Top African Referee Barred From Entering the U.S. For World Cup

The African continent’s top referee has been banned from entering the United States ahead of the FIFA World Cup.

Omar Artan was set to make history as the first Somalian to officiate the World Cup before he was allegedly denied entry at Miami International Airport despite having a travel visa. The reason for his denial was not made immediately clear, although Somali is one of the countries on President Trump’s travel ban, and has been a frequent target of his racist attacks since he returned to office.

“Omar Artan is among Africa’s most respected referees and deserves the support of the entire football community,” Somalian s Ministry of Youth and Sports adviser and former national team captain, Ciise Aden Abshir said in a statement to Agence France-Presse. “Denying him entry to the United States and preventing him from officiating scheduled matches harms not only him personally but also undermines football’s commitment to fairness, merit, and the spirit of fair play.”

Artan is one of many players, officials, coaches, and fans who will run into issues simply getting into the World Cup with the United States’ aggressive anti-immigration policies—which risk overshadowing the event entirely. Iranian team staff allege they had visas denied, Cameroonian-born Swiss midfielder Breel Embolo was denied entry, and  Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein was detained and question in Chicago O’Hare airport for seven hours. 

Both FIFA and the Trump administration have had a year and a half to prepare for the tournament. It was predictable the entire time that visas for players, staff, and referees would be an issue. And yet, with the tournament three days away, it is engulfed in avoidable chaos.

President Trump’s immigration czar, Tom Homan, is pledging a rapid surge of immigration agents in New York City.

Homan told Fox News Monday that he is reviewing plans to rapidly increase ICE activity in the city, deploying “more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen,” claiming that he promised New York Governor Kathy Hochul to boost ICE’s presence in New York if the state passed any bills preventing local and state law enforcement from cooperating with federal agencies in New York’s jails. Hochul signed such a bill last month.

“I made her a promise: You’re going to see more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen in New York City, and it’s coming,” Homan said. “I just reviewed an operational plan.”

Homan and other Trump administration officials have threatened ICE surges in major cities across the country, especially when cities and states pass laws restricting or barring cooperation with ICE. In late 2025 to early 2026, a major ICE escalation was attempted with Operation Metro Surge in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, which caused a massive backlash among local residents and resulted in the deaths of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Victor Manuel Diaz.

There are about 20,000 ICE agents, though this figure includes many who work in administrative capacities. The population of New York City is over eight million, and letting ICE agents loose won’t go over well with residents. Hochul told reporters Monday that Trump promised her, in a meeting with other state governors, that one of the lessons of Operation Metro Surge was that “we’re not going where we’re not welcome.”

“And he looked over at me, as the governor of the state of New York at this meeting, and he says, ‘For example, I will not go to New York unless Kathy asks.’ And I said, ‘I’m not asking, so we’re good,’” Hochul said, pointing out the failures of Minneapolis and suggesting Republicans would pay a heavy political price in the state for an ICE surge.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is on reasonably good terms with Trump, referenced the impending soccer World Cup in his rebuke to Homan.

“We will not allow ICE or anyone else to sow fear in our communities—especially at this moment. As the world comes to our city, we will stand proudly with our immigrant neighbors and reject these attacks for what they are: an attempt to divide us,” Mamdani posted on X. That doesn’t bode well for ICE agents in New York City, who would meet even more resistance than they did in Minneapolis.

President Donald Trump has once again turned his ire onto the Senate parliamentarian, amid his ongoing feud with members of his own party.

“Senate Majority Leader John Thune should immediately fire the Parliamentarian, who treats Republicans, and everything that they stand for, horribly!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Monday.

This is the second time Trump has lashed out against Elizabeth MacDonough, who recently struck $1 billion in funding for the Secret Service from the $72 billion budget reconciliation bill.

MacDonough had determined that the funds, including an estimated $220 million for the construction of Trump’s White House ballroom, fell outside of the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee’s plans to fund immigration enforcement.

Trump has not been able to get over it. The president claimed again Monday that MacDonough should be removed because she was appointed by a Democrat, and thus “caters to Democrats.” In reality, her job requires her to advise lawmakers, and to strike certain provisions from reconciliation bills in accordance with the “Byrd rule.”

“Just the other night, as an example, she ruled against us on a proposal that would have easily been approved, and should have been, by anyone else,” Trump wrote. “We have every right to change her, and should do so, IMMEDIATELY. As long as she’s there, we will never get our desperately needed, SAVE AMERICA ACT, approved, and put into full force and effect!”

It doesn’t seem that Thune is on board with the president’s outrageous demand.

After MacDonough’s decision, a spokesperson for the South Dakota Republican relayed the appropriate deference: “Redraft. Refine. Resubmit. None of this is abnormal during a Byrd process.”

Despite deadly disease outbreaks, a fractured dynamic among members of his staff, and myriad public health institutions being stripped of funds, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “checked out.”

A lengthy New York Times report Sunday describes the extent to which the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, is detached from his colleagues and uninterested in the work his department is meant to handle.

HHS is a massive organization, tasked with designing policy to manage and improve the health of Americans. There are 13 divisions within it; some are well known, such as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. Forty percent of the country receives health care from HHS through Medicare and Medicaid.

But Kennedy has apparently been coasting through work, even while he tries to strip Medicaid from Americans helping their disabled relatives. According to the Times, Kennedy usually arrives in the office at 10 a.m. after a morning workout and leaves at 4 p.m.—and that’s if he’s in D.C., which he often is not. He rarely speaks to people outside his close circle, and prefers small, closed-door meetings.

The heads of the 13 HHS divisions meet weekly on Tuesdays to discuss their work. The Times reports that Kennedy barely attended these discussions until February, and is now showing up once a month. Even when he deigns to appear, he often is more interested in scrolling on his phone than in the discussion, according to staffers interviewed by the Times. Several said he looked “checked out.”

Kennedy has also failed to lead during times of crisis. After two children died of measles in Texas in early 2025, Demetre Daskalakis, the head of HHS’s response team, requested a meeting with Kennedy. Daskalakis said he was turned down; he has since left the agency. Kennedy, meanwhile, went on to recommend measles patients up their vitamin intake instead of taking a tried-and-true vaccine.

Under Donald Trump, HHS has experienced a staffing crisis that Kennedy is doing little to fix. The president still doesn’t have a surgeon general—Trump is currently on his third nomination after the first two stalled. Acting directors are managing about half of 27 institutes at the National Institutes of Health. Marty Makary, the leader of the Food and Drug Administration, left the agency in May after disputes surrounding Trump’s embrace of flavored vapes.

Kennedy has been slow to plug gaps and has targeted career staff, per the Times. He personally fired CDC Director Susan Monarez 10 months ago after she reportedly refused to approve his wacko childhood vaccine schedule. Jay Bhattacharya, who already leads the NIH, has now been tasked with that massive job, as well.

About the only thing Kennedy remains interested in, besides flipping the food pyramid, is promoting his baseless anti-vaccine rhetoric. It’s a sad state of affairs at HHS, and one that should worry all Americans.

Republicans are trying their best to push the blame for the resurgence of the flesh-eating New World screwworm on former President Joe Biden—even though it was their current boss who cut funding for the monitoring program.

“Under the last administration with the massive movement under the open borders policy that the cartels, etcetera, border security, that’s when it began to make its way back up toward America, hitting Mexico in early 2023, moving its way up through Mexico in 2024,” Agriculture Secretary Rollins said Monday morning on CNBC, claiming that Biden’s immigration policy was the direct cause of the screwworm reinfestation.

“This is another thing we can thank Joe Biden for,” Senator Roger Marshall told NewsMax. “That when millions of people came out of Central America, they brought this screwworm with them. It was on their pets, maybe on their flesh as well.”

This is pretty shameless, given Trump has been in office for over 500 days and specifically cut the program that handled this very problem.

“The Trump Admin cut funding for screwworm detection and fired 25% of staff responsible for tracking the disease,” Ohio Representative Shontel Brown wrote on X, in response to Rollins. “I’m embarrassed for the Secretary that her only answer is to blame the administration that left office a year and a half ago.”

The return of the screwworm—first eradicated in 1966—has also thrown beef safety into limbo, as the screwworm’s presence could tighten the supply and raise already high prices even higher.