President Donald Trump on Thursday revoked the Secret Service detail for former Vice President Kamala Harris that was previously extended by former President Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, fallout continues from the White House’s attempt to remove Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez.
Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill has been tapped as the interim director of the CDC, a White House official confirmed to ABC News.
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s expanded use of expedited removal, dealing a major, but possibly temporary, blow to the president’s deportation agenda.
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb in Washington, D.C., ruled the Trump administration’s reliance on the expedited process to detain immigrants in the interior of the country with little to no due process is unlawful.
Expedited removal is a streamlined process that allows the government to quickly remove a migrant from the country. Under the Biden administration, its use was typically restricted to apply to migrants who had recently crossed into the country and were found near the southern border.
Under President Donald Trump, the Department of Homeland Security has been given wider discretion to detain migrants anywhere in the interior of the country and place them in removal procedures if they can’t prove they’ve been in the country for more than two years. Through this process, migrants were sometimes not given the opportunity to see a judge.
Expedited removal has been prominently used at courthouses across the country where migrants have been detained outside of court hearings after having their cases dismissed by immigration judges.
While Cobb’s decision doesn’t prevent courthouse arrests, it severely curtails the administration’s ability to directly place immigrants in expedited removal if their cases are dismissed.
In a strongly worded opinion, Cobb said the Trump administration’s legal arguments about due process affect noncitizens and citizens, alike.
“The Government could accuse you of entering unlawfully, relegate you to a bare-bones proceeding where it would ‘prove’ your unlawful entry, and then immediately remove you,” she wrote. “By merely accusing you of entering unlawfully, the Government would deprive you of any meaningful opportunity to disprove its allegations. Fortunately, that is not the law.”
Cobb said she is not questioning the constitutionality of the expedited removal process but ordered that anyone subjected to it be afforded due process.
Music was heard outside the briefing room on Friday afternoon, including “I Dream a Dream,” from the musical “Les Misérables.”
The White House said that Trump was playing music in the Rose Garden on a newly installed sound system.
French President Emmanuel Macron said that if Russia’s Vladimir Putin doesn’t agree to a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by Sept. 1, then it will “again” show that Putin is playing President Donald Trump.
Macron referred to the Monday deadline as having been set by Trump. Macron also told reporters that a bilateral Putin-Zelenskyy meeting was Putin’s proposal to Trump.
“If it’s not kept, the Monday deadline that had been set by President Trump, I think that, once again, it will mean that President Putin will have been playing President Trump”, Macron said at a press conference in France.
On Friday, Zelenskyy said the Russians “will do everything to avoid meeting.”
A Ukrainian delegation is in the U.S. for talks with Trump administration officials Friday. Zelenskyy said White House special envoy Steve Witkoff would be meeting with members of his team in New York, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance would participate as well.
Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesperson, on Friday gave no updated timeline for a possible Putin-Zelenskyy meeting.
President Donald Trump told Congress that he will slash $4.9 billion of congressionally-approved USAID and State Department foreign aid funding, the Office of Management and Budget said on Friday.
The administration is claiming to have slashed the foreign aid money through a rarely used funding move called a “pocket rescission.” It is a process that means the White House delivers a request for Congress to slash money from its budget so late in the fiscal year that the funds expire before Congress is obligated to hold a vote.
Congress already acted to slash much of USAID’s funding through a formalized rescission process over the summer. Republicans approved $9.4 billion in cuts aimed at formalizing the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts to USAID and public broadcasting.
However, Trump’s latest move is different because, unlike the budget change that Congress rubber-stamped, the White House could now be sidestepping Congress’s power of the purse.
Congress members on both sides of the aisle sounded off. Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate’s Appropriations Committee, blasted the move on Friday, calling it an “apparent attempt to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval” in a statement. She also said the pocket rescission process was illegal, citing the U.S. Governmental Accountability Office, that said the The Impoundment Control Act– which Trump says authorized his action– “does not provide that authority.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., responded to Trump’s move on Friday. “Trump is rooting for a shutdown. He knows he has created a huge problem because now any budget deal with Republicans isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. He’s not even pretending to follow the law,” Murphy said in a post on X.
