Senator probes CBP nominee's alleged interference in migrant death investigation
A leading Senate Democrat said in a letter Wednesday that he is seeking records to determine if President Donald Trump's nominee to lead U.S. Customs and Border Protection improperly intervened in the criminal probe into the 2010 death of an undocumented immigrant in federal custody.
In a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) said nominee Rodney Scott was a top Border Patrol official in the San Diego sector when agents battered Anastasio Hernandez Rojas with batons and shocked him with a taser, leaving him unconscious and bloody. His subsequent death led to investigations that shadowed CBP for years and are likely to undergo fresh scrutiny as Scott's Senate confirmation hearing approaches.
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Forbes
34 minutes ago
- Forbes
Travel Ban Reinstated By Trump With Mostly Muslim Countries
President Donald J. Trump, citing national security concerns, has reinstated and expanded the controversial nationality-based travel ban first introduced during his initial term. The new ban, formalized in a Presidential Proclamation that came into effect on Monday, June 9, 2025, suspends the entry of nationals from 19 countries, primarily targeting Muslim-majority and African nations. The proclamation fully suspends immigrant and nonimmigrant visa issuance to nationals of 12 countries: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. It imposes partial restrictions on B-1/B-2 tourist visas and F, M, and J student and exchange visas for nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela. Exceptions apply to green card holders, dual nationals, certain special immigrant visa holders, athletes in international competitions, and immediate relatives of U.S. citizens. The administration relies on a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which authorizes the president to suspend the entry of any class of noncitizens deemed 'detrimental to the interests of the United States.' That authority was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), which ruled 5-4 that President Trump's third version of the travel ban was constitutional, emphasizing executive deference on immigration and national security. But critics argue that this expanded ban perpetuates discriminatory intent, noting the disproportionate impact on Muslim and African nations and the invocation of Trump's 2024 campaign pledge to 'restore the travel ban and keep radical Islamic terrorists out.' Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law at Cornell Law School, predicts court challenges but warns that they may fail under the current precedent. 'Even if this expansion is legal, it is not good policy,' he said. 'Families will be separated, and we are not necessarily safer.' The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called the order 'ideologically motivated,' 'unnecessary,' and 'overbroad,' criticizing its chilling effect on lawful travel, academic exchange, and humanitarian reunification. Legal scholars have started to question the constitutionality of this policy. More specifically, they contend that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits governments from denying equal legal protection, while the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment forbids favouring or disfavoring any religion. Critics argue that Trump's policy, which targets specific nations commonly associated with certain religions, risks violating both clauses by enabling discrimination based on nationality and faith. Additionally, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished national origin quotas to prevent such bias. By reinstating restrictions linked to religious or national identity, opponents claim the policy mirrors discriminatory practices that the law aimed to eliminate. Jeremy Robbins, Executive Director of the American Immigration Council, noted: 'Blanket nationality bans have never demonstrated any meaningful national security value. This ban hurts our economy and punishes immigrants who qualify to come legally.' According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) 'In total, just under 162,000 immigrant visas and temporary work, study, and travel visas were issued in fiscal year 2023 to nationals of the affected countries in the now banned visa categories, according to the Migration Policy Institute.' Nationals from the banned countries represent more than 475 million people globally. Beyond family separations, the ban may deter students, scientists, and health professionals at a time when the U.S. is experiencing labor shortages in STEM and healthcare. Universities like Harvard have expressed alarm at the targeting of international students, as the administration simultaneously suspended new visas for foreign scholars at select institutions, further stoking fears of ideological purges in academia. The 2025 travel ban echoes policies from Trump's first term and extends their scope. The first 'Muslim ban' of 2017 was repeatedly struck down until a more narrowly tailored version survived judicial review. Today's ban, while more procedurally refined, raises the same fundamental concern: are Americans safer by denying entry based on birthplace? Lyndon B. Johnson's signing of the 1965 INA famously stated that 'the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system' would never return. Critics now argue that President Trump has revived that very shadow, using presidential proclamations instead of legislative quotas. 'This is not national security—it's national scapegoating,' said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. 'It undermines constitutional values and stigmatizes entire populations for political gain.' The legality of the 2025 travel ban reinstated as it is may pass muster under Trump v. Hawaii, but its morality, logic, and long-term consequences remain in question. As lawsuits mount and civil rights groups prepare their defences, the nation must decide: do we protect ourselves by shutting doors or by standing firm in our values of openness, equality, and due process?
Yahoo
34 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Opinion - Trump-Musk divorce threatens the president and the entire Republican Party
Few expected the relationship between President Trump and Elon Musk to survive four years, but the spectacular collapse of this partnership has shocked even seasoned observers with its speed and intensity. Now, as two of the world's most powerful men openly clash, there are seismic implications for the country as a whole and the Republican Party specifically. Put another way, not only does this fissure expose cracks in the GOP and MAGA coalition, it's also a considerable threat to Republicans' midterms hopes and Trump's signature legislation. The fight, which began two weeks ago when Musk expressed 'disappointment' with Trump's 'one big, beautiful' bill had initially been confined to disagreements over the legislation, rather than personal attacks. Then, on Thursday afternoon, it escalated in unprecedented, dramatic fashion. Following Trump's recent comment that he would have won Pennsylvania without Musk's help, Musk replied 'Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.' That was just Musk's opening salvo against the man he spent roughly $300 million to get elected. The tech billionaire then went on a blistering war path. He claimed Trump was on 'the Epstein list,' supported impeachment — a touchy subject for the twice-impeached Trump — and claimed that tariffs would cause a recession. Not content with attacking Trump, Musk has also threatened to fund primary challenges to Republicans who support the bill, and has criticized both Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.). With unprecedented speed, Musk went from the man who could pour hundreds of millions into Republican coffers to Republicans' enemy number one. Influential commentator Steve Bannon pushed for Musk's deportation, claiming he's an illegal alien, and Trump threatened to cancel all government contracts with Musk's multiple companies, saying Musk 'went CRAZY.' Whether or not the rumors of an impending détente between the two is enough to heal the rupture remains to be seen, but it's unlikely that all of the pieces will ever get put back together. Given Musk's deep pockets and control of social media platform X, where he has a cult-like following, Trump and the Republicans now find themselves in a treacherous spot at a precarious time. Indeed, even before the dramatic escalation, Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' was in limbo in the Senate. As Alexander Bolton noted in this publication prior to Thursday's blowup, Trump's bill is 'losing momentum in the Senate in the face of blistering attacks from Elon Musk.' To that end, Musk's criticisms of the bill and threats to primary its Republican supporters has already led two House Republicans who voted for the bill, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and John Rose (R-Tenn.), to come out against some of it. It appears that this fight has brought some Republicans back into Trump's fold. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who had been opposed to the bill prior to its passage in the House, condemned Musk, saying he 'crossed the line.' And Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn), another House conservative, dismissed Musk's influence, saying he is 'just another shiny object.' For their part, Republican senators who may have had doubts about Trump's signature legislation now risk being seen as taking Musk's side and being disloyal to the president. However, it would be a mistake to overlook the implications of the breakup or the dangers for Republicans. If he wants, Musk could very easily fund primaries against vulnerable GOP House members, and his control of X gives him unprecedented influence over the media ecosystem. Further, Musk's influence among the Silicon Valley cohort that moved stridently to the right in 2024 could peel off a new group of Republican voters and donors. In that same vein, there are possible electoral consequences for Republicans, even if tempers between Trump and Musk cool down. Trump was counting on the bill's passage to be a significant political tailwind that would boost his polling numbers and Republicans' midterm hopes, particularly given the ongoing chaos over tariffs and trade policy. Now, whichever version of the bill eventually passes, Republicans look like the party of chaos. It is entirely possible that this ongoing feud dents voters' confidence in Republicans' ability to competently govern, something Democrats are clearly hoping for. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Democrats are 'reveling' about the fight, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) reposting Musk's attacks and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) taking digs at the 'GOP civil war.' To be sure, despite Musk's efforts, it remains likely that a version of Trump's 'one, big, beautiful bill' will still pass, but Republicans now have a bigger headache. Ultimately, divorces are always messy, but the Trump-Musk divorce is unprecedented, and it could not have come at a worse time for Republicans. With razor-thin margins in the House and the absence of Trump's much-touted trade bills, it poses the most significant threat to Republicans' midterm hopes, and by extension, the rest of Trump's term. Douglas E. Schoen and Carly Cooperman are pollsters and partners with the public opinion company Schoen Cooperman Research based in New York. They are co-authors of the book, 'America: Unite or Die.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
34 minutes ago
- Yahoo
An Uproar at the NIH
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Updated at 10:26 a.m. on June 9, 2025 Since winning President Donald Trump's nomination to serve as the director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya—a health economist and prominent COVID contrarian who advocated for reopening society in the early months of the pandemic—has pledged himself to a culture of dissent. 'Dissent is the very essence of science,' Bhattacharya said at his confirmation hearing in March. 'I'll foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment where scientists, including early-career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement, respectfully.' Two months into his tenure at the agency, hundreds of NIH officials are taking Bhattacharya at his word. More than 300 officials, from across all of the NIH's 27 institutes and centers, have signed and sent a letter to Bhattacharya that condemns the changes that have thrown the agency into chaos in recent months—and calls on their director to reverse some of the most damaging shifts. Since January, the agency has been forced by Trump officials to fire thousands of its workers and rescind or withhold funding from thousands of research projects. Tomorrow, Bhattacharya is set to appear before a Senate appropriations subcommittee to discuss a proposed $18 billion slash to the NIH budget—about 40 percent of the agency's current allocation. The letter, titled the Bethesda Declaration (a reference to the NIH's location in Bethesda, Maryland), is modeled after the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by Bhattacharya and two of his colleagues in October 2020 that criticized 'the prevailing COVID-19 policies' and argued that it was safe—even beneficial—for most people to resume life as normal. The approach that the Great Barrington Declaration laid out was, at the time, widely denounced by public-health experts, including the World Health Organization and then–NIH director Francis Collins, as dangerous and scientifically unsound. The allusion in the NIH letter, officials told me, isn't meant glibly: 'We hoped he might see himself in us as we were putting those concerns forward,' Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and one of the letter's organizers, told me. None of the NIH officials I spoke with for this story could recall another time in their agency's history when staff have spoken out so publicly against a director. But none of them could recall, either, ever seeing the NIH so aggressively jolted away from its core mission. 'It was time enough for us to speak out,' Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the National Cancer Institute, who has signed her name to the letter, told me. To preserve American research, government scientists—typically focused on scrutinizing and funding the projects most likely to advance the public's health—are now instead trying to persuade their agency's director to help them win a political fight with the White House. In an emailed statement, Bhattacharya said, 'The Bethesda Declaration has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the NIH has taken in recent months, including the continuing support of the NIH for international collaboration. Nevertheless, respectful dissent in science is productive. We all want the NIH to succeed.' A spokesperson for HHS also defended the policies the letter critiqued, arguing that the NIH is 'working to remove ideological influence from the scientific process' and 'enhancing the transparency, rigor, and reproducibility of NIH-funded research.' The agency spends most of its nearly $48 billion budget powering science: It is the world's single-largest public funder of biomedical research. But since January, the NIH has canceled thousands of grants—originally awarded on the basis of merit—for political reasons: supporting DEI programming, having ties to universities that the administration has accused of anti-Semitism, sending resources to research initiatives in other countries, advancing scientific fields that Trump officials have deemed wasteful. Prior to 2025, grant cancellations were virtually unheard-of. But one official at the agency, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of professional repercussions, told me that staff there now spend nearly as much time terminating grants as awarding them. And the few prominent projects that the agency has since been directed to fund appear either to be geared toward confirming the administration's biases on specific health conditions, or to benefit NIH leaders. 'We're just becoming a weapon of the state,' another official, who signed their name anonymously to the letter, told me. 'They're using grants as a lever to punish institutions and academia, and to censor and stifle science.' NIH officials have tried to voice their concerns in other ways. At internal meetings, leaders of the agency's institutes and centers have questioned major grant-making policy shifts. Some prominent officials have resigned. Current and former NIH staffers have been holding weekly vigils in Bethesda, commemorating, in the words of the organizers, 'the lives and knowledge lost through NIH cuts.' (Attendees are encouraged to wear black.) But these efforts have done little to slow the torrent of changes at the agency. Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and one of the letter's signers, told me that the NIH fellows union, which he is part of, has sent Bhattacharya repeated requests to engage in discussion since his first week at the NIH. 'All of those have been ignored,' Morgan said. By formalizing their objections and signing their names to them, officials told me, they hope that Bhattacharya will finally feel compelled to respond. (To add to the public pressure, Jeremy Berg, who led the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences until 2011, is also organizing a public letter of support for the Bethesda Declaration, in partnership with Stand Up for Science, which has organized rallies in support of research.) Scientists elsewhere at HHS, which oversees the NIH, have become unusually public in defying political leadership, too. Last month, after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—in a bizarre departure from precedent—announced on social media that he was sidestepping his own agency, the CDC, and purging COVID shots from the childhood-immunization schedule, CDC officials chose to retain the vaccines in their recommendations, under the condition of shared decision making with a health-care provider. Many signers of the Bethesda letter are hopeful that Bhattacharya, 'as a scientist, has some of the same values as us,' Benjamin Feldman, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told me. Perhaps, with his academic credentials and commitment to evidence, he'll be willing to aid in the pushback against the administration's overall attacks on science, and defend the agency's ability to power research. But other officials I spoke with weren't so optimistic. Many at the NIH now feel they work in a 'culture of fear,' Norton said. Since January, NIH officials have told me that they have been screamed at and bullied by HHS personnel pushing for policy changes; some of the NIH leaders who have been most outspoken against leadership have also been forcibly reassigned to irrelevant positions. At one point, Norton said, after she fought for a program focused on researcher diversity, some members of NIH leadership came to her office and cautioned her that they didn't want to see her on the next list of mass firings. (In conversations with me, all of the named officials I spoke with emphasized that they were speaking in their personal capacity, and not for the NIH.) Bhattacharya, who took over only two months ago, hasn't been the Trump appointee driving most of the decisions affecting the NIH—and therefore might not have the power to reverse or overrule them. HHS officials have pressured agency leadership to defy court orders, as I've reported; mass cullings of grants have been overseen by DOGE. And as much as Bhattacharya might welcome dissent, he so far seems unmoved by it. In early May, Berg emailed Bhattacharya to express alarm over the NIH's severe slowdown in grant making, and to remind him of his responsibilities as director to responsibly shepherd the funds Congress had appropriated to the agency. The next morning, according to the exchange shared with me by Berg, Bhattacharya replied saying that, 'contrary to the assertion you make in the letter,' his job was to ensure that the NIH's money would be spent on projects that advance American health, rather than 'on ideological boondoggles and on dangerous research.' And at a recent NIH town hall, Bhattacharya dismissed one staffer's concerns that the Trump administration was purging the identifying variable of gender from scientific research. (Years of evidence back its use.) He echoed, instead, the Trump talking point that 'sex is a very cleanly defined variable,' and argued that gender shouldn't be included as 'a routine question in order to make an ideological point.' The officials I spoke with had few clear plans for what to do if their letter goes unheeded by leadership. Inside the agency, most see few levers left to pull. At the town hall, Bhattacharya also endorsed the highly contentious notion that human research started the pandemic—and noted that NIH-funded science, specifically, might have been to blame. When dozens of staffers stood and left the auditorium in protest, prompting applause that interrupted Bhattacharya, he simply smiled. 'It's nice to have free speech,' he said, before carrying right on. Article originally published at The Atlantic
