DHS shutdown looms as negotiations on funding bill stall on Capitol Hill
Lawmakers in the House and Senate left Washington on Thursday as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) heads for another shutdown, when stopgap funding lapses tonight. Nearly all Democrats blocked a second attempt to pass the annual DHS appropriations bill as negotiations for guardrails on federal immigration enforcement have stalled. Senator John Fetterman was the only lawmaker to break ranks with the party.
Forcing a shutdown is one of the few levers Democratic members of Congress can use to force Republicans to consider their demands to rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they conduct surges throughout the country. These include preventing officers from wearing masks, making sure body-worn cameras are used at all times, and requiring judicial warrants to conduct raids and arrests. Notably, these are requests that Republicans say are off the table.
This ongoing battle on Capitol Hill comes as Tom Homan – Trump’s “border czar” – announced the immigration crackdown in Minnesota would end on Thursday, after widespread backlash against ICE and CBP officers’ use of force in the state, which saw the fatal shooting of two US citizens and several weeks of protests.
Key events
Michael Sainato
Democratic lawmakers, led by the senators Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Duckworth and the representative Mike Quigley, are demanding answers about how Donald Trump’s immigration policies are exacerbating childcare shortages and costs in the US.
About 20% of the childcare workforce in the US are immigrants – and as high as 70% in some regions of the US – and the president’s immigration policies could reduce the childcare workforce by an estimated 15%, according to a letter sent today by 48 lawmakers to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families (ACF).
“Immigration policy changes – including terminations of temporary protected status (TPS), the elimination of other lawful immigration pathways, and immigration raids in and around childcare programs – are driving childcare providers out of the workplace, exacerbating childcare workforce shortages and high prices,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter.
The lawmakers provided examples of childcare workers ensnared by Trump’s deportation push, including a nanny in Wisconsin, an asylum seeker with no criminal record who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after a routine check-in, and immigrant teachers at a preschool in Washington DC who lost their work authorizations and were forced to quit due to TPS terminations by the Trump administration.
White House says it has made ‘every good faith effort’ to keep DHS open amid looming shutdown
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the Trump administration has made “every good faith effort” to keep the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) open as negotiations to place stronger guardrails on federal immigration enforcement have stalled with Democrats on Capitol Hill, and lawmakers failed to advance a full-year appropriations bill to keep the department funding through September.
In an interview with Fox News, Leavitt said that Democrats are “barreling” the agency towards a shutdown for “political and partisan reasons”. This week, Democrats rejected the White House’s legislative counter-proposal for a DHS funding bill, saying that it was insufficient.
Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, said that the latest inflation figures from Bureau of Labor Statistics show a failure from the Trump administration to make good on campaign promises.
“One year into his [Donald Trump’s] second term, food continues to get more expensive, utility costs are soaring and housing prices are rising,” Warren said in a statement. “Trump is making life less affordable for American families – and instead of fixing the economic pain he’s caused, he says this is the Trump economy and he is ‘very proud’ of it.”
Lauren Almeida
Core inflation, which does not include food and energy prices, slowed to 2.5%, in line with expectations.
It comes after official figures on Wednesday showed the US economy added 130,000 jobs last month, well ahead of forecasts. Last month the Federal Reserve held interest rates at a range of 3.5% to 3.75%, after three consecutive quarter-point cuts.
US inflation eases to 2.4% according to latest data
The annual rate of US inflation eased in January, according to the latest data consumer price index report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Over the last 12 months, the cost of goods has increased by 2.4% – down from 2.7% in last month’s report.
DHS shutdown looms as negotiations on funding bill stall on Capitol Hill
Lawmakers in the House and Senate left Washington on Thursday as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) heads for another shutdown, when stopgap funding lapses tonight. Nearly all Democrats blocked a second attempt to pass the annual DHS appropriations bill as negotiations for guardrails on federal immigration enforcement have stalled. Senator John Fetterman was the only lawmaker to break ranks with the party.
Forcing a shutdown is one of the few levers Democratic members of Congress can use to force Republicans to consider their demands to rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they conduct surges throughout the country. These include preventing officers from wearing masks, making sure body-worn cameras are used at all times, and requiring judicial warrants to conduct raids and arrests. Notably, these are requests that Republicans say are off the table.
This ongoing battle on Capitol Hill comes as Tom Homan – Trump’s “border czar” – announced the immigration crackdown in Minnesota would end on Thursday, after widespread backlash against ICE and CBP officers’ use of force in the state, which saw the fatal shooting of two US citizens and several weeks of protests.
Donald Trump will travel to Fayetteville, North Carolina, with the first lady, Melania Trump, later today. He’ll deliver remarks to families of the Fort Bragg military base at 1.30pm ET, before heading to Palm Beach, Florida – where he’ll hold closed-door meetings over the weekend.
We’ll bring you the latest lines.
The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said on Friday that any decision to narrow the scope of US metals tariffs would be made by President Trump.
Bessent, asked on CNBC about a Financial Times report that Trump is planning to roll back some of his 50% tariffs on steel, aluminum, copper and other metal goods, said he spoke to US trade representative Jamieson Greer about the matter and added: “We’ll see if there is a narrowing.“
“If anything is done, I think it would be some sort of clarification on some incidental objects, but again, that’s going to be the president’s decision,” Bessent said.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has accelerated a profound shift in the global order, according to new analysis.
A report from Focal Data, which analyses UN voting records, reveals how Washington’s “America First” agenda has started to redraw the geopolitical map in favour of China.
In 2026, the world is now diplomatically closer to Beijing than it has been in recent memory, with significant shifts in alignments taking place during the start of Trump’s second presidential term.
These charts show how Trump is isolating the US on the world stage:
Donald Trump plans to scale back some tariffs on steel and aluminum goods, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Officials in the commerce department and the US trade representative’s office believe the tariffs are hurting consumers by raising prices for goods including pie tins and food-and-drink cans, the FT report said.
Voters nationwide are worried about prices, and cost-of-living concerns are expected to be a major factor for Americans heading into the November midterm elections.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 30% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the rising cost of living, while 59% disapproved, including nine in 10 Democrats and one in five Republicans.
Justice department moves to drop charges against men accused of hitting ICE officer in Minnesota
Federal prosecutors in Minneapolis have moved to drop felony assault charges against two Venezuelan men, including one shot in the leg by an immigration officer, after new evidence emerged undercutting the government’s version of events.
In a filing on Thursday, the US attorney’s office for the district of Minnesota said “newly discovered evidence” in the criminal case against Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis “is materially inconsistent with the allegations against them” made in a criminal complaint and a court hearing last month.
The government’s motion asked the judge for “dismissal with prejudice”, meaning the charges against the two men cannot be resubmitted.
The pending dismissal comes after a string of high-profile shootings involving federal immigration agents where eyewitness statements and video evidence called into question claims made to justify using deadly force. Dozens of felony cases against protesters accused of assaulting or impeding federal officers have also crumbled.
The case at issue in Thursday’s filing stemmed from a 14 January incident during which an FBI investigator alleged in an affidavit that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers attempted to conduct a traffic stop on a vehicle driven by Aljorna, who crashed and fled on foot toward an apartment complex.
As an immigration officer chased and tried to arrest him, the government claimed, Aljorna began to violently resist.
As the officer and Aljorna struggled on the ground, Sosa-Celis and another man came out of a nearby apartment and attacked the officer with a snow shovel and a broom handle, the complaint alleged. The officer, who was not named in court filings, then fired his handgun, striking Sosa-Celis in the upper right thigh. The men then fled into a nearby apartment, where they were later arrested.
Thursday’s one-page motion seeking to dismiss the charges did not detail what new evidence had emerged, but cracks began to appear in the government’s case during a 21 January court hearing to determine whether the accused men could be released pending trial.
Melody Schreiber
A senior US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official says Moderna’s clinical trial on a new, potentially more effective flu vaccine was a “brazen failure” and that the FDA is now calling it into question.
The FDA unexpectedly refused to consider Moderna’s application for a flu shot based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in a decision that experts say is already having a chilling effect on vaccine development.
Officials say the issue is the design of the study, in which control group participants over the age of 65 should have received a high-dose flu shot instead of a standard flu shot. Outside experts say the reasons seem to go deeper.
“It’s all pretext and obfuscation when the real agenda is rejecting conventional science and serving a predetermined anti-vaccine agenda,” said Richard Hughes IV, a partner with Epstein Becker Green and law professor at George Washington University.
Dorit Reiss, professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, said “personally humiliating a company is not a legitimate reason to refuse to review a submission”, and the refusal needs to “address substantive reasons”. Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, says “they’re just coming up with reasons to not approve mRNA anything, and they’re going to eventually do it to all these vaccines”.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services, said the concerns that mRNA and other vaccines are being targeted by officials were “baseless”.
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, met his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, on Friday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, an AFP journalist said, at a time of heightened Washington-Beijing tensions.
The meeting came days after Donald Trump said he would host the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, at the White House late this year, as the world’s two biggest economies look to reset ties marred by a trade war.
Rubio arrived late on Friday in the Germany city, and is set to deliver a speech on Saturday to the annual meeting focused on international security and defence.
Trump’s climate repeal ‘un-American’ and ‘Orwellian’, says Kerry
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that the Trump administration has revoked the bedrock scientific determination that gives the government the ability to regulate climate-heating pollution. The move was described as a gift to “billionaire polluters” at the expense of Americans’ health.
The endangerment finding, which states that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare, has since 2009 allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit heat-trapping pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources.
Donald Trump called the move “the single largest deregulatory action in American history”. “This is a big one if you’re into environment,” he told reporters on Thursday. “This is about as big as it gets.”
The move comes as part of Trump’s bigger anti-environment push, which has seen him roll back pollution rules and boost oil and gas.
On social media, Barack Obama said the repeal will leave Americans “less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change – all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money”.
The former secretary of state John Kerry called the new rule “un-American”.
“Repealing the Endangerment Finding takes Orwellian governance to new heights and invites enormous damage to people and property around the world,” said Kerry, who also served as Joe Biden’s climate envoy. “Ignoring warning signs will not stop the storm. It puts more Americans directly in its path.”
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
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Daniel Rosen, the Trump-appointed US attorney in Minnesota, said in a court filing that charges should be dropped against an immigrant who was shot by a federal immigration officer last month because “newly discovered evidence” contradicts the account of the incident from federal officers.
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Sensitive intelligence that a whistleblower has accused Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, of mishandling concerned a report from the National Security Agency on an intercepted phone call last year between two members of foreign intelligence who were discussing Jared Kushner and Iran, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times report.
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Asked if he has “fired or disciplined that staffer who posted the video from your account that included the Obamas”, Donald Trump said that he had not. The president then went on to excuse the racist clip, which depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as cartoon apes.
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A federal judge denied a request on Thursday from the Trump administration to pause her order keeping temporary legal protections for Haitian immigrants in place, and said that she would not be intimidated by death threats she read aloud in court.
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Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, claimed US Customs and Border Protection in the San Diego area has saved 1.7 billion lives by seizing drugs.
