President Donald Trump is heading to North Carolina on Friday to celebrate members of the special forces who stormed into Venezuela on the third day of the New Year and whisked away that country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, to face U.S. smuggling charges.First Lady Melania Trump will also be making the trip to Fort Bragg, one of the largest military bases in the world by population, to spend time with military families.Trump has been hitting the road more frequently to states that could play key roles in November’s midterm congressional elections, including a stop before Christmas in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The White House has been trying to promote Trump’s economic policies, including attempts to bring down the cost of living at a time when many Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated with Trump’s efforts to improve affordability.The president spoke at Fort Bragg in June at an event meant to recognize the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. But that celebration was overshadowed by his partisan remarks describing protesters in Los Angeles as “animals” and his defense of deploying the military there.Trump has since deployed the National Guard to places like Washington and Memphis, Tennessee, as well as other federal law enforcement officials involved in his crackdown on immigration. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced Thursday that the administration is ending the operations in Minnesota that led to the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens.This time, Trump’s visit is meant to toast service members involved in his administration’s dramatic ouster of Maduro, an operation he has described as requiring bravery and advanced weapons.His administration has since pushed for broad oversight of the South American country’s oil industry. Next month, he plans to convene a gathering of leaders from a number of Latin American countries in Florida, as the administration spotlights what it sees as concerning Chinese influence in the region.The March 7 gathering can give Trump a chance to further press a new and aggressive foreign policy which the president has proudly dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine,” a reference to 19th-century President James Monroe’s belief that the U.S. should dominate its sphere of influence.
WASHINGTON —
President Donald Trump is heading to North Carolina on Friday to celebrate members of the special forces who stormed into Venezuela on the third day of the New Year and whisked away that country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, to face U.S. smuggling charges.
First Lady Melania Trump will also be making the trip to Fort Bragg, one of the largest military bases in the world by population, to spend time with military families.
Trump has been hitting the road more frequently to states that could play key roles in November’s midterm congressional elections, including a stop before Christmas in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The White House has been trying to promote Trump’s economic policies, including attempts to bring down the cost of living at a time when many Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated with Trump’s efforts to improve affordability.
The president spoke at Fort Bragg in June at an event meant to recognize the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. But that celebration was overshadowed by his partisan remarks describing protesters in Los Angeles as “animals” and his defense of deploying the military there.
Trump has since deployed the National Guard to places like Washington and Memphis, Tennessee, as well as other federal law enforcement officials involved in his crackdown on immigration. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced Thursday that the administration is ending the operations in Minnesota that led to the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens.
This time, Trump’s visit is meant to toast service members involved in his administration’s dramatic ouster of Maduro, an operation he has described as requiring bravery and advanced weapons.
His administration has since pushed for broad oversight of the South American country’s oil industry. Next month, he plans to convene a gathering of leaders from a number of Latin American countries in Florida, as the administration spotlights what it sees as concerning Chinese influence in the region.
The March 7 gathering can give Trump a chance to further press a new and aggressive foreign policy which the president has proudly dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine,” a reference to 19th-century President James Monroe’s belief that the U.S. should dominate its sphere of influence.
U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna stood outside of Levi’s Stadium on Sunday as thousands of football fans streamed inside the Santa Clara venue.
The congressman wasn’t there to cheer on his favorite team. He had stopped by to send a message: Federal immigration agents were not welcome at the Super Bowl.
“This is my district and this is a time for elected leaders to be outside with people,” said Khanna (D-Fremont). “I’ve communicated to the NFL and to the administration to keep ICE out, but I think physically being here in the community makes a big difference.”
At a news conference earlier this month, NFL chief security officer Cathy Lanier said she was confident that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would not conduct operations at the Super Bowl. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem previously confirmed that ICE would be present.
“We’ll be all over that place,” she told Benny Johnson, a right-wing podcaster, in October. “We’re going to enforce the law.”
Khanna said his office had been flooded with calls and emails as the mixed messaging left many local residents fearful. He kept his district office open Sunday in case constituents had run-ins with ICE and needed assistance.
As of 2 p.m., there hadn’t been any reports.
Khanna was among 21 Democrats in Congress, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who sent a joint letter to Noem last week voicing opposition to immigration raids at the Super Bowl.
“This should be a moment of celebration, unity, and economic opportunity, not a flashpoint for fear, polarization, and violence,” the lawmakers wrote. “Having ICE at the Super Bowl would undermine public safety, disrupt communities, and threaten the peaceful enjoyment this event should bring to the region and the nation.”
Khanna wasn’t the only one speaking out against ICE on Sunday.
Around 5:30 p.m. about two dozen anti-ICE and anti-Trump protesters gathered across the street from the stadium and unfurled a large yellow banner with the words “Trump must go now.” They chanted a profane slogan and “Trump is on the Epstein list.”
One woman, dressed as the Statue of Liberty, held a poster that said “Murder Is Murder Stop ICE.” Another carried a sign with photos of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, two U.S. citizens fatally shot by federal agents in Minnesota.
Before the game, activists Shasti Conrad and Michael Ceraso passed out rally towels with the words “ICE OUT” emblazoned on one side and a picture of a rabbit kicking a football enclosed in an ice cube on the other. The rabbit was inspired by halftime performer Bad Bunny, who has spoken out about the administration’s immigration raids, including at the Grammy Awards. Trump has called Bad Bunny “a terrible choice” for halftime performer.
“My heart told me to do it,” said Ceraso, explaining that he felt called to speak up for others living in fear.
Conrad wasn’t sure how football fans would react but said most people eagerly accepted a towel. “We have had overwhelming support,” she said, adding that thousands of towels were gone by the early afternoon.
Others used music to get their message across. At one point, a song disparaging Noem and serving as an anti-ICE anthem that’s been widely circulated on social media could be heard coming from a crowd gathered outside the stadium.
The Trump administration’s immigration raids, often conducted by masked agents in unmarked cars, have come under fire due to aggressive, and some argue unconstitutional, tactics — such as allegedly using children as bait or forcibly entering homes without a judicial warrant. The killings of Good and Pretti sparked further fear and backlash.
WASHINGTON — The White House’s TrumpRx website went live Thursday with a promise to instantly deliver prescription drugs at “the lowest price anywhere in the world.”
“This launch represents the largest reduction in prescription drug prices in history by many, many times, and it’s not even close,” President Trump said at a news conference announcing the launch of the platform.
Drug policy experts say the jury is still out on whether the platform will provide the significant savings Trump promises, though it will probably help people who need drugs not commonly covered by insurance.
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, called the site a “vanity project” and questioned whether the program presents a possible conflict of interest involving the pharmaceutical industry and the Trump family.
What is TrumpRx, really?
The new platform, trumprx.gov, is designed to help uninsured Americans find discounted prices for high-cost, brand-name prescriptions, including fertility, obesity and diabetes treatments.
The site does not directly sell drugs. Instead, consumers browse a list of discounted medicines, and select one for purchase. From there, they either receive a coupon accepted at certain pharmacies or are routed directly to a drug manufacturer’s website to purchase the prescription.
The White House said the reduced prices are possible after the administration negotiated voluntary “most favored nation” agreements with 16 major drugmakers including Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
Under these deals, manufacturers have agreed to set certain U.S. drug prices no higher than those paid in other wealthy nations in exchange for three-year tariff exemptions. However, the full legal and financial details of the deals have not been made public, leaving lawmakers to speculate how TrumpRx’s pricing model works.
What does it accomplish?
Though the White House has framed TrumpRx as a historic reset for prescription drug costs, economists said the platform offers limited new savings.
But it does move the needle on the issue of drug pricing transparency, away from the hidden mechanisms behind how prescription drugs are priced, rebated and distributed, according to Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.
“This has been a murky world, a terrible, obscure, opaque marketplace where drug prices have been inconsistently priced to different consumers,” Joyce said, “So this is a little step in the right direction, but it’s mostly performative from my perspective, which is kind of Trump in a nutshell.”
Still, for the uninsured or people seeking “lifestyle drugs” — like those for fertility or weight loss that insurers have historically declined to cover — TrumpRx could become a useful option, Joyce said.
“It’s kind of a win for Trump and a win for Pfizer,” Joyce said. “They get to say, ‘Look what we’re doing. We’re lowering prices. We’re keeping Trump happy, but it’s on our low-volume drugs, and drugs that we were discounting big time anyway.’”
Where does it fall short?
Early analyses by drug policy experts suggest many of the discounted medications listed on the TrumpRx site were already on offer through other drug databases before the platform launched.
For example, Pfizer’s Duavee menopause treatment is listed at $30.30 on TrumpRx, but it is also available for the same price at some pharmacies via GoodRx.
Weight management drug Wegovy starts at $199 on TrumpRx. Manufacturers were already selling the same discounted rates through its NovoCare Pharmacy program before the portal’s launch.
“[TrumpRx] uses data from GoodRx, an existing price-search database for prescription drugs,” said Darius N. Lakdawalla, a senior health policy researcher at USC. “It seems to provide prices that are essentially the same as the lowest price GoodRx reports on its website.”
Compared to GoodRx, TrumpRx covers a modest subset of drugs: 43 in all.
“Uninsured consumers, who do not use or know about GoodRx and need one of the specific drugs covered by the site, might benefit from TrumpRx. That seems like a very specific set of people,” Lakdawalla said.
Where do Democrats stand?
Democrats slammed the program this week, saying it would not provide substantial discounts for patients, and called for greater transparency around the administration’s dealings with drugmakers. To date, the administration has not disclosed the terms of the pricing agreements with manufacturers such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca.
In the lead-up to the TrumpRx launch, Democratic members of Congress questioned its usefulness and urged federal health regulators to delay its debut.
“This is just another Donald Trump pet project to rebrand something that already exists, take credit for it, and do nothing to actually lower healthcare prices,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said Friday. “Democrats will continue fighting to lower healthcare costs and push Republicans to stop giving handouts to billionaires at the expense of working-class Americans.”
Three other Democratic senators — Dick Durbin, Elizabeth Warren and Peter Welch — raised another concern in a Jan. 29 letter to Thomas March Bell, inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services.
The three senators pointed to potential conflicts of interest between TrumpRx and an online dispensing company, BlinkRx.
Months before, he became a partner at 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm that holds a significant stake in BlinkRx and led the startup’s $140-million funding round in 2024. After his appointment, BlinkRx launched a service to help pharmaceutical companies build direct-to-patient sales platforms quickly.
“The timing of the BlinkRx announcement so closely following the administration’s outreach to the largest drug companies, and the involvement of President Trump’s immediate family, raises questions about potential coordination, influence and self-dealing,” according to an October 2025 statement by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Both BlinkRx and Donald Trump Jr. have denied any coordination.
What’s next?
The rollout of TrumpRx fits into a suite of White House programs designed to address rising costs, an area of vulnerability for Republicans ahead of the November midterms.
The White House issued a statement Friday urging support for the president’s healthcare initiative, dubbed “the great healthcare plan,” which it said will further reduce drug prices and lower insurance premiums.
For the roughly 8% of Americans without health insurance, TrumpRx’s website promises that more high-cost, brand-name drugs will be discounted on the platform in the future.
“It’s possible the benefits will become broader in the future,” Lakdawalla said. “I would say that the jury remains out on its long-run structure and its long-run pricing effects.”
WASHINGTON — Senate Republican Leader John Thune warned Thursday that Congress is not close to an agreement to fund the Department of Homeland Security, signaling that another short-term extension may be the only way to avoid a shutdown as Democrats demand “nonnegotiable” ICE reforms ahead of the Feb. 13 deadline.
The Republicans are increasingly looking to punt the full funding package a second time if negotiations collapse. Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, Thune said that such a move would not include any reforms lawmakers had previously negotiated, including body cameras for immigration agents.
“As of right now, we aren’t anywhere close to having any sort of an agreement that would enable us to fund the Department of Homeland Security,” he said. “If [Democrats] are coming to the table demanding a blank check or refusing to consider any measures but their own, they’re likely to end up with nothing.”
He spoke hours after House and Senate Democrats announced they were aligned behind a list of 10 demands they say must be passed before approving the Homeland Security funding package through September.
Democrats are pressing for statutory limits on immigration raids, new judicial warrant requirements, body-worn cameras, identification rules for agents and enhanced oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — reforms they say are necessary to rein in what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called an agency “out of control.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Democrats are planning to propose the legislation as soon as possible.
“We want our Republican colleagues to finally get serious about this, because this is turning America inside out in a way we haven’t seen in a very long time,” Schumer said.
The coordinated demands signal unity among House and Senate Democrats after a rocky week on Capitol Hill. In a slim vote, 21 House Democrats joined Republicans on Tuesday to end a partial government shutdown by temporarily extending Homeland Security funding through Feb. 13.
The two-week stopgap, called a “continuing resolution,” was meant to leave time for the two parties to debate how to rein in ICE after the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.
But that truce has quickly unraveled. Republican leaders have little appetite for the full slate of reforms. Some have indicated openness to narrower changes, such as expanding body camera programs and training, but reject mask bans and the removal of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has already ruled out warrant requirements, which would limit immigration agents from entering private property without a court order. In remarks to reporters Wednesday, he also hinted at some interest in attaching voter ID and anti-sanctuary city policies to negotiations.
“It will be part of the discussion over the next couple of weeks, and we’ll see how that shakes out. But I suspect that some of the changes — the procedural modifications with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement — will be codified,” he said.
Johnson was confident the two sides could make a deal without further delays, adding that negotiations are largely between “the White House, Schumer and Senate Democrats.”
President Trump has privately supported the short-term extension to cool tensions while publicly defending immigration agents and expressing skepticism toward Democrats’ reform push, according to House leadership.
White House border policy advisor Tom Homan also announced a drawdown of 700 federal agents from Minneapolis this week as what officials framed as a goodwill gesture amid negotiations.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Thursday that the administration is willing to consider some of the demands Democrats have made, but said some of their requests are not “grounded in any common sense and they are nonstarters for this administration.”
Leavitt did not specify which reforms the administration was willing to consider. She did, however, say the president is committed to keeping the government open and supporting “immigration enforcement efforts in this country.”
The White House did not respond when asked if the president would support a short-term spending measure should negotiations stall.
Republicans continue to warn that a failure to reach a deal would jeopardize disaster response funding, airport security operations, maritime patrols, and increased security assistance for major national events, including the upcoming World Cup in Los Angeles.
“If we don’t do it by the middle of next week, we should consider a continuing resolution for the rest of the year and just put this all behind us,” said Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chair of the House Freedom Caucus.
Democrats, however, remain adamant that verbal assurances are no longer enough.
“These are just some of the commonsense proposals that the American people clearly would like to see in terms of the dramatic changes that are needed at the Department of Homeland Security before there is a full-year appropriations bill,” Jeffries said.
Times staff writer Ana Ceballos in Washington contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s repeated calls to “nationalize” elections drew swift resistance from California officials this week, who said they are ready to fight should the federal government attempt to assert control over the state’s voting system.
“We would win that on Day One,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta told The Times. “We would go into court and we would get a restraining order within hours, because the U.S. Constitution says that states predominantly determine the time, place and manner of elections, not the president.”
“We’re prepared to do whatever we have to do in California,” said California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, whose office recently fought off a Justice Department lawsuit demanding California’s voter rolls and other sensitive voter information.
Both Bonta and Weber said their offices are closely watching for any federal action that could affect voting in California, including efforts to seize election records, as the FBI recently did in Georgia, or target the counting of mailed ballots, which Trump has baselessly alleged are a major source of fraud.
Weber said California plays an outsized role in the nation and is “the place that people want to beat,” including through illegitimate court challenges to undermine the state’s vote after elections, but California has fought off such challenges in the past and is ready to do it again.
“There’s a cadre of attorneys that are already, that are always prepared during our elections to hit the courts to defend anything that we’re doing,” she said. “Our election teams, they do cross the T’s, dot the I’s. They are on it.”
“We have attorneys ready to be deployed wherever there’s an issue,” Bonta said, noting that his office is in touch with local election officials to ensure a rapid response if necessary.
The standoff reflects an extraordinary deterioration of trust and cooperation in elections that has existed between state and federal officials for generations — and follows a remarkable doubling down by Trump after his initial remarks about taking over the elections raised alarm.
Trump has long alleged, without evidence and despite multiple independent reviews concluding the opposite, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He has alleged, again without evidence, that millions of fraudulent votes were cast, including by non-citizen voters, and that blue states looked the other way to gain political advantage.
Last week, the Justice Department acted on those claims by raiding the Fulton County, Ga., elections hub and seizing 2020 ballots. The department also has sued states, including California, for their voter rolls, and is defending a Trump executive order seeking to end mail voting and add new proof of citizenship requirements for registering to vote, which California and other states have sued to block.
On Monday, Trump further escalated his pressure campaign by saying on former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino’s podcast that Republicans should “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” alleging that voting irregularities in what he called “crooked states” are hurting his party. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
On Tuesday morning, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, appeared to try to walk back Trump’s comments, saying he had been referring to the Save Act, a measure being pushed by Republicans in Congress to codify Trump’s proof-of-citizenship requirements. However, Trump doubled down later that day, telling reporters that if states “can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”
Bonta said Trump’s comments were a serious escalation, not just bluster: “We always knew they were going to come after us on something, so this is just an affirmation of that — and maybe they are getting a step closer.”
Bonta said he will especially be monitoring races in the state’s swing congressional districts, which could play a role in determining control of Congress and therefore be a target of legal challenges.
“The strategy of going after California isn’t rational unless you’re going after a couple of congressional seats that you think will make a difference in the balance of power in the House,” Bonta said.
California Democrats in Congress have stressed that the state’s elections are safe and reliable, but also started to express unease about upcoming election interference by the administration.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) said on “Meet the Press” last week that he believes the administration will try to use “every tool in their toolbox to try and interfere,” but that the American people will “overcome it by having a battalion of lawyers at the polls.”
California Sen. Adam Schiff this week said recent actions by the Trump administration — including the Fulton County raid, where Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard put Trump on the phone with agents — were “wrong” and set off “alarm bells about their willingness to interfere in the next election.”
Democrats have called on their Republican colleagues to help push back against such interference.
“When he says that we should nationalize the elections and Republicans should take over, and you don’t make a peep? What is going on here?” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday. “This is the path that has ruined many a democracy, and our democracy is deep and strong, but it requires — and allows — resistance to these things. Verbal resistance, electoral resistance. Where are you?”
Some Republicans have voiced their disagreement with Trump. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Tuesday that he is “supportive of only citizens voting and showing ID at polling places,” but is “not in favor of federalizing elections,” which he called “a constitutional issue.”
“I’m a big believer in decentralized and distributed power. And I think it’s harder to hack 50 election systems than it is to hack one,” he said.
However, other Republican leaders have commiserated with Trump over his qualms with state-run elections. House Majority Leader Mike Johnson (R-La.), for example, took aim at California’s system for counting mail-in ballots in the days following elections, questioning why such counting led to Republican leads in House races being “magically whittled away until their leads were lost.”
“It looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No, because it happened so far upstream,” Johnson said. “But we need more confidence in the American people in the election system.”
Elections experts expressed dismay over Johnson’s comments, calling them baseless and illogical. The fact that candidates who are leading in votes can fall behind as more votes are counted is not magic but math, they said — with Democrats agreeing.
“Speaker Johnson seems to be confused, so let me break it down. California’s elections are safe and secure. The point of an election is to make sure *every* eligible vote cast is counted, not to count fast,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) wrote on X. “We don’t just quit while we’re ahead. It’s called a democracy.”
Democrats have also expressed concern that the administration could use the U.S. Postal Service to interfere with counting mail-in ballots. They have specifically raised questions about a rule issued by the postal service last December that deems mail postmarked on the day it is processed by USPS, rather than the day it is received — which would impact mail-in ballots in places such as California, where ballots must be postmarked by election day to be counted.
“Election officials are already concerned and warning that this change could ultimately lead to higher mailed ballots being rejected,” Senate Democrats wrote to U.S. Postal Service Postmaster General David Steiner last month.
Some experts and state officials said voters should make a plan to vote early, and consider dropping their ballots in state ballot drop boxes or delivering them directly to voting centers.
Some of the things people buy the most are at their most expensive point of the year as the calendar changes over to 2026. Our get the facts data team dug into what actually caused the prices of some items to go up or go down. Let’s start with beef. Right now, the average price for ground beef is 823 per pound and 967 for steaks, the highest prices for both all year. Several factors like President Trump’s tariffs. Cattle inventories and an aging farming population contributed to the increase, but so did something called the New World screwworm, *** parasitic fly that produced *** deadly disease in some places like Mexico. Another grocery staple that is more expensive now, coffee. Our get the Facts data team found the price rose each month throughout the year, maxing out at 926 cents *** pound. Two of the world’s biggest coffee producers, Brazil and Vietnam, Were impacted by drought and excessive rains earlier this year, which reduced coffee production, and Brazil saw an additional 40% tariff over the summer as well. One of the biggest talking points, especially from President Trump about the state of the economy was egg prices. They are one of the few items tracked that actually are cheapest now. Egg prices saw their biggest price hike in nearly 10 years in January, then rose to an all-time high of 623. Per dozen in March. This was in large part to ongoing bird flu outbreaks. Egg prices would start falling in the summer and are now 286 *** dozen. Some other groceries that saw increases this year, cookies, potato chips, bacon, cheddar cheese, and orange juice. But it wasn’t all increases at the supermarket. Some items are cheaper now compared to January, like pasta, white bread, tomatoes, and strawberries. In Washington, I’m Amy Lou.
If your next Amazon order seems more expensive, President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs may be partially to blame, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Tuesday.Like many retailers, Amazon and its vast network of third-party sellers loaded up on inventory ahead of Trump’s tariff rollout last spring. But that supply ran out by the fall, Jassy said in a CNBC interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.“So you start to see some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices, some of the items,” he said. “Some sellers are deciding that they’re passing on those higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices, some are deciding that they’ll absorb it to drive demand and some are doing something in between.”The comments are a stark shift from last June, when Jassy said in a CNBC interview that the company had not seen “prices appreciably go up.” That was after Amazon drew the direct ire of Trump and members of his administration following reports that the e-commerce giant planned to display how tariffs were impacting prices.After Trump spoke with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at the time, a company spokesperson told CNN the move “was never a consideration for the main Amazon.” It was only being considered for certain products on its spinoff site, Haul, which sells items below $30, the company said.On Tuesday, though, Jassy said: “We’re going to do everything we can to work with our selling partners to make prices as low as possible for consumers, but you don’t have endless options.”In a statement, though, the company told CNN that overall price levels have not changed more than expected. “While we are seeing prices for some sellers and some brands go up, overall the prices of products on Amazon have not changed outside of normal fluctuations,“ an Amazon spokesperson said.And the White House said it maintains that foreign exports are footing that tariff bill.“The average tariff imposed by America has increased by almost tenfold under President Trump, and inflation has continued to cool from Biden-era highs,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.“The Administration has consistently maintained that foreign exporters who depend on access to the American economy, the world’s biggest and best consumer market, will ultimately pay the cost of tariffs, and that’s what’s playing out,” he added.Amazon isn’t the only retailer warning of higher prices because of tariffs. Walmart, Target and Home Depot and many other companies have publicly said tariffs are making products more expensive. And while overall consumer inflation was modest last year, many businesses surveyed by the Federal Reserve in its latest Beige Book, a collection of anecdotes, warned they’re planning bigger price hikes this year.
If your next Amazon order seems more expensive, President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs may be partially to blame, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Tuesday.
Like many retailers, Amazon and its vast network of third-party sellers loaded up on inventory ahead of Trump’s tariff rollout last spring. But that supply ran out by the fall, Jassy said in a CNBC interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“So you start to see some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices, some of the items,” he said. “Some sellers are deciding that they’re passing on those higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices, some are deciding that they’ll absorb it to drive demand and some are doing something in between.”
The comments are a stark shift from last June, when Jassy said in a CNBC interview that the company had not seen “prices appreciably go up.” That was after Amazon drew the direct ire of Trump and members of his administration following reports that the e-commerce giant planned to display how tariffs were impacting prices.
After Trump spoke with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at the time, a company spokesperson told CNN the move “was never a consideration for the main Amazon.” It was only being considered for certain products on its spinoff site, Haul, which sells items below $30, the company said.
On Tuesday, though, Jassy said: “We’re going to do everything we can to work with our selling partners to make prices as low as possible for consumers, but you don’t have endless options.”
In a statement, though, the company told CNN that overall price levels have not changed more than expected. “While we are seeing prices for some sellers and some brands go up, overall the prices of products on Amazon have not changed outside of normal fluctuations,“ an Amazon spokesperson said.
And the White House said it maintains that foreign exports are footing that tariff bill.
“The average tariff imposed by America has increased by almost tenfold under President Trump, and inflation has continued to cool from Biden-era highs,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.
“The Administration has consistently maintained that foreign exporters who depend on access to the American economy, the world’s biggest and best consumer market, will ultimately pay the cost of tariffs, and that’s what’s playing out,” he added.
Amazon isn’t the only retailer warning of higher prices because of tariffs. Walmart, Target and Home Depot and many other companies have publicly said tariffs are making products more expensive. And while overall consumer inflation was modest last year, many businesses surveyed by the Federal Reserve in its latest Beige Book, a collection of anecdotes, warned they’re planning bigger price hikes this year.
Democratic lawmakers and candidates for office around the country increasingly are returning to the phrase, popularized during the first Trump administration, as they react to this administration’s forceful immigration enforcement tactics.
The fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent this month in Minneapolis sparked immediate outrage among Democratic officials, who proposed a variety of oversight demands — including abolishing the agency — to rein in tactics they view as hostile and sometimes illegal.
Resurrecting the slogan is perhaps the riskiest approach. Republicans pounced on the opportunity to paint Democrats, especially those in vulnerable seats, as extremists.
An anti-ICE activist in an inflatable costume stands next to a person with a sign during a protest near Legacy Emanuel Hospital on Jan. 10 in Portland, Ore. The demonstration follows the Jan. 7 fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis as well as the shooting of two individuals in Portland on Jan. 8 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
(Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / Getty Images)
“If their response is to dust off ‘defund ICE,’ we’re happy to take that fight any day of the week,” said Christian Martinez, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee. The group has published dozens of press statements in recent weeks accusing Democrats of wanting to abolish ICE — even those who haven’t made direct statements using the phrase.
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona) amplified that message Wednesday, writing on social media that “When Democrats say they want to abolish or defund ICE, what they are really saying is they want to go back to the open borders policies of the Biden administration. The American people soundly rejected that idea in the 2024 election.”
The next day, Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) introduced the “Abolish ICE Act,” stating that Good’s killing “proved that ICE is out of control and beyond reform.” The bill would rescind the agency’s “unobligated” funding and redirect other assets to its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security.
Many Democrats calling for an outright elimination of ICE come from the party’s progressive wing. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said in a television interview the agency should be abolished because actions taken by its agents are “racist” and “rogue.” Jack Schlossberg, who is running for a House seat in New York, said that “if Trump’s ICE is shooting and kidnapping people, then abolish it.”
Other prominent progressives have stopped short of saying the agency should be dismantled.
A pair of protesters set up signs memorializing people who have been arrested by ICE, or have died in detention, at a rally in front of the Federal Building in Los Angeles on Friday.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Sen. Alex Padilla, (D-Calif.) who last year was forcefully handcuffed and removed from a news conference hosted by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, joined a protest in Washington to demand justice for Good, saying “It’s time to get ICE and CBP out,” referring to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“This is a moment where all of us have to be forceful to ensure that we are pushing back on what is an agency right now that is out of control,” Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said on social media. “We have to be loud and clear that ICE is not welcome in our communities.”
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona) said Democrats seeking to abolish ICE “want to go back to the open borders policies of the Biden administration.”
(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)
Others have eyed negotiations over the yearly Homeland Security budget as a leverage point to incorporate their demands, such as requiring federal agents to remove their masks and to turn on their body-worn cameras when on duty, as well as calling for agents who commit crimes on the job to be prosecuted. Seventy House Democrats, including at least 13 from California, backed a measure to impeach Noem.
Rep. Mike Levin (D-San Diego), who serves on the House Committee on Appropriations, said his focus is not on eliminating the agency, which he believes has an “important responsibility” but has been led astray by Noem.
He said Noem should be held to account for her actions through congressional oversight hearings, not impeachment — at least not while Republicans would be in control of the proceedings, since he believes House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) would make a “mockery” of them.
“I am going to use the appropriations process,” Levin said, adding that he would “continue to focus on the guardrails, regardless of the rhetoric.”
Chuck Rocha, a Democratic political strategist, said Republicans seized on the abolitionist rhetoric as a scare tactic to distract from the rising cost of living, which remains another top voter concern.
“They hope to distract [voters] by saying, ‘Sure, we’re going to get better on the economy — but these Democrats are still crazy,’” he said.
Dozens of Angelenos and D.C.-area organizers, along with local activists, rally in front of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles on Friday. Democrats have for years struggled to put forward a unified vision on immigration — one of the top issues that won President Trump a return to the White House.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Democrats have for years struggled to put forward a unified vision on immigration — one of the top issues that won President Trump a return to the White House. Any deal to increase guardrails on Homeland Security faces an uphill battle in the Republican-controlled Congress, leaving many proposals years away from the possibility of fruition. Even if Democrats manage to block the yearly funding bill, the agency still has tens of billions of dollars from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Still, the roving raids, violent clashes with protesters and detentions and deaths of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike increased the urgency many lawmakers feel to do something.
Two centrist groups released memos last week written by former Homeland Security officials under the Biden administration urging Democrats to avoid the polarizing language and instead channel their outrage into specific reforms.
“Every call to abolish ICE risks squandering one of the clearest opportunities in years to secure meaningful reform of immigration enforcement — while handing Republicans exactly the fight they want,” wrote the authors of one memo, from the Washington-based think tank Third Way.
“Advocating for abolishing ICE is tantamount to advocating for stopping enforcement of all of our immigration laws in the interior of the United States — a policy position that is both wrong on the merits and at odds with the American public on the issue,” wrote Blas Nuñez-Neto, a senior policy fellow at the new think tank the Searchlight Institute who previously was assistant Homeland Security secretary.
Roughly 46% of Americans said they support the idea of abolishing ICE, while 43% are opposed, according to a YouGov/Economist poll released last week.
Sarah Pierce, a former policy analyst at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services who co-wrote the Third Way memo, said future polls might show less support for abolishing the agency, particularly if the question is framed as a choice among options including reforms such as banning agents from wearing masks or requiring use of body cameras.
“There’s no doubt there will be further tragedies and with each, the effort to take an extreme position like abolishing ICE increases,” she said.
Laura Hernandez, executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, a California-based organization that advocates for the closure of detention centers, said the increase in lawmakers calling to abolish ICE is long overdue.
“We need lawmakers to use their power to stop militarized raids, to close detention centers and we need them to shut down ICE and CBP,” she said. “This violence that people are seeing on television is not new, it’s literally built into the DNA of DHS.”
Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) introduced the “Abolish ICE Act.”
(Paul Sancya / Associated Press)
Cinthya Martinez, a UC Santa Cruz professor who has studied the movement to abolish ICE, noted that it stems from the movement to abolish prisons. The abolition part, she said, is watered down by mainstream politicians even as some liken immigration agents to modern-day slave patrols.
Martinez said the goal is about more than simply getting rid of one agency or redirecting its duties to another. She pointed out that alongside ICE agents have been Border Patrol, FBI and ATF agents.
“A lot of folks forget that prison abolition is to completely abolish carceral systems. It comes from a Black tradition that says prison is a continuation of slavery,” she said.
But Peter Markowitz, a law professor and co-director of the Immigration Justice Clinic at the Cardozo School of Law, said the movement to abolish ICE around 2018 among mainstream politicians was always about having effective and humane immigration enforcement, not about having none.
“But it fizzled because it didn’t have an answer to the policy question that follows: If not ICE, then what?” he said. “I hope we’re in a different position today.”
Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger will make history once she takes office this weekend, becoming the state’s first female governor.
Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger will make history once she takes office this weekend, becoming the state’s first female governor.
Spanberger defeated Republican Winsome Earle-Sears in November, but the election set the state up for a historic inauguration weekend regardless of the winner.
Spanberger, who will become the state’s 75th governor, has an inaugural ceremony scheduled for Saturday at noon in Richmond. The event’s theme is “United for Virginia’s Future.”
“Virginia has known that it was going to have a woman governor for the last several months, but it will be a crowning moment for Virginia politics when that day comes to pass,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Spanberger said she’s still processing the significance of the moment.
With Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill’s election victories, there will be 14 female governors in the U.S. But, Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, said that women are still underrepresented at the gubernatorial level.
“It shows progress, because it wasn’t only that those women came out of nowhere, right?” Dittmar said. “These were women who’ve established their political credentials and qualifications and done so in ways that are similar to their male counterparts.”
In Virginia, Ghazala Hashmi was elected to be the state’s next lieutenant governor, the first Indian American to win statewide office there.
Having two women top a statewide ticket has become more common, Dittmar said, and what it demonstrates is that “women are in the kind of pools and of potential candidates to be recruited and supported and ultimately nominated to be governor and then, of course, to be successful at the end of the day.”
Many of the women who have become governors served in state legislatures or Congress, which could be “feeder positions” for gubernatorial or higher offices, Dittmar said.
“We have seen that the challenge for women to get into the running and ultimately into gubernatorial office also comes from some gatekeeping we’ve seen by parties,” Dittmar said.
“And so the fact that we again saw parties really backing these women in terms of selection, to some extent, at least at the state level, that was evidence that also, party leaders are starting to see the benefit of more inclusion in office.”
Generally, most women who run for political office aren’t themselves making a case to be elected because it could be historic, Dittmar said.
“What we saw with Sherrill and Spanberger, in particular, is that they were focused on, ‘Here are the issues that are most important to the voters in our state. I am fully qualified to do this job,’” Dittmar said.
“When and where they kind of brought gender into their campaign was more in the specific roles and experiences, the lived experiences they have had as women, particularly as mothers, I think in both cases, talking about how that perspective and lived experience is going to help them to do the job better.”
However, Dittmar said, there’s been little racial and ethnic diversity among the women who have served, “and so that is something to look forward toward.”
Spanberger’s latest administration appointments
Ahead of her inauguration weekend, Spanberger tapped Jenna Conway to be the state superintendent of public instruction.
Conway is currently chief of early learning and specialized populations at Virginia’s Department of Education, helping make sure every child is prepared for kindergarten. She’s a Charlottesville City Schools graduate.
Connor Andrews, meanwhile, was named deputy secretary. He worked as a policy analyst under former Gov. Ralph Northam, and has been working as the University of Virginia’s director for state government relations.
Spanberger named Carrie Chenery the secretary of commerce and trade. Chenery once worked as assistant secretary of agriculture and forestry in the Office of the Governor. She founded Valley Pike Partners, a consulting firm based in the Shenandoah Valley.
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For years, the water table has been dropping beneath thousands of acres of desert farmland in western Arizona, where a Saudi-owned dairy company has been allowed to pump unlimited amounts of groundwater to grow hay for its cows.
But the company and other landowners in the area will now face limits under a decision by state officials to impose regulation.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs said Monday that her administration is acting to “crack down on the out-of-state special interests that are pumping our state dry while Arizona families and farmers suffer.”
Fondomonte, part of the Saudi dairy giant Almarai, is by far the largest water user in the area, using dozens of wells to to irrigate alfalfa that it ships overseas to the Middle East.
After conducting a review, the state Department of Water Resources designated the Ranegras Plain area, located 100 miles west of Phoenix, as a new “active management area” to preserve the groundwater.
This isn’t the first time the Democratic governor and her administration have used this approach to curb excessive pumping in a rural areas. In January 2025, her administration similarly established a new regulated area to limit agricultural pumping around the city of Willcox in southeastern Arizona.
Hobbs pointed out that some residents’ wells have gone dry as water levels have plummeted in the Ranegras Plain, and that the land has been sinking as the aquifer is depleted.
“Unlike politicians of the past, I refuse to bury my head in the sand. I refuse to ignore the problems we face,” Hobbs said Monday in her state of the state address. “We can no longer sit idly by while our rural communities go without help. They deserve solutions and security, not another decade of inaction and uncertainty.”
The state’s action will prohibit landowners from irrigating any additional farmland in this part of La Paz County and require those with high-capacity wells to start reporting how much water they use. It also will bring other changes, forming a local advisory council and requiring a plan to reduce water use.
State officials reached the decision after receiving more than 400 comments from the public on the proposal, the vast majority in support. Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, issued the decision, saying the future of residents and local businesses “depends upon protecting the finite groundwater resources.”
According to state data, water levels in wells in parts of the area have dropped more than 200 feet over the last 40 years, and pumping has increased over the last decade.
Some residents who spoke at a hearing last month said it’s wrong that Fondomonte gets to use the water to grow hay and export it across the world. Others said they don’t see any problem with having a foreign company as their neighbor but believe farms must switch to less water-intensive crops.
Following the state’s announcement, Fondomonte said in a written statement that it is “committed to progressive, efficient agricultural practices,” supports the farming community, and “has invested significantly to bring the latest technology to conserve water” on its farms. The company also said it would comply with state and local regulations.
The company currently faces a lawsuit filed by Arizona Atty. Gen. Kris Mayes alleging that its excessive pumping violates the law by causing declines in groundwater, land subsidence and worsening water quality. That lawsuit is set to continue while the state also imposes its new regulatory limits.
Holly Irwin, a La Paz County supervisor who for years has pushed to protect the area’s water, said she’s pleased the state finally acted “to stop the bleeding that threatens the vitality of our community.”
“It’s a big win,” said Irwin, a Republican. “It’s going to prevent other megafarms from being able to move into the area and set up the same type of operation that Fondamonte has going on right now. And it’ll prevent them from expanding.”
Fondomonte started its Arizona farming operation in 2014. Saudi Arabia has banned the domestic farming of alfalfa and other forage crops because the country’s groundwater has been depleted. As a result, Saudi companies have been buying farmland overseas.
A lawyer for the company has said it owns 3,600 acres in this part of Arizona. The company also rents 3,088 acres of farmland and 3,163 acres of grazing land in the state.
In addition, it owns 3,375 acres of California farmland near Blythe, where it uses Colorado River water to irrigate alfalfa fields.
Efforts to address the depletion of groundwater present complex challenges for communities and government agencies in Arizona, California and other Western states, where climate change is exacerbating strains on water supplies.
Arizona’s current groundwater law, adopted in 1980, limits pumping in Phoenix, Tucson and other urban areas. But those rules do not apply to about 80% of the state, which has allowed large farming companies and investors to drill wells and pump as much as they want.
Since Hobbs took office in 2023, she has supported efforts to address overpumping. In one step intended to rein in water use, she terminated Fondomonte’s leases of 3,520 acres of state-owned farmland in Butler Valley in western Arizona. That decision followed an Arizona Republic investigation that revealed the state had given Fondomonte discounted, below-market lease rates.
When she ended those leases, Hobbs said Fondomonte “was recklessly pumping our groundwater to boost their corporate profits.”
WASHINGTON — After President Trump ordered strikes that led to the capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, celebrations erupted in Venezuelan communities across the U.S.
But for many of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants facing possible deportation, their relief and joy were cut by the fear about what comes next from an administration that has zeroed in on Venezuelans as a target.
“Many of us asked ourselves, ‘What’s going to happen with us now?’” said A.G., a 39-year-old in Tennessee who asked to be identified by her initials because she lacks legal status. Even so, Maduro’s ouster gave her a lot of hope for her mother country.
Venezuelans began fleeing in droves in 2014 as economic collapse led to widespread food and medicine shortages, as well as political repression. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans are now living outside the country — including 1.2 million in the U.S.
Venezuelans migrants walk toward Bucaramanga, Colombia, in 2019.
(Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)
A.G. and her now-18-year-old son arrived at the southern border in 2019. Since then, she said, they have built a good life — they own a transport company with delivery trucks, pay taxes and follow the law.
Maduro’s fall left her with mixed feelings.
“He’s obviously a dictator, many people have died because of him and he refused to give up power, but the reason that they entered Venezuela, for me what President Trump did was illegal,” she said. “Innocent people died because of the bombs. I’m asking God that it all be for good reason.”
Dozens of Venezuelans and others were killed in the U.S. invasion — more than 100, a government official said — including civilians.
The Trump administration is framing its Venezuela operation as an opportunity for Venezuelans like A.G. “Now, they can return to the country they love and rebuild its future,” said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Matthew Tragesser.
Katie Blankenship, a Miami-based attorney with Sanctuary of the South who has represented many Venezuelans facing deportation, sees a less promising future.
“We’re going to see increased targeting of Venezuelans to force them to leave the U.S. into a political and socioeconomic environment that’s likely only more destabilized and subject to more abuse,” she said.
The Venezuelan community in the U.S. swelled, in part, because the Biden administration expanded pathways for them to enter the country.
Volunteer help a Venezuelan immigrant at the storage units from a volunteer-run program that distributes donations to recently arrived Venezuelan immigrants in need, in Miami, Fla., in 2023.
(Eva Marie Uzcategui / Los Angeles Times)
One of those programs allowed more than 117,000 Venezuelans to purchase flights directly to the U.S. and stay for two years if they had a U.S.-based financial sponsor and passed a background check. Other Venezuelans entered legally at land ports of entry after scheduling interviews with border officers.
By the end of the Biden administration, more than 600,000 Venezuelans had protection from deportation under Temporary Protected Status, a program used by both Republican and Democratic administrations for immigrants who cannot return home because of armed conflict, natural disaster or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly referred to Venezuelan immigrants as criminals, singling them out more than any other nationality — in 64% of speeches, an Axios analysis showed. He has said repeatedly, without evidence that Venezuela emptied its prisons and mental institutions to flood the U.S. with immigrants.
One of Trump’s first acts as president was to designate the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization. Within two months, he invoked an 18th century wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport 252 Venezuelan men accused of being Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador, where they were imprisoned and tortured despite many having no criminal histories in the U.S. or Latin America.
Later, the Trump administration stripped away protections for Venezuelans with financial sponsors and TPS, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem calling the latter “contrary to the national interest.”
In a September Federal Register Notice, Noem said that TPS for Venezuelans undercut the administration’s foreign policy objectives because one result of allowing Venezuelans in the U.S. was “relieving pressure on Maduro’s regime to enact domestic reforms and facilitate safe return conditions.” In other words, if Venezuelans returned home, that would pressure the government to enact reforms.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, along with U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, left, and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, right, participates in a news conference near Camp 57 at Angola prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary and America’s largest maximum-security prison farm, to announce the opening of a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility that will house immigrants convicted of crimes in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, on Sept. 3, 2025.
(Matthew Hilton / AFP via Getty Images)
The administration has offered contrasting assessments of conditions in Venezuela. Noem wrote that although certain adverse conditions continue, “there are notable improvements in several areas such as the economy, public health, and crime.”
Throughout the year, though, the State Department continued to reissue an “extreme danger” travel advisory for Venezuela, urging Americans to leave the country immediately.
Conditions for Venezuelans in the U.S. grew more complicated after a man from Afghanistan was accused of shooting two National Guard members in November; in response, the administration froze the immigration cases of people from 39 countries, including Venezuela, that the administration considers “high-risk.” That means anyone who applied for asylum, a visa, a green card or any other benefit remains in limbo indefinitely.
After a panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act in September, the Justice Department appealed. In a support brief filed in December, the Justice Department cited escalating tensions with Venezuela.
David Smilde, a Tulane University sociologist and expert on Venezuelan politics, said that invading Venezuela could justify renewed use of the Alien Enemies Act.
The law says the president can invoke the Alien Enemies Act not only in times of “declared war,” but also when a foreign government threatens or carries out an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” against the U.S.
“Now it will be difficult, I think, for the court to say, ‘No, you can’t use this,’” Smilde said.
With U.S. officials promising improved conditions in Venezuela and encouraging citizens to return, Smilde said, they could invoke the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport undocumented immigrants who don’t leave willingly.
“There’s several layers to this,” he said, “and none of it looks very good for Venezuelan immigrants.”
This couple from Venezuela shared their story of why they left their three children back in their home country and spoke of the the experiences of their travel to the United States at the Parkside Community Church in Sacramento on June 16, 2023.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
Jose, a 28-year-old Venezuelan living east of Los Angeles, fled Venezuela in 2015 after being imprisoned and beaten for criticizing the government. He lived in Colombia and Peru before illegally crossing the U.S. border in 2022, and now has a pending asylum application. Jose asked to be identified by his middle name out of fear of retaliation by the U.S. government.
The news this week that an ICE agent had shot and killed a woman in Minnesota heightened his anxiety.
“You come here because supposedly this is a country with freedom of expression, and there is more safety, but with this government, now you’re afraid you’ll get killed,” he said. “And that was a U.S. citizen. Imagine what they could do to me?”
People visit a memorial for Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis.
(Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Jose qualifies for a work permit based on his pending asylum, but his application for one is frozen because of the executive order following the National Guard shooting.
The news of Maduro’s arrest was bittersweet, Jose said, because his mother and grandmother didn’t live to witness that day. He said his mother died last year of kidney failure due to lack of medical care, leaving him as the primary breadwinner for his two young sisters who remain in Venezuela with their father, who is disabled.
Still, he said he’s happy with what Trump has done in Venezuela.
“People are saying he’s stealing our petroleum,” he said, “but for 25 years, Cuba, China and Iran have been stealing the petroleum and it didn’t improve our lives.”
Many Venezuelans were encouraged by news that Venezuela would release a “significant number” of political prisoners as a peace gesture.
For Jose, that’s not enough. Venezuela’s government ordered police to search for anyone involved in promoting or supporting the attack by U.S. forces, leading to detentions of journalists and civilians.
“Venezuela remains the same,” he said. “The same disgrace, the same poverty and the same government repression.”
A.G. said she was heartened to hear Noem say Sunday on Fox News that every Venezeulan who had TPS “has the opportunity to apply for refugee status and that evaluation will go forward.” But the administration quickly backtracked and said that was not the case.
Instead, Noem and other administration officials have doubled down on the notion that Venezuelans without permanent lawful status should leave. Noem told Fox News that there are no plans to pause deportation flights despite the political uncertainty in Venezuela.
Tragesser, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman, said the agency’s posture hasn’t changed.
“USCIS encourages all Venezuelans unlawfully in the U.S. to use the CBP Home app for help with a safe and orderly return to their country,” he said.
Protesters against immigration enforcement actions took to the streets in cities and towns across the country on Saturday after a federal officer shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis and another shot and wounded two people in Portland, Oregon.Video above: Protesters and counterprotesters clash in Minneapolis day after ICE shootingThe demonstrations come as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security pushes forward in the Twin Cities with what it calls its biggest-ever immigration enforcement operation. President Donald Trump’s administration has said both shootings were acts of self-defense against drivers who “weaponized” their vehicles to attack officers. Steven Eubanks, 51, said he felt compelled to get out of his comfort zone and attend a Saturday protest in Durham, North Carolina, because of what he called the “horrifying” killing in Minneapolis.”We can’t allow it,” Eubanks said. “We have to stand up.”Video below: Protests intensify after ICE shooting of Renee GoodIndivisible, a social movement organization that formed to resist the Trump administration, said hundreds of protests were scheduled in Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio, Florida and other states. Many were dubbed “ICE Out for Good” using the acronym for the federal agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Indivisible and its local chapters organized protests in all 50 states last year.In Minneapolis, a coalition of migrant rights groups called for a demonstration at Powderhorn Park, a large green space about half a mile from the residential neighborhood where 37-year-old Renee Good was shot on Wednesday. They said the rally and march would celebrate Good’s life and call for an “end to deadly terror on our streets.”Protests held in the neighborhood have so far been largely peaceful, in contrast to the violence that hit Minneapolis in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Near the airport, some confrontations erupted on Thursday and Friday between smaller groups of protesters and officers guarding the federal building used as a base for the Twin Cities crackdown. On Friday night, a protest outside a Minneapolis hotel that attracted about 1,000 people turned violent as people threw ice, snow and rocks at officers, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said during a news conference Saturday. One officer suffered minor injuries after being struck with a piece of ice, O’Hara said. Twenty-nine people were cited and released, he said.Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey stressed that while most protests have been peaceful, those who cause damage to property or put others in danger will be arrested.The Trump administration has been surging thousands of federal officers to Minnesota under a sweeping new crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents. More than 2,000 officers were taking part. Some officers moved in after abruptly pulling out of Louisiana, where they were part of another operation that started last month and was expected to last until February. Associated Press writer Allen Breed contributed to this report from Durham, North Carolina.
MINNEAPOLIS —
Protesters against immigration enforcement actions took to the streets in cities and towns across the country on Saturday after a federal officer shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis and another shot and wounded two people in Portland, Oregon.
Video above: Protesters and counterprotesters clash in Minneapolis day after ICE shooting
The demonstrations come as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security pushes forward in the Twin Cities with what it calls its biggest-ever immigration enforcement operation. President Donald Trump’s administration has said both shootings were acts of self-defense against drivers who “weaponized” their vehicles to attack officers.
Steven Eubanks, 51, said he felt compelled to get out of his comfort zone and attend a Saturday protest in Durham, North Carolina, because of what he called the “horrifying” killing in Minneapolis.
“We can’t allow it,” Eubanks said. “We have to stand up.”
Video below: Protests intensify after ICE shooting of Renee Good
Indivisible, a social movement organization that formed to resist the Trump administration, said hundreds of protests were scheduled in Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio, Florida and other states. Many were dubbed “ICE Out for Good” using the acronym for the federal agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Indivisible and its local chapters organized protests in all 50 states last year.
In Minneapolis, a coalition of migrant rights groups called for a demonstration at Powderhorn Park, a large green space about half a mile from the residential neighborhood where 37-year-old Renee Good was shot on Wednesday. They said the rally and march would celebrate Good’s life and call for an “end to deadly terror on our streets.”
Protests held in the neighborhood have so far been largely peaceful, in contrast to the violence that hit Minneapolis in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Near the airport, some confrontations erupted on Thursday and Friday between smaller groups of protesters and officers guarding the federal building used as a base for the Twin Cities crackdown.
NurPhoto
In St. Paul, Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz and First Lady Gwen Walz join a moment of silence with clergy and demonstrators at the Minnesota State Capitol during a vigil urging accountability and compassion after an ICE agent shot and killed a woman this week.
On Friday night, a protest outside a Minneapolis hotel that attracted about 1,000 people turned violent as people threw ice, snow and rocks at officers, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said during a news conference Saturday. One officer suffered minor injuries after being struck with a piece of ice, O’Hara said. Twenty-nine people were cited and released, he said.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey stressed that while most protests have been peaceful, those who cause damage to property or put others in danger will be arrested.
The Trump administration has been surging thousands of federal officers to Minnesota under a sweeping new crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents. More than 2,000 officers were taking part.
Some officers moved in after abruptly pulling out of Louisiana, where they were part of another operation that started last month and was expected to last until February.
Associated Press writer Allen Breed contributed to this report from Durham, North Carolina.
WASHINGTON — A highly confidential CIA assessment produced at the request of the White House warned President Trump of a wider conflict in Venezuela if he were to support the country’s democratic opposition once its president, Nicolás Maduro, was deposed, a person familiar with the matter told The Times.
The assessment was a tightly held CIA product commissioned at the request of senior policymakers before Trump decided whether to authorize Operation Absolute Resolve, the stunning U.S. mission that seized Maduro and his wife from their bedroom in Caracas over the weekend.
Announcing the results of the operation on Sunday, Trump surprised an anxious Venezuelan public when he was quick to dismiss the leadership of the democratic opposition — led by María Corina Machado, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition candidate who won the 2024 presidential election that was ultimately stolen by Maduro.
Instead, Trump said his administration was working with Maduro’s handpicked vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who has since been named the country’s interim president. The rest of Maduro’s government remains in place.
Endorsing the opposition would probably have required U.S. military backing, with the Venezuelan armed forces still under the control of loyalists to Maduro unwilling to relinquish power.
A second official said that the administration sought to avoid one of the cardinal mistakes of the invasion of Iraq, when the Bush administration ordered party loyalists of the deposed Saddam Hussein to be excluded from the country’s interim government. That decision, known as de-Baathification, led those in charge of Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons to establish armed resistance to the U.S. campaign.
The CIA product was not an assessment that was shared across the 18 government agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, whose head, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, was largely absent from deliberations — and who has yet to comment on the operation, despite CIA operatives being deployed in harm’s way before and throughout the weekend mission.
The core team that worked on Absolute Resolve included Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who met routinely over several months, sometimes daily, the source added.
Signs have emerged that Trump’s team was in communication with Rodríguez ahead of the operation, although the president has denied that his administration gave Rodríguez advance notice of Maduro’s ouster.
“There are a number of unanswered questions,” said Evan Ellis, who served in Trump’s first term planning State Department policy on Latin America, the Caribbean and international narcotics. “There may have been a cynical calculation that one can work with them.”
Rodríguez served as a point of contact with the Biden administration, experts note, and also was in touch with Richard Grenell, a top Trump aide who heads the Kennedy Center, early on in Trump’s second term, when he was testing engagement with Caracas.
While the federal indictment unsealed against Maduro after his seizure named several other senior officials in his government, Rodríguez’s name was notably absent.
Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president Monday in a ceremony attended by diplomats from Russia, China and Iran. Publicly, the leader has offered mixed messages, at once vowing to prevent Venezuela from becoming a colonial outpost of an American empire, while also offering to forge a newly collaborative relationship with Washington.
“Of course, for political reasons, Delcy Rodríguez can’t say, ‘I’ve cut a deal with Trump, and we’re going to stop the revolution now and start working with the U.S.,” Ellis said.
“It’s not about the democracy,” he said. “It’s about him not wanting to work with Maduro.”
In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Machado said she had yet to speak with Trump since the U.S. operation over the weekend, but hoped to do so soon, offering to share her Nobel Peace Prize with him as a gesture of gratitude. Trump has repeatedly touted himself as a worthy recipient of the award.
“What he has done is historic,” Machado said, vowing to return to the country from hiding abroad since accepting the prize in Oslo last month.
“It’s a huge step,” she added, “towards a democratic transition.”
Deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro arrived in the United States to face criminal charges after being captured in an audacious nighttime military operation that President Donald Trump said would set the U.S. up to “run” the South American country and tap its vast oil reserves to sell to other nations.Video above: U.S. strikes Venezuela, captures President Maduro in overnight operationMaduro landed Saturday evening at a small airport in New York following the middle-of-the-night operation that extracted him and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their home in a military base in the capital, Caracas — an act that Maduro’s government called “imperialist.” The couple faces U.S. charges of participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy.The dramatic action capped an intensive Trump administration pressure campaign on Venezuela’s autocratic leader and months of secret planning, resulting in the most assertive American action to achieve regime change since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Legal experts raised questions about the lawfulness of the operation, which was done without congressional approval. Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, meanwhile, demanded that the United States free Maduro and called him the country’s rightful leader as her nation’s high court named her interim president.Some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed, said Rodríguez, who didn’t give a number. Trump said some U.S. forces were injured, but none were killed.Speaking to reporters hours after Maduro’s capture, Trump revealed his plans to exploit the leadership void to “fix” the country’s oil infrastructure and sell “large amounts” of oil to other countries. Video below: ‘We are going to run the country,’ Trump says of VenezuelaTrump says US will ‘run the country’The Trump administration promoted the ouster as a step toward reducing the flow of dangerous drugs into the U.S. The president touted what he saw as other potential benefits, including a leadership stake in the country and greater control of oil.Trump claimed the U.S. government would help lead the country and was already doing so, though there were no immediate visible signs of that. Venezuelan state TV aired pro-Maduro propaganda and broadcast live images of supporters taking to the streets in Caracas in protest.“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago news conference. He boasted that this “extremely successful operation should serve as warning to anyone who would threaten American sovereignty or endanger American lives.”Maduro and other Venezuelan officials were indicted in 2020 on narco-terrorism conspiracy charges, and the Justice Department released a new indictment Saturday of Maduro and his wife that painted his administration as a “corrupt, illegitimate government” fueled by a drug-trafficking operation that flooded the U.S with cocaine. The U.S. government does not recognize Maduro as the country’s leader.The Trump administration spent months building up American forces in the region and carrying out attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean for allegedly ferrying drugs. Last week, the CIA was behind a drone strike at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels — the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. campaign began in September.Video below: Fact checking President Trump’s Venezuela claimsEarly morning attackTaking place 36 years to the day after the 1990 surrender and seizure of Panama leader Manuel Antonio Noriega following a U.S. invasion, the Venezuela operation unfolded under the cover of darkness early Saturday. Trump said the U.S. turned off “almost all of the lights” in Caracas while forces moved in to extract Maduro and his wife.Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. forces had rehearsed their maneuvers for months, learning everything about Maduro — where he was and what he ate, as well as details of his pets and his clothes.“We think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we debrief, we rehearse again and again,” Caine said. “Not to get it right, but to ensure we cannot get it wrong.”Multiple explosions rang out that morning, and low-flying aircraft swept through Caracas. Maduro’s government accused the United States of hitting civilian and military installations, calling it an “imperialist attack” and urging citizens to take to the streets. The explosions — at least seven blasts — sent people rushing into the streets, while others took to social media to report what they saw and heard.Restrictions imposed by the U.S. government on airspace around Venezuela and the Caribbean expired early Sunday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on X, an announcement that suggested any further immediate major U.S. military action was unlikely. “Airlines are informed, and will update their schedules quickly,” he posted.Under Venezuelan law, Rodríguez would take over from Maduro. Rodríguez, however, stressed during a Saturday appearance on state television that she did not plan to assume power, before Venezuela’s high court ordered that she become interim president.“There is only one president in Venezuela,” Rodriguez said, “and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros.”Video below: President Donald Trump’s full comments on Venezuela strike and Nicolas Maduro captureSome streets in Caracas fill upVenezuela’s ruling party has held power since 1999, when Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, took office, promising to uplift poor people and later to implement a self-described socialist revolution.Maduro took over when Chávez died in 2013. His 2018 reelection was widely considered a sham because the main opposition parties were banned from participating. During the 2024 election, electoral authorities loyal to the ruling party declared him the winner hours after polls closed, but the opposition gathered overwhelming evidence that he lost by a more than 2-to-1 margin.In a demonstration of how polarizing Maduro is, people variously took to the streets to protest his capture, while others celebrated it. At a protest in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, Mayor Carmen Meléndez joined a crowd demanding Maduro’s return.“Maduro, hold on, the people are rising up!” the crowd chanted. “We are here, Nicolás Maduro. If you can hear us, we are here!”In other parts of the city, the streets were empty hours after the attack.“How do I feel? Scared, like everyone,” said Caracas resident Noris Prada, who sat on an empty avenue looking at his phone. “Venezuelans woke up scared. Many families couldn’t sleep.”In Doral, Florida, home to the largest Venezuelan community in the United States, people wrapped themselves in Venezuelan flags, ate fried snacks and cheered as music played. At one point, the crowd chanted “Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!”Questions of legalityWhether the United States violated any laws, international or otherwise, was still a question early Sunday. “There are a number of international legal concepts which the United States might have broken by capturing Maduro,” said Ilan Katz, an international law analyst.In New York, the U.N. Security Council, acting on an emergency request from Colombia, planned to hold a meeting on U.S. operations in Venezuela on Monday morning. That was according to a council diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a meeting not yet made public.Lawmakers from both American political parties have raised reservations and flat-out objections to the U.S. attacks on boats suspected of drug smuggling. Congress has not approved an authorization for the use of military force for such operations in the region.Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he had seen no evidence that would justify Trump striking Venezuela without approval from Congress and demanded an immediate briefing by the administration on “its plan to ensure stability in the region and its legal justification for this decision.”___Toropin and Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jorge Rueda in Caracas, Venezuela; Lisa Mascaro, Michelle L. Price, Seung Min Kim and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington; Farnoush Amiri in New York; and Larry Neumeister in South Amboy, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
Deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro arrived in the United States to face criminal charges after being captured in an audacious nighttime military operation that President Donald Trump said would set the U.S. up to “run” the South American country and tap its vast oil reserves to sell to other nations.
Video above: U.S. strikes Venezuela, captures President Maduro in overnight operation
Maduro landed Saturday evening at a small airport in New York following the middle-of-the-night operation that extracted him and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their home in a military base in the capital, Caracas — an act that Maduro’s government called “imperialist.” The couple faces U.S. charges of participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy.
The dramatic action capped an intensive Trump administration pressure campaign on Venezuela’s autocratic leader and months of secret planning, resulting in the most assertive American action to achieve regime change since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Legal experts raised questions about the lawfulness of the operation, which was done without congressional approval.
Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, meanwhile, demanded that the United States free Maduro and called him the country’s rightful leader as her nation’s high court named her interim president.
Some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed, said Rodríguez, who didn’t give a number. Trump said some U.S. forces were injured, but none were killed.
Speaking to reporters hours after Maduro’s capture, Trump revealed his plans to exploit the leadership void to “fix” the country’s oil infrastructure and sell “large amounts” of oil to other countries.
Video below: ‘We are going to run the country,’ Trump says of Venezuela
Trump says US will ‘run the country’
The Trump administration promoted the ouster as a step toward reducing the flow of dangerous drugs into the U.S. The president touted what he saw as other potential benefits, including a leadership stake in the country and greater control of oil.
Trump claimed the U.S. government would help lead the country and was already doing so, though there were no immediate visible signs of that. Venezuelan state TV aired pro-Maduro propaganda and broadcast live images of supporters taking to the streets in Caracas in protest.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago news conference. He boasted that this “extremely successful operation should serve as warning to anyone who would threaten American sovereignty or endanger American lives.”
Maduro and other Venezuelan officials were indicted in 2020 on narco-terrorism conspiracy charges, and the Justice Department released a new indictment Saturday of Maduro and his wife that painted his administration as a “corrupt, illegitimate government” fueled by a drug-trafficking operation that flooded the U.S with cocaine. The U.S. government does not recognize Maduro as the country’s leader.
The Trump administration spent months building up American forces in the region and carrying out attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean for allegedly ferrying drugs. Last week, the CIA was behind a drone strike at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels — the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. campaign began in September.
Video below: Fact checking President Trump’s Venezuela claims
Early morning attack
Taking place 36 years to the day after the 1990 surrender and seizure of Panama leader Manuel Antonio Noriega following a U.S. invasion, the Venezuela operation unfolded under the cover of darkness early Saturday. Trump said the U.S. turned off “almost all of the lights” in Caracas while forces moved in to extract Maduro and his wife.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. forces had rehearsed their maneuvers for months, learning everything about Maduro — where he was and what he ate, as well as details of his pets and his clothes.
“We think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we debrief, we rehearse again and again,” Caine said. “Not to get it right, but to ensure we cannot get it wrong.”
Multiple explosions rang out that morning, and low-flying aircraft swept through Caracas. Maduro’s government accused the United States of hitting civilian and military installations, calling it an “imperialist attack” and urging citizens to take to the streets. The explosions — at least seven blasts — sent people rushing into the streets, while others took to social media to report what they saw and heard.
Restrictions imposed by the U.S. government on airspace around Venezuela and the Caribbean expired early Sunday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on X, an announcement that suggested any further immediate major U.S. military action was unlikely. “Airlines are informed, and will update their schedules quickly,” he posted.
Under Venezuelan law, Rodríguez would take over from Maduro. Rodríguez, however, stressed during a Saturday appearance on state television that she did not plan to assume power, before Venezuela’s high court ordered that she become interim president.
“There is only one president in Venezuela,” Rodriguez said, “and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros.”
Video below: President Donald Trump’s full comments on Venezuela strike and Nicolas Maduro capture
Some streets in Caracas fill up
Venezuela’s ruling party has held power since 1999, when Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, took office, promising to uplift poor people and later to implement a self-described socialist revolution.
Maduro took over when Chávez died in 2013. His 2018 reelection was widely considered a sham because the main opposition parties were banned from participating. During the 2024 election, electoral authorities loyal to the ruling party declared him the winner hours after polls closed, but the opposition gathered overwhelming evidence that he lost by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
In a demonstration of how polarizing Maduro is, people variously took to the streets to protest his capture, while others celebrated it. At a protest in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, Mayor Carmen Meléndez joined a crowd demanding Maduro’s return.
“Maduro, hold on, the people are rising up!” the crowd chanted. “We are here, Nicolás Maduro. If you can hear us, we are here!”
In other parts of the city, the streets were empty hours after the attack.
“How do I feel? Scared, like everyone,” said Caracas resident Noris Prada, who sat on an empty avenue looking at his phone. “Venezuelans woke up scared. Many families couldn’t sleep.”
In Doral, Florida, home to the largest Venezuelan community in the United States, people wrapped themselves in Venezuelan flags, ate fried snacks and cheered as music played. At one point, the crowd chanted “Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!”
Questions of legality
Whether the United States violated any laws, international or otherwise, was still a question early Sunday. “There are a number of international legal concepts which the United States might have broken by capturing Maduro,” said Ilan Katz, an international law analyst.
In New York, the U.N. Security Council, acting on an emergency request from Colombia, planned to hold a meeting on U.S. operations in Venezuela on Monday morning. That was according to a council diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a meeting not yet made public.
Lawmakers from both American political parties have raised reservations and flat-out objections to the U.S. attacks on boats suspected of drug smuggling. Congress has not approved an authorization for the use of military force for such operations in the region.
Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he had seen no evidence that would justify Trump striking Venezuela without approval from Congress and demanded an immediate briefing by the administration on “its plan to ensure stability in the region and its legal justification for this decision.”
___
Toropin and Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jorge Rueda in Caracas, Venezuela; Lisa Mascaro, Michelle L. Price, Seung Min Kim and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington; Farnoush Amiri in New York; and Larry Neumeister in South Amboy, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
Deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro arrived in the United States to face criminal charges after being captured in an audacious nighttime military operation that President Donald Trump said would set the U.S. up to “run” the South American country and tap its vast oil reserves to sell to other nations.Maduro landed Saturday evening at a small airport in New York following the middle-of-the-night operation that extracted him and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their home in a military base in the capital, Caracas — an act that Maduro’s government called “imperialist.” The couple faces U.S. charges of participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy.The dramatic action capped an intensive Trump administration pressure campaign on Venezuela’s autocratic leader and months of secret planning, resulting in the most assertive American action to achieve regime change since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Legal experts raised questions about the lawfulness of the operation, which was done without congressional approval. Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, meanwhile, demanded that the United States free Maduro and called him the country’s rightful leader as her nation’s high court named her interim president.Some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed, said Rodríguez, who didn’t give a number. Trump said some U.S. forces were injured, but none were killed.Speaking to reporters hours after Maduro’s capture, Trump revealed his plans to exploit the leadership void to “fix” the country’s oil infrastructure and sell “large amounts” of oil to other countries. Trump says US will ‘run the country’The Trump administration promoted the ouster as a step toward reducing the flow of dangerous drugs into the U.S. The president touted what he saw as other potential benefits, including a leadership stake in the country and greater control of oil.Trump claimed the U.S. government would help lead the country and was already doing so, though there were no immediate visible signs of that. Venezuelan state TV aired pro-Maduro propaganda and broadcast live images of supporters taking to the streets in Caracas in protest.“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago news conference. He boasted that this “extremely successful operation should serve as warning to anyone who would threaten American sovereignty or endanger American lives.”Maduro and other Venezuelan officials were indicted in 2020 on narco-terrorism conspiracy charges, and the Justice Department released a new indictment Saturday of Maduro and his wife that painted his administration as a “corrupt, illegitimate government” fueled by a drug-trafficking operation that flooded the U.S with cocaine. The U.S. government does not recognize Maduro as the country’s leader.The Trump administration spent months building up American forces in the region and carrying out attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean for allegedly ferrying drugs. Last week, the CIA was behind a drone strike at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels — the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. campaign began in September.Early morning attackTaking place 36 years to the day after the 1990 surrender and seizure of Panama leader Manuel Antonio Noriega following a U.S. invasion, the Venezuela operation unfolded under the cover of darkness early Saturday. Trump said the U.S. turned off “almost all of the lights” in Caracas while forces moved in to extract Maduro and his wife.Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. forces had rehearsed their maneuvers for months, learning everything about Maduro — where he was and what he ate, as well as details of his pets and his clothes.“We think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we debrief, we rehearse again and again,” Caine said. “Not to get it right, but to ensure we cannot get it wrong.”Multiple explosions rang out that morning, and low-flying aircraft swept through Caracas. Maduro’s government accused the United States of hitting civilian and military installations, calling it an “imperialist attack” and urging citizens to take to the streets. The explosions — at least seven blasts — sent people rushing into the streets, while others took to social media to report what they saw and heard.Restrictions imposed by the U.S. government on airspace around Venezuela and the Caribbean expired early Sunday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on X, an announcement that suggested any further immediate major U.S. military action was unlikely. “Airlines are informed, and will update their schedules quickly,” he posted.Under Venezuelan law, Rodríguez would take over from Maduro. Rodríguez, however, stressed during a Saturday appearance on state television that she did not plan to assume power, before Venezuela’s high court ordered that she become interim president.“There is only one president in Venezuela,” Rodriguez said, “and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros.”Some streets in Caracas fill upVenezuela’s ruling party has held power since 1999, when Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, took office, promising to uplift poor people and later to implement a self-described socialist revolution.Maduro took over when Chávez died in 2013. His 2018 reelection was widely considered a sham because the main opposition parties were banned from participating. During the 2024 election, electoral authorities loyal to the ruling party declared him the winner hours after polls closed, but the opposition gathered overwhelming evidence that he lost by a more than 2-to-1 margin.In a demonstration of how polarizing Maduro is, people variously took to the streets to protest his capture, while others celebrated it. At a protest in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, Mayor Carmen Meléndez joined a crowd demanding Maduro’s return.“Maduro, hold on, the people are rising up!” the crowd chanted. “We are here, Nicolás Maduro. If you can hear us, we are here!”In other parts of the city, the streets were empty hours after the attack.“How do I feel? Scared, like everyone,” said Caracas resident Noris Prada, who sat on an empty avenue looking at his phone. “Venezuelans woke up scared. Many families couldn’t sleep.”In Doral, Florida, home to the largest Venezuelan community in the United States, people wrapped themselves in Venezuelan flags, ate fried snacks and cheered as music played. At one point, the crowd chanted “Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!”Questions of legalityWhether the United States violated any laws, international or otherwise, was still a question early Sunday. “There are a number of international legal concepts which the United States might have broken by capturing Maduro,” said Ilan Katz, an international law analyst.In New York, the U.N. Security Council, acting on an emergency request from Colombia, planned to hold a meeting on U.S. operations in Venezuela on Monday morning. That was according to a council diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a meeting not yet made public.Lawmakers from both American political parties have raised reservations and flat-out objections to the U.S. attacks on boats suspected of drug smuggling. Congress has not approved an authorization for the use of military force for such operations in the region.Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he had seen no evidence that would justify Trump striking Venezuela without approval from Congress and demanded an immediate briefing by the administration on “its plan to ensure stability in the region and its legal justification for this decision.”___Toropin and Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jorge Rueda in Caracas, Venezuela; Lisa Mascaro, Michelle L. Price, Seung Min Kim and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington; Farnoush Amiri in New York; and Larry Neumeister in South Amboy, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
Deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro arrived in the United States to face criminal charges after being captured in an audacious nighttime military operation that President Donald Trump said would set the U.S. up to “run” the South American country and tap its vast oil reserves to sell to other nations.
Maduro landed Saturday evening at a small airport in New York following the middle-of-the-night operation that extracted him and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their home in a military base in the capital, Caracas — an act that Maduro’s government called “imperialist.” The couple faces U.S. charges of participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy.
The dramatic action capped an intensive Trump administration pressure campaign on Venezuela’s autocratic leader and months of secret planning, resulting in the most assertive American action to achieve regime change since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Legal experts raised questions about the lawfulness of the operation, which was done without congressional approval.
Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, meanwhile, demanded that the United States free Maduro and called him the country’s rightful leader as her nation’s high court named her interim president.
Some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed, said Rodríguez, who didn’t give a number. Trump said some U.S. forces were injured, but none were killed.
Speaking to reporters hours after Maduro’s capture, Trump revealed his plans to exploit the leadership void to “fix” the country’s oil infrastructure and sell “large amounts” of oil to other countries.
Trump says US will ‘run the country’
The Trump administration promoted the ouster as a step toward reducing the flow of dangerous drugs into the U.S. The president touted what he saw as other potential benefits, including a leadership stake in the country and greater control of oil.
Trump claimed the U.S. government would help lead the country and was already doing so, though there were no immediate visible signs of that. Venezuelan state TV aired pro-Maduro propaganda and broadcast live images of supporters taking to the streets in Caracas in protest.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago news conference. He boasted that this “extremely successful operation should serve as warning to anyone who would threaten American sovereignty or endanger American lives.”
Maduro and other Venezuelan officials were indicted in 2020 on narco-terrorism conspiracy charges, and the Justice Department released a new indictment Saturday of Maduro and his wife that painted his administration as a “corrupt, illegitimate government” fueled by a drug-trafficking operation that flooded the U.S with cocaine. The U.S. government does not recognize Maduro as the country’s leader.
The Trump administration spent months building up American forces in the region and carrying out attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean for allegedly ferrying drugs. Last week, the CIA was behind a drone strike at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels — the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. campaign began in September.
Early morning attack
Taking place 36 years to the day after the 1990 surrender and seizure of Panama leader Manuel Antonio Noriega following a U.S. invasion, the Venezuela operation unfolded under the cover of darkness early Saturday. Trump said the U.S. turned off “almost all of the lights” in Caracas while forces moved in to extract Maduro and his wife.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. forces had rehearsed their maneuvers for months, learning everything about Maduro — where he was and what he ate, as well as details of his pets and his clothes.
“We think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we debrief, we rehearse again and again,” Caine said. “Not to get it right, but to ensure we cannot get it wrong.”
Multiple explosions rang out that morning, and low-flying aircraft swept through Caracas. Maduro’s government accused the United States of hitting civilian and military installations, calling it an “imperialist attack” and urging citizens to take to the streets. The explosions — at least seven blasts — sent people rushing into the streets, while others took to social media to report what they saw and heard.
Restrictions imposed by the U.S. government on airspace around Venezuela and the Caribbean expired early Sunday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on X, an announcement that suggested any further immediate major U.S. military action was unlikely. “Airlines are informed, and will update their schedules quickly,” he posted.
Under Venezuelan law, Rodríguez would take over from Maduro. Rodríguez, however, stressed during a Saturday appearance on state television that she did not plan to assume power, before Venezuela’s high court ordered that she become interim president.
“There is only one president in Venezuela,” Rodriguez said, “and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros.”
Some streets in Caracas fill up
Venezuela’s ruling party has held power since 1999, when Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, took office, promising to uplift poor people and later to implement a self-described socialist revolution.
Maduro took over when Chávez died in 2013. His 2018 reelection was widely considered a sham because the main opposition parties were banned from participating. During the 2024 election, electoral authorities loyal to the ruling party declared him the winner hours after polls closed, but the opposition gathered overwhelming evidence that he lost by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
In a demonstration of how polarizing Maduro is, people variously took to the streets to protest his capture, while others celebrated it. At a protest in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, Mayor Carmen Meléndez joined a crowd demanding Maduro’s return.
“Maduro, hold on, the people are rising up!” the crowd chanted. “We are here, Nicolás Maduro. If you can hear us, we are here!”
In other parts of the city, the streets were empty hours after the attack.
“How do I feel? Scared, like everyone,” said Caracas resident Noris Prada, who sat on an empty avenue looking at his phone. “Venezuelans woke up scared. Many families couldn’t sleep.”
In Doral, Florida, home to the largest Venezuelan community in the United States, people wrapped themselves in Venezuelan flags, ate fried snacks and cheered as music played. At one point, the crowd chanted “Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!”
Questions of legality
Whether the United States violated any laws, international or otherwise, was still a question early Sunday. “There are a number of international legal concepts which the United States might have broken by capturing Maduro,” said Ilan Katz, an international law analyst.
In New York, the U.N. Security Council, acting on an emergency request from Colombia, planned to hold a meeting on U.S. operations in Venezuela on Monday morning. That was according to a council diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a meeting not yet made public.
Lawmakers from both American political parties have raised reservations and flat-out objections to the U.S. attacks on boats suspected of drug smuggling. Congress has not approved an authorization for the use of military force for such operations in the region.
Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he had seen no evidence that would justify Trump striking Venezuela without approval from Congress and demanded an immediate briefing by the administration on “its plan to ensure stability in the region and its legal justification for this decision.”
___
Toropin and Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jorge Rueda in Caracas, Venezuela; Lisa Mascaro, Michelle L. Price, Seung Min Kim and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington; Farnoush Amiri in New York; and Larry Neumeister in South Amboy, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., ended the first year of President Trump’s second term with a record of rulings that gave him much broader power to control the federal government.
In a series of fast-track decisions, the justices granted emergency appeals and set aside rulings from district judges who blocked Trump’s orders from taking effect.
Upon taking office, Trump claimed migrants who were alleged to belong to “foreign terrorist” gangs could be arrested as “enemy aliens” and flown secretly to a prison in El Salvador.
Roberts and the court blocked such secret deportations and said the 5th Amendment entitles immigrants, like citizens, a right to “due process of law.” Many of the arrested men had no criminal records and said they never belonged to a criminal gang. Those who face deportation “are entitled to notice and opportunity to challenge their removal,” the justices said in Trump vs. J.G.G.
They also required the government to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been wrongly deported to El Salvador. He is now back in Maryland with his wife, but may face further criminal charges or efforts to deport him.
And last week, Roberts and the court barred Trump from deploying the National Guard in Chicago to enforce the immigration laws.
Trump had claimed he had the power to defy state governors and deploy the Guard troops in Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., Chicago and other Democratic-led states and cities.
The Supreme Court disagreed over dissents from conservative Justices Samuel A. Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.
For much of the year, however, Roberts and the five other conservatives were in the majority ruling for Trump. In dissent, the three liberal justices said the court should stand aside for now and defer to district judges.
In May, the court agreed that Trump could end the Biden administration’s special temporary protections extended to more than 350,000 Venezuelans as well as an additional 530,000 migrants who arrived legally from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua or Venezuela.
It was easier to explain why the new administration’s policies were cruel and disruptive rather than why they were illegal.
Trump’s lawyers argued that the law gave the president’s top immigration officials the sole power to decide on these temporary protections and that “no judicial review” was authorized.
Nonetheless, a federal judge in San Francisco twice blocked the administration’s repeal of the temporary protected status for Venezuelans, and a federal judge in Boston blocked the repeal of the entry-level parole granted to migrants under Biden.
Since 1887, when Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroad rates, the government has had semi-independent boards and commissions led by a mix of Republicans and Democrats.
But Roberts and the court’s conservatives believe that because these agencies enforce the law, they come under the president’s “executive power.”
That ruling may come with an exception for the Federal Reserve Board, an independent agency whose nonpartisan stability is valued by business leaders.
Georgetown Law Professor David Cole, the former legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the court has sent mixed signals.
“On the emergency docket, it has ruled consistently for the president, with some notable exceptions,” he said. “I do think it significant that it put a halt to the National Guard deployments and to the Alien Enemies Act deportations, at least for the time being. And I think by this time next year, it’s possible that the court will have overturned two of Trump’s signature initiatives — the birthright citizenship executive order and the tariffs.”
For much of 2025, the court was criticized for handing down temporary unsigned orders with little or no explanation.
That practice arose in 2017 in response to Trump’s use of executive orders to make abrupt, far-reaching changes in the law. In response, Democratic state attorneys and lawyers for progressive groups sued in friendly forums such as Seattle, San Francisco and Boston and won rulings from district judges who put Trump’s policies on hold.
The 2017 “travel ban” announced in Trump’s first week in the White House set the pattern. It suspended the entry of visitors and migrants from Venezuela and seven mostly-Muslim countries on the grounds that those countries had weak vetting procedures.
Judges blocked it from taking effect, and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, saying the order discriminated based on nationality.
A year later, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and upheld Trump’s order in a 5-4 ruling. Roberts pointed out that Congress in the immigration laws clearly gave this power to the president. If he “finds that the entry of … any class of aliens … would be detrimental,” it says, he may “suspend the entry” of all such migrants for as long as “he shall deem necessary.”
Since then, Roberts and the court’s conservatives have been less willing to stand aside while federal judges hand down nationwide rulings.
Democrats saw the same problem when Biden was president.
In April 2023, a federal judge in west Texas ruled for anti-abortion advocates and decreed that the Food and Drug Administration had wrongly approved abortion pills that can end an early pregnancy. He ordered that they be removed from the market before any appeals could be heard and decided.
The Biden administration filed an emergency appeal. Two weeks later, the Supreme Court set aside the judge’s order, over dissents from Thomas and Alito.
The next year, the court heard arguments and then threw out the entire lawsuit on the grounds that abortion foes did not have standing to sue.
Since Trump returned to the White House, the court’s conservative majority has not deferred to district judges. Instead, it has repeatedly lifted injunctions that blocked Trump’s policies from taking effect.
Although these are not final rulings, they are strong signs that the administration will prevail.
In November, the justices sounded skeptical of Trump’s claim that a 1977 trade law, which did not mention tariffs, gave him the power to set these import taxes on products coming from around the world.
In the spring, the court will hear Trump’s claim that he can change the principle of birthright citizenship set in the 14th Amendment and deny citizenship it to newborns whose parents are here illegally or entered as visitors.
Rulings on both cases will be handed down by late June.
WASHINGTON — The day after Christmas is typically quiet in the nation’s capital. But President Trump’s decision to acknowledge a covert U.S. strike on Venezuelan territory, in an interview with an obscure local news outlet on Friday, set off a scramble in a drowsy Washington that has become a hallmark of the president.
Officials working on Latin America policy for the administration that had been closely tracking reports of refinery fires and other curious events throughout Venezuela couldn’t immediately figure out which target the president was talking about, three sources familiar with the matter told The Times.
Trump would later detail that the strike targeted a “dock area where they load the boats up with drugs.” But initial confusion from within his own government signaled just how tight a circle within the West Wing is determining whether to climb the escalation ladder toward war with Caracas.
Trump initially confirmed he had authorized CIA actions in Venezuela in an exchange with reporters on October. While the administration is obligated to report covert CIA operations to Congress, more robust congressional authorization is required for the use of military force.
“I authorized for two reasons, really. No. 1, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America,” Trump said at the time. “And the other thing, the drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela, and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea.”
The strike comes as Venezuelan authorities have increased the number of U.S. citizens detained in their custody, the New York Times first reported on Friday. Caracas had freed 17 Americans and permanent residents held in notorious Venezuelan prisons at the start of the Trump administration.
Evan Ellis, who served in Trump’s first term planning State Department policy on Latin America, the Caribbean and international narcotics, said it was “unclear whether the initial plan was for this operation to be publicly announced in an interview by the president.” Venezuela’s dictatorial president, Nicolás Maduro, “was certainly confused about it,” he said.
“It would make sense for them to do something like that, rather then a military strike, especially right now when there’s a delicate line between military operations and other things,” Ellis added. “My sense is — to the extent the president has acknowledged it — that this was them carrying out their mission to shape the battlespace in support of broader national objectives.”
Trump has repeatedly told the media that Maduro’s days in power are numbered. The administration refers to him and his regime as an illegitimate narco-state terrorizing American communities. On a bipartisan basis, going back to Trump’s first term and throughout the Biden administration, the United States has recognized a democratic opposition in Venezuela as its rightful government.
But a military war on the drug trade would make little sense targeting Venezuela, where only a fraction of illicit narcotics smuggled into the United States originate. Trump has hinted in recent weeks at other motives driving his calculus.
Over the last four months, the Trump administration slowly ramped up its pressure campaign on Maduro, first by targeting boats allegedly carrying narcotics and drug smugglers in international waters before announcing a blockade of Venezuelan oil tankers. Venezuela’s oil exports have consequently plummeted by half over the course of the last month.
On Wednesday, the Treasury Department also issued sanctions against four companies that it said were either operating in Venezuela’s oil sector or as accompanying oil tankers.
“Maduro’s regime increasingly depends on a shadow fleet of worldwide vessels to facilitate sanctionable activity, including sanctions evasion, and to generate revenue for its destabilizing operations,” the department said in a statement. “Today’s action further signals that those involved in the Venezuelan oil trade continue to face significant sanctions risks.”
The Pentagon, meanwhile, has stationed nearly a quarter of the U.S. naval fleet in the Caribbean since the summer, in what Trump has referred to as a “massive armada” without precedent in the region.
While Venezuela’s current oil output is modest, the nation sits on the world’s largest known oil reserves, offering significant potential access to any future strategic partners. China is currently the largest importer of Venezuelan oil, and at least one tanker subjected to the U.S. blockade has sought protection from Moscow, Maduro’s chief military ally.
Addressing the blockade in an exchange with reporters, Trump said he had spoken with top U.S. oil executives about what the Venezuelan market would look like with Maduro no longer in power. And he suggested the U.S. government would keep whatever barrels are seized, hearkening back to Trump’s campaign, throughout the 2010s, for the United States to control the oil fields of Iraq as the spoils of its war there.
“We’re going to keep it,” Trump said last week, of the 1.9 million barrels of Venezuelan oil on the first tanker seized. “Maybe we’ll sell it. Maybe we’ll keep it. Maybe we’ll use it in the strategic reserves. We’re keeping it.”
eSchool News is counting down the 10 most-read stories of 2025. Story #1 focuses on the Trump Administration’s goal of dismantling the U.S. Department of Education.
Key points:
In light of Donald Trump assuming a second presidential term in 2025, conversations concerning dismantling the United States Department of Education have resurfaced. Supporters argue that federal involvement in education undermines state authority, while critics fear that removing the federal role could exacerbate inequities and hinder national progress. To evaluate the proposal, it is crucial to examine the federal and state roles in education, the historical and constitutional context, and the potential benefits and challenges of such a shift.
The federal role in education
The United States Constitution does not explicitly grant the federal government authority over education. As Lunenberg et al. (2012) noted, “Education is not a function specifically delegated to the federal government” (p. 327). Instead, under the Tenth Amendment, powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved for the states (McCarthy et al., 2019). This leaves education primarily under state jurisdiction, with federal involvement historically limited to indirect support rather than direct control.
The United States Department of Education was established in 1979. It is responsible for overseeing federal funding for schools, enforcing federal laws in education, and ensuring equal access for students across the country. Furthermore, it has played a significant role through legislation such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and its successors: NCLB (No Child Left Behind) and ESSA (the Every Student Succeeds Act). These laws link federal funding to specific requirements, which aim to address inequities in education. Currently, federal contributions account for approximately 8 percent of funding for elementary and secondary education, with the remaining 92 percent coming from state and local sources (“The Federal Role,” 2017).
The role of state and local control in education
Education policy and administration have traditionally been state functions. States determine funding formulas, establish teacher certification requirements, and oversee curricula through their departments and boards of education (Lynch, 2016). Governors and state legislatures allocate funds, which are often distributed to schools based on enrollment, need, or specific programs (Lunenberg et al., 2012).
Local school boards also play a critical role, managing day-to-day operations and responding to community needs. This decentralized structure reflects a longstanding belief that local authorities are better positioned to address the diverse needs of their communities. However, it has also led to significant disparities between states and districts in terms of funding, resources, and student outcomes.
Dismantling the United States Department of Education
One of the most compelling arguments for dismantling the United States Department of Education lies in the principle of localized control. Critics argue that education is best managed by state and local governments because they are closer to the specific needs of their communities. Localized governance could allow schools to tailor their policies, curriculum, and resource allocation in ways that best fit the unique demographics of their regions. For example, schools in rural areas may have vastly different needs than those in urban centers, which is why local authorities are likely better equipped to address these disparities without the interference of federal oversight.
The concern extends beyond general education. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which is enforced by the United States Department of Education, mandates that students with disabilities receive free and appropriate public education (FAPE) along with necessary services and accommodations. Similarly, the department oversees federal programs that support English Language Learner (ELL) students by helping schools provide tailored instruction and resources to students who are not native English speakers. Without federal oversight, it is possible that these programs could lose funding or be inconsistently applied across states, causing vulnerable populations to be without critical support.
Advocates of dismantling the United States Department of Education also point to the financial burden of maintaining a federal agency. They argue that billions of dollars allocated to the department could be redirected to state education budgets, thereby allowing for more impactful initiatives at the forefront. By eliminating bureaucratic layers, states could potentially deliver education funding more efficiently, thereby focusing resources directly on teachers, classrooms, and students.
Another critical function of the United States Department of Education is establishing and enforcing national education standards. Programs such as NCLB and ESSA aim to hold schools accountable for student performance and ensure consistency across states (albeit, there are arguments those programs have led to a culture of “teaching to the test” and have stifled creativity in the classroom), but allowing states and local districts to have greater freedom to design their own standards and assessments may fostering innovation while also leading to the quality of education varying dramatically from state to state and can cause challenges for students in transient populations due to a lack of cohesion disrupting their education and limiting their opportunities.
Keeping the United States Department of Education
Dismantling the United States Department of Education raises significant concerns about equity. The department plays a crucial role in addressing disparities in funding education, as well as in funding access. Federal programs (i.e., Title I, free meals, counseling, after-school programs, etc.) provide additional resources to schools serving high numbers of low-income students, many of which are located in inner-city areas. Without the United States Department of Education, these programs might be eliminated or left to the discretion of states that have historically struggled to prioritize funding for underserved communities.
Inner-city urban schools often face unique challenges (i.e., overcrowding, insufficient funding, higher rates of poverty among students, etc.). Many of these schools also serve disproportionately high numbers of students with disabilities and ELL students, thereby making federal support even more vital. The United States Department of Education enforces civil rights protections that ensures that all students (including vulnerable subgroups) receive equitable treatment. Dismantling the department could weaken these safeguards, thereby leaving marginalized communities more vulnerable to neglect. Therefore, the loss of federal oversight is a serious concern for public education. Historically, states have not always allocated resources equitably, and urban school districts have often been underfunded compared to their suburban counterparts. Federal intervention has been essential in addressing these disparities. Without it, inner-city schools may struggle to maintain even basic standards of education, thereby exacerbating poverty and inequality.
All schools (not just inner-city schools) will be adversely impacted by dismantling the United States Department of Education. Federal funding supports Advanced Placement (AP) courses, STEM initiatives, and dual-enrollment opportunities. Dismantling the United States Department of Education could lead to inconsistencies in college admissions processes because states might adopt different graduation requirements and assessments. This lack of standardization could complicate admissions for students applying to out-of-state or prestigious universities. Furthermore, the United States Department of Education funds research initiatives that lead to the development of new teaching methods, technologies, and curricula. These innovations often benefit all schools, but without federal support, such research might stagnate leaving schools without access to cutting-edge educational resources.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the debate pertaining to dismantling the United States Department of Education has taken on new urgency under the Trump administration in 2025. While advocates of dismantling the department argue for greater local control and efficiency, the critics highlight the potential risks to equity and access. As the nation grapples with this issue, it is essential to prioritize the needs of students (and communities). The ultimate goal must be to create a more equitable and effective education system that serves all students regardless of their background or zip code.
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Dr. Yuvraj Verma, Bessemer City Middle School and William Howard Taft University
After a rudderless year and an exodus of around 4,000 employees due to Trump administration cuts, NASA got what may be its first piece of good news recently. On December 17, the Senate confirmed billionaire Jared Isaacman as the agency’s new administrator. He now holds the power to rehabilitate a battered engine of scientific research, or steer it towards even more disruption.
Considering the caliber of President Trump’s other appointees, Isaacman is probably the best candidate for the job. Outside of being a successful entrepreneur, he has flown fighter jets and been to space twice as part of the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn private missions. One of those flights saw him complete the first commercial space walk, and travel farther from Earth than any human since the end of the Apollo program.
“Perfect is the enemy of the good. Isaacman checks a lot of boxes,” says Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and the founder of NASA Watch, a blog dedicated to the agency. “He’s passed every requirement to fly in a spacecraft that American astronauts at NASA are required to pass. He also went out of his way to have a diverse crew, and shove as much science as he could in those missions.”
And yet if you’re a NASA employee or just someone who cares about the agency’s work, there are still plenty of reasons to be concerned for its future. When Trump first nominated Isaacman in the spring, the billionaire wrote a 62-page document detailing his vision for NASA. In November, Politicoobtained a copy of that plan, titled Project Athena.
To some insiders, Project Athena painted a picture of someone who, at least at the time when it was written, fundamentally misunderstood how NASA works and how scientific discovery is funded in the US and elsewhere. It also suggests Isaacman may be more open to Trump’s NASA agenda than would appear at first glance.
When asked about the plan by Politico, one former NASA official characterized it as “bizarre and careless.” Another called it “presumptuous,” given many of the proposed changes to the agency’s structure would require Congressional approval. In one section, Isaacman recommended taking “NASA out of the taxpayer funded climate science business and [leaving] it for academia to determine.” In another section, he promised to evaluate the “relevance and ongoing necessity” of every agency center, particularly NASA’s iconic Jet Propulsion Laboratory, saying the facility and others must increase the “output and time to science KPI.”
A lot has changed since Isaacman first wrote that document. It came before the workforce cuts, before the future of Goddard Space Flight Center became uncertain and before Trump surprised everyone by renominating Isaacman. But during his Senate testimony earlier this month, the billionaire said “I do stand behind everything in the document, even though it was written seven months ago. I think it was all directionally correct.”
He did appear to distance himself from some viewpoints expressed in or inferred by Project Athena, however. Isaacman stated that “anything suggesting that I am anti-science or want to outsource that responsibility is simply untrue.” He also came out against the administration’s plan to cut NASA’s science budget nearly in half, claiming the proposals would not lead to “an optimal outcome.”
One thing is clear, Isaacman is not your typical bureaucrat. “One of the pitfalls of some prior NASA administrators has been that they’ve shown too much reverence for the internal processes and bureaucratic structure of the agency to the detriment of decision-making and performance,” said Casey Drier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for the exploration and study of space. “Isaacman has positioned himself as the opposite of that. Clearly, that’s something that could lead to a lot of political and congressional challenges if taken too far.”
Even if Isaacman doesn’t follow through on any of the proposals made in Project Athena, there’s only so much a NASA administrator — even one sympathetic to civil servants working under them — can do.
“Once a budget request goes out publicly, everyone in the administration has to defend it. Anything he does will have to be internal and private,” Drier explains. “He never explicitly criticized the administration during his hearing. He’s also coming relatively late in the budget process.”
A lot of NASA’s future will depend on the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is responsible for implementing the president’s agenda across the executive branch. As a direct result of guidance the OMB issued over the summer, NASA awarded 25 percent fewer new grants in 2025 than it did on average between 2020 and 2024.
“The OMB has added layers of requirements that scientists now have to go through to spend the money they’ve already been allocated. The administration has worked against its own stated goals of efficiency,” Drier said. “Isaacman can’t solve that himself. He can’t tell the OMB what to do. That’s going to be a serious challenge.”
Looming over everything is the fact NASA still does not have a full-year budget for 2026. Congress has until January 30 to fund NASA and the rest of the federal government before the short-term funding bill it passed on November 12 runs out. “On paper, the official policy of the administration is still to terminate a third of NASA’s scientific capability,” Drier points out.
There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic. Publicly, both the House and Senate have come out against Trump’s funding cuts. And some science missions that were slated to be cancelled, such as OSIRIS-APEX, have been approved for another full year of operations.
What NASA needs now is someone who will, as Drier puts it, “vigorously advocate” for the agency in whatever way they can. It remains to be seen if that’s Jared Isaacman.
WASHINGTON — More than a quarter of federal immigration judges in California have been fired, retired or quit since the start of the Trump administration.
The reduction follows a trend in immigration courts nationwide and constitutes, critics say, an attack on the rule of law that will lead to yet more delays in an overburdened court system.
The reduction in immigration judges has come as the administration scaled up efforts to deport immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. Trump administration officials have described the immigration court process, in which proceedings can take years amid a backlog of millions of cases, as an impediment to their goals.
Nationwide, there were 735 immigration judges last fiscal year, according to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the arm of the Justice Department that houses immigration courts. At least 97 have been fired since President Trump took office and about the same number have resigned or retired, according to the union representing immigration judges.
California has lost at least 35 immigration judges since January, according to Mobile Pathways, a Berkeley-based organization that analyzes immigration court data. That’s down from 132. The steepest drop occurred at the San Francisco Immigration Court, which has lost more than half its bench.
“A noncitizen might win their case, might lose their case, but the key question is, did they receive a hearing?” said Emmett Soper, who worked at the Justice Department before becoming an immigration judge in Virginia in 2017. “Up until this administration, I had always been confident that I was working in a system that, despite its flaws, was fundamentally fair.”
Our government institutions are losing their legitimacy
— Amber George, former San Francisco Immigration Court judge
The administration intends to fill some judge positions, and in new immigration judge job listings in Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere seeks candidates who want to be a “deportation judge” and “restore integrity and honor to our Nation’s Immigration Court system.”
The immigration judges union called the job listings “insulting.”
Trump wrote on Truth Social in April that he was elected to “remove criminals from our Country, but the Courts don’t seem to want me to do that.”
“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” he added.
The National Assn. of Immigration Judges said it expects a wave of additional retirements at the end of this month.
“My biggest concern is for the people whose lives are left in limbo. What can they count on when the ground is literally shifting every moment that they’re here?” said Amber George, who was fired last month from the San Francisco Immigration Court. “Our government institutions are losing their legitimacy.”
Because immigration courts operate under the Justice Department, their priorities typically shift from one presidential administration to the next, but the extreme changes taking place have renewed longtime calls for immigration courts to become independent of the executive branch.
The Trump administration recently added 36 judges; 25 of them are military lawyers serving in temporary positions.
This summer, the Pentagon authorized up to 600 military lawyers to work for the Department of Justice. That took place after the department changed the requirements for temporary immigration judges, removing the need for immigration law experience.
The Department of Justice did not respond to specific questions, but said judges must be impartial and that the agency is obligated to take action against those who demonstrate systemic bias.
Former judges say that, because terminations have happened with no advance notice, remaining court staff have often scrambled to get up to speed on reassigned cases.
Ousted judges described a pattern: In the afternoon, sometimes while presiding over a hearing, they receive a short email stating that they are being terminated pursuant to Article II of the Constitution. Their names are swiftly removed from the Justice Department website.
Jeremiah Johnson is one of five judges terminated recently from the San Francisco Immigration Court.
Johnson said he worries the Trump administration is circumventing immigration courts by making conditions so unbearable that immigrants decide to drop their cases.
The number of detained immigrants has climbed to record levels since January, with more than 65,000 in custody. Immigrants and lawyers say the conditions are inhumane, alleging medical neglect, punitive solitary confinement and obstructed access to legal counsel. Requests by immigrants for voluntary departure, which avoids formal deportation, have surged in recent months.
Many of those arrests have happened at courthouses, causing immigrants to avoid their legal claims out of fear of being detained and forcing judges to order them removed in absentia.
“Those are ways to get people to leave the United States without seeing a judge, without due process that Congress has provided,” Johnson said. “It’s a dismantling of the court system.”
A sign posted outside the San Francisco Immigration Court in October protests enforcement actions by immigration agents. The court has lost more than half of its immigration judges.
(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)
The judges in San Francisco’s Immigration Court have historically had higher asylum approval rates than the national average. Johnson said grant rates depend on a variety of circumstances, including whether a person is detained or has legal representation, their country of origin and whether they are adults or children.
In November, the military judges serving in immigration courts heard 286 cases and issued rulings in 110, according to Mobile Pathways. The military judges issued deportation orders in 78% of the cases — more often than other immigration judges that month, who ordered deportations in 63% of cases.
“They’re probably following directions — and the military is very good at following directions — and it’s clear what their directions are that are given by this administration,” said Mobile Pathways co-founder Bartlomiej Skorupa. He cautioned that 110 cases are a small sample size and that trends will become clearer in the coming months.
Former immigration judges and their advocates say that appointing people with no immigration experience and little training makes for a steep learning curve and the possibility of due process violations.
“There are multiple concerns here: that they’re temporary, which could expose them to greater pressure to decide cases in a certain way; and also they lack experience in immigration law, which is an extremely complex area of practice,” said Ingrid Eagly, an immigration law professor at UCLA.
Immigration courts have a backlog of more than 3 million cases. Anam Petit, who served as an immigration judge in Virginia until September, said the administration’s emphasis on speedy case completions has to be balanced against the constitutional right to a fair hearing.
“There are not enough judges to hear those cases, and this administration [is] taking it upon themselves to fire a lot of experienced and trained judges who can hear those cases and can mitigate that backlog,” she said.
Complementary bills introduced in the U.S. Senate and House this month by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Rep. Juan Vargas (D-San Diego) would prevent the appointment of military lawyers as temporary immigration judges and impose a two-year limit of service.
“The Trump administration’s willingness to fire experienced immigration judges and hire inexperienced or temporary ‘deportation judges,’ especially in places like California, has fundamentally impacted the landscape of our justice system,” Schiff said in a statement announcing the bill.
The bills have little chance in the Republican-controlled Congress but illustrate how significantly Democrats — especially in California — oppose the administration’s changes to immigration courts.
Former Immigration Judge Tania Nemer, a dual citizen of Lebanon and the U.S., sued the Justice Department and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi this month, alleging that she was illegally terminated in February because of her gender, ethnic background and political affiliation. In 2023, Nemer ran for judicial office in Ohio as a Democrat.
Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, seen here at the White House in October, has dismissed complaints by a former immigration judge who alleged she was fired without cause.
“Most recently, yesterday, I was sued by an immigration judge who we fired,” she said Dec. 2. “One of the reasons she said she was a woman. Last I checked, I was a woman as well.”
Other former judges have challenged their terminations through the federal Merit Systems Protection Board.
Johnson, of San Francisco, is one of those. He filed his appeal this month, claiming that he was not given cause for termination.
“My goal is to be reinstated,” he said. “My colleagues on the bench, our court was vibrant. It was a good place to work, despite all the pressures.”
The Trump administration and House Republicans advanced measures this week to end gender-affirming care for transgender children and some young adults, drawing outrage and resistance from LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations, families with transgender kids, medical providers and some of California’s liberal leaders.
The latest efforts — which seek to ban such care nationwide, strip funding from hospitals that provide it and punish doctors and parents who perform or support it — follow earlier executive orders from President Trump and work by the Justice Department to rein in such care.
Many hospitals, including in California, have already curtailed such care or shuttered their gender-affirming care programs as a result.
Abigail Jones, a 17-year-old transgender activist from Riverside, called the moves “ridiculous” and dangerous, as such care “saves lives.”
She also called them a purely political act by Republicans intent on making transgender people into a “monster” to rally their base against, and one that is “going to backfire on them because they’re not focusing on what the people want,” such as affordability and lower healthcare costs.
On Wednesday, the House passed a sweeping ban on gender-affirming care for youth that was put forward by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), largely along party lines.
The bill — which faces a tougher road in the U.S. Senate — bars already rare gender-affirming surgeries but also more common treatments such as hormone therapies and puberty blockers for anyone under 18. It also calls for the criminal prosecution of doctors and other healthcare workers who provide such care, and for penalties for parents who facilitate or consent to it being performed on their children.
“Children are not old enough to vote, drive, or get a tattoo and they are certainly not old enough to be chemically castrated or permanently mutilated!!!” Greene posted on X.
“The tide is turning and I’m so grateful that congress is taking measurable steps to end this practice that destroyed my childhood,” posted Chloe Cole, a prominent “detransitioner” who campaigns against gender-affirming care for children, which she received and now regrets.
Queer rights groups denounced the measure as a dangerous threat to medical providers and parents, and one that mischaracterizes legitimate care backed by major U.S. medical associations. They also called it a threat to LGBTQ+ rights more broadly.
“Should this bill become law, doctors could face the threat of prison simply for doing their jobs and providing the care they were trained to deliver. Parents could be criminalized and even imprisoned for supporting their children and ensuring they receive prescribed medication,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the nation’s leading LGBTQ+ rights groups.
On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are proposing new rules that would ban such care by medical providers that participate in its programs — which includes nearly all U.S. hospitals. The health department said the move is “designed to ensure that the U.S. government will not be in business with organizations that intentionally or unintentionally inflict permanent harm on children.”
The department said officials will propose additional rules to prohibit Medicaid or federal Children’s Health Insurance Program funding from being used for gender-affirming care for children or for young adults under the age of 19, and that its Office of Civil Rights would be proposing a rule to exclude gender dysphoria as a covered disability.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, issued warning letters to manufacturers of certain medical devices, including breast binders, that marketing their products to transgender youth is illegal.
“Under my leadership, and answering President Trump’s call to action, the federal government will do everything in its power to stop unsafe, irreversible practices that put our children at risk,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement. “Our children deserve better — and we are delivering on that promise.”
The proposed rule changes are subject to public comment, and the Human Rights Campaign and other LGBTQ+ organizations, including the Los Angeles LGBT Center, urged their supporters to voice their opposition.
Joe Hollendoner, the center’s chief executive, said the proposed changes “cruelly target transgender youth” and will “destabilize safety-net hospitals” and other critical care providers.
“Hospitals should never be forced to choose between providing lifesaving care to transgender young people and delivering critical services like cancer treatment to other patients,” Hollendoner said. “Yet this is exactly the division and harm these rules are designed to create.”
Hollendoner noted that California hospitals such as Children’s Hospital Los Angeles have already curtailed their gender-affirming services in the face of earlier threats from the Trump administration, and thousands of transgender youth have already lost access to care.
Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a statement contrasting the Trump administration’s moves with California’s new partnership with The Trevor Project, to improve training for the state’s 988 crisis and suicide hotline for vulnerable youth, including LGBTQ+ kids at disproportionately high risk of suicide and mental health issues.
“As the Trump administration abandons the well-being of LGBTQ youth, California is putting more resources toward providing vulnerable kids with the mental health support they deserve,” Newsom said.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office is already suing the Trump administration for its efforts to curtail gender-affirming care and target providers of such care in California, where it is protected and supported by state law. His office has also resisted Trump administration efforts to roll back other transgender rights, including in youth sports.
On Thursday, Bonta said the proposed rules were “the Trump Administration’s latest attempt to strip Americans of the care they need to live as their authentic selves.” He also said they are “unlawful,” and that his office will fight them.
“If the Trump Administration puts forth final rules similar to these proposals, we stand ready to use every tool in our toolbox to prevent them from ever going into effect,” Bonta said — adding that “medically necessary gender-affirming care remains protected by California law.”
Arne Johnson, a Bay Area father of a transgender child who helps run a group of similar families called Rainbow Families Action, said there has been “a lot of hate spewed” toward them in recent days, but they are focused on fighting back — and asking hospital networks to “not panic and shut down care” based on proposed rules that have not been finalized.
Johnson said Republicans and Trump administration officials are “weirdly obsessed” with transgender kids’ bodies, are “breaking the trust between us and our doctors,” and are putting politics in between families and their healthcare providers in dangerous ways.
He said parents of transgender kids are “used to being hurt and upset and sad and worried about their kids, and also doing everything in their power to make sure that nothing bad happens to them,” and aren’t about to stop fighting now.
But resisting such medical interference isn’t just about gender-affirming care. Next it could be over vaccines being blocked for kids, he said — which should get all parents upset and vocal.
“If our kids don’t get care, they’re coming for your kids next,” Johnson said. “Pretty soon all of us are going to be going into hospital rooms wondering whether that doctor across from us can be trusted to give our kid the best care — or if their hands are going to be tied.”
