Mahmoud Khalil Hits Trump With Blockbuster Lawsuit After Kidnapping

Mahmoud Khalil is suing the Trump administration for $20 million. The 30-year-old Columbia University graduate and green card holder, whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement took as a political prisoner in March, gained his freedom just last month.

On March 8, plainclothes agents ripped Khalil from his Manhattan apartment and his wife, who was then eight months pregnant, and sent him to an ICE detention center in Louisiana.

Khalil remained there for over three months. All the while, the Trump administration taunted and baselessly smeared him as “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, [and] anti-American,” while admitting outright that it was seeking to deport him solely for his beliefs. Still, the Trump administration continues its vendetta, alleging that Khalil improperly filled out his green card application, a claim his attorneys challenge and are seeking to dismiss.

Having returned to his wife and newborn son, Khalil is seeking damages for the ordeal the Trump administration subjected him to. Khalil’s attorneys on Thursday filed a claim for $20 million that names the departments of State and Homeland Security and ICE.

According to the Associated Press, the filing takes the administration to task for its campaign to “terrorize him and his family,” including having “effectively kidnapped him,” before sending him to a remote prison “deliberately concealed” from his family and lawyers, where he endured harsh conditions, was denied his medication, and lost 15 pounds due to being fed “nearly inedible” food.

Regarding the possibility of a settlement, Khalil said he would share the money with other pro-Palestinian advocates Trump is attempting to silence, but would also accept an apology from his administration and a change to its deportation policy.

In light of the news, the Trump administration remains steadfast in its harassment campaign against Khalil, telling the AP that his claim is “absurd” and accusing him of “hateful behavior and rhetoric.”

Former Washington Post writer Joe Davidson made sure to make his disdain for Post owner Jeff Bezos known in a scathing resignation letter.

In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Davidson stated that he was stepping down from his position as the “Federal Insider” columnist, a position he held since 2008, because the paper had pulled one of his columns for being too critical of Donald Trump.

“For me, the cost became too great when a Federal Insider column I wrote was killed because it was deemed too opinionated under an unwritten and inconsistently enforced policy, which I had not heard of previously,” Davidson wrote.

“Blocking my column because it was too opinionated was a shock. I’ve authored many pieces over my 17 years writing the Federal Diary (renamed the Federal Insider in 2016), that were at least if not more opinionated as the now dead one. In that piece, I argued that ‘one hallmark of President Donald Trump’s first three, turbulent months in office is his widespread, ominous attack on thought, belief and speech.’ The piece contained specific examples, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s alarming memo supporting deportation of Columbia University pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. Rubio said Khalil could be expelled for ‘expected beliefs … that are otherwise lawful.’ What immigrants might believe in the future now can make them federal law enforcement targets.”

Davidson went on to mention that his article covered the DHS kidnapping of Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk for writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed, a “terrifying sight” reminiscent of “George Orwell’s dystopian and cautionary tale against totalitarianism and thought police in [his] novel ‘1984.’”

“Killing that column was a death blow to my life as a Washington Post columnist. But I wrote two more articles to see if I could cope with the restrictions. That’s when I learned just how severe the policy is. In my next piece, I was not allowed to describe a potential pay raise for federal employees as ‘well-deserved’ because of Post policy,” Davidson continued.

“As a columnist, I can’t live with that level of constraint. A column without commentary made me a columnist without a column. I also was troubled by significant inconsistencies in the implementation of the policy. During this period, The Post allowed stronger, opinionated language by other staffers, including the words ‘viciousness,’ ‘cruelty’ and ‘meanness’ to describe Trump’s actions.”

There has been an alarming amount of capitulation to Trump from the media in this first year of his second term. Earlier this month, CBS settled with Trump for $16 million in a defamation lawsuit.

“I’m gone from The Post, but only as a journalist. Many people understandably have canceled subscriptions to protest Bezos’s actions that have damaged the news organization’s integrity,” Davidson wrote. “I still subscribe, and read and support the enduring fine work of Post journalists in the newspaper and digitally.”

A new report from The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff finds morale at Immigration and Customs Enforcement is suffering as the agency, under the direction of President Trump and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller, targets undocumented immigrants who haven’t committed crimes.

While the Trump administration may claim its deportation campaign prioritizes violent criminals and gang members, in reality, it has focused on arresting noncriminals, evidently to hit quotas passed down by Trump and Miller.

And while the administration may claim ICE agents are happier than ever, Miroff’s report—based on conversations with 12 current and former ICE personnel—shows that the change is frustrating many agents and officers.

One ICE veteran finds the job so “infuriating” that the agent is considering quitting. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” said the agent, who complained about having to focus instead on “arresting gardeners.”

A former agent told Miroff that “morale is in the crapper,” and “even those that are gung ho about the mission aren’t happy with how they are asking to execute it—the quotas and the shift to the low-hanging fruit to make the numbers.”

Another former ICE official suggested that this shift is vindicating criticisms the agency has faced in the past, observing, “What we’re seeing now is what, for many years, we were accused of being, and could always safely say, ‘We don’t do that.’”

One of Miroff’s interviewees was Adam Boyd, a young attorney who resigned from the agency’s legal department because it’s no longer focused on “protecting the homeland from threats.” Instead, he said, “It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December.”

Boyd told Miroff: “We still need good attorneys at ICE. There are drug traffickers and national-security threats and human-rights violators in our country who need to be dealt with. But we are now focusing on numbers over all else.”

One former ICE official said that there are now “national-security and public-safety threats that are not being addressed,” as the agency moves staff from its Homeland Security Investigations division, focused largely on transnational crime, to its Enforcement and Removal Operations division—a move that many perceive as retaliation for HSI in recent years distancing itself from the agency’s deportation arm.

When Miller issued his demand for 3,000 arrests per day, he reportedly steamrolled any veteran officials who dared to speak up about its impracticality, which has led many to keep silent since then for fear of drawing his ire, Miroff writes. This means that “no one is saying, ‘This is not obtainable,’” an ICE official told him. “The answer is just to keep banging the [ICE rank-and-file] and tell [them] they suck. It’s just not a good atmosphere.”

Former X CEO Linda Yaccarino suffered gross sexual harassment from none other than Grok, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence bot, shortly before she abruptly left her position. 

Grok went rogue earlier this week after engineers at xAI tweaked the robot’s code, and began espousing horrific antisemitic and white supremacist rhetoric—par for the course considering that Musk has turned the site into a breeding ground for hate speech.  

But that wasn’t all “MechaHitler” Grok was up to. The program also wrote disgusting sexual comments about Yaccarino in response to gross prompting from X users. 

The posts have since been removed.

On Wednesday, Yaccarino announced her sudden departure from X “after two incredible years.” It’s not clear that Grok’s statements contributed to her departure from X, which fell into massive turmoil during her tenure. Yaccarino gave no explanation for leaving, but a person familiar with the matter told NBC News it had been in the works for about a week. 

A right-wing commentator who has possibly tweeted about Hooters more times than anyone is now Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to Malaysia.

“Mr. President, thank you for the honor of a lifetime. In your America, all dreams come true. It will be my honor to represent the United States of America in Malaysia,” Adams said Thursday on X. “To the esteemed Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I look forward to a confirmation process that is at the heart of the Constitution that has given me the freedom to pursue the American Dream.”

Nick Adams is an Australian who arrived on the U.S. political scene in 2016 as an early Trump supporter. He fell in with the Turning Point USA crowd and became an American citizen in 2021. Adams is also a stringent right-winger whose X account reads as a caricature of the entire manosphere. His views range from traditional white supremacy to comical hypermasculinity. His banner on X reads “President Trump’s Favorite Author,” in reference to Trump tweeting some praise from Adams in 2017.

“I’m a walking, talking masterpiece of masculinity. Testosterone levels spike when I enter a room,” Adams posted in 2023. “Everywhere I go, I leave a trail of awestruck admirers in my wake.”

Last year, Adams described his “ideal woman” as “10/10, Low maintenance, strong Trump supporter, no desire to interfere with my foursomes, picks me up from Hooters when I’ve had a few too many domestics with the boys, has dinner ready at 5pm, doesn’t ask questions when I’m out late with the boys.”

“I have already put together a team of billionaires and hundred millionaires to acquire Hooters—any additional investors interested in teaming up on this important venture to save Western Civilization?” he wrote this year in one of his countless posts about the overly sexualized restaurant chain.

Last month, he described the U.S. and Israeli bombings of Iran, which killed hundreds of civilians, as “life saving bombings.” And just this Wednesday, Adams said that “almost all of America’s economic and infrastructure problems are caused by illegal immigration.”

Regardless of how real you think Adams’s Andrew Tate–adjacent MAGA man schtick is, the most important takeaway is that Trump now has yet another mindless devotee with zero actual qualifications in a consequential Cabinet position. This is an administration made up entirely of yes-men.

Donald Trump announced a 50 percent tariff on copper, a move that is sure to slow production and make prices skyrocket.

“Copper is necessary for Semiconductors, Aircraft, Ships, Ammunition, Data Centers, Lithium-ion Batteries, Radar Systems, Missile Defense Systems, and even, Hypersonic Weapons, of which we are building many,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Tuesday night.

Trump said that the decision was the result of a “robust national security assessment” and indicated that the tariffs served to boost domestic manufacturing to make the United States competitive with China. “America will once again build a DOMINANT copper industry,” he wrote.

The U.S. currently produces just over half of the refined copper that it consumes, with two-thirds of that copper coming from Arizona, according to Reuters. The rest is imported, mostly from the Americas. Canada, Chile, and Peru accounted for more than 90 percent of refined copper imports last year.

China also gets the majority of its copper from Chile and Peru, as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Beijing has made significant investments to expand its copper mining operation.

Carlos Miguel Gutierrez, who served as secretary of commerce under President George W. Bush, told CNBC that U.S. reliance on copper imports was a “vulnerability” but that the U.S. doesn’t have “the capacity right now to offset copper imports.” He said it would take the U.S. until at least 2027 or 2028 to build up the capacity to smelt enough copper for all of the country’s needs.

In the meantime, Trump’s tariffs will put a significant strain on domestic manufacturing by raising copper prices. Following Trump’s initial threat of a tariff on copper prices, the price spiked 13 percent, its highest one-day gain since 1989. By August, American consumers may end up paying as much as $15,000 per metric ton for copper, while the rest of the world pays only $10,000, according to an estimate from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

A federal judge on Thursday blocked Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order nationwide.

Trump’s order, which seeks to deny automatic citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants or those with temporary status, was set to go into effect in late July, in at least some states, after the Supreme Court last month lifted nationwide injunctions halting the order.

However, the Supreme Court left open the possibility that a judge could freeze Trump’s order by granting nationwide class action status to all children who would be affected by it. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups thus challenged Trump’s order and refiled their case as a class action lawsuit before U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante, a George W. Bush appointee.

On Thursday, Laplante granted their request, certifying the class and issuing an injunction that stops Trump’s order in its tracks—or, at least, is set to do so after a pause of a few days, during which the president will have the opportunity to appeal.

“The preliminary injunction is just not a close call to the court,” LaPlante reportedly ruled from the bench. (He said he will issue a written decision later Thursday.) “The deprivation of U.S. citizenship and an abrupt change of policy that was longstanding” would cause “irreparable harm,” he said, calling citizenship “the greatest privilege that exists in the world.”

Laplante’s decision marks a significant, if temporary, victory against Trump’s anti-constitutional war on birthright citizenship.

This story has been updated.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is refusing to take responsibility after a report found that she personally instituted a rule that created obstacles in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to the deadly floods in Texas over the July 4 weekend.

Per a Thursday CNN report citing four FEMA officials, Noem recently enacted a requirement that DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000 be signed off by her office. As a result, the agency was unable to deploy proactive Urban Search and Rescue squads near anticipated areas of flooding, as it usually would. While state rescue teams sprang into action, “FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets”—and they didn’t receive it until Monday, at which point floodwaters had been raging for over 72 hours.

Texas’s request for aerial imagery to help with search and rescue efforts was also “delayed as it awaited Noem’s approval for the necessary contract,” and, at a FEMA-manned disaster call center, “callers have faced longer wait times as the agency awaited Noem’s approval for a contract to bring in additional support staff.”

It’s a damning report describing a policy one former Customs and Border Protection official called “absolutely nuts,” according to Federal News Network.

Noem dismissed the report out of hand during a Thursday morning appearance on Fox and Friends, even laughing when co-host Griff Jenkins brought it up, before fixating on the outlet that published it rather than the direct line FEMA officials drew between her policy and delays in the disaster response.

“Well there you go. Fake news,” Noem said. “CNN, again, is absolutely trash, what they are doing by saying that. Because our Coast Guard, our Border Patrol, [Border Patrol Tactical Unit] teams were there immediately. Every single thing … they asked for, we were there.”

Noem continued, “The fact that CNN is continuing to be political and push out fake information and false information and lies is not shocking, but it’s a disservice to the country. It’s a real disservice to the country because people start to mistrust anything that comes out, then, over the news.”

U.S. permanent resident and reggaeton artist Leamsy Izquierdo has revealed that conditions in “Alligator Alcartraz,” where he is detained, are as inhumane as advertised.

“There’s no water here for people to bathe. I haven’t showered for four days, there’s no water, no toothpaste, they don’t let you out for even a minute to get some air,” said Izquierdo, whose stage name is Leamsy La Figura, in a phone call later shared online by his partner Katia Hernández. “We are in a cage of metal bars with the lights on 24 hours a day, and the mosquitoes seem like elephants.”

Izquierdo has been detained at Alligator Alcatraz since Friday.

“They give us food only once a day, food that has even been infested with worms. The lights are never turned off, they’re on 24 hours a day,” he continued. “And the mosquitoes seem like elephants.”

Izquierdo is a lawful permanent legal resident of the United States, but was scooped up and deported on extremely short notice after he was arrested on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and simple assault in Miami-Dade County on July 2.

“He never attacked anyone,” Hernández told Telemundo 51. “The police didn’t give him time to explain.”

The Trump administration has been very defensive of conditions in their shining concentration camp on a hill.

“The reporting on the conditions in the facility is completely false,” Stephanie Hartman, director of communications for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said to CBS News. “The facility meets all required standards and is in good working order.”

Izquierdo’s case, much like that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and countless other immigrants, shows just how indiscriminate and extrajudicial Trump’s immigration crackdown is. Ordinary people will continue to suffer while Trump and his inner circle delight in their pumped-up detainment and deportation numbers.

North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis revealed that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed because one senator decided to believe his lies. 

During an exclusive interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper Wednesday, Tillis responded to the claim that Kennedy had gone back on his promises to Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, who serves as the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

“The main reason I supported Kennedy was because Bill Cassidy thought that we should see how it plays out,” Tillis said. 

But Cassidy, who had led the charge on Kennedy’s confirmation, had been duped. 

In February, Cassidy had promised before the Senate that, if confirmed, Kennedy would “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ recommendations without changes.”

But in early June, Kennedy stripped that committee of all of its members. 

In a post on X Monday, Cassidy explained that “now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.

Cassidy also claimed that Kennedy had “committed that he would work within current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems and not establish parallel systems,” and that he would not use his position to “wrongfully sow public fear” about vaccines. 

In May, Kennedy announced that he’d made changes to the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedules without ACIP’s input, upending the decades-old consensus-driven method for making recommendations. Kennedy has also repeatedly sown doubts about vaccines, touting conspiracy theories and possible health risks for the measles vaccine amid a massive measles outbreak.