Free Republic

The Trump administration has abruptly shifted the focus of its mass deportation campaign, telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to largely pause raids and arrests in the agricultural industry, hotels and restaurants, according to an internal email and three U.S. officials with knowledge of the guidance. The decision suggested that the scale of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign — an issue that is at the heart of his presidency — is hurting industries and constituencies that he does not want to lose. The new guidance comes after protests in Los Angeles against the Trump administration’s immigration raids, including at farms...

The Trump administration on Monday repeatedly stonewalled a federal judge seeking answers about whether the government had violated his order barring the deportation of more than 200 noncitizens without due process, escalating a conflict that threatened to become a constitutional crisis. At a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, a Justice Department lawyer refused to answer any detailed questions about the deportation flights to El Salvador that took place over the weekend, arguing that President Trump had broad authority to remove the immigrants from the United States under an obscure wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act. The...

The president’s Day 1 actions included directives that fly in the face of legal limits on involving the military in domestic operations and the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.President Trump’s flurry of executive actions on immigration in the hours after taking office was the leading edge of an effort to roll back four years of policies put in place by the Biden administration and reimpose an agenda that would fundamentally upend the United States’ global role as a sanctuary for refugees and immigrants. In a series of orders he signed on Monday evening, Mr. Trump moved to seal the nation’s...

President-elect Donald J. Trump has promised to unravel President Biden’s major legislation when he takes office next month, but Mr. Biden is hoping to salvage his most prized policies with help from an unlikely source: Republicans.With just weeks left in office, Mr. Biden and his aides have emphasized that his signature economic legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, overwhelmingly benefits Republican districts, in the hopes that Mr. Trump would face blowback from his own party if he repealed it.The administration is also racing to award hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and finalize environmental regulations to lock in Mr. Biden’s...

When a draft of a blockbuster Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade leaked in 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris met with Ron Klain, then the White House chief of staff, in her West Wing office. He had an idea: She should lead a new task force on abortion rights. She seemed uncertain. “Why?” she asked. “We need a real leader, and you’re the leader,” Mr. Klain responded. Ms. Harris asked for time to think about it. She did not want to just give a speech without substance. And she had spent much of the previous year and a half...

“I’m standing behind a Black woman to be president of the United States, and it doesn’t make me any less of a Black man,” said the Illinois attorney general. “I’m asking all of you all to do the same.” A day after Vice President Kamala Harris announced that she intended to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, more than 40,000 Black men from across the country convened on a virtual fund-raising call to discuss what the moment required of them. For four hours, one Black man after another — prominent politicians, activists, entertainers — laid out the challenges ahead for Ms....

In recent weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris has dashed off to Florida on short notice. She sparred with the state’s conservative governor, Ron DeSantis, over how to teach slavery in schools. And she flew into Iowa to defend abortion rights while 13 Republican presidential candidates were having dinner a few miles away. Although her words were directed at Republicans, her message was also aimed at all her doubters. Once a rising star as a senator in California, Ms. Harris has for years been saddled by criticism of her performance as vice president. She has struggled with difficult assignments on issues...

The dizzying events of the past week have pushed to the sidelines the congressional squabbling over President Biden’s domestic agenda, and are already redefining the arc of his presidency.WASHINGTON — Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, gave a pep talk early on Feb. 18 at the daily gathering of the president’s most senior aides: The next 10 days, he said, will be the most consequential of the Biden presidency.President Biden’s military and intelligence chiefs had told him that a Russian invasion was all but inevitable. Mr. Klain, a veteran of Washington and one of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers,...

PARIS — Vice President Kamala Harris spent hours talking with Emmanuel Macron, the French president, managing to skirt a recent diplomatic rift between the two allies over an Australian submarine deal. She attended a conference on promoting democratic elections in Libya. And she secured a commitment for the United States to join a nonbinding international declaration to protect civilians against cyberattacks. During a tightly choreographed trip to France this week, Harris appeared determined to assert herself as a diplomatic asset for a president who believes he knows more about the process — and the vice presidency — than most. The...

President Trump moved to replace the top ranks of the Department of Homeland Security on Monday, a day after forcing the resignation of its secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, as he accelerated a purge of the nation’s immigration and security leadership. The White House announced the departure of Randolph D. Alles, the director of the Secret Service, who had fallen out of favor with the president even before a security breach at his Mar-a-Lago club that the agency effectively blamed on Mr. Trump’s employees. Government officials, who asked not to be identified discussing personnel changes before they were announced, said at least...