WTF Is the FAA Doing in El Paso?

The Federal Aviation Administration will now reopen the El Paso Texas Airport and surrounding airspace, after initially planning to close it for 10 days, a bizarre reversal of an even more bizarre move that would have a massive negative impact on the communities and businesses in the region.

“The temporary closure of airspace over El Paso has been lifted,” the FAA wrote on X Wednesday morning. “There is no threat to commercial aviation. All flights will resume as normal.”

But the FAA had just said late Tuesday that the flight restrictions were being imposed for “special security reasons.”

A Trump administration official told NBC News on Wednesday that the planned 10-day closure was actually because Mexican cartel drones had entered U.S. airspace, but they have since been disabled.

There has been no additional explanation for the decision—or the sudden reversal—but there were multiple theories about why Trump’s FAA would halt all aviation activity above this southern border town of 700,000.

Other possibilities that were floated included a planned military action or exercise, a credible security threat, or a very sensitive package or person that needed to be transported.

“Important context: the El Paso TFR is not like the 9/11 nationwide airspace shutdown. DC & NY restrictions were created later,” CNN’s Pete Muntean said. “A ban on all flights over a U.S. city—including medevac and police helicopters—has no modern precedent.”

What could have merited shutting down a major airport—and a hub of U.S.-Mexico trade—for 10 whole days?

“The highly consequential decision by FAA to shut down the El Paso Airport for 10 days is unprecedented and has resulted in significant concern within the community,” said Representative Veronica Escobar, who represents the El Paso region. “From what my office and I have been able to gather overnight and early this morning there is no immediate threat to the community or surrounding areas.”

This story has been updated.

Yet another member of the American Olympic team has chosen to call out the state-sponsored violence taking place back home.

Richard Ruohonen—a member of the U.S. curling team from Minnesota—separated his love for his countrymen from the government Tuesday, telling reporters that while he’s “proud to represent Team USA” and the country, he did not condone the actions of ICE and the rest of the Trump administration in his home state.

“What’s happening in Minnesota is wrong,” Ruohonen said, citing the Bill of Rights and his 28 years of experience as an attorney. “There’s no shades of gray. It’s clear.

“I really love what’s been happening there now, with people coming out, showing the love, the compassion, integrity, and respect for others that they don’t know, and helping them out. And we love Minnesota for that,” he continued. “I want to make it clear: We are out here, we love our country. We’re playing for the U.S., we’re playing for Team USA, and we’re playing for each other, and we’re playing for our family and our friends that sacrificed so much to get here today.

“What the Olympics means is excellence, respect, friendship. And we all, I think, exemplify that,” Ruohonen added. “And we are playing for the people of Minnesota and the people around the country who share those same values, that compassion, that love, and that respect.”

In standing up to address the injustices taking place across America, Ruohonen effectively placed a target on his back. Within minutes, MAGA-aligned social media influencers were busy tearing him apart, arguing that Ruohonen should stay in Italy, that there should be censors placed on the U.S team, and that the curling team’s sponsors should be boycotted.

But he’s not the first U.S. athlete to announce their discontent with the state of the country. On Sunday, Donald Trump referred to Olympic freestyle skier Hunter Hess as a “loser” after Hess candidly expressed to reporters that he had “mixed emotions” representing the U.S. in the current climate.

“It’s a little hard; there’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren’t,” Hess said at a news conference Friday. “I think for me it’s more I’m representing my friends and family back home … all the things I believe are good about the U.S.”

Hess’s teammate, Chris Lillis, took his criticism a step further.

“I feel heartbroken about what’s happened in the United States. I’m pretty sure you’re referencing ICE and some of the protests,” Lillis said. “I think that, as a country, we need to focus on respecting everybody’s rights and making sure that we’re treating our citizens, as well as anybody, with love and respect.… I hope that when people look at athletes [competing] in the Olympics, they realize that that’s the America that we’re trying to represent.”

Representative Jamie Raskin has claimed that President Trump is named over a million times in the unredacted Epstein files.

“The idea that we could get through a meaningful fraction of them is just ridiculous,” he told Axios Tuesday, after viewing the unredacted files a day earlier. “I mean, there’s tons of redacted stuff.… And [Trump’s] name, I think I put his name, and it appears more than a million times. So it’s all over the place.

“To me, this whole rollout of saying that members can come from nine to five to sit at those four computers, is just part of the coverup,” Raskin continued.

“If this is true, it would mean the Department of Justice redacted more than 96% of the mentions of Trump,” MS NOW’s Matt Fuller wrote.

“Unfortunately the GOP set the line for removal at 2 million mentions,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s press office quipped.

The DOJ’s release of the files has been extremely contentious, as it redacted the names of multiple associates and potential co-conspirators of Epstein for no apparent reason, while revealing identifying information about the victims.

One of the more notable files that Raskin and other Democrats who viewed the unredacted files have pointed to is an email chain between Epstein and his primary accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, in which Epstein details a phone call between his lawyers and Trump.

“Trump is paraphrased and quoted as saying, ‘No, Jeffrey Epstein was not a member of Mar-a-Lago, but he was a guest at Mar-a-Lago, and no, we never asked him to leave,’” Raskin told reporters on Monday. The exchange is from 2009—two years after Trump supposedly kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago.

A 23-year-old British woman was reportedly shot and killed by her father after arguing with him about Donald Trump.

New testimony offered as part of a coroner’s inquest Tuesday shed more light on the death of Lucy Harrison, who was fatally shot in January last year while visiting her father, Kris Harrison, in a suburb outside of Dallas.

Lucy Harrison’s boyfriend, Sam Littler, who had traveled with her to Texas for the holidays, told an inquest at Cheshire Coroner’s Court that the day the couple was expected to return to the United Kingdom, Harrison and her father got into “quite a big argument.”

He noted that Harrison’s father had previously been to rehab for alcohol abuse issues and that Lucy would often get upset with her father over his gun ownership. But their argument on January 10, 2025, wasn’t about guns—it was about Trump.

Littler recounted that Harrison had asked her father: “How would you feel if I was the girl in that situation and I’d been sexually assaulted?”

Harrison’s father replied that it wouldn’t upset him much considering that he had two other daughters who lived with him, Littler recalled.

A few hours later, Harrison’s father led her into the ground floor bedroom—and then Littler heard a loud bang. “I remember running into the room and Lucy was lying on the floor near the entrance to the bathroom and Kris was just screaming, just sort of nonsense,” Littler said.

It’s not entirely clear what specific “situation” Harrison was referring to in her argument with her father, but Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by so many women, he once tried to to defend himself by invoking his high rate of accusations after he was found liable for sexual abuse. Trump has also appeared tens of thousands of times in the most recent release of Epstein files.

Harrison’s father was not present at the inquest Tuesday, but in a statement sent to court, he claimed that he’d relapsed on alcohol, drinking an entire bottle of white wine. He claimed that he’d been inspired to show his daughter his Glock 9mm semiautomatic handgun after the two had watched a news segment about gun crime.

“As I lifted the gun to show her I suddenly heard a loud bang. I did not understand what had happened. Lucy immediately fell,” he said. American authorities have previously said they did not intend to press charges related to Harrison’s death.

If Harrison’s death was indeed the result of their earlier argument about Trump, it wouldn’t be the first time the president has been invoked by someone committing or threatening a violent act.

It was Canada that footed the bill for the Gordie Howe International Bridge that connects Detroit to Windsor, Ontario. The project created new American labor, and was constructed with U.S. supplies. The six-lane bridge was scheduled to open sometime in 2026—but then Donald Trump got involved.

On Monday night, the president claimed that he would block the opening unless Canada “fully compensated” America “for everything” and gives him what he wants: “at least half” ownership of the bridge. Since then, his administration has attempted to reframe the botched deal as an inexplicable White House win.

“I think the president was very clear and direct in his truth,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday. “But just to reiterate, the fact that Canada will control what crosses the Gordie Howe bridge and will own land on both sides is unacceptable to the president. It is also unacceptable that more of this bridge is not made with more American-made materials.

“Even more so than what President Barack Obama committed to the Canadians at the time, at the start of the project,” she continued.

“This is just another example of President Trump putting America’s interests first,” Leavitt added.

Trump hopped on Truth Social Monday to effectively kill the project as it stands, backtracking on his 2018 position that the bridge would be a welcome addition to American commerce.

“Canada is building a massive bridge between Ontario and Michigan. They own both the Canada and the United States side and, of course, built it with virtually no U.S. content,” Trump wrote online. “President Barack Hussein Obama stupidly gave them a waiver so they could get around the BUY AMERICAN Act, and not use any American products, including our Steel. Now, the Canadian Government expects me, as President of the United States, to PERMIT them to just ‘take advantage of America!’”

Ahead of a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters that Michigan already has an ownership stake in the bridge, and that—despite what Trump said—the construction was made with U.S. steel and labor.

“This is going to be resolved,” Carney said.

The latest tranche of Epstein files includes a 2014 email from the infamous sexual predator asking his personal pilot to purchase and place tiny hidden cameras for him around his home in Palm Beach, Florida. While it’s unclear where exactly the cameras were placed and what they were used for, it’s not a far stretch to infer that they aided Epstein in his trafficking and abuse in some way—especially as multiple victims have reported that they felt they were being recorded when visiting his properties.

“Lets get three motion detected hidden cameras, that record, thanks. also a new airplay compatible receiver for gym thanks,” Epstein wrote to his pilot, Larry Visoski, in February 2014, as first reported by The Telegraph.

“Jeffrey, I already two purchased the Motion sensor camera from the Spy Store in Fort Lauderdale yesterday, I charged them last night and figuring our how to work them as we speak,” Visoski wrote back. “Its amazing how small they are, the size of Thumb nail drive, 64 hour recording, Motion sensor. I’m installing them into Kleenex boxes now. I’ll bring them by later today, I just had a Root Canal done, so I’m still hurting.”

This isn’t the first time emails showed the predator’s interest in hidden surveillance. In a 2012 email, Epstein asked a Scott Denett “for Wednesday please suggst some web enabled security surveillance cameras? Thanks.” And way back in 2005, a Palm Beach cop who conducted a raid of Epstein’s home reported that he “located two covert (hidden) cameras,” both hidden inside clocks.

These haunting emails sow serious doubts in the Justice Department’s claim that “there were no cameras found inside any bedrooms or living areas of either residence” during its 2019 raids of Epstein’s New York and U.S. Virgin Island properties.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt abruptly ended a press briefing Tuesday after being asked about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s ties to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s a miracle Leavitt didn’t burst a blood vessel after a Bloomberg reporter asked whether the Trump administration still supported Lutnick after the secretary confirmed earlier in the day that he kept in contact with Epstein for years after he previously claimed to have cut ties with him. Lutnick even coordinated a family trip to the financier’s “pedophile island” in 2012, four years after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution of a minor.

“So, does the White House stand behind Secretary Lutnick right now, or given what he has said today, has there been any shift in how the White House is viewing Secretary Lutnick’s performance?” the reporter asked.

“No, Secretary Lutnick remains a very important member of President Trump’s team, and the president fully supports the secretary,” Leavitt replied.

“I will just point out that there are a lot of wins in the news this week that people in this room have not asked about, because you continue to ask questions about the same subject, so let me point them out for you,” Leavitt continued, before launching into a prepared propaganda spiel that the White House had published on its website the day before.

Leavitt touted the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing at a record high last week, a historically low national homicide rate (which had already started to plunge during the Biden administration), national median rents dropping to a four-year low, and mortgage affordability hitting a four-year high.

Some of the things she listed were not actually wins for Americans, but rather wins for Trump. Leavitt celebrated that a federal appeals court had upheld the Trump administration’s policy of detaining undocumented immigrants en masse, and a recent statement from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons objecting to surgical intervention for transgender minors.

“So, we’re gonna get back to business. The president is very busy today and you will see him all tomorrow at the event in the East Room touting his administration’s energy policy,” Leavitt said before quickly exiting the room.

While the White House appears increasingly frustrated that the media isn’t saying what they want it to say, the American people and its leaders are clearly deeply disturbed by the Trump administration’s deepening ties to Epstein, as the calls for Lutnick to resign only continue to grow.

Vice President JD Vance and his wife honored the victims of the Armenian genocide on Tuesday, sparking immediate backlash from Washington to the Middle East. The problem? His boss doesn’t recognize the World War I–era atrocity.

Vance shared an image of himself and his wife, Usha Vance, on X, honoring the estimated 1.2 million Armenians killed in the ethnic cleansing. But moments after he hit “post,” the statement was deleted.

“Today, Vice President Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance attended a wreath laying ceremony at the Armenian Genocide memorial to honor the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide,” Vance initially wrote.

It was not immediately clear why Vance retracted the public message, though there would be plenty of obvious reasons to do so. Donald Trump has refuted congressional and academic consensus on the matter, refusing to describe the extermination event as a “genocide.”

Vance’s office blamed the slip-up on a staffer, according to a pool report circulated by CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“This is an account managed by staff that primarily exists to share photos and videos of the Vice President’s activities,” Vance’s office said in a statement.

The mass killing was conducted between 1915 and 1917 by the Ottoman Empire, paving the way for a homogenous ethnostate that would, a handful of years later, become the Republic of Turkey. Turkish government propagandists have long maintained that the Armenian genocide is a fiction and that deporting Armenians was a legitimate action—ignoring the estimated 1.2 million Armenians killed as the Ottomans forced them on a death march into the Syrian desert.

Trump repeatedly rejected congressional efforts to recognize the genocide during his first administration, but could not intervene in 2021 when then-President Joe Biden acknowledged Congress’s 2019 vote on the phrase and changed long-standing presidential policy by finally recognizing the calamity with the appropriate language.

Even before the mishap, Vance was already trailblazing administrative policy: His visit Monday marked the first time that any U.S. president or vice president had stepped foot in Armenia.

But back home, Vance’s blunderous backpedal was not received well by the Armenian American community.

“Turkey never tires of humiliating America,” said Aram Hamparian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, in a statement on X. “This time, forcing a sitting US Vice President to delete his post about the Armenian Genocide.”

“While it’s no surprise to see Turkey still strong-arming global leaders to enforce its Armenian Genocide gag-rule,” Hamparian continued, “it is deeply troubling to witness Vice President Vance—a man who loudly proclaims solidarity with Christian victims of persecution—display such weakness in the face of this foreign pressure.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked in her Tuesday press briefing about Vance tweeting and then promptly deleting the post about the Armenian genocide. She curtly said there had been “no change of policy” since Trump’s statement on April 24, Armenian Remembrance Day, when he did not refer to the ethnic cleansing as a genocide.

A Trump-appointed judge blocked an attempt by the Department of Justice to seize the state of Michigan’s voter rolls Tuesday.

U.S. District Court Judge Hala Jarbou ruled that federal law does not require Michigan to turn over voter registration lists or voters’ personal information, and dismissed the case. The Trump administration wanted an electronic copy of Michigan’s voter registration list of eight million voters, complete with full names, birth dates, addresses, and either driver’s license numbers or partial Social Security numbers. It will likely appeal the ruling.

The president was also rebuffed in court last month for trying to get Oregon and California to hand over their voter registration data. It’s all part of a plan to centralize voter information under the direction of the White House, raising issues of what the Trump administration plans to do with that data.

Trump’s Department of Justice has reportedly sent draft agreements to several states that would give the federal government the ability to flag voters’ names and order states to remove them from the rolls. Some Republican-run states, such as Alaska and Texas, have agreed to do this, while other states, controlled by both Democrats and Republicans, have refused.

In Minnesota, the Trump administration tried to use the federal immigration crackdown in the state to leverage Governor Tim Walz into handing over not only his state’s voter registration data but also Medicaid and SNAP records. Walz said no.

President Trump has been fearmongering about the 2026 midterm elections for months, making baseless claims about voter fraud and election rigging recycled from 2020. In recent weeks, Trump has spoken of “taking over” elections. This, coupled with the FBI raid of a Georgia elections office last month and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s suggestion to send ICE to the polls, reveals how much Trump wants to rig the midterms.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Todd Lyons faced tough questions while defending his agency’s wanton violence before a meeting of the House Homeland Security Committee Tuesday—but none tougher than those from Representative LaMonica McIver.

“Mr. Lyons, do you consider yourself a religious man?” McIver asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Lyons replied.

“Oh, yes! OK, well how do you think Judgment Day will work for you with so much blood on your hands?” the New Jersey Democrat asked.

“I’m not gonna entertain that question, ma’am,” Lyon said.

“Oh, OK, of course not. Do you think you’re going to hell, Mr. Lyons?” McIver pressed.

Their exchange was interrupted by the smack of committee Chair Andrew Garbarino’s gavel, who urged the lawmakers to “adhere to established standards of decorum and debate.”

“Mr. Chairman, I was asking a question,” McIver replied. “You guys are always talking about religion here and the Bible, I mean, it’s OK for me to ask a question, right?”

McIver continued: “How many government agencies, Mr. Lyons, are you aware of that routinely kill American citizens and still get funding?”

Again, Lyons refused to “entertain” the question.

“Of course you’re not, exactly. Once again, questions that you cannot answer,” McIver replied.

“This is why we need to abolish ICE,” McIver urged, before yielding back her time.

Last year, McIver was arrested during a visit to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in New Jersey and charged with “assaulting, impeding, and interfering [with]” law enforcement officers as they moved to unlawfully arrest Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. McIver has pleaded not guilty and recently moved to appeal a judge’s decision not to dismiss all of the charges.

Those weren’t all the questions that Lyons refused to answer. The ICE chief wouldn’t say whether any federal agents had been fired since the deadly shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Lyons also wouldn’t say whether those two deserved to die because the investigations into their deaths were still ongoing.

Instead, Lyons insisted that it was the ICE agents who were really the victims of their own sweeping immigration enforcement crackdown, and refused to commit to unmasking the agents under his supervision.