Attorney general says deportation flights will ‘absolutely’ continue as judge’s noon deadline nears – live

The Trump administration turned the deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members into a spectacle by sending around video of them arriving in El Salvador and being manhandled off the plane and into a detention facility.

It appears to be part of a plan to encourage undocumented immigrants in the United States to leave voluntarily. Another aspect of the plan is the CBP Home app, which was formerly used under a different name by the Biden administration to manage arrivals of asylum seekers. Under Donald Trump, it has been rebranded and is now intended to facilitate departures of immigrants without visas, and the White House just released video of the president encouraging them to make use of it:

People in our country illegally can self-deport the easy way, or they can get deported the hard way, and that’s not pleasant.

Here’s more about the app:

The Trump administration faces a deadline of 12pm ET to provide federal judge James Boasberg with more information about the three flights carrying suspected Venezuelan gang members that were allowed to depart the United States over the weekend.

The case is the latest instance of the Trump administration apparently defying a court order – something top administration officials are making no apologies for.

In an interview with Fox News yesterday, attorney general Pam Bondi said that the White House was “absolutely” hoping to continue similar deportation flights, which saw the suspected gang members deported to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, which cuts through much of the usual due process required by immigration law.

“These are foreign terrorists. The president has identified them and designated them as such, and we will continue to follow the Alien Enemies Act,” Bondi said.

Donald Trump plans to sign more executive orders at 3.30pm today.

It’s the only event on his White House schedule, and currently listed as closed to the press, but Trump is known to use the signing as an opportunity to invite reporters into the Oval Office and take their questions.

The US defense department webpage celebrating a Black Medal of Honor recipient that was removed and had the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address has been restored – and the letters scrubbed – after an outcry.

But defense department officials have continued to argue publicly that it is wrong to say that diversity is a strength, and that it’s essential to dismantle all “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts.

On Saturday, the Guardian reported that US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers’s Medal of Honor webpage led to a “404” error message – and that the URL had been changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal”.

Rogers, who died in 1990, served in the Vietnam war, where he was wounded three times while leading the defense of a base. Then president Richard Nixon awarded him the Medal of Honor, the country’s highest military honor, in 1970, making him the highest-ranking African American to receive it, according to the West Virginia military hall of fame.

On Saturday the webpage honoring him was no longer functional, with a “404 – Page Not Found” message appearing along with the note: “The page you are looking for might have been moved, renamed, or may be temporarily unavailable.”

The Trump administration fired most of the board of the US Institute of Peace (USIP) and sent its new leader into the Washington DC headquarters of the independent organization on Monday, in its latest effort targeting agencies tied to foreign assistance work.

The remaining three members of the group’s board – defense secretary Pete Hegseth, secretary of state Marco Rubio and national defense university president Peter Garvin – fired president and CEO, George Moose, on Friday, according to a document obtained by the Associated Press.

An executive order that Donald Trump signed last month targeted the organization, which was created by Congress more than 40 years ago, and others for reductions.

Current USIP employees said staffers from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” entered the building despite protests that the institute is not part of the executive branch. USIP called the police, whose vehicles were outside the building on Monday evening.

Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will hold a phone call between 9am and 11am EDT on Tuesday to talk about settling the Ukraine conflict and normalising relations between Russia and the United States, the Kremlin said.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said there was already a “certain understanding” between the two leaders, based on a phone call they held on 12 February and on subsequent high-level contacts between the two countries.

“But there are also a large number of questions regarding the further normalisation of our bilateral relations, and a settlement on Ukraine. All of this will have to be discussed by the two presidents,” Peskov told reporters.

“The leaders will speak for as long as they deem necessary,” he said.

The Trump administration has removed former surgeon general Vivek Murthy’s advisory on gun violence as a public health issue from the US Department of Health and Human Services’ website.

This move was made to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order to protect second amendment rights, a White House official told the Guardian.

The “firearm violence in America” page, where the advisory had been posted, was filled with data and information about the ripple effects of shootings, the prevalence of firearm suicides and the number of American children and adolescents who have been shot and killed. Now, when someone reaches the site they will be met with a “page not found” message.

When it was originally released last summer, Murthy’s advisory was met with praise from violence prevention and research groups, and was lambasted by second amendment law centers and advocacy groups that argued the Biden administration was using public health as a cloak to push forward more gun control.

“This is an extension of the Biden Administration’s war on law-abiding gun owners. America has a crime problem caused by criminals,” the National Rifle Association (NRA) said in a statement posted to X on 25 July 2024.

Donald Trump visited the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Monday for the first time since making himself its new chair, threatening to shutter an expensive new addition and describing the marble Washington landmark as being in “tremendous disrepair.”

Trump presided over the center’s board meeting in a demonstration of his takeover of an institution that has long enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington, Reuters reported.

Trump, a former real estate executive, criticised an expansive addition built on the Kennedy Center complex for lacking windows and suggested closing it.

He said the center would improve physically over time, however, and he encouraged people to attend shows there.

“This represents a very important part of DC, and actually our country,” he said when asked why he was making time to come to the Kennedy Center with so many other things on his plate. “I think it’s important to make sure that our country is in good shape and is represented well.”

Last month Trump became chair of the Kennedy Center after pushing out billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein. He fired its longtime president, Deborah Rutter, and installed his former ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, as interim president.

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

We start with news that a federal judge has given the Trump administration a deadline of today to provide details about plane loads of Venezuelans it deported despite orders not to, in a brewing showdown over presidential power.

Donald Trump claims the deported Venezuelans are members of the prison gang Tren de Aragua, which he designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

The White House on Saturday published a Trump proclamation that invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to declare the gang was conducting irregular warfare against the US, Reuters reported.

Later on Saturday, US district judge James Boasberg issued an order blocking the deportations but the flights continued anyway and 261 people were flown to El Salvador.

A Trump administration lawyer argued both that the judge’s initial oral ruling to block the flights was superseded by a more sparsely written order issued later and that the government had the legal right to continue with flights once they had left US airspace.

Since taking office in January, Trump has sought to push the boundaries of executive power, challenging the historic checks and balances between the US branches of government.

Read our latest story here: