U.S. Forces Enter Iran-Israel Feud Despite Trump Vow to End All Wars

Despite what the White House previously said, the United States is absolutely working with Israel after it launched strikes on Iran, according to Israeli and U.S. officials.

The report contradicts messaging issued by the White House late Thursday, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed in a statement that “we are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region.”

But by Friday afternoon, another U.S. official had confirmed the country’s involvement in the emerging conflict.

“The official said there are hundreds of thousands of American citizens and other American assets in Israel and the U.S. is working to protect them,” reported Axios’s Barak Ravid.

Israeli strikes have so far killed four senior Iranian commanders, including Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iranian state media confirmed late Thursday, though regional sources told Reuters that up to 20 senior commanders had been killed.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, said there would be “severe punishment” for the strikes. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi rejected calls for restraint Friday in the wake of Israel’s large-scale attack.

But why the U.S. is embedded in a new global conflict is unclear. Donald Trump earned national support in part due to his isolationist campaign promises and his pledge to swiftly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Six months into his second term, he has not only failed to do either but has seemingly embroiled America in a dire situation in the Middle East.

Trump publicly stoked tensions between Iran and Israel for days, reportedly under the assumption that it would encourage Iran to return to the negotiating table over a potential nuclear deal. That hasn’t happened. Instead, Iran has backtracked out of discussions that were scheduled to take place later this weekend.

In a phone call with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl Friday morning, the president referred to the attacks as “excellent,” remarking that Iran “got hit hard, very hard,” and that there was “a lot more” to come.

Israel’s attack, per Trump, was months in the making.

“I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come—And they know how to use it,” Trump posted to Truth Social, promising that if Iran refused to come up with a nuclear deal then there would be “nothing left.”

Despite public opinion, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the original Iran nuclear deal in 2018. That arrangement, signed by several world powers, restricted Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Countries and organizations around the world lamented America’s withdrawal, while conservatives and Israel celebrated it.

In the aftermath of the withdrawal, political analysts pointed to three possible reasons for the massive policy reversal: that Trump was attempting to shed the legacy of his predecessor, President Barack Obama; that Trump was cozying up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and/or that he had been influenced by a widening cast of yes-men in the White House.

President Trump thinks that Iran will now somehow be more willing to concede to a nuclear deal after being bombed by Israel, according to Axios.

“I don’t think so. Maybe the opposite,” Trump said when asked if Israel’s attack hurt efforts to close the nuclear deal between Iran and the U.S. “Maybe now they will negotiate seriously. I gave Iran 60 days, today is day 61.… They should have made a deal.… Maybe now it will happen.”

Trump seems to think that Isreal striking nuclear facilities while killing multiple military leaders and scientists—and several civilians, according to state media in Iran—on Thursday evening would cause Iran to retreat with its tail between its legs. But Trump’s comments came roughly at the same time as Iran began raining missiles on Tel Aviv—hardly a sign that it was ready to slink back to the negotiating table.

Indeed, Iran’s refusal to back down in the face of violence, pressure, and sanctions is well documented. Thursday’s strikes make it more likely that Iran will redouble its efforts to acquire a nuclear bomb, not that it would reenter talks. And this was fully demonstrated today as Iran struck back against Israel, launching multiple missiles at Tel Aviv. The extent of the damage is still unknown at this time. But what is known is that American intelligence has helped Israel repel Iran’s missiles—another reason to suspect Trump is being delusional when he clings to hope that he’ll have a deal soon.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Friday that it would not release green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, after a federal judge ordered him to be released.

U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz of New Jersey had given the government a deadline of 1:30 p.m. on Friday to appeal his ruling, and in a last-minute filing, the government said that it didn’t have to appeal the decision to keep detaining Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and leader of pro-Palestine campus protests.

The government claimed that the judge “did not order” them to release Khalil, but said only that they could not detain him based on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s determination that he was a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests because allowing him to remain in the U.S. would create a “hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States.”

The government stated that it was well within its rights to detain Khalil on “other grounds,” namely his removability as “an alien inadmissible at the time of entry or admission, to wit.

“And while the court made a factual finding that it was unlikely that Khalili would be detained on another basis … the court never held that it would be unlawful for Respondents to detain Khalil based on another charge of removability,” the filing stated.  

Last month, the U.S. government alleged that Khalil purposefully failed to divulge his work as an unpaid intern for the United Nationals Relief and Work Agency and “withheld his membership of certain organizations” when applying for a visa, which was grounds for his removal. Khalil entered the U.S. on a student visa in 2022, and later applied for permanent residency in 2024. 

UNWRA is a U.S. aid organization in Gaza that Israel has long sought to shut down. Israeli officials claimed that 12 of the organization’s 32,000 staff members had been complicit in Hamas’s deadly incursion into Israeli territory on October 7, 2023. A U.N. investigation found that nine of them could have been involved. 

The U.S. government also claimed Khalil had failed to disclose his work with the Syria office in the British Embassy in Beirut, as well as his involvement with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestinian activism group at his school. 

But none of this would have likely prevented him from receiving his green card, and it serves as weak pretext for his removal.

Across the country, federal judges have ordered the release of multiple students and faculty detained as part of Donald Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. Mahmoud has remained in ICE custody since March, and missed the birth of his child. 

A revolt at a controversial New Jersey ICE facility morphed into a jailbreak late Thursday.

Four detainees were unaccounted for at Delaney Hall detention center after about 50 captives pushed down a dormitory wall in protest of their living conditions, an immigration attorney representing one of the men told NJ Advance Media.

Detainees were starving, reportedly having been made to wait hours for their next meal, when the literal pushback began.

“It’s about the food, and some of the detainees were getting aggressive and it turned violent,” the lawyer, Mustafa Cetin, told NJ Advance Media. “Based on what he told me, it was an outer wall, not very strong, and they were able to push it down.”

But the crowd was not alone in their protest—instead, a gathering of people outside the facility mobilized to block ICE activity, barricading the gate to prevent more officers from entering the center.

Amy Torres, executive director of New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, told NPR affiliate WHYY that officers had used “pepper spray and tackled and dragged protesters away from the facility.”

“She said some protesters had minor injuries, but no one was hit by the vehicles,” WHYY reported.

Delaney Hall is run by a private prison company, GEO Group, that made $2.24 billion in revenue in 2024, according to its fourth-quarter earnings report. The company currently has a $60 million contract with the Trump administration to hold up to 1,000 people in the New Jersey detention center.

Shortly after the ICE facility reopened in May, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and New Jersey Representative LaMonica McIver were arrested and charged while touring the facility. The lawmakers were reportedly visiting to serve a summons for code violations to a Geo Group representative. The charges against Baraka were dropped weeks later.

“I have serious concerns about the reports of abusive circumstances at the facility,” McIver wrote in a statement late Thursday regarding the breakout. “Even now, as we are hearing reports from news organizations and advocates on the ground about a lack of food and basic rights for those inside, the administration appears to be stonewalling efforts to learn the truth.”

Dozens of anti-ICE protests have spread from coast to coast, with gatherings in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco, San Diego, Denver, Seattle, Las Vegas, Raleigh, Columbus, Oklahoma City, Washington, D.C., and others. But Donald Trump is still having a difficult time believing that his nativist agenda is facing such widespread opposition: On Wednesday, the president torched a Fox News reporter when she informed him that the protests had spread outside of Los Angeles, spouting from the Kennedy Center’s red carpet that he simply didn’t believe her while patting his administration on the back for its military intervention in the City of Angels.

Immigrant workers are keeping Trump’s multiple estates running even as the president indiscriminately targets them for raids and deportation.

Forbes reports that Trump has used at least 1,880 seasonal immigrant workers at Mar-a-Lago and other golf clubs since 2008. His winery has hired 31 since the year started, even as his administration is working to deport thousands every single day.

These workers are on short-term temporary H-2A agricultural and H-2B hospitality visas—status that would very well put them at high risk of deportation if they weren’t cleaning Trump’s clubs. These workers make between $14.17 and $23.01 an hour working as servers, cooks, groundskeepers, and more.

Wouldn’t someone who claims to love American workers as much as Trump does, who waxes poetic about reinvigorating domestic markets, make it a point to staff his lavish estates with the U.S. laborers he’s fighting for? It’s clear that the president, like most avaricious businessmen, is cool with immigrant work—as long as it’s cheap, noncommittal, and for him.

The Department of Homeland Security admitted to scrounging around for dirt on Kilmar Abrego Garcia only after he was wrongfully deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

Freshly returned from a Salvadoran prison, Abrego Garcia attended an arraignment hearing in Nashville Friday, where he pleaded not guilty to two charges related to illegally transporting undocumented immigrants for cash. The charges stemmed from an investigation into a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, where Abrego Garcia was discovered in a car with several Hispanic men who did not possess identification.  

During the hearing Friday, one DHS agent revealed that he was only asked to look into Abrego Garcia’s case on April 28 of this year, according to Tennessee Lookout’s Anita Wadhwani. 

That’s more than a month after Abrego Garcia was sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison, and a week after Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to recover his kidnapped constituent, boosting the story’s profile to the national level. That was also a full week after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed, seemingly out of nowhere and without providing any evidence, that Abrego Garcia had “engaged in human trafficking.”

Last week, after months of claiming that Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States despite being deported over an “administrative error,” Attorney General Pam Bondi announced his return and made several other allegations against Abrego Garcia that were not included in the indictment. 

Since accidentally sending Abrego Garcia abroad, the Trump administration has been intent on smearing him any way it can, repeatedly alleging an affiliation to the transnational MS-13 gang based on thin evidence and even falsely claiming he was a convicted criminal. 

Bondi said that if Abrego Garcia is convicted, the government plans to return him to El Salvador after he completes his sentence, once again violating a judge’s order preventing his removal.

Donald Trump has praised Israel’s sweeping military operation targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities and military leaders, and Republicans have already started taking up positions as faithful cheerleaders.

Shortly after the strikes in Iran were first reported Thursday evening, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham had his own sickening message of support for Israel. “Game on. Pray for Israel,” he wrote in a post on X Thursday, summoning a wave of critics condemning his rhetoric about the deadly strikes.

Republican Senator Jim Risch, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also shared his support for Israel’s strike in a post on X.

“We stand with Israel tonight and pray for the safety of its people and the success of this unilateral, defensive action. I am also praying for the brave U.S. service members in the Middle East who keep America safe—Iran would be foolish to attack the United States,” the post read.

Risch did not extend wishes of safety to Iranian civilians, after several were killed in Israel’s attacks on residential buildings. Risch was one of several lawmakers behind the recent Stand with Israel Act, which would bar the U.S. from funding any U.N. agency that suspends, downgrades, or expels Israel over its catastrophic military campaign in Gaza.

On Friday morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson jumped to Israel’s defense over its unprecedented strike, and blamed Iran for bringing the action on itself by refusing nuclear disarmament. “Israel decided it needed to take action to defend itself. They were clearly within their right to do so,” he wrote in a post on X. “Iran will face grave consequences if it responds by unjustifiably targeting U.S. interests.”

Texas Senator Ted Cruz was also on defense, and compared people who criticized Israel’s strike to terrorists. In a post on X, former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes wrote, “This is all so unnecessary. All of it. Everywhere.” Cruz reposted, adding, “You forgot to add ‘death to Israel’ and ‘death to America.’”

Between 2019 and 2024, Cruz received a whopping $562,593 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its members, and has received more than $1.8 million from pro-Israel PACs between 1990 and 2024, according to OpenSecrets.

Representative Don Bacon, who received $697,837 from AIPAC in 2024, did his paid gig as Israel’s spokesperson by simply reposting from Israel’s official X account. “When someone threatens to annihilate you - you better believe them. When they build weapons of mass death - stop them,” the post read.

Supporting Israel’s assault on Iran has caused the president to lose some of his longest-term acolytes.

One such loss apparently includes Tucker Carlson, who issued a newsletter to his audience Friday grimly titled: “This Could Be the Final Newsletter Before All-Out War.” In it, the ex–Fox News anchor accused Donald Trump of being “complicit in the act of war” and chastised executive decisions that he said had effectively launched U.S. soldiers into another war in the Middle East.

“Earlier this week, unnamed Washington sources expressed concern over Israel’s ability to fend off Iran’s retaliation, which would inevitably lead to Benjamin Netanyahu ordering the American military to step in and fight on his country’s behalf,” Carlson wrote. “On Thursday, Iran’s president threatened to ‘destroy’ any country that eliminates his government’s nuclear facilities. Now, the world will learn what that looks like.”

Carlson also rejected Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s insistence that the White House had not been involved in the bubbling tensions that preceded the attack, and that the administration was putting the safety of American forces in the region above all else.

“While the American military may not have physically perpetrated the assault, years of funding and sending weapons to Israel, which Donald Trump just bragged about on Truth Social, undeniably place the U.S. at the center of last night’s events,” Carlson continued. “Washington knew these attacks would happen. They aided Israel in carrying them out. Politicians purporting to be America First can’t now credibly turn around and say they had nothing to do with it. Our country is in deep.”

Prior to the election, Trump had won enormous support across America for pledging to swiftly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Six months into his second term, he has not only failed to do either but has seemingly escalated the situation in the Middle East.

Israel bombed Iran early Friday morning, just days before Iran was scheduled for negotiations with U.S. officials regarding its nuclear program. The attack appeared to shut down potential talks, as Iran announced that it would withdraw from the discussions in the wake of the attack.

Iran has argued that it is seeking uranium for peaceful purposes. Iranian officials announced Thursday afternoon their intentions to expand their nuclear program, despite facing a censure from a U.N. nuclear watchdog for failing to uphold nonproliferation obligations.

Israeli strikes have so far killed four senior Iranian commanders, including Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iranian state media confirmed late Thursday, though regional sources told Reuters that up to 20 senior commanders had been killed.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, said there would be “severe punishment” for the strikes.

“It’s worth taking a step back and wondering how any of this helps the United States. We can’t think of a single way,” Carlson wrote.

The Trump administration is giving the personal data of Medicaid-enrolled immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Associated Press. The Department of Homeland Security forced the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—which is part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services—to hand over personal information, an unprecedented move.

This is yet another clear invasion of privacy aimed to help ICE find immigrants’ names, homes, and jobs and identify immigrants receiving aid so that they can revoke green card applications and target permanent residency seekers. 

Most of the data covers residents of California, Illinois, Washington state, and Washington, D.C.—all states that let noncitizens enroll in Medicaid, and all states that are seeing ramped-up ICE raids and protests in response.  

CMS tried to fight DHS’s request, arguing that they’d be violating the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act of 1974, and in general going against “longstanding policy” of not giving people’s personal Medicaid data to a department that has nothing to do with Medicaid just because they are immigrants.  

“We deeply value the privacy of all Californians,” Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “This potential data transfer brought to our attention by the AP is extremely concerning, and if true, potentially unlawful, particularly given numerous headlines highlighting potential improper federal use of personal information and federal actions to target the personal information of Americans.”

MAGA seems to be split on whether continuing to fight and fund Israel’s wars against the rest of the Middle East is “America First” or not.

Israel bombed multiple cities and nuclear facilities in Iran Thursday night, dragging its U.S. benefactor into a war against what Prime Minister Netanyahu swears is an imminent nuclear threat from Iran. And while Trump and most GOP officials have fallen in line, a recent X poll suggests disharmony among the base on this issue.

“Explain it to me like I am 5 years old,” wrote MAGA loyalist Laura Loomer. “How is it not AMERICA FIRST to congratulate those who just made sure Islamists who chant “DEATH TO AMERICA” and who openly plotted to assassinate President @realDonaldTrump never have an opportunity to have a nuke? Explain it to me.”

Loomer was rebuked by some of her own fellow MAGA coalition members.

“Explain to me, how is it America First to openly support those who blatantly disregarded our diplomatic efforts in order to get us dragged into another war on behalf of them?” one “America First” user replied. “You can’t be America first and support billions of dollars going to a foreign nation to sponsor their war. You can’t be America first if you want our servicemen to die on behalf of another nation.”

“Iran has ‘almost had a nuke’ for 30+ years. Read ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf.’ Not crying for Iran. Screw em!” an account named “Silent Patriot” responded. “But I also haven’t forgotten all the children abused by the Mossad/CIA controlled Epstein/Maxwell. This is not good guys vs bad guys. Bad killing bad.”

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham giddily egged on Israel’s attack. “Game on. Pray for Israel,” he posted shortly after Israel bombed Iran multiple times.

“War pig says what?” a prominent MAGA account replied.

Using taxpayer dollars to help Israel start a war is certainly not “America First,” and neither are most of Trump’s actions compared to his rhetoric. Only time will tell if his base actually catches on.