Laken Riley Act passes Congress, awaits Trump’s signature
The House has passed a bill to require the detainment of unauthorized migrants accused of theft and violent crimes. It marks the first legislation that President Donald Trump can sign as Congress, with some bipartisan support, swiftly moved in line with his plans to crackdown on illegal immigration. The Laken Riley Act is named after a Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan man. Its passage shows just how sharply the political debate over immigration has shifted to the right following Trump’s election victory.
Representative Tom Emmer, the House Republican whip, posted the final vote on X, showing that it passed with 263 votes in favor to 156 against, with 14 members not voting.
In an impassioned floor speech against the bill before it passed, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued that the law would be a financial windfall for private prison companies, by mandating detention for minor offenses. “I want folks at home to look, look at what members of Congress are invested in private prisons companies, who receive this kind of money, and look at the votes on this bill. It is atrocious that people are lining their pockets with private prison profits in the name of a horrific tragedy and the victim of a crime. It is shameful.”
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Updated at 17.28 EST
Key events
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Three federal judges denounced Donald Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters in stark terms in court orders formally dismissing cases before them.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was set to preside over Trump’s own criminal prosecution for seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election until the Supreme Court stepped in, wrote that “no pardon can change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021.” Trump’s action, forcing her to dismiss the case against John Banuelos, who was charged with firing a pistol into the air during the riot, Chutkan added, “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake…. And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power”.
“In hundreds of cases like this one over the past four years, judges in this district have administered justice without fear or favor”, she added. “The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”
Similarly, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell scoffed at Trump’s claim, in the pardon language, that his action “ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.”
In an order dismissing the case against two Jan. 6 defendants who pleaded guilty to felonies, Howell wrote: “No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election. No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity”.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly agreed that Trump’s action could never change the reality of the crimes. “What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens. Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies.”
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Here’s more from the news conference with Capitol police officers reacting to Donald Trump’s pardons of January 6 rioters.
Harry Dunn, a former officer, explained that another former officer, Sgt Aquilino Gonell, wanted to be present but was unable to do so. “He’s struggling, like a lot of us are,” Dunn said.
Representative Daniel Goldman, a New York Democrat, read a statement from Gonell, who stressed that Trump pardoned rioters who attacked the police that day even though “many of the officers who guarded his inauguration were violently assaulted by the people he pardoned later that day”.
Dunn also said that he was most outraged by the submission of Republican members of Congress he had helped protect that day, and who say privately that they disagree with the pardons. “That’s not good enough,” Dunn said. “His enablers in Congress didn’t say anything when Donald Trump told you exactly what he was going to do,” he added.
But Dunn finished with a defiant statement that he would refuse to be silent as Trump tries to rewrite the history of January 6. “The winner writes history; he didn’t win. I’m not going away,” he said.
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Updated at 18.41 EST
January 6 police officers hit back at Trump’s pardons for rioters
Daniel Hodges, a serving Capitol police officer, and Harry Dunn, a former officer, who both defended the Capitol against the pro-Trump mob on January 6, just reacted to Donald Trump’s pardons for the rioters at an emotional news conference with Democratic lawmakers.
Dunn, who said that it was difficult to speak about the pardons, given the violence he experienced that day, said that Trump made it clear four years ago, and during his campaign for the presidency last year, that he “was proud of the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan 6”. Even still, Dunn noted, many of the Capitol police officers “that Donald Trump sent a mob to attack are the same people who made sure he was safe on Monday”.
Hodges, who was one of the officers who spent the previous several days protecting the Capitol for the inauguration of Trump, said that he had done so even though, “everything he is everything he stands for is anathema to me, but he is the president.” He seemed stunned when he noted that one of the first things Trump did after the inauguration at the Capitol was to pardon everyone “who tried to stop the transfer of power” in that same building four years earlier.
Hodges added that while Trump “is going to leverage the power he has in terrible ways” the public still has the power to apply pressure to Republicans in Congress. “Those in Congress who enable him, still answer to you”, Hodges said.
“The people who attacked us on Jan 6 are free now,” Hodges said. “They can try it again.”
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Updated at 18.40 EST
Republicans to set up new January 6 investigation, Mike Johnson says
Mike Johnson, the House speaker, announced on Wednesday that he is setting up a new select subcommittee “to continue House Republicans’ investigation into all events leading up to and after January 6”.
The new panel, Johnson said on social media, will be dedicated to “exposing the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated Jan 6 Select Committee”, that investigated the Capitol riot and issued its final report in 2022.
Johnson said the new panel to investigate the previous panel, and search for evidence that the Capitol riot was, as Trump supporters have suggested, somehow orchestrated by federal agents, would be chaired by Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia.
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Updated at 17.47 EST
Lauren Gambino
California attorney general Rob Bonta said Donald Trump “cannot bully” the state into carrying out the president’s mass deportation agenda.
He was responding to a new DoJ memo that directs federal prosecutors to investigate any state or local officials who stand in the way of beefed-up enforcement of immigration laws under the Trump administration.
“This is a scare tactic, plain and simple. The President is attempting to intimidate and bully state and local law enforcement into carrying out his mass deportation agenda for him,” Bonta said, adding that his office was reviewing the memo and was “prepared to take legal action if the Trump Administration’s vague threats turn to illegal action”.
California law limits how state and local law enforcement can assist federal immigration authorities. The state has the largest population of undocumented people in the country. Bonta said Trump already tried – and failed – to undermine the state law during his first term when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that it “did not conflict with federal law or violate the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution”.
Bonta continued: “California law is clear – SB 54 prohibits state and local law enforcement from using taxpayer funds to enforce federal immigration law, subject to several narrow exceptions. SB 54 does not prevent state and local law enforcement from investigating and prosecuting crimes. Nor does it prevent federal agencies from conducting immigration enforcement themselves; what it says is that they cannot make us do their jobs for them.”
Trump and his team have also suggested using the threat of withholding federal disaster assistance as a way to force the state to cooperate.
The American Civil Liberties Union also announced that it is joining the legal effort to derail Trump’s deportation plans. “We’re suing to stop the Trump administration’s attempt to massively expand fast-tracked deportations without due process,” the ACLU declared in a Bluesky post. “This policy was illegal when Trump enacted it in his first term and it’s illegal now.”
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Laken Riley Act passes Congress, awaits Trump’s signature
The House has passed a bill to require the detainment of unauthorized migrants accused of theft and violent crimes. It marks the first legislation that President Donald Trump can sign as Congress, with some bipartisan support, swiftly moved in line with his plans to crackdown on illegal immigration. The Laken Riley Act is named after a Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan man. Its passage shows just how sharply the political debate over immigration has shifted to the right following Trump’s election victory.
Representative Tom Emmer, the House Republican whip, posted the final vote on X, showing that it passed with 263 votes in favor to 156 against, with 14 members not voting.
In an impassioned floor speech against the bill before it passed, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued that the law would be a financial windfall for private prison companies, by mandating detention for minor offenses. “I want folks at home to look, look at what members of Congress are invested in private prisons companies, who receive this kind of money, and look at the votes on this bill. It is atrocious that people are lining their pockets with private prison profits in the name of a horrific tragedy and the victim of a crime. It is shameful.”
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Updated at 17.28 EST
Trump draws attention to the fact that former president Joe Biden did not pardon himself.
“This guy went around giving everybody pardons,” Trump told the conservative commentator Sean Hannity in a preview clip from the Oval Office interview that will be broadcast later today. “You know, the funny thing, maybe the sad thing, is he didn’t give himself a pardon. And if you look at it, it all had to do with him.”
Trump is, of course, correct that the former president pardoned a slew of officials and six members of his own family, but not himself. But the fact that he brought Biden’s legal exposure up, unprompted, will raise eyebrows. Trump’s comment could be simply an observation, but could also be taken as a signal to his supporters in government that a criminal investigation of the former president is not out of the question.
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Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump’s nominee for health secretary, has a financial stake in ongoing litigation against the drug company Merck over Gardasil, a vaccine that protects against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, The New York Times reports, citing court documents and ethics records made public Wednesday.
A series of three doses of HPV vaccine is currently recommended by the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for young people ages 15 through 26 years to prevent cervical and other cancers. If confirmed, Kennedy would oversee the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, which approved the vaccine, and have direct authority over a special vaccine court that compensates injuries.
“CDC is aware of public concern about the safety of HPV vaccine” a message on the CDC website says. “Since the vaccine’s introduction in 2006, vaccine safety monitoring and studies conducted by CDC, FDA, and other organizations have documented a reassuring safety record.”
As Reuters reported last week: “Details of the Gardasil litigation show how Kennedy took action beyond sowing doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines in the court of public opinion and helped build a case against the pharmaceutical industry before judges and juries.”
According to the Times, ethics records show that Kennedy “would continue to collect fees for cases in which he referred clients to Wisner Baum, a law firm suing Merck over Gardasil”. Ethics disclosures related to Kennedy’s confirmation hearings show that he has made more than $2.5m in recent years from the arrangement with the law firm.
In 2022, Kennedy recorded a social media video urging people who believe that they suffered injury from the vaccine to go to a Wisner Baum website to join a consolidated federal lawsuit against the drug company.
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Updated at 16.57 EST
Afternoon summary
The impacts of Donald Trump’s return to the White House are being felt across the United States, and the world. The president just ordered the southern border closed to migrants, the justice department has threatened to investigate state and local officials who do not cooperate with immigration enforcement efforts, while refugees approved for resettlement to the United States have been stranded globally by the new administration’s policies. Trump’s first interview since taking office, with conservative commentator Sean Hannity, will air at 9pm this evening, but the president took to Truth Social a few hours ago to warn Russia that he will impose sanctions and tariffs if they do not end their war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Democrats have launched a renewed plea not to confirm Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon, pointing to new details of his behavior during his second marriage.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
The US military plans to expand its troop numbers along the US border, with a deployment of 1,500 active duty soldiers.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman, both billionaires friendly with Trump, feuded on X over a big AI infrastructure project the president unveiled yesterday.
Mike Johnson said he was “looking forward” when asked about Trump’s blanket pardons to January 6 rioters – but had plenty to say when it came to Joe Biden’s pardons to his own family.
Deporting undocumented immigrants accused of crimes and securing the border are relatively popular with Americans, a new poll found, but Trump’s most extreme actions are less so.
Read the note Biden left for Donald Trump in the White House – a tradition for outgoing presidents to their successors.
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Updated at 15.57 EST
Trump signs order to ‘immediately repel, repatriate, and remove’ migrants
Donald Trump has just signed an executive order effectively closing the US-Mexico border to migrants, including people seeking asylum.
“President Trump is authorizing and directing the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of State to take all necessary action to immediately repel, repatriate, and remove illegal aliens across the southern border of the United States,” the White House said.
“Through the exercise of his authority, President Trump has further restricted access to the provisions of the immigration laws that would enable any illegal alien involved in an invasion across the southern border of the United States to remain in the United States, such as asylum.”
The administration specifically blamed Joe Biden for border crossings, saying:
States, such as the Great State of Texas, have asked the Federal Government for protection against invasion during the Biden Administration, but it failed to protect them from millions of illegal aliens entering the United States, invading their communities, and imposing billions of dollars of costs upon State and local governments.
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Democrats demand Senate hold off on confirming Hegseth after new details of behavior emerge
Democratic senators have called for the Senate to hold off on confirming Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, saying revelations about his behavior during his second marriage and excess drinking are cause for concern.
In a joint statement, Elizabeth Warren, Tim Kaine, Mark Kelly, Mazie Hirono, Richard Blumenthal, Tammy Duckworth, Jeanne Shaheen and Kirsten Gillibrand demand meetings with Hegseth before the full Senate votes on his confirmation:
In a sworn statement under the penalty of perjury, a new report shows U.S. Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth was ‘erratic and aggressive’ toward his second wife over many years, to the point that she feared for her safety. The report also details repeated instances of his drinking alcohol in excess, including the need to be dragged out of a strip club while in uniform. This affidavit is part of a disturbing pattern of behavior that has been documented through numerous public and private reports. The affidavit also raises additional questions about the thoroughness of his FBI background check during a rushed confirmation process.
Despite repeated requests, Mr. Hegseth has refused to meet with the vast majority of Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. We request that Mr. Hegseth meet privately with every interested lawmaker on the committee before the Senate votes on his nomination so that we can have frank discussions about the new information that has come to light. It would be irresponsible and contrary to our constitutional duty for the Senate to vote to confirm this nomination before such meetings have occurred.
On Monday, the Senate armed services committee approved Hegseth’s nomination, and he awaits confirmation by the full chamber.
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Updated at 15.13 EST
Trump administration plans to reimpose rule allowing immediate expulsion of migrants
Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser to Donald Trump and an architect of his hardline immigration policies, said the administration is looking for a way to reimpose a federal rule allowing for the immediate expulsion of border crossers, even if they are seeking asylum.
According to the Associated Press, Miller told Republican senators at a lunch today that the Trump administration is looking for a legal rationale to reinstate rule, known as Title 42. The president approved the rule during his first term in office as a measure against the Covid-19 pandemic, before Joe Biden allowed it to lapse.
Here’s more about Title 42, and what it would do:
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Lauren Gambino
Progressive Democrats insisted the party is unified in holding Donald Trump accountable for his actions as they search for a new leader and a new message.
At a press conference on Capitol Hill, members of the House Progressive Caucus blasted Trump’s “hateful and xenophobic” immigration agenda and implored Republicans to approve disaster aid for fire-torn California.
“I visited some of the burn sites. … It looks like a war zone out there,” said congresswoman Luz Rivas, a Democrat who represents Los Angeles. “What we saw and what we heard from our constituents has made it clear that our communities need federal disaster aid quickly and now without any conditions attached.”
Texas congressman Greg Casar, chair of the caucus, said progressives were not divided in their approach to immigration, as many Democrats joined with Republicans to approve enforcement bills that advocates and legal experts argue would strip individuals accused of theft-related crimes of their due process rights.
“Our goal as a progressive caucus is to recognize that many of these Republican bills are intended to divide the American people and to try to put frontline Democratic members in a difficult place,” he said. “And the way the progressive caucus and the progressive movement in this country can help is by telling the truth.”
He said progressives could start by reminding Americans “every single day” of Trump’s decision to pardon January 6th rioters convicted of assaulting police officers as well as his repeal of a Biden-era action to lower the cost of prescription drugs.
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Here’s what Joe Biden wrote to Donald Trump
Fox News obtained the text of the letter Joe Biden left to Donald Trump upon his return to the presidency.
Leaving a letter for your successor is an American presidential tradition. Here’s what Biden wrote:
Dear President Trump,
As I take leave of this sacred office I wish you and your family all the best in the next four years. The American people – and people around the world – look to this house for steadiness in the inevitable storms of history, and my prayer is that in the coming years will be a time of prosperity, peace, and grace for our nation.
May God bless you and guide you as He has blessed and guided our beloved country since our founding.
Joe Biden
1-20-25
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There is some uncertainty over the number of extra troops being sent to the US southern border. US officials told AP the Pentagon would deploy as many as 1,500 active duty troops in the coming days.
Acting defense secretary Robert Salesses was expected to sign the deployment orders on Wednesday, but it wasn’t yet clear which troops or units will go, and the total could fluctuate. It remains to be seen if they will end up doing law enforcement, which active-duty troops have not done since their response to the Rodney King riots in 1992.
The troops are expected to be used to support border patrol agents, with logistics, transportation and construction of barriers. They have done similar duties in the past, when both Trump and former president Joe Biden sent active duty troops to the border.
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Updated at 14.35 EST
US military plans to send extra troops to Mexico border, reports say
The military is planning to increase the number of active-duty troops deployed to the US-Mexico border as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrants, Reuters reports.
Here’s more:
The U.S. military is preparing to send about 1,000 additional active-duty troops to the border with Mexico, a U.S. official said, just two days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on immigration.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, did not say when the troops would be deployed.
They would be joining the roughly 2,200 active-duty and thousands of National Guard troops already on the border.
During his first term, Trump ordered 5,200 troops to help secure the border with Mexico. Former President Joe Biden deployed active-duty troops to the border as well.
Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order instructed the Pentagon to send as many troops as necessary to obtain “complete operational control of the southern border of the United States.”
“Within 90 days, the heads of the Defense Department and Department of Homeland Security will need to recommend whether additional actions, including invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, might be necessary,” it said.
The Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the U.S. president to deploy the military to suppress domestic insurrection.
As an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits military forces being used for domestic law enforcement, the 1807 act has been used in the past to quell civil unrest. The last time was in 1992, when the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Black motorist Rodney King led to deadly riots.
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Updated at 14.33 EST
The day so far
The impacts of Donald Trump’s return to the White House are being felt across the United States, and the world. The justice department has threatened to investigate state and local officials who do not cooperate with immigration enforcement efforts, while refugees approved for resettlement to the United States have been stranded globally by the new administration’s policies. Trump’s first interview since taking office, with conservative commentator Sean Hannity, will air at 9pm this evening, but the president took to Truth Social a few hours ago to warn Russia that he will impose sanctions and tariffs if they do not end their war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Democrats have launched a renewed plea not to confirm Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon, pointing to new details of his behavior during his second marriage.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Elon Musk and Sam Altman, both billionaires friendly with Trump, feuded on X over a big AI infrastructure project the president unveiled yesterday.
Mike Johnson said he was “looking forward”, when asked about Trump’s blanket pardons to January 6 rioters – but had plenty to say when it came to Joe Biden’s pardons to his own family.
Deporting undocumented immigrants accused of crimes and securing the border are relatively popular with Americans, a new poll found, but Trump’s most extreme actions are less so.
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