Republicans Find a Way to Give ICE Even More Money—and Less Oversight

Senate Republicans are looking to funnel nearly $70 billion with absolutely no strings attached to Donald Trump’s lawless immigration enforcement campaign.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley unveiled the legislative text Monday night for the Republicans’ reconciliation package, directing $38.2 billion to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The bill also allocates $26 billion for offices under Customs and Border Protection, including $3.5 billion for border security technology and screening, according to Punchbowl News.

Meanwhile, another bill from the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee would provide an additional $32.5 billion, bringing the total package for immigration enforcement to roughly $69.2 billion, with ICE set to receive approximately $38.2 billion, according to Migrant Insider.

Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy for the Center for American Progress, warned on X Monday night that these funds had “enormous flexibility, with far less accountability or oversight than typical annual appropriations for DHS funding has.”

Senate Republicans have framed this massive expenditure as giving ICE and CBP enough funds to be shutdown-proof until the end of Trump’s term. But in reality, ICE already had twice as much funding as it needed to run from the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill, passed in July. Now ICE has roughly four or five times the amount of funding it needs to run until 2029, while CBP only has the funds to make it to 2027, according to Kogan.

There do not appear to be any offsetting cuts to pay for this bill.

Since Trump launched his sweeping immigration crackdown, American voters have borne witness to federal immigration agents’ use of threats and intimidation, excessive force, warrantless searches or arrests, racial profiling, and wrongful detentions. ICE has detained hundreds of children, and families of mixed legal status are being regularly torn apart by the administration’s relentless immigration crackdown. Federal immigration agents were also responsible for the deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota.

Rather than reform these federal agencies, Senate Republicans are choosing to write them a blank check using taxpayer dollars.

President Trump thinks that an event where he is surrounded by children is the best time to discuss the Iran war and then doze off.

On Tuesday, at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office to restore the Presidential Fitness Award, Trump went off on a tangent on the war while thanking some members of his Cabinet, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whom he praised for a press conference earlier in the day.

“That was really great, and you’re doing very well,” Trump said from his seat at the Resolute Desk, turning to Hegseth. Then he abruptly changed the subject to Iran.

“They don’t like playing games with us. They don’t like it at all, you’ll see that. As time goes by, you’re gonna see it. I think you’ve already seen it; we’ve basically wiped out their military in about two weeks,” Trump added, with kids and senior officials on either side of him. Later, Trump went further, describing Iran’s leaders as “sick people” and “lunatics” that he would not allow to have a nuclear weapon.

Then Trump thanked Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but as Kennedy spoke about how “grateful” he was for Trump’s decision to restore the fitness test, the president fell asleep.

When it became Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s turn to speak, Trump’s head was bobbing, his eyes opening and closing as McMahon spoke about needing to eat well and exercise to have a “sound mind.”

All of this shows that Trump is not well, mentally or physically. He is in clear decline in full view to the public, and no matter the subject, he will wander off topic and doze off if he gets the chance.

Donald Trump does not have the same sway that he used to.

The MAGA leader’s supposedly astronomical influence over the Republican Party is being tested in the run-up to the November midterms, Politico reported early Tuesday.

There’s plenty of evidence that his pull is fading. Trump’s retribution campaign begins in Indiana, where 21 local Republican legislators blocked his attempts to redistrict their state in December. Eight of them are up for reelection this cycle, and Trump aims to oust all of them. So far, Trump has endorsed primary challengers against seven, and his allies have spent millions of dollars on the relatively tiny races.

Yet his candidates have largely failed to break out on their own, with the strongest only holding narrow leads in polls. Even those close to the president are not expecting all of Trump’s favorites to win, reported Politico.

The president has also backed primary opponents to some of his biggest in-party thorns, including Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy and Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, the latter of whom has so far weathered the storm. Cassidy, who became an enemy of the far-right movement when he voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges in 2021, is down by just a handful of points, according to the ​​latest Emerson College poll.

It’s another indication that the MAGA movement is turning away from its longtime leader, potentially looking for new stewardship as Trump enters the lame-duck stage of his presidency—even if Trump has no plans to end his reign.

The 79-year-old once again toyed with the idea of extending his time in office while speaking at the White House small-business summit Monday, claiming that he could potentially stay in office for another two terms, or eight years in total.

“He’s hit his max power and now you’re seeing the backside of that power curve,” former GOP Representative Adam Kinzinger told Politico. “This will be his last competitive election cycle that will have any impact on him. And I think the base is starting to think into the future.”

President Trump is dumping toxic debris containing lead and chromium from his East Wing demolition onto East Potomac Golf Links—raising more questions about the health and safety standards tied to his vanity project, and potentially putting golfers in harm’s way. And the president is doing this debris dumping while simultaneously preparing to massively overhaul the public golf course, as well.

The National Parks Service claims that the soil, even with the presence of lead, is not excessively toxic, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department telling The New York Times that the soil has been tested “multiple times by multiple parties, and this project passed all standards set by law.” But doubts remain.

“There’s no safe level of exposure to lead; it’s one of the most toxic elements we know of,” Harvard exposure assessment professor Joseph G. Allen told the Times. “One of the risks you have to think about with lead is that it doesn’t just stay outside in soil.… We track it on our shoes. So depending on where the soil was placed, golfers and other people could track it indoors.

“We knew that the demolition of the East Wing and the changes to East Potomac were legally toxic; now we know they’re environmentally toxic as well,” said Democracy Defenders Fund executive chair Norm Eisen, who is representing the DC Preservation League in a lawsuit against the dumping and against Trump’s takeover of the public golf course. The group recently sought a temporary restraining order on construction and tree removal at the course, but its request was denied.  

President Donald Trump’s Department of Education is targeting Smith College for accepting transgender women.

The DOE’s Office of Civil Rights announced Monday that it would investigate Smith College for allowing “biological males into women’s intimate spaces” in violation of Title IX, the landmark 1972 law banning sex discrimination, which the Trump administration has used to rampantly discriminate against transgender people.

“Title IX contains a single-sex exception that allows colleges to enroll all-male or all-female student bodies—but the exception applies on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity,” the DOE said in a statement. “An all-girls college that enrolls male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex under Title IX.”

Smith College is considered a historically women’s college, or HWC, founded as a single-sex education institution. The school accepts “any applicants who self-identify as women; cis, trans, and nonbinary women” and has accepted transgender women since 2015. Many other HWCs also accept transgender women.

As for the DOE’s phony concerns about “intimate spaces,” Smith College’s website says it provides single-occupancy, all-gender restrooms, and an all-gender locker room with private changing and showering areas on campus.

Shannon Minter, an attorney with the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told CNN that the investigation was an “ominous” government overreach into the workings of private institutions.

“If [women’s colleges] have chosen—as many of them have—to admit transgender students, that’s something they should be able to do freely without being worried about persecution by the federal government,” he told CNN.

“This administration seems hell-bent on eliminating any inclusion of transgender people anywhere in our society.”

MAGA’s best case scenario for the war in Iran is, apparently, a return to the prewar status quo.

In an interview with Fox News Monday night, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that the U.S. would win the Middle East war if it regained “freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz” and attained relative peace for Iran’s neighbors—something that existed before Donald Trump decided to attack Iran.

“We’re close to victory,” Graham said. “Victory for me would mean regaining freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, degrading a little bit further—short, big, strong response—their military capability a bit further, threaten Kharg Island with destruction and pull out and try to get Israel and Saudi Arabia back to peace.

“The Strait of Hormuz is the only thing left,” Graham noted, touting White House talking points. “This has been a brilliant campaign by President Trump and our military.

“If we can take back control of the Straits of Hormuz, it is checkmate,” Graham said. “This thing is over.”

Yet even better than a win for the U.S. would be a win for Israel, according to Graham.

“The ultimate victory is that Saudi Arabia and Israel make peace, ending the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Graham continued, continuing to heap praise on Trump’s name by claiming that the president will “go down in history as the greatest peacemaker.”

U.S. involvement in the war was reportedly arranged following a February 11 meeting between Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and several U.S. and Israeli officials in the White House Situation Room. It was reportedly Netanyahu’s direct influence—and the ensuing pressure campaign—that thrust America into the war. U.S. military commanders advised Trump that components of Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran were “farcical,” but by that point, Trump had already been inspired to go after Tehran’s theocratic regime.

The State Department backed the narrative via a government release penned late last month, detailing how the U.S. “is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally, as well as in the exercise of the United States’ own inherent right of self-defense.”

Nonetheless, the White House has disputed that narrative, repeatedly insisting that Israel had nothing to do with Trump’s decision to involve the country in another unpopular war in the Middle East.

America has so far been at war with Iran for more than nine weeks and spent at least $25 billion in the process (though some estimates put the number at more than $70 billion). The regional conflict has damaged strategic alliances, stalled global trade, and thrust the world into an energy crisis due to the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz.

It is not clear exactly what the war in Iran has accomplished. Together, the U.S. and Israel have killed thousands of Iranian civilians and obliterated Iranian civilian infrastructure, failing to damage Iran’s nuclear capabilities in the process. Meanwhile, 13 U.S. soldiers have died.

The war has also spiked the cost of living for people around the world and agitated international relations—particularly between the U.S. and longtime allies in the Western hemisphere.

It has also sparked a political rejection of MAGA ideology across the U.S. as the American public becomes more and more disillusioned with its increasingly infirm, unstable, and volatile president.

President Trump is trying to get the personal information of thousands of election workers and volunteers in Fulton County, Georgia, who helped with the 2020 election.

The Fulton County Board of Elections filed a 27-page motion Monday to block a Department of Justice subpoena seeking the personal information of election workers, calling the move unprecedented and politically motivated.

The subpoena, issued on April 17 but disclosed in court Monday, demands that the board’s custodian of records appear in federal court Tuesday with the full election staff roster, including names, home addresses, email addresses, and personal phone numbers of everyone involved in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia’s most populous county.

County attorneys say that this goes too far and could include nearly 3,000 county employees, temporary poll workers, and volunteers. Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the purpose of the subpoena is to “intimidate workers in our county, to discourage people from voting,” adding that the county would fight back with “with every possible resource.”

Trump and his MAGA base have pushed conspiracy theories that Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia was due to election fraud, even though those claims have been debunked in court. Since winning his second term as president, Trump has weaponized the federal government to go after Fulton County, sending his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to accompany FBI agents to raid an elections office there in January.

All of this could be a pretext for Trump to interfere in the November midterm elections, and even beyond that. The country could be in for several long legal battles.

The federal government secretly used your tax dollars to settle sexual harassment claims against House members for decades.

According to documents from the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights and Republican Representative Nancy Mace, who recently forced the release of those documents through a subpoena, the federal government paid out more than $338,000 from 2004 to 2017 to secretly settle sexual harassment claims against six House members or their offices. The following year, Congress banned the federal government from paying off settlements for sex pests.

Mace said she plans to release the records publicly “once we confirm that personally identifiable information of victims and witnesses has been properly redacted.... Accountability is not a threat,” she said. “It is a promise.”

According to Mace’s calculations, those implicated include former Democratic Representatives Eric Massa ($115,000) and John Conyers ($77,000), and Republicans Blake Farenthold ($84,000) and Patrick Meehan ($39,000), whose misconduct was already public but not the exact sums. Less public settlements included an $8,000 payout on behalf of the late Democratic Representative Carolyn McCarthy’s office and a $15,000 payout for former Republican Representative Rodney Alexander. Alexander claimed the settlement had to do with accusations against one of his staffers at the time, while a former McCarthy aide did not respond to a query from Politico.

These payouts—which have received even more scrutiny in the wake of allegations of misconduct against former Representatives Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales—demonstate the massive lack of accountability for members of Congress. Our leaders are hiding behind our money instead of actually having to acknowledge their misdeeds.

The war in Iran has done very little damage to the country’s nuclear capabilities, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.

So far, America has been at war with Iran for more than nine weeks and spent at least $25 billion in the process. The regional conflict has damaged strategic alliances, stalled global trade, and thrust the world into an energy crisis due to the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. It has also killed thousands of people.

And yet assessments of Tehran’s nuclear program remain largely unchanged from roughly a year ago, when Donald Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, hitting Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan on June 22.

Prior to the June attack, U.S. analysts believed that Iran had the capacity to build a nuclear bomb within three to six months, according to three sources familiar ‌with the matter that spoke with Reuters Monday night. Afterward, U.S. analysts estimated that the attack—internally referred to as Operation Midnight Hammer—changed the Islamic Republic’s nuclear timeline back to about nine months to a year.

That estimate is still the same, according to Reuters’s unnamed sources.

Since February 28, the majority of U.S. and Israeli attacks have focused on hitting conventional military targets in Iran. The stagnant timeline suggests that such a strategy is not effective at diminishing Iran’s nuclear capabilities. To do that may require the destruction or removal of Iran’s remaining stockpile of highly enriched uranium, or HEU, reported Reuters.

Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Iran Nuclear Deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country.

By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total HEU stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Trump has previously stated that his primary objective in the war was to completely eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities, but his administration has not been consistent in relaying its mission progress to the general public.

In the immediate aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump and his administration claimed that Iran’s nuclear production was set back by multiple “years.” Yet former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent suddenly resigned over the issue in March, writing in his resignation letter that he could not “in good conscience” support the war in Iran because the country “posed no imminent threat to our nation.”

Another Republican governor is refusing to bend to Donald Trump’s demand to rig their state’s elections in his favor.

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, a longtime Trump ally, is not preparing to call a special legislative session to redraw his state’s congressional map mid-decade, his office told Palmetto Politics.

McMaster’s office told the outlet that he had been in communication with the White House following the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act last week, but the governor’s office rejected the idea it was being “pressured” by the Trump administration. His office insisted that it was part of “ongoing coordination” with the White House and the talks were simply part of the “regular communications” the governor enjoys with Trump.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision, McMaster suggested that it could be worth reviewing South Carolina’s congressional map, noting that it had been upheld as recently as 2024. “In light of the Court’s most recent decision on the Voting Rights Act, it would be appropriate for the General Assembly to ensure that South Carolina’s congressional map still complies with all requirements of federal law and the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote in a post on X.

South Carolina currently has six Republicans and one Democrat in the House of Representatives.

Last week, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, another Republican, also said that he wouldn’t pursue mid-decade redistricting in light of the recent Supreme Court decision. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to threaten red states that refuse to rig their elections in his favor.