order

CHICAGO — An appeals court intervened Wednesday and suddenly blocked an order that required a senior Border Patrol official to give unprecedented daily briefings to a judge about immigration sweeps in Chicago.

The one-page suspension by the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals came before Greg Bovino’s first scheduled, late afternoon meeting with U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis at the courthouse in downtown Chicago.

Ellis had ordered the meetings Tuesday after weeks of tense encounters and increasingly aggressive tactics by government agents working Operation Midway Blitz. It has produced more than 1,800 arrests and complaints of excessive force.

Bovino told Fox News that he was eager to talk to Ellis. But government lawyers, at the same time, were appealing her decision. Lawyers for news outlets and activists who say agents have used too much force, including tear gas, have until 5 p.m. Thursday to respond in the appeals court.

Ellis’ order followed enforcement actions in which tear gas was used, including in a neighborhood where children had gathered for a Halloween parade last weekend on the city’s Northwest Side. Neighbors had joined in the street as someone was arrested.

“Halloween is on Friday,” she said. “I do not want to get violation reports from the plaintiffs that show that agents are out and about on Halloween, where kids are present and tear gas is being deployed.”

Bovino defended agents’ actions.

“If she wants to meet with me every day, then she’s going to see, she’s going to have a very good firsthand look at just how bad things really are on the streets of Chicago,” Bovino told Fox News. “I look forward to meeting with that judge to show her exactly what’s happening and the extreme amount of violence perpetrated against law enforcement here.”

Meanwhile, prosecutors filed charges against Kat Abughazaleh, a Democratic congressional candidate, and five other people over protests at an immigration enforcement building in Broadview, outside Chicago. The indictment, unsealed Wednesday, alleges they illegally blocked an agent’s car on Sept. 26.

Abughazaleh said the prosecution was an “attempt to silence dissent.”

The Chicago court actions came as groups and officials across the country have filed lawsuits aimed at restricting federal deployments of National Guard troops.

President Trump’s administration will remain blocked from deploying troops in the Chicago area until at least the latter half of November, following a U.S. Supreme Court order Wednesday calling on the parties to file additional legal briefs.

The justices indicated they would not act before Nov. 17 on the administration’s emergency appeal to overturn a lower-court ruling that has blocked the troop deployments.

In Portland, Ore., a federal trial seeking to block a troop deployment got underway Wednesday morning with a police commander describing on the witness stand how federal agents at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building repeatedly fired tear gas at nonviolent protesters.

In Chicago, Bovino, who is chief of the Border Patrol sector in El Centro, Calif., was to sit for a daily 5:45 p.m. briefing to report how his agents are enforcing the law and whether they are staying within constitutional bounds, Ellis said. The check-ins were to take place until a Nov. 5 hearing.

Ellis also demanded that Bovino produce all use-of-force reports since Sept. 2 from agents involved in Operation Midway Blitz.

The judge expressed confidence Tuesday that the check-ins would prevent excessive use of force in Chicago neighborhoods.

Ellis previously ordered agents to wear badges, and she has banned them from using certain riot control techniques against peaceful protesters and journalists. She subsequently required body cameras after the use of tear gas raised concerns that agents were not following her initial order.

Ellis set a Friday deadline for Bovino to get a camera and to complete training.

Lawyers for the government have repeatedly defended the actions of agents, including those from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and told the judge that videos and other portrayals of enforcement actions have been one-sided.

Besides his court appearance, Bovino still must sit for a videotaped Thursday deposition, an interview in private, with lawyers from both sides.

Fernando writes for the Associated Press.

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge in San Francisco on Tuesday indefinitely barred the Trump administration from firing federal employees during the government shutdown, saying that labor unions were likely to prevail on their claims that the cuts were arbitrary and politically motivated.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston granted a preliminary injunction that bars the firings while a lawsuit challenging them plays out. She previously issued a temporary restraining order against the job cuts that was set to expire Wednesday.

Illston, who was nominated by former President Clinton, has said she believes evidence will show the mass firings were illegal and in excess of authority.

Federal agencies are enjoined from issuing layoff notices or acting on notices issued since the government shut down Oct. 1. Illston said her order does not apply to notices sent before the shutdown.

The Republican administration has slashed jobs in education, health and other areas it says are favored by Democrats. The administration also said it will not tap roughly $5 billion in contingency funds to keep benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as SNAP, flowing into November.

The American Federation of Government Employees and other labor unions sued to stop the “reductions in force” layoffs, saying the firings were an abuse of power designed to punish workers and pressure Congress.

“President Trump is using the government shutdown as a pretense to illegally fire thousands of federal workers — specifically those employees carrying out programs and policies that the administration finds objectionable,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement thanking the court.

The White House referred a request for comment to the Office of Management and Budget, which did not immediately respond.

Lawyers for the government say the district court does not have the authority to hear personnel challenges and that President Trump has broad authority to reduce the federal workforce as he pledged to do during his campaign.

“The president was elected on this specific platform,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Velchik said. “The American people selected someone known above all else for his eloquence in communicating to employees that you’re fired; this is what they voted for.”

Trump starred on a long-running reality TV series called “The Apprentice” in which his signature catchphrase was telling candidates they were fired.

About 4,100 layoff notices have gone out since Oct. 10, some sent to work email addresses that furloughed employees are not allowed to check. Some personnel were called back to work, without pay, to issue layoff notices to others.

The lawsuit has expanded to include employees represented by additional labor unions, including the National Treasury Employees Union, the American Federation of Teachers, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. All Cabinet departments and two dozen independent agencies are included in the lawsuit.

Democratic lawmakers are demanding that any deal to reopen the government address expiring health care subsidies that have made health insurance more affordable for millions of Americans. They also want any government funding bill to reverse the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s big tax breaks and spending cuts bill passed this summer.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to negotiate with Democrats until they agree to reopen the government.

This is now the second-longest shutdown in U.S. history. The longest occurred during Trump’s first term over his demands for funds to build the Mexico border wall. That one ended in 2019 after 35 days.

Har writes for the Associated Press.

NASHVILLE — A federal judge in Tennessee on Monday warned of possible sanctions against top Trump administration officials if they continue to make inflammatory statements about Kilmar Abrego Garcia that could prejudice his coming trial.

U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw filed an order late on Monday instructing local prosecutors in Nashville to provide a copy of his opinion to all Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security employees, including Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

“Government employees have made extrajudicial statements that are troubling, especially where many of them are exaggerated if not simply inaccurate,” Crenshaw writes.

He lists a number of examples of prohibited statements as outlined in the local rules for the U.S. District Court of Middle Tennessee. They include any statements about the “character, credibility, reputation, or criminal record of a party” and “any opinion as to the accused’s guilt or innocence.”

“DOJ and DHS employees who fail to comply with the requirement to refrain from making any statement that ‘will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing’ this criminal prosecution may be subject to sanctions,” his order reads.

Earlier this year, Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation to El Salvador, where he was held in a notoriously brutal prison despite having no criminal record, helped galvanize opposition to President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Facing mounting public pressure and a court order, the Trump administration brought him back to the U.S. in June, but only after issuing an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty to those charges and asked Crenshaw to dismiss them.

Meanwhile, Trump administration officials have waged a relentless public relations campaign against Abrego Garcia, repeatedly referring to him as a member of the MS-13 gang and even implicating him in a murder. Crenshaw’s opinion cites statements from several top officials, including Bondi and Noem, as potentially damaging to Abrego Garcia’s right to a fair trial. He also admonishes Abrego Garcia’s defense attorneys for publicly disclosing details of plea agreement negotiations.

Abrego Garcia has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the U.S. illegally from El Salvador as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from being deported back to his home country, finding he had a well-founded fear of violence there from a gang that targeted his family.

Since his return to the U.S. in June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has announced plans to deport him to a series of African countries, most recently Liberia.

Loller writes for the Associated Press.

The long-running saga of Saab Gripen fighters for Ukraine took a dramatic new turn today, with the Swedish and Ukrainian leaders unveiling a plan to export as many as 150 Gripens to Kyiv. While no timeline has been set, and the financing is yet to be determined, the deal, if it goes ahead, would provide Ukraine with its first new-built fighter jets since it gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky today signed a letter of intent (LOI) with the aim of “deepening air force cooperation.” The cornerstone of this is a potential major export deal covering “likely between 100 and 150 fighter jets,” according to Kristersson. The LOI was signed in front of a Gripen E at Linköping, the site of Saab’s manufacturing facility for the fighter.

“Sweden supports the development of Ukraine’s future air force,” the Swedish government said in a statement. “This new Swedish–Ukrainian cooperation will include exchange of experience and knowledge on air combat and defense and on the use of advanced capabilities in this area, for example, fighter aircraft.”

🇺🇦🇸🇪 Ukraine and Sweden signed the first agreement to bring a fleet of Swedish-made Gripen jets to Ukraine – powerful aircraft ready for a wide range of missions! We look forward to the future contract, which is expected to bring at least 100 of these fighter jets to Ukraine.

💬… pic.twitter.com/iaxTHDQ2uq

— MFA of Ukraine 🇺🇦 (@MFA_Ukraine) October 22, 2025

At Linköping, Zelensky “got the chance to see first-hand the impressive capabilities of the Gripen fighter,” Kristersson said, describing the LOI as “a step towards a massive possible export deal regarding Gripen.”

Kristersson continued: “We fully realize it’s a long road ahead of us, but from today we are committed to exploring all the possibilities in providing Ukraine with a large amount of Gripen fighters in the future.”

As well as the plan to get Gripens into Ukrainian Air Force hands, the Swedish government said that it would harness Ukraine’s “unique experience of air combat and defense” as it continues to develop advanced systems, including the Gripen.

Even if Ukraine receives ‘only’ 100 Gripen E/Fs, this will mark by far the biggest export order for the type and Sweden’s biggest-ever arms sale. It is also significant that the Gripen has long been touted as very suitable for Ukraine, especially since it was built from the start with austere operations in mind; Ukraine is regularly conducting these kinds of operations to keep its fighters from being destroyed on the ground.

So far, Brazil has ordered 36, Thailand has ordered four, and Colombia is set to buy between 15 and 24. For its part, Sweden has ordered 60, the first of which was delivered to an operational unit earlier this week.

The LOI covers the in-production Gripen E. Despite it having a similar outward appearance to the Gripen C/D, the Gripen E is regarded as a completely new aircraft type — as you can read about here.

Today Sweden takes an important step towards increasing air defence & JAS Gripen cooperation with Ukraine. We are one step closer to seeing Gripen protect Ukraine’s air space. Ukraine has asked for 100-150 Gripen E and we are looking into how this can be financed. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/j3hZJvs1dH

— Pål Jonson (@PlJonson) October 22, 2025

In the past, Ukraine has repeatedly been linked with a possible transfer of secondhand Swedish Air Force Gripen C/Ds, a topic that was reportedly discussed between Zelensky and Kristersson earlier this month.

Sweden’s long-term plan is to have 120 Gripens in service by 2030, with half being E variants. That would leave roughly 37 Gripen C/D models potentially available to Ukraine, but the number is likely somewhat lower due to airframe fatigue and other factors.

Kristersson has said it would take around three years for new-build Gripen Es to arrive in Ukraine. With an urgent need for fighters, Zelensky today said he would like to see Gripens delivered from 2026. That would almost certainly involve secondhand Gripen C/Ds.

An important meeting with the @SwedishPM Ulf Kristersson. We greatly value our relations with Sweden and all forms of support for our people. And today, one of the key topics of our negotiations was strengthening Ukraine’s defense capabilities. We consider the JAS 39 Gripen… pic.twitter.com/iW5BxkSF6w

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 22, 2025

Ukrainian pilots have already been exposed to the Gripen C/D in Sweden, where test flights began in 2023.

Despite the arrival of Western-supplied F-16s and Mirage 2000s, the Ukrainian Air Force continues to rely heavily on its Soviet-era fighters. The MiG-29, in particular, has been continually adapted to carry new weaponry, both Western-supplied and locally developed.

Long-term, however, Ukraine has been looking to acquire advanced Western-made fighter equipment in more significant numbers than the secondhand F-16s and Mirages, stocks of which are limited. Meanwhile, the Mirages and F-16s are now old, approaching the ends of their service lives, and will need to be replaced before too long.

As we’ve highlighted in detail as far back as April of 2022, Gripens would be a very good fit for Ukraine:

“Another option, and possibly the best of all, would be Sweden’s surplus JAS 39C/D Gripen multirole fighters. These light-to-medium-weight fighters are built with great efficiency and reliability in mind. They were designed to be turned around in the bush by tiny teams of mainly conscripted groundcrew and flown from roadways and rough fields during wartime. Distributed operations under very harsh sustained wartime conditions, especially in the cold, are literally what the design is all about.”

“Their single F404-derivative engine (license-built by Volvo) drinks comparatively small amounts of fuel compared to the other options, and the type has a wide array of available armory from multiple nations. It has all-around good performance, modern radar and avionics, and is small in size, making it hard to spot visually.“

“The Gripen really is well-suited for the current combat doctrine Ukraine is using in Ukraine today, although the fact that it is a Swedish design makes it a bit harder for the United States and NATO to supply and support it. Still, other NATO members operate the type. There is also the question of how many Swedish Gripens will be able to give up at this time.”

President Zelenksy says Gripen was chosen because it is the best fighter when it comes to money, maneuverability and how to use it.

— Mikael Holmström (@MikaelHolmstr) October 22, 2025

While Gripen C/Ds might still be supplied in the short term, which would help considerably with training and transition, Ukraine would ultimately receive the more capable Gripen E (and potentially also the two-seat Gripen F).

The Gripen will also provide Ukraine with a notable opportunity to work with the two Saab 340 airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) aircraft equipped with Erieye radar that have been donated by Sweden. A delivery date for the transfer of these aircraft to Ukraine has not been announced.

However, the Saab 340 AEW&C aircraft “will provide Ukraine with a completely new capability against both airborne and maritime targets,” the Swedish government has said. “Ukraine’s capability to identify and engage targets at long range will be strengthened. The package will also include a holistic solution that involves training, technical equipment, and methodological support for air surveillance and command and control.”

Once Gripens are available to Ukraine, the Saab 340 AEW&C will be able to operate alongside them as a fighter control asset, detecting targets, prioritizing them, and then assigning them to the fighters for interception.

Today’s announcement could potentially yield the biggest overhaul for the Ukrainian Air Force since the country gained independence in 1991. How this will sit with other Western nations that are also supplying arms to Ukraine, and especially the United States, is far from clear. However, Sweden has long taken a more autonomous approach when it comes to defense exports.

But there are many more hurdles to overcome before the jets might start to arrive on Ukrainian soil. First, it has to be determined how Kyiv will pay for the fighters. Second, there are questions about how rapidly Saab might be able to start producing Gripen Es for export, and in what kind of numbers; potentially, it might be able to leverage the Brazilian Gripen production line. Lastly, and most critically, Ukraine still has to survive an existential conflict with Russia before it can get its hands on any of its much-anticipated Gripens.

Contact the author: [email protected]

“Art is worth something, even if it’s stolen.”

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SACRAMENTO — California will close part of Interstate 5 on Saturday after military officials confirmed that live-fire artillery rounds will be shot over the freeway during a Marine Corps event, prompting state officials to shut down 17 miles of the freeway in an unprecedented move expected to cause massive gridlock.

Gov. Gavin Newsom criticized the White House for failing to coordinate or share safety information ahead of the Marine Corps 250th anniversary celebration, which will feature Vice President JD Vance.

The closure will stretch from Harbor Drive in Oceanside to Basilone Road near San Onofre and will be in effect from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Amtrak also is shutting down train service between Orange and San Diego counties midday.

“The President is putting his ego over responsibility with this disregard for public safety,” Newsom said in a statement Saturday. “Firing live rounds over a busy highway isn’t just wrong — it’s dangerous.”

The freeway closure comes despite the Marine Corps and White House saying it is unnecessary. It also underscores the deepening strain between California and the Trump administration — which has been escalating in recent months after the White House deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles to clamp down on protests, ramped up immigration raids and pressured California universities to comply with his agenda.

The Marine Corps said in a statement that Saturday’s event will be a “historic Amphibious Capabilities Demonstration, showcasing the strength and unity of the Navy-Marine Corps team and ensuring we remain ready to defend the Homeland and our Nation’s interests abroad.”

A spokesperson for the Marines said artillery was shot from Red Beach into designated ranges on Friday evening as part of a dress rehearsal.

“M777 artillery pieces have historically been fired during routine training from land-based artillery firing points west of the I-5 into impact areas east of the interstate within existing safety protocols and without the need to close the route,” the statement said. “This is an established and safe practice.”

The governor’s office said it was informed earlier in the week that the White House was considering closing the freeway and when no order materialized by Wednesday, state officials began weighing whether to do so themselves. Driving that decision, they said, were safety concerns about reports that live ordnance would be fired over the freeway and onto the base.

Newsom’s office said Thursday it was told no live fire would go over the freeway, only to be informed Friday that the military event organizers asked CalTrans for a sign along I-5 that read “Overhead fire in progress.”

Earlier Saturday morning, the state was told that live rounds are scheduled to be shot over the freeway around 1:30 p.m, prompting California Highway Patrol officials to recommend the freeway closure because of the potential safety risk and likelihood it would distract drivers.

The military show of force coincides with “No Kings” rallies and marches across the state Saturday challenging President Trump and what critics say is government overreach. Dozens of protests are scheduled Saturday across Southern California, with more than 2,700 demonstrations expected across the country.

During “No Kings” protests in June, President Trump held a military parade in Washington, D.C., which included a 21-gun salute, to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary.

“Using our military to intimidate people you disagree with isn’t strength — it’s reckless, it’s disrespectful, and it’s beneath the office he holds,” Newsom said in a statement. “Law and order? This is chaos and confusion.”

The Marine Corps said in a statement to The Times on Thursday that a detailed risk assessment was conducted and “no highways or transportation routes will be closed” for the event titled “Sea to Shore — A Review of Amphibious Strength.”

Capt. Gregory Dreibelbis of the I Marine Expeditionary Force said that no ordnance will be fired from a U.S. Navy ship during the event, but Marines will fire high explosive rounds from artillery known as M777 Howitzers into designated ranges “with all safety precautions in place.” Simulated explosives and visual effects will also be used, he said.

William Martin, the communications director for Vance, said the Marine Corps determined the training exercise is safe and accused Newsom of politicizing the event.

“Gavin Newsom wants people to think this exercise is dangerous,” Martin said in a statement.

Caltrans said in a press release that the closure is “due to a White House-directed military event at Camp Pendleton involving live ammunition being discharged over the freeway” and that drivers should expect delays before, during and after the event.

CalTrans advised drivers in San Diego County that the detour to head north will begin at State Route 15 in southeast San Diego. Travelers west of SR-15 along the I-5 corridor in San Diego are advised to use SR-94, SR-52, SR-56, or SR-78 to I-15 north.

Drivers heading from San Diego to Los Angeles County are advised to use I-15 north to State Route 91 west into Los Angeles. For those starting in Los Angeles and heading south to San Diego, use SR-91 east to I-15 south.

To get to Orange County from San Diego, drivers should take I-15 north to SR-91 west, then SR-55 south. If heading from Orange County south to San Diego, drivers should use SR-55 north to SR-91 east to I-15 south.

The Trump administration previously had plans for a major celebration next month for the 250th anniversary of the Navy and Marines, which would have included an air and sea show — with the Blue Angels and parading warships — to be attended by Trump, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Plans to host that show in San Diego have been called off, the paper reported.

Camp Pendleton is a 125,000-acre base in northwestern San Diego County that has been critical in preparing troops for amphibious missions since World War II thanks to its miles of beach and coastal hills. The U.S. Department of Defense is considering making a portion of the base available for development or lease.

In a rare public rebuke, the Los Angeles City Council pressed the city’s top lawyer to abandon her attempt to halt a federal judge’s order prohibiting LAPD officers from targeting journalists with crowd control weapons.

One day before “No Kings” demonstrations against the Trump administration were set to launch in L.A. and elsewhere, the council voted 12-0 to direct City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto to withdraw her request to lift the order.

Hours later, Feldstein Soto’s legal team did just that, informing the judge it was pulling back its request — around the same time the judge rejected it.

Since June, the city has been hit with dozens of legal claims from protesters and journalists who reported that LAPD officers used excessive force against them during protests over Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The lawsuit that prompted the judge’s ban was brought by the Los Angeles Press Club and the news outlet Status Coup, who pointed to video evidence and testimonials suggesting that LAPD officers violated their own guidelines, as well as state law, by shooting journalists and others in sensitive parts of the body, such as the head, with weapons that launch projectiles the size of a mini soda can at speeds of more than 200 miles per hour.

“Journalism is under attack in this country — from the Trump Administration’s revocation of press access to the Pentagon to corporate consolidation of local newsrooms,” Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who introduced the motion opposing Feldstein Soto’s legal filing, said in a statement. “The answer cannot be for Los Angeles to join that assault by undermining court-ordered protections for journalists.”

In a motion filed Wednesday, Feldstein Soto’s legal team sought a temporary stay of the order issued by U.S. District Judge Hernán D. Vera. She reiterated her earlier argument that Vera’s ban was overly broad, extending protections to “any journalist covering a protest in [the City of] Los Angeles.”

The city’s lawyers also argued that the ban, which bars the LAPD from using so-called less lethal munitions against journalists and nonviolent protesters, creates “ambiguous mandates” that jeopardize “good-faith conduct” by officers and pose “immediate and concrete risk to officer and public safety.”

In addition to Feldstein Soto’s request for a temporary stay, the city has filed an appeal of Vera’s injunction. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is taking up the appeal, with a hearing tentatively set for mid-November.

Council members have become increasingly vocal about their frustrations with the city attorney’s office. Two months ago, they voiced alarm that an outside law firm billed the city $1.8 million in just two weeks — double the amount authorized by the council. They have also grown exasperated over the rising cost of legal payouts, which have consumed a steadily larger portion of the city budget.

After Feldstein Soto’s motion was reported by LAist, several city council members publicly distanced themselves from her and condemned her decision.

In a sternly worded statement before Friday’s vote, Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez wrote that the city attorney’s “position does not speak for the full City Council.”

“The LAPD should NEVER be permitted to use force against journalists or anyone peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights,” said the statement from Soto-Martínez, who signed Hernandez’s proposal along with Councilmembers Ysabel Jurado and Monica Rodriguez.

On Friday, the council also asked the city attorney’s office to report back within 30 days on “all proactive litigation the Office has moved forward without explicit direction from the City Council or Mayor since July 1, 2024.”

Rodriguez said that Friday’s vote should send a message that the city council needs “to be consulted as a legislative body that is independently elected by the people.”

“What I hope is that this becomes a more permanent act of this body — to exercise its role in oversight,” she said.

Carol Sobel, the civil rights attorney who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs, welcomed the council’s action. Still, she said Feldstein Soto’s filings in the case raise questions about whose interests the city attorney is representing.

“Sometimes you say ‘Mea culpa, we were wrong. We shouldn’t have shot people in the head, despite our policies,’” she said.

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge blocked the Trump administration Wednesday from firing thousands of government workers based on the ongoing federal shutdown, granting a request from employee unions in California.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston issued the temporary restraining order after concluding that the unions “will demonstrate ultimately that what’s being done here is both illegal and is in excess of authority and is arbitrary and capricious.”

Illston slammed the Trump administration for failing to provide her with clear information about what cuts are actually occurring, for repeatedly changing its description and estimates of job cuts in filings before the court, and for failing — including during Wednesday’s hearing in San Francisco — to articulate an argument for why such cuts are not in violation of federal law.

“The evidence suggests that the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, and the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, have taken advantage of the lapse in government spending and government functioning to assume that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them anymore,” Illston said — which she said was not the case.

She said the government justified providing inaccurate figures for the number of jobs being eliminated under its “reduction in force” orders by calling it a “fluid situation” — which she did not find convincing.

“What it is is a situation where things are being done before they are being thought through. It’s very much ready, fire, aim on most of these programs,” she said. “And it has a human cost, which is really why we’re here today. It’s a human cost that cannot be tolerated.”

Illston also ran through a string of recent comments made by President Trump and other members of his administration about the firings and their intentionally targeting programs and agencies supported by Democrats, saying, “By all appearances, they’re politically motivated.”

The Trump administration has acknowledged dismissing about 4,000 workers under the orders, while Trump and other officials have signaled that more would come Friday.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said Wednesday on “The Charlie Kirk Show” that the number of jobs cut could “probably end up being north of 10,000,” as the administration wants to be “very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy, not just the funding,” and the shutdown provided that opportunity.

Attorneys for the unions, led by the American Federation of Government Employees, said that the figures were unreliable and that they feared additional reduction in force orders resulting in more layoffs, as promised by administration officials, if the court did not step in and block such actions.

Illston, an appointee of President Clinton, did just that.

She barred the Trump administration and its various agencies “from taking any action to issue any reduction in force notices to federal employees in any program, project or activity” involving union members “during or because of the federal shutdown.”

She also barred the administration from “taking any further action to administer or implement” existing reduction notices involving union members.

Illston demanded that the administration provide within two days a full accounting of all existing or “imminent” reduction in force orders that would be blocked by her order, as well as the specific number of federal jobs affected.

Elizabeth Hedges, an attorney for the Trump administration, had argued during the hearing that the order should not be granted for several procedural reasons — including that the alleged harm to federal employees from loss of employment or benefits was not “irreparable” and could be addressed through other avenues, including civil litigation.

Additionally, she argued that federal employment claims should be adjudicated administratively, not in district court; and that the reduction in force orders included 60-day notice periods, meaning the layoffs were not immediate and therefore the challenge to them was not yet “ripe” legally.

However, Hedges would not discuss the case on its actual merits — which is to say, whether the cuts were actually legal or not, which did not seem to sit well with Illston.

“You don’t have a position on whether it’s OK that they do what they’re doing?” Illston asked.

“I am not prepared to discuss that today, your honor,” Hedges said.

“Well — but it’s happening. This hatchet is falling on the heads of employees all across the nation, and you’re not even prepared to address whether that’s legal, even though that’s what this motion challenges?” Illston said.

“That’s right,” Hedges said — stressing again that there were “threshold” arguments for why the case shouldn’t even be allowed to continue to the merits stage.

Danielle Leonard, an attorney for the unions, suggested the government’s positions were indefensible and directly in conflict with public statements by the administration — including remarks by Trump on Tuesday that more cuts are coming Friday.

“How do we know this? Because OMB and the president relentlessly are telling us, and other members of the administration,” Leonard said.

Leonard said the harm from the administration’s actions is obvious and laid out in the union’s filings — showing how employees have at times been left in the dark as to their employment status because they don’t have access to work communication channels during the shutdown, or how others have been called in to “work without pay to fire their fellow employees” — only to then be fired themselves.

“There are multiple types of harm that are caused exactly right now — emotional trauma. That’s not my word, your honor, that is the word of OMB Director Vought. Let’s cause ‘trauma’ to the federal workforce,” Leonard said. “And that’s exactly what they are doing. Trauma. The emotional distress of being told you are being fired after an already exceptionally difficult year for federal employees.”

Skye Perryman, president and chief executive of Democracy Forward, which is co-counsel for the unions, praised Illston’s decision in a statement after the hearing.

“The statements today by the court make clear that the President’s targeting of federal workers — a move straight out of Project 2025’s playbook — is unlawful,” Perryman said. “Our civil servants do the work of the people, and playing games with their livelihoods is cruel and unlawful and a threat to everyone in our nation.”

Illston asked the two parties to confer on the best date, probably later this month, for a fuller hearing on whether she should issue a more lasting preliminary injunction in the case.

“It would be wonderful to know what the government’s position is on the merits of this case — and my breath is bated until we find that,” Illston said.

After the hearing, during a White House news conference, Trump said his administration was paying federal employees whom “we want paid” while Vought uses the shutdown to dismiss employees perceived as supporting Democratic initiatives.

“Russell Vought is really terminating tremendous numbers of Democrat projects — not only jobs,” Trump said.

CHICAGO — Cook County’s top judge signed an order barring ICE from arresting people at court. Cook County includes Chicago, which has seen a federal immigration crackdown in recent months.

Detaining residents outside courthouses has been a common tactic for federal agents, who have been stationed outside county courthouses for weeks, making arrests and drawing crowds of protesters.

The order, which was signed Tuesday night and took effect Wednesday, bars the civil arrest of any “party, witness, or potential witness” while going to court proceedings. It includes arrests inside courthouses and in parking lots, surrounding sidewalks and entryways.

“The fair administration of justice requires that courts remain open and accessible, and that litigants and witnesses may appear without fear of civil arrest,” the order states.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security defended the practice of making arrests at courthouses, calling it “common sense.”

“We aren’t some medieval kingdom; there are no legal sanctuaries where you can hide and avoid the consequences for breaking the law,” DHS said in a Wednesday statement. “Nothing in the constitution prohibits arresting a lawbreaker where you find them.”

Immigration advocates decry immigration enforcement outside courthouses

Local immigration and legal advocates, including the county’s public defender’s office, have called for an order like this, saying clients were avoiding court out of fear of being detained. The office has confirmed at least a dozen immigration arrests at or near county courthouses since the end of July, when representatives said they’ve seen U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s presence outside courthouses increase.

“I have had numerous conversations with clients who are presented with a difficult decision of either missing court and receiving an arrest warrant or coming to court and risk being arrested by ICE,” Cruz Rodriguez, an assistant public defender with the office’s immigration division, said at a news conference earlier this month.

Domestic violence advocacy organizations also signed on to a petition earlier this month calling for Cook County Circuit Chief Judge Timothy Evans to issue the order. This comes after advocates said a woman was was arrested by ICE last month while entering the domestic violence courthouse.

Alexa Van Brunt, director of MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois office, which filed the petition, said she was “gratified” by Evans’ order.

“This is a necessary and overdue action to ensure that the people of Cook County can access the courts without fear,” she said in a Wednesday statement to the Associated Press.

Evans said justice “depends on every individual’s ability to appear in court without fear or obstruction.”

“Our courthouses remain places where all people — regardless of their background or circumstance — should be able to safely and confidently participate in the judicial process,” Evans said in a statement.

ICE tactics outside courthouses seen across country

The tactic of detaining people at courthouses in the Chicago area is part of a larger jump in courthouse immigration arrests across the country. The flurry of immigration enforcement operations at courthouses has been condemned by judicial officials and legal organizations, and has drawn lawsuits from some states and the adoption of bills seeking to block the practice.

In June, President Donald Trump’s administration sued the state of New York over a 2020 law barring federal immigration agents from making arrests at state, city and other municipal courthouses.

Statehouse Democrats vow to adopt resolutions condemning federal immigration crackdown

Opening the second day of the six-day fall legislative session in Springfield, Ill., House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch decried the federal government’s immigration squeeze and vowed that his majority Democrats would use floor time Wednesday to adopt resolutions condemning the action.

“We won’t sit back and let our democracy be taken from us,” Welch said at the Capitol, surrounded by two dozen of his caucus members

Questioned about the practical impact of resolutions, Welch said there also are discussions about legislation to restrict federal agents’ patrol statewide. He lambasted reports of ICE arrests in medical facilities and applauded Evans’ ruling prohibiting warrantless arrests near courthouses.

“If we can do something similar statewide, I’d love to get that done,” Welch said. “These should be safe spaces.”

Republicans questioned their opponents’ sincerity. Debating a resolution condemning political violence, GOP Rep. Adam Niemerg noted incendiary language from Gov. JB Pritzker — in the spring he called for “street fighters” to oppose the administration — although the governor has not espoused violence. Rep. Nicole La Ha, who said she has received death threats, accused Democrats of trying to stifle opposition.

“This is not a stand against violence,” La Ha said. “It is a tasteless tactic to punish dissent and difference of opinion.”

Illinois governor denounces tear gas use on protesters

Meanwhile, Pritzker suggested federal agents may have violated a ruling by a federal judge last week that said they could not use tear gas, pepper spray and other weapons on journalists and peaceful protesters after a coalition of news outlets and protesters sued over the actions of federal agents during protests outside a Chicago-area ICE facility. Pritzker said he expected the attorneys involved to “go back to court to make sure that is enforced against ICE”

“ICE is causing this mayhem,” he said. “They’re the ones throwing tear gas when people are peacefully protesting.”

The comments also come after Pritzker denounced Border Patrol agents for using tear gas on protesters who gathered Tuesday after a high-speed chase on a residential street on Chicago’s South Side.

A few protesters also gathered Wednesday afternoon outside an ICE facility in the west Chicago suburb of Broadview, where a fence that has been at the center of a recent lawsuit had come down.

A judge ordered ICE to remove the fence after the village of Broadview sued federal authorities for “illegally” erecting an 8-foot-tall fence outside the facility, blocking public streets and creating problems for local emergency services trying to access the area. On Monday, state legislators and Black mayors of nearby suburbs gathered outside the facility to demand the fence be removed and announce an executive order limiting protests in the area to designated zones. Trump has long targeted Black mayors in large Democratic cities, many of whom have voiced solidarity with one another in recent months amid federal interventions in their areas.

Community efforts to oppose ICE have also ramped up in the nation’s third-largest city, where neighborhood groups have assembled to monitor ICE activity and film any incidents involving federal agents in their areas.

On Tuesday, hundreds of people attended “Whistlemania” events across the city and made thousands of “whistle kits” with whistles, “Know Your Rights” flyers and instructions on how to use them to alert neighbors of when immigration enforcement agents are nearby.

An increasing number of GoFundMe pages have also been launched to pay for legal costs for community members detained by ICE, most recently a landscaper and father of three children detained earlier this month.

Fernando writes for the Associated Press. AP writer John O’Connor in Springfield contributed.

Oct. 15 (UPI) — Mike Johnson, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, called Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., a “faithful colleague” on Wednesday, one day after he was issued a restraining order.

A Florida judge issued the protective order Tuesday against Mills, directing him to have no contact with a former girlfriend who accused him of threatening her.

“I have not heard or looked into any of the details of that. I’ve been a little busy,” Johnson told reporters in the Capitol. “We have a House Ethics Committee. If it warrants that, I’m sure they’ll look into that.”

The petitioner was Lindsey Langston, a Republican state committeeperson and Miss United States 2024. She alleged that Mills threatened her on Instagram after blocking him and telling him she didn’t want further contact. “The messages progressively got more threatening over time,” she wrote.

She said he threatened to release nude videos of her.

In his order, the judge said the evidence supported Langston’s allegations that Mills had caused her “substantial emotional distress.” The judge said Mills offered “no credible rebuttal” to her testimony. He found that Langston has a “reasonable cause to believe she is in imminent danger of becoming the victim of another act of dating violence” without the restraining order being put in place, Politico reported.

When pressed about the allegations, Johnson brushed them off.

“You have to ask Rep. Mills about that. He’s been a faithful colleague here. I know his work on the Hill. I don’t know all the details of all the individual allegations, and what he’s doing — things outside life,” Johnson said. “Let’s just talk about the things that are really serious.”

The restraining order directs Mills, 45, to stay at least 500 feet away from Langston and to not contact her until Jan. 1. The order also blocks Mills from mentioning Langston on social media, according to NBC News.

California Sen. Alex Padilla is among the highest-ranking Latinos in U.S. politics today, but it took a pair of handcuffs to make him famous.

How’s that for a comment on America 2025?

Padilla, you may remember, was tackled and cuffed by federal officers after attempting to ask a question of Homeland Security Czarina Kristi Noem at an L.A. news conference in June, when the National Guard first made its appearance on our streets. Noem later claimed Padilla “lunged” at her — which he did not — using the classic Trumpian technique of erasing reality with blame, especially when it comes to brown people.

Padilla told me that “from day one of this administration, I have tried to speak truth to power,” and if getting tackled forced people to “have no choice but to now start paying attention … that could be helpful, because the general public knows it’s wrong.”

U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi recycled the incident on Tuesday when Padilla attempted to question her during a congressional hearing, voicing concern about the weaponization of the Department of Justice. Bondi refused to answer multiple questions, instead invoking the Noem defense.

“I find it interesting that you want order … in this proceeding now,” Bondi said. “You sure didn’t have order when you stormed Secretary Noem at a press conference in California, did you?”

Again, no storming, no lunging, not even a feint. Really, if anything can be said of Padilla, it’s that he’s a guy who likes order. An MIT-trained engineer, he’s known for being calm to the point of boring — in the best of ways. Who wouldn’t want a bit of boring in their politics today, if it’s seasoned with compassion and common sense?

Calm, of course, does not mean a lack of conviction. As the government shutdown limps to the end of its first full week, Padilla took a few minutes to fill me in on why Democrats shouldn’t back down, and why he won’t — whether the issue is healthcare, immigration or the collision of the two, which is at the heart of this shutdown.

Republicans would like voters to believe that undocumented immigrants are throwing parties in our emergency rooms, racking up free services while shoving U.S. citizens out to the sidewalk. In reality, there’s not a lot of good data on how many ER visits involve undocumented folks because doctors are more focused on saving lives than checking immigration status. But one Texas study found that about 2% of all hospital visits in a three-month period involved people without documentation. That’s in a state with a high number of undocumented folks, so take it for what it’s worth — hardly a scourge.

Padilla and Democrats would like to stay focused on an actual crisis — healthcare premiums for low- and middle-income folks are about to skyrocket in coming weeks if Congress doesn’t keep the Obama-era subsidies that make the premiums affordable. Padilla wants voters to understand how dire this is.

“This is not a what-might-happen-next-year concern … this is a now concern,” Padilla told me.

“Open enrollment is opening,” he said. “People are setting their premiums and have to make choices of where to sign up for healthcare and at the cost right now, and so it does need to be immediately addressed.”

In case you think this is partisan show, far-right MAGA cheerleader Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) agrees with Padilla. That’s when you know things are getting weird.

“Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!” Greene wrote on social media, breaking with her party on the issue.

That’s about the only thing that Padilla and Greene may ever agree on. Padilla is the son of immigrants who met in L.A. and later obtained legal status. He was born in Southern California, making birthright citizenship core to his identity at a moment when Trump is asking the Supreme Court to end it. His isn’t just an immigrant story, it’s a California story, and it’s never far from his mind.

He was recently asked if he regretted fighting with the Biden administration over proposed immigration reform that lacked pathways for immigrants, especially Dreamers and others who have been in the United States for years if not decades, to become citizens. Would it have been better to sell them out, leave them in limbo, but fix the border before Trump could exploit it?

“Of course not,” Padilla told me. Rather than shrink under attack, Padilla said he’s holding his ground.

California is one of a handful of states that does in fact offer healthcare to undocumented people, though budget shortfalls forced Gov. Gavin Newsom to scale back that plan.

No federal dollars are used for that undocumented healthcare — it’s solely state money. And Padilla supports it.

“There are some states that choose to use state funding to provide that care, and I agree with that, because it’s much smarter, from a public health standpoint, to help prevent people from getting sick or treat people early on, not administer healthcare, certainly not primary care, through emergency rooms,” he said.

Padilla said it’s rich that the very workers deemed essential during the coronavirus pandemic, the workers who kept food on tables, deliveries going, and cared for our young and our elderly, are now “the primary target of Trump’s massive deportation agenda. So whether it’s in the vein of the healthcare question, whether it’s in the vein of the indiscriminate raids by ICE and other federal agencies, that’s the cruel irony.”

The Trump administration raised Padilla’s profile inadvertently, but the newfound fame has had a somewhat unexpected consequence: Frequent speculation that he may run for governor when Newsom terms out in 2026.

Padilla said he hasn’t “made a decision on that and not making any announcements right now.”

Instead, he’s focusing on helping to pass California’s Proposition 50, which would rig election maps to potentially create five more Democratic seats in the midterm elections, with the hopes of taking control of at least one house of Congress, an effort he says is “critical to reining in this out-of-control administration.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Sunday that he intends to seek a court order in an attempt to stop President Trump’s deployment of California National Guard troops to Oregon.

Calling the president’s action a “breathtaking abuse of power,” Newsom said in a statement that 300 California National Guard personnel were being deployed to Portland, Ore., a city the president has called “war-ravaged.”

“They are on their way there now,” Newsom said of the National Guard. “This is a breathtaking abuse of the law and power.”

Trump’s move came a day after a federal judge in Oregon temporarily blocked the federalization of Oregon’s National Guard.

The president, who mobilized the California National Guard amid immigration protests earlier this year, has pursued the use of the military to fight crime in cities including Chicago and Washington, D.C., sparking outrage among Democratic officials in those cities. Local leaders, including those in Portland, have said the actions are unnecessary and without legal justification.

“The Trump Administration is unapologetically attacking the rule of law itself and putting into action their dangerous words — ignoring court orders and treating judges, even those appointed by the President himself, as political opponents,” Newsom said.

In June, Newsom and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed a federal lawsuit over Trump’s mobilization of the state’s National Guard during immigration protests in Los Angeles. California officials are expected to file the court order over Sunday’s deployment using that existing lawsuit.

Newsom has ratcheted up his rhetoric about Trump in recent days: On Friday, the governor lashed out at universities that may sign the president’s higher education compact, which demands rightward campus policy shifts in exchange for priority federal funding.

“I need to put pressure on this moment and pressure test where we are in U.S. history, not just California history,” Newsom said. “…This is it. We are losing this country.”

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has ruled for a second time that the Trump administration may cancel the “temporary protected status” given to about 600,000 Venezuelans under the Biden administration.

The move, advocates for the Venezuelans said, means thousands of lawfully present individuals could lose their jobs, be detained in immigration facilities and deported to a country that the U.S. government considers unsafe to visit.

The high court granted an emergency appeal from Trump’s lawyers and set aside decisions of U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not. The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here,” the court said in an unsigned order Friday.

Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have denied the appeal.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. “I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” she wrote. “Because, respectfully, I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance, I dissent.”

Last month, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had overstepped her legal authority by canceling the legal protection.

Her decision “threw the future of these Venezuelan citizens into disarray and exposed them to substantial risk of wrongful removal, separation from their families and loss of employment,” the panel wrote.

But Trump’s lawyers said the law bars judges from reviewing these decisions by U.S. immigration officials.

Homeland Security applauded the Supreme Court’s action. “Temporary Protected Status was always supposed to be just that: Temporary,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Yet, previous administrations abused, exploited, and mangled TPS into a de facto amnesty program.”

Congress authorized this protected status for people who are already in the United States but cannot return home because their native countries are not safe.

The Biden administration offered the protections to Venezuelans because of the political and economic collapse brought about by the authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary under Biden, granted the protected status to groups of Venezuelans in 2021 and 2023, totaling about 607,000 people.

Mayorkas extended it again in January, three days before Trump was sworn in. That same month, Noem decided to reverse the extension, which was set to expire for both groups of Venezuelans in October 2026.

Shortly afterward, Noem announced the termination of protections for the 2023 group by April.

In March, Chen issued an order temporarily pausing Noem’s repeal, which the Supreme Court set aside in May with only Jackson in dissent.

The San Francisco judge then held a hearing on the issue and concluded Noem’s repeal violated the Administrative Procedure Act because it was arbitrary and and not justified.

He said his earlier order imposing a temporary pause did not prevent him from ruling on the legality of the repeal, and the 9th Circuit agreed.

The approximately 350,000 Venezuelans who had TPS through the 2023 designation saw their legal status restored. Many reapplied for work authorization, said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law, and a counsel for the plaintiffs.

In the meantime, Noem announced the cancellation of the 2021 designation, effective Nov. 7.

Trump’s solicitor general, D. John Sauer, went back to the Supreme Court in September and urged the justices to set aside the second order from Chen.

“This case is familiar to the Court and involves the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this Court’s orders on the emergency docket,” he said.

The Supreme Court’s decision once again reverses the legal status of the 2023 group and cements the end of legal protections for the 2021 group next month.

In a further complication, the Supreme Court’s previous decision said that anyone who had already received documents verifying their TPS status or employment authorization through next year is entitled to keep it.

That, Arulanantham said, “creates another totally bizarre situation, where there are some people who will have TPS through October 2026 as they’re supposed to because the Supreme Court says if you already got a document it can’t be canceled. Which to me just underscores how arbitrary and irrational the whole situation is.”

Advocates for the Venezuelans said the Trump administration has failed to show that their presence in the U.S. is an emergency requiring immediate court relief.

In a brief filed Monday, attorneys for the National TPS Alliance argued the Supreme Court should deny the Trump administration’s request because Homeland Security officials acted outside the scope of their authority by revoking the TPS protections early.

“Stripping the lawful immigration status of 600,000 people on 60 days’ notice is unprecedented,” Jessica Bansal, an attorney representing the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network, wrote in a statement. “Doing it after promising an additional 18 months protection is illegal.”

WASHINGTON — Historically, the U.S. military has been an engine for cultural and social change in America. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s vision for the armed forces he leads runs counter to that.

In comments Tuesday to hundreds of military leaders and their chief enlisted advisers, Hegseth made clear he was not interested in a diverse or inclusive force. His address at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, verbalized what Hegseth has been doing as he takes on any program that can be labeled diversity, equity or inclusion, as well as targeting transgender personnel. Separately, the focus on immigration also is sweeping up veterans.

For too long, “the military has been forced by foolish and reckless politicians to focus on the wrong things. In many ways, this speech is about fixing decades of decay, some of it obvious, some of it hidden,” Hegseth said. “Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading, and we lost our way. We became the woke department, but not anymore.”

Hegseth’s actions — and plans for more — are a reversal of the role the military has often played.

“The military has often been ahead of at least some broader social, cultural, political movements,” said Ronit Stahl, associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. ”The desegregation of the armed forces is perhaps the most classic example.”

President Harry S. Truman’s desegregation order in 1948 came six years before the Supreme Court ordered school desegregation in the Brown vs. Board of Education case — and, Stahl said, “that obviously takes a long time to implement, if it ever fully is implemented.”

It has been a circuitous path

Truman’s order was not a short progression through American society. Although the military was one of the few places where there was organizational diversity, the races did not mix in their actual service. Units like the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo Code Talkers and the Buffalo Soldiers, formed in 1866, were segregated until the order opened the door to integrated units.

Women were given full status to serve in 1948 with the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act. There were restrictions on how many could serve and they were generally not allowed to command men or serve in combat. Before then, they had wartime roles and they did not serve in combat, although hundreds of nurses died and women were pilots, including Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs.

The WASPs and Tuskegee Airmen were among the first groups this year to be affected when Hegseth issued his DEI order. The Air Force removed training videos of the airmen along with ones showing the World War II contributions of the WASPs at the basic training base in San Antonio. The videos were restored after widespread bipartisan outcry over their removal.

Other issues over time have included “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy that allowed gay and lesbian service members to serve as long as their sexual orientation was not public. That was repealed during the Obama administration. Women were allowed to serve on combat aircraft and combat ships in the early 1990s — then all combat positions after a ban was lifted in 2015.

“The military has always had to confront the question of social change and the question of who would serve, how they would serve and in what capacity they would serve. These are questions that have been long-standing back to the founding in some ways, but certainly in the 20th century,” said David Kieran, distinguished chair in Military History at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. “These are not new questions.”

Generally the answer has come down to what “the military writ large” has concluded. “‘How do we achieve our mission best?’” Kieran said. “And a lot of these things have been really hotly debated.”

Part of a larger, longer debate

Kieran offered one example: changes the Army made in the 1960s when it was dealing with a climate of racism and racial tensions. Without that, he said, “the military can’t fight the war in Vietnam effectively.”

The same considerations were given to how to address the problem of sexual harassment. Part of the answer involved what was morally right, but “the larger issue is: If soldiers are being harassed, can the Army carry out its mission effectively?”

While “it is important to see these actions as part of a longer history and a larger debate,” Kieran said, “it’s certainly also true that the current administration is moving at a far more aggressive and faster pace than we’ve seen in earlier administrations.”

Michael O’Hanlon, director of research in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, questioned some of the actions that Trump’s Defense Department has taken, including replacing the chairman of the joint chiefs, Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr.

“He was a fine Air Force officer,” O’Hanlon said. Even if he got the job in part because of his race, “it wouldn’t be disqualifying in my book, unless he was unqualified — and he wasn’t.”

Matthew Delmont, a professor of history at Dartmouth College, said the current attitudes he is seeing toward the military suggest a misunderstanding of the armed forces and why the changes have been made.

“The military, for more than seven decades now, has been more on the leading edge in terms of figuring out how to put together an organization that tries to take advantage of the talents and capacities of all Americans,” Delmont said. Since Truman signed his executive order, “the military has moved faster and farther than almost any other organization in thinking about issues of racial equality, and then later thinking about the issues related to gender and sexuality.”

Delmont said bias, prejudice and racism remain in the military, but the armed services have done more “than a lot of corporations, universities, other organizations to try to address those head-on.”

“I wouldn’t say it was because they were particularly interested in trying to advance the social agenda,” he said. “I think they did it because they recognized you can’t have a unified fighting force if the troops are fighting each other, or if you’re actively turning away people who desire to serve their country.”

Fields writes for the Associated Press.

DUBAI — President Trump has signed an executive order vowing to use all measures, including U.S. military action, to defend the energy-rich nation of Qatar — though it remains unclear just what weight the pledge will carry.

The text of the order, available Wednesday on the White House’s website but dated Monday, appears to be another measure by Trump to assure the Qataris following Israel’s surprise attack on the country targeting Hamas leaders as they weighed accepting a ceasefire with Israel over the war in the Gaza Strip.

The order cites the two countries’ “close cooperation” and “shared interest,” vowing to “guarantee the security and territorial integrity of the state of Qatar against external attack.”

“The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty or critical infrastructure of the state of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States,” the order says.

“In the event of such an attack, the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures — including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military — to defend the interests of the United States and of the state of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.”

The order apparently came during a visit to Washington on Monday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump organized a call by Netanyahu to Qatar during the visit in which Netanyahu “expressed his deep regret” over the strike that killed six people, including a member of the Qatari security forces, the White House said.

Qatari officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s order. However, the Qatari-funded satellite news network Al Jazeera prominently reported about it Wednesday under the headline: “New Trump executive order guarantees Qatar security after Israeli attack.”

The true scope of the pledge remains in question. Typically, legally binding agreements, or treaties, need to receive the approval of the U.S. Senate. However, presidents have entered international agreements without the Senate’s approval, as President Obama did with Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

And ultimately, any decision to take military action rests with the president. That uncertainty has clouded previous U.S. defense agreements in Trump’s second term, such as NATO’s Article 5 guarantees.

Qatar, a peninsular nation that sticks out into the Persian Gulf, became fantastically wealthy through its natural gas reserves. It has been a key U.S. military partner, allowing America’s Central Command to have its forward operating base at its vast Al Udeid Air Base. President Biden named Qatar a major non-NATO ally in 2022, in part due to its help during America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In the aftermath of the Israeli attack, Saudi Arabia entered a mutual defense agreement with Pakistan, bringing the kingdom under Islamabad’s nuclear umbrella. It’s unclear whether other Gulf Arab countries, worried about Israel as well as Iran as it faces reimposed United Nations sanctions over its nuclear program, may seek similar arrangements as well with the region’s longtime security guarantor.

“The Gulf’s centrality in the Middle East and its significance to the United States warrants specific U.S. guarantees beyond President Donald J. Trump’s assurances of nonrepetition and dinner meetings,” wrote Bader al-Saif, a history professor at Kuwait University who analyzes Gulf Arab affairs.

Gambrell writes for the Associated Press.

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily halted a Trump administration plan to reduce disaster relief and anti-terrorism funding for states with so-called sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants.

U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy granted the temporary restraining order curtailing the cuts at the request of California, 10 other states and the District of Columbia, which argued in a lawsuit Monday that the policy appeared to have illegally cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.

The states said they were first notified of the cuts over the weekend. McElroy made her decision during an emergency hearing on the states’ motion in Rhode Island District Court on Tuesday afternoon.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta cheered the decision as the state’s latest win in pushing back against what he described as a series of unlawful, funding-related power grabs by the Trump administration.

“Over and over, the courts have stopped the Trump Administration’s illegal efforts to tie unrelated grant funding to state policies,” Bonta said. “It’s a little thing called state sovereignty, but given the President’s propensity to violate the Constitution, it’s unsurprising that he’s unfamiliar with it.”

Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the funding and notified the states of the cuts, immediately responded to a request for comment Tuesday.

Sanctuary policies are not uniform and the term is imprecise, but it generally refers to policies that bar states and localities — and their local law enforcement agencies — from participating in federal immigration raids or other enforcement initiatives.

The Trump administration and other Republicans have cast such policies as undermining law and order. Democrats and progressives including in California say instead that states and cities have finite public safety resources and that engaging in immigration enforcement serves only to undermine the trust they and their law enforcement agencies need to maintain with the public in order to prevent and solve crime, including in large immigrant communities.

In their lawsuit Monday, the states said the funding being reduced was part of billions in federal dollars annually distributed to the states to “prepare for, protect against, respond to, and recover from catastrophic disasters,” and which administrations of both political parties distributed “evenhandedly” for decades before Trump.

Authorized by Congress after events such as Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina, the funding covers the salaries of first responders, testing of state computer networks for cyberattack vulnerabilities, mutual aid compacts between regional partners and emergency responses after disasters, the states said.

Bonta’s office said California was informed over the weekend by Homeland Security officials that it would be receiving $110 million instead of $165 million, a reduction of its budget by about a third. The states’ lawsuit said other blue states saw even more dramatic cuts, with Illinois seeing a 69% reduction and New York receiving a 79% reduction, while red states saw substantial funding increases.

Bonta on Tuesday said the administration’s reshuffling of funds based on state compliance with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement priorities was illegal and needed to be halted — and restored to previous levels based on risk assessment — in order to keep everyone in the country safe.

“California uses the grant funding at stake in our lawsuit to protect the safety of our communities from acts of terrorism and other disasters — meaning the stakes are quite literally life and death,” he said. “This is not something to play politics with. I’m grateful to the court for seeing the urgency of this dangerous diversion of homeland security funding.”

Homeland Security officials have previously argued that the agency should be able to withhold funding from states that it believes are not upholding or are actively undermining its core mission of defending the nation from threats, including the threat it sees from illegal immigration.

Other judges have also ruled against the administration conditioning disaster and public safety funding on states and localities complying with federal immigration policies.

Joining California in Monday’s lawsuit were Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said Monday that it will open 13 million acres of federal lands for coal mining and provide $625 million to recommission or modernize coal-fired power plants as President Trump continues his efforts to reverse the yearlong decline in the U.S. coal industry.

Actions by the Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency follow executive orders Trump issued in April to revive coal, a reliable but polluting energy source that’s long been shrinking amid environmental regulations and competition from cheaper natural gas.

Environmental groups denounced the announcement, which comes as the Trump administration has clamped down on renewable energy, including freezing permits for offshore wind projects, ending clean energy tax credits and blocking wind and solar projects on federal lands.

Under Trump’s orders, the Energy Department has required fossil-fueled power plants in Michigan and Pennsylvania to keep operating past their retirement dates to meet rising U.S. power demand amid growth in data centers, artificial intelligence and electric cars. The latest announcement would allow those efforts to expand as a precaution against possible electricity shortfalls.

Trump also has directed federal agencies to identify coal resources on federal lands, lift barriers to coal mining and prioritize coal leasing on U.S. lands. A sweeping tax bill approved by Republicans and signed by Trump reduces royalty rates for coal mining from 12.5% to 7%, a significant decrease that officials said will help ensure U.S. coal producers can compete in global markets.

‘Mine baby, mine’

The new law also mandates increased availability for coal mining on federal lands and streamlines federal reviews of coal leases.

“Everybody likes to say, ‘drill baby, drill.’ I know that President Trump has another initiative for us, which is ‘mine baby, mine,’” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at a news conference Monday at Interior headquarters. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin and Energy Undersecretary Wells Griffith also spoke at the event. All three agencies signed orders boosting coal.

“By reducing the royalty rate for coal, increasing coal acres available for leasing and unlocking critical minerals from mine waste, we are strengthening our economy, protecting national security and ensuring that communities from Montana to Alabama benefit from good-paying jobs,” Burgum said.

Zeldin called coal a reliable energy source that has supported American communities and economic growth for generations.

“Americans are suffering because the past administration attempted to apply heavy-handed regulations to coal and other forms of energy it deemed unfavorable,” he said.

Trump has clamped down on renewable energy

Environmental groups said Trump was wasting federal tax dollars by handing them to owners of the oldest, most expensive and dirtiest source of electricity.

“Subsidizing coal means propping up dirty, uncompetitive plants from last century — and saddling families with their high costs and pollution,” said Ted Kelly, clean energy director for the Environmental Defense Fund. “We need modern, affordable clean energy solutions to power a modern economy, but the Trump administration wants to drag us back to a 1950s electric grid.’’

Solar, wind and battery storage are the cheapest and fastest ways to bring new power to the grid, Kelly and other advocates said. “It makes no sense to cut off your best, most affordable options while doubling down on the most expensive ones,” Kelly said.

The EPA said Monday that it will open a 60-day public comment period on potential changes to a regional haze rule that has helped reduce pollution-fueled haze hanging over national parks, wilderness areas and tribal reservations. Zeldin announced in March that the haze rule would be among dozens of landmark environmental regulations that he plans to roll back or eliminate, including a 2009 finding that climate change harms human health and the environment.

Coal production has dropped steeply

Burgum, who also chairs Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, said the actions announced Monday, along with the tax law and previous presidential and secretarial orders, will ensure “abundant, affordable energy while reducing reliance on foreign sources of coal and minerals.’’

The Republican president has long promised to boost what he calls “beautiful” coal to fire power plants and for other uses, but the industry has been in decline for decades.

Coal once provided more than half of U.S. electricity production, but its share dropped to about 15% in 2024, down from about 45% as recently as 2010. Natural gas provides about 43% of U.S. electricity, with the remainder from nuclear energy and renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower.

Energy experts say any bump for coal under Trump is likely to be temporary because natural gas is cheaper, and there’s a durable market for wind and solar power no matter who holds the White House.

Daly writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Todd Richmond in Madison, Wis., contributed to this report.

Sept. 27 (UPI) — The superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa was apprehended by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on a deportation order and in possession of a loaded gun in a district vehicle.

Ian Andre Roberts, 54, entered from Guyana in 1999 on a student visa and had a final order for removal by an immigration judge in May 2024, ICE said in a news release Friday.

“This suspect was arrested in possession of a loaded weapon in a vehicle provided by Des Moines Public Schools after fleeing federal law enforcement,” Sam Olson, ICE field office director in St. Paul, Minn., said in the release.

“This should be a wake-up call for our communities to the great work that our officers are doing every day to remove public safety threats. How this illegal alien was hired without work authorization, a final order of removal, and a prior weapons charge is beyond comprehension and should alarm the parents of that school district,” he said.

On Friday, ICE officers approached Roberts in the vehicle and, after identifying himself, he sped away, the agency said. His vehicle was found later near a wooded area.

At 8:45 a.m., the Iowa Department of Public Safety said in a news release that the agency received a mutual aid request to assist ICE in finding someone who fled from a traffic stop.

Iowa State Patrol troopers and special agents assisted ICE in finding Roberts, and he was taken into custody. Initially, he was listed as detained at the Pottawattamie County Jail, although the ICE website later removed any mention of a specific detention facility.

In 2021, Roberts pleaded guilty in Erie., Pa. to unlawful possession of a loaded firearm in a vehicle, which is a fifth-degree penalty, according to court records. It is a violation of law for someone without legal status in the United States to possess a firearm and ammunition.

On Friday, he also was in possession of a fixed-blade hunting knife and $3,000 in cash.

Roberts began working for the school district in 2023 after the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners granted Roberts a license to serve in Iowa as a superintendent.

Before coming to Iowa, he had been the superintendent of Middlecreek Township School District in Erie, Pa., since August 2020. Before that, he was chief schools officer for Aspire Public Schools Oakland, Calif., from 2018-2020.

The district said a third-party comprehensive background check was conducted on Roberts, and he was required to verify employment eligibility for all employees. The search found he held educational leadership positions in the U.S. for more than 20 years.

“We do not have all the facts. There is much we do not know,” school board President Jackie Norris said Friday during a news conference. “However, what we do know is Dr. Roberts has been an integral part of our school community since he joined two years ago.”

Later Friday, the district said in a news release that it “has not been formally notified by ICE about this matter, nor have we been able to talk with Dr. Roberts since his detention.”

Weapons are prohibited on school grounds, at school-sponsored events and at school-related activities.

Associate Superintendent Matt Smith will serve as interim superintendent, having previously served as interim superintendent during the 2022-23 school year. The district is the largest in Iowa with more than 30,000 students and nearly 5,000 teachers in more than 60 schools, according to its website.

“Unfortunate situations like today underscore exactly why we must fix our broken immigration system. An individual with a prior weapons charge and an active deportation order should never have been placed in this position of public trust,” Republican U.S. Rep. Zach Nunn, who serves the Des Moines area, posted on X.

U.S. Rep. and Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson wrote on X that “He should be deported immediately. He should have never been anywhere around Iowa kids in the first place!”

Roberts, who was born in Guyana in 1973, competed for the South American nation in the 2000 Sydney Olympics in track and field as an 800-meter runner, coming in next to last in his heat.

“After transitioning from my professional track and field career, I embarked on a mission to transform schools,” he wrote on his LinkedIn Profile. “I’ve been in the trenches as a teacher in Brooklyn, New York, Prince Georges County, Maryland, and Baltimore City, where I earned the honor of being named Teacher of the Year for two consecutive years.

“Throughout my career, my Olympic tenacity has fueled my commitment to achieving excellence in education. I’ve led schools to achieve unprecedented gains in college acceptance/enrollment, increased attendance, and academic achievement.”

He received a doctorate from Trident University in Arizona, masters’ degrees from St. John’s and Georgetown and a bachelor’s from Morgan State. He went to Harvard’s graduate school of education and MIT’s School of Management.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to uphold President Trump’s birthright citizenship order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.

The appeal, shared with the Associated Press on Saturday, sets in motion a process at the high court that could lead to a definitive ruling from the justices on whether the citizenship restrictions are constitutional.

Lower-court judges have blocked them from taking effect anywhere. The Republican administration is not asking the court to let the restrictions take effect before it rules.

The Justice Department’s petition has been shared with lawyers for parties challenging the order, but is not yet docketed at the Supreme Court.

Any decision on whether to take up the case probably is months away and arguments probably would not take place until the late winter or early spring.

“The lower court’s decisions invalidated a policy of prime importance to the president and his administration in a manner that undermines our border security,” Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer wrote. “Those decisions confer, without lawful justification, the privilege of American citizenship on hundreds of thousands of unqualified people.”

Cody Wofsy, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represents children who would be affected by Trump’s restrictions, said the administration’s plan is plainly unconstitutional.

“This executive order is illegal, full stop, and no amount of maneuvering from the administration is going to change that. We will continue to ensure that no baby’s citizenship is ever stripped away by this cruel and senseless order,” Wofsy said in an email.

Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term in the White House that would upend more than 125 years of understanding that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment confers citizenship on everyone born on American soil, with narrow exceptions for the children of foreign diplomats and those born to a foreign occupying force.

In a series of decisions, lower courts have struck down the executive order as unconstitutional, or likely so, even after a Supreme Court ruling in late June that limited judges’ use of nationwide injunctions.

While the Supreme Court curbed the use of nationwide injunctions, it did not rule out other court orders that could have nationwide effects, including in class-action lawsuits and those brought by states. The justices did not decide at that time whether the underlying citizenship order is constitutional.

But every lower court that has looked at the issue has concluded that Trump’s order violates or probably violates the 14th Amendment, which was intended to ensure that Black people, including formerly enslaved people, had citizenship.

The administration is appealing two cases.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco ruled in July that a group of states that sued over the order needed a nationwide injunction to prevent the problems that would be caused by birthright citizenship being in effect in some states and not others.

Also in July, a federal judge in New Hampshire blocked the citizenship order in a class-action lawsuit including all children who would be affected.

Birthright citizenship automatically makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers who are in the country illegally, under long-standing rules. The right was enshrined soon after the Civil War in the first sentence of the 14th Amendment.

The administration has asserted that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore not entitled to citizenship.

Sherman and Whitehurst write for the Associated Press.

The acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento has said she was fired after telling the Border Patrol chief in charge of immigration raids in California that his agents were not allowed to arrest people without probable cause in the Central Valley.

Michele Beckwith, a career prosecutor who was made the acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of California earlier this year, told the New York Times that she was let go after she warned Gregory Bovino, chief of the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector, that a court injunction blocked him from carrying out indiscriminate immigration raids in Sacramento.

Beckwith did not respond to a request for comment from the L.A. Times, but told the New York Times that “we have to stand up and insist the laws be followed.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Sacramento declined to comment. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment Friday evening.

Bovino presided over a series of raids in Los Angeles starting in June in which agents spent weeks pursuing Latino-looking workers outside of Home Depots, car washes, bus stops and other areas. The agents often wore masks and used unmarked vehicles.

But such indiscriminate tactics were not allowed in California’s Eastern District after the American Civil Liberties Union and United Farm Workers filed suit against the Border Patrol earlier in the year and won an injunction.

The suit followed a January operation in Kern County called “Operation Return to Sender,” in which agents swarmed a Home Depot and Latino market, among other areas frequented by laborers. In April, a federal district court judge ruled that the Border Patrol likely violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

As Beckwith described it to New York Times reporters, she received a phone call from Bovino on July 14 in which he said he was bringing agents to Sacramento.

She said she told him that the injunction filed after the Kern County raid meant he could not stop people indiscriminately in the Eastern District. The next day, she wrote him an email in which, as quoted in the New York Times, she stressed the need for “compliance with court orders and the Constitution.”

Shortly thereafter her work cell phone and her work computer stopped working. A bit before 5 p.m. she received an email informing her that her employment was being terminated effective immediately.

It was the end of a 15-year career in in the Department of Justice in which she had served as the office’s Criminal Division Chief and First Assistant and prosecuted members of the Aryan Brotherhood, suspected terrorists, and fentanyl traffickers.

Two days later on July 17, Bovino and his agents moved into Sacramento, conducting a raid at a Home Depot south of downtown.

In an interview with Fox News that day, Bovino said the raids were targeted and based on intelligence. “Everything we do is targeted,” he said. “We did have prior intelligence that there were targets that we were interested in and around that Home Depot, as well as other targeted enforcement packages in and around the Sacramento area.”

He also said that his operations would not slow down. “There is no sanctuary anywhere,” he said. “We’re here to stay. We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to affect this mission and secure the homeland.”

Beckwith is one of a number of top prosecutors who have quit or been fired as the Trump administration pushes the Department of Justice to aggressively carry out his policies, including investigating people who have been the president’s political targets.

In March, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles was fired after lawyers for a fast-food executive he was prosecuting pushed officials in Washington to drop all charges against him, according to multiple sources.

In July, Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, was fired by the Trump administration, according to the New York Times.

And just last week, a U. S. attorney in Virginia was pushed out after he had determined there was insufficient evidence to prosecute James B. Comey. A new prosecutor this week won a grand jury indictment against Comey on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding.