Noem Pisses Off Coast Guard by Using Their Resources for Deportations

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is under fire for using Coast Guard resources to aid in deportations.

The Coast Guard is the only military branch overseen by DHS, and Noem’s decisions have caused tension with some of the branch’s leaders. Under Noem, the Coast Guard’s aircraft have been used for deportations 10 times as much as under the previous administration, according to sources who spoke with NBC.

“It puts so much stress on the Wing,” a Coast Guard official told the outlet, referencing the branch’s air units. 

Noem’s prioritization of deportations has changed the way the military branch operates. One decision she made was to shift Coast Guard resources from a search and rescue mission to find a missing service member last year, shortly after Noem was confirmed as secretary. 

When a 23-year-old Coast Guard member went overboard in the Pacific Ocean while serving on cutter Waesche in February 2025, officials scrambled planes and ships to the ocean to find the service member, including a Coast Guard C-130 that was supposed to transport detained immigrants from California to Texas. When Noem learned of this, she personally told Admiral Kevin Lunday, the acting commandant of the Coast Guard, to pull the plane away from the search and rescue mission and back to deportation duty. 

A regional commander pulled two other C-27 planes to transport the detainees in order to keep the C-130 in the search mission for an additional hour. But ultimately, after a 190-hour search covering 19,000 square miles, the missing service member wasn’t found. 

Search and rescue operations, which used to be the branch’s core mission, now have a diminished priority in the Coast Guard. They are now below counternarcotics and training, as well as deportations, in priority, according to unnamed officials. The branch’s leadership has raised concerns in internal discussions and with people outside of the agency.  

Back in May, Noem’s top adviser and rumored boyfriend, Corey Lewandowski, berated Coast Guard flight staff for leaving behind Noem’s heated blanket when she had to switch planes due to a maintenance issue, even firing the pilot of the first plane before rehiring him because there weren’t any other pilots to take Noem home. One former Coast Guard official said that incidents like these contribute to “a general atmosphere of ‘keep your head down; you don’t want to be on the firing line.’”

The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert called out CBS on Monday for blocking his interview with a political candidate—and figured out a sneaky way around the Federal Communications Commission’s new rule targeting late-night talk shows, according to Deadline.

Colbert made the unprecedented move Monday to introduce his late-night talk show guest—who would not be joining him: James Talarico, a Democratic Senate primary candidate from Texas.

“He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert explained. “Then I was told, in some uncertain terms, that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on.

“And because my network clearly does not want us to talk about this,” Colbert said, “let’s talk about this.”

In January, the FCC published new guidance stating daytime and late-night talk shows were not exempt from the rule requiring them to provide equal time for candidates across the political spectrum. They had previously been spared under an exemption for “bona fide news.”

The FCC claimed it had “not been presented with any evidence” that any television talk show currently on air would qualify for the bona fide news exemption, nor would any program “motivated by partisan purposes.”

Colbert referred to a clip of FCC Chair Brendan Carr—a helpful lackey for President Donald Trump’s crackdown on free speech—discussing Colbert and fellow late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. “If Kimmel or Colbert want to continue to do their programming, and they don’t want to have to comply with this requirement, then they can go to a cable channel or a podcast or a streaming service, and that’s fine,” Carr said.

So Colbert took his advice and posted his interview with Talarico straight to YouTube.

“This is the interview Donald Trump didn’t want you to see,” Talarico wrote in a post on X Tuesday. “His FCC refused to air my interview with Stephen Colbert. Trump is worried we’re about to flip Texas.”

ABC’s The View is currently under investigation by the FCC for speaking with Talarico.

President Trump used the death of civil right activist Jesse Jackson to take a cheap shot at former President Barack Obama—and to pat himself on the back for not being racist.

“The Reverend Jesse Jackson is Dead at 84. I knew him well, long before becoming President. He was a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts.’ He was very gregarious - Someone who truly loved people! Despite the fact that I am falsely and consistently called a Racist by the Scoundrels and Lunatics on the Radical Left, Democrats ALL, it was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday morning.

“Jesse was a force of nature like few others before him,” he continued. “He had much to do with the Election, without acknowledgment or credit, of Barack Hussein Obama, a man who Jesse could not stand. He loved his family greatly, and to them I send my deepest sympathies and condolences. Jesse will be missed! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Jackson, a Martin Luther King Jr. protege perhaps best known for his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition activism of the 80s and 90s, passed away early Tuesday morning at the age of 84. A cause of death was not given but his family said he died peacefully surrounded by loved ones.

And while the president is not exaggerating about his past relationship with Jackson, his family put out a much more thoughtful public eulogy.

“Our father was a servant leader—not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” their statement read. “We shared him with the world, and in return the world became part of our extended family.”

And for what it’s worth, Jackson and Obama did have a contentious relationship at times. While Jackson was an early supporter of Obama’s, he was very critical of his lack of emphasis on Black issues, accusing the then-senator in 2007 of “acting like he’s white” with his weak response to the overcharging of six Black teenagers in the Jena 6 case. (He later said his comments were taken out of context.) And in 2008, Jackson was overheard on a hot mic chastising Obama for his rightward shift, saying, “See, Barack’s been, ahh, talking down to black people on this faith-based ... I want to cut his nuts off.”

He endorsed Obama nonetheless, crying when he learned that he would become the first Black president. He then endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Bernie Sanders in 2020.

This story has been updated.

Ex-progressive Senator John Fetterman is bucking his party yet again, but this time the fallout could drastically impact the results of future elections.

The Pennsylvania turncoat came out in favor of voter ID legislation, revealing that he would support a clean bill if it required voters to show identification before they cast their ballot. The issue is currently gaining momentum in the Senate under the banner of the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act. Democrats have branded the voter restriction initiative “Jim Crow 2.0”

“I would never refer to the SAVE Act as like Jim Crow 2.0 or some kind of mass conspiracy,” Fetterman told Fox News’ Kayleigh McEnany. “But that’s part of the debate that we were having here in the Senate right now. And I don’t call people names or imply that it’s something gross about the terrible history of Jim Crow.”

The SAVE Act would require Americans to present their birth certificate or passport in order to register to vote, and would further require voters to bring physical identification with them to the ballot box.

That’s not only completely unnecessary considering that it’s already illegal for nonvoters to participate in U.S. elections, but could also prove disastrous for married women, adding additional hurdles for individuals who have changed their names since their birth certificate was issued.

Donald Trump already tried and failed to implement voter ID in June. At the time, a federal judge excoriated the president’s efforts, arguing that adding layers of difficulty to the voting process would only serve to harm eligible voters by adding significant barriers before they can cast their ballots.

Since he lost the 2020 election, Trump and his allies have obsessed over contrived claims of voter fraud—a statistical nonissue in U.S. elections. For instance, a statewide audit out of Georgia, the epicenter of Trump’s baseless theory, revealed in September that just 20 noncitizens out of 8.2 million residents existed on the state’s voter roll, just 0.00024 percent of the state’s voting population. Out of those 20, only nine participated in elections, years ago, before ID was required as a part of the voter verification process. The other 11 individuals were registered but never actually voted, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

But Fetterman—who mind-bogglingly ran on the progressive ticket—has had a penchant for Trumpian politics since he moved to Washington.

“It’s not like a radical idea,” Fetterman told Fox. “It’s not something—and there already are many states that show basic IDs. So that’s where we are in the Senate.”

Critics argue that restrictions on the front end of the electoral process—such as one-day voting, mail-in ballots, and requiring day-of voter ID—would minimize voter turnout and limit the American democracy’s ability to represent its constituents. This would especially be true in high-density areas like the nation’s biggest cities, where those stipulations would significantly drain resources (i.e., by increasing the number of volunteers required) and require more time to process, potentially leading to more delays that Republicans could weaponize to further restrict voter access.

The federal government is being sued by civil rights organizations to protect voter data seized by the FBI in a raid at a Fulton County, Georgia, elections building last month.

The NAACP, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Georgia Coalition of the People’s Agenda, and other groups filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia Sunday to “prohibit the Trump administration from misusing the voter information” it seized as part of the raid.

Donald Trump has long claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him despite no evidence of voter fraud. Georgia was won by President Biden in that election, and as a result, the Trump administration last month launched an investigation into Fulton County, the largest and most Democratic-leaning county in the state.

“Having already failed to overturn the valid results of the 2020 presidential election by invoking false claims of widespread voter fraud, promoting fake electors, and inciting a violent insurrection, Trump and his minions are refusing to give up the ‘lost cause,’ trampling even more voting and privacy rights in the process,” said Damon Hewitt, the president and executive director of the Lawyer’s Committee, in a statement. “Ironically, this is happening in the same jurisdiction where Trump pressured state elections officials to ‘find 11,870 votes’ in an effort to declare himself the victor in 2020.”

The Georgia raid has raised concerns that Trump is trying to manufacture a justification to take over elections in battleground areas, especially considering that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was inexplicably present and found to be giving updates to Trump the next day. The president claims the raid happened on the orders of Attorney General Pam Bondi, who hasn’t cleared things up.

Gabbard has spent the last several months investigating long-debunked claims of voter fraud from the 2020 election, a departure from her supposed job overseeing U.S. intelligence. Under her watch, the FBI seized close to 700 ballots and other election materials from Fulton County, including tabulator tapes from scanners that count votes, electronic ballot images created when ballots were counted and then recounted, and all voter rolls.

This new lawsuit joins another legal action filed by the county earlier this month to return all seized materials. Meanwhile, Trump and his Republican allies continue to push for a federal takeover of elections, with the president threatening to push through voter I.D. even without Congress. It seems that the future of free and fair elections rests on whether the courts can stop the Trump administration.