Fox News Airs Outrageous Lie About Kilmar Abrego Garcia

On Wednesday night, a Fox News guest falsely accused Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident who was wrongfully deported by the Trump administration, of killing Americans.

In an appearance on Fox News @ Night, Monica Paige, White House correspondent for Frontlines, a program by Charlie Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, discussed the GOP spending bill.

Paige urged Republican lawmakers to unify behind the bill, whose fate was then less certain, due to a number of holdouts whom House Speaker Mike Johnson has since reportedly won over.

Paige said, “If you’re going to vote ‘no’ on this, then you’re voting along with Democrats, especially Democrats like Maxine Dexter, who was on the Hill today, dressed in a white robe, who also visited El Salvador to go see Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who killed Americans.”

The accusation against Abrego Garcia, whom Trump deported to an El Salvador prison, where he says he was tortured, due to an “administrative error”—and who, upon his return, now faces federal charges—is a complete fabrication.

Paige apologized within a few hours on X, but, per a report from Mediaite, Gallagher failed to correct her on air, and the error remains unacknowledged by Fox, which did not immediately respond to TNR’s request for comment.

Paige’s apology states:

Tonight during an interview on Fox News, I inadvertently said that Kilmar Abrego Garcia ‘killed Americans.’

What I meant to say was that he has been connected with gang activity that has devastated the lives of many people, and killed an untold number of Americans. He has not been personally linked to the death of anyone even while being accused of gang activity including human trafficking, drug trafficking, and spousal abuse.

I misspoke and I apologize for the mistake.

While the retraction employs familiar MAGA talking points—elevating fiercely disputed accusations against Abrego Garcia, ostensibly to minimize Trump’s harrowing denial of his due process—that’s still more than can be said of Fox, which has thus far been mum on the error.

FOX News @ Night issued a correction in its segment on Thursday night, after this piece was published.

Florida Representative Randy Fine took a moment to remind people that the most important reason to pass the “big, beautiful bill” is to give Donald Trump exactly what he wants.

During a Fox News interview in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the Florida Republican tried to recenter amid lengthy deliberations over the president’s behemoth budget bill that was returned to the House.

“But what we have to understand that the American people are counting on us, and people are losing sight of what this bill does,” Fine said, before proceeding to not explain what the bill does at all.

“Imagine you’re a waitress working right now who’s depending on tips to pay your bills, or you’re an older person whose dependent on Social Security and you don’t want to pay taxes on what you earned for your whole life, or you’re one of the people who’s gonna lose all of the tax breaks they’ve had all of this time, we need to give certainty to the American people,” Fine said.

“But the most important thing is we’ve all committed to support President Trump. He is counting on us to deliver on his signature legislative achievement, and we just have to get the job done.” Fine said.

The most important thing is being transparent with the American public. The benefits of Trump’s No Tax on Tips provision are easily outweighed by massive cuts to essential programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. Although Trump has claimed there will be no taxes on Social Security for seniors, that provision isn’t actually in his massive spending and tax bill.

Instead, seniors who are not on Social Security will get a short-term standard deduction boost, but those who do receive Social Security payments will get absolutely nothing. And the tax breaks that would be extended from Trump’s 2017 tax plan are skewed to benefit corporations and the very rich.

President Trump has no idea what’s actually in his sweeping, term-defining budget bill. NOTUS reported on Wednesday that House Republicans had to tell the president that his “big, beautiful bill” was indeed slashing Medicaid.

Trump had a sit-down with the more moderate House Republicans on Wednesday in which he told them that the three things they needed to let be if they wanted to win in 2026 and 2028: Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

“But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one member told the president, according to NOTUS sources.

Trump has never been the wonkiest guy, but the fact that he was seemingly unaware that his “big, beautiful bill” is attacking Medicaid is alarming. Either he’s just completely settled into being a vessel for the Heritage Foundation while their guys spoon-feed him legislation, or his mental acuity needs to be questioned. Or both.

Trump’s budget bill will throw millions off of Medicaid to help fund tax breaks for the richest people in the country. At least 17 million Americans are expected to lose their health insurance by 2034, thanks to changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. It’s not that Trump didn’t understand that, it’s that he didn’t seem to know that was happening at all. To him, this bill is simply a GOP loyalty test with a massive check attached.

With House Republicans poised to pass President Trump’s centerpiece legislation, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is making the most of the customary “magic minute” he’s afforded at the end of floor debate. In a marathon speech that has lasted six hours thus far, the New York Democrat is taking to task supporters of the “big, beautiful bill,” which would deliver historic rollbacks in the social safety net.

Beginning just shy of 5 a.m., and ongoing as of this writing, Jeffries began by observing, “This bill represents the largest cut to health care in American history. It’s an all-out assault on the health care of the American people,” which renders hollow Trump’s January promise to “love and cherish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.”

Later on, Jeffries addressed House Speaker Mike Johnson, saying, “I feel the obligation, Mr. Speaker, to stand on this House floor, and take my sweet time.” As his Democratic colleagues broke into applause, Jeffries continued, “to tell the stories of the American people” as well as “their health care,” “their Medicaid,” “their nutritional assistance,” “veterans,” “farmers,” “children,” “seniors,” “people with disabilities,” and “small businesses.”

Jeffries’s speech is working through a sizable collection of letters from residents of each U.S. state who are worried about losing health care coverage, or otherwise suffering under the legislation, as well as naming the Republican lawmakers who represent those concerned residents.

Shortly before 8 a.m., Jeffries said, “Budgets are moral documents. And in our view, Mr. Speaker, budgets should be designed to lift people up. This reckless Republican budget that we are debating right now … tears people down … and that is why I stand here on the floor of the House of Representatives with my colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus, to stand up and push back against it with everything we have.”

The longest “magic minute” was an over eight-hour speech delivered in February 2018 by then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Jeffries, having recently completed his sixth hour of speaking, shows no sign of stopping soon—his effort echoing, to a degree, Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking 25-hour speech in April lambasting the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

This story was last updated at 11:53 a.m.

It doesn’t appear that the president’s “big, beautiful bill” will muster enough votes in time.

Donald Trump has imposed a July 4 deadline on Congress to pass his signature legislative item, but actually meeting the due date has sent Republicans into disarray.

By late Wednesday afternoon, House Speaker Mike Johnson had already laid bare that the process would make lawmakers, and presumably their constituents, unhappy.

“All of us have to give up on our personal preferences,” Johnson told reporters. “That’s what I think people are recognizing and coming to grips with.”

The House Freedom Caucus had released a three-page memo earlier Wednesday heavily criticizing the Senate’s version of Trump’s exorbitantly expensive tax cut, flaming the Senate draft for adding pork where the House had proposed cuts. In their complaint, they advocated for more extreme slices from the federal budget.

But the hard-line fiscal conservatives aren’t the only party members opposing the bill: Moderates are worried about the high cost the legislation will have on safety-net programs, including some $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, and swing-district Republicans are worried about political backlash in their Democrat-led states.

Any of these groups have the muster to keep the bill from passing: Johnson can afford to lose just three votes if he wants to push the bill to the president’s desk.

By the afternoon, some lawmakers had gone public with their complaints about the fiasco.

“We aren’t delayed because moderates whose constituents will be completely screwed are holding out,” posted Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell. “We are delayed because the most extreme members who want to hurt MORE people are holding out.”

Texas Representative Chip Roy, the policy chair of the House Freedom Caucus, told NBC News that the bill was not “totally exciting” for his conference and that he wasn’t sure if the bill would pass by the end of the week. He added that the half-trillion dollars in savings would have to come from somewhere else in the federal budget, though he wasn’t committed to ironing out the details in this package.

Congress is not supposed to be at the mercy of the president: The Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution to isolate three separate systems of government, intended to continually check one another’s power. But that has not been the case since Trump resumed office with a conservative majority in both legislative chambers as well as the nation’s highest judiciary. Instead, month after month, the federal government has seen lawmakers bend and capitulate to the president’s will, buying into his “mandate from the people” spiel, even when his policies cause direct harm to their constituents.

A federal judge sentenced a January 6 rioter to life in prison Wednesday for plotting to assassinate the federal agents who’d investigated him.  

U.S. District Judge Thomas Varlan ordered 36-year-old Edward Kelley to spend the rest of his life behind bars, after Kelley was convicted on the charges of conspiracy to murder federal employees, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, and influencing a federal official by threat.

Kelley received his sentencing in front of more than a dozen of the targets on his “kill list,” which had specifically taken aim at individuals working at the FBI’s headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee. Prosecutors said that Kelley had created the list while awaiting trial in his insurrection case, and that he had attempted to recruit others to help him target the office with car bombs and drones, or attack individuals at their homes or public places. 

Kelley was previously convicted in November 2024 of multiple felonies and misdemeanors related to his participation in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, where he pushed a police officer to the ground before being one of the first rioters to break into the building. 

He was one of the more than 1,500 recipients of Donald Trump’s sweeping Inauguration Day pardon for violently opposing his loss in the 2020 presidential election. 

Not every January 6 rioter is getting the same shake. Former FBI agent and January 6 rioter Jared L. Wise—who shouted “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” while the mob attacked law enforcement at the Capitol—will now work alongside former interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin on the Department of Justice’s “weaponization” working group. 

Trump adviser Stephen Miller is up in arms after a federal district court judge dealt a significant blow to Trump’s immigration agenda Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled unlawful Trump’s day-one proclamation shutting down the right to claim asylum at the southern border on the dubious grounds that an “invasion” is occurring there.

In response, Miller claimed that Moss, an Obama appointee, is a “marxist judge” attempting to “circumvent the Supreme Court.” Quote-tweeting that post, Miller added, “The West will not survive if our sovereignty is not restored.”

In his 128-page ruling, Moss said that Trump’s proclamation asserted “sweeping authority” that far exceeds the powers he legally possesses under the Constitution and the Immigration and Nationality Act. And the Trump administration’s “appeal to necessity cannot fill that void.”

Contrary to Trump’s arguments, Moss wrote, the president does not have “the unilateral authority to limit the rights of aliens present in the United States to apply for asylum,” nor does he have the “authority to adopt an alternative immigration system, which supplants the statutes that Congress has enacted and the regulations that the responsible agencies have promulgated.”

The ruling, which applies to all people “who are now or will be present in the United States,” effectively stops the proclamation in its tracks—at least after a two-week stay, during which the president is expected to appeal. In the interim, Moss said the administration “shall take steps to ensure that they … are fully prepared to implement the Court’s order without further delay.”

Deborah Pearlstein of Princeton University noted that Moss’s ruling exemplifies how courts may still rein in Trump’s unlawful actions, even after the Supreme Court recently impeded their ability to do so in a ruling restricting lower courts’ ability to issue nationwide freezes on Trump’s anti-constitutional executive orders.

Moss mentioned that Supreme Court case in his ruling, but cited the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that directs courts to “set aside” federal actions found to be “not in accordance with law.”

Republican Representative Derrick Van Orden made sure to let reporters know that he wasn’t President Trump’s bitch—as he prepared to vote “yes” on the budget bill that will leave at least 30,000 of his constituents without health care by 2034.

“The president of the United States didn’t give us an assignment. We’re not a bunch of little bitches around here, okay? I’m a member of Congress,” Van Orden said, according to Punchbowl News’s Kenzie Nguyen. “I represent almost eight hundred thousand Wisconsinites.”

Van Orden really had the audacity to take this kind of tone with reporters after a “yes” vote on the House’s previous version of the budget bill. He is also expected to vote “yes” on the new version of the bill approved by the Senate.

Aside from the aforementioned health care cuts, the House-approved version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act would remove $607 million from rural Wisconsin hospitals, placing important care centers like Aspirus Stanley Hospital, the ​​Mayo Clinic Health System-Oakridge in Osseo, and Froedtert Holy Family Memorial Hospital in Manitowoc at risk of shutting down. While the Senate bill includes slightly higher funding for rural hospitals, advocates say it’s still not enough given the cuts to Medicaid.

“It creates Medicaid winners and losers, with Wisconsin at the bottom,” Wisconsin Hospital Association President Eric Borgerding wrote recently in a column for the Wisconsin State Journal.

The bill passed the Senate on Tuesday and is currently under deliberation in the House, with no clear end date in sight.

The monstrous, recently constructed immigrant detention facility in the Florida Everglades, flippantly dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” literally took on water within a day of President Trump visiting the camp Tuesday to commemorate its planned Wednesday opening.

Florida officials have assured the public that the facility, which will cost an estimated $450 million per year to operate, was built to withstand a Category 2 hurricane (though the Naples Daily News notes that winds of recent hurricanes in the area have significantly exceeded Category 2 levels).

A report by the Miami Herald further casts into doubt official claims about the facility’s durability. According to the Herald, “a garden-variety South Florida summer rainstorm” on Tuesday afternoon—of about an inch-and-a-half of rain—caused flooding in the facility.

The Herald reports: “Rainfall seeped through the edges of the facility as the roofs and walls trembled. Drips leaked from above a door frame. The water spread under poles hoisting the Florida and U.S. flags.”

On Wednesday, the Florida Division of Emergency Management told the Herald that contractors, overnight, “went back and tightened any seams at the base of the structures that allowed water intrusion during the heavy storm,” claiming flooding had been “minimal.”

The news validates growing concerns about the condition of the facility, which was jury-rigged on a site known to be prone to flooding.

On Wednesday, two dozen House Democrats, led by Representatives Janelle Bynum of Oregon and Maxwell Frost of Florida, railed against the “makeshift unsafe, unsanitary, overly crowded, and environmentally destructive” facility in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons.

“Detainees will be kept in tents with inadequate sanitation facilities and will face unbearable living conditions, including exposure to deadly pathogens, constant threats from unpredictable flooding and extreme weather events, and daily temperatures averaging 90 degrees, with a heat index often over 100 degrees Fahrenheit,” the lawmakers wrote.

The site, the letter continues, is “known as being one of the most dangerous and inhospitable environments in the United States. This remote swamp is notorious for oppressive heat, relentless humidity, severe storms, and perilous terrain infested with venomous snakes, disease-carrying insects, and large predatory wildlife, including alligators and crocodiles.”

The Trump administration and MAGA more broadly, meanwhile, have relished the cruelty of the facility—which journalist Andrea Prizer, who authored a book on the history of concentration camps, deemed a concentration camp. For example, Trump on Tuesday joked to reporters that detainees will have to be taught to run in a zigzag in order to evade alligators.

The assessment from House Democrats, borne out by reports that the facility apparently had trouble withstanding a commonplace rain shower, continues: “The deliberate placement of vulnerable immigrants into such a hostile and lethal environment is morally reprehensible, inherently cruel, and starkly violates basic humanitarian standards.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is seeking creative ways to staff her agency with sycophants of Donald Trump, Bloomberg Government reported Wednesday.

At the first-ever meeting of Trump’s revamped Homeland Security Advisory Council Wednesday, Noem outright asked the members “how to fire people that don’t like us.”

Noem complained that she was “surrounded by bureaucrats,” and wanted to root out employees who “don’t support what we’re doing.”

Under the leadership of Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the DHS has enacted brutal immigration reform that pushes the boundaries of U.S. law. Their efforts have involved making absurd changes to Customs and Border Control policies, stripping immigrants of their lawful immigration status, and conducting widespread paramilitary raids that target average civilians, not criminals.

In April, Trump announced that he had “revamped” his Homeland Security Advisory Council by once again fishing from the Fox News talent pool, recruiting host Mark Levin and former Fox News contributor Bo Dietl.

The council also included Trump’s disgraced former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, DHS adviser Corey Lewandowski, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, and Florida state Senator Joseph Gruters, who serves on the Republican National Committee and is a close ally of Trump’s.