roughly 26% of staffers were furloughed. Among those who were allowed to keep working: employees responsible for processing oil, gas and coal permits and leases, along with items related to other energy and mineral resources, according to the contingency plan, which cited the president’s declared national energy emergency as rationale. As a result, the federal government issued 693 new oil and gas drilling permits and 52 new oil and gas leases on federal lands during the shutdown, according to tracking by the Center for Western Priorities.

Also during the shutdown, the BLM continued to move ahead with plans to consider the expansion of the Castle Mountain Mine, which is surrounded by California’s Castle Mountains National Monument. Already, the Interior Department had approved a different nearby mine, the Colosseum, ending a years-long dispute in which the National Park Service had alleged the mine was operating without authorization.

In Alaska, the Trump administration moved to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing and approved a long-disputed push to build a 211-mile industrial road through the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve to allow for mining in a remote corner of the Northwest. The U.S. also took an equity stake in a company focused on mining exploration in that area, part of a growing trend that some experts have described as unusual.

And in Utah, the BLM is now reconsidering an application, which has been rejected seven times, to build a four-lane highway through desert tortoise habitats in the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area.

There’s real fear among federal employees and advocates that this dynamic — an emphasis on developing public lands, as stewardship and research efforts languish — will become the new reality, said Jordan Marbury, communications manager for Friends of the Inyo. What’s more, he said, is that some worry the administration will point to the shutdown as proof that public lands never really needed all that staffing in the first place.

“It could get to the point where conservation is totally an afterthought,” he said.

More recent land news

Operators of the 1,000-acre Inglewood Oil Field must stop pumping by the end of the decade, if a state edict holds up in court. My L.A. Times colleague Doug Smith looks at what will become of one of the Los Angeles region’s last great pieces of undeveloped land, which offers a rare opportunity to address the pressing needs of open space and affordable housing in underserved neighborhoods.

Homes sit in the shadow of the Inglewood Oil Field.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Five California tribes have established an intertribal commission to co-manage Chuckwalla National Monument, marking a historic step toward tribal sovereignty over sacred desert lands. Times environment reporter Tyrone Beason examines how this will work — and why it’s a big deal.

President Trump has tapped former New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce to lead the BLM — which manages about 10% of land in the U.S. — after his first pick, oil and gas lobbyist Kathleen Sgamma, withdrew her name from consideration in the wake of reporting on comments she made criticizing Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Industry trade organizations are praising Pearce’s nomination, while environmental groups allege that the former Republican Party of New Mexico chair is a climate change denier with a record of supporting expanded oil and gas drilling on public lands and shrinking national monuments, the Santa Fe New Mexican reports.

Lawmakers have begun to use the Congressional Review Act, which enables Congress to overturn recent federal rules with a majority vote, in an unprecedented way: to revoke specific land management plans that limit mining and drilling in specific places, Inside Climate News reports. So far, lawmakers have rescinded BLM plans that ended new coal leasing in Montana’s Powder River Basin and that limited development in North Dakota and portions of Alaska. They are now seeking to do the same in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. That’s despite warnings from legal experts, environmental organizations and hunting and fishing groups that these precedents could paralyze the ability of agencies to manage public lands.

A few last things in climate news

Negotiators for seven Western states say they are making progress in ongoing talks over how to share the diminishing waters of the Colorado River, according to our water reporter Ian James. Still, a deadline set by the Trump administration came and went Tuesday without any regionwide agreement on water cutbacks, Ian reports.

The Trump administration plans to allow new oil and gas drilling off the California coast, but energy companies may not be interested in battling the state’s strict environmental rules to try and tap into limited petroleum reserves, our climate policy reporter Hayley Smith writes. Citing these obstacles, some experts told Hayley the move may be politically motivated: It’s likely to set up a fight with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has said that any such proposal will be dead on arrival.

Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks to reporters at the COP30 Climate Summit in Belém, Brazil, on Tuesday.

(Alessandro Falco)

Speaking of Newsom and Trump, the California governor is in Belém, Brazil, for the annual United Nations climate policy summit, which the Trump administration is sitting out. My colleague Melody Gutierrez, who’s also there, looks at how California hopes it can fill in the gap left by America’s absence as Newsom positions himself for a 2028 presidential run.

Meanwhile, diplomats have accused top U.S. officials of threatening and bullying leaders from poorer or small countries to defeat a historic deal to slash pollution from cargo ships that was slated by be approved by more than 100 nations, according to a bombshell New York Times report. Federal representatives denied that officials made threats but “acknowledged derailing the deal and repeated their opposition to international efforts to address climate change,” the paper reported.

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

For more land news, follow @phila_lex on X and alex-wigglesworth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Democrats’ caterwauling this week after a few of their senators caved to end the government shutdown couldn’t completely drown out another noise: the sound of President Trump pinballing dumb “policy” ideas as he flails to respond to voters’ unhappiness that his promised Golden Age is proving golden only for him, his family and his donors.

On social media (of course) and in interviews, the president has been blurting out proposals that are news even to the advisors who should be vetting them first. Rebates of $2,000 for most Americans and pay-downs of federal debt, all from supposed tariff windfalls. (Don’t count on either payoff; more below.) New 50-year mortgages to make home-buying more affordable (not). Docked pay for air traffic controllers who didn’t show up to work during the shutdown, without pay, and $10,000 bonuses for those who did. (He doesn’t have that power; the government isn’t his family business.) Most mind-boggling of all, Trump has resurrected his and Republicans’ long-buried promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare.

It’s been five years since he promised a healthcare plan “in two weeks.” It’s been a year since he said he had “concepts of a plan” during the 2024 campaign. What he now calls “Trumpcare” (natch) apparently amounts to paying people to buy insurance. Details to come, he says, again.

With all this seat-of-the-pants policymaking, Trump only underscores the policy ignorance that’s been a defining trait since he first ran for office. No other president in memory put out such knee-jerk junk that’s easily discounted and mocked.

In his first term, Trump didn’t learn how to navigate the legislative process, and thus steer well-debated ideas into law. He didn’t want to. Even more in his second term, Trump avoids that deliberative democratic process, preferring rule by fiat and executive order (even if the results don’t outlast your presidency, or they fizzle in court). For Trump, ideas don’t percolate, infused with expertise and data. They pop into his head.

But diktats are not always possible, as the shutdown dramatized when Republicans couldn’t agree with Democrats on the must-pass legislation to keep the government funded.

With Republicans controlling the White House and Congress (and arguably the Supreme Court: see recent decisions siding with the Trump administration to block SNAP benefits), the Democrats were never going to actually win the shutdown showdown — not if winning meant forcing Republicans to agree to extend health insurance tax credits for millions of Americans. Expanding healthcare coverage has never been Republicans’ priority. Tax cuts are, mainly for the wealthy and corporations, and Republicans pocketed that win months ago with Trump’s big, ugly bill, paid for mainly by cuts to Medicaid.

Yet Democrats won something: They shoved the issue of spiraling healthcare costs back onto politics’ center stage, where it joins the broader question of affordability in an economy that doesn’t work for the working class. Drawing attention to the cruel priorities of Trump 2.0 is a big reason that I and many others supported Democrats forcing a shutdown, despite the unlikelihood of a policy “W.” (I did not support the Senate Democrats’ caving just yet, not so soon after Democrats won bigger-than-expected victories in last week’s off-year elections on the strength of their fight for affordability, including health insurance.)

The fight isn’t over. The Senate will debate and vote next month on extending tax credits for Obamacare that otherwise expire at year’s end, making coverage unaffordable for millions of people. Even if the Democrats win that vote — unlikely — the subsidies would be DOA in the House, a MAGA stronghold. What’s not dead, however, is the issue of rising insurance premiums for all Americans. It’s teed up for the midterm election campaigns.

Such pocketbook issues have thrown Trump on the defensive. The result is his string of politically tone-deaf remarks and unvetted, out-of-right-field initiatives.

On Monday night, having invited Fox News host Laura Ingraham into the White House for an interview and a tour of his gilt-and-marble renovations, he pooh-poohed her question about Americans’ anxiety about the costs of living with this unpolitic rejoinder: “More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats.” When Ingraham, to her credit, reminded Trump that he’d slammed President Biden for “saying things were great, and things weren’t great,” Trump stood his shaky ground, sniping: “Polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” (False.)

On Saturday, Trump had posted that Republicans should take money “from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate” Obamacare. He told Ingraham, “Call it Trumpcare … anything but Obamacare.” Healthcare industry experts pounced: Such direct payments could allow younger, healthy people to get cheaper, no-frills coverage, but would leave the insurance pools with disproportionately more ailing people and, in turn, higher costs.

As for Trump’s promised $2,000 rebates and reductions in the $37 trillion federal debt, he posted early Sunday and again on Monday that “trillions of dollars” from tariffs would make both things possible soon. On Tuesday night, he sent a fundraising email: “Would you take a TARIFF rebate check signed by yours truly?”

Maybe if he’d talked to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who professed ignorance about the idea on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday, Trump would have learned that tariffs in the past year raised not trillions but $195 billion, significantly less than $2,000 rebates would cost. Not only would there be nothing to put toward the debt, but rebates would add $6 trillion in red ink over 10 years. That would put Trump just $2 trillion short of the amount of debt he added in his first term.

When Ingraham asked where he’d get the money to pay bonuses to air traffic controllers, Trump was quick with a nonanswer: “I don’t know. I’ll get it from someplace.” And when she told him the 50-year mortgage idea “has enraged your MAGA friends,” given the potential windfall of interest payment for banks, Trump was equally dismissive: “It’s not even a big deal.”

Not a big deal: That’s policymaking, Trump-style.

Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
Threads: @jkcalmes
X: @jackiekcalmes

In September, Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago, depicted as Lt. Col. Kilgore, the gung-ho warmonger memorably played by Robert Duvall in Francis Ford Coppola’s messy masterpiece, “Apocalypse Now” — except the graphic bore the title “Chipocalypse Now.”

Trump sent out the message as his scorched-earth immigration enforcement campaign descended on the Windy City after doing its cruelty calisthenics in Southern California over the summer. Two months later, the campaign — nicknamed “Operation Midway Blitz” — shows no sign of slowing down.

La migra has been so out of control that a federal judge issued an injunction against their use of force, saying what they’ve done “shocks the conscience.” Among other outrages, agents shot and killed an immigrant trying to drive away from them, ran into a daycare facility and dragged out a teacher and tear-gassed a street that was about to host a Halloween kiddie parade.

I had a chance to witness the mayhem it has caused last week — and how Chicagoans have fought back.

The University of Chicago brought me to do talks with students and the community for a couple of days, including with members of the Maroon, the school’s newspaper. Earlier in the week, Fox News put them on blast because they had created a database of places around campus where la migra had been spotted.

Good job, young scribes!

In Little Village, pocket Patton meets his match

After my speech at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, I noticed someone had hung whistles around the neck of a bronze bust. Whistles have become the unlikely tool of resistance in the city, I wrote in a columna — something that I argued Latinos nationwide had also employed metaphorically with their election night clapback at Republicans.

When I woke up Thursday morning at my tony hotel, the Chicago Tribune’s front page screamed “Use of Force Under Fire” and focused on the actions of commander-at-large Gregory Bovino. You remember him, Angelenos: he’s the pocket Patton who oversaw the pointless invasion of MacArthur Park in July and seemed to spend as much time in front of cameras as doing his actual job.

Bovino has continued the buffoonery in Chicago, where he admitted under oath to lying about why he had tossed a tear gas canister at residents in Little Village, the city’s most famous Mexican American neighborhood, in October (Bovino originally said someone hit him with a rock).

I Ubered to Little Village to meet with community activist Baltazar Enriquez so we could eat at one of his neighborhood’s famous Mexican restaurants and talk about what has happened.

I instead walked right into a cacophony of whistles, honks and screams: Bovino and his goons were cruising around Little Village and surrounding neighborhoods that morning just for the hell of it.

From L.A. to the rest of the country, and back

“Every time Trump or la migra lose in something, they pull something like this,” a business owner told me as she looked out on 26th Street, Little Village’s main thoroughfare. Customers were hiding inside her store. Over four hours, I followed Enriquez as he and other activists drove through Little Village’s streets to warn their neighbors what was happening.

The scene played out again in Little Village on Saturday shortly after I filed my columna, with Bovino holding a tear gas canister in his hand and threatening to toss it at residents, openly mocking the federal judge’s injunction prohibiting him from such reckless terrorizing (Monday, the Department of Homeland Security claimed agents had weathered gun shots, bricks, paint cans and rammed vehicles). And to top it off, he had his officers pose in front of Chicago’s infamous stainless steel bean for a photo, just like they did in front of the Hollywood sign (Block Club Chicago reported the funboys shouted “Little Village” for giggles).

Given ICE just received billions of dollars in funds to hire more agents and construct detention camps across the country, expect more scenes like this to continue in Chicago, boomerang back to Southern California and cut through the heart of Latino USA in the weeks, months and years to come. But I nevertheless left Chicagoland with hope — and a whistle.

Time for us to start wearing them, Los Angeles.

Today’s top stories

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) currently faces the lowest approval ratings of any national leader in Washington.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

The government shutdown

• Senators approved a deal that could end the shutdown on a 60-40 vote, a day after Senate Republicans reached a deal with eight senators who caucus with Democrats.
• Democrats in the House vowed to keep fighting for insurance subsidies.
• Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is facing pressure to step down as Senate Democratic leader after failing to prevent members of his caucus from breaking ranks.
• States are caught in Trump’s legal battle to revoke SNAP benefits after a federal judge ordered full funding.

A brief bout of summer weather

Courts protect LGBTQ+ rights

More big stories

Commentary and opinions

• California columnist Anita Chabria argues that Democrats crumbled like cookies in the shutdown fight.
• Gov. Gavin Newsom is still writing his path to the presidency. Columnist George Skelton points to Zohran Mamdani for inspiration.
• President Trump’s effort to rename Veterans Day flopped — and for good reason, argues guest contributor Joanna Davidson.

This morning’s must reads

Other great reads

For your downtime

(Andrew Rae / For The Times)

Going out

Staying in

Question of the day: What’s one special dish your family makes for Thanksgiving?

Judi Farkas said: “An old Russian recipe that has descended through 5 generations of our family, Carrot Tzimmis was traditionally served as part of the Passover meal. It’s perfect with a Thanksgiving turkey. Tzimmis is sweet, as are so many of the Thanksgiving dishes, so I pair it with a Jalapeño Cornbread dressing and a robust salad vinaigrette so that no one gets overwhelmed. It connects me to my family’s heritage, but repurposed for the holidays we celebrate now.”

Email us at [email protected], and your response might appear in the newsletter this week.

And finally … the photo of the day

A person surfs at Salt Creek Beach on Sunday in Dana Point.

(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times)

Today’s great photo is from Juliana Yamada of a surfer at Salt Creek Beach in Dana Point.

Have a great day, from the Essential California team

Jim Rainey, staff reporter
Hugo Martin, assistant editor
Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor
June Hsu, editorial fellow
Andrew Campa, weekend reporter
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters

How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to [email protected].

BALTIMORE — U.S. Catholic bishops elected Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley as their new president on Tuesday, choosing a conservative culture warrior to lead during President Trump’s second term.

The vote serves as a barometer for the bishops’ priorities. In choosing Coakley, they are doubling down on their conservative bent, even as they push for more humane immigration policies from the Trump administration.

Coakley was seen as a strong contender for the top post, having already been elected in 2022 to serve as secretary, the No. 3 conference official. In three rounds of voting, he beat out centrist candidate Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, who was subsequently elected vice president.

Coakley serves as advisor to the Napa Institute, an association for conservative Catholic powerbrokers. In 2018, he publicly supported an ardent critic of Pope Francis, Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was later excommunicated for stances that were deemed divisive.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has often been at odds with the Vatican and the inclusive, modernizing approach of the late Pope Francis. His U.S.-born successor, Pope Leo XIV, is continuing a similar pastoral emphasis on marginalized people, poverty and the environment.

The choice of Coakley may fuel tensions with Pope Leo, said Steven Millies, professor of public theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

“In the long conflict between many U.S. bishops and Francis that Leo inherits, this is not a de-escalating step,” he said.

Half the 10 candidates on the ballot came from the conservative wing of the conference. The difference is more in style than substance. Most U.S. Catholic bishops are reliably conservative on social issues, but some — like Coakley — place more emphasis on opposing abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

The candidates were nominated by their fellow bishops, and Coakley succeeds the outgoing leader, Military Services Archbishop Timothy Broglio, for a three-year term. The current vice president, Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, was too close to the mandatory retirement age of 75 to assume the top spot.

Coakley edged out a well-known conservative on the ballot, Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota’s Winona-Rochester diocese, whose popular Word on Fire ministry has made him a Catholic media star.

In defeating Flores, Coakley won over another strong contender, who some Catholic insiders thought could help unify U.S. bishops and work well with the Vatican. Flores has been the U.S. bishops’ leader in the Vatican’s synod process to modernize the church. As a Latino leading a diocese along the U.S.-Mexico border, he supports traditional Catholic doctrine on abortion and LGBTQ issues and is outspoken in his defense of migrants.

Flores will be eligible for the top post in three years. His election as vice president indicates that the U.S. conference “may eventually, cautiously open itself to the church’s new horizons,” said David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture.

The bishops are crafting a statement on immigration during the annual fall meeting. On many issues, they appear as divided and polarized as their country, but on immigration, even the most conservative Catholic leaders stand on the side of migrants.

The question is how strongly the whole body plans to speak about the Trump administration’s harsh immigration tactics.

Fear of immigration enforcement has suppressed Mass attendance at some parishes. Local clerics are fighting to administer sacraments to detained immigrants. U.S. Catholic bishops shuttered their longstanding refugee resettlement program after the Trump administration halted federal funding for resettlement aid.

“On the political front, you know for decades the U.S. bishops have been advocating for comprehensive immigration reform,” Bishop Kevin Rhoades, of Indiana’s Fort Wayne-South Bend diocese, said during a news conference.

Rhoades serves on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, and he leads the bishops’ committee on religious liberty. He said bishops are very concerned about detained migrants receiving pastoral care and the sacraments.

“That’s an issue of the right to worship,” he said. “One doesn’t lose that right when one is detained, whether one is documented or undocumented.”

The bishops sent a letter to Pope Leo from their meeting, saying they “will continue to stand with migrants and defend everyone’s right to worship free from intimidation.”

The letter continued, “We support secure and orderly borders and law enforcement actions in response to dangerous criminal activity, but we cannot remain silent in this challenging hour while the right to worship and the right to due process are undermined.”

Pope Leo recently called for “deep reflection” in the United States about the treatment of migrants held in detention, saying that “many people who have lived for years and years and years, never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what is going on right now.”

Stanley writes for the Associated Press.