Trump Makes Stunning Deal With Mexican Cartel Leader

The Trump administration has reportedly cut a deal with a former cartel boss in Mexico, with 17 family members being allowed to enter the United States.

Mexican Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch confirmed in a radio interview that the family of Ovidio Guzmán Lopez, the son of notorious cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, were allowed to enter the U.S., the Associated Press reports.

Guzmán Lopez took over a faction of the Sinaloa cartel after his dad was captured and imprisoned, before he himself was extradited to the U.S. in 2023. Garcia Harfuch said that Guzmán Lopez had been sharing dirt on other criminal organizations as part of a likely cooperation agreement with the U.S.

“It is evident that his family is going to the U.S. because of a negotiation or an offer that the Department of Justice is giving him,” Garcia Harfuch said. Video reportedly surfaced of cartel family members carrying suitcases while crossing the border near Tijuana, Mexico, while U.S. officials waited.

The news comes on the same day that the Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office announced that top leaders of the Sinaloa cartel were being charged with “narcoterrorism.” U.S. Attorney Adam Gordon for the Southern District of California didn’t comment on the deal, but issued a threat.

“Let me be direct, to the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, you are no longer the hunters, you are the hunted. You will be betrayed by your friends, you will be hounded by your enemies, and you will ultimately find yourself and your face here in a courtroom in the Southern District of California,” Gordon said, according to the AP.

The deal is a shocking development considering that President Trump started his political career by saying, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best.”

“They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems,” Trump said in his 2015 speech at Trump Tower in New York. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they’re telling us what we’re getting.”

Now it seems that some people with connections to cartel leaders, who are guilty of those things, get the privilege of coming to the U.S. How does Trump explain this decision?

Donald Trump’s tax promises for the middle and working classes are actually not in his tax proposal.

The president has trumpeted the extension of his 2017 tax plan, attempting to make the bill more palatable to non-millionaires by claiming that it would end tax on tips, overtime, and Social Security benefits. But as it turns out, none of that is actually in the text of the bill.

During a heated exchange between Representative Tom Suozzi and Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff on the Joint Committee of Taxation, it became abundantly clear that none of those promises would be happening.

“On tips—the president said, ‘Your tips will be a 100 percent yours.’ Does this tax bill continue the payroll tax on people’s tips?” asked Suozzi.

“Yes it does,” said Barthold.

“Overtime. The president said, ‘Your overtime will be tax-free.’ Does this bill continue the payroll tax on overtime?” continued Suozzi.

“It does not exempt overtime from payroll tax,” said Barthold.

“The president said he’s going to remove taxes from Social Security,” pressed Suozzi. “Does this bill remove taxes on Social Security benefits?”

“The legislation provides an increased exception amount—” Barthold began, before Suozzi interrupted.

“But does it remove taxes on Social Security benefits?” reiterated Suozzi.

“It does not change Social Security,” Barthold said.

And while middle- and working-class Americans get shafted by the bill on what Trump promised them, the wealthy will continue to benefit from the president’s bill—even if it’s not what he claims he wants.

NBC reported Thursday that Trump pressed House Speaker Mike Johnson to raise the top income tax rate to close the carried interest loophole, raising the 37 percent tax rate to 2017 levels—39.6 percent—for Americans making $2.5 million or more.

But when Suozzi asked if the reconciliation bill included “an increase in the tax rate for the wealthiest people in the United States of America,” the answer wasn’t so promising.

“The legislation before you extends permanently the top bracket at 37 percent,” Barthold said.

“So it does not return it to what it was at 39.6 [percent]?” Suozzi continued.

“That is correct, Mr. Suozzi,” Barthold responded.

It seems that Donald Trump is starting to sweat after getting heat for accepting what appears to be a massive bribe from the Qatari government.

The claims of corruption cracked the president’s demeanor, as he took to Truth Social to try to defend receiving a luxury jet from Qatar’s Defense Ministry, which needs to be completely rebuilt into a new Air Force One at the taxpayer’s expense.

“The Boeing 747 is being given to the United States Air Force/Department of Defense, NOT TO ME! It is a gift from a Nation, Qatar, that we have successfully defended for many years,” Trump wrote. He claimed that the jet would be used in light of delays from Boeing and that it would somehow save money.

“Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country,” Trump added.

A defensive Trump was clearly attempting to insulate himself from the backlash. He went on to repost several Truth Social posts from a few accounts praising him and defending his decision to accept the plane from Qatar. One Truth Social post shared by the president included an image of the Statue of Liberty wearing a sign that said, “Gift From a Foreign Nation.”

He shared another post from an account called Women for Trump comparing his decision to accept a luxury plane to foreign aid that the U.S. provided to countries around the world—before Trump, that is. “The Media and the left never have a problem with America giving billions of taxpayers dollars to foreign countries, but apparently getting a gift from another country is wrong!? Give me a break!” the post read.

In reality, Trump has received strong criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike. Even his far-right allies have decried the decision as clearly corrupt. But Trump’s claim that the plane wasn’t a gift to him personally isn’t true, and it isn’t even something the president actually believes.

On Tuesday, the president was asked about the gift while flying on the current Air Force One, which he complained was “much smaller, much less impressive” than the planes in the Gulf nations he was visiting this week.

“So they said to me, ‘We would like to, in effect, we would like to make a gift. You’ve done so many things and we’d like to make a gift to the Defense Department, which is where it’s going,’” Trump said.

Just because the plane is going to the Department of Defense doesn’t mean it’s not a gift to him, in return for the “many things” he’s supposedly done for Qatar. The DOD will be responsible for the expensive rebuild, as the plane needs to be outfitted with self-defense technology and electromagnetic shielding necessary for it to be used as Air Force One. As if that wasn’t already expensive enough, the plane’s software will also be subject to a pricey security sweep to ensure there is no embedded foreign technology.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid in a congressional hearing on Tuesday.

“The math is not adding up. They’re trying to convince people that they are cutting millions of undocumented people from [Medicaid],” Ocasio-Cortez said. She noted that the GOP is claiming that one million undocumented immigrants are collecting Medicaid payments, but their cuts would result in 13.7 million people losing their health insurance.

“They’ve asked us to read this bill, and we have. This bill bans the people that they kick off of Medicaid from even buying their own insurance from the Affordable Care Act exchange,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, adding that the bill “increases costs for people they do deem eligible and who are low income and forces them to pay even more.”

Ocasio-Cortez noted that people on private insurance wouldn’t be escaping consequences, either.

“And if you have a private insurer, don’t worry, you’re getting screwed over too. Because your health care premiums are going to skyrocket from the disaster that is happening from this bill,” the New York congresswoman added.

Ocasio-Cortez is correctly pointing out House Republicans’ budget plan will gut a social program that millions of Americans depend on, while also taking aim at the GOP bogeyman of Obamacare. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 8.6 million people will lose access to Medicaid, while millions more will lose health insurance by 2034 as other protections expire. Far from being a “big beautiful bill,” as Trump claims, it will worsen the quality of life for Americans who don’t have any other health care options.

The bill also punishes single parents by making it harder to receive the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as food stamps, and gives President Trump unprecedented power over nonprofit organizations. The cuts to Medicaid in the bill already face opposition from within the Republican Party. Will Congress open its eyes to the rest of the issues in the bill and say no to the GOP and the president’s cruel priorities?

Republicans contending with the prospective damage of their Medicaid cuts have decided to simply brush off the protests of their constituents as “misinformation.”

Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee went back and forth Tuesday on who exactly would be affected if conservative lawmakers trudge forward with $880 billion in cuts to the public health insurance coverage. At one point, a wheelchair-bound protester identifying herself as from Youngstown, Ohio, interrupted Alabama Representative Gary Palmer to express her fears.

“You will kill me, I’m HIV-positive,” she shouted as security rolled her out. “I have survived on my meds that are $10,000 a month.”

“If you [got] all these cuts, how the hell would I be able to shop at your store?” she added.

But Palmer was unswayed, quickly throwing aside her plea for help.

“It’s unfortunate that people are so enraged by the misinformation that they’ve been given,” he said after the protester had been removed from the room. “It’s a commentary on this Congress and how we treat people.”

The Republican bill would kick 8.6 million Americans off Medicaid over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (Republicans offered their own numbers, revealing shortly before the committee meeting was scheduled to begin that at least 7.6 million Americans would be affected.)

Republicans claim that the bulk of people who would be booted off the program include undocumented immigrants and non-disabled, jobless Americans. That could happen by way of adding a work requirement to Medicaid, which would ask recipients to navigate work-reporting and verification systems on a monthly basis—a detail that would require significant federal funding. The plans would also negate coverage for individuals who find themselves temporarily unemployed, for instance those who were recently fired or laid off.

But critics of the Republican measure argue that eligible Medicaid recipients could get strung up in these increasingly frequent eligibility checks, potentially lapsing their coverage and benefits. A February report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that introducing work requirements to the insurance program could strip upward of 36 million Americans of their health coverage—half of Medicaid’s 72 million enrollees.

Republicans have spent months attempting to pencil out an $880 billion cut to the program in order to extend Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for corporations and billionaires, in an effort to make the tax cuts’ estimated $6.8 trillion deficit hike more palatable to their base.

“Republicans are trying to say this is kind of a moderate bill,” Energy and Commerce Ranking Member Frank Pallone told reporters Monday. “Nothing could be further from the truth.

Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee may make it harder for single parents to access the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

A new provision in Republicans’ 97-page bill, rolled out Monday evening, allows for exceptions to the program’s work requirements for some able-bodied adults, including certain married parents, without making the same considerations for single parents.

The general work requirements for SNAP benefits include registering for work, participating in SNAP Employment and Training, or E&T, taking a suitable job if offered, and not voluntarily quitting or reducing work hours below 30 a week without a good reason, according to the USDA Food and Nutritional Service.

Republicans’ new bill includes a work-requirement exception for an individual who is “responsible for a dependent child 7 years of age or older and is married to, and resides with, an individual who is in compliance” with the work requirements, but contains no equivalent exception for single parents.

In 2022, children in single-parent families made up a 53 percent majority of SNAP recipients, according to a report from the Institute for Family Studies. A whopping 49 percent of those children are living with their mothers, 4 percent reside with their fathers, and 6 percent reside with relatives or foster parents.

On top of that, E&T requirements have created something of a catch-22 within the SNAP benefits program. Congress’s 2018 farm bill, which permitted paid training to be a component in E&T, inadvertently resulted in significant reduction or total loss of food assistance for beneficiaries because the earnings they made ended up counting against their eligibility.

The new legislation would tighten eligibility requirements for SNAP and place a greater financial burden on states instead of the federal government, which is looking to shed millions of dollars in spending as part of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts. Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee have been directed to find $230 billion in potential cuts.

Trump is holding hostage the emergency disaster relief and transit funding of states that don’t agree with his immigration demands, according to two lawsuits filed by several states Tuesday.

The lawsuits claim that the White House is using cuts to federal aid to threaten states into supporting President Trump’s mass deportations, putting their infrastructure and emergency response abilities at risk.

“By hanging a halt in this critical funding over states like a sword of Damocles, defendants impose immense harm on states, forcing them to choose between readiness for disasters and emergencies, on one hand, and exercising their judgment about how to best use scarce resources to investigate and prosecute crimes on the other,” a draft of one of the complaints states.

One of the parties to the lawsuits, New York, claims that it could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for bomb squads, hazmat units, emergency relief services, and SWAT teams that were vital in the state’s response to hurricanes and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Other states joining the lawsuit include California, Rhode Island, Illinois, and more than 12 others. In one of the complaints, they cite the Department of Homeland Security’s new “Standard Terms and Conditions,” which state that emergency relief grants to states depend on them providing help with deportation efforts and ending any program that “benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration.”

The other lawsuit, filed by many of the same states, is directed at the Department of Transportation over the agency’s declaration last month that it would halt funding for any state that doesn’t cooperate with the Trump administration on immigration.

“On April 24, 2025, United States Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy issued a letter to all recipients of U.S. DOT funding announcing its policy, for the first time, of imposing an immigration enforcement condition on all U.S. DOT funding,” the lawsuit draft states.

In both lawsuits, the states claim that their funding had already been approved by Congress without conditions, making the White House’s attempt to withhold funds illegal. It also seems to be an attempt by Trump to impound funds already appropriated by Congress, setting up a constitutional crisis.

But these two lawsuits aren’t even the first examples of Trump trying to withhold funds from states going against his deportation agenda: A federal judge found last month that the White House tried to secretly withhold disaster relief funds from states with immigration policies counter to Trump’s agenda. It seems that Trump is trying to strongarm state governments by using needed funding against them.

Donald Trump announced Tuesday he will lift all U.S. sanctions on Syria, but the timing of the lifted international penalties was remarkably suspicious.

“I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” Trump told an auditorium in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, describing the apparently unnecessary sanctions as “brutal and crippling.”

“In Syria, which has seen so much misery and death, there is a new government that will hopefully succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace. That’s what we want to see,” he continued. “In Syria, they’ve had their share of travesty, war, killing many years. That’s why my administration has already taken the first steps toward restoring normal relations between the United States and Syria for the first time in more than a decade.”

American caution toward Syria has spanned half a dozen administrations. Syria has been designated as a state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. since 1979, when Syrian forces occupied Lebanon. The Bush administration slammed Syria with more sanctions in 2004, condemning Syria’s “pursuit of weapons of mass destruction” and its support for Hezbollah and Hamas, U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. The Obama administration imposed more sanctions on Syria in 2011, denouncing the country’s dictator, former President Bashar Al Assad, for human rights abuses against its protesting citizens.

“We’re taking them all off,” Trump said Tuesday.

But the decision to strip what had effectively become an embargo of Syrian goods followed another important development for the Trump family: the possibility of building a Trump Tower in Syria’s capital, Damascus.

“[Syrian leader Ahmed Al Sharaa] wants a business deal for the future of his country,” pro-Trump activist Jonathan Bass—who met with Sharaa for hours in late April—told Reuters Monday.

Sharaa is working to meet face-to-face with Trump, but his priorities include economic revival, regional stability, and healed relations with Israel, according to Bass.

“He told me he wants a Trump Tower in Damascus. He wants peace with his neighbors. What he told me is good for the region, good for Israel,” Bass told the newswire.

As a reminder, it’s actually unconstitutional for presidents to profit from or receive compensation from foreign governments—but that hasn’t stopped Trump one bit. The Trump family’s Middle East real estate plans include a Trump-branded golf course in Qatar (as part of a $5.5 billion development project), a $1 billion Trump hotel and residence in Dubai, and a $2 billion cryptocurrency investment by an Abu Dhabi firm into one of Trump’s cryptocurrency projects, the World Liberty Financial coin.

The family also revealed in December that it would be expanding its presence in Saudi Arabia, announcing Trump Tower Jeddah. The price tag for the building has not been made public, but one of the developers on the project, Dar Global, compared it to another $530 million Trump Tower in the city, reported Reuters.

Donald Trump got back into his hobby of sucking up to autocratic dictators Tuesday, when the U.S. president made several effusive comments about Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

During a rambling address at a Saudi investment forum in Riyadh, the president showered the head of the country’s royal family with praise, touting the crown prince as an “incredible man.”

“We have great partners in the world, but we have none stronger, and nobody like the gentleman that’s right before me, he’s your greatest representative, your greatest representative,” Trump said, as MBS beamed up at him from the audience.

“And if I didn’t like him, I would get out of here so fast. You know that don’t you? He knows me well,” Trump said. “I do, I like him a lot. I like him too much, that’s why we give so much, you know? Too much. I like you too much!”

But who exactly does the president like so much? The 39-year-old prince rules over a modern surveillance state, where political dissent is not tolerated, and human rights standards are abysmal. MBS also serves as the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s massive sovereign wealth fund that has both facilitated and benefited from rights violations.

But still, a drowsy-sounding Trump couldn’t help from gushing over the kingdom.

“We are rockin’, the United States is the hottest country—with the exception of your country, I have to say, right?” Trump joked, addressing MBS in the crowd.

“I’m not going to take that on. No, Mohammed, I’m not gonna take that on. Wouldn’t that be a terrible thing if I made that full statement. I will not do it. You’re hotter! At least as long as I’m up here, you’re hotter.”

Trump also announced that he would be lifting sanctions against Syria to “give them a chase at greatness.” After the audience got through cheering, the president sighed, acknowledging that he’d just made a major U.S. policy shift at the behest of a foreign leader.

“Oh, what I do for the crown prince,” he said.

House Republicans’ draft budget bill includes a clause to give Donald Trump the ability to revoke the tax-exempt status of any group the Treasury Department says is a supporter of terrorism. 

The move appears to be a revival of the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, which the House passed in November under President Biden. The Senate had not taken up the measure, which drew criticism for granting dangerous powers to the president. Now those powers have resurfaced deep within the GOP’s “big beautiful bill”: on page 380, to be exact. 

Last year, 15 Democrats joined Republicans in the House to pass the anti–free speech bill, which was originally intended to help clamp down on pro-Palestinian protesters, particularly those on college campuses. Even though the bill has languished since then, Trump has still attempted to target nonprofit institutions that refuse to kowtow to him, including institutions such as Harvard University.

If the clause isn’t excised from the final bill and passes, Trump can target any nonprofit that he and the Republicans don’t like, whether they are focused on reproductive rights, climate change, refugee support, or anything else. The budget bill is going through the reconciliation process, meaning that it only requires a simple majority in the House and Senate to be passed. 

If party lines hold on this bill, the nonprofit clause can pass without a single Democratic vote. Will Democrats hold the line and try to mobilize to remove the anti-nonprofit clause? Or will the caucus once again be divided, with some Democrats supporting the measure?