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Top federal immigration officials answer lawmaker questions
On Capitol Hill, leaders for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will answer questions from the House homeland security committee.
“We sit here today at an inflection point,” said committee chair Andrew Garbarino, a Republican congressman from New York. After the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Nicole Good in Minneapolis by federal immigration officers, fervent outrage at the excessive use of force by ICE and border patrol agents has spread across the country.
“This is all unacceptable and preventable. The safety and law enforcement and the communities they serve and protect must also always come first,” Garbarino said in his opening remarks. “When officials or elected leaders rush to conclusions about law enforcement or their fellow Americans, public trust suffers. There must be complete and impartial investigation.”
This hearing comes as members of Congress continue to negotiate guardrails for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ahead of another possible partial shutdown when funding for the department lapses in three days. “Shutting down DHS makes America less safe,” Garbarino said, while noting that other agencies like Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also fall under DHS mandate.
Key events
Acting ICE director says officers are facing ‘deadliest operating environment’ in agency’s history
Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, spoke about “the dangers that ICE agents and officers face nationwide” during his opening remarks today.
“I’m encouraged that some Minnesota officials are finally signaling the willingness to cooperate with ICE. Let me be clear, promises are not enough,” he said. “We need action in the wake of the unprecedented border crisis of the previous administration. ICE stepped into the breach to enforce the law. This commitment has a cost. We’re facing the deadliest operating environment our agents agencies history.”
Top Democrat reignites calls for Noem to resign
In his opening remarks today, Bennie Thompson, the homeland security committee’s ranking member, said that Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security has the “blood of American citizens on its hand”. Thompson is one of several Democrats who have called on Noem to resign or risk impeachment.
The Democratic lawmaker also listed, what he sees, as several examples of indiscriminate use of force and profiling by federal law enforcement as the immigration crackdown continues in Minnesota. This included the detention of five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father – who were taken from Minneapolis, and sent to a facility in Texas.
“DHS personnel are now forcing their way into private homes without a judicial warrant, in violation of the fourth amendment,” Thompson said. “Secretary Noem is a liar with no concern for the lives of Americans killed by the department she runs. She must go.”
Top federal immigration officials answer lawmaker questions
On Capitol Hill, leaders for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will answer questions from the House homeland security committee.
“We sit here today at an inflection point,” said committee chair Andrew Garbarino, a Republican congressman from New York. After the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Nicole Good in Minneapolis by federal immigration officers, fervent outrage at the excessive use of force by ICE and border patrol agents has spread across the country.
“This is all unacceptable and preventable. The safety and law enforcement and the communities they serve and protect must also always come first,” Garbarino said in his opening remarks. “When officials or elected leaders rush to conclusions about law enforcement or their fellow Americans, public trust suffers. There must be complete and impartial investigation.”
This hearing comes as members of Congress continue to negotiate guardrails for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ahead of another possible partial shutdown when funding for the department lapses in three days. “Shutting down DHS makes America less safe,” Garbarino said, while noting that other agencies like Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also fall under DHS mandate.
One note for today, the Rules committee will take up the SAVE America act, paving the way for a possible House floor vote. A reminder, this is the legislation – backed by the president and many Republican members of Congress – that would require proof of citizenship in order to vote.
Voting rights experts have long warned this requirement would act as a barrier to participating in elections, and noncitizens voting is both illegal and extremely rare.
Donald Trump has spent recent weeks reviving his baseless claims that US elections are “rigged,” even urging GOP lawmakers to “nationalize” voting, despite states running election administration, not the federal government.
Melody Schreiber
The Trump administration has launched TrumpRx, but there are other sites offering discounts on more medications, and the new government site will appeal to a very limited group of patients, experts say.
Trump has promised reforms on the unusually high drug prices in the US, and he called the announcement “the largest reduction in prescription drug prices in history” at a press conference on Thursday. Yet the site only lists 43 medications, more than half of which are available in generic form at significantly cheaper prices elsewhere.
The site may make some weight loss and fertility drugs not covered by insurance more accessible, but overall “it is not a solution for high drug prices in the United States”, said Sean Sullivan, professor of health economics and policy and former dean of pharmacy at the University of Washington.
“Consumers can probably get a cheaper version of these medicines through insurance and their pharmacies, or via cash pay services like Cost Plus Drugs than by the deals offered through TrumpRx,” Sullivan said.
“Healthcare is really complicated in America, and even the supply of prescription drugs is really complicated in America, and this has added to the complexity, instead of reducing complexity,” said Rena Conti, associate professor of markets, public policy, and law at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
The best course is likely still to “ask your local pharmacist what the best deal is”, Conti said.
Read Melody’s full report here:
DHS funding bill negotiations stall on Capitol Hill
On Capitol Hill, negotiations on a full year funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continue with little success in sight.
A reminder, short of passing another continuing resolution, DHS funding lapses after 13 February.
In order to prevent a shutdown in the coming days, Republicans would need seven Democrats on board for either another stopgap measure, or to agree to a full appropriations bill.
Later today we’ll hear from both House GOP and Democratic leaders at their respective press conferences to get a sense of how this back-and-forth is playing out.
Earlier, we reported that House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, said that the initial GOP response to Democrats’ demands – which includes the need for judicial warrants and for immigration officers to no longer wear masks – is “both incomplete and insufficient in terms of addressing the concerns Americans have about ICE’s lawless conduct”. We’ve yet to see the memo or document outlining what the Republicans’ counter offer actually looks like.
Donald Trump is in Washington today. As of now, he’ll have time signing time in the Oval Office, followed by a policy meeting. However, none of these events will be open to the press. We will hear from press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who will brief reporters at 1pm ET.
We’ll bring you the latest lines as it happens.
Jamie Raskin, a top House Democrat, accused the justice department of making “puzzling, inexplicable redactions” to documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that obscured the names of abusers, while allowing the identities of the disgraced financier’s victims to become public.
Raskin told reporters that he wanted to view the complete files to better understand how the justice department handled the redaction process.
Watch the video below…
Rory Carroll
An Irish man who has been held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for five months despite having a valid work permit and no criminal record says he fears for his life and has appealed for help from Ireland’s government.
Seamus Culleton said conditions at his detention centre in Texas were akin to “torture” and that the atmosphere was volatile. “I’m not in fear of the other inmates. I’m afraid of the staff. They’re capable of anything.”
Speaking from the El Paso facility to Ireland’s RTÉ radio, Culleton implored the taoiseach, Micheál Martin, to raise his case with Donald Trump when he visits the White House next month for St Patrick’s Day celebrations.
“Just try to get me out of here and do all you can, please. It’s an absolute torture, psychological and physical torture,” Culleton said, adding he did not know how much more he could take. “It’s just a horrible, horrible, horrible place.”
Originally from County Kilkenny, Culleton, 42, runs a plastering business in the Boston area. After buying supplies at a hardware store on 9 September 2025 he was followed by ICE agents and arrested.
Culleton entered the US in 2009 on a visa waiver programme and overstayed the 90-day limit but after marrying a US citizen, Tiffany Smyth, and applying for lawful permanent residence, he obtained a statutory exemption that allowed him to work, according to his lawyer, Ogor Winnie Okoye.
The detention prevented him from attending the final interview in October for his green card that would have confirmed his legal status, said Okoye. “It’s inexplicable that this man has been in detention.”
Trump’s immigration chiefs to testify in Congress following protester deaths
The heads of the agencies carrying out president Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda will testify in Congress on Tuesday and face questions over how they are prosecuting immigration enforcement inside American cities.
Trump’s immigration campaign has been heavily scrutinized in recent weeks, after the shooting deaths in Minneapolis of two protesters at the hands of Homeland Security officers. The agencies have also faced criticism for a wave of policies that critics say trample on the rights of both immigrants facing arrest and Americans protesting the enforcement actions.
Todd Lyons, the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Rodney Scott, who heads Customs and Border Protection (CPB), and Joseph Edlow , who is the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), will address lawmakers on the House committee on homeland security.
The officials will speak at a time of falling public support for how their agencies are carrying out Trump’s immigration vision but as they are flush with cash from a spending bill passed last year that has helped broaden immigration enforcement activities across the country.
The administration says that activists and protesters opposed to its operations are the ones ratcheting up attacks on their officers, not the other way around, and that their immigration enforcement operations are making the country safer by finding and removing people who’ve committed crimes or pose a threat to the country.
Donald Trump has done a number of U-turns on the Epstein files since his campaign in 2024.
The president wants the latest batch of files to be the last, but Democrats are pushing for three million more to be released.
The Guardian US reporter Richard Luscombe gives an overview of the latest findings after the Department of Justice released the files…
Americans’ hope for their future has fallen to a new low, according to new polling.
In 2025, only about 59% of Americans gave high ratings when asked to evaluate how good their life will be in about five years, the lowest annual measure since Gallup began asking this question almost 20 years ago, AP reported.
It’s a warning about the depth of the gloom that has fallen over the country over the past few years. In the data, Gallup’s ‘current’ and ‘future’ lines have tended to move together over time – when Americans are feeling good about the present, they tend to feel optimistic about the future. But the most recent measures show that while current life satisfaction has declined over the last decade, future optimism has dropped even more.
“While current life is eroding, it’s that optimism for the future that has eroded almost twice as much over the course of about that last 10 years or so,” said Dan Witters, the research director of the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index.
Gallup assesses people who rate their current life at a 7 or higher and their anticipated future at an 8 or higher as “thriving.” Fewer than half of Americans, about 48%, are now in that category.
Mark Keierleber
Police departments across the US are quietly leveraging school district security cameras to assist Donald Trump’s mass immigration enforcement campaign, an investigation by the 74 reveals.
Hundreds of thousands of audit logs spanning a month show police are searching a national database of automated license plate reader data, including from school cameras, for immigration-related investigations.
The audit logs originate from Texas school districts that contract with Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that manufactures artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers and other surveillance technology. Flock’s cameras are designed to capture license plate numbers, timestamps and other identifying details, which are uploaded to a cloud server. Flock customers, including schools, can decide whether to share their information with other police agencies in the company’s national network.
Multiple law enforcement leaders acknowledged they conducted the searches in the audit logs to help the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) enforce federal immigration laws. The Trump administration’s aggressive DHS crackdown, which has grown increasingly unpopular, has had a significant impact on schools.
Educators, parents and students as young as five have been swept up, with immigrant families being targeted during school drop-offs and pick-ups. School parking lots are one place the cameras at the center of these searches can be found, along with other locations in the wider community, such as mounted on utility poles at intersections or along busy commercial streets.
The data raises questions about the degree to which campus surveillance technology intended for student safety is being repurposed to support immigration enforcement.
Dara Kerr
A federal judge on Monday blocked a California law from going into effect that would ban federal immigration agents from covering their faces, but they will still be required to wear clear identification showing their agency and badge number.
California became the first state to ban most law enforcement officers from wearing facial coverings under a bill that was signed by Gavin Newsom, the governor, in September, following last summer’s high-profile raids by ICE officers in Los Angeles.
The Trump administration filed a lawsuit in November challenging the law, arguing it would threaten the safety of officers who are facing harassment, doxing, and violence. The Department of Justice claimed the law violated the constitution because California would be directly regulating the federal government. The agency argued that federal officers should be able to choose a whether to wear a face covering.
“Denying federal agencies and officers that choice would chill federal law enforcement and deter applicants for law enforcement positions,” the justice department wrote in its lawsuit.
Judge Christina Snyder said she issued the initial ruling because the mask ban as it was enacted did not also apply to state and local law enforcement authorities, thus it discriminated against the federal government.
Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, called the ruling a “key court victory” in a post on social media, saying federal agents are “attacked on a regular basis just for doing their jobs”. She added that the justice department “will ALWAYS have the backs of our great federal law enforcement officers”.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he will prioritise discussions on negotiations with Iran when he meets with US president Donald Trump in Washington this week.
“On this trip we will discuss a range of issues: Gaza, the region, but of course first and foremost the negotiations with Iran. I will present to the president our views regarding the principles for the negotiations,” Netanyahu said before heading to the United States, where he will meet Trump on Wednesday.
Their meeting comes days after Iran and the United States held talks in Oman last week, after which Trump said another round of negotiations would follow, AFP reports.
Trump threatens to block bridge he previously endorsed as ‘vital economic link’
Donald Trump last night threatened to block a bridge connecting the US and Canada and made a bizarre false claim that increased trade between Canada and China would include a ban on Canadians playing ice hockey.
Trump began his latest diatribe against the US’s second-largest trading partner by claiming that “everyone knows, the Country of Canada has treated the United States very unfairly for decades”.
The president also threatened to block the scheduled opening of the $4.6bn Gordie Howe International Bridge, connecting Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan, built by a binational partnership that won approval during the Obama administration but began construction in 2018, when Trump was president.
“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve,” Trump wrote on Monday.
Trump himself had publicly endorsed the bridge project in 2017, before construction began, in public comments and a joint statement issued by him and the then prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.
“No two countries share deeper or broader relations than Canada and the United States,” the joint statement issued on 13 February 2017 read.
“Given our shared focus on infrastructure investments, we will encourage opportunities for companies in both countries to create jobs through those investments. In particular, we look forward to the expeditious completion of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which will serve as a vital economic link between our two countries,” Trump and Trudeau said after their first meeting that day.
Read our full report here:
Democrats say White House offer on ICE is ‘insufficient’ as Homeland Security funding set to expire
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that Democratic leaders say a proposal from the White House is “incomplete and insufficient” as they demand new restrictions on president Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement late Monday that a White House counterproposal to the list of demands they called for over the weekend “included neither details nor legislative text” and does not address “the concerns Americans have about ICE’s lawless conduct.” The White House proposal was not released publicly.
The Democrats’ statement comes as time is running short, with another partial government shutdown threatening to begin Saturday, AP reported. Among the Democrats’ demands are a requirement for judicial warrants, better identification of DHS officers, new use-of-force standards and a stop to racial profiling. They say such changes are necessary after two protesters were fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis last month.
Earlier on Monday, Senate majority leader John Thune had expressed optimism about the rare negotiations between Democrats and the White House, saying there was “forward progress.”
Thune said it was a good sign that the two sides were trading papers, and “hopefully they can find some common ground here.” But coming to an agreement on the charged issue of immigration enforcement will be difficult, especially as rank-and-file lawmakers in both parties were skeptical about finding common ground.
Many Democrats who are furious about ICE’s aggressive crackdown have said they won’t vote for any more Homeland Security funding until enforcement is radically scaled back. “Dramatic changes are needed at the Department of Homeland Security before a DHS funding bill moves forward,” Jeffries said earlier Monday. “Period. Full stop.”
In other developments:
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Donald Trump threatened to block a new bridge connecting the US and Canada he supported in 2017 and made the bizarre false claim that increased trade between Canada and China would include a total ban on Canadians playing ice hockey.
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The Miami Herald reported that one partially redacted Epstein files document includes an account of a 2006 phone call in which Trump told the Palm Beach police chief that “everyone has known” Jeffrey Epstein was abusing girls and Ghislaine Maxwell ‘“is evil”. Trump now says he had no idea Epstein was abusing girls and wishes Maxwell well.
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An immigration judge rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was arrested last year as part of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said in a statement.
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The US military’s Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced it carried out another deadly strike on Monday, killing two suspected drug smugglers in the eastern Pacific.
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A federal judge in California issued a preliminary injunction that blocks part of a new state law that bans federal law enforcement officers from covering their faces.
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