Hegseth Reshapes Hundreds of Immigration Courts in One Fell Swoop

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is replacing immigration judges with hundreds of military lawyers, following the Trump administration’s monthslong purge of immigration courts.

Hegseth approved more than 600 military lawyers from the Department of Defense to serve as temporary immigration judges, nearly doubling the ranks of jurists overseeing the president’s massive deportation efforts, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. It’s a move that indicates the Trump administration was simply clearing house to install its own ranks of loyalist judges, intent on seeing the president’s deportations through.

A memo dated August 27 said that the military would begin dispatching batches of 150 attorneys to the Justice Department “as soon as practicable” and have an initial group identified by next week. Appointments would last no longer than 179 days, expiring in February, but they can be renewed.

Since President Donald Trump entered office, a series of departures and firings have left only roughly 600 immigration judges to oversee the nation’s 71 immigration courts and handle a backlog of 3.7 million cases—and the number increases every day.

Most recently in July, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers claimed that another 17 immigration judges had been fired “without cause.” In February, Kerry Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney, who was part of an upcoming class of immigration judges who were all dismissed, alleged that her dismissal was politically motivated.

As a result of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the number of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reached an all-time high. At the end of August, a record number of 61,226 people were detained by ICE, and 70 percent of them did not have criminal convictions.

President Trump gave a strange, clearly made-up answer when asked about a viral video of someone tossing black trash bags out of a White House window. 

“There’s a video that is circulating online now of the White House where a window is open to the residence upstairs, and somebody is throwing a big bag out of the window,” Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Trump during his Tuesday press conference. “Have you seen this?” 

“No, that’s probably AI-generated,” Trump replied. “Actually you can’t open the windows, you know why? They’re all heavily armored and bulletproof.” 

“So that’s a fake video?” Doocy followed up.

“Well it’s gotta be, because I know every window up there. The last place I’d be doing it is that because there’s cameras all over the place right, including yours,” Trump responded, even though Doocy didn’t ask whether it was the president in the video.

“No, but every window … they’re bulletproof,” Trump continued. “And number one, they’re sealed, and number two, each window weighs about 600 pounds, so you have to be pretty strong to open them up. No, that has to be—where was the window? Let me see it.” 

Doocy then showed Trump the video on his phone. 

“Maybe for the renovation?” someone in the crowd called out.  

“Which is the window?” Trump asked, staring intently at the video. 

“It looks like this is the 15th Street side, I think.” 

“Yeah those windows are sealed. Those windows are all sealed, you can’t open ‘em.” 

The video was not AI-generated, it was very much real. Trump’s own officials admitted as much. 

“It was a contractor who was doing regular maintenance while the President was gone,” a White House person told Time in an article published just a few hours before Trump pulled the “that was AI” card. 

This was all very strange to watch. Trump jumping so quickly to blame AI after his own staff had already offered an explanation suggests that much of what dominates online discourse —like whether or not Trump is dying—doesn’t always reach the president’s ears. He also appeared to admit his own explanation was a lie when he later clarified, “If something happens really bad, just blame AI.”

President Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., may have helped a Republican congressman get off scot-free after he allegedly assaulted a woman. 

In February, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department arrived at Mills’s luxury penthouse on the Wharf in response to a call about a domestic disturbance. There they found Mills’s “significant other” of a year, 27, “physically shaking and scared,” according to a police report.

Mills and his wife, Rana Al Saadi, have been in the process of divorcing for almost three years. 

There are three separate police reports of the conflict. In one, Mills’s partner told police that the congressman “grabbed her, shoved her, and pushed her out of the door.” The police report also noted that she had fresh bruises on her arms, and that she played them a recorded phone call in which Mills told her to lie about where her bruises were from. Mills, 45, later showed up to the scene. When police told him he’d be placed under arrest, his significant other recanted all of her previous statements, and Mills was freed. 

The MPD later sent an arrest warrant for Mills to the U.S. attorney’s office, where interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin refused to sign it. The case remained under MPD “investigation” until Trump took over the MPD. Then it was promptly, conveniently closed. 

“I would like to thank the Metro Police Department for their diligent investigation into false and misleading accusations made against me by the media, ensuring that both truth and justice prevailed,” Mills said in a statement to The Hill. “The media’s claims and political spins have been debunked, and the case is closed. It’s blatantly obvious that some have attempted to over-politicize this to impact the 2026 election, but these efforts have failed.”

This seems like a pretty clear abuse of power on Trump’s part—taking over a city’s police department, which then closes an investigation into one of your party members a year before midterm elections. It certainly aligns with the other instances of this administration’s rampant corruption and cronyism. 

The MPD investigation was just one allegation against Mills. He’s also currently facing a lawsuit that charges him of using revenge porn against his ex-partner, Florida Republican state committee member and Miss United States 2024, Lindsey Langston. Mills allegedly threatened to post nude videos of Langston and promised to hurt any man she dated in the future. That case is ongoing.  

An active congressman with two allegations of assault against women is still sitting in the Capitol building thanks to the president. That’s what Trump’s version of draining the swamp actually looks like. 

Scores of scientists slammed the Trump administration’s latest climate report as a “farce” full of misinformation, The Guardian reported Tuesday.

In July, the Department of Energy published “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” a report claiming that the impacts of global warming had been overblown—without having it peer reviewed at all.

In response a group of 85 climate experts compiled a more than 400-page review, and found that the DOE’s report had been authored by five fringe experts who had cherry-picked cases and misrepresented research and evidence to support their flimsy findings.

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said that DOE’s climate report “makes a mockery of science.”

The document “relies on ideas that were rejected long ago, supported by misrepresentations of the body of scientific knowledge, omissions of important facts, arm waving, anecdotes and confirmation bias,” Dessler told The Guardian. “This report makes it clear DOE has no interest in engaging with the scientific community.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright personally selected five climate scientists to author the report who were “well known for manufacturing uncertainty” around climate science, the review found. The report’s authors, John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven E. Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer, have each downplayed the impacts of climate change. Eleven percent of the report’s citations led to the authors’ own research, a rate that was nearly five times higher than another 2023 climate report.

Wright said the authors were chosen “for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate.” But the review stated that the DOE report “covers areas in which the authors are not experts,” and that the report’s many mistakes were “caused by a lack of familiarity with the science.”

Pamela McElwee, an associate professor of human ecology at Rutgers University, told The Guardian that the five people who were selected by the secretary of energy for their viewpoints “produced a shoddy mess of cherry-picked data and unsupported assertions.”

Dessler was distraught over how badly mischaracterized some research about climate-driven extreme events had been. “I mean, they just don’t understand what they’re talking about,” he said.

The scientists said that the shoddy work was in service of a predetermined outcome: a report that would help support the administration’s repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, stating that the current and projected concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is vowing to keep troops stationed in Los Angeles, despite a Tuesday ruling declaring the administration’s use of the military in the city for domestic law enforcement purposes illegal.

Earlier, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s use of federal troops to perform police functions in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act. The judge further barred the administration from using the military in California “to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants” in ways that violate that law.

California Governor Gavin Newsom applauded the ruling on X, writing that the courts ruled that Trump’s “militarization of our streets and use of the military against US citizens is ILLEGAL.”

But Bill Essayli, the acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, told the governor that the troops are going nowhere. “The military will remain in Los Angeles,” he wrote in response to Newsom. “This is a false narrative and a misleading injunction.”

Essayli went on to argue that the military is not involved with “direct law enforcement operations” in Los Angeles. Instead, he repeated the administration’s justification for its iron-fisted military crackdown on the city, first sparked by anti–Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in June: that troops are protecting federal agents from “thugs” supported by Democratic officials. (Several hundred National Guard troops still remain in Los Angeles.)

Essayli’s claim runs counter to Tuesday’s ruling, which found that the Trump administration indeed “systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson is offering Republicans a cowardly out to avoid voting on a bipartisan discharge petition to release the Epstein files in full. 

Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna have been trying to push a House bill that would force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files, an effort that was reignited by the Trump administration’s shady mess of a rollout that shed further light on the president’s close friendship with the defamed serial sexual predator. 

But rather than deliver transparency to the public, Johnson scheduled a vote this week that would allow Republicans to order the Oversight Committee to “continue its ongoing investigation.” The legislation does nothing to force the Justice Department to outright release the files in full, as Khanna and Massie are fighting for. 

This all comes as the House Oversight Committee plans to meet with 10 of Epstein’s victims on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to further investigate “the possible mismanagement of the federal government’s investigation of Mr. Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell, the circumstances and subsequent investigations of Mr. Epstein’s death, the operation of sex-trafficking rings and ways for the federal government to effectively combat them, and potential violations of ethics rules related to elected officials.” Massie and Khanna also plan to hold a press conference with the victims on Wednesday.   

“Speaker Johnson just scheduled this meaningless vote to provide political cover for those members who don’t support our bipartisan legislation to force the release of the Epstein files,” Massie wrote shortly after news of Johnson’s ghost vote broke. Massie said he plans to file his discharge petition to force a vote on releasing the files on Tuesday at 2 p.m. Johnson’s vote allows Republicans to pretend they’re doing something on the matter by simply telling the Oversight Committee to keep up the good work, serving as yet another exhibit of Republicans choosing to protect rich pedophiles.  

At least half a million people across the country marched against the billionaire takeover of the government on Labor Day—but you wouldn’t know it by the amount of coverage media devoted to it.

The U.S. Department of Labor has called President Donald Trump’s second administration the “new dawn” and “golden age” of the American worker. However, Americans expressed their discontent Monday by organizing more than one thousand Workers over Billionaires demonstrations.

In Chicago, where Trump has threatened to carry out the next phase of his illegal law enforcement takeover of Democratic cities, hundreds of workers from dozens of unions marched in protest of the Trump administration. “No Troops in Chicago,” read one protester’s sign, while others had slogans about “Families Over Billionaires,” and “Education Not Deportation.”

Stacy Davis Gates, head of the Chicago Teachers Union, delivered remarks condemning Trump’s efforts to tamper with government institutions that were built by workers, for workers.

“Lincoln didn’t free us. We freed ourselves, workers. Our work created the Departments of Housing, Education. Labor, and more. We built the United States as we’ve known it, and now workers will protect it,” Gates said, according to the union’s post on X.

Across the country, unions in Boston, Massachusetts organized the city’s first Labor Day parade in decades. Governor Maura Healey and Senator Elizabeth Warren marched alongside union leaders and thousands of protesters. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Senator Ed Markey made remarks to the demonstrators at City Hall.

“We won’t let you get away with kicking our loved ones off health care to fund tax breaks for the rich,” said Wu, according to The Boston Globe. “We won’t let you sweep the Epstein files under your Qatari jet.”

In Los Angeles, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler joined members of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor as they rallied in Long Beach. The May Day Strong movement, the group behind the nationwide protests, was backed by the AFL-CIO, which includes 63 national and international unions that represent more than 15 million working people. Worker demonstrations were planned all across Southern California, and hundreds marched in the northern part of the state in San Francisco.

Near Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York, a crowd of several hundred people gathered to protest the president, holding signs asking “Which Side Are You On?” according to The New York Times.

The demonstrations weren’t confined to larger U.S. cities.

In Durham, North Carolina, hundreds of workers marched at Duke University, and protesters strode down the streets of Asheville demanding, “Power to the people!”

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, 6,000 people took to the streets, according to the American Federation of Teachers. Des Moines, Iowa, Seattle, Washington, St. Louis, Missouri, and Detroit, Michigan were among the other cities where demonstrators gathered.

Across the country, people showed up to express their resounding rage with America’s first billionaire president, who seems bent on reshaping the American economy to benefit his family, and his wealthy friends—while sending prices soaring, sparking an economic slowdown, and making plans to gut essential programs like Medicaid and Social Security.

On Tuesday, The Boston Globe revealed that the Justice Department lawyer pushing Donald Trump’s war against Harvard University for alleged complicity in campus antisemitism once wrote a college paper from the perspective of Adolf Hitler.

When Michael Velchik was a senior at Harvard in 2011, studying Classics, he was assigned to write a brief paper in Latin “from the perspective of a controversial historical or literary figure justifying your actions and defending yourself against potential accusations.” Students could choose a “classical figure such as Nero or Cleopatra; a mythological figure such as Medea or Theseus; or anyone from the post-classical world, whether a Shakespearean villain or a twentieth-century tycoon.”

Velchik chose Hitler, according to three sources of the Globe—two of whom had read the paper and considered it disturbing. “At Harvard in 2011, no one would say that Hitler was a controversial figure,” an unnamed source said.

The instructor, dismayed, reportedly had Velchik redo the assignment.

Fast-forward 18 months—when Velchik was getting ready to matriculate at Harvard Law School—and, per the Globe, he told a peer that Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, was his favorite book he’d read that year. “[I]s it bad that my favorite class at harvard was nietzsche and my favorite book i’ve read this year is mein kampf?” he wrote in a June 2013 email.

After starting at Harvard Law, Velchik offered additional thoughts on Hitler’s book in another email to a peer. Sharing quick reviews of 76 books he’d recently read, he called Mein Kampf “fascinating,” and wrote of its author, “He certainly excelled as an orator, and his writing reflects oratory.… Understands the importance of propaganda. Thought that the timing of a speech was important: better late at night!”

Velchik omitted to mention Hitler’s responsibility for the Holocaust.

And he wasn’t as impressed with other books as he’d been with Mein Kampf. Velchik was critical of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which he said “reminded” him why he didn’t “usually read books written by women.”

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee will meet with 10 victims of serial sexual abuser and wealthy socialite Jeffrey Epstein. The meeting will seek to shed more light on “the possible mismanagement of the federal government’s investigation of Mr. Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell, the circumstances and subsequent investigations of Mr. Epstein’s death, the operation of sex-trafficking rings and ways for the federal government to effectively combat them, and potential violations of ethics rules related to elected officials,” Oversight Chair James Comer noted.

This bipartisan effort comes after months of distraction and denial from the Trump administration—from Attorney General Pam Bondi first claiming she had the Epstein files on her desk, to later saying there actually were no files and the case was effectively closed, to President Trump himself proclaiming that anyone who still cared about the said files is a big stupid idiot. That fiasco only fed more attention to the case, and now nearly 70 percent of the country believes that someone in the government (perhaps … the president) is hiding something. House Speaker Mike Johnson even called summer recess early to avoid having to vote on Epstein related issues. Now, as Congress returns, eyes are turning back to it.

If the House Oversight’s move wasn’t concerning enough for the Trump administration, Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie will be holding a public press conference at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning. “I pray Speaker Johnson will listen to the pleas of these victims for justice and quit trying to block a vote on our legislation to release the Epstein files,” Massie wrote on X.

Massie and Khanna filed a bipartisan discharge petition calling on the Justice Department to release the Epstein files in full. The move struck a nerve with Trump, who called Massie “the worst Republican congressman.”

We’ll see if Trump has anything more to say on Wednesday morning.

“These victims haven’t spoken for decades. When Epstein got that lenient plea deal, no one talked to the victims or their lawyers,” Khanna said to Fox News Digital on Monday. “There are a lot of other rich, powerful men, politicians, business leaders, who have committed abuse and who have not been held accountable. That’s what we’re going to hear on September 3, and people are going to be outraged, and I don’t see how, after that, the House can’t vote for the release of these files.”

Owen Shroyer, a host for Infowars, announced Monday that he is leaving the conspiracy-driven news platform due to a fight with its founder, Alex Jones. Jones believed Shroyer was too “anti-Trump,” according to the outgoing host.

“I have nothing but respect and appreciation for Alex and everything we’ve done at Infowars,” Shroyer said in a livestream late Monday. “I’m not sure that was mutual, but it doesn’t really matter.”

Prior to his decision to leave, Shroyer said, “Alex had been coming into my show [War Room], and talking about how I’m negative and calling me a pessimist, and all this other stuff, which is fine.” Shroyer said. “He says I’m too negative, he says I’m a pessimist, whatever, I’m too anti-Trump.”

Shroyer decided to take time off, thinking “maybe he’s right.” But their issues persisted when he returned.

“It’s not to say that I didn’t have creative control over the Infowars War Room,” Shroyer said. “But I mean, imagine. It’s like somebody staring over your back 24/7. And so every single day that I came back, it was either a guest I was told I had on at the last minute or it was him coming into the studio—he wants me to cover this, he wants me to cover that.”

On Thursday, these frustrations came to a head, as Shroyer said he prepared a three-hour show that he thought he would host where a “babysitter wouldn’t be looking over my shoulder.”

“I was wrong,” he continued. “It happened, and I just said I’m out.”

On air, Jones attributed Shroyer’s absence to a family emergency, but, Shroyer said, “There was no family emergency. I walked off the show.”

Jones on X Tuesday said he wishes Shroyer the best, but denied insinuations of censorship, which he claimed were drummed up to promote the departing host’s next venture.

“I only encouraged him to be more positive in general about the fact that humanity has come a long way in the great awakening,” Jones wrote—the “great awakening” referring to a time during which humanity is “waking up” to the supposed sinister plans of a global elite cabal. “I am surprised by the censorship claim he is hinting at but if he thinks he needs to say that to build his show that will be on him.”