Trump Fumes as Judge Blocks White House Ballroom Construction

A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom project after a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation—who argue that Trump acted beyond his authority when he demolished the East Wing to build said ballroom.

The Trust was awarded a preliminary injunction by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, suspending the project until the lawsuit is decided.

“The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” Leon, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, wrote. “(U)nless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!”

Enforcement of the ruling is paused for two weeks, while awaiting a probable appeal from the Trump administration—but Leon warned that “any above-ground construction over the next fourteen days that is not in compliance” with his ruling “is at risk of being taken down depending on the outcome of this case.”

Trump, incensed, took to Truth Social to rail against Leon’s decision.

“The National Trust for Historic Preservation sues me for a Ballroom that is under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World. I then get sued by them over the renovation of the dilapidated and structurally unsound former Kennedy Center, now, The Trump Kennedy Center (A show of Bipartisan Unity, a Republican and Democrat President!), where all I am doing is fixing, cleaning, running, and ‘sprucing up’ a terribly maintained, for many years,” Trump wrote. “Yet, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005, is not suing the Federal Reserve for a Building which has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman.”

Trump’s ballroom was initially projected to cost $200 million, and has since ballooned to double that.

This story has been updated.

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from defunding National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. 

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled that President Trump’s executive order last May to end federal funding for the two public broadcasting networks is illegal and unenforceable, saying that the First Amendment to the Constitution “does not tolerate viewpoint discrimination and retaliation of this type.”

“It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the President does not like and seeks to squelch,” Moss, who was appointed to the Washington, D.C., circuit by President Obama, wrote in his ruling. 

Trump and his fellow Republicans have long railed against PBS and NPR for what they perceive as bias towards liberals and Democrats. That’s not enough for the president to deny them federal funding, Moss said, because there is no legal precedent for it. 

“The Federal Defendants fail to cite a single case in which a court has ever upheld a statute or executive action that bars a particular person or entity from participating in any federally funded activity based on that person or entity’s past speech,” Moss wrote. “The First Amendment does not tolerate viewpoint discrimination and retaliation of this type.” 

The heads of NPR (which sued the Trump administration last May) and PBS celebrated the decision. “Public media exists to serve the public interest — that of Americans — not that of any political agenda or elected official,” NPR’s president and CEO Katherine Maher said to the Associated Press. PBS President and  CEO Paula Kerger, called the executive order “textbook” viewpoint discrimination and retaliation. 

“At PBS, we will continue to do what we’ve always done: serve our mission to educate and inspire all Americans as the nation’s most trusted media institution,” Kerger said. 

Trump’s executive order cut off millions of dollars for PBS’s children’s programming from the Department of Education, resulting in layoffs for one-third of PBS Kids employees. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversaw the federal funding for PBS and NPR, was forced to close after Congress eliminated federal appropriations for the public outlets. 

The Trump administration will likely appeal the ruling, and it’s not clear how or if Congress will resume funding for PBS and NPR. Smaller and more rural communities with fewer news outlets were hit the hardest by the loss of public funding, as comedian John Oliver pointed out on HBO’s Last Week Tonight in November. Arkansas PBS even briefly considered ending its affiliation with the national PBS organization. Hopefully, this court ruling will spur a much-needed revival of public media funding in the U.S. 

This story has been updated.

The Justice Department dropped thousands of criminal cases last year in an attempt to reorient its efforts—almost singularly—toward winning convictions in cases involving immigrants.

Altogether, America’s top law enforcement agency closed some 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of Donald Trump’s term, which involved investigations into terrorism, white-collar crimes, and drugs, while prosecuting 32,000 new immigration cases, ProPublica reported Tuesday.

The bulk of the shuttered files were closed without prosecution, and had been referred to the DOJ by different law enforcement agencies under different presidential administrations. Some were the result of yearslong investigations helmed by the FBI or the DEA.

The process began immediately after Attorney General Pam Bondi was confirmed by the Senate in February 2025. That month alone, the DOJ declined nearly 11,000 cases, marking the most it had done so at once since at least 2004, and nearly doubling the previous high, when more than 6,500 cases were dismissed in September 2019 (during Trump’s first administration).

The shift in priorities is an indication that “making America safe again” is not necessarily as much of a goal for the current administration as Trump has promised. At the president’s direction, federal authorities have arrested thousands of noncriminal immigrants across the country. The administration has claimed that the subjects of its deportation purge are the “worst of the worst”—including “murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists.”

But demanding the DOJ hyperfixate on immigration (a civil issue that has historically been handled by the courts) has come at a cost to investigating and prosecuting actual crime. Over the last year, the DOJ has declined more than 1,000 terrorism cases, more than other administrations, per ProPublica.

The result has been a crushing blow to agency morale, according to DOJ officials. Federal prosecutor Joseph Gerbasi spent years working on the agency’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section to challenge fentanyl suppliers in India and China before Bondi ordered him to abandon his work.

“All of the building blocks of what would become successful prosecutions were pulled out,” Gerbasi told ProPublica. The career prosecutor retired as the section’s acting deputy chief in March 2025, just weeks into Bondi’s tenure. Gerbasi had worked for the DOJ for 28 years.

He’s not alone: Thousands of lawyers have quit the agency, or been forced out, as Bondi carries out the Trumpian overhaul.

Bondi’s decision to halt the work had an “overwhelming deflating effect on morale,” Gerbasi said.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to Medicaid are putting more than 440 hospitals at risk of closure, which could sever care from millions of Americans.

Public Citizen, a government watchdog, reported Tuesday that 446 hospitals were at a heightened risk of closure due to the president’s behemoth budget bill, which will cut an estimated $911 billion from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, over the next 10 years.

These are hospitals that receive more than 20 percent of their revenue from low-income government programs such as Medicaid and CHIP, and have operated on a negative profit margin between 2022 and 2024. They account for 68,986 beds and employ approximately 275,458 direct patient care workers, not including nonmedical workers.

The hospitals endangered by the president’s bill serve poorer communities with a higher percentage of Hispanic and Black populations than other hospitals. At-risk hospitals served communities that had 7 percent more Hispanic and 4 percent more Black people than other hospitals. Nearly 20 percent of at-risk hospitals served high-poverty areas.

Many of these hospitals hold special Medicaid designations indicating how essential they are to the communities they serve. For example, 19 percent of the at-risk hospitals identified were designated “Critical Access Hospitals,” which are 24/7 health care facilities that operate more than 35 miles from another hospital.

These cuts will hurt hospitals across 44 states, both red and blue. However, five blue states—New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington, and California—now have more than one-quarter of their hospitals at risk.

In rural communities, more people receive and rely on Medicaid coverage, meaning that rural hospitals—which already operate on razor-thin margins—will be forced to absorb skyrocketing rates of uncompensated care, according to the National Rural Health Association. Rather than shut their doors right away, rural hospitals will cut services and lay off staff, depriving patients of access to essential health care. Public Citizen identified 176 at-risk hospitals in rural areas.

Democratic lawmakers have previously warned that more than 300 rural hospitals are at risk of closure as a result of Trump’s Medicaid cuts. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers have seemed less than concerned about cutting services.

Approximately half of the hospitals in the United States are in urban areas, and Public Citizen has identified 267 urban hospitals that are also at risk of closure.

American journalist Shelly Kittleson was kidnapped in broad daylight in Baghdad on Tuesday. The Iraqi Ministry of Interior stated that Kittleson, who has covered the Middle East for various outlets, was taken by “unknown individuals.”

“Security forces immediately launched an operation to apprehend the perpetrators, acting on precise intelligence and through intensive field operations, tracking the kidnappers’ movements. The pursuit resulted in the interception of a vehicle belonging to the kidnappers, which overturned as they attempted to escape. Security forces were able to arrest one of the suspects and seize one of the vehicles used in the crime,” the ministry reported.

The investigation to find the remaining perpetrators, and to free Kittleson, is ongoing.

Kittleson has written extensively for outlets like BBC World, Politico, Al-Monitor, and Foreign Policy. She was awarded the Premio Caravella award in Italy in 2017 for her war zone reporting.

“We are deeply alarmed by the kidnapping of Al-Monitor contributor Shelly Kittleson in Iraq on Tuesday,” Al-Monitor said in a statement. “We call for her safe and immediate release. We stand by her vital reporting from the region and call for her swift return to continue her important work.”

Senator Ted Cruz is jet-setting in tough times again.

TMZ spotted the Texas politician at the airport in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Tuesday, protected by a security detail composed of police officers, even as TSA agents aren’t being paid thanks to a partial government shutdown.

Like several other Republican senators, Cruz hightailed it out of Washington, D.C., over the weekend, first heading to Houston before swinging by the CPAC convention in Dallas. His Florida trip is only the latest time Cruz has decided to take a vacation instead of looking out for his constituents.

In January, Cruz headed off to sunny Laguna Beach, California, as a major winter storm was set to hit Texas. Last July, Cruz was sightseeing in Athens during Texas’s deadly floods, and five years ago, he earned the moniker “Cancún Cruz” for heading to Mexico rather than sticking around to help with relief efforts as many in his state lost electricity during catastrophically low temperatures.

At least 246 people in Texas lost their lives during that winter storm in 2021, but Cruz doesn’t appear to have learned to at least try to act like he cares. Since many TSA agents aren’t being paid, travelers are dealing with long security lines across the country and the Trump administration has deployed ICE agents to stand around in airports and do nothing except intimidate immigrants.

Meanwhile, negotiations on how to resume funding the Department of Homeland Security and at least attempt to reform ICE are going nowhere. Cruz and fellow Republicans don’t seem all that concerned as they head to more relaxing destinations.

The Daily Mail has reported that Bryon Noem—husband of the proudly anti-LGBTQ former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—likes to dress in drag as a large-breasted woman in his spare time. Mr. Noem has not exactly denied the report. 

The piece, published on Tuesday, asserts that Noem was an active buyer and participant in the online “bimbofication” community, where he confessed he was into “huge, huge ridiculous boobs” according to one model, and allegedly sent at least $25,000 to different members of said community. The Daily Mail obtained multiple messages and selfie photos of a man who does look exactly like Mr. Noem donning fake breasts and pursing his lips.

According to messages seen by the conservative British tabloid, Bryon, under the  pseudonym “Jason Jackson,” had extensive text and audio contact with one model.

“How are your boobs?” he asked the model. “Would you ever go bigger?” When she sent him a topless photos of her breasts, “Jason” replied with his own, stuffing two large balloons in a crop top. 

“You turn me into a girl,” he said. “Should I put on leggings?” The PayPal account tied to the pseudonym shows multiple payments to the model between $500 and $1,000.

“He’d say, ‘I love my wife, I want to get better,’” the model said. “Then he’d disappear, come back, and start again.” 

Bryon didn’t deny any of the photos or messages when The Daily Mail reached out to him. But he did deny endangering national security or making any comments about his wife. 

This development is deeply ironic given how homophobic and transphobic the bulk of the GOP is. Bryon’s actions are the kind of thing Republicans crusade against—and only expect godless liberals to do, not strong conservative fathers married to former Trump Cabinet members. 

The last time Bryon was in the news was when his wife was repeatedly questioned about her alleged affair with Corey Lewandowski while he sat right behind her at a congressional hearing.

Spokespersons for former Secretary Noem told The New York Post that she is “devastated” and “blindsided” by the news. 

Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail that he would sic his deportation agenda on the “worst of the worst,” but that has not been the case.

Approximately 63 percent of the people arrested in Minnesota between December and February had no criminal record whatsoever, according to arrest data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.

During that period, federal agents cuffed more than 3,700 Minnesota residents, according to the dataset. But the numbers may still be higher: In early February, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo claiming that agency officials had arrested more than 4,000 individuals in the state, emphasizing that the detainees included “murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members and terrorists.”

Just one in three of the arrestees actually had either a pending criminal conviction or pending charges, reported MPR News. The arrest data did not identify the exact charges against each individual.

The majority of those arrested in Minnesota were noncriminal immigrants. They were detained for civil immigration violations, such as overstayed visas, which have historically been handled through immigration courts in the U.S.

Some of the people arrested who had criminal histories were already incarcerated and taken directly from jail, rather than arrested during the street operations of ICE or CBP agents, reported MPR. Many of those taken from jail had not yet been convicted.

A similar story played out halfway across the country in Maine, where just 11 of nearly 200 people detained by Trump officials in January actually had a criminal record, according to federal data obtained Monday by the Bangor Daily News. The numbers suggest that the Trump administration made it a priority to target noncriminals: Roughly 80 percent of those arrested were detained on noncriminal immigration violations.

The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to justify the mass arrests, insisting that the targets of their violent purge were horrific career criminals and that those protesting Washington’s overreach were domestic terrorists.

After agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in early January—the first of two U.S. citizens to be killed by federal forces occupying Minneapolis—White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt feigned confusion over the public backlash, playfully suggesting that she didn’t understand what the big hubbub was over the sweeping arrests.

Leavitt claimed that the people the administration was removing were “heinous murderers and rapists and criminals” who nobody in the country would want in their “neighborhood, in [their] community, around [their] children, and around [their] families.”

Months later, it’s clear that the Trump administration’s peremptory narrative was a lie. Just a fraction of the arrests were criminals in any sense of the word, while the vast majority were normal people living and working in Minnesota and Maine.

Donald Trump’s administration will bar green card holders (read: legal, permanent residents) from receiving small business loans, threatening to further unravel the U.S. job market.

The Small Business Administration has barred green card holders from receiving SBA loans and will expand that policy to SBA-backed loans from private companies starting in April, the Associated Press reported Monday. Additionally, any business that is even partially owned by a green card holder will no longer be eligible for a small business loan.

Speaking at CPAC Saturday, SBA administrator Kelly Loeffler touted the end of “DEI lending” to “foreign nationals.” Of course, the individuals affected by the policy change are not foreign nationals but legal permanent residents who may have lived and worked for their entire lives in the United States.

The SBA’s blatantly racist policy is an extension of the administration’s nativist preference that is making the country poorer.

Immigrants are more likely to start businesses than those born in the U.S., and nearly half of Fortune 500 companies in 2025 were founded by immigrants or their children. SBA loans are an essential resource for foreign-born entrepreneurs because they typically accumulate low interest and do not require a strong credit history.

This policy will undoubtedly wreak havoc on state economies that rely on immigrant-run businesses. For example, 99 percent of new jobs in California come from small businesses, and immigrant entrepreneurs account for 40 percent of the state’s economy.

As part of the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigrants—both legal and undocumented—the SBA’s new policy threatens to further unravel the U.S. job market, which has reached its lowest hiring levels since April 2020.

ICE agents will be staking out Marine Corps graduation events to find undocumented immigrants in the recruits’ families.

NBC News reports that REAL IDs, U.S. passports, or U.S. birth certificates are now required to access Marine bases as part of heightened security measures following the war in Iran. Anyone who travels to Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island in Beaufort, South Carolina, for graduation and family days this week without such documentation could be detained.

“Increased force protection measures” at the recruit depot means that “federal law enforcement personnel will be present at installation access points to conduct enhanced screening and lawful immigration status inquiries during recruit family and graduation days,” the Parris Island website states.

Graduation at Parris Island is on April 3, and family members are invited to visit the base beginning April 1 as recruits complete their 13-week boot camp. During their training period, Marine recruits aren’t allowed to see their families. This is the first time that federal agents will be there for immigration enforcement.

“While the Marine Corps routinely coordinates with federal partners on security matters, this is the first time in recent memory that federal law enforcement agencies have supported base access operations at Parris Island in this capacity,” a spokesperson for MCRD Parris Island told NBC.

The Department of Homeland Security contradicted the message, with a spokesperson telling NBC that “ICE will not be making arrests at the basic training graduation in Paris Island, SC.”

That’s not surprising, considering that sending ICE agents after the family members of military recruits is not a good look. But the Trump administration doesn’t normally care about where it sends its violent ICE agents, who can now be found at schools, churches, and even emergency rooms.