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The US Senate has passed a six-month spending bill on a 54-46 vote, narrowly avoiding a government shutdown. The bill is now headed to Donald Trump’s desk for signing.
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The US Senate has passed a six-month spending bill on a 54-46 vote, narrowly avoiding a government shutdown. The bill is now headed to Donald Trump’s desk for signing.
The family of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, has released a video of his arrest by plainclothes immigration officers. The video, recorded by his wife Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant, shows immigration agents confronting Khalil and informing him that he is ‘going to be under arrest’ and ordering him to ‘stop resisting’.
The US Senate passed the Halt Fentanyl Act on Friday on a roll call vote of 84-16. The act would impose harsher penalties on people who traffic the drug and would reclassify fentanyl as a schedule one substance, a classification for drugs that have a high potential for abuse.
Donald Trump is cancelling the construction of a new FBI headquarters in Maryland. The FBI is currently based in downtown Washington DC, but has long been eyeing a move to the city’s suburbs.
Speaking to reporters after a meeting with G7 foreign ministers in Canada, secretary of state Marco Rubio has warned that more visas of anti-war protesters who are on temporary status in the US will be revoked, Reuters reports.
The family of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, has released a video of his arrest by plainclothes immigration officers. The video, recorded by his wife Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant, shows immigration agents confronting Khalil and informing him that he is ‘going to be under arrest’ and ordering him to ‘stop resisting’.
The agents then handcuffed Khalil and took him into a car, refusing to give Abdalla their names when she asked for them. Khalil, a legal US resident and a green card holder, was sent to an immigration detention center in Louisiana and is being threatened with deportation over his participation in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University.
In a statement, Abdalla described the video as “the most terrifying moment of my life.”
This felt like a kidnapping because it was: Officers in plainclothes — who refused to show us a warrant, speak with our attorney, or even tell us their names — forced my husband into an unmarked car and took him away from me. They threatened to take me too, even though we were calm and fully cooperating. For the next 38 hours after this video, neither I or our lawyers knew where Mahmoud was being held. Now, he’s over 1,000 miles from home, still being wrongfully detained by US immigration,” Abdalla said.
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The US Senate has passed a six-month spending bill on a 54-46 vote, narrowly avoiding a government shutdown. The bill is now headed to Donald Trump’s desk for signing.
Ten democrats just voted to advance the government spending bill, the Associated Press reports. They are:
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer
Sen Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second highest-ranking Senate Democrat
Sen Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats
Sen Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada
Sen John Fetterman of Pennsylvania
Sen Gary Peters of Michigan
Sen Kirsten Gillibrand of New York
Sen Brian Schatz of Hawaii
Sen Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire
Sen Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire
A spending bill to avert a partial government shutdown has narrowly cleared a key procedural hurdle in the Senate, paving the way for passage as a midnight deadline looms.
Ten Democrats joined with Republicans to clear the 60-vote threshold needed to advance the measure. Democrats confronted two painful options Friday as a midnight deadline loomed. They could allow the passage of a bill they believe gives President Donald Trump vast discretion on spending decisions.
Or they could vote no and let funding lapse. The top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer, said Democrats really didn’t have a choice because a shutdown would have far worse consequences for Americans.
The US Senate passed the Halt Fentanyl Act on Friday on a roll call vote of 84-16. The act would impose harsher penalties on people who traffic the drug and would reclassify fentanyl as a schedule one substance, a classification for drugs that have a high potential for abuse.
Senator Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Senate judiciary committee, applauded the bill’s passage in a statement saying,
Together, we’ve taken steps to open the doors of research to permanently schedule the deadliest substances the United States has ever faced and to send a clear message that Congress is willing and ready to act.
Together, we’ve taken an important step to live up to our commitment to our constituents and to the loved ones lost – to put them first and to serve them.”
The US Justice department is investigating whether Columbia University concealed “illegal aliens” on its campus, according to a top US justice department official. Agents with the Department of Homeland Security searched two university residences with a warrant Thursday evening.
No one was arrested, and it was unclear whom the authorities were searching for. But by Friday afternoon US officials had announced developments related to two people they had pursued in connection with the demonstrations.
A Columbia doctoral student from India whose visa was revoked by the Trump administration fled the US on an airliner. A Palestinian woman who had been arrested during the protests at the university last April was arrested by federal immigration authorities in Newark, New Jersey.
Donald Trump just made a little bit of local news: he’s cancelling the construction of a new FBI headquarters in Maryland.
The FBI is currently based in downtown Washington DC, but has long been eyeing a move to the city’s suburbs. After years of wrangling by the congressional delegations of Maryland and Virginia, the federal government selected the former as the site of the new HQ, but Trump says he’ll put a stop to that:
You have that big FBI building, and it’s a very big building, and they were going to build an FBI headquarters three hours away in Maryland, a liberal state, but that has no bearing on what I’m about to say. But we’re going to stop it, not going to let that happen. We’re going to build another big FBI building right where it is, which would have been the right place, because the FBI and the DoJ have to be near each other.
The president said he had discussed it with FBI director Kash Patel, who said he preferred a smaller building:
He said, I’m just going to take a old Department of Commerce building that’s about 25% the size, and that’s what I need. We’re going to have the best staff that you’ve ever seen, and that’s what I need. It’s in a nice location, but I don’t need that big building.
With the niceties out of the way, Donald Trump is laying into Joe Biden and his attorney general Merrick Garland, airing a mostly familiar list of grievances about their administration.
“There could be no more heinous betrayal of American values than to use the law to terrorize the innocent and reward the wicked. That’s what they were doing at a level that’s never been seen before, and it’s exactly what you saw with Joe Biden Merrick Garland and their cronies,” Trump said.
Turning to his familiar rhetoric over immigration, Trump said of Biden: “They imported illegal alien murderers, drug dealers and child predators from all over the world to come into our country, while putting elderly Christians and anti-abortion activists on trial for singing hymns and for saying prayers.”
While Biden did preside over large levels of undocumented border crossings, there’s no evidence they encouraged them to enter, and it was widely viewed as a political liability for the president.
And as he often does, Trump has also repeatedly referenced the long saga of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Trump has thus far confined his remarks to recognizing the team at the justice department, including attorney general Pam Bondi and Emil Bove, who was previously his defense attorney and acted as deputy attorney general for the first few weeks of his term.
“We’re turning the page on four long years of corruption, weaponization and surrender to violent criminals, and we’re restoring fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law. And you’re the people that are doing it,” Trump said.
