Trump Uses Veto to Punish Tribe for Blocking Alligator Alcatraz

President Donald Trump has vetoed a bill that would expand the territory of a small Native American tribe in the Everglades because they didn’t support his “Alligator Alcatraz” plans.

“Despite seeking funding and special treatment from the Federal Government, the Miccosukee Tribe has actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies that the American people decisively voted for when I was elected. My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding projects for special interests, especially those that are unaligned with my Administration’s policy of removing violent criminal illegal aliens from the country,” Trump wrote in a message to Congress Tuesday night.

“It is not the Federal Government’s responsibility to pay to fix problems in an area that the Tribe has never been authorized to occupy. For these reasons, I cannot support the Miccosukee Reserved Amendments Act.”

The Miccosukee Tribe was part of a lawsuit along with two environmental groups—Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity—that argued that the Trump administration and Florida state government hadn’t carried out the required environmental review for the construction of the detention center deep in the cherished Southern Florida wetlands.

Now Trump is denying their effort to regain just a portion of the land that was taken from them in the First and Second Seminole Wars of the nineteenth century.

The Miccosukee weren’t the only ones hit with a spiteful veto from a most spiteful president. In Colorado, Trump shot down a massive clean water project that was years in the making because MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert refused to cave to his pressure to stay mum on the Epstein files. She voted for their release, and now 39 communities may have to go back to the drawing board for their clean water.

Border Patrol has been arresting U.S. citizens, according to the agency’s leader.

U.S. Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino told Fox News Tuesday that his underlings had in fact arrested American citizens, claiming that they had cuffed U.S. nationals for assaulting border patrol agents.

“As far as American citizens, the vast majority of American citizens, especially that the U.S. Border patrol has arrested, many of those citizens assaulted federal officers, assaulted border patrol agents, in the performance of our duties,” Bovino said. “Anyone that assaults a federal officer, you’re gonna go to jail.”

The Homeland Security Department released a memo in November claiming that assaults on DHS agents had risen by 1,150 percent since 2024. They blamed the supposed rise on the rhetoric of sanctuary city politicians, alleging that political opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda—such as condemning ICE and Border Patrol agents as “Nazis” and “slave patrols”—had inspired the unprecedented violence.

“Our law enforcement officers have had Molotov cocktails and rocks thrown at them, been shot at, had cars used as weapons against them, and been physically assaulted,” Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in the memo.

Meanwhile, the tactics utilized by ICE agents to arrest and detain the undocumented population have been nothing short of appalling. ICE agents have violently ripped families apart, beaten suspects, and even detained elected officials attempting to visit their facilities or escort immigrants to and from scheduled immigration court dates.

But the agents have also masked their faces and intentionally tried to hide their identities, making the government officials practically indiscernible from violent laypeople as they invade homes, hijack cars, or assault people on the street.

Bovino himself is no stranger to violent behavior. In late November, the Border Patrol chief was slammed by a U.S. district judge after he semantically dodged questions related to his and his agents’ excessive use of force against protesters in Chicago. At the time, Bovino split hairs about how many canisters of tear gas he threw into a crowd as well as other alleged misconduct by officers under his command during “Operation Midway Blitz.”

Colorado MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert is claiming that President Donald Trump killed a massive clean water project in her district as punishment for her voting to release the Epstein files, even after Trump pressed her not to. 

The Arkansas Valley Conduit was a project decades in the making that was supposed to grant safe drinking water to 39 communities across the region, and received bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress. Trump ended all of that on Tuesday. 

“My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding expensive and unreliable policies,” he said in a statement justifying his veto of the bill. “Ending the massive cost of taxpayer handouts and restoring fiscal sanity is vital to economic growth and the fiscal health of the Nation.”

Boebert was incensed. 

“President Trump decided to veto a completely non-controversial, bipartisan bill that passed both the House and Senate unanimously. Why? Because nothing says ‘America First’ like denying clean drinking water to 50,000 people in Southeast Colorado, many of whom enthusiastically voted for him in all three elections,” she wrote in a statement. “I thought the campaign was about lowering costs and cutting red tape. But hey, if this administration wants to make its legacy blocking projects that deliver water to rural Americans; that’s on them.”

“And I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability. Americans deserve leadership that puts people over politics,” she continued. 

Boebert is clearly alluding to Trump’s aforementioned phone call to demand that she remove her name from the petition to release the Epstein files.  

Boebert also argued that the veto would have been reasonable if it targeted more liberal voters in Colorado, but not people in her region who “overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in the last three elections.” 

“These are not the people that should be attacked,” she said in a video message. 

The bill’s unanimous passage—and the bipartisan disapproval around its veto—suggest that this fight may not be over. 

Three years after Virginia Giuffre left her job as Mar-a-Lago’s pool attendant to “work” for Jeffrey Epstein, another employee at the club spa issued an allegation that hampered the prodigious sex trafficker’s access to Donald Trump’s Palm Beach resort.

Epstein wasn’t actually a member, but Trump told his employees to treat him like one. The financier was a frequent client at the club’s spa, where his appointments were arranged by Ghislaine Maxwell, so much so that he was allowed house calls at his neighboring estate by the spa’s masseuses, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

That privilege came to a jarring end in 2003, when an 18-year-old beautician returned from one of the house visits complaining that Epstein had attempted to pressure her into sex.

Managers at the club spa then wrote a letter to Trump, urging him to ban Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. The letter was well received, and Trump told the spa management to “kick him out,” according to the Journal.

Prior to his death, pedophilic sex trafficker Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together on several occasions and were caught partying with underaged girls in New Jersey casinos. Epstein was invited to Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples in 1993, and in 2002, Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy.”

The same year that the beautician accused Epstein of coercing her, Trump participated in a 50th birthday book for Epstein, penning a letter in which he referred to the disgraced financier as his “pal” and waxed poetic about their shared “secret.”

Trump shocked the country in July when he admitted that he had thrown Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago when he became aware that Epstein was abducting the resort’s underage female employees, and that Trump knew Giuffre—one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers—was one of the “stolen” girls.

But it appears Trump’s “kick him out” directive only referred to the spa, as Epstein wasn’t formally banned from Mar-a-Lago until October 2007, after he reportedly acted inappropriately toward a club member’s daughter. That same month, Epstein’s account was listed as “closed” in Mar-a-Lago’s books.

Even still, a nixed membership did not mean that Epstein was totally absent from the club. Also in October 2007, an article from The New York Post reported that Epstein denied the Mar-a-Lago ban, claiming that he had been invited to an event that year.

Democrats have won big in Iowa, as they’ll send Renee Hardman to the state Senate with 71.5 percent of the vote, a whopping 27 points more than Kamala Harris won in the state by last year.

Hardman’s Tuesday night win also prevents Republicans from gaining a supermajority in the chamber. Hardman is the first Black woman elected to the Iowa state Senate.

A Democratic victory that large in a red state mirrors recent historic results elsewhere, and may indicate that voters may be fatigued or are just outright rejecting anything to do with President Donald Trump. Those results include Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill’s gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey. But a victory in a small, downballot race such as Hardman’s shows that disapproval of Trump and his administration may be hitting closer to home as the government fails to end endless wars and make the country more affordable.

Earlier this year, Democrats also won big in Erie County, Pennsylvania, which narrowly supported Trump in the 2024 election, and defeated a 36-year Republican incumbent in Virginia’s 66th state House district. Democrats in Georgia managed to win two statewide races for public service commissioner, their first nonfederal statewide wins since 2006.

And even in the deep Southern state of Mississippi, Democrats were able to break the supermajority in the state Senate by flipping three seats after 13 years, taking away Republicans’ ability to override the governor’s veto and easily propose constitutional amendments.

All that is to say that these results should have Trump very worried about how negatively Americans are feeling about his second term, even those who voted for him in 2024. If this holds, it could be a major issue for the GOP come 2026 midterms.