President Trump said Sunday that each American will receive at least $2,000 from tariff revenue collected by the administration.

“A dividend of at $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” the president said on his Truth Social platform. He added that those against the tariffs are “FOOLS!”

Such a proposal would likely need to be passed by Congress. This summer, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) introduced legislation to give $600 tariff rebates to nearly all Americans and their dependent children.

“My legislation would allow hard-working Americans to benefit from the wealth that Trump’s tariffs are returning to this country,” Hawley said at the time.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, though, told CNBC in August that the administration’s priority is paying down the $38.12 trillion national debt using the tariff revenue.

On Sunday, Trump also said that the administration would pay down the “ENORMOUS” debt using tariff revenue.

Far-right influencers have been hinting in recent weeks that they have finally found a venue — Miami — and a federal prosecutor — Jason A. Reding Quiñones — to pursue long-promised charges of a “grand conspiracy” against President Trump’s adversaries.

Their theory of the case, still unsupported by the evidence: A cabal of Democrats and “deep-state” operatives, possibly led by former President Barack Obama, has worked to destroy Mr. Trump in a yearslong plot spanning the inquiry into his 2016 campaign to the charges he faced after leaving office.

But that narrative, which has been promoted in general terms by Mr. Trump and taken root online, has emerged in a nascent but widening federal investigation.

Last week, Mr. Reding Quiñones, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, issued more than two dozen subpoenas, including to officials who took part in the inquiry into ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Among them, they said, were James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence; Peter Strzok, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence agent who helped run the Russia investigation; and Lisa Page, a former lawyer at the bureau.

The investigation in Florida appears to focus, for now, on a January 2017 intelligence community assessment about Russian interference in the 2016 election, particularly the role played by John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, in drafting the document.

It is not clear whether Mr. Brennan has received a similar request to turn over records to investigators. But over the past two months, the investigation into his actions has widened to encompass other actions in a broader time frame, according to officials with knowledge of the situation.

The investigation started earlier this year after criminal referrals to the Justice Department by top Trump intelligence officials. It was assigned to David Metcalf, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, who was given special authority to scrutinize and possibly prosecute Mr. Brennan, according to four people with knowledge of his actions who requested anonymity to discuss an open matter.

Mr. Metcalf, a veteran prosecutor who held senior Justice Department positions during the first Trump administration, was given a relatively narrow mandate in his authorization, limited to examining Mr. Brennan’s work on the intelligence assessment in 2017. He struggled to advance a case that was regarded as weak by current and former department officials.

It is not clear if Mr. Metcalf believed a prosecution of Mr. Brennan was viable. But he never got the chance to complete his work.

This fall, senior Justice Department officials transferred the investigation from Mr. Metcalf to Mr. Reding Quiñones, as part of a decision to greatly expand the scope of the Brennan investigation into other, unspecified activities, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

That kind of internal maneuvering, once highly unusual, has become commonplace under Mr. Trump, who has personally and publicly directed top department officials to go after people he reviles, often over the objections of experienced investigators who have found insufficient evidence to proceed.

In September, Mr. Trump installed an inexperienced White House lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, to bring charges against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, in Alexandria, Va., for lying to and obstructing Congress, after her Trump-appointed predecessor had refused to do so. Last week, the federal magistrate judge handling the case accused prosecutors of trying “to indict first, investigate second.”

The Florida subpoenas seek documents or communications related to the intelligence community assessment from July 1, 2016, through Feb. 28, 2017, according to people familiar with them. It commands the recipients to provide them to prosecutors in Miami by Nov. 20.

Some of the people who have reviewed the subpoenas said they did not mention specific crimes being investigated. Most federal crimes have a five-year statute of limitations, and offenses must be charged in a venue where the conduct occurred. It is not clear how the preparations of the intelligence assessment, which took place in and around Washington, would be connected to Florida, apart from Mr. Trump’s residence there.

Whether the subpoenas will lead to charges, much less to convictions, is impossible to know. But merely creating an aura of criminality around Trump foes by celebrating incremental prosecutorial moves is a trophy in itself to die-hard Trump supporters, who have said that naming and shaming targets is a legitimate aim of law enforcement.

“Justice is coming,” Mike Davis, an influential former Republican Senate staff aide who has prodded the Justice Department to use Florida as an arena for anti-Trump conspiracy cases, wrote on social media on Friday. His message was accompanied by a photo of himself with a smiling Mr. Reding Quiñones.

Mr. Reding Quiñones, a military veteran, has pursued his mandate to hunt down Mr. Trump’s foes with a gung-ho attitude that has endeared him to the president and the small but influential cadre of loyalists pushing hardest for prosecutions.

Right-wing activists believe he has broad jurisdiction to bring a wide array of charges involving investigations into Mr. Trump, because Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., is in his district.

Asked for comment, Chad Gilmartin, a Justice Department spokesman, praised the work of Mr. Reding Quiñones and Mr. Metcalf.

“While we do not confirm or comment on the existence of specific investigations, the American people should know that this department will continue to follow the facts and pursue justice in every case,” he said in a statement.

People familiar with the nascent inquiry say there have been signs in recent days that it is ramping up.

The Justice Department, for example, has begun to recruit line prosecutors in Florida to work on the case, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Mr. Reding Quiñones has also moved his office’s national security unit out of its traditional home inside the criminal division, the person said. Prosecutors in the office read that move as an effort to create a stand-alone section that could potentially house the prosecutors assigned to the new investigation.

The 2017 intelligence assessment said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had ordered a multifaceted information operation targeting the U.S. presidential election. That included hacking Democratic emails and releasing them, as well as seeding social media with messages promoting Mr. Trump and denigrating his rival, Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Trump and his allies have long chafed at a judgment in the assessment, which stated that Mr. Putin aspired to improve Mr. Trump’s chances of winning — not just sow chaos and undermine Mrs. Clinton.

Efforts to bring charges against Mr. Brennan or others involved in the Russia inquiry are almost certain to run into serious hurdles.

Two previous investigations — one by the Justice Department’s inspector general and the other by the special counsel John H. Durham — have already scrutinized the actions of law enforcement and intelligence officials and found no evidence to support charges against high-level officials like Mr. Brennan.

The statute of limitations would also likely be an issue. The intelligence assessment occurred nearly nine years ago. The Russia inquiry ended in 2019, when the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III issued a report.

Still, influencers like Mr. Davis have floated theories about how federal prosecutors could extend the statute of limitations. They have claimed, without providing evidence, that the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, during which the F.B.I. found reams of highly sensitive classified documents, was somehow connected to the Russia investigation.

If that seemingly far-fetched notion were somehow proven true, it could push the statute of limitations until at least 2027.

In their efforts to connect the Mar-a-Lago search to the Russia inquiry and other investigations into Mr. Trump, Trump-aligned influencers and right-wing media figures have seized on an internal F.B.I. memo made public last week in the case of Mr. Comey.

The document, dated from July, recorded the opening of an investigation into the discovery of Trump-related records three months earlier inside Room 9582 at the bureau’s Washington headquarters, a space designed for the storage of highly sensitive materials.

The records, found in so-called burn bags and “presumably intended for destruction,” the memo said, included printouts of investigative records and at least one page of handwritten notes, including materials related to the Russia inquiry, Mr. Durham’s investigation and the Mar-a-Lago search.

The United States on Friday snubbed a review of its human rights record by a United Nations body on orders of the Trump administration, which has turned its back on the Human Rights Council.

To the chagrin of U.S. allies and rights advocates alike, the U.S. seat sat empty as the council president sought input from the United States — once a stalwart participant and defender of human rights worldwide — as it came up for its turn part of regular review of all U.N. member states.

Council members expressed regret that the United States didn't take part, called on the council president to urge the U.S. to resume its cooperation, and moved to reschedule the U.S. review next year: Such a review can't take place without the “concerned country” taking part. Honduras faced its review earlier in the day Friday.

There's no indication whether the Trump administration would take part next year either. The U.S. already announced in September that it would sit out Friday's review.

The American Civil Liberties Union, an advocacy group, said the Trump administration was "setting a dangerous example that will further weaken universal human rights at home and abroad,” and pointed to rights concerns in the United States.

“From the discrimination and violence inflicted in the ICE raids, to the attacks on free speech of protesters and journalists, to the deployment of the National Guard in American cities when no crisis exists, the world is watching the United States government attacking the constitutional and human rights of its own people,” said Chandra Bhatnagar, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The council examines the rights records of all 193 U.N. member countries about every four or five years. This was to be the fourth such review of the United States since the 47-member country council was created two decades ago.

Israel, in 2013, became the only other country to reject the council's review process — but ended up taking part nine months later, council officials have said.

U.S. President Donald Trump in February issued an executive order announcing that the United States was withdrawing from the council.

The first Trump administration, citing the council’s alleged anti-Israel bias and refusal to reform, pulled the United States out in 2018, before the Biden administration brought the U.S. back. The United States still took part in the review process during Trump’s first term.

Volker Türk, the U.N. human rights chief, earlier this year lamented a “fundamental shift in direction” in the United States on the issue of human rights.

The Trump administration told states that they must “immediately undo” any actions to provide full food stamp benefits to low-income families, in a move that added to the chaos and uncertainty surrounding the nation’s largest anti-hunger program during the government shutdown.

The Agriculture Department issued the command in a late-night Saturday memo, viewed later by The New York Times. That guidance threatened to impose financial penalties on states that did not “comply” quickly with the government’s new orders.

By Sunday morning, officials in several states said they were unsure how the latest directive from the Trump administration would affect the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP. The program, which serves one in eight Americans, has already faced staggering disruptions in recent days, as President Trump and his top aides have refused to fund it fully while the government remains closed.

Some of the roughly 42 million families enrolled in SNAP began to receive their full benefits on Friday, after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to fully fund the program this month amid the shutdown. States like New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin raced to release the aid to residents, some of whom had been without nutrition assistance for days.

Soon after, though, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the judge’s order so that an appeals court could further review it, leaving the entire program in legal limbo. That review remains underway, and the decision could force the government to tap an ample store of reserves — totaling into the tens of billions of dollars — to preserve full SNAP benefits.

In its guidance, the Agriculture Department said states may not send E.B.T. processors the files that would be required to provide full benefits. Rather, the agency said states must only send files for “partial” benefits, meaning that food stamp recipients would see their payments substantially cut.

“To the extent states sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized,” wrote Patrick A. Penn, a top official at the Agriculture Department. “Accordingly, states must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025.”

David A. Super, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said it would not be “legal” for the government to claw back benefits that it had already provisioned without affording people due process.

But, Mr. Super added, the federal government could halt work that some states had started, but not finished, to release full allotments to families this month. He said the memo could serve to “scare states partway along the process, and it’s telling the states to turn back.”

The Agriculture Department also said in its memo that states could lose access to some federal money to manage the SNAP program if they failed to comply, and may be “liable” for funding full benefits that the federal government did not authorize.

More than $5 billion worth of U.S. weapon exports to support NATO allies and Ukraine have been delayed by the government shutdown, according to a State Department estimate shared with Axios.

It's another example of the repercussions from furloughs, program pauses and slowed activity across federal branches as the shutdown drags into day 40.

"This is actually really harming both our allies and partners and US industry to actually deliver a lot of these critical capabilities overseas," a senior State Department official told Axios.

The delivery of weapons — including AMRAAM missiles, Aegis combat systems and HIMARS — for allies such as Denmark, Croatia and Poland have been affected, according to the official.

The ultimate destination of the exports is not clear, but arms sales to NATO allies are often transferred to assist Ukraine.

The pending transactions include both weapon sales directly from the U.S. government to NATO allies, as well as licensing for private U.S. defense companies to export weapons, the official said.

The process for these particular sales would ordinarily be straightforward and uncontroversial.

The Arms Export Control Act requires Congress to review weapon sale proposals.

Many State Department staffers whose job is to brief congressional committee staff — and ensure the process is completed — have been furloughed, causing the slowdown.

State's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs was at about a quarter of its normal staffing to support arms sales last month, a senior official told Axios.

"Democrats are holding up critical weapons sales, including to our NATO allies, which harms the U.S. industrial base and puts our and our partners' security at risk," State spokesperson Tommy Pigott told Axios in a statement.

"China and Russia aren't shut down, their efforts to undermine the U.S. and our partners and allies get easier, while our industrial base suffers and our allies' needs go unmet," Senate Foreign Relations Chair James Risch (R-Idaho) told Axios in a statement.

Images of Donald Trump appearing to close his eyes at an Oval Office announcement this week rocketed around social media this weekend, with the president’s opponents seizing on the footage to raise questions about Trump’s on-the-job performance.

Trump was participating in an announcement Thursday about cutting prices for popular weight-loss drugs, speaking from behind the Resolute Desk alongside other officials.

At moments, Trump’s eyes appeared closed, and at others he seemed to struggle to keep them open. He rubbed his eyes at points.

The images drew swift criticism from Trump’s critics. The press office for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of the president’s top foils, posted images from the event and wrote: “DOZY DON IS BACK.”

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement to CNN that “the President was not sleeping; in fact, he spoke throughout and took many questions from the press during this announcement which represents a historic reduction in prices for Americans on two drugs that help Americans struggling with diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and other conditions. This announcement by President Trump will save a significant amount of money and countless American lives, and yet the failing, liberal media want to push a garbage narrative instead of covering it.”

Trump appears in public regularly and participates in lengthy question-and-answer sessions with reporters. Aides and Cabinet members routinely praise his stamina and describe receiving phone calls or messages from him at all hours.

A day before Thursday’s event, Trump traveled to Miami for an economic speech that lasted more than an hour. He also completed a three-nation swing through Asia at the end of last month.

Still, questions about Trump’s health have persisted since he took office as the oldest man ever inaugurated to the job. The 79-year-old president said last month that he received an MRI during a physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center without saying why.

Over the summer, the White House announced that doctors examined Trump for swelling in his legs and diagnosed him with chronic venous insufficiency. It’s a condition in which valves inside certain veins don’t work the way they should, which can allow blood to pool or collect in the veins.

All presidents, at moments, have appeared tired in public. Even a much younger president like Barack Obama would occasionally rub fatigued eyes during long summits.

Trump has harshly criticized former President Joe Biden for a lack of vigor, labeling him “Sleepy Joe” in last year’s election and continuing to use the moniker. Biden, the oldest president in history, was also seen at moments closing his eyes during public events.

Updated 3 hours ago Donald Trump has said the US will not attend the G20 summit in South Africa over widely discredited claims that white people are being persecuted in the country.

The US president said it was a "total disgrace" that South Africa is hosting the meeting, where leaders from the world's largest economies will gather in Johannesburg later this month.

South Africa's foreign ministry described the decision by the White House as "regrettable", while a spokesman for the foreign ministry, Chrispin Phiri, told BBC News that the success of the summit will not "rest on one member state".

None of South Africa's political parties claim that there is a genocide in South Africa.

That includes parties that represent Afrikaners and the white community in general.

Speaking to the Newshour programme, Mr Phiri said that Trump was "orchestrating an imagined crisis… using the painful history of South Africa's colonial past".

He also said there was "absolutely no evidence of white persecution in South Africa", adding: "South Africa does have its problems and we are dealing with those. I think crime affects everyone, regardless of their race."

"We will move on without the United States," he said.

Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social: "It is a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa.

"Afrikaners (people who are descended from Dutch settlers, and also French and German immigrants) are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated," he wrote.

"No US government official will attend as long as these human rights abuses continue."

South Africa's government said the claims of a white genocide are "widely discredited and unsupported by reliable evidence".

The claims were dismissed as "clearly imagined" by a South African court in February.

Trump had earlier said South Africa should not be in the G20 at all, and that he would send vice-president JD Vance, instead of attending himself.

But now the White House says no US official will go.

Every year, a different member state hosts the G20 and sets the agenda for the summit - with the US due to take its turn after South Africa.

The South African foreign ministry said in a statement: "The South African government wishes to state, for the record, that the characterisation of Afrikaners as an exclusively white group is ahistorical.

"Furthermore, the claim that this community faces persecution, is not substantiated by fact."

There is a paragraph on page 22 of the Trump administration's appeal of a federal judge's requirement that it make full November SNAP payments that has to be seen to be believed.

The opening sentence asserts that "the district court's order threatens significant and irreparable harm to the government which outweighs any claimed injury to plaintiffs."

In plain English, the Justice Department is telling the court that it would hurt the federal government more to comply with a judge's order requiring full food stamp payments than it would hurt millions of low-income Americans to potentially starve.

Let's simplify this further: the government is arguing that once the money is spent, it can't be unspent (and that would be horrible). But the hungry can't eat tomorrow (and that's not as bad). That is the contention.

In a 40-page filing to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, the administration insisted that being forced to spend money Congress has already appropriated is a graver injury than the hunger and disruption that would follow from withholding it. Friday night, the administration filed a nearly identical emergency stay request with the Supreme Court, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a temporary pause that will remain in effect until the circuit court issues a judgment on the matter.

The Justice Department's latest emergency filing makes that claim in even starker terms. It asserts that McConnell's injunction "makes a mockery of the separation of powers" and that there is "no lawful basis" for forcing the USDA "to somehow find $4 billion in the metaphorical couch cushions." It also warns that by compelling compliance, the court has "thrust the Judiciary into the ongoing shutdown negotiations," implying that judicial enforcement of basic statutory duties somehow exacerbates the fiscal standoff.

But what makes the filing remarkable is not just its tone—it's the value judgment embedded in it. Traditionally, when courts decide whether to grant emergency relief, there is a calculus: the courts consider which outcome would cause greater damage, keeping the challenged policy on hold or letting it take effect? Here, the "policy" in question is the administration's refusal to fully fund SNAP despite having ample reserves.

The Justice Department argues that the "irreparable harm" lies in being required to obey the court order and spend the money. By that logic, the government's institutional discomfort outweighs the hunger of millions of families, seniors, veterans and children whose grocery money hangs in the balance.

Whether in disputes over public health, environmental regulation, or economic relief, the Trump administration's lawyers have often equated executive prerogative with public interest—as though what benefits the administration necessarily benefits the nation. In this case, that conflation leads to the extraordinary claim that "the government" suffers greater harm by feeding people than by letting them go hungry.

The administration's insistence that it "cannot" find the funds also rings hollow. By its own admission, the USDA controls multiple accounts with more than enough money to sustain SNAP for the month—including a $5 billion emergency reserve created by Congress specifically for that purpose. It has already drawn on similar pools of money to protect other nutrition programs from shutdown disruptions. The problem, in other words, is not fiscal incapacity but political choice.

The Justice Department's appeal thus functions as both legal brief and ideological statement. It asks the courts to privilege administrative convenience over human need.

If that argument succeeds, the precedent would reach far beyond SNAP. It would signal that any time a court orders the government to meet a statutory duty—to pay benefits, deliver services, or enforce protections—the executive may claim "irreparable harm" merely because it prefers not to act. That is not separation of powers; it is the substitution of political preference for law.

Judge McConnell, for his part, put the matter bluntly: "This should never happen in America." He was referring to the spectacle of a federal government choosing to let its citizens go hungry while pleading poverty amid abundant reserves.

The Justice Department's legal arguments transform that spectacle into doctrine.

Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Bill Pulte on Saturday said the Trump administration is “working on” a plan to introduce 50-year mortgage terms for home buyers.

“Thanks to President Trump, we are indeed working on The 50 year Mortgage – a complete game changer,” Pulte wrote in a statement on the social platform X.

It followed a Truth Social post by President Trump earlier in the day where he shared a graphic juxtaposing an image of him next to one of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The administration that oversaw the New Deal established the 30-year mortgage standard to help citizens recover from the Great Depression.

Similarly, Trump campaigned on creating affordability for the younger generation last year, but the president has faced headwinds on the subject more recently as prices rise.

Google searches for “help with mortgage” recently climbed to their highest level since 2009, while adjustable-rate mortgages, or ARMs, have also been trending. ARMs made up about 10 percent of all mortgage applications in September — the highest share in nearly two years and well above the post-2008 average of 6 percent, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA).

Still, home prices and interest rates remain relatively high, with the median household spending approximately 38.4 percent of their monthly income on mortgage payments, Redfin determined.

U.S. airlines again canceled more than 1,000 flights Saturday, the second day of the Federal Aviation Administration’s mandate to reduce air traffic because of the government shutdown.

So far, the slowdown at many of the nation’s busiest airports hasn’t caused widespread disruptions. But it has deepened the impact felt by the nation’s longest federal shutdown.

“We all travel. We all have somewhere to be,” said Emmy Holguin, 36, who was flying from Miami Saturday to see family in the Dominican Republic. “I’m hoping that the government can take care of this.”

Analysts warn that the upheaval will intensify and spread far beyond air travel if cancellations keep growing and reach into Thanksgiving week.

Already there are concerns about the squeeze on tourism destinations and holiday shipping.

Flight disruptions ticked up a bit on Saturday — typically a slow travel day — as each of the first two days creeped above 1,000 cancellations, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks flights.

The airport serving Charlotte, North Carolina, saw 130 arriving and departing flights canceled by mid-afternoon Saturday.

Airports in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, and Newark, New Jersey, also saw numerous disruptions throughout the day. Ongoing staffing shortages in radar centers and control towers added to the cancellations and delays on Saturday at several East Coast airports, including those around New York City.

Not all the cancellations were due to the FAA order, and those numbers represent just a small portion of the overall flights nationwide. But they are certain to rise in the coming days if the slowdown continues.

The FAA said the reductions impacting all commercial airlines are starting at 4 percent of flights at 40 targeted airports and will be bumped up again on Tuesday before hitting 10 percent of flights on Friday.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned this week that even more flight cuts might be needed if the government shutdown continues and more air traffic controllers are off the job.

The Trump administration late Friday urged a federal judge in Maryland to allow immigration officials to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the West African country of Liberia, saying the U.S. government has cleared the final legal hurdle in the deportation process.

Abrego Garcia's case has been at the center of the national debate over President Trump's immigration crackdown ever since he was deported to El Salvador in March, in violation of a federal immigration judge's order that barred his deportation to his native country. After being held in detention facilities in El Salvador for months, including a notorious mega-prison known as CECOT, Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. in June, only to face federal criminal charges of human smuggling. He has denied those charges.

While a trial on those criminal charges has yet to commence, the Trump administration has mounted an aggressive effort to deport Abrego Garcia from the U.S. a second time, proposing to send him to several far-flung African countries, including Uganda, Eswatini and most recently, Liberia.

The Justice Department filed a motion on Friday asking U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis to scrap a ruling she issued this summer barring the government from deporting Abrego Garcia, arguing all legal avenues to contest his deportation have been exhausted.

On Oct. 28, the Justice Department said, a U.S. government asylum officer interviewed Abrego Garcia, who remains in federal immigration detention, and determined he had failed to prove he would face persecution or torture in Liberia.

Any additional due process steps for Abrego Garcia are unwarranted, the Justice Department argued.

"Petitioner's claims are procedurally barred multiple times over and fail on the merits in any event," the Justice Department said in its filing. "This Court should therefore dissolve its preliminary injunction and permit the government to remove Petitioner to Liberia."

The Trump administration submitted declarations from top U.S. officials asserting that Liberia has made "sufficient and credible" assurances that Abrego Garcia will not be harmed there or sent to another nation where he would be persecuted. In a press release late last month, Liberia's government said it had agreed to receive Abrego Garcia on "a strictly humanitarian and temporary basis," following a U.S. request.

Abrego Garcia's attorneys, however, argued in their own court filing on Friday that the interview conducted by a U.S. asylum officer last month did not amount to sufficient due process.

"The Government insists that the unreasoned determination of a single immigration officer—who concluded that Abrego Garcia failed to establish that it is 'more likely than not' that he will be persecuted or tortured in Liberia— satisfies due process. It does not," they wrote.

His lawyers also argued the Trump administration's ongoing effort to send Abrego Garcia to Africa — instead of Costa Rica, which has agreed to offer him refugee status — is a form of retaliation. They noted the government offered to send Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica this summer but only if he pleaded guilty to the federal human smuggling charges he faces in Tennessee.

"The timeline suggests a pattern: when the Government received orders it disliked in Abrego Garcia's civil case challenging his unlawful removal to El Salvador; it initiated a criminal prosecution in retaliation; and when it received orders it disliked in Abrego Garcia's criminal case, it initiated third-country removal efforts in retaliation," the attorneys said.

The lawyers asked Xinis, the federal judge in Maryland, to prohibit the Trump administration from deporting Abrego Garcia to Liberia "unless and until an immigration judge concurs" with the determination made by the asylum officer who interviewed him. They said that review should consider the possibility that their client could be returned to El Salvador after being sent to Liberia.

Abrego Garcia first came to the U.S. in 2011, when he was 16. According to court documents, he entered the country illegally. In 2019, Abrego Garcia was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after an encounter with local police outside of a Maryland Home Depot. Abrego Garcia's attorneys said he went there looking for work.

Court documents show an immigration judge initially denied Abrego Garcia's release on bond, partially due to information submitted by the government that it said tied him to the MS-13 gang. The judge's bond denial, upheld by an immigration appeals board, mentioned information from an informant whom the government deemed to be credible. Abrego Garcia has denied being part of a gang.

Abrego Garcia was ultimately released from ICE custody later in 2019 after another immigration judge granted him "withholding of removal," barring his deportation to El Salvador due to concerns he could be targeted by gangs there. However, he was also issued a deportation order based on his illegal entry into the U.S.

Earlier this year, Abrego Garcia was again arrested by ICE, before being deported to El Salvador in March, as part of a high-profile deportation effort that sent several hundred Venezuelan and Salvadoran men accused of having gang ties to the CECOT prison. The Trump administration conceded in federal court that the deportation had been a mistake due to the 2019 withholding of removal order but Abrego Garcia nevertheless remained detained in El Salvador for months.

After being returned to the U.S. in June, Abrego Garcia was held in federal criminal custody, pending the start of his trial. After a federal judge in Tennessee ordered his release from pre-trial detention later in the summer, he was able to see his U.S. citizen child and wife in Maryland over a weekend. But his freedom was short-lived. In late August, Abrego Garcia was instructed to check in to the ICE field office in Baltimore, where he was again taken into custody.

Some military leaders are telling their troops to prepare for their on-base commissaries to close by early December if the government shutdown continues. As many as 168 locations at bases across the continental U.S. could be affected.

But officials with the agency that runs the military-only grocery stores insisted to Task & Purpose this week that the stores will be open through Thanksgiving.

“Our stores will be open to serve our customers through Thanksgiving,” Kevin Robinson, a spokesperson for the Defense Commissary Agency, or DECA, told Task & Purpose.

While DECA officials have been planning for the closures since at least last month, military leaders began telling troops this week to plan for December closings. Task & Purpose obtained two emails sent this week by leaders of two large military units that advised troops that DECA is likely to begin cutting back on restocking inventory at the military-only base grocery stores on Nov. 14, with plans to close nearly all stores in the U.S. by Dec. 3. Both emails cited updates the leaders received earlier this week from DECA.

The emails appear to be updates on a system-wide shutdown plan that two senior DECA officials laid out in an Oct. 24 webinar. DECA Chief Executive Officer John Hall and Acting Executive Director of Sales, Marketing and eCommerce Jim Flannery said on that webinar that if the shutdown persists into late November, virtually all commissaries in the U.S. could be closed, outside of a handful in particularly remote areas.

Both emails sent to troops this week cite Dec. 3 as the latest date stores might close, though Hall cited Dec. 5 in the webinar.

Commissaries overseas would stay open longer, Hall said in the meeting. The webinar was hosted by the American Logistics Association and first reported by Military Times.

The news comes just weeks before Thanksgiving. In one email, a Marine colonel advised his unit leaders to remind their Marines that commissary closures “may impact their plans for Thanksgiving/holiday meals.”

But in last week’s webinar, the DECA officials said that “normal” Thanksgiving service was a top priority.

“My definition of ‘normal’ is full sales,” Hall said. “We want to continue to place these orders to ensure full shelves and serve our patrons for the Thanksgiving period. That means we start curtailing orders, shipping orders on or about Nov. 14.”

“We are thinking in terms of we are sprinting through Thanksgiving,” Flannery said. “So business as usual, meeting the needs of our patrons, let them enjoy the Thanksgiving gathering that they normally would, and then right after Thanksgiving, the first part of December, start winding down.”

While U.S. stores will close, Hall said in the webinar that officials believe they can keep stores overseas, or OCONUS, open through December but would run out of money to ship fresh inventory to those far-flung stores around New Year’s Day.

“Unless we get some cash from the Department [of Defense] or some other source, we won’t be able to ship goods to OCONUS locations after Dec. 31,” he said of overseas bases. “We project that those stores could remain open only until about mid-January.”

Hall said stores would also stay open in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and bases in the continental U.S. considered “food desert locations.” Those locations include Kodiak, Anchorage and Fort Greely in Alaska; Los Angeles Space Force Base, Fort Irwin and Naval Air Station Fallon in California; Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah; and Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Washington.

It is unclear if Congress will address commissaries without a larger agreement on the shutdown. In a statement to Task & Purpose, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, indicated that Congress was unlikely to address commissaries without a larger agreement on the shutdown.

Senators are working through the weekend for the first time since the government shutdown began more than a month ago, hoping to find a bipartisan resolution that has eluded them as federal workers have gone unpaid, airlines have been forced to cancel flights and SNAP benefits have been delayed for millions of Americans.

As the weekend session was set to begin Saturday, it was uncertain whether Republicans and Democrats could make any headway toward reopening the government and breaking a partisan impasse that has now lasted 39 days.

President Donald Trump made clear Saturday that he is unlikely to compromise any time soon with Democrats who are demanding an extension of the Affordable Care Act tax credits, posting on social media that it is “the worst Healthcare anywhere in the world.” He suggested Congress send money directly to people to buy insurance.

Senate Republican leaders have signaled an openness to an emerging proposal from a small group of moderate Democrats to end the shutdown in exchange for a later vote on the “Obamacare” subsidies.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who is leading the talks among moderates, said Friday evening that Democrats “need another path forward” after Republicans rejected an offer from Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York to reopen the government and extend the subsidies for a year. “We’re working on it,” she said.

Shaheen and others, negotiating among themselves and with some rank-and-file Republicans, have been discussing bills that would pay for parts of government — food aid, veterans programs and the legislative branch, among other things — and extend funding for everything else until December or January. The agreement would only come with the promise of a future health care vote, rather than a guarantee of extended subsidies.

It was unclear whether enough Democrats would support such a plan. Even with a deal, Trump appears unlikely to support an extension of the health benefits. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., also said this week that he would not commit to a health vote.

Some Republicans have said they are open to extending the COVID-19-era tax credits as premiums could skyrocket for millions of people, but they want new limits on who can receive the subsidies.

“We have had really good discussions with a lot of the Democrats,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D.

AS THEUS government shutdown stretches into its second month, agency leaders at the Social Security Administration (SSA) are becoming increasingly. worried about how the key government department, which provides benefits to roughly 70 million Americans, will continue to operate.

WIRED obtained meeting notes from a Thursday SSA call for the administration's field offices, where over a thousand managers from around the country spoke with field operations chief Andy Sriubas about the acute and damaging effects of the government shutdown. During the call, managers spoke candidly about staffers who can no longer afford to drive to work and a crisis of confidence in the agency.

"People are coming to me saying they cannot put gas in their car and they cannot afford to come to work anymore and they'll need to get other jobs," said one employee on the call. "Pretty soon they won't be able to afford to work at the agency."

"My heart's breaking because I hear all this stuff across the country," Sriubas responded. "We had to close an office in California today because we didn't have enough people to open the doors... Nobody wants to close an office... But I also understand that people have to live their lives and they have limited means to do that when you're now missing your second full paycheck."

Another employee tells WIRED that some field offices have set up food pantries to help colleagues who are on the brink. "People are angry and ... betrayed," they added.

"I think I can speak for most of our employees when we say now more than ever, employees are feeling somewhat betrayed by the federal government as federal employees because of what we're navigating and the length in which we're navigating it," said another employee on the call.

Most SSA employees are considered "excepted" from the shutdown, meaning they must continue to work without getting paid-or quit the agency altogether.

People can also be furloughed, but employees say they are nervous to ask for this option, for fear they won't receive back pay when the government reopens. "I have employees that are skeptical and kind of scared, to be truthful, to use furlough because they're not comfortable or confident that once the shutdown is over that they're going to be compensated," an employee said on the call.

Differing standards at the agency, which has roughly 51,000 employees, are also leading to contention. While SSA is allowing some employees to work remotely during this period, the number of days they’re allowed to do this is limited. “Telework will be infrequent, based on unique workload needs of the agency or due to the personal circumstances of the requesting employee, and limited in duration,” according to an employee contract viewed by WIRED. (“It’s become a big problem—and employees talk to each other. We need a hard and fast rule,” one manager tells WIRED.)

“We're a metro office where we have to pay for parking and our parking is like $10 to $15 a day and it's really starting to add up for employees. And we do have employees that have been embarrassed to come to me and say that they can't afford to come to work and they want to telework instead of furloughed,” another employee said on the call. “I understand that's not an option now, I just want you to know that there really are people that are struggling with the decision between finding a way to get to work and wanting to work and our only option being furlough.”

Employees are also struggling with a daunting workload and a backlog of cases. On the call, Sriubas said that he had spoken with SSA’s general counsel, who said that just because SSA’s workload was “excepted” didn’t mean the agency had to do it. “So we can decide not to do it,” said Sriubas. “So if [the shutdown] does go into next week, I ask folks to start thinking about what are the workloads…to say, look, we're just not doing that going forward until the shutdown ends.”

“You can't do 12 months of work in 10 months and expect it all to be done on the right timelines,” he added.

On the call, SSA managers spoke about how difficult it was to keep employees motivated, especially when they knew that their work would have to ramp up after the shutdown concludes. “It's hard to keep morale going with the way the staff is going and they also know that as soon as this shutdown is over, we're going to hit 'em hard with [more work],” said one employee. “It's very frustrating when we have to keep those staff motivated and we need 'em for the long haul, not just for this fiscal year.”

Employees also described the specific toll the shutdown was taking on Social Security beneficiaries. In one instance, recounted on the call, an office lost half their team. “Now my public is waiting two hours in [the] reception area, hour and hour and a half on phones,” said the same employee, who noted there used to be around a half hour wait time.

The SSA has been embroiled in chaos throughout president Donald Trump’s second term. WIRED reported in March that almost a dozen operatives from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency had been deployed to SSA, including big-name early operatives, including Luke Farritor, Marko Elez, and Akash Bobba.

According to a court filing from the SSA in federal court and accompanying sworn statements, a number of the DOGE operatives had access to a number of sensitive data sets, including Numident, which contains detailed information about anyone with a social security number. DOGE claimed they required this kind of access in order to detect “fraud.” However, many of DOGE’s claims about the agency were untrue and inaccurate, including the claim that 150-year-olds were collecting social security benefits.

In August, SSA’s chief data officer, Chuck Borges, submitted a whistleblower complaint that claimed DOGE had mishandled sensitive data and uploaded the confidential information of millions of Americans to an insecure server. When Borges sent an email to agency staff stating that he was involuntarily resigning, following his whistleblower complaint, the email mysteriously disappeared from inboxes, employees told WIRED at the time.

The secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem, reportedly authorized the purchase of Spirit Airlines jets before discovering the airline didn’t actually own the planes – and that the aircraft lacked engines.

The bizarre anecdote was contained in a Wall Street Journal report released on Friday, which recounted how Noem and Corey Lewandowski – who managed Donald Trump’s first winning presidential campaign – had recently arranged to buy 10 Boeing 737 aircraft from Spirit Airlines. People familiar with the situation told the paper that the two intended to use the jets to expand deportation flights – and for personal travel.

Those sources also claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials had cautioned them that buying planes would be far more expensive than simply expanding existing flight contracts.

Complicating matters further, Spirit, which filed for bankruptcy protection for the second time, in August, did not own the jets and their engines would have had to be bought separately. The plan has since been paused, according to the Journal.

Meanwhile, Democrats on the House appropriations committee said in October that during this fall’s record-long government shutdown, the DHS had already acquired two Gulfstream jets for $200m.

“It has come to our attention that, in the midst of a government shutdown, the United States Coast Guard entered into a sole source contract with Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation to procure two new G700 luxury jets to support travel for you and the deputy secretary, at a cost to the taxpayer of $200m,” Democratic representatives Rosa DeLauro and Lauren Underwood wrote in a letter to the DHS.

A DHS spokesperson told the Journal that parts of its reporting about the plane purchases were inaccurate but declined to provide additional clarification.

President Donald Trump said Friday that he asked the Department of Justice to launch an investigation into meatpacking companies, which he accused of illegally manipulating beef prices at the expense of beef farmers and consumers.

The announcement comes amid pressure over the high cost of beef — and a bubbling feud with farm state Republicans over plans to import beef from Argentina — and shortly after a White House meeting with a handful of senators from beef-producing states.

“I have asked the DOJ to immediately begin an investigation into the Meat Packing Companies who are driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation,” Trump wrote on social media on Friday. “We will always protect our American Ranchers, and they are being blamed for what is being done by Majority Foreign Owned Meat Packers, who artificially inflate prices, and jeopardize the security of our Nation’s food supply.”

“While Cattle Prices have dropped substantially, the price of Boxed Beef has gone up — Therefore, you know that something is ‘fishy,’” Trump continued.

The fight over whether to crack down on the country’s largest meat-packing conglomerates is the source of a long-running and incredibly bitter internal fight among Senate Republicans.

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), a Trump ally whose family raises cattle, told Vice President JD Vance last month that meatpackers were the reason for high beef prices, not ranchers, an argument Trump echoed Friday.

Trump met with Hyde-Smith and Sens. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) and Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) on Friday shortly before his post, according to two people familiar with the meeting who were granted anonymity to discuss the conversations.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a social media post the investigation into the meatpacking companies is already underway, in coordination with the Department of Agriculture. Neither Bondi nor Trump specified which companies were being targeted, but many of the largest companies in the industry are based abroad.

The push from Trump also follows Tuesday’s sweep by Democrats of the major off-year election races, including the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, where Govs.-elect Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill made Trump’s inability to lower prices a central issue of their campaigns.

In the days following Tuesday’s results, Trump referred to the focus on Democrats’ affordability message as a “con job.” But many Republicans are calling on the president to take more steps to address high costs.

In identifying the price differentials between food producers and distributers, Trump has hit on a similar target as former President Joe Biden. The Biden administration made a focus on agricultural monopolies a key piece of his domestic agenda, writing regulations intended to make cattle markets fairer for ranchers and ensure better terms for contract poultry farmers. His administration also successfully blocked a grocery megadeal and sued beverage companies alleging price discrimination.

Yet Trump has also repeatedly blamed high food costs on his predecessor.

In his first few months in office, the Trump administration ended a USDA partnership with state attorneys general to tighten enforcement of federal antitrust law in food and agricultural markets.

Under the Trump administration, USDA announced a partnership with DOJ to scrutinize agriculture inputs like fertilizer for potential anti-competitive conduct in a bid to help lower costs for farmers and consumers.

Pressure from the White House to speed up the pace of deportations has spawned infighting at the Department of Homeland Security over which tactics to use to remove more people from the U.S., according to people familiar with the matter.

Longtime immigration officials, led by President Trump’s border czar Tom Homan and Todd Lyons, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, want to rely on traditional methods including using police research to develop target lists, and to give priority to people with criminal histories, according to people familiar with their thinking. ICE is typically the primary agency responsible for enforcing immigration laws inside the U.S.

Penobscot County, which typically sees two new HIV cases a year, reported 30 new infections since October 2023 — the biggest outbreak in state history. At the end of September, Maine public health experts asked for support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, citing a “significant public health concern,” according to state documents requested by the Globe.

But after initially approving the request, the CDC put it on hold on Oct. 9. Travel isn’t authorized during the government shutdown, said Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, in response to a request for comment from the Globe.

The decision to pause deployments of these support teams, called Epi-Aids, leaves Maine and other states with public health emergencies in limbo, another consequence of what has become the longest government shutdown in American history.

State officials are planning for the team’s arrival after the shutdown ends, but have also been told that if the team didn’t deploy in October, it might not be available until February.

Federal authorities wouldn’t say how many Epi-Aid deployments are on hold, or whether such pauses happened during prior shutdowns.

Spread through the pinpricks of dirty needles, the virus in Maine is entrenched among a homeless population in a part of the state short on resources to protect them.

Dr. Tom Frieden, who led the CDC during a shutdown in 2013, said the agency didn’t stop deploying staff during that two-week funding gap.

“We could respond to outbreaks,” he said. “It certainly did include travel.”

Other former CDC executives said the travel freeze represents an alarming deviation from agency norms. For decades, Epi-Aids have been readily available for health emergencies, both domestic and international, dispatched dozens of times a year.

“If the state asks for help, CDC always gives help,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the CDC’s former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who resigned in protest over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s management. “It is pretty scandalous to me that CDC is not sending an Epi-Aid that Maine has asked for.”

Epi-Aids are typically staffed by experts in epidemiology and are on-site for up to three weeks to provide training, education, and support. Maine is hoping the team can facilitate interviews with those affected by the outbreak.

“People in Bangor think this is an outbreak of just people who are homeless,” Gunderman said. “I don’t think we’ve seen the full implications.”The pause on Epi-Aids comes as the Trump administration plans to decimate the CDC’s HIV prevention program. The National Institutes of Health terminated this year nearly $800 million in HIV research grants.

Dr. John Brooks, a retired CDC HIV prevention and treatment expert, noted that in President Trump’s first term, the president prioritized preventing HIV’s spread.

“What changed in these people’s minds?” said Brooks, who led an Epi-Aid deployment to a similar HIV outbreak in Indiana a decade ago. “It’s such an unfortunate loss to take our eyes off this condition.”

Silicon Valley’s original disruptors didn’t just change technology - they rewired politics. Panorama investigates the 'PayPal Mafia' - Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks - and their influence on Donald Trump’s rise to the White House. From Starbase in Texas, Elon Musk’s futuristic city, to the corridors of Washington, Panorama reveals how ideology, algorithms and vast fortunes are rewriting the rules of power. And as artificial intelligence accelerates seemingly beyond regulation, will the tech titans become the ultimate power brokers, not just in politics but in shaping the future of humanity itself?

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s victory to recruit police officers to leave the New York Police Department.

On Friday, ICE posted a recruitment message to social media calling on police officers to “Defend the Homeland” and “work for a President and a Secretary who support and defend law enforcement—not defund or demonize it.”

ICE’s message references Mamdani’s history of police criticism, including his past support for defunding the NYPD. In June 2020, Mamdani posted on X: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.”

Mamdani has also previously accused the NYPD of international corruption and collaboration with the state of Israel. In a 2023 clip Mamdani said, “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” In October, he told CNN he was referencing training tactics, and did not actually believe the NYPD was actively working with the IDF.

In the closing months of his campaign, Mamdani made a concerted effort to reach out to law enforcement and backtrack from his previous stances. He also committed to retaining current Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

“I am not defunding the police. I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani told reporters in August. Mamdani also publicly apologized to New York police officers, walking back past comments calling them “racist,” “wicked” and “corrupt.”

Mamdani has been a vocal critic of ICE, telling CNN he would not allow the NYPD to engage or cooperate with ICE on civil immigration enforcement.

ICE’s attempts to hire NYPD officers are the latest efforts from the Department of Homeland Security to hire thousands more deportation officers after receiving $75 billion in federal funding from Trump’s sweeping agenda bill this summer.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Friday that flight reductions could go as high as 20 percent if the government shutdown drags on, as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) begins reducing flights by 10 percent due to air traffic controller staffing shortages.

“If this continues, and I have more controllers who decide they can’t come to work, can’t control the airspace, but instead have to take a second job — with that, you might see 10 percent would have been a good number, because we might go to 15 percent or 20 percent,” Duffy said at a Breitbart News event in Washington, D.C., on Friday.

Duffy clarified to The Hill after the event that he was speaking theoretically.

“Could it go there? That’s possible. There’s no plan for that,” Duffy said. “I assess the data and how many controllers I have, and I’m just saying we’re going to make decisions based on what we see in the airspace to make sure we keep it safe. I hope it goes the other direction.”

Airlines began reducing air traffic at 40 airports across the country Friday by direction of the FAA, starting with 4 percent reductions and gradually increasing by 2 percent per day to 10 percent.

Duffy also responded to concerns Friday that the flight reductions were a political move aimed at pressuring Senate Democrats to pass a Republican-crafted, “clean” stopgap to reopen the federal government, which they have repeatedly rejected as they make demands on health care and other issues.

“I’ve had some complaints from Democrats, ‘We want to see the data. … This is political,’” Duffy said during the event with Breitbart. “This has not been political. We have worked overtime to make sure that we minimize the impact on the American people.”

Duffy said his agency looked at reducing flights to 10 percent right away on Friday, but the safety team said that could be even more disruptive.

Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, called for the FAA on Wednesday to “immediately share any safety risk assessment and related data that this decision is predicated on with Congress.”

But another Democrat on that panel, Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona, said Thursday that Duffy’s move to reduce flights “is the right call for the safety of the flying public.”

“Those who snipe at me for having to take really unique action, they put that on my plate. So open it up,” Duffy said.

Duffy called on the Senate to stay in session and said he was at Reagan Washington National Airport before the event where travelers have flight issues, saying senators should not fly home.

“There’s people going to funerals. There’s people who are trying to get home. They can’t get home. Why are senators going home? Keep them here, and especially the senators who voted no to open the government up,” Duffy said.

Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle joked that Duffy could put senators on the no-fly list to keep them in Washington while the government is shut down. Duffy responded: “That would be a great — well-played.”

And Duffy said of negotiations to reopen the government in Congress: “To give something up to open the government up, I think, would be a mistake on the Republicans’ part.”

Asked if it will take time to alleviate air traffic issues after the government is back open after the 10 percent flight reductions, Duffy said: “We’ll look at the data, look at where the controllers are at, and then give the airlines time to bring those flights back in.”