Key events
President Donald Trump’s administration is faltering in its aggressive pursuit of the death penalty as it revisits cases in which predecessors explicitly decided against seeking capital punishment, AP reports.
Since taking office in February, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has authorized prosecutors to seek the death penalty against 19 people, including nine defendants in cases in which president Joe Biden’s administration had sought lesser sentences.
But judges have blocked those reversal attempts for all but two defendants, most recently on Monday in a pair of cases in the US Virgin Islands, showing the limits of the Trump administration’s power to undo decisions in cases already well underway.
In pursuing capital punishment, the Justice Department is seeking to follow through on a Trump campaign promise to resume federal executions after they were halted by Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The Republican president’s Justice Department has accused the previous Democratic administration of supplanting “the will of the people with their own personal beliefs” in failing to seek death sentences in many cases involving horrific crimes.
Detailed opinions haven’t been issued in the most recent two cases, which involve a man accused of killing a police officer in 2022 and two men accused of armed robbery and murder in 2018. But other judges who have rejected reversal attempts on constitutional and procedural grounds were blunt in their assessment of the Trump administration’s approach.
“The government has proceeded hastily in this case, and in doing so has leapfrogged important constitutional and statutory rights,” Trump appointee US judge Stephanie Gallagher in Maryland wrote in June, striking the notice of intent to seek the death penalty against three alleged MS-13 gang members accused of killing two teenage girls in 2020. “That is unacceptable.”
Government workers are ‘canary in coalmine’ for Trump bid to gut union rights, leaders warn
Michael Sainato
The Trump administration has unilaterally stripped hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their union contracts after a federal appeals court overruled an injunction which halted the plans. It is just getting started, according to the White House.
An executive order issued in March sought to cancel all collective bargaining agreements for most federal employees, citing national security concerns – and remove collective bargaining rights from more than a million workers.
While unions including the American Federation of Government Employees launched legal action as they challenged the move, obtaining an injunction, this was in effect overruled earlier this month.
Union contracts at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture have since been terminated. An estimated 400,000 have been affected, about 2.6% of unionized workers in the US.
“I think that what this administration is doing is trying us as a test bed. If they are successful, I do believe that they’ll be coming after every labor organization in the US,” Everett Kelley, president of the AFGE, the largest federal labor union in the US, told the Guardian. “This is a fight for the very democracy of this country. This is a fight for every worker in America.
“If Trump is successful in dismantling AFGE, there’s nothing to stop him from coming after every labor organization in the country, and we believe he will.”
George Chidi
The US vice-president, JD Vance, previewed in Georgia on Thursday the lines of attack candidates will use to defend the president’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act in the midterms next year, calling it “the biggest tax cut for families that this country has ever seen”.
Vance touted an increase in the child tax credit, the elimination of taxes on overtime and on tips in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act while speaking in a warehouse for ATLA Refrigeration in Peachtree City, Georgia.
Vance did not mention that only the first $25,000 of tips will be tax free and will require itemization to claim, something few service workers do because the standard deduction usually provides a larger benefit. Eliminating overtime taxes also applies to the first $12,500 of a filer’s overtime income, phasing out at $150,000 of income. The increase in the child tax credit is $200 a child under 17 to $2,200, which will now be indexed to inflation.
The event also served as a preview of the attacks Jon Ossof, the Georgia Democratic senator, will face in the bruising swing state battle to come next year.
The White House paired Vance’s appearance with an information blitz on the “working families” tax cut. Ossoff would come to regret voting against the bill, Vance said.
“In about a year, you are not going to be able to turn on the television without Senator John Ossoff pretending that he supported the working families tax cut, when in reality he voted against them,” Vance said.
California voters will decide in November whether to approve a redrawn congressional map designed to help Democrats win five more US House seats next year, after Texas Republicans advanced their own redrawn map to pad their House majority by the same number of seats at president Donald Trump’s urging.
California lawmakers voted mostly along party lines Thursday to approve legislation calling for the special election. Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, who has led the campaign in favor of the map, then quickly signed it – the latest step in a tit-for-tat gerrymandering battle, AP reported.
“This is not something six weeks ago that I ever imagined that I’d be doing,” Newsom said at a press conference, pledging a campaign for the measure that would reach out to Democrats, Republicans and independent voters. “This is a reaction to an assault on our democracy in Texas.”
Republicans, who have filed a lawsuit and called for a federal investigation into the plan, promised to fight the measure at the ballot box as well.
California Assemblyman James Gallagher, the Republican minority leader, said Trump was “wrong” to push for new Republican seats elsewhere, contending the president was just responding to Democratic gerrymandering in other states. But he warned that Newsom’s approach, which the governor has dubbed “fight fire with fire,” was dangerous.
“You move forward fighting fire with fire and what happens?” Gallagher asked. “You burn it all down.”
Texas’ redrawn maps still need a final vote in the Republican-controlled state Senate, which advanced the plan out of a committee Thursday but did not bring the measure to the floor. The Senate was scheduled to meet again Friday.
Environmental group hails ‘landmark victory’ after Alligator Alcatraz closure ruling
Environmental groups have welcomed the ordered closure of the Trump administration’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail within 60 days.
In her 82-page order, published in the US district court’s southern district of Florida on Friday, judge Kathleen Williams determined the facility was causing severe and irreparable damage to the fragile Florida Everglades.
The shock ruling by district court judge Kathleen Williams builds on a temporary restraining order she issued two weeks ago halting further construction work at the remote tented camp, which has attracted waves of criticism for harsh conditions, abuse of detainees and denial of due process as they await deportation.
“This is a landmark victory for the Everglades and countless Americans who believe this imperilled wilderness should be protected, not exploited,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, which mounted the legal challenge.
“It sends a clear message that environmental laws must be respected by leaders at the highest levels of our government – and there are consequences for ignoring them”.
Judge Williams also ruled that no more detainees were to be brought to the facility while it was being wound down.
She also noted that a plan to develop the site on which the jail was built into a massive tourist airport was rejected in the 1960s because of the harm it would have caused the the land and delicate ecosystem.
“Since that time, every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades,” she wrote.
“This order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”
No further construction at the site can take place, she ruled, and there must be no further increase in the number of detainees currently held there, estimated to be about 700. After the 60-day period, all construction materials, fencing, generators and fixtures that made the site a detention camp must be removed.
Read my colleague Richard Luscombe’s latest report here:
Trump administration accused of wanting to ‘revoke visas based on speech, not conduct’
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that the Trump administration has been accused of wanting to “proactively conduct reviews of social media posts and revoke visas based not on conduct but speech”.
It comes as the state department said it was reviewing the records of more than 55 million US visa holders for potential revocation or deportable violations of immigration rules, in a significant expansion of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
David J Bier, the director of immigration policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in DC, told the Washington Post:
I doubt that’s feasible for everyone, but I suspect that these reviews will be done in a discriminatory manner targeting immigrants with certain backgrounds and in certain visa categories or specific people they want an excuse to revoke.
In a move first reported by the Associated Press, the state department said that all of the foreigners who currently hold valid US visas are subject to “continuous vetting” for any indication that they could be ineligible for the document, including those already admitted into the country.
Should such evidence come to light, the visa would be revoked and, if the visa holder were in the United States, they would be subject to deportation.
“We are gathering more information than ever,” a senior state department official told the Washington Post, admitting it was likely that social media vetting would add more time to the review process.
It follows an announcement by the Trump administration on Tuesday that it will look for “anti-American” views, including on social media, when assessing the applications of people wanting to live in the United States.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which handles requests to stay in the US or become a citizen, said it would expand vetting of the social media postings of applicants and that “reviews for anti-American activity will be added to that vetting”.
Read our latest report here:
In other developments:
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California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a law to hold a special election in November in which voters will be asked to approve a new congressional map, tilted in favor of Democrats, for the 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections, if Texas goes ahead with a plan to do the same for Republicans.
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Donald Trump ventured from the White House in his motorcade through the not all that mean streets of Washington DC to deliver pizza and hamburgers to law enforcement officers and National Guard troops, and regale them with his plans to upgrade the grass in the district to make it look more like one of his golf courses. “I know more about grass than any human being I think anywhere in the world”, the commander-in-chief told the officers.
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A federal judge ruled that Trump’s former lawyer and campaign surrogate, Alina Habba, has been unlawfully serving as the the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey.
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A New York state appeals court tossed out a half-billion-dollar penalty that Trump had been ordered to pay after a judge found the president fraudulently overstated the value of his properties and other assets to bolster his family business. Despite the president falsely claiming the ruling to be a “total victory”, the five-judge panel let the lower court’s fraud verdict stand, which paves the way for New York attorney general Letitia James to appeal the decision to the state’s highest court.
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The Trump administration ratcheted up pressure on the Federal Reserve to remove governor Lisa Cook, after the economist declared she had “no intention of being bullied” into stepping down.
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