Congress braces for DHS shutdown as funding bill negotiations stall
Congress is facing a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) if doesn’t pass a full year funding bill by Friday.
Lawmakers passed a stopgap funding bill to keep the department running until 13 February, while Democrats negotiate with GOP colleagues and the White House over further guardrails for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), amid the ongoing use of force by officers – which has resulted in the fatal shootings of two American citizens in Minneapolis.
Democrats argue that federal immigration enforcement officers are conducting indiscriminate raids, brutalizing people, and hiding their identities in the process. They have issued list of demands which include the need for judicial warrants, and for agents to not wear masks. Republicans, by and large, have pushed back – saying these are non-starters. Instead they have floated another short-term spending bill to extend negotiations in the midst of another policy impasse.
Democrats, however, seem deeply reluctant for another stopgap, and would favor a shutdown to make their points clear.
Key events
Michelle R Smith
Three members of Congress say US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr lied during his Senate confirmation hearings in response to newly revealed emails that undermine his testimony that a trip he took to Samoa ahead of a deadly measles outbreak had “nothing to do with vaccines”.
The governor of Hawaii, a medical doctor who responded to the crisis, also spoke out – saying that the disclosure of the emails by the Guardian and the Associated Press show Kennedy misled the Senate and that he should step down.
Kennedy, a lawyer and longtime anti-vaccine activist before his appointment as health secretary, was asked about the trip several times during two days of confirmation hearings last year. He repeatedly denied that his reason for going there in June 2019 had anything to do with vaccines. But the records show staff at the US embassy and the United Nations wrote emails shortly before Kennedy’s visit saying he was visiting because of his concerns about vaccine safety.
Samoan officials later said Kennedy’s trip bolstered the credibility of anti-vaccine activists ahead of the measles outbreak that sickened thousands and killed 83 people, mostly children under age five.
The new reporting comes after a year in which Kennedy has used his power as health secretary to remake federal vaccine recommendations and policies to align with his anti-vaccine views and to sow doubts about vaccine safety. Meanwhile, measles has gained a foothold in communities around the United States.
Epstein survivors urged lawmakers to treat Maxwell’s testimony with ‘the utmost skepticism’ and to show her no leniency
In a letter sent to the House oversight committee before Ghislaine Maxwell’s deposition, a group of Jeffrey Epstein survivors, including several Jane Does and family members of the late Virginia Giuffre, urged lawmakers to be skeptical of any information she provided (of course, as we’ve been reporting she ended up providing none).
We urge the Committee to approach Ms. Maxwell’s testimony with the utmost skepticism, to rigorously scrutinize any claims she makes, and to ensure that this process does not become another vehicle through which survivors are harmed or silenced. Truth, accountability, and transparency must be the priority — not the rehabilitation of a convicted trafficker’s narrative.
In the letter, the group criticized Maxwell’s refusal to identify “the many powerful men” involved in Epstein’s trafficking network and her refusal to “meaningfully cooperate” with law enforcement. They also slammed the decision to transfer Maxwell to a low-security prison last year, a move they said “appears to be preferential treatment”.
Ms Maxwell was not a peripheral figure. She was a central and indispensable architect of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise. Despite this, she has refused to meaningfully cooperate with law enforcement or provide credible, complete information about the scope of the trafficking network.
They added:
Any attempt to grant Ghislaine Maxwell leniency, whether through sentencing relief, special treatment or credibility afforded to her testimony, would be catastrophic for survivors.
Maxwell’s lawyer says she is ‘prepared to speak honestly if granted clemency’
In a social media post earlier, Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyer David Oscar Markus said he had advised her to plead the fifth during her deposition today and that she was “prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump”.
“Only she can provide the complete account. Some may not like what they hear, but the truth matters,” Markus said. “For example, both President Trump and President Clinton are innocent of any wrongdoing. Ms Maxwell alone can explain why, and the public is entitled to that explanation.”
The attorney said he had delivered that statement to the House oversight committee, and told members that his client “would very much like to answer your questions” but she “must remain silent because she has a habeas petition currently pending that demonstrates that her conviction rests on a fundamentally unfair trial”.
Democrats have condemned Maxwell invoking her right to silence and refusal to answer any questions. California Democrat Ro Khanna posted on X:
Here is my conclusion after sitting through Maxwell’s deposition with her refusing to answer a single question about the men who raped underage girls, saying she would only do so for clemency. She must immediately be sent back to the maximum security prison where she belongs.
Representative Suhas Subramanyam, of Virginia, said:
She is campaigning over and over again to get that pardon from President Trump, and this president has not ruled it out. And so that is why she is continuing to not cooperate with our investigation.
And the BBC reported New Mexico Democrat Melanie Stansbury as saying:
This was an effort to essentially try to secure her pardon by keeping her mouth shut, and we will not allow this silence to stand.
‘Who is she protecting?’ Garcia demands answers to Ghislaine Maxwell’s ‘cover-up’ after she invokes fifth amendment during committee deposition
Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight comittee, issued a sharp rebuke following Ghislaine Maxwell’s virtual deposition earlier today.
Maxwell, a convicted co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein, invoked the fifth amendment and “no questions and provided no information about the men who raped and trafficked women and girls”, according to Garcia.
“After months of defying our subpoena, Ghislaine Maxwell finally appeared before the Oversight Committee and said nothing,” he added in a statement.
“Who is she protecting? And we need to know why she’s been given special treatment at a low security prison by the Trump Administration. We are going to end this White House cover-up.”
Dharna Noor
Bad Bunny’s treatment of Puerto Rico’s grid crisis in his Super Bowl performance has sparked social media conversation from scholars.
Toward the end of his performance, Bad Bunny performed his song “El Apagón,” which translates to “blackout.” Dancers playing workers hung from electric poles as the singer lambasted the energy instability facing Puerto Rico.
“The power lines moment was kinda extraordinary,” historian Adam Tooze said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
In 2016, a controversial Obama-era law created an oversight board to manage Puerto Rico’s longstanding debt crisis, which critics said infringed on the island’s economic autonomy. The board recommended that the island’s publicly owned electric grid be privatized, sparking fury from opponents.
The following year, the longest blackout in US history began in Puerto Rico in the wake of the deadly Hurricane Maria. Some residents, left without electricity for almost a year, were forced to learn electrical skills themselves, climbing up power lines in an attempt to rig up homemade solutions to the outage.
After the harrowing outage, the island’s then-governor announced he would indeed privatize the grid, selling it to Canadian company Luma Energy. Puerto Ricans were promised their energy woes were behind them, but more than one million were affected by power outages just days later, and blackouts have remained a persistent issue.
“Maldita sea, otro apagón,” Bad Bunny sang in “El Apagón” – “Damn, another blackout.”
A staunch opponent of grid privatization, the artist in 2024 spent hundreds of thousands on billboards criticizing Puerto Rico’s New Progressive Party for corruption and its links to Luma Energy.
Historian Greg Grandin called Bad Bunny “our social democratic moment’s answer to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s [neoliberal] Hamilton,” noting that Miranda, the composer, supported Promesa, though he later expressed opposition to harsh austerity measures implemented by the board.
Disgraced former congressman, George Santos, has also weighed in on Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance.
“I expected a little more energy and sassiness from Bad Bunny,” he wrote on X. “Lady Gaga was out of no where or simply the token white girl?”
A reminder that Santos, a Republican, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison after he pleaded guilty to identity theft and wire fraud. However, Donald Trump commuted Santos’s sentence last year.
“I speak fluent Spanish and I still can’t decipher what Bad Bunny says when he ‘sings’… lol but it does make you at least want to move your body and dance lol,” Santos added, in a series of comments about the half-time show watched by millions.
Richard Luscombe
Tom Homan – the Trump administration’s “border czar” sent to Minnesota in January after federal agents fatally shot two US citizen protesters – warned last year that the government’s aggressive, widespread approach to immigration enforcement would cost it public support.
Homan made the observation in an interview with NBC in June for the forthcoming book Undue Process, by the network’s homeland security correspondent, analyzing the immigration policy of mass deportation that Donald Trump has pursued during his second presidency.
“I think the vast majority of the American people think criminal illegal aliens need to leave,” Homan told author Julia Ainsley, reported by NBC News on Monday. “And if we stick to that prioritization, I think we keep the faith of the American people.
“And I think the more we do that, the more the American people will support what President Trump’s doing. We got to do it and we’ve got to do it in a humane manner.”
Instead, the homeland security department (DHS) has rounded up hundreds of thousands of people, including US citizens, in an aggressive and often violent manner, prompting protests in numerous cities and punctuated by the shooting deaths in Minneapolis in January of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by immigration officers.
And figures released on Monday, reported by CBS, reveal that less than 14% of almost 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the first year of Trump’s second presidency had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses – discrediting the administration’s often repeated insistence it was targeting only “the worst of the worst”.
Current and former Trump officials echoed the president’s criticisim of Bad Bunny’s widely acclaimed Super Bowl performance.
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division at the Department of Justice, wrote: “My mother: ‘who is this Bad Bunny?’ Don’t worry mom, we aren’t watching him.”
Podcast host Dan Bongino, who served for a short period as the deputy director of the FBI, wrote “Kid Rock > Sad Bunny” in reference to Turning Point USA’s counter programming during the half-time show.
Meanwhile, conservative activist Laura Loomer, agreed with Trump’s assessment of the performance, but went further. “Not a single white person or English translation at the Super Bowl,” she wrote. “This isn’t White enough for me. Cant even watch a Super Bowl anymore because immigrants have literally ruined everything.”
Miranda Bryant
US senator Lisa Murkowski said “it hurts my heart” that the trust between Greenland and the US, built up since the second world war, has been broken by “just a few sentences and words”. This comes after Donald Trump’s insistence that the US should acquire the autonomous territory, against the will of its people, Denmark, and the rest of Nato.
Addressing Greenlandic people, the senator for Alaska appeared at a press conference alongside three other lawmakers who made the visit – Independent senator Angus King of Maine, and Democratic senators Gary Peters of Michigan, and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire.
Speaking in Nuuk, the delegation appeared alongside Pipaluk Lynge and Erik Jensen, members of Greenland’s foreign and security policy committee, and the actor Viggo Mortensen, a vocal Donald Trump critic.
The visit, which saw them go to the US space base in Pituffik, meet with Greenlandic politicians and a helicopter tour of the Greenland ice sheet, comes after a US senatorial delegation visited Copenhagen last month.
“To the citizens of Greenland, it hurts my heart to know how much anxiety and worry you feel in these times of uncertainty,” Murkowski added. “In just a few sentences and words, the trust that has been built since the second world war has been eroded and degraded.”
The Republican senator added:
I want to remind you that regardless of what our president says, we have a big role in Congress. And I believe there is a common interest that we must work together on, and it begins and ends with respect and dialogue.
Congress braces for DHS shutdown as funding bill negotiations stall
Congress is facing a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) if doesn’t pass a full year funding bill by Friday.
Lawmakers passed a stopgap funding bill to keep the department running until 13 February, while Democrats negotiate with GOP colleagues and the White House over further guardrails for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), amid the ongoing use of force by officers – which has resulted in the fatal shootings of two American citizens in Minneapolis.
Democrats argue that federal immigration enforcement officers are conducting indiscriminate raids, brutalizing people, and hiding their identities in the process. They have issued list of demands which include the need for judicial warrants, and for agents to not wear masks. Republicans, by and large, have pushed back – saying these are non-starters. Instead they have floated another short-term spending bill to extend negotiations in the midst of another policy impasse.
Democrats, however, seem deeply reluctant for another stopgap, and would favor a shutdown to make their points clear.
