Breaking News
Breaking News
from Washington and beyond

Trump Attacks Immigrants in Wild Rant at National Prayer Breakfast

As Jesus said, kick out all people you don’t like.

Donald Trump raises a finger above his head while speaking at a podium
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

After concluding that his administration needed a “softer touch” on immigration, President Donald Trump delivered remarks Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast that quickly devolved into a wildly racist tirade against immigrants.

“We have to get the bad ones out,” Trump said, claiming that immigrants were a threat to innocent churchgoers. “You can’t have people going to churches and coming out and have criminals taking advantage, and doing things that nobody even wants to describe.”

Trump claimed his immigration enforcement crackdown in Washington, D.C., had removed scores of “monsters” from the streets. “We took out over 2,000 hardcore criminals. You know, two percent of the population produces 90 percent of the violent crime,” he said.

In reality, federal data suggests that more than 80 percent of the immigrants arrested in response to Trump’s so-called “crime emergency” in Washington had no prior criminal records at all, which is part of a broader national trend of targeting law-abiding immigrants.

To illustrate his point, Trump claimed that he’d single-handedly saved the capital’s restaurant industry. “The restaurant would be robbed with people sitting there. ‘Hold up your hands, everybody! Give us your money!’ And then they’d whack people with the butt of a gun,” he said.

Trump also openly mocked Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for urging Trump to abide by the U.S. Constitution in his lawless crackdown in Minnesota.

“‘This is the Constitution of the United States’—People don’t want to be mugged!” Trump cried. “They don’t want to have a murderer living next door that was, you know, killed three people in a certain country and is now living beautifully here. Because generally speaking, if they’ve killed in another country, they’re not gonna be the best of citizens.

“These are some of the meanest, most vicious people. They only gave us the worst,” Trump said, before turning to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who had once offered to take “homegrown” American citizens Trump wanted to deport.

“He’s sent us a few. I don’t want to talk to him about it,” Trump joked. “But he sends us some real bad ones.

“Isn’t it true that you will not send your good people to the United States? Wouldn’t you say? Look at him, he doesn’t know. He said, ‘What’s going on here?’ But no, he sends bad people to the United States,” Trump said.

Trump couched his criticism by saying that South American and Latin American leaders were “streetwise” in their supposed decisions about what citizens to keep and who to send away—which among other things, is definitely not how immigration works. “They cherish their good people, they only send us their bad people,” he said.

Trump’s fearmongering about immigrants is not only wildly racist—it’s also anti-Christian, going against the very Bible he hawks to his followers.

Leviticus 19:32-34 states, “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”

Is Kamala Harris Running? Why She Relaunched Her Social Accounts

Kamala Harris appears to be pushing her millions of followers to something bigger.

Kamala Harris laughs while she speaks on a mic. Her book 107 Days is in the background.
Mario Tama/Getty Images

Former Vice President Kamala Harris has rebranded her KamalaHQ social media account, sparking rumors of another presidential run.

On Wednesday evening, she announced a relaunch of KamalaHQ on X, the account that served as her primary social media presence during the 2024 election.

The video post featured a mock login page for the KamalaHQ account, and included multiple failed password attempts like “waytooonline,” “thebabysitterisweird,” and project2025wasreal” before “headquarters” worked. The post was captionless.

The initial reaction was disdain, as many assumed it was an announcement of her candidacy for 2028.

But on Thursday, Harris clarified that her social media accounts—which have seven million followers across X, TikTok, and Instagram—will be devoted to “an online organizing project for next generation campaigning.”

The new accounts will be called “Headquarters,” which they describe as “the new Gen-Z led progressive content hub.” The new username is “headquarters_67.”

“So KamalaHQ is turning into ‘Headquarters,’ and it’s where you can go online to get basically the latest of what’s going on, and also to meet and revisit with some of our great, courageous leaders,” Harris said in an announcement video from the account Thursday morning. “Stay engaged and I’ll see you out there.”

The account will be run by 501(c)(4) People for the American Way and Luminary Strategies, a consulting firm that emerged from Harris’s former social media team.

For what it’s worth, this hasn’t exactly quelled the initial rumors of Harris returning to the presidential fold, as this media arm could certainly be a part of that larger effort. But for now we can only speculate about the potential of this new “Headquarters.”

New Democratic Governor Cuts Her State Out of ICE Operations

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has ended the state’s mandatory ICE program less than one month after entering office.

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signs executive orders.
Win McNamee/Getty Images

Virginia’s new Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, has ordered state agencies to stop cooperation with ICE.

Spanberger announced Wednesday in an executive order that four state agencies will be leaving ICE’s 287(g) program, including the state police and Department of Corrections. This means that these agencies won’t be making civil immigration arrests on behalf of ICE, rolling back an executive order from the previous governor, Republican Glenn Youngkin.

“Virginians deserve to have their state and local law enforcement resources devoted to the safety and security of their communities, not federal civil immigration enforcement,” the order states, adding that the current ICE agreements “improperly cede accountability and discretion over Virginia law enforcement to the federal government.”

While ending some state cooperation with ICE is a big step, many local sheriff’s offices and police departments in Virginia still have local agreements with the agency. But Spanberger’s move could be a precursor that Virginia’s House and Senate follow to restrict law enforcement relationships with ICE, especially considering that Democrats control both chambers.

Other states, such as California and Illinois, have already banned local law enforcement from working with ICE through the 287(g) program. On Tuesday, neighboring Maryland’s House and Senate voted to ban local police from the program as well. Support for ending cooperation with ICE is growing across the country as the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis and the agency’s violent detention of immigrants continue to horrify the public.

Trump Caught in Obvious Lie on Tulsi Gabbard Joining FBI Georgia Raid

Donald Trump claimed he didn’t know why Gabbard was at the FBI raid of the Fulton County election office—despite being on the phone with her when it happened.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard speaks
Allison Robbert/Bloomberg/Getty Images

President Donald Trump says he has no clue why Tulsi Gabbard was spotted lurking around a federal raid at the election office in Fulton County, Georgia—but whatever the reason, it had to do with China!

During an exclusive interview Wednesday, NBC News’s Tom Llamas asked Trump point-blank why the director of national intelligence was present at the raid in Georgia.

“Why is Tulsi Gabbard there?” Llamas asked.

“I don’t know, but you know, uh, a lot of the cheating comes from, it’s international cheating,” Trump said. “You have people—they say—from China trying to, let me ask you, do you think China tries to influence our election?”

“We know that foreign governments try to influence a lot of things in this country,” Llamas replied.

“Well therefore, she’s foreign governments,” Trump said.

As per usual, it’s not clear whether the president was simply playing dumb or whether he’s actually clueless. But he used his garbled answer as a jumping-off point to boost long-debunked claims about election interference. However, a U.S. intelligence report released in 2021 resoundingly dispelled Trump’s and former officials’ repeated claims that China—not Russia—was the biggest threat to election integrity in 2020.

What’s more, The New York Times reported that Gabbard called the president on her cell phone after the raid. Trump initially didn’t pick up, but called back shortly after to talk to the agents on speakerphone. He thanked the agents and had questions for them.

Last week, White House officials spilled that Gabbard has spent months leading an investigation into Trump’s baseless claims about the results of the 2020 presidential election. Gabbard has reportedly regularly briefed Trump and his chief of staff Susie Wiles, as well as other well-known election deniers Cleta Mitchell, a far-right activist with the ear of the president, and Kurt Olsen, a former lawyer for the Trump campaign who helped mount the “Stop the Steal” lawsuits.

Trump Reveals What He Wants to Do With Money From Bonkers IRS Lawsuit

Donald Trump is determined to take $10 billion from U.S. taxpayers.

Donald Trump speaks while sitting at this desk in the Oval Office
Alex Wong/Getty Images

The president has pledged to donate any money he wins from his unprecedented $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for leaking his tax returns.

“Any money that I win, I’ll give it to charity, 100 percent to charity, charities that will be approved by government or whatever,” Trump said in a sit-down interview with NBC News Wednesday, adding that he’d practically already won the suit.

“Scott Bessent is the head of the IRS. Pam Bondi is the head of the Justice Department. They are going to defend the IRS against you, their boss,” pressed NBC’s Tom Llamas.

But Trump shrugged that jarring comment off, acknowledging there had “never been anything like it.” Instead, according to Trump, the more palatable truth involved snatching billions from taxpayers to do with whatever he wants.

“What I would do? Tell them to pay me, but I’ll give 100 percent of the money to charity,” Trump said. One of those potential beneficiaries, according to the president, could be the American Cancer Society.

“You’d take it out of the system?” asked Llamas.

“No, I’m putting it back into the system,” Trump said. “If I give money to the American Cancer Society, I will give 100 percent of the money away to charity. I don’t want any of it.”

“Thirty-trillion-dollar debt, and we’re going to take $10 billion out of the system?” pressed Llamas, incredulously.

“Well I mean you give it away anyway, they give away a lot of money,” Trump responded. “I’ll tell you what, speaking about that, Minnesota and these other states—we have massive investigations going into fraud.”

Trump, in a personal capacity, sued the IRS and the Treasury in a Miami federal court last week for a breach that occurred between May 2019 and September 2020. The problem: The breach occurred during the first Trump administration, when Trump himself was in charge of governing those institutions.

Legal experts have questioned the validity of the suit, arguing that the president’s complaints have long passed the statute of limitations. They have also raised a plethora of concerns relating to conflict of interest, questioning whether the leader of the executive branch could attempt to take one of the agencies under his purview for billions of dollars.