Birthday note apparently from Trump to Epstein branded ‘sickening’ – US politics live | Donald Trump

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Attorney general touts more than 2,100 arrests in DC

Attorney general Pam Bondi said that there had been 2,177 arrests in DC since the beginning of the federal law enforcement surge in the nation’s capital that began on 7 August.

She also said that 222 illegal firearms had been seized.

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Updated at 09.03 EDT

We’ll hear from Donald Trump at 4.30pm ET today, when he signs a proclamation in the Oval Office. The press will be permitted, and we can expect a series of questions: from fallout over his alleged Epstein “birthday book” contribution, to the ramping up of immigration enforcement in Chicago.

Before that, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will hold a briefing at 1pm ET, where reporters will get an opportunity to question the administration. We’ll bring you the latest as it happens.

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Updated at 08.32 EDT

US supreme court ‘effectively legalized racial profiling’, immigration experts warn

Lauren Gambino

Immigration advocates warned that the supreme court has “effectively legalized racial profiling”, granting federal agents the power to stop people in Los Angeles simply for speaking Spanish or appearing Latino – and opening the door, they say, to a broader unraveling of civil rights protections nationwide.

In a 6–3 decision on Monday, the court’s conservative majority lifted restrictions on “roving” immigration patrols across the LA area after a lower court found that federal agents were indiscriminately targeting people on the basis of race, language, employment or location.

The high court’s ruling alarmed civil liberties advocates and rattled immigrant communities in a county where one in three residents is foreign-born, and where the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement has already seen armed and masked federal agents detain residents, including US citizens, near bus stops, construction sites, churches and other public spaces with little explanation or due process.

At a news conference near a Home Depot in a heavily Latino neighborhood of Los Angeles, where raids in June sparked massive protests, the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, assailed the decision, saying the supreme court “has now given the green light for law enforcement to profile and detain Angelenos based on their race”.

Bass quoted from the forceful dissent issued by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina to serve on the court, who warned: “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

“I agree with her – I dissent,” Bass said. “We all dissent because from the beginning, we have known that Los Angeles has been used as a test case for total dominance and unchecked power by the federal government.”

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Texas state representative James Talarico, a Democrat and former schoolteacher with a rising national profile, joined a widening race for the US Senate on Tuesday that already has two prominent challengers trying to unseat Republican senator John Cornyn.

Talarico, 36, has gained popularity in the Texas House through viral social media posts challenging Republican-led policies such as private school vouchers and requiring the Ten Commandments in classrooms, AP reports. It is the first statewide race for Talarico, who flipped a seat in Austin’s booming suburbs in 2018.

He will seek the Democratic nomination in a field that includes former US representative Colin Allred, who is running again after unsuccessfully challenging Republican senator Ted Cruz last year.

“I get the sense that there is a deep hunger across the political spectrum for a fundamentally different kind of politics,” Talarico said in an interview ahead of his announcement. “It’s been 10 years now of Trumpian politics, politics as a blood sport … and there is a hunger 10 years later for a return to more timeless values of sincerity and honesty and compassion and respect.”

Talarico, who has degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University, is working on a Master of Divinity at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and said he hopes to one day lead the church he grew up in.

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Boston mayor Michelle Wu, the city’s first Asian and female leader, is expected to take a critical step to securing a second term when voters on Tuesday narrow the field to the top two candidates.

The expectation is that Wu will face against nonprofit leader Josh Kraft, son of Patriots owner Robert Kraft, AP reports. Two other candidates, Robert Cappucci and Domingos DaRosa, are also running. Cappucci is a military veteran and former district school committee member while DaRosa is a community activist.

For months, Wu has maintained a double-digit lead over Kraft, despite him spending millions of dollars of his own money on his campaign. Wu has been bolstered in part by her defense of the city against attacks from the Trump administration. Both are Democrats, and the party has occupied City Hall for the past century, though the position is nonpartisan.

Members of president Donald Trump’s administration have accused the city of not doing enough to crack down on illegal immigration and threatened a surge in arrests.

Boston is commonly known as a sanctuary city, which limits cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Wu has repeatedly said she wants it to be a welcoming place for immigrants.

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Court rejects Trump’s attempt to overturn E Jean Carroll’s $83m verdict

Sam Levine

Donald Trump now cannot claim presidential immunity to get off the hook from paying $83.3m in damages to the writer E Jean Carroll, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday, upholding a jury’s 2024 award against the president for defamation.

Trump’s lawyers had pointed to the supreme court’s ruling last year saying the president has immunity for official acts to argue that the damages should be overturned. A three-judge panel for the US court of appeals for the second circuit, rejected that argument.

“The jury’s duly rendered damages awards were reasonable in light of the extraordinary and egregious facts of this case,” the judges wrote in their unanimous opinion. The panel consisted of judges Denny Chin, an appointee of Barack Obama, as well as Sarah AL Merriam and Maria Araújo Kahn, both appointees of Joe Biden. Their decision was unanimous.

At an earlier stage in the case, they also concluded Trump had waived his right to argue presidential immunity because he had not raised it earlier.

“We conclude that Trump has failed to identify any grounds that would warrant reconsidering our prior holding on presidential immunity,” the panel wrote. “A case involving the criminal prosecution of a former President, did not alter the prevailing law on whether presidential immunity can be waived.” Justin Smith, a lawyer for Trump, had argued that presidential immunity is “not waivable”, according to Politico.

Neither the White House nor Trump’s personal lawyers in the case immediately responded to requests for comment. The second circuit on 13 June upheld Carroll’s separate $5m jury verdict against Trump in May 2023 for a similar defamation and for sexual assault.

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Jamie Grierson

Donald Trump’s second state visit to the UK will see a big policing operation led by drones in the airspace over Windsor, police have said.

King Charles is to host the US president and his wife, Melania Trump, at Windsor Castle from 17 to 19 September, where they will be entertained with a ceremonial welcome and state banquet.

A round-the-clock policing operation will be in place in the Berkshire town during the event, with a temporary order restricting the airspace from 16 September – when the state visit rehearsal is to take place – until 18 September.

This means non-police drones and smaller aircraft cannot fly through the protected area, Thames Valley police officers said on Monday during a drone-flying demonstration at the force’s training centre in Sulhamstead, Berkshire.

The Stop Trump Coalition is to stage a mass demonstration in central London on the first day of the trip, with a further protest planned near Windsor Castle.

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US immigration officers ramp up sweeps in LA after raid restrictions are lifted

Johana Bhuiyan

US immigration officers are ramping up immigration sweeps in Los Angeles again after the supreme court reversed a temporary restraining order that banned the Trump administration from stopping people solely based on their race, language or job.

In a post on Twitter/X, Greg Bovino, the head of US border patrol in Los Angeles, called the temporary restraining order “very poorly” written and “the worst” he’s ever seen. He also said that border patrol would be starting operations back up again today.

“We are going hard in Los Angeles today and are hitting a location as I write this,” Bovino wrote.

Immigration officers were forced to pause their sweeping immigration raids after advocacy groups sued the Trump administration for systemically racially profiling brown-skinned people. US district judge in Los Angeles Maame E Frimpong granted the groups a temporary restraining order after finding a “mountain of evidence” that the immigration enforcement tactics were violating the constitution.

But the supreme court ruled 6-3 to lift those restrictions on Monday. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who voted to approve the stay on the order, wrote that the Immigration and Nationality Act allows immigration officers to “interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien as to his right to be or to remain in the United States”. While “ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” it can be used as a “relevant” factor, he wrote.

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House committee releases image of ‘sickening’ Trump birthday note to Epstein

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.

We start with news that House Democrats on Monday released an image of a sexually suggestive letter and drawing that appears to bear the signature of Donald Trump, the very same note the president had denied writing after reports of its existence were published earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal.

The letter, described as “sickening” by one representative, was turned over by lawyers for disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s estate in response to a subpoena from the House oversight committee, and was included in a set of notes sent to the convicted sex offender for his 50th birthday.

The image showed a letter that in effect comported with a description in the Journal’s report from July. Inside the sketch of a woman’s torso, the note depicts an imagined conversation between Trump and Epstein, with what appeared to be Trump’s signature below.

“The oversight committee has secured the infamous ‘Birthday Book’ that contains a note from President Trump that he has said does not exist,” Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the panel, said in a statement. “It’s time for the president to tell us the truth about what he knew and release all the Epstein files.”

The White House did not immediately comment on the letter, but officials sought to discredit the note. Deputy chief of staff for communications, Taylor Budowich, suggested in an X post carrying a different version of Trump’s signature that the letter or the signature had been falsified.

“Time for news corp to open that check book, it’s not his signature. DEFAMATION!” Budowich wrote, referencing the defamation suit that Trump filed against News Corp, the parent company of the Journal, over its original story.

Maryland representative Jamie Raskin called the letter “sickening” and called for the full Epstein files to be released. Posting on X, he said:

House Democrats fought to bring this sickening letter into the light while Trump and MAGA mouthpieces assured us it did not exist. Trump even sued the Wall Street Journal for reporting on it!

We can’t trust a word MAGA says. Release the full Epstein file NOW!

Read the full story here:

In other developments:

US immigration officers are ramping up immigration sweeps in Los Angeles again after the supreme court reversed a temporary restraining order that banned the Trump administration from stopping people solely based on their race, language or job. In a post on Twitter/X, Greg Bovino, the head of US border patrol in Los Angeles, called the temporary restraining order “very poorly” written and “the worst” he’s ever seen.

Donald Trump’s second state visit to the UK will see a big policing operation led by drones in the airspace over Windsor, police have said. King Charles is to host the US president and his wife, Melania Trump, at Windsor Castle from 17 to 19 September, where they will be entertained with a ceremonial welcome and state banquet.

Donald Trump launched a vitriolic attack against Tom Hanks for supposedly being “destructive” and “woke” after one of America’s most beloved actors was snubbed without much explanation by West Point last week. On his social media site on Monday, the US president applauded the alumni association of the US Military Academy (or West Point) for abruptly calling off a ceremony honoring Hanks, twice an Academy award winner who has played numerous military characters and also has a long history of advocating for veterans.

Donald Trump now cannot claim presidential immunity to get off the hook from paying $83.3m in damages to the writer E Jean Carroll, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday, upholding a jury’s 2024 award against the president for defamation. Trump’s lawyers had pointed to the supreme court’s ruling last year saying the president has immunity for official acts to argue that the damages should be overturned.

The US supreme court allowed Donald Trump on Monday to keep a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission away from her post for now, temporarily pausing a judicial order that required the reinstatement of the commissioner who the Republican president has sought to oust.

Intent on vindication after spending four months in prison last year, Donald Trump’s White House trade adviser Peter Navarro asked a federal appeals court on Sunday night to force the justice department to explain why it would not defend his 2022 conviction for defying a January 6 committee subpoena.

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