Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the week, but we will be back on Monday. Here are the latest developments:
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Donald Trump told reporters that he did direct aides to post a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes on his social media platform, but claimed to have not seen that part of the 62-second clip.
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While video posted on social media captured the booing of JD Vance, the US vice-president, at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan, the crowd reaction to his presence was not heard or remarked upon in the US TV coverage streamed live on Peacock, the NBC Sports platform.
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After the president claimed that the suggestion to rename New York’s Penn Station Trump Station had not come from him but Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, Schumer called that an “absolute lie.”
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A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration cannot continue withholding funds for a vital infrastructure project from New York and New Jersey. Trump has reportedly frozen the funds as leverage in his attempt to get Schumer’s support for naming both Penn Station and Washington’s Duller Airport after himself.
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Pete Hegseth, the former Fox weekend host now serving as US defense secretary, announced that the Pentagon would no longer send active-duty service members to Harvard, denouncing his alma mater as “woke”.
Key events
Judge stops effort to end asylum claim by family of 5-year-old Minneapolis boy, Liam Conejo Ramos
At an asylum hearing in Minneapolis on Friday, the family of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old whose detention by immigration agents focused outrage over the administration’s effort to deport even non-violent asylum seekers, was given more time to make their case, Kristen Stenvik, superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, where Liam goes to school told MS NOW.
A lawyer for the family, Paschal Nwokocha, told Minnesota Public Radio: “the government was bent on removing this family from the United States. We were able to get additional time to do what we need to do in court.”
The federal government had filed a motion Wednesday seeking to end asylum claims for the family. The 5-year-old had just returned home this week after he was detained with his father on 20 January and sent to a detention center in Texas.
Judge orders Trump administration to unfreeze funds for New York-New Jersey rail project
A New York federal judge on Friday unfroze funds withheld by Donald Trump for a $16 billion project to overhaul critical rail infrastructure in New York and New Jersey, Reuters reports.
The Gateway Project will build a new commuter rail tunnel between Manhattan and New Jersey and repair a century-old tunnel used by more than 200,000 travelers and 425 trains daily. The existing Hudson Tunnel was heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and needs frequent emergency repairs that disrupt travel on the nation’s most heavily used passenger rail line.
US district judge Jeannette Vargas in Manhattan handed down the temporary order hours after New York and New Jersey said construction would halt for lack of funding.
New Jersey’s acting attorney general, Jennifer Davenport, and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, issued statements praising the ruling.
“The Trump Administration must drop this campaign of political retribution immediately and must allow work on this vital infrastructure project to continue,” Davenport said.
“We won a court order and blocked the Trump administration from freezing funding for the Hudson Tunnel Project,” James said. “We will continue our lawsuit and fight to protect our good-paying union jobs and ensure one of the most important infrastructure projects in the nation can resume.”
The states said in a January lawsuit that Trump’s administration had frozen the funds in a “brazen act of political retribution” against their Democratic leaders.
The Trump administration has withheld $205 million in reimbursements for the project since October 1. In a move that echoed Trump’s 2019 attempt to extract “a favor” from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in return for unfreezing funds for weapons, which led to his first impeachment, Trump has reportedly demanded that Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate’s Democrats, agree to rename both Washington Dulles Airport and New York’s Penn Station after him in exchange for unfreezing the funds.
Trump claims Schumer suggested renaming Penn Station Trump Station; Schumer calls that an ‘absolute lie’
On his flight to Florida Friday night, Donald Trump was asked about reports that he told the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, that he would unfreeze funds for a major infrastructure project in New York if he supports renaming Penn Station after him.
“Chuck Schumer suggested that to me,” Trump claimed, “about changing the name of Penn Station to Trump Station.”
“Absolute lie,” Schumer fired back on social media. “He knows it. Everyone knows it. Only one man can restart the project and he can restart it with the snap of his fingers.”
Trump says he directed posting of racist video that depicted Obamas as apes but claims not to have seen offensive images
Donald Trump admitted on Friday night that he did direct aides to post a racist video on his social media account that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, but claimed that he did not see that part of the video, which was near the end of a 62-second clip that otherwise repeated conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss.
Although the White House initially defended the video in a statement from the press secretary, the clip was later deleted and reporters were told that it had been posted, without the president’s knowledge, by an aide.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump undercut those efforts by his aides to explain away his own behavior, telling reporters that he did approve posting the video. “I looked at it, I saw it and I just looked at the first part,” the president said. “I didn’t see the whole thing; I guess during the end of it there was some kind of a picture that people don’t like. I wouldn’t like it either. But I didn’t see it, I just, I looked at the first part … then I gave it to the people. Generally they look at the whole thing, but I guess somebody didn’t and they posted – and we took it down.”
Asked whether he would apologize, as even Republican officials have suggested he should, Trump bristled. “No, I didn’t make a mistake,” the president who approved the posting of a racist meme on his social media account said. “I mean you give, I look at a lot of, thousands of things,” he added, apparently suggesting that his posts, which are official statements from the president of the United States, are not something he takes much care about.
Trump then went on to offer a version of the explanation his press secretary had given earlier in the day, when she suggested that the meme was a harmless reference to the Lion King. “But nobody knew that was at the end,” Trump added, in reference to what was, again, a clip that lasted just over one minute. “Certainly if they had looked, they would’ve seen it, and probably they would’ve had the sense to take it down.”
Trump’s claim that the clip was taken down as soon as the racist depiction of the Obamas was discovered is untrue, given that the post remained up for hours after Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, attempted to brush off the outrage.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Leavitt said in a statement on Friday morning. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
Hours passed between that dismissive statement and the removal of the video from the president’s social media platform.
The president did not say who had posted the video, but Natalie Harp, an aide to Trump, and a former anchor for the conspiratorial One America News, reportedly has access to the president’s Truth Social account.
“I am, by the way, the least racist president you’ve had in a long time,” Trump told another reporter who pressed him on whether posting a racist video was a wise political move.
Hegseth says US defense department will no longer support ‘woke’ Harvard
Pete Hegseth, the former Fox weekend host now serving as US defense secretary, announced in a video statement on Friday that the Pentagon is “discontinuing all graduate-level professional military education, PME, all fellowships, and certificate programs between Harvard University and the war department for active-duty service members”.
Hegseth, who made no mention of the master’s in public policy he earned from Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government, attacked the university as “one of the red-hot centers of Hate America activism”.
“Too many faculty members openly loathe our military; they cast our armed forces in. a negative light and squelch anyone who challenges their leftist political leanings,” he said.
“University leadership encouraged a campus environment that celebrated Hamas, allowed attacks on Jews, and still promotes discrimination based on race in violation of supreme court decisions,” he claimed. “DEI was literally founded at Harvard.”
“With some exceptions,” Hegseth added, “the Ivy League as a whole has pervasive institutional bias and a lack of viewpoint diversity, including the coddling of toxic ideologies that undercuts our mission.”
“That is why, in two weeks’ time, components of all of our departments – army, navy and air force – will evaluate all existing graduate programs for active-duty service members at all Ivy League universities and other civilian universities,” he added.
“The goal is to determine whether or not they actually deliver cost-effective, strategic education for future senior leaders.”
The Pentagon’s focus on “building lethality”, Hegseth also said, “no longer includes spending millions of dollars on expensive universities that actively undercut our mission and undercut our country. We train warriors, not wokesters.”
The Harvard alumni ended his video message with: “Harvard: good riddance.”
While Hegseth made no explicit reference to his own time at Harvard, the intended audience for his remarks, Fox News viewers, including Viewer Number One in the White House, likely understood what he meant by the cryptic aside “I know it well” when he first mentioned the school.
That’s because Hegseth’s attack on Harvard has been a theme of his political rhetoric in books and on television for years. He disparaged the school in two of his books, and, in a live segment of the morning show Fox & Friends in 2022, Hegseth made a show of defacing his diploma and writing “Return to sender” on it in large letters.
During the same broadcast, Hegseth acknowledged that he was not really “returning” his degree: “People will say, ‘This is just a stunt, you still have a degree’. And that’s fine, I went; I got the degree; I walked; took the classes and all that.”
Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Friday to boost imports of Argentinian beef, though economists have said the attempt to lower costs for American consumers will probably have little impact on prices, Reuters reports.
When the White House first said Trump would raise the limit on how much low-tariff beef could be imported from Argentina, US cattle ranchers were enraged.
Trump has faced pressure to address the issue of affordability, which he has been calling “a hoax” since a focus on rising costs helped Democratic candidates sweep several elections in 2025.
The move comes as US beef prices set record highs last year, benefiting ranchers who largely supported Trump, due to strong consumer demand and declining cattle supplies
Ranchers slashed the herd to its lowest level in 75 years as of January, after a persistent drought burned up pastures used for grazing and hiked feeding costs, according to US data.
Trump’s decision to raise the tariff rate quota on Argentine beef by 80,000 metric tons will let Argentina ship more of its beef to the US at a lower rate of duty. The increase will apply only to lean beef trimmings, which are blended with domestic supplies to make hamburger meat, according to the proclamation.
“Instead of imports that sideline American ranchers, we should be focused on solutions that cut red tape, lower production costs, and support growing our cattle herd,” said Deb Fischer, a Republican senator from the major cattle-producing state of Nebraska.
Economists have said increased US imports of Argentinian beef will likely be too small to significantly lower costs for grocery store shoppers, but the shipments could help improve margins for food companies.
The US imported about 33,000 metric tons of Argentinian beef in 2024, representing 2% of total imports, according to government data.
Boos for JD Vance are heard at Olympics opening ceremony, but not by viewers in US
While video posted on social media captured the booing of JD Vance, the US vice-president, at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan, the crowd reaction to his presence was not heard or remarked upon in the US TV coverage streamed live on Peacock, the NBC Sports platform.
“As the United States team, led by the speedskater Erin Jackson, made its way across the stadium it was loudly applauded,” the Guardian’s Sean Ingle reported from the San Siro in Milan. “But then the TV cameras panned to the US vice-president, JD Vance, and his wife, Usha, and the cheers turned to loud boos.
“The boos were picked up on the broadcast, too,” the Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur noted, referring to the Canadian broadcaster CBC’s coverage of the moment, which featured one commentator saying: “There is the vice-president JD Vance and his wife Usha – oop, those are not … uh … those are a lot of boos for him. Whistling, jeering, some applause.”
The NBC live stream seen by Americans, however, skipped over the moment. The booing of Vance, when he appeared on screens inside the stadium during the entry of Team USA, was also not audible, or mentioned in a clip of the moment posted on YouTube by the broadcaster.
On social media, the White House shared a clip of the US team’s entrance, and Vance applauding, from the boo-less NBC broadcast.
Other journalists inside the stadium confirmed the unusual booing during the ceremony.
“It’s very rare to hear boos at an Olympic opening ceremony,” the USA Today correspondent Christine Brennan reported from Italy. “In my 22 Olympics it probably has happened but I sure don’t remember it. Vice President JD Vance just got booed when he appeared on the big screen. The US athletes, on the other hand, received loud cheers.”
The BBC Sport live blogger heard the boos. “The USA team got huge cheers as they entered the arena,” Emma Smith reported from the stadium for the BBC. “Those cheers turned quickly to boos when American vice president JD Vance appeared on the big screen. He is at the stadium tonight with wife Usha.”
Arthur noted that Vance was not alone in being booed. “Israel was definitely booed,” the columnist noted on the Star’s live blog. “ Not universally, but there were more boos than cheers in the Milan stadium for the four Israeli athletes who marched.”
Bill Clinton demands public hearing in Congress and full release of Epstein files
Bill Clinton, the former president, renewed his call for the full release of files from the federal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, and demanded that his testimony to Congress on his relationship with Epstein be made in a public hearing, not behind closed doors.
“I have called for the full release of the Epstein files. I have provided a sworn statement of what I know. And just this week, I’ve agreed to appear in person before the committee. But it’s still not enough for Republicans on the House Oversight Committee,” Clinton said in a statement.
“Now, Chairman Comer says he wants cameras, but only behind closed doors. Who benefits from this arrangement? It’s not Epstein’s victims, who deserve justice. Not the public, who deserve the truth. It serves only partisan interests. This is not fact-finding, it’s pure politics,” he added. “I will not sit idly as they use me as a prop in a closed-door kangaroo court by a Republican Party running scared. If they want answers, let’s stop the games & do this the right way: in a public hearing, where the American people can see for themselves what this is really about.”
The former president’s spokesman has said that he used Epstein’s private jet on four trips in 2002 and 2003 – visiting Europe, Asia and Africa “in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation” – but denied ever visiting Epstein private island and claimed he had no contact with him after he was first charged with sex crimes.
Bill Clinton’s statement on Friday seconded a call made by his wife, the former first lady and US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, on Thursday, when she accused James Comer, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee, of playing “games”, by demanding testimony from both Clintons, but behind closed doors. “You love to talk about transparency,” Hillary Clinton told Comer on social media. “There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on.”
Sanya Mansoor
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is investigating federal immigration authorities’ use of surveillance technologies. That includes the collection of sensitive biometric data and the use of facial recognition technology, which has become increasingly used by DHS and ICE agents against immigrants and citizens.
Joseph Cuffari, the head of the DHS watchdog, wrote in a letter on Friday that his office’s audit would address many concerns flagged by Democratic senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine. The pair wrote to Cuffari on 29 January –following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, about potential civil liberty violations tied to federal laws about data privacy and unlawful searches.
“ICE’s new information collection tools potentially enable DHS to circumvent the constitutional protections provided by the fourth amendment-protections guaranteed to all Americans and all persons within our borders,” the senators wrote.
The letter took particular issue with ICE’s contracts with surveillance and analytics firm, Palantir, and facial recognition software developer, Clearview AI, as well as the use of programs “that DHS does not have office access to-including Flock License Plate Scanning Software”.
Senators asked for more information about how DHS stores and uses sensitive, personally identifying data, reckons with false positives, considers consent around data collection and how this data may be used to define targets of immigration enforcement activities.
The Senators said in a joint press release on Friday that the investigation is “an important first step in investigating if Americans’ data is being misused.”
For some immigration advocates, there’s a need for even more urgency. “ICE has been operating like a paramilitary force, using facial recognition tech to suppress dissent and target people of color in blatant racial profiling incidents across the country,” said Laura Rivera, senior staff attorney at Just Futures Law, in an emailed statement. (The organization has been working to uncover more details about Palantir’s collaboration with DHS through public records requests). “An Inspector General investigation into these abuses is far from enough-we need real accountability and a ban on the use of this noxious method of surveillance.”
This week, congressional Democrats also introduced a measure that would ban ICE and CBP from using facial recognition technology and other biometric identification systems.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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Following intense backlash from Democrats and Republicans, the White House has now taken down Trump’s Truth Social repost of a racist video, depicting the Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Earlier, press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to brush off the outrage, defending Trump’s repost as “an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King”.
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Indirect talks between Iran and the US on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme ended on Friday with a broad agreement to maintain a diplomatic path, possibly with further talks in the coming days, according to statements from Iran and the Omani hosts. The relieved Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, described the eight hours of meetings as a “good start” conducted in a good atmosphere. The US team was led by Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the US president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
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Donald Trump has told the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, that he will unfreeze funds for major infrastructure projects in New York City if he supports renaming Dulles international airport and Penn Station after him. The demand, which was first reported on Thursday by Punchbowl News, comes after the president in October halted $18bn in funding for a major subway line expansion in New York City as well as a new rail tunnel connecting the city to New Jersey.
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The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced today that officials arrested one of the “key participants” in the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack that killed four US government officials, including the US ambassador to Libya, J Christopher Stevens. Bondi said suspect Zubayar al-Bakoush was taken into custody at 3am ET on Friday. “We will prosecute this alleged terrorist to the fullest extent of the law. He’ll face charges related to murder, terrorism, arson, among others,” Bondi told reporters today.
