Trump deploying military to Chicago on ‘flimsy pretext’, Illinois lawsuit alleges
According to Illinois’ lawsuit, Donald Trump is deploying the military to Illinois based on a “flimsy pretext” that alleges an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in a suburb of Chicago needs protecting as protests outside the building over Trump’s immigration crackdown continue.
The state argues that the Trump administration as a result cannot satisfy the legal prerequisites to allow it to federalize national guard troops without governor JB Pritzker’s blessing and is violating the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law which sharply limits the use of the military for domestic enforcement.
The lawsuit also argues Trump’s actions violate the US constitution’s 10th amendment, which protects states’ rights, by usurping Pritzker’s role as the commander-in-chief of the national guard in Illinois and by infringing on the state’s authority over local law enforcement.
Key events
We’re due to hear from White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, shortly. We’ll bring you the latest lines as we get them.
Donald Trump has said that he had a “very good” telephone call with Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva this morning and that the pair mainly discussed the economy and trade.
“We will be having further discussions, and will get together in the not too distant future, both in Brazil and the United States,” Trump added in a post on Truth Social.
Talks begin in Egypt on Trump plan to end Gaza war
Delegations from Israel, Hamas and the US began indirect negotiations in Cairo today that the US hopes will pave the way for an end to the war in Gaza, facing contentious issues such as demands that Israel pull out of the enclave and Hamas to disarm.
Israel and Hamas have both endorsed the overall principles behind Donald Trump’s plan, under which fighting would cease, hostages go free and aid pour into Gaza. The delegations are also expected to discuss key stipulations of the plan, including “Israeli military withdrawal lines in Gaza and the names of high-profile Palestinian prisoners to be released in exchange for the remaining 48 hostages”, per the Wall Street Journal.
The plan has the backing of Arab and western states. Trump has called for negotiations to take place swiftly towards a final deal, in what Washington hails as the closest the sides have yet come to ending the conflict.
Last night wrote on Truth Social that talks were “proceeding rapidly” in the lead-up to today’s meeting. “I am told that the first phase should be completed this week, and I am asking everyone to MOVE FAST,” Trump said. He has also warned of “MASSIVE BLOODSHED” if a deal is not finalized in the coming days.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the path to bringing the conflict to a close would come in two phases: the first includes the coming meetings and working out logistics of the hostage release. “But that work is happening even as I speak to you this very moment,” he said.
The second, harder part, he added, is working out what happens inside Gaza after Israel withdraws to the agreed upon lines. The plan includes creating a Palestinian technocratic leadership in Gaza.
You can follow all the latest developments on this hugely significant moment for the Middle East here:
Trump deploying military to Chicago on ‘flimsy pretext’, Illinois lawsuit alleges
According to Illinois’ lawsuit, Donald Trump is deploying the military to Illinois based on a “flimsy pretext” that alleges an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in a suburb of Chicago needs protecting as protests outside the building over Trump’s immigration crackdown continue.
The state argues that the Trump administration as a result cannot satisfy the legal prerequisites to allow it to federalize national guard troops without governor JB Pritzker’s blessing and is violating the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law which sharply limits the use of the military for domestic enforcement.
The lawsuit also argues Trump’s actions violate the US constitution’s 10th amendment, which protects states’ rights, by usurping Pritzker’s role as the commander-in-chief of the national guard in Illinois and by infringing on the state’s authority over local law enforcement.
US supreme court begins new term with nation’s democratic governance at stake
Robert Tait
Context may be everything in the precedent-shattering era of the current US supreme court.
For several years – since conservatives, gained a six-three majority on the bench thanks to Donald Trump’s nominations during his first presidency – the court has been delivering transformative rulings that have reverberated across the social and political landscape.
In 2022, it overturned Roe v Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion that had existed for nearly half-a-century.
In July 2024, in a far-reaching decision, it granted Trump – and, by extension, other US presidents – sweeping immunity from prosecution for all acts, including potential crimes, committed in the course of his official duties.
This year, following his return to the White House, the court has sided with Trump roughly 20 times after administration officials sought relief from lower court rulings that pushed back on his assertion of expansive executive power to implement his agenda.
Now scrutiny on the nine justices is about to reach a new level of intensity as the court begins what is expected to be an unusually fraught term today, amidst the president’s increasingly unfettered forays into authoritarianism.
With the president pushing to prosecute his political enemies, threatening a crackdown on the left on the putative grounds of combating violent extremism, and preparing to deploy military force in Democrat-run cities, the court is due to hear and issue rulings on a slew of ideologically-charged cases.
The survival of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, the legality of transgender surgery, the rights of states to count mail-in ballots at elections, and Trump’s powers to impose his sweeping tariff policy could all be up for grabs in the coming weeks and months.
At stake, some seasoned legal experts say, is the very future of democratic governance in the US.
You can read the rest of Robert’s piece here:
Christian group ‘deceived’ supreme court about LGBTQ+ research, cited scholars say
Sam Levin
On Tuesday, a Christian legal group will urge the US supreme court to overturn a ban on anti-LGBTQ+ “conversion therapy” in a case that could erode protections for transgender and queer youth across the country.
Lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has opposed abortion and LGBTQ+ rights in high-profile litigation, are representing a woman challenging a 2019 Colorado law that prohibited conversion practices for youth under age 18. The ban applies to licensed clinicians who seek to change a patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity, tactics medical groups have discredited as harmful and ineffective.
ADF’s petition in the case, Chiles v Salazar, cited several scholars to support its argument that conversion practices should once again be permitted. Two of those experts, however, told the Guardian that ADF had “profoundly” misrepresented their research, which discussed the “psychological damage” of conversion therapy.
The family of a deceased researcher, also quoted by ADF, said they were “deeply disturbed” by the “distortion” of his work.
“This is the most upsetting use of my scholarship that has ever happened in my career,” said Clifford Rosky, a University of Utah professor of constitutional law and civil rights. He has worked to ban conversion practices, but ADF nonetheless cited his research on sexual orientation and LGBTQ+ rights, co-authored with renowned sexuality researcher Dr Lisa Diamond, to bolster its petition. “It’s upsetting because this is lethally dangerous to LGBTQ+ kids,” he said.
ADF defended its quotations as “accurate” in a statement.
You can read the rest of Sam’s exclusive report here:
Illinois sues to block Trump from deploying national guard troops to Chicago
Illinois has filed a lawsuit this morning seeking to block Donald Trump from deploying hundreds of federalized national guard troops into the streets of Chicago.
The Democratic-led state filed the lawsuit hours after a federal judge in Oregon yesterday temporarily blocked
the Trump administration from sending any national guard troops to police Portland.
The lawsuit took aim at a decision by the Trump administration over the weekend to federalize up to 300 members of the Illinois national guard over the objections of Democratic governor JB Pritzker and another 400 from Texas to deploy into Chicago.
“These advances in President Trump’s long-declared ‘War’ on Chicago and Illinois are unlawful and dangerous,” the complaint alleged.
The White House did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
In response to the news that the supreme court has declined to hear Ghislaine Maxwell’s appeal of her criminal conviction, World Without Exploitation, the US’ largest anti-trafficking coalition, issued a statement in support of the court’s decision.
“In 2022, the jury spoke loud and clear about how, for decades, Maxwell caused such devastating harm to so many women and girls. We’re heartened that she was rightfully not given leniency for her heinous crimes,” said director Lauren Hersh.
Jeffries challenges Johnson to ‘primetime’ debate on House floor
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has challenged speaker Mike Johnson to a debate on the House floor “any day this week in primetime, broadcast live to the American people”.
“It will also give you an opportunity to explain your my way or the high way approach to shutting the government down, when Democratic votes are needed to resolve the impasse that exists,” Jeffries wrote.
For his part, Johnson responded to the request a short while ago at his press conference.
“Look, my friend Hakeem had his shot. We debated all this on the House floor,” the Republican speaker said. “They [Democrats] gave it their best shot, and they argued and they stomped their feet and screamed at us and all that, and still, we passed the bill in bipartisan fashion and sent it over to the Senate. The House has done its job. I’m not going to let Hakeem try to pretend to these theatrics.”
Mike Johnson added that he hasn’t heard much from Democrats in terms of calls since the government shut down last week.
Over the weekend, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said there had been no attempt from Republicans to negotiate about their dueling funding bills.
“There’s nothing for us to negotiate,” Johnson said today. “I didn’t add a single Republican policy or priority or preference to the CR [continuing resolution]. It is 100% totally clean. It is an exact status quo replica of what we’re doing right now.”
The Senate will meet for votes at 5:30pm today, but Republicans still need more Democrats to break ranks and vote yes on the GOP funding patch.
“I sure pray, and I hope you all will, that a handful of additional common sense people on the Democrat side will change their votes, reopen the government so we can get back to all these issues as we desperately want to do,” Johnson added.
Johnson says Democrats funding bill is a ‘wish list of big government liberal nonsense’
Republican House speaker Mike Johnson is now addressing reporters. A reminder, that Johnson is keeping the House out of session this week to force Democrats’ hand and ensure a GOP-written continuing resolution, to keep the government funding, clears the Senate.
“They [Democrats] hastily filed an outrageous counter proposal. It is a wild Wish List of big government liberal nonsense that we can’t do,” Johnson said. “The clean continuing resolution would simply keep the lights on so that the members in the House and Senate can have those debates on health care.”
The House speaker continues to blame lawmakers across the aisle. “The ball is in the court for Court of the Senate Democrats…we don’t have enough Republican votes to fix this,” Johnson said, referring to the 60-vote hurdle needed for this legislation to advance.
Johnson also repeated several misleading claims that Democrats are trying to pass a short-term funding bill to fund Medicaid for “illegals who break our law and come over the border”.
Undocumented immigrants remain ineligible for federally funded health insurance, and are only able to receive emergency Medicaid treatment, according to longstanding US laws. Instead, Democrats’ funding patch seeks to reverse many of the cuts to Medicaid that are set to take effect after Trump’s sweeping domestic policy agenda passed earlier this year.
This includes allowing lawfully present noncitizens – which includes several groups, such as refugees and asylum seekers, those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and survivors of domestic abuse and human trafficking who are awaiting visas or documentation – to still enroll in certain federal health care programs. All of these immigrants have entered the country legally and are accounted for by the federal government.
I’ve been reporting on how Democrats have been pushing back against these claims in recent weeks. You can read more below.
At the center of Maxwell’s appeal to the supreme court is a plea deal that Epstein struck with federal prosecutors in Florida, back in 2007. Then, Epstein only received state charges for agreeing to a guilty plea.
This deal also prevented any criminal charges against Epstein’s “co-conspirators” – a element Maxwell’s attorneys say should have shielded her from prosecution in New York, where she was ultimately convicted.
But so far, two federal courts have already kept Maxwell’s conviction in place.
