A wonky policy change by the Trump administration may spell the end of a wide swath of data from the Census Bureau, including key statistics used for redistricting, policymaking and research.

Federal law requires the bureau to keep people anonymous in the data it produces from surveys and government records.

But this month, the administration put out an order that many data experts say makes it harder, if not impossible, for the agency to balance protecting the confidentiality of people's information with releasing useful data about local areas and small populations.

The order by the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, bans "noise infusion." It's one of the main privacy protection techniques the bureau has used for decades to make certain data fuzzy — to ensure that individual people, including members of minority communities, can't be identified.

Instead, the Trump administration's new policy, which also applies to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, leaves both statistical agencies with two options going forward: releasing "coarsened" statistics with fewer details or not releasing some statistics at all.

Data experts worry it could be the latter at the Census Bureau.

"Neighborhood-level data is at risk. Rural communities' data may be not publishable," says Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Massive Data Institute and vice president of the Association of Public Data Users. "There are some counties that are only a couple hundred people, and you might not be able to publish data for those counties anymore."

John Abowd, a former chief scientist at the Census Bureau who served during the first Trump and Biden administrations, says the order upends privacy protection systems for multiple ongoing surveys and other datasets.

For the once-a-decade head count the bureau is best known for, the agency did not add any statistical noise to the state-level 2020 census results used to redistribute congressional seats and Electoral College votes.

But the bureau has applied privacy protection methods involving noise to the detailed demographic data that's used for redrawing maps of individual voting districts.

Abowd says under the Trump administration's ban on statistical noise, plans for 2030 census redistricting data "will have to be completely redesigned, and not just the confidentiality protections."

"The only confidentiality protection available is coarsening. It is guaranteed to reduce the level of detail drastically," Abowd adds.

Asked if some political mapmakers may find that kind of redistricting data unusable, Abowd replied: "I'm pretty sure most would."

The bureau's public information office did not respond to NPR's requests for comment. In a statement, Commerce Department spokesperson Kristen Eichamer says the order prioritized coarsening as the preferred privacy protection technique to "maintain public confidence in our data while upholding our duty to safeguard the privacy of those who provide information."

Eichamer also stated that "indiscriminate use of noise infusion—even when not mandated by law—ultimately undermined confidence in the department's products and cast doubt on their integrity." Asked by NPR for specific examples of such use, Eichamer did not respond.

The department's order could be revoked before the 2030 census, under a new presidential administration.

But census watchers are concerned about lasting repercussions from a policy change coming in the middle of key preparations for the upcoming national tally and shortly after a thinning of the bureau's expertise amid the Trump administration's slashing of the federal workforce.

And some current staffers are expressing alarm about the order.

"It would not be a major overreaction to say that this is cataclysmic," says a bureau employee who asked NPR not to name them because they are not authorized to speak to the press. "From our perspective right now, if this policy stays in effect, it's the end of a lot of our data production."

There's been a multiyear battle over a certain use of statistical noise

The use of statistical noise in certain 2020 census data did spark controversy within the statistical and redistricting worlds in the lead-up to its release in 2021. As the bureau's chief scientist, Abowd led the adoption of a new privacy protection system based on a mathematical concept known as differential privacy. Bureau officials said the shift was needed to keep up with advances in computing and broader access to voter registration lists and commercial data sets that have made it easier to reidentify individuals within purportedly anonymized statistics.

Early tests of the system's effect on redistricting data raised alarm among many data users, who feared that the statistics would ultimately be unusable. Republican state officials in Alabama sued the bureau to try to block the new privacy protections. But the case was ultimately dropped, and in the end, maps for voting districts across the country were drawn using the noise-infused 2020 census redistricting data.

Last year, however, America First Legal, a law group co-founded by Stephen Miller, President Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy, filed a lawsuit challenging the bureau's differential privacy system in an attempt to force the release of new 2020 census results, even though the released state population numbers were not adjusted with any statistical noise. After a three-judge court ruled it was past the time limit to sue, the group refiled their case, which continues to challenge another statistical technique the bureau used.

Jarosz at Georgetown University is concerned that the Trump administration's new ban on statistical noise was released with little explanation.

"The way that it should work is that scientists, experts do their best job to come up with a plan. They present that to the public. There are opportunities for feedback. There are opportunities for criticism from other experts that aren't in the federal government. And we end up with a system where it's had really good transparency, lots of checks and balances," Jarosz says. "This new order upends all of that. It takes the public out of the process. It takes the experts out of the process. This feels very much like a political choice."

Until the bureau starts publicly explaining how the order is affecting its data releases, Jarosz adds, it's an open question whether participants in the bureau's surveys should be concerned about the confidentiality of the personal information they have shared with the government.

"The Census Bureau and all of the statistical agencies are bound by laws to protect the privacy of our information. And so they had put together the best tools that they could find to do that," Jarosz says. "If they keep publishing the same amount of data and they don't have those tools, then yes, privacy could potentially be at risk."

Edited by Benjamin Swasey

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

California Senate Democrats want to put the brakes on a new program by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration that steers free pollution permits to oil refineries and other major polluters — and they’re using the state budget to force the issue.

In the spending proposal they released last month, the senators moved to block the program until the state funds a three-party climate deal the governor struck with the Legislature last year, an agreement they say Newsom is now breaking. They call their counterplan “Deal is a Deal,” signaling a standoff that could stretch through the summer.

“We really need to stay to the deal,” said Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes, a San Bernardino Democrat and chair of the Senate’s climate budget subcommittee.

At stake are billions of dollars earmarked for public transit, safe drinking water and affordable housing raised from climate market auctions. The Senate is also threatening to hold up many of Newsom’s own priorities, including funding for high-speed rail and wildfires, electric-car tax credits and a clean jet fuel subsidy.

At issue is a new incentive program created last month by the California Air Resources Board, which overhauled the state’s carbon market under pressure from Newsom and heavy lobbying by the oil industry. It offers free pollution permits worth as much as $4 billion to companies that pledge to invest in clean energy and efficiency initiatives, with half slated for the fossil fuel industry.

That program threatens to drain funds for a series of air quality, housing and transit programs that lawmakers and Newsom agreed to fund last year, when they extended the state’s carbon market through 2045, rebranding it “cap and invest.” The overhaul also puts up to $1 billion guaranteed to the Legislature for discretionary projects in jeopardy.

A climate bargain under threat

California’s carbon-trading program, launched in 2013, is California’s way of putting a price tag on greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change.

Last year’s late-session deal set a new pecking order for the billions of dollars the program raises by auctioning pollution permits.

Under the deal, high-speed rail gets $1 billion a year before many other climate programs are funded; another $1 billion annually is dedicated to lawmakers’ priorities.

Last in line are the programs that turn carbon-market money paid by polluters into tangible benefits for some of California’s most burdened communities: affordable housing projects near transit, cleaner buses and rail, safe drinking water, wildfire protection and neighborhood air monitoring.

Last month, following intense lobbying by the oil industry and ballooning gas prices, the air board adopted rules to cut the number of auctioned pollution permits drastically through 2030 with Newsom’s blessing. It also created a new incentive for oil and gas refineries and other industries investing in decarbonization.

“It’s unfortunate that the state of California empowers the oil industry to freak everyone out and adopt bad policies,” said Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office projects the changes could cut annual auction revenue for state climate programs from roughly $4 billion to $2 billion, which would wipe out community-focused programs.

Newsom spokesperson Anthony Martinez said the changes keep the carbon market “durable” while helping consumers and industry.

“That is not a retreat from climate leadership — it’s how California keeps leading while the federal government is retreating,” Martinez said.

Senate holds Newsom priorities hostage

Senate Democrats have countered with their own plan. It would protect the $1 billion lawmakers control, then steer as much as $2 billion to the housing, transit, clean air and drinking water programs. Newsom’s priorities would move to the back of the line, meaning if the climate fund brings in only $2 billion, Cal Fire, high-speed rail and other programs would get little or nothing.

“Why, at this time … would we take away critical funding to build affordable homes in California?” said Sen. Jesse Arreguín, an Oakland Democrat and chair of the housing committee.

Wiener said public transit should not have to fight for survival. “Every year, transit funding becomes a political football.”

Meanwhile, Assembly Democrats are mum on the rule change in their budget plan and have not proposed any alternatives.

Assemblymembers Jacqui Irwin and Cottie Petrie-Norris, Democrats who chair key climate and energy committees, have supported the air board’s plan, saying the changes reflect the Legislature’s focus on affordability, including potentially more money for Californians’ electric bills.

The governor and the Legislature have until June 30 to agree on a budget deal before the new fiscal year starts. But much of the climate funding tied up in negotiations is not bound by the deadline and can be hashed out before the legislative session wraps in September.

The Senate’s opposition is threatening to hold up many of Newsom’s priorities.

One is his January proposal to spend $200 million on electric vehicle incentives, $115 million of which would come from the climate fund. Senate Democrats have deferred negotiations on it and talks could last through the summer.

The Senate also rejected Newsom’s proposed sustainable aviation fuel tax credit, which Newsom argues would encourage the production of greener fuel and boost refinery jobs. The initiative, which would allow eligible producers to pay less into the state’s road repair funding, followed intensive lobbying by petroleum refining company Phillips 66, the only company that has publicly announced it would benefit from the credit.

Cleanup tool or polluter subsidy?

The climate funding dispute turns on the idea that California may be using its carbon market to soften the rules for some of the state’s biggest polluters.

Air regulators say the permits created through its new program, the Manufacturing Decarbonization Incentive, will go only to companies that cut their own emissions. They say the program has guardrails, including requirements to return the permits if companies fail to deliver. They argue the program will help keep refineries and other major industries in California while sustaining clean-energy investment as President Donald Trump withdraws federal support.

“The cap-and-invest program was updated to do what it was always designed to do: reduce pollution cost-effectively, protect ratepayers, and keep businesses operating in California,” Lindsay Buckley, a spokesperson for the board, said. “The program was never designed to maximize auction revenue.”

Critics of the new program see only a subsidy for polluters that does not guarantee emissions reductions. They argue the new program could threaten California’s ability to meet its legally mandated 2030 emissions targets.

Several board members shared concerns. The overhaul passed 10-3, but only after the board required further review before the new incentive program launches.

The Senate plan would block climate-fund spending unless the Department of Finance certifies that last year’s deal can be funded. It would also stop the air board from handing out the new industrial permits unless state officials show they align with California’s climate targets, lower gasoline prices and leave enough money for threatened climate programs.

The budget fight could have political consequences for Newsom as he defends his climate record beyond California, said Katie Valenzuela, a policy advocate who focuses on environmental justice issues.

“If this (rule) goes forward and isn’t fixed, this is a huge stain on his climate legacy,” Valenzuela said. “He is showing loud and clear that the most vulnerable residents who are most impacted by climate change are not his priority.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said he will approve the latest revision of the city’s budget, which has to address the city’s ongoing structural deficit. The revision restores funding to some recreation centers, libraries and arts programs.

The decisions made in the budget affect services used by San Diegans every day, from road infrastructure to public safety. KPBS has been tracking Mayor Gloria’s budget proposals that aim to tackle the city’s $118 million deficit while balancing public wants. And if you want to try to balance the budget yourself, you can check out the KPBS Budget Challenge.

San Diego's Independent Budget Analyst Charles Modica joined KPBS Metro Reporter Andrew Bowen Thursday for an AMA (ask me anything) on the r/SanDiego subreddit.

People wanted to know more about the city’s relationship with SDG&E, what contributed to the deficit, the price of parking permits and how bike lanes factor into the budget. Modica and Bowen broke down these questions.

Redditor u/Carnitazz asked if the city of San Diego could acquire SDG&E’s infrastructure to avoid rate increases. While Modica said the city is exploring this option, it would require massive up-front costs.

Modica said the biggest costs would likely come from “purchasing the transmission/distribution infrastructure that SDG&E owns.”

Redditor u/Broad-Spare-4432 inquired if the city could raise the price of residential parking permits to cover the cost of the program.

Bowen explained why parking permit fees haven’t increased more.

User u/b_tuccinardi wanted to know how bike lanes fit into the city’s spending. Bowen said it's only a small chunk of the overall budget.

That Redditor also asked why the city of San Diego isn’t using strategies similar to those used by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to balance their budget.

Modica explained what makes San Diego’s situation different.

The City Council approved this year’s budget on Tuesday, after hours of public comment. Many people discussed the controversial contract between the city and Flock Safety, a company that provides automated license plate reader cameras.

Some speakers spoke in support of the surveillance system, while others said it’s an invasion of privacy. The council ultimately did not change the contract.

“I think the technology can be useful, and I think the privacy concerns are also real,” Modica said in an interview with KPBS shortly after the Reddit AMA. “That's a decision for the folks that people in the city elect to make. Because that's the kind of decision that people are elected to make.”

Modica said this was a challenging budget year, and next year is likely to follow the same pattern. He said what it would take to begin to fix the basic infrastructure of the city is up to voters.

“That ultimately requires voter approval of new revenue, and voter approval ultimately requires trust in the city's operations,” Modica said. “So it's important for the city to work well and effectively and efficiently. And it's also important for folks who are demanding and expecting the city to provide programs to be realistic about what those programs cost.”

More in-depth responses to many more questions are live on the Reddit AMA now.

One of my favorite random facts about the city of San Diego is that it loses money every year because of ongoing flooding of the Convention Center.

This year, the mayor proposed to pay $1.2 million on the “dewatering” of the Convention Center through a novel source: the money coming in from Measure C, the 2020 ballot measure that increased the hotel room tax in the city. The money from the tax was supposed to fund an expansion of the Convention Center, improved homeless services and road repair. For years, the city could not collect the Measure C money because of an ongoing court battle. Now, for the second year, it is collecting the tax.

The mayor also proposed that $3 million the city gave the Tourism Authority to market the Convention Center also come from the new tax.

This helped give the city’s independent budget analyst and the City Council an idea. They were scrambling to find money to restore funding for the arts that Mayor Todd Gloria had proposed cutting in his budget.

They found $6 million in Measure C.

Here’s how: The city makes payments of about $12 million per year to pay off old debt it took out for the 2001 expansion of the Convention Center.

They’re going to pay half of that with Measure C’s tax collections. The tax passed to fund a new expansion of the Convention Center is now going to actually be to pay off the one from 25 years ago. The city’s lawyers confirmed with the Council that Measure C does explicitly allow the city to use the new tax revenue for old debt. The people who came up with Measure C likely thought of that in the context of a new bond for a new expansion refinancing some old debt.

The mayor issued a statement Wednesday saying he disagreed with some of the Council’s adjustments to his budget but he would not veto them.

“Decisions like diverting Measure C funds from the Convention Center may avoid difficult cuts this year, but they set us up for the same budget challenges next year,” he said.

Councilmember Kent Lee, who helped craft the solution to help arts organizations, sent over a statement: “It’s clear we must address the needs of our Convention Center both in terms of maintenance and delivering on the expansion. In addition to seeking long term and more sustainable solutions to arts and culture funding.”

They’ll likely need a new design or strategy or new money – the time from when Measure C passed to when collection began included major inflation in construction and other costs.

“This is a short-term solution… a bridge to a long-term solution to arts funding. All of this needs to be part of the regional and collaborative discussions we have moving forward,” Lee said in a written statement.

Updated June 12, 2026 at 9:01 PM PDT

Congress has let a key spy tool, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, lapse.

Each year, the provision is used by American intelligence agencies to collect the electronic communications of hundreds of thousands of foreigners located outside of the United States.

The government says that more than 60% of the president's daily intelligence briefing relies on information collected under the authority.

The tool officially lapsed at the end of the day on Friday. What happens now?

Intelligence collection will continue

Intelligence collection under FISA's Section 702 is authorized annually by a federal court — and the law allows for that collection to continue for the duration of the court's authorization, even if the law lapses before the court's next approval. That means companies — electronic communications service providers, in this context — will still be legally required to turn over material to intelligence agencies.

Still, some lawmakers worry that the companies compelled to turn over communications may attempt to challenge the law in court, possibly leading to an indeterminately long window during which they stop providing intel.

Advocates on all sides of the surveillance fight believe those challenges are ultimately likely to fail, but those closely linked to the intelligence community emphasize that even a small pause comes with risks ahead of major events like America's 250th celebration and the World Cup.

Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency during the second Obama and first Trump administration, says he doesn't believe Section 702's lapse to be a sky-is-falling moment — but that Congress could have chosen to avoid any issues by passing an extension.

"I don't want to overhype this and say that the statute's lapse is a horrific risk. It clearly is not," Gerstell said. "But by the same token, I just want to emphasize that it is irresponsible to accept any risk in this area under circumstances where we can control the risk. We can make it zero."

Elizabeth Goitein, a privacy rights advocate and senior director of the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program, says the FISA law is clear that companies must continue to comply with the government's collection requests even after lapse — and that existing case law means any challenges will be sorted quickly. Companies risk a fine of $250,000 per day by not complying.

"The FISA court, under the law, has 30 days to resolve this type of challenge," Goitein said, and because the court has previously reviewed the statute, "I do not think it would take very long for the FISA court to compel compliance."

Goitein said she feels the security risks of a lapse are limited and wants to see the law updated with key privacy and civil liberties reforms.

Why is Congress letting the law expire?

Section 702 has never been short on controversy. Each time the provision has come up for renewal over its nearly two-decade history, a bipartisan group of lawmakers has pushed for reforms to the program to better protect Americans' privacy rights.

In collecting the communications of foreign nationals targeted by the intelligence community, Americans' information — including calls, texts and emails — can also be swept up in the dragnet.

And federal law enforcement regularly queries the FISA database for Americans' information and reviews their content. Those reviews are subject to certain procedural and executive branch oversight measures but do not require intelligence agencies and agents to demonstrate probable cause of wrongdoing to a court.

Reform-minded members of Congress — pointing to a history of abuses — want to see additional changes to the program, including a warrant requirement before law enforcement can review Americans' information.

The fight over those reforms led to a series of short-term extensions to the law this year as lawmakers struggled to reach agreement.

In the weeks leading up to the June 12 expiration, it appeared there was movement toward a three-year extension with moderate reforms, though stopping short of a warrant requirement. While any deal was far from certain, there were signs of progress.

Then, things fell apart when, last week, President Trump nominated Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence. As director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte is known for leveraging his post and large social media audience to attack the president's perceived foes.

The fallout

Democrats — even those most closely aligned with the intelligence community — immediately decried the appointment and said they would not reauthorize Section 702 while Pulte was Trump's pick, over concerns that Pulte would weaponize FISA information as well as the rest of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

In an interview with NPR's Morning Edition, Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the chamber's intel committee, said "he's extraordinarily unqualified, but the timing could also not be more of a mistake." Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat, described Pulte as a "political hack" and "malignant clown."

Even Republican leaders expressed worries. "We don't need a weaponized DNI," Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters last week. "We need professionals there." Sen. Tom Cotton, the top intel Republican, refused to weigh in on Pulte's qualifications.

At the end of this week, both the House and Senate made a series of failed bids to extend Section 702, then — on Thursday — left town. The Senate is back next week, while the House is not scheduled to return until the week of June 22.

On Thursday afternoon, President Trump announced a permanent nominee to serve as director of national intelligence, federal prosecutor Jay Clayton. When asked by reporters in the Oval Office if Pulte would still take the job on an acting basis, Trump said he would "for a short while." He didn't say how long.

Copyright 2026 NPR

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Before Sayuri Tsuchitani became an entrepreneur, she spent two decades on her feet: cutting, coloring and styling hair. A hairdresser's work is physically tough, and Tsuchitani often wondered how she'd manage as she grew older.

When the pandemic shut the Los Angeles salon where she worked, she recognized a chance to make a change: She applied for a loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration, or the SBA, for a business of her own.

"The SBA led me to my success of the American dream," said Tsuchitani, who took advantage of a pandemic-era funding program to open a Japanese head spa: a salon offering blood-flow massages, ayurvedic oil treatments and deep scalp cleanses. She launched one location, then two more; hired one worker, then nine more.

But today, the SBA would disqualify Tsuchitani from its loan program because of a new policy. Tsuchitani is a green-card holder, also known as a lawful permanent resident; she moved from Japan 28 years ago. And in March, the U.S. small-business agency, for the first time in its history, stopped approving loans to firms that are not fully owned by U.S. citizens — and only citizens.

"Unapologetic about it"

The change is part of the quieter side of the Trump administration's push to discourage immigration. As many agencies have limited how noncitizens can qualify for programs — like housing subsidies or commercial trucking licenses — the SBA moved to do the same. Early announcements said the agency would ferret out "hostile foreign nationals" and "illegal aliens." But the SBA's rules had long restricted lending to immigrants, mainly to those living here legally and permanently. And that's what the SBA cut.

"It was a bit of a shock to the system," said Eda Henries, who runs a firm that helps small businesses raise and manage funds. "No one even thought for a second that would be on the table. No one expected that it would include legal permanent residents."

In announcing the policy change, the SBA referred to permanent residents as "foreign nationals." And the head of the agency, Kelly Loeffler, has argued they shouldn't benefit from American taxpayer dollars, though permanent residents pay taxes to the U.S. government just as citizens do.

SBA's small-business loans "are for American citizens, and we're unapologetic about it," Loeffler told Newsmax in March. She has cited an audit last year that found — and stopped — one six-figure loan approved for a business 49% owned by an immigrant without legal status.

In a statement to NPR, agency spokesperson Maggie Clemmons said: "The agency's rule change will help ensure more American citizens have access to funding previously granted to noncitizens. Across every program, the SBA is ensuring that every taxpayer dollar entrusted to this agency goes to support U.S. job creators and workers."

Historically, research has found immigrants are much more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans. Of all the people in the country, about 15% are foreign-born, but they run 20% to 25% of businesses, according to U.S. Census data. A new study this month by the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy estimates that immigrants and their children have launched two-thirds of the country's startups valued at more than $1 billion.

The SBA did not respond to NPR's questions about the potential impact of its policy on future job and business creation in the U.S.

SBA is a core pillar of small business

Of all SBA loans last year, the agency said 4% went to businesses involving permanent residents. It's a modest share, but transformative for those companies. For small businesses, the SBA is often the first lender, with affordable rates, to take a risk on an entrepreneur.

"I don't know where our business would be without this," said Cristina Foanene, whose glass company in Fresno, Calif., has received three SBA loans over a decade. The money allowed the company to expand its showrooms and manufacturing facilities to make windows and doors.

Foanene and her husband moved permanently to the U.S. from Romania 20 years ago as investors, bringing with them hundreds of thousands of dollars to start their business. So far, they've hired some 30 people, with more planned. One of their employees recently retired after 19 years with the company.

And it was that first SBA loan that made other investors feel comfortable lending to Foanene's business, she said.

So where will immigrant entrepreneurs turn for big cash infusions now?

"The alternative — it's just really scarce," said Henries, the small-business adviser.

Businesses denied loans mid-deal

Traditional banks often hesitate to deal with small firms. And Henries worries that the new SBA policy will push more business owners toward riskier or predatory lending, including merchant cash advances. Some may not grow their companies, or not start them in the first place.

Similar concerns have some Democrats in Congress trying to reverse the policy. The group — which includes Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Nydia Velázquez of New York, as ranking members of the Senate and House small-business committees, respectively — introduced a bill to restore the eligibility of legal permanent residents for SBA loans.

The impact is already rippling out, said Henries. The private lenders, such as banks, that issue SBA loans now take longer to verify every owner's citizenship status, she said, and some businesses are left in the lurch.

"I have clients that were in the middle of underwriting — we're in the process of doing deals with lenders and small business owners," Henries said. "These are clients that employ dozens of people and generate revenue, and pay taxes. And all of a sudden, the lenders put the brakes on."

Eight business owners who are legal permanent residents and had received or applied for SBA loans this year declined to speak to NPR on the record, for fear of drawing unwanted attention to their immigration status within the business community.

Foanene is now a citizen and chokes up just thinking about the day she took the oath, calling it one of her proudest moments. She wonders if leaders at the SBA might have a change of heart if they heard more stories like hers.

"It really made me sad," Foanene said. "If they will understand that there are people that are coming here with honest intention of building a business and creating jobs, then I feel like maybe they will say, 'Actually, it is benefiting our country.'"

NPR's Katie Daugert contributed to this report. 

Copyright 2026 NPR

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Families of transgender youth in California learned this week that their private medical records will not be sent to the Trump administration, for now. That's after a federal judge temporarily blocked hospitals in California from producing any documents responding to criminal subpoenas from the Department of Justice.

For nearly a year, the DOJ has served hospitals with subpoenas, seeking detailed patient files of transgender youth, personnel files for clinicians, and other documents related to transgender healthcare. Attorneys for the government haven't articulated exactly what's being investigated, but they have pointed to the stated goal of President Trump to end gender-affirming care for youth.

Criminal subpoenas to hospitals

At first, the DOJ issued administrative subpoenas, and many of those were quashed in court. Now they've moved to criminal subpoenas using a grand jury in a federal court in Texas.

One was posted publicly by NYU Langone Medical Center last month. It is not known how many hospitals across the country have received the criminal subpoenas, but the notice from NYU says that it was "one of several institutions" to receive them. The Trump administration refers to transgender healthcare as "sex-rejecting procedures" in the subpoena.

The administrative and criminal subpoenas are practically identical, says Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, which has brought many of the lawsuits fighting these subpoenas. "Nothing has changed — they haven't uncovered some new reason or basis to be seeking these records," he says.

"It is pure harassment. It's just an effort to frighten people, to intimidate doctors out of providing the care and to frighten parents and make them afraid that the federal government is going to seek them out, identify them and harm their families in some way," he adds.

Stanford case brought by families

The win in California this week is significant, Minter says. A group of six families who received care at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford sued to block the hospital from sending any of their medical files to the Justice Department.

Right before a deadline for the hospital to send those files, a federal judge in the Northern District of California granted a request for a temporary restraining order that applies to the whole state.

A Justice Department spokesperson in a statement said "it will use every legal and law enforcement tool available to ‌protect innocent ⁠children from being mutilated under the guise of 'care.'"

'Long journey to survive'

Arne Johnson is the parent of a trans teen in the Bay Area and a volunteer with the group Rainbow Families Action. He says even if the win is temporary, it's still a relief for parents like him. "This is like being in a stormy ocean right now — like you're floating on a raft and each individual wave is terrifying, but we also know we have a really long journey to survive," says Johnson, who is not a plaintiff in the case.

He says he's grateful to the families who brought the case and the attorneys representing them. "It's impressive and very noble in a time when people are compromising and turning their backs on our families," he says, fighting tears. "It just really means a lot to folks to see how hard people are working to fight for our kids."

So far, the many legal challenges to the Trump administration's attempt to get the medical files of transgender youth have been quite effective, Minter says. "We don't have any reason to believe that any hospitals have turned over records yet, but there would be no way to know that for certain," he adds.

At the same time, many hospitals and clinics that had been providing gender affirming care for young people all over the country have ended their programs, citing legal and financial pressure from the Trump administration. And this week, a federal judge in Maryland rejected a bid to certify a class of families of transgender youth nationwide to fight the administrative subpoenas.

Craig Konnoth is a professor specializing in health law and LGBTQ rights at the University of Virginia School of Law. He notes that the federal government's moves to get private medical records are unprecedented and could have effects far beyond transgender youth.

"It's not just search and seizure of medical records," he says. "It's the ability of the government to come after you, hoping that they'll be able to catch you out in something, that they will attach a label to afterwards, because they don't like the group that you belong to or the group that you're trying to assist."

That's why, he says, if the government succeeds in these efforts, the implications are vast.

Copyright 2026 NPR

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea's ousted President Yoon Suk Yeol and his former defense minister were sentenced to 30 years in prison Friday in a case alleging Yoon ordered drone flights over Pyongyang in 2024 to heighten tensions with North Korea and justify declaring martial law at home.

The Seoul Central District Court found Yoon and his ex-defense minister, Kim Yong Hyun, guilty of aiding an adversary and abusing their power, saying they sought to provoke North Korea into launching armed attacks or other serious provocations against South Korea to manufacture a national emergency. It said the moves harmed South Korea's military interests by exposing its capabilities, undermining its ability to conduct future operations and prompting North Korea to strengthen its defense posture.

The same court earlier sentenced Yoon to life in prison for a rebellion conviction over his short-lived imposition of martial law in December 2024.

North Korea accused Seoul of flying drones over Pyongyang to drop propaganda leaflets three times in October 2024. Kim, who was South Korea's defense minister at the time, issued a vague denial before the Defense Ministry said it could neither confirm nor deny the allegations. Tensions rose sharply but did not lead to any military clashes.

Yoon's lawyers criticized the latest ruling, saying the drone flights were a response to North Korea flying thousands of trash-carrying balloons into the South earlier in 2024. They argued that a guilty verdict would undermine South Korea's security interests but did not immediately say whether they would appeal.

Investigators led by special prosecutor Cho Eun-suk had sought a 30-year prison term for Yoon, accusing him of trying to create a warlike situation between the Koreas while plotting an authoritarian push to remove his political opponents and "monopolize" power. They had sought a 25-year prison term for Kim Yong Hyun, a key confidant of Yoon who helped plan and mobilize forces for Yoon's martial law declaration.

Yoon proceeded with the declaration late in the night of Dec. 3, 2024, delivering a televised address in which he accused liberal lawmakers of being North Korea-sympathizing "anti-state" forces. He cited a range of grievances, but particularly the opposition's impeachments of senior officials and cuts to his government's budget bill.

Martial law lasted about six hours until lawmakers broke through a blockade of soldiers and police at the National Assembly and voted to overturn it, forcing Yoon's Cabinet to lift the measure.

Yoon was quickly suspended from office, impeached and formally removed by the Constitutional Court. He was arrested in July 2025 and several criminal trial are ongoing.

The verdict in the most serious case, of rebellion, has been appealed both by Yoon and prosecutors, who had sought a death sentence.

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Federal financial aid is the engine of the country’s higher education system, pouring billions in student loans and grants into California alone, and this summer, the U.S. Department of Education plans to expand aid for students enrolled in short-term job training programs.

Except the state isn’t ready.

Launching a new financial aid program means creating new systems at the state and local level, and the California Student Aid Commission, the state agency in charge, said it needs more help. Although the federal aid program is slated to begin as soon as July 1, Daisy Gonzales, the executive director of the aid commission, has said repeatedly, both in state hearings and in an interview with CalMatters, that the money won’t be available to students until weeks or even months later.

Financial aid systems are “extremely complex,” she said, and the state lacks the infrastructure to build one on the federal government’s timeline.

The new financial aid awards, known as short-term or workforce Pell grants, are an expansion of the federal Pell grant program, which has for decades offered thousands of dollars in cash to low-income students for tuition and living expenses.

Historically, students in short-term job training programs were ineligible for federal student aid. The new Pell grants will give money to students who enroll in programs such as automotive mechanics or information technology, with most lasting about 10 weeks. Both public and private institutions are eligible, and the average student is expected to receive between $1,000 and $3,000, though details haven’t been finalized.

The new grants are part of a national, bipartisan push to further align higher education with the needs of employers, but the results are sometimes lacking.

In 2024, CalMatters investigated how California’s job centers used federal money to help low-income and unemployed adults attend short-term job training programs at for-profit colleges. Thousands of dollars in public subsidies went to those schools to train truck drivers and nursing assistants — careers that have a reputation for low wages, poor working conditions or high turnover rates.

Some of these for-profit schools were under investigation for various violations when they enrolled students. CalMatters found that the majority of truck driving schools had effectively no oversight. Some nursing assistants were making less than $30,000 after graduating.

The new Pell grants for short-term job training programs come with federal regulations aimed to ensure that graduates earn wages above the poverty line in an in-demand career and that only certain kinds of verified schools will be eligible. California is considering state legislation that would further restrict the kinds of programs that could qualify.

Since neither the state nor the federal government rigorously track these short-term job training programs, it’s not clear how many exist and how many students could ultimately benefit. Experts say that California’s community college students could be among the primary recipients, since the state’s 116 community colleges already offer numerous short-term job training programs in the skilled trades, healthcare, technology and public safety. But in an email to CalMatters, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office said it is too early to provide any estimates.

For one approximation, Gonzales points to CalGrant C, which provides state funding to students in job training programs that last at least 15 weeks. This year, roughly 225,000 students were potentially eligible. But unlike the new Pell grants, which could lead to billions in federal spending, CalGrant C has a relatively small budget, serving just under 7,800 students a year.

Are workforce investments paying off? 

In southern San Diego County, many community college students are working full-time jobs but are still unable to afford their living expenses, said Mark Sanchez, the president of Southwestern College in Chula Vista. Many students — including U.S. citizens — are “transitory,” he said, meaning that they live in Tijuana, where the cost of housing is cheaper, and cross the U.S. border for school each day because they can’t afford living in California.

Sanchez has been advocating for the new Pell grants, arguing to state and local officials that they could create a pathway for his students to get higher-paying jobs. His staff estimated roughly 1,500 students could be eligible for the grants in about 50 different programs, ranging from musicianship to accounting.

For students to qualify, schools will need to work over time with the state and federal government to prove that at least 70% of graduates of these job training programs are employed and that their wages are higher than the federal poverty line. The data is scattered and hard to track, and in some cases, information isn’t collected at all, said Su Jin Jez, the chief executive of California Competes, an education nonprofit.

State data can tell you, for instance, that a college graduate is working for a school district and how much they make, but the data can’t tell you what they’re doing at the school, such as whether they’re a teacher, a secretary, a lawyer or a janitor, said Jez. “Our state puts billions into aligning higher education and workforce and we don’t have a good way to understand if these investments are paying off.”

California Competes is sponsoring two bills in the Legislature this year, including one by Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Napa Democrat, that will require state workforce agencies to collect more data. The other is by Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, a Thousand Oaks Democrat, and will regulate which programs can qualify for the new short-term Pell grants. For the latter bill, Assemblymember Juan Alanis, a Modesto Republican, is a co-author and The Institute for College Access & Success is a co-sponsor.

Separately, the governor’s office has written emergency legislation that contains proposed regulations for the new Pell grants. Though the California Student Aid Commission can’t take positions on bills, Gonzales has openly praised the bill by Irwin and criticized the governor’s proposal saying it “risks creating a fragmented system.”

Avoiding another failure

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature created a new financial aid program, known as the Learning-Aligned Employment Program, which was supposed to give out millions in financial aid to working students to help them secure jobs related to their program of study.

The program was a failure, said Gonzales, who was the deputy chancellor of the community college system at the time. It only had one-time funding and a three-year window to succeed, she said. “What was deeply missing….was the professional development and the technical assistance. You can’t just introduce a new tool, and then say, ‘Students apply.’”

By the end of the three-year window, few students had applied and state legislators decided to cut the program. In an emailed statement to CalMatters, Nicole Kangas, a spokesperson for the student aid commission, said the Learning-Aligned Employment Program is a warning for the new Pell grants.

The expanded Pell grants were approved last summer, but the U.S. Education Department only finalized its regulations last month, giving states less than two months to roll it out before the July 1 start date. Now California officials and colleges have a long list of regulatory and administrative tasks to complete, including creating special agreements between the state and each of its college districts and universities. When the California Student Aid Commission created similar agreements with universities for the Middle Class Scholarship, the contracts were between 60 and 120 pages long and took about nine months to finalize, said Gonzales.

“We really are behind,” she said, adding that multiple other states have already passed legislation. Certain new regulations, such as Irwin’s bill, could give the state “an opportunity to catch up,” she said.

For Sanchez, the challenge is not just administrative. Once the new Pell grants are available, he said Southwestern College still needs to inform current and potential students that these grants exist and convince them to apply.

Even though the majority of community college students are struggling financially — including some who are homeless — many aren’t aware of financial aid, are hesitant to apply or they submit incomplete applications. Less than half of all community college students applied for financial aid last year, and state data shows that even fewer ultimately received it.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Updated June 13, 2026 at 3:04 AM PDT

The U.S. and Iran appeared closer to reaching a peace deal on Friday, as a sequence of social media posts signaled progress is being made.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in an afternoon post on X that he could "confirm that a final, agreed upon text of the peace deal has been reached and Pakistan is now working closely with both sides to finalize the next steps." Pakistan has taken the lead in mediation efforts.

"Peace has never been this close as it is now," Sharif added.

Also on Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on X: "The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding has never been closer." President Trump, who has said multiple times the countries are on the verge of a deal, shared Araghchi's post on his own social media.

Trump had said on Thursday he was canceling strikes on Iran and that a peace deal was imminent. It was the latest in a series of whiplash proclamations threatening more strikes and promising peace.

"Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening," Trump wrote on Truth Social.

"The Naval Blockade will remain in full force and effect until this Transaction is finalized — Time and place of the signing to be announced shortly," he added.

Trump said later on Thursday, in the Oval Office: "We should get done over the next few days. We're going to have a signing, maybe in Europe, and it's a great thing."

Trump was asked if they secured an agreement on nuclear issues and he said "yes, conceptually."

In recent days, Trump had again been amping up his war rhetoric. Earlier Thursday morning, the president had said that the U.S. will attack Iran "VERY HARD TONIGHT," while almost simultaneously telling Fox News the two sides are still negotiating.

Trump posted that the U.S. would also seize vital Iranian oil infrastructure, including Kharg Island, "at some point in the not too distant future."

The island, a key oil infrastructure site for Iran, has long been on the U.S. military's radar as a strategic target but carries a high potential for U.S. casualties.

"My preference has always been (to) take Kharg Island," Trump said on Fox News, adding later. "But I don't know that America has the stomach."

But in his Oval Office remarks, Trump said the deal was so close that the time and place of the signing would be announced shortly.

The conflicting statements come as Trump tries to pressure Iran into submission as inflation hits the highest number in years and his popularity remains at a low point.

It's clear that Trump wants the war to be over

Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor of information studies at Syracuse University, says there are also so many other things out of his control.

"I think from a rhetorical perspective, Trump is still trying to manufacture reality that he wants to be true, but it comes up against the actual state of affairs that he doesn't have much control over at the end of the day," she said.

She said it's also about assuring Americans that it's going to work out like he promised if he just has a little more time to end the war. The challenge is gas prices keep going up. Electricity is getting more expensive. And after weeks of hearing the same thing, polls show Americans are losing confidence in the message.

After more than three months of war, Iran has effectively shut ⁠down the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway through which about 20% of the world's energy supply travels.

A volatile ceasefire has been in place since April, but the two sides have been increasingly striking each other's targets as Trump has grown frustrated about the lack of a deal.

Copyright 2026 NPR

President Trump on Thursday named Jay Clayton, a federal prosecutor and former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to serve as director of national intelligence.

"Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay," the president wrote in a post on Truth Social announcing the nomination. "I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

Clayton's selection follows Trump's decision to nominate Bill Pulte, a close ally and political attack dog, to serve as acting director of national intelligence. The appointment sparked a political backlash that doomed efforts in Congress to renew a crucial intelligence tool before it expires on Friday.

The appointment last week of Pulte, the 38-year-old director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, roiled congressional negotiations around section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, one of the nation's most important surveillance tools.

Pulte was appointed despite any experience in national security, and his selection drew concerns from Democrats about the risk of sensitive intelligence being weaponized against the president's perceived political rivals.

Still, Clayton's nomination will not be enough to keep the FISA 702 program from expiring Friday. On Thursday, the House failed in its effort to pass a three-week extension of the program and left Washington for a scheduled recess.

They are set to return to Washington the week of June 22.

Copyright 2026 NPR

New federal work requirements are rolling out in stages across California’s public benefit programs, leaving many recipients in San Diego County wondering whether the changes apply to them.

CalFresh work requirements took effect June 1, while similar requirements for Medi-Cal are scheduled to begin Jan. 1, 2027.

San Diego County estimates that roughly 400,000 people could be affected by the changes across both programs.

For CalFresh, some people who previously qualified for automatic exemptions may now need to meet work requirements. That includes some veterans, people experiencing homelessness and former foster youth.

However, many people may still be exempt.

People under 18 or over 64, those who are pregnant, people unable to work because of a physical or mental health condition, caregivers for a child under 14 and students enrolled at least half time may still qualify for exemptions.

At the San Diego Food Bank, CalFresh navigators are helping recipients understand the new rules and determine whether they remain eligible for food assistance.

“Our team has been very focused on connecting with the community, letting them know what the requirements are, and then how we can help find exemptions,” said Josue Castro, who oversees the organization's CalFresh program.

Medi-Cal's work requirements are still months away, but advocates say many people are already confused because the rules differ from CalFresh.

“It’s understandable that there is confusion because this is a brand-new requirement that has never been imposed,” said Linda Nguy, an associate director of policy advocacy with the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

Nguy said the exemptions for Medi-Cal are not identical to those for CalFresh. Older adults, people with disabilities, children, former foster youth, Native Americans and parent caregivers are among those who may qualify for exemptions from Medi-Cal work requirements.

“There is a lot of overlap in terms of the requirements, but they don’t perfectly align,” Nguy said.

In a statement to KPBS, the California Department of Health Care Services said it is reviewing the new federal rules and warned they could change how medical frailty exemptions are evaluated, meaning some people with serious health conditions may need to provide additional documentation to qualify.

Nguy encouraged people to seek help early because qualifying for one program does not necessarily mean they will qualify under the rules for the other.

San Diego County said residents with questions about their eligibility can call the county’s access customer service call center at 866-262-9881 for assistance.

When President Trump named Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence last week, it threw a grenade into the middle of delicate congressional negotiations around one of the nation's key spy powers.

Pulte, the 38-year-old director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is best known for his role as a partisan attack dog for the president. He was a prominent advocate for Trump's push to fire then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and used his sizable social media following to push for mortgage fraud investigations into Trump's perceived enemies.

As director of national intelligence, Pulte would oversee the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. That includes the collection of hundreds of thousands of foreigners' electronic communications under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, one of the nation's most important surveillance tools.

On Capitol Hill, where months-long negotiations over the renewal of the FISA 702 program appeared close to an end, Pulte's appointment came as a surprise to the lawmakers involved in the deliberations.

The Senate was moving toward a robust three-year extension ahead of the law's Friday expiration after two prior short-term extensions. Then Trump's Truth Social post dramatically changed the context of the talks.

"I am appointing the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and Chairman of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, William J. Pulte, to serve as Acting Director of National Intelligence," Trump wrote. "William has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America."

The announcement was met with confusion and dismay on Capitol Hill. Many Democrats, concerned that Pulte has no national security sector experience and a history of weaponizing his role, made clear they would not support extending FISA Section 702 with him in the role.

"Inventor of Twitter Philanthropy"

The scion of a homebuilding fortune built by his grandfather, he attended Northwestern University and graduated with a degree in broadcast journalism. He started a private equity firm that invests in home services-related businesses and ran a nonprofit that worked with Detroit and surrounding cities to clear blighted lots.

During Trump's first term, Pulte turned his philanthropic attention online and quickly rose to prominence by giving away money to people on Twitter. He often offered bounties for retweets by prominent accounts.

"If @realDonaldTrump retweets this, I will give $30,000 to a Veteran on Twitter," reads a characteristic 2019 post. It was shared by the president with the caption "THANK YOU BILL!"

Pulte, who often claimed to be the "Inventor of Twitter Philanthropy" in local media interviews, regularly sent funds to folks looking to pay down debt, seek medical care or simply buy dinner. He told the Detroit Free Press in August 2019 that he employed a team of more than 10 people to "field and vet" thousands of requests.

His following on the platform ballooned to nearly 3 million people. In December 2021, as his Twitter philanthropy push continued, the future Trump confidante was still reluctant to talk about politics.

"I tell people, don't bait me into politics," he told the Detroit Free Press. "I stay apolitical."

Behind the scenes, though, Pulte and his wife, Diana, were quickly becoming Republican mega-donors. Less than two months prior, the Pultes made a $500,000 contribution to the Trump-aligned "Make America Great Again, Again!" super PAC.

By the end of the 2024 election cycle, the family had given roughly a million dollars to Republican candidates and party-aligned groups.

Housing chief to intel chief

After Pulte helped boost Trump's presidential return, the president-elect named Pulte to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

The agency was created after the 2008 recession to bolster the health of U.S housing finance markets, ensuring the safety and accessibility of mortgage loans. In his perch as the agency's director, he's gained a reputation for making abrupt policy announcements on X and has drawn scrutiny from industry leaders and investors over his muddled promises about the future of the federally controlled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

More than policy, Pulte's tenure has been marked by how he has leveraged the role to go after people the president dislikes. Pulte leveraged his broad social media following to broadcast accusations that several of the president's perceived enemies had committed mortgage fraud, including Fed official Lisa Cook, New York's Democratic Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. Each has denied wrongdoing.

Pulte did not respond to multiple interview requests placed through the administration and FHFA staff.

FISA hand grenade

By statute, the director of national intelligence is meant to ensure impartial intelligence assessments are presented to the president, to avoid the failures that occurred ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks and Iraq War — a job description that Pulte's critics say is temperamentally at odds with his reputation as a partisan attack dog.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, had been working alongside the committee's chairman, Sen. Tom Cotton, to adapt an extension of FISA 702 passed by the House last month into something that could secure the 60 votes needed to clear the Senate when Trump made his appointment announcement.

In an interview with NPR's Morning Edition the following day, Warner expressed that putting a man who weaponized confidential mortgage information in charge of all U.S. intelligence agencies made it impossible to convince Democrats and some Republicans to back the tool, given the existing concerns among a bipartisan group of lawmakers that the tool enables warrantless domestic surveillance.

"He's extraordinarily unqualified, but the timing could also not be more of a mistake," Warner said. Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat, described Pulte as a "political hack" and "malignant clown" in a press conference this week.

Even Republican leaders expressed worries. "We don't need a weaponized DNI," Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters last week. "We need professionals there."

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said "I have no observations on the matter" when asked whether Pulte had the right experience to lead the intelligence agencies.

Democratic congressional staff familiar with the negotiations told NPR that unless the president reversed course on Pulte's nomination ahead of Friday's nominal deadline — intelligence collection could continue under grandfathered authority for many months — there would likely not be enough Democratic support to renew FISA authority.

Trump has said he is interviewing candidates to take the job on a permanent basis, but does not seem inclined to reverse course on Pulte before Friday's FISA deadline. He is instead encouraging Congress to pass another short-term extension.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump said that as an acting director, not beholden to Senate confirmation, Pulte can quickly shake up the agency and continue to reduce its headcount.

"You're less shackled," he said. "It sort of gives you more power, you know, for a somewhat limited period of time."

Copyright 2026 NPR

Updated June 11, 2026 at 5:59 AM PDT

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — President Donald Trump on Thursday said the U.S. would hit Iran "VERY HARD TONIGHT," threatening in a social media post to "assume total control" of Iran's oil and gas industries, including the key Kharg Island, in the "not too distant future."

The post come after the U.S and Iran traded strikes for a second day, pushing the Middle East closer to the resumption of a full-scale war. The American attack, which lasted into Thursday morning in Iran, appeared more intense and wider than the day before.

Iran released little information on the extent of the damage and said it fired back at Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan, as it had a day before.

The U.S. military continued to enforce its blockade of Iranian ports, saying Thursday it fired missiles to disable a tanker attempting to transport Iranian oil. An Indian official said a U.S. strike on a different merchant ship earlier this week killed three Indian sailors.

It was the third time this week that back-and-forth strikes have rattled the Middle East. The first involved attacks between Iran and Israel, followed by the two rounds of fire between the U.S. and Iran, which hit countries in the region that host American bases.

The new exchange of fire came as efforts to negotiate an end to the war appeared stuck, with U.S. President Donald Trump warning that Tehran would "pay the price" for stalled negotiations. Iran's Foreign Ministry said in a statement Thursday that the U.S. attacks had "effectively rendered the ceasefire ... meaningless," without saying it was abandoning it.

Central to the negotiations is Iran's stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, which has disrupted global energy supplies, driven up fuel prices and made food and other basics more expensive well beyond the region.

Iran announced Thursday that the strait was closed — but it was unclear what that meant since it has severely restricted traffic through the waterway since early in the war and only a trickle of ships have gotten through. The U.S. military's Central Command disputed the claim — and Trump said Wednesday that the U.S. has undertaken a secret mission in recent weeks to sneak ships through the passage.

The two sides also remain at odds over Iran's nuclear program, which Tehran insists is peaceful but which the U.S. and Israel fear could be used to build an atomic weapon due to its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. The U.S. and Israel said a major reason they went to war on Feb. 28 was to ensure that Iran would never be able to do that.

The U.S. strikes Iran and Iran fires back at Gulf states

Central Command said its latest round of airstrikes came "in response to Iran's unwarranted and continued aggression" and targeted "Iranian military surveillance capabilities, communication systems and air defense sites." It did not elaborate on the damage done by the strikes, which it said ended just before sunrise Thursday in Iran.

Explosions from the strikes echoed around Iran's capital, as well as the port city of Bandar Abbas and other southern areas along the Strait of Hormuz. Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard later said sites hit included a manufacturing complex, a military barracks and a local Guard base outside of Tehran.

Kuwait closed its airspace for several hours because of the attack, but did not elaborate on any damage. Jordan said it intercepted 20 Iranian missiles fired toward an area that is home to a base hosting U.S. troops, though no one was hurt.

Bahrain's Interior Ministry said an 11-year-old girl was hurt and cars and homes were damaged by debris from interceptions responding to the Iranian attack.

Meanwhile, Israel warned residents in the country's north to seek shelter after the detection of suspected incoming fire from Lebanon, where Israel is fighting the Iran-allied Hezbollah militant group.

Trump says the U.S. is sneaking oil through the Strait of Hormuz

Iran's ability to control the Strait of Hormuz has proved a strong bargaining chip since the narrow waterway's effective closure has severely disrupted the global economy.

Trump said Wednesday that the U.S. military has undertaken a mission since last month to sneak oil shipments past Iran's forces in the strait, aided by the destruction of Iranian radar equipment.

Trump said as a result more than 100 million barrels of oil have evaded Iran's chokehold. There was no immediate confirmation of that figure, which equals roughly five days of oil shipments through the waterway before the war began.

But the seas remain dangerous for mariners.

The U.S. military's Central Command said Thursday that it struck a Guinea-Bissau-flagged tanker attempting to evade the American blockade with a shipment of Iranian oil. It said Hellfire missiles were launched to disable the M/T Jalveer late Wednesday after the ship's crew failed to obey U.S. orders.

It's the ninth merchant vessel the U.S. military says it has disabled since imposing the blockade in mid-April in waters off Iran. Two of those ships came under U.S. fire earlier this week.

Three Indian sailors were killed when American forces struck the Palau-flagged M/T Settebello on Tuesday, Indian Ports, Shipping and Waterways Minister Sarbananda Sonowal announced Thursday on X. The mariners had initially been reported missing.

U.S. Central Command said American forces issued warnings before firing on the ship, which it accused of trying to evade the blockade.

The leader of the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, condemned the attack. India's foreign ministry summoned a senior U.S. diplomat to convey its "deepest concerns" over the attack and formally protest the strike, spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said.

Big disagreements stand in the way of a quick peace deal

Trump suggested earlier this week that an agreement with Iran could be close — but the exchanges of fire have called that into question, and big differences remain.

The U.S. wants to see Iran give up its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which is a short technical step from weapons-grade levels.

Iran is refusing to give up the uranium and demanding relief from sanctions. It also wants the release of frozen assets even before a final agreement is in place, something Trump rejected.

Iran has insisted that any deal to end the war must also end fighting between its ally Hezbollah and Israel. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears intent on pursuing his goal of destroying the militant group.

A Qatari diplomatic delegation, negotiating in coordination with the U.S., left Tehran on Thursday morning after holding talks, according to an official with knowledge of the team who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the mediation. Pakistan, meanwhile, expressed deep concern over rising tensions and urged both Iran and the U.S. to adhere to the ceasefire.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Some of the most forceful objections against President Trump's proposed triumphal arch are coming from — and on behalf of — veterans.

That's because the 250-foot structure would be built on a roundabout near the main entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place for over 400,000 active-duty service members, veterans and their families.

The Trump administration says in its proposal that the purpose of the arch is to "celebrate the triumphs of the American people, inspire patriotism and love of country, and beautify our nation's capital."

But critics of the arch call it a presidential "vanity project" that will complicate traffic, disrupt the symbolic view between the cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial and disrespect those buried on those nearby hallowed grounds. Along with Democratic lawmakers, detractors also say it can't proceed without congressional authorization – which Trump has said he does not need and will not seek.

A group of three Vietnam War veterans, joined by an architectural historian, is suing the administration on those grounds to try to block construction of the arch.

One of those veterans, 83-year-old Shaun Byrnes of Virginia, met NPR on Monday outside the cemetery entrance on Arlington Memorial Bridge. It's just steps from the grassy traffic circle where Byrnes hopes an arch will never stand.

"There are other important monuments to our best presidents in Washington," he said. "They were all constructed not at the direction of those great men, but after they had passed away by our citizens as a way of honoring them and keeping their memories alive. This current arch does not check any of those boxes."

In the fight against the arch, Byrnes says he is thinking of his friends, and not just those who are buried in Arlington.

"Perhaps more important, at least more meaningful to me, is I have a lot of friends that I lost that are not buried here because we never recovered them," he said.

Byrnes served in the Navy for four years of the Vietnam War — many of those in South Vietnam, where he was seriously injured. He recalled one day of heavy firing, when he happened to step away from the platform just moments before one of his group's guns overheated and exploded, killing three men and leaving him with severe burns.

Byrnes went on to spend 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, primarily based in the Soviet Union. He identifies as politically moderate and said he never could have imagined suing his own government: "I'm a loyal citizen. I love my country."

Critics say the approval process is premature without Congress' green light 

Byrnes joined fellow veterans Jon Gundersen and Michael Lemmon, whom he's known for decades through the foreign service, and architectural historian Calder Loth to file the lawsuit in February. They are represented by the progressive consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen.

Nicolas Sansone, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said the case hinges on two statutes — the Commemorative Works Act and part of Title 40 of the U.S. Code — that requires Congressional authorization for any new memorial or monument on federal land in D.C.

"The starting point for a monument like this is an act of Congress saying, 'Hey, we need to build a monument, and here's what it should be, and here's where it should be situated, and here's what we want it to represent and the interests we want it to serve, with that democratic mandate,'" Sansone told NPR.

The Trump administration has argued in legal filings that Congress already approved the project back in 1925, when it authorized a pair of 166-foot columns for that same section of Arlington Memorial Bridge. But they were never constructed, even though the bridge project was completed nearly a century ago, as Sansone notes.

"If the administration can use any sort of prior authorization to build a monument … [that would] essentially allow unfettered building and unlimited adjustments to existing monuments that have already become part of the national fabric," Sansone said.

As a result of an earlier hearing, the administration says it will give 14 days' notice before starting construction, to give the plaintiffs time to re-file another emergency request to stop it. But the judge in the case has not yet issued a ruling on the legality of the project itself.

Even so, the administration has proceeded to bring its proposal before the two federal agencies tasked with giving feedback, usually after Congress approves.

The Commission for Fine Arts, which is packed with Trump appointees, gave final approval to the design last month, despite public protestation and unanswered questions about its exterior engravings.

The National Capital Planning Commission — a 12-member body chaired by a Trump staffer — also gave the proposal a preliminary stamp of approval at its meeting last week. That allows it to request more information about details such as lighting plans, road and air traffic impacts and federally required third-party environmental and historic preservation reviews.

Separately, the National Park Service is now accepting public comments on the arch through June 15. Publicly available materials submitted by the administration to NPS outline a proposed construction timeline that would take two to three years — and permanently alter the historically significant landscape.

"The idea that one president can unilaterally drive a project forward to kind of reshape the monumental core of the capitol, I think poses real problems no matter who the president is," Sansone said.

Evan Cash was the sole National Capital Planning Commission member to vote against the arch at last week's meeting. During the commissioners' discussion, he said his vote was influenced by the lack of Congressional and public buy-in.

"Normally, when we're dealing … with a commemorative project, we have a framework for understanding what the project is trying to accomplish," said Cash, who has served on the commission for over a decade.

Cash said he hopes the administration comes to its July meeting with "some clarity, some authorization, some purpose."

Who is the arch for? Not us, say veterans and their loved ones  

Members of the public have voiced a wide range of concerns and criticisms of the arch. Nearly 1,700 people submitted comments online before the National Capital Planning Commission met last Thursday, where nearly two dozen spoke out against it in the room.

Two of them said it was their first time protesting anything. Many said they had loved ones buried at Arlington, while several served in the military themselves.

"The proposed Monumental Arch will be a monumental disgrace to the nation and a monstrous insult to the heroes in the cemetery," said Stephen Eubank, who said seven of his relatives are interred there. "I hope those of you foisting it on us will be haunted forever by the ghosts of those 400,000."

One major point of contention — and confusion — has been the purpose of the arch.

The administration has broadly characterized the arch as a commemoration of the country's 250th birthday. But in October, when asked whom it was meant to honor, Trump told a journalist: "Me."

And, despite its proximity to the nation's most prestigious military cemetery, lead architect Nicolas Charbonneau told the Commission for Fine Arts that the arch would be "not primarily a monument dedicated to the dead, but to the living, to this great country and its [perserverence]."

"Who is this arch for? Is it for me? The president has already answered that question — it is for him," Marine Corps combat veteran Jimi Shaughnessy said at the meeting, calling it a waste of time, land and money.

Shaughnessy said his family's history of military service dates back nearly 200 years. His great-grandparents — who "led the charge on horseback against Pancho Villa" and treated the wounded as a World War II nurse — are both buried at Arlington.

"Service members and their families navigate many transitions throughout a military career and beyond," he said. "That final transition — from service to rest — is not theirs to manage. It is ours. It falls to us, the living, to receive our wounded and our dead with the highest esteem and care. An arch is not what they need."

If Trump really wants to help service members, Shaughnessy said, he would restore the funding his administration has stripped from agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Park Service.

Major veterans' groups have not publicly weighed in on the arch; the American Legion telling NPR it does not have a position on the issue.

A spokesperson for Arlington National Cemetery said it is aware of the "ongoing process," but referred questions to the Department of the Interior and National Park Service as the proposed site is outside cemetery property.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told NPR in an email last week that the arch will "enhance the visitor experience at Arlington National Cemetery for veterans, the families of the fallen, and all Americans alike, serving as a visual reminder of the noble sacrifices borne by so many American heroes throughout our 250-year history so we can enjoy our freedoms today."

Copyright 2026 NPR

California voters are delivering a split decision on whether they want to pay more sales tax to support healthcare services: Los Angeles County’s measure is clinging to a narrow lead, while Contra Costa County’s went down in defeat, a divide experts attribute to growing anxiety over the cost of living.

In Los Angeles, Measure ER, which proposes a half-cent sales tax for the next five years, led as of Tuesday evening with 50.59% of the vote. The measure requires a simple majority to pass. Supporters estimate that tax, which would not apply to groceries and medications, could generate $1 billion a year.

The county’s voters historically have been supportive of taxing themselves to fund public initiatives, said Mike Bonin, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. But Measure ER proved to be a hard sell.

Even among Democrats and progressives, Bonin said, there was weariness over the measure’s regressive nature — meaning sales taxes tend to fall harder on lower-income residents than wealthy ones. “This is tough on people, and so there was some resistance to it, which is why I think it took until (Monday) for it to get over the hump,” Bonin said.

In Contra Costa, Measure B would have levied a five-eights-cent tax generating an estimated $150 million a year. Voters rejected the measure, with 57% of voters opposing as of the latest count.

“We’re in a difficult period for middle-income people,” said Marc Joffe, president of the Contra Costa Taxpayers Association who led the campaign against Measure B. “I think the fact that gasoline went up to $6 during the course of the campaign was probably a wind (at) our back.”

The results stand in contrast to Santa Clara County, where voters last fall approved a sales tax with 57% of the vote.

Why counties turned to voters

Both measures were a response to the federal spending package Congress and President Trump passed last summer. Because of changes to Medicaid, also known as Medi-Cal in California, counties are bracing for a spike in the number of uninsured people. And as people lose coverage but continue to seek care, safety net providers stand to lose significant revenue. In L.A., money from the sales tax would also shore up county public health, Planned Parenthood services and emergency preparedness.

Coalitions of safety net providers backed the measures, warning that without new revenue, they could be forced to reduce hours, cut staff or close facilities.

“There’s no way out of this,” Louise McCarthy, chief executive of the Community Clinic Association of Los Angeles County, said on election night. “This is a situation that is being forced upon us. No local decisions made this happen, and no local decisions without revenue can solve the problem we’re in now.”

New estimates by the UC Berkeley Labor Center project that 2.2 million more Californians will go without health insurance by 2030 because of Trump’s spending law and recent state actions. That would nearly double the state’s uninsured rate to 14.7% and erase much of the state’s progress over the last decade at getting everyone insured. Counties, which operate safety net clinics and hospitals, say the federal policies and funding cuts – and not enough support from the state – are leaving them with major budget holes and in search of new ways to generate revenue.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who introduced Measure ER, called the sales tax a “last resort,” saying the county had already enacted hiring freezes, limited overtime and tapped emergency reserves. The county estimates it will lose about $2.5 billion over the next three years because of federal cuts.

The measure was opposed by some cities, anti-tax groups and County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents the region’s sprawling northern exurbs. Lancaster and Palmdale have nation-leading sales tax rates of 11.25%, and in Contra Costa County, sales taxes in Pinole and El Cerrito in Contra Costa have reached 10.25%. Both counties needed Legislative approval to pursue new sales taxes because their measures exceeded state limits.

The sales tax measures came as half of Californians named cost of living as the top state issue.

Susan Shelley with the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which opposed both measures, argued the proposals were misleading. Because backers structured the measures as general sales taxes — meaning counties can legally use the funds at their discretion — rather than earmarked taxes for healthcare, they required only a simple majority, not the two-thirds threshold that a special tax would have demanded.

For other counties that may consider taking similar measures to voters: “I hope it sends the message that people are taxed enough,” Shelley said.

Jim Mangia, chief executive of St. John’s Community Health, said the county will use the sales tax revenue as intended: for healthcare.

“This is a temporary solution, and we will not stop fighting for the long-term federal funding Angelenos deserve,” he said.

Counties press state for help

Contra Costa County runs one hospital and 11 clinics. Proponents of the measure estimated it would face at least a $1 billion deficit over five years because of funding losses, though opponents disputed those figures.

County Supervisor John Gioia said revenue from the tax would have protected critical services and helped keep people insured. Under Trump’s budget bill counties will soon have to check people’s eligibility for Medicaid every six months rather than once a year, and adults without children will face new work reporting requirements.

Gioia said the tax could have funded additional eligibility workers and bolstered the county’s program that provides basic health services to people with no insurance options.

Los Angeles and Contra Costa looked to Santa Clara County as a model. Voters there approved a similar measure last November; it took effect in April, and county officials anticipate it will make roughly $337 million a year. The county is allocating those dollars toward emergency services, cardiac care, mental health services and maternity care, among other areas.

But even that revenue only covers a third of Santa Clara’s projected shortfall, said County Executive James R. Williams. The county is still cutting and reorganizing staff and services in order to balance its budget.

“We were very clear, right from the outset, when we put this emergency measure on the ballot, that we were staring down over a billion dollars a year in revenue losses as a direct result of” federal spending cuts, Williams said. The missing link, he said, “is that the state has to do its part.”

The California State Association of Counties estimates federal cuts will cost the 58 counties up to $9.5 billion – a cost local officials say they can’t foot alone. The association has been pushing for additional state funding for months without much success. Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators must finalize the 2026-27 budget by next week.

“For most California counties, raising local taxes to absorb the impacts of (federal cuts) is not feasible,” said Graham Knaus, chief executive of the association. “And the fact that counties are even being forced to contemplate it is unacceptable.”

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

Not all of the city's libraries and recreation centers will be fully funded, but the use of Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology will continue in the fiscal year 2026-27 budget passed by the San Diego City Council.

Mayor Todd Gloria on Wednesday said he would sign the budget, waiving his veto or line-item veto powers, but said he was less than pleased with some aspects.

"Leadership means making responsible choices even when the outcome isn't perfect," he said. "While I disagree with several of the council's adjustments, I will sign this budget — with gratitude for the thousands of residents who participated, the philanthropic partners who stepped up, the city staff who worked tirelessly to prepare it, and the City Council whose partnership is necessary to keep this city moving.

"The work does not end here. Putting San Diego on stable financial footing will require fiscal discipline, honest conversations, and more difficult decisions in the years ahead. My administration has never shied away from tough calls, and I will continue advancing responsible solutions that protect core services, strengthen infrastructure, and secure our long-term financial health."

The unanimous decision to pass the budget late Tuesday came following hours of public comment and last-minute council debate.

Coming into Tuesday's meeting, amendments proposed to Gloria's May budget revision by Budget Chair Councilmember Henry Foster III included full libraries and recreation center restorations, a public-private partnership to restore arts funding previously slated to be cut and the defunding of the $2 million ALPR contract with Flock.

"We started this process with about a $120 million structural deficit," Foster said, blaming past cities leaders for decades of mismanagement. "A budget cycle demands tough discussions and tough decisions. This proposed budget has made progress."

The last item proved a sticking point with five of the nine-member council.

"Do we want to spend scarce resources on a 24/7 AI powered surveillance?" Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera said. "Or do we want to use those dollars to keep parks open, restore library hours, and create opportunities for young people, families, and seniors in our rec centers?”

But others questioned the honesty of juxtaposing funding libraries against license plate readers.

"License plate readers being directly opposed to children and families is a false comparison and is being done deliberately," Councilmember Raul Campillo said. "Criminals who have beat families to death in my district have been caught by this. Who here wants to go tell those families 'no, your family doesn't get justice?"'

Councilmember Marni von Wilpert said there "would be consequences" to defunding the ALPR "Smart Streetlights" contract. Councilmembers Elo-Rivera and Vivian Moreno were concerned with the technology collecting private information amid increasing federal involvement in San Diego through Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and other agencies.

Ultimately, the Flock contract was left untouched, some library hours were restored — in Council Districts 4, 8 and 9 — and multiple recreation centers had hours fully restored — Pacific Highlands Ranch, Nobel Athletic Fields, Robb Athletic Field, Canyonside, Doyle, Carmel Valley, Mira Mesa, Hourglass Field and Standley.

Council President Pro Tem Kent Lee said he was tired of cuts being proposed to libraries, arts, culture and other city services every year.

"If this were a year where resources were abundant, I would choose to fund all of these initiatives," he said. "It has frustrated us to be repeatedly told that these cuts are 'inevitable,' only for us to find other solutions."

Last week, Lee was joined by Foster III with County Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe and representatives of the Prebys Foundation to announce a public-private proposal to restore San Diego's arts funding, which would have the foundation put up $3 million for arts and culture programs slashed in the current proposed budget.

The council adopted recommendations from the city's Independent Budget Analyst's office to shift $6 million from San Diego's Transient Occupancy Tax — essentially a hotel tax — to arts programs, as well as restore $1.3 million in grants.

It would cover around $10.35 million of the nearly $12 million cut under the proposed budget as the city looks to tighten its belt around a $118 million structural budget deficit.

Gloria said new sources of revenue to cover the non-art additions include an increase in the transient occupancy tax — charged to those who stay in the city's hotels — and a $4.3 million boost to revenue by recovering rent from the city's golf courses.

"Every private golf course in San Diego pays rent for the land it sits on," he said. "Our public courses sit on public land owned by the people of San Diego. The new legal guidance allows us to properly account for the value of that land, and to make sure the public benefits when the courses succeed."

Councilmembers also had to weigh significant decisions made Monday evening, when the council voted unanimously to end paid parking at Balboa Park by the end of the year and reduce trash fees for single-family homes.

Paid parking will end on Dec. 31 and the trash fees will be reduced to $38.75 starting next year for the "typical" 95-gallon bin bundle — a number adjusted for inflation from the initial proposal in 2021. Those using 65- or 35-gallon bins will pay "proportionally less." That amount will increase to $39.91 on July 1, 2028.

The decisions Monday mean the city must find the lost revenue — or slash existing services — from somewhere else. A possible reduction of services includes the elimination of bulky item pickup and delay of an electric vehicle rollout.

The city will immediately stop selling yearly passes for the parking, will stop selling quarterly passes on Sept. 30 and monthly passes by Nov. 30. Those who have already purchased a yearly pass will get a prorated refund from the city.

Single-family refuse pickup is funded by the city's general fund, which all residents pay into through property tax — whether they rent or own a single-family home, a condominium or an apartment. The city takes away 300,000 tons of trash and 150,000 tons of recycling, compostables and yard waste annually.

"The question I asked at the beginning of the budget season was this: does the final budget protect the basics for people to live safely now, while investing in the future for this city to flourish later?" Campillo said. "In large part, the answer is yes. While no budget is as good as we all want, this unanimously approved budget is significantly better than the original proposal, thanks in large part due to public input. We were able to come together to significantly reduce the city's budget deficit while maintaining vital public safety services and community programs. I fought hard for critical restorations to the parks, libraries, and arts and culture programming in my district and across the city because we all deserve a safe, prosperous city."

Von Wilpert praised the council's ability to balance safety with other needs.

"Although we continue to face significant financial challenges, the final budget addresses the priorities that matter most to our community," she said. "This budget protects public safety and the infrastructure our residents rely on every day. It keeps our neighborhoods safe by funding stormwater channel clearing in our most flood-prone communities and maintaining our San Diego Fire Department Wildfire Helicopter program. It supports funding our parks and libraries, which provide our youth with a safe place to unlock their full potential and thrive."

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Republican Steve Hilton will advance to the November general election in the race for California governor, setting up a longshot contest against Democrat Xavier Becerra in which he’s promised to slash spending and regulations if elected.

Hilton, a British American former Fox News host, secured about 25% of the vote in the June 2 primary, with about 88% of votes counted as of Tuesday evening.

His opponent, Becerra, is a former state attorney general and U.S. Health and Human Services secretary who emerged from a large pool of Democratic candidates.

In a statement, Hilton said he would “lead the movement for change” in California and called Becerra the embodiment of the same decade and a half of Democratic control.

“My mission is clear: to go to Sacramento, clean up the corruption, cut your costs, help your business, and fix our schools,” he said. “We can’t keep voting the same way and expect different results.”

Hilton’s win knocks billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer from contention after he spent $215 million of his own money to boost his populist campaign and blanket the airwaves with ads. It will make the general election a traditional partisan matchup during a midterm election year that Democrats will treat as a check on President Donald Trump’s administration rather than the intra-Democratic Party brawl that Steyer supporters had hoped.

California uses a top-two primary system; the two candidates with the most votes advance to the November ballot regardless of party.

Steyer conceded in a statement Tuesday evening and endorsed Becerra for the November election. He said he was proud to have made “enemies” of the state’s utilities, tech companies and Big Oil, and didn’t blame Californians who “just couldn’t stomach voting for a billionaire.”

“It is absolutely essential that (Trump’s) handpicked candidate does not hold the keys to California,” he said, referring to Hilton.

With a crowded field of Democrats all competing for votes, Hilton led in the polls for much of the race, energizing conservative voters with promises to cut income taxes and the gas tax, boost oil drilling and overturn environmental regulations such as the state’s greenhouse gas reduction mandates.

He’s sold his candidacy as an opportunity for Californians crushed by high costs to end “16 years of one-party rule.” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the last Republican to lead California, left office in 2011.

“The people of California have really been generous in giving the Democratic Party the opportunity to show that their ideas work,” Hilton said last week, declaring victory early at a press conference in Sacramento. “I think the patience is running out, really.”

He faces an uphill battle in November.

California Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one. Though Hilton says he’s presenting the chance for the state to go in a different direction, there has been a GOP candidate in the general election for governor in every race in the past two decades — and besides Schwarzenegger’s tenure, Democrats have won them all.

He’s also endorsed by Trump, whom Californians disapprove of by high margins.

But he has not downplayed the endorsement.

“I think it’s going to be very helpful to Californians to have a governor who has a good working relationship with the president and his team,” he said.

Hilton’s signature campaign promise is to eliminate the income tax for the first $100,000 in earnings and institute a flat tax rate above that; he said last week that his campaign will consider raising that cap after conducting an economic analysis of the California cost of living. Either option would represent an enormous reduction in state revenue that Hilton has said he expects to offset by cutting a third of state spending.

He has not said how, if elected, he would get such a proposal through the Democratic supermajority in the state Legislature.

Hilton was born in London, the son of Hungarian immigrants to the United Kingdom. He got his start in politics working for the British Conservative Party and played a prominent role in the rise of Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010. He moved in 2012 to Silicon Valley, where his wife was a Google executive, and dabbled in startups before launching a weekly Fox News show in 2017 during Trump’s first presidency. The show, The Next Revolution, ran through 2023.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Updated June 11, 2026 at 3:05 PM PDT

Last January, when federal immigration agents started an immigration crackdown in Portland, Maine, pediatric occupational therapist Xenia Pantos was driving using their spouse's car to work when they saw masked federal agents and vehicles with tinted windows parked in the road. Worried about immigrant community members, Pantos stopped for a few minutes to observe.

Pantos told NPR they stayed at least 10 feet away from the agents and did not interact with them, but noticed an agent taking photos of another observer's license plate.

Hours later, Pantos' spouse, Carly Williams, a nonprofit consultant, said she received a call from a blocked number. A deep male voice on the other end of the line asked for her by name and identified himself as calling from the Department of Homeland Security.

Williams said the caller asked if anyone else drives her vehicle. When Williams mentioned her spouse sometimes did, the caller asked Williams if she knew her spouse had stopped at an incident that morning.

"What he basically said was, 'You should let her know to not do that anymore because people who are doing that type of thing are getting added to a domestic terrorist watch list,'" Williams recalled in an interview with NPR. (While the caller referred to Pantos as "she" and "her," Pantos uses they/them pronouns).

"That was a pretty terrifying phone call to receive, as you can imagine," Williams said.

DHS declined to comment on the couple's account when asked by NPR.

For months, Department of Homeland Security officials have repeatedly denied having a database tracking U.S. citizen protesters or a database of "domestic terrorists", even as anecdotes like what happened to Pantos and Williams suggest federal agents are collecting observers' information in some capacity.

In a previously unpublicized letter sent to members of Congress in April, recently departed acting ICE director Todd Lyons acknowledged the agency gives itself wide latitude to collect information on individuals suspected of potential violations of law, including interference with ICE operations or officer safety matters, and maintains records on people who were never arrested.

In the letter, Lyons denied that ICE maintains a database of protesters or that DHS maintains a "separate, standalone database" of individuals who were encountered but not arrested or detained. But he said at protests that involved alleged criminal conduct, ICE has collected "information to identify individuals reasonably believed to be involved in, or directly supporting, potential violations of federal law and to address officer safety and facility security concerns." The letter said ICE collects "essential biographic and biometric information and situational details."

Lyons wrote: "If individuals who interact with ICE officers are not arrested or detained, any information collected during those encounters is maintained consistent with applicable law and DHS and ICE policies and is treated as an official government record."

NPR is the first news organization to review the letter, which is dated April 21.

It was sent in response to Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) and 11 other Democratic members of Congress who wrote to DHS in February asking questions about what data the department collects on protesters.

Civil liberties experts told NPR Lyons' letter appears to be the clearest official acknowledgement yet by federal immigration officials that they may be routinely collecting and preserving information on protesters and observers who are not arrested.

"This letter is evidence of the fact that ICE is knowingly collecting and maintaining official government records on any protestor or lawful observer that its agents claim is potentially interfering with them or threatening agent safety," said JoAnna Suriani, a lawyer at the nonprofit legal and advocacy organization, Protect Democracy.

Suriani is representing Pantos, Williams and other observers in Maine in a federal lawsuit that alleges their First Amendment rights were violated by federal agents who tried to intimidate them by recording their faces and license plates and threatening to add them to a domestic terrorism database.

"Anyone who has seen the videos of our clients' interactions with ICE agents can see they aren't impeding anything and pose no threat to anyone, so why was their information collected?" Suriani said.

Protesters photographed, filmed and threatened with charges

Since the Trump administration's immigration crackdown began last year, peaceful protesters and observers recording federal immigration operations on their cell phones have been threatened with criminal charges for impeding or interfering with law enforcement operations. However, many cases where charges were brought against activists have been dismissed or resulted in acquittals. DHS officials have also previously asserted that recording federal agents and posting the videos amounts to "doxxing" and is a threat to their safety.

Observers in several states, including Minnesota and Tennessee, complained that agents photographed their faces and license plates and later determined their identities and where they lived. Federal agents have access to a suite of surveillance tools, including facial recognition technology, and can access vehicle registration records using a car's license plate.

A number of observers have also said their Global Entry status was revoked after interacting with federal immigration officials. The program is run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, another DHS agency, and allows expedited processing for pre-approved, low-risk travelers.

In January, a DHS official sent a memo to some federal immigration agents temporarily assigned to Minneapolis instructing them to collect personal information about protesters and agitators, including license plates, identifications and images, according to correspondence reviewed by CNN. NPR has not independently confirmed the reporting.

Frost told NPR he has been concerned about law enforcement tracking protesters since he was part of the Black Lives Matter movement and learned police were collecting information on him and other protesters.

He said while it may be typical for law enforcement to conduct investigations and determine if someone broke the law and then move on, it is concerning if information on people who are exercising their rights is kept by a large federal department.

"That's the concern, is that we have an agency that's been tasked with immigration enforcement having a database … relating to Americans exercising the First Amendment, which is wrong," Frost told NPR.

ICE letter provides nuance after blanket denial

At a February congressional hearing, Lyons denied his agency was surveilling U.S. citizens and said: "There is no database for protesters."

DHS has repeatedly provided a statement to the media that says, "There is NO database of 'domestic terrorists' run by DHS. We do of course monitor and investigate and refer all threats, assaults and obstruction of our officers to the appropriate law enforcement. Obstructing and assaulting law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime. Our law enforcement methods follow the U.S. constitution."

A department spokesperson provided that statement in response to NPR's inquiry asking if the Lyons' letter still reflected current policy, and again in response to a request for comment about Pantos and Williams' account.

At a congressional hearing last week, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said his department had used facial recognition technology on people gathered outside of Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in New Jersey that has been the site of recent protests that have led to intense clashes between some individuals and federal agents. Dozens of people have been arrested in connection with the demonstrations, including some who are accused of assaulting federal officers.

"I have zero tolerance," Mullin said in the hearing. "If you verbally assault our officers, you go after our vehicles, you assault our property, you assault one of our officers, we will find you, we will arrest you."

Lyons' April letter began by saying, "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not maintain any kind of database of U.S. citizens protesting ICE activities." It also asserted that "DHS policies and practices are designed to respect lawful protests and constitutionally protected activities."

The letter continued, "Where individuals decide to go beyond protected speech and commit crimes against federal personnel and property or threaten, or forcibly impede, assault, or interfere with lawful operations, ICE remains steadfast in exercising its authority to investigate and prosecute violators."

While the letter suggested personal information is only collected if there is potential unlawful activity, Scarlet Kim, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Trump administration has set a precedent of characterizing lawful First Amendment activities as possible crimes.

"We know that very high level officials within DHS and Lyons himself have explicitly equated First Amendment-protected activities like video recording, gathering information about federal agents, and sharing that information publicly as essentially potential criminal acts that threaten officer safety," said Kim, who is representing observers in Memphis and Minneapolis in federal lawsuits against agencies involved in immigration enforcement.

"So their own definition of what potentially violates the law and could trigger surveillance against an individual includes activities that are squarely protected by the First Amendment," Kim said.

While Lyons writes, "DHS is not creating or maintaining a separate, standalone database for individuals encountered that haven't been arrested or detained," Kim said the letter "strongly suggests" that even if DHS does not have a standalone database of U.S. citizens engaged in First Amendment-protected activities, federal agents are likely collecting and maintaining that information in existing data systems.

"He did not deny that, essentially, that information would not be placed in other existing databases," Kim said.

The letter from Frost and his fellow Democrats was addressed to the Secretary of Homeland Security and asked about policies at DHS, but the response came just from ICE, which is just one agency within the department, raising questions about what may be happening in other parts of the department.

The Democrats' letter questioned whether DHS maintains or accesses information from lists or programs called "Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta" among others. A January article by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported DHS and FBI have secret watchlists with those code names to track anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian protesters, as well as "Antifa." Klippenstein's report cited conversations with two senior national security officials. NPR has not independently confirmed the reporting.

The letter from Lyons said in response: "ICE does not maintain, add, or access information from the programs mentioned in your letter."

Frost told NPR he plans to continue pressing the department as he has many more questions about how the information ICE is collecting is used and how it is shared with other parts of DHS.

Last month, the organization FIRE, which advocates for freedom of expression, announced that it is suing DHS and ICE for access to records on whether it is maintaining a database of protesters.

Maine couple left with unanswered questions

Pantos told NPR they had no idea their information might be collected by federal agents when they made the decision to pull over and peacefully observe that morning in January, and that what they had done was protected by the First Amendment.

But after the unexpected phone call threatening that Pantos could be added to a domestic terrorist database, Pantos said they felt too scared to observe ICE activity again. They worried about their family's safety.

"We are a queer couple, which brings additional risks," Pantos said. "There has been an ICE surge in Portland and I've felt really overwhelmed and powerless."

In March, two months after the incident, the couple drove to Quebec City in Pantos' car to celebrate their anniversary. When they tried to re-enter the U.S., a Customs and Border Protection officer pulled them aside for additional questioning and took their phones and keys for about an hour, they said.

To their surprise, one of the officer's first questions was to ask Williams if she had her car registration with her, despite the fact that they were traveling in Pantos' car. After Williams said she didn't have it with her, the officer asked her to describe her car and to recite her license plate number if she remembered it, according to the couple's account.

"He was clearly looking at a computer screen," Williams said, adding that the officer "seemed to be verifying what I was saying."

The couple told NPR that was the moment they realized their data must have been retained in some kind of federal system after Pantos stopped to observe federal agents in January.

"I have to think, because he asked about Carly's vehicle when we were in my vehicle, that there is some sort of an alert when you run our passports that brings attention to us in a way that it didn't used to before all of this happened," Pantos told NPR.

"I feel really concerned about what has happened with my data and the data of so many other people," Pantos said.

Copyright 2026 NPR

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SAN FRANCISCO — The speedy shuttering of the main immigration courthouse in San Francisco affects over 100,000 pending immigration cases, slowing down their consideration and leaving more immigrants in limbo and at risk of deportation.

But it also deals a symbolic blow to a region that has long stood at the vanguard of immigration advocacy.

For decades, the San Francisco immigration court was where immigrants living between California's Central Valley and central Oregon could make the case for why they shouldn't be deported. The broad jurisdiction made it one of the busiest immigration courts in the country, hearing thousands of cases a year.

It was also one of the courts most likely to grant an immigrants' asylum application to stay in the U.S. Its closing comes as the Trump administration seeks to limit pathways for many foreigners to enter or stay in the country.

"It's part of the message that the Trump administration is sending, that they're not open to asylum seekers. And one way of doing that is closing the court that has been very generous to asylum seekers," said Bill Hing, a law and migration studies professor at the University of San Francisco. "It's sending a message that the progressive cases that have come out of San Francisco are going to end."

Earlier this year, the Justice Department, which oversees immigration courts, announced it would not be renewing the lease on the building at 100 Montgomery St. — the main courthouse in San Francisco, with 21 courtrooms. The move followed the termination and resignation of nearly all the judges who worked out of that location. The closure, which was supposed to happen at the end of the year but has been accelerated, sends 100,000 cases to the Concord Immigration Court, about an hour away across the San Francisco Bay.

About 17,000 cases will stay at 630 Sansome St. in San Francisco, another, smaller location with just two operating courtrooms.

The DOJ cited cost saving as the reason for the closure. It didn't respond to a request for comment about concerns that the closure is related to the court's track record of asylum approvals.

"Reducing the immigration court backlog remains a priority for the agency. Any immigration judge can hear any case at any time throughout the country to assist with caseloads," Kathryn Mattingly, spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, said in a statement. That branch of the DOJ makes up immigration courts.

"As EOIR continues to add new immigration judges, EOIR will continue to make scheduling adjustments to ensure all cases are handled in a timely and lawful manner."

The San Francisco court, on average, denied asylum about 30% of the time in fiscal year 2025, which is half the national average. Since 2004, more than half of respondents who got a decision were approved for asylum, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Immigration attorneys worry that the Trump administration's strategy is not to add more immigration judges to the existing system to fairly decide cases.

Rather, "it's to make the barriers to having your case heard so high that it becomes almost virtually impossible," Ghassan Shamieh, an immigration attorney with cases in the closing court, said, speculating about the administration's reasons. "Changing locations of the physical court is a step to further that agenda."

San Francisco's progressive immigration history may have made it a target

Hing, the law professor, remembers practicing in the San Francisco immigration court after he graduated from law school in the 1970s. He said the court was significant to the region due to San Francisco's own deep history with immigration, from those entering at Angel Island to the Chinese Exclusion Act.

"Chinese exclusion set the groundwork for much of the litigation [in San Francisco] when it came to challenging deportation," Hing said, adding that for decades downtown firms provided pro bono assistance to asylum seekers and other immigrants. That included firms that specialized in immigration law during peak moments of migration, like the rise in Central American migrants in the 1980s.

"Then you add to that the evolution of nonprofit organizations in the city. And it's very, very collaborative," he said.

That strong legal presence resulted in several precedent-setting immigration cases reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. Some of the case law predates the modern-day immigration court system, such as immigration decisions regarding protection from deportation for union leader Harry Bridges, admission of visitors to the U.S. who identify as gay, and battles that laid the groundwork for relief from deportation for Filipino World War II veterans.

More recent cases set some of the legal standards for asylum.

Over time, as the San Francisco immigration court was formally stood up, it gained a reputation for granting more relief from deportation than the national average. Immigration attorneys attribute the high success rate to San Francisco having the second-highest representation rate in the country — meaning more immigrants with cases in the court, about 69%, had lawyers representing them, according to the American Immigration Council. Concord ranks third.

In response to questions about the impact on asylum rates, EOIR spokesperson Kathryn Mattingly said the closure was due to the expiration of the lease of the building and that relocating the court's work would be "more cost effective." She did not address criticism about the impact of the closure on immigrants' access to lawyers, or on their asylum cases.

San Francisco and Concord face the brunt of layoffs, less resources

The Concord Immigration Court, which now must absorb the bulk of cases from the closure, has never been fully staffed.

At the start of the year, the immigration court system nationally had a quarter fewer immigration judges compared to the start of 2025, even as the backlog in cases is 3.5 million.

The shrinking ranks particularly affected the Bay Area in California. San Francisco went from 21 judges to now just two, at a second location in the city; Concord was meant to have 21 judges but now has 4, not counting the supervisor.

The cases are coming to Concord as immigration judges continue to be terminated in that location, as recently as May. The Trump administration has terminated over 130 immigration judges nationally; many others have resigned or retired.

Although the Justice Department has boasted of hiring the most immigration judges in one year, including a record-setting class of more than 80 people in May, only one of those new judges is currently assigned to Concord.

Cases at Concord are currently being scheduled for nameless "visiting judges" — without clarity on if it would be a new judge, one not yet hired, or a judge in another part of the country appearing via video conference.

The lack of an assigned judge means that case could be moved on the schedule again, and attorneys said it can add challenges to fully preparing a case.

In response to questions about staffing, Mattingly said any immigration judge can be assigned to adjudicate cases in any court in the nation, as needed.

"Cases will be timely adjudicated either at the Concord Immigration Court or remotely," she said. "Reducing the immigration court backlog remains a priority for the agency."

Jane Lee is an immigration attorney who volunteers as an "attorney of the day," providing day-of legal assistance to immigrants who come to their hearings without a lawyer.

"The area that this court is going to cover is really large and there's like thousands of cases and we don't have the judges," she said of the court in Concord.

The cases currently scheduled for San Francisco are expected to be heard at Concord starting in December.

Delays mean immigrants in both courts wait longer to know if they can stay

Across the Bay, Shamieh, the immigration attorney, said he has hundreds of cases still pending in the Montgomery San Francisco court, which currently has no judges and no hearings scheduled ahead of its December closure.

"This uncertainty is incredibly scary," Shamieh said. "Judges had cases going till 2027, 2028."

Elin, who entered the U.S. from Nicaragua in 2020 and is seeking asylum, has been hit hard by multiple delays.

He has been waiting for his final hearing for several years out of San Francisco. It's been rescheduled multiple times; one delay came after the judge who was supposed to hear his case was fired.

It's now slated for 2029, in San Francisco at the closed Montgomery location and with a judge that no longer works there. His case is poised to be among those moved to Concord — a commute of more than an hour; he does not have a car.

"There isn't a set date and this situation is very stressful – sometimes I am afraid to go outside," he said in an interview with NPR. He provided only his first name to NPR for fear of reprisals for his pending case. "My brother's asylum was approved and he just got his green card. So for me, I think this wait time is harmful because I am still in limbo."

Elin said he has been in the U.S. since late 2020. He has a work permit, pays taxes and believes he could have a good case to stay.

"It is a balance because I do want my case decided and finished — and at the same time, I also want to wait to see if a change in president [by 2029] could be better," he said.

The volatile schedules are also affecting attorneys. Jordan Weiner, interim executive director of La Raza Centro Legal, said her nonprofit firm has stopped taking new cases because of the unpredictability of the current paused caseload while the transfer to Concord moves forward.

"Even though it's sort of like a lull, that doesn't mean we can sign more clients because tomorrow we could get hearing notices for every single client for next week," Weiner said. "And so we're not able to take new clients until we know what's going to be happening with these cases."

Resources coalesce around Concord, again unifying legal efforts

There's also signs that San Francisco's storied immigration defense bar is starting to adjust to the new realities.

When the Concord Immigration Court opened in 2024, advocates foresaw challenges. The building is not very close to public transportation. The courtrooms are located on the top floors of a building that has other offices, and there's minimal signage and waiting areas.

Nonprofit legal and community organizations quickly jumped in to support the new court — including creating packets with lawyers' contact information, volunteers to greet people in the lobby and a fund to help cover immigrants' asylum application fees. Now, there is a coalition of about 100 volunteers who wear bright blue vests and hand out the packets and coordinate with volunteer attorneys.

Legal organizations in San Francisco are seeing the development of those resources in Concord as an opportunity to create a unified legal aid system once more.

Milli Atkinson, director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the Bar Association of San Francisco, manages her own 100 volunteer "attorneys of the day" who provide legal aid to those in immigration court without a lawyer.

Her biggest concern is immigrants, particularly those without lawyers, not knowing they are now supposed to go to a different city. She said this was also an issue in the 2024 transition.

Back then, "if you were confused about when your court [hearing] was or where your court was, there was a little bit of grace given to respondents. A judge would understand if you missed a hearing because you just got a new notice and you were going to all your old hearings and you just didn't show up to this one," Atkinson said. Now, she worries that grace won't be extended this time as the administration looks for ways to issue more orders of deportation for those who miss their hearing.

Mattingly, the EOIR spokesperson, said the agency is issuing new hearing notices to all parties whose cases are reassigned to a new location.

The legal organizations in both cities are beginning to share resources. The San Francisco attorneys of the day are already training in the Concord court and preparing to serve the clients that are moved over, while juggling the two remaining courtrooms at the smaller location in San Francisco.

Still, the closure of the city's larger courthouse is bittersweet for attorneys like Atkinson who have practiced there for decades.

"Like Ellis Island, like Angel Island, there's a history of tragic injustice," Atkinson said. "But there is also a history of moments of people's lives being changed and people having, for the first time maybe ever, the sense that they're they're going to be safe and that there's a future and hope for them and their family."

Copyright 2026 NPR

Updated June 10, 2026 at 4:34 PM PDT

Bill Gates appeared before members of Congress on Wednesday and said he never witnessed or knew about any of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes.

Gates was on Capitol Hill to answer questions about his relationship with Epstein, as the House Oversight Committee continues its investigation into the late sex offender. He took part in a closed-door transcribed interview.

"I'm glad to be here voluntarily to testify to help with the committee's work," Gates told reporters before the interview. "I hope my testimony is helpful to the important work of the committee to find justice for the victims.

In the text of his prepared opening statement, Gates described how he first met Epstein in 2011 through people in his "professional and philanthropic work" on global health. He continued to have conversations with Epstein through 2014 about potential donors, according to the statement. Gates said he was aware "that Epstein had faced prior legal issues, but I did not fully understand the extent of the crimes he committed."

"I accepted the introduction without applying the scrutiny I should have," Gates said. He added that he "made it clear to Epstein from the outset that he would never play a role in any of the work or receive any compensation."

Gates says Epstein used information about his infidelities to pressure him

Gates also admitted to extramarital affairs in the statement and said Epstein used that information to "pressure me to re-engage with him." Gates said Epstein was unsuccessful in his effort.

Lawmakers said they've seen Epstein try to blackmail powerful people before.

"He uses that over and over again," Rep. Robert Garcia, the lead Democrat on the committee, said of Epstein during a break in the interview. "The theme of blackmail, the theme of using his power and information against others is very common."

Gates said he realized in 2014 that Epstein "would never deliver on his promises" and stopped communicating or meeting with him.

"I should never have met with Epstein in the first place," Gates said.

The committee interview was not recorded, in contrast to the videotaped appearances earlier this year of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to the committee. The Republican-led committee will, instead, release a transcript in the days afterward, as it did after the appearances of former Attorney General Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Gates says he met with Epstein after his conviction in efforts to secure "billions" in charitable donations

Rep. Melanie Stansbury, a Democrat from New Mexico, said she directly asked Gates why he continued to associate with Epstein even though he was a registered sex offender. She said he responded that "getting billions of dollars for global health was worth it."

"He admitted that he knew of Mr. Epstein's reputation. He admitted that he knew that he had been convicted of sexual crimes. But ultimately, in his words, he viewed this narrow relationship as being an acceptable means to access wealthy donors," Stansbury said.

Other lawmakers, like Rep. Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, called the questioning "intense," but said Gates was "well-coached" in his answers and he didn't expect too much new information.

Overall, Burchett said it's clear to him that Epstein was "a friend collector."

"He just liked to have people around him that were a big deal," Burchett said.

From his view, Garcia said Gates was "being cooperative in answering the questions, but he's certainly pushing back."

The Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist is one of many influential people whose names appear in the Department of Justice documents about the disgraced financier. Appearing in the files is not necessarily an indication of criminal wrongdoing.

Gates' name appears numerous times in the Epstein files. He allegedly met with Epstein multiple times after the financier's conviction in 2008 for sex crimes that involved minors. An email indicates that Gates planned to travel on Epstein's private plane in 2013. Gates also appears in photos with Epstein and others whose faces are redacted. In his opening statement, Gates did not address any travel on Epstein's plane, but said he never went to Epstein's island, ranch or Florida home.

Epstein was arrested a second time in July 2019 on federal sex-trafficking charges and later died in prison. Authorities determined his death was a suicide.

Epstein's emails also mention Gates' ex-wife, Melinda French Gates. In one instance, Epstein claims, in an email that appears to be sent to himself, that he helped Bill Gates get medication to treat an STI from "sex with Russian girls." Epstein also said that Gates had wanted to try to give that medication to French Gates in secret.

Gates did not directly address the email in his opening statement, but he said Epstein became aware of "sensitive information about my personal life," including his affairs.

French Gates told NPR in February that the emails in the Epstein files filled her with "unbelievable sadness" and reminded her of problems she faced in her marriage.

"Whatever questions remain there of what — I can't even begin to know all of it — those questions are for those people and for even my ex-husband," French Gates said. "They need to answer to those things, not me."

A spokesperson for Bill Gates also told NPR earlier this year: "These claims are absolutely absurd and completely false. The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein's frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame."

Survivors of Epstein's abuse continue to call for justice and transparency from the committee's investigation. Annie Farmer, who testified publicly that Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell sexually abused her at Epstein's New Mexico ranch when she was 16, told NPR on Monday that a lot of people don't realize how long and personal Epstein and Gates' relationship was, and "it's fair" for Gates to answer questions about that connection.

"What we've seen so far is that a lot of people have taken the stance of just wanting to cover for themselves and have not offered real information," Farmer said of some of the high-profile appearances before the committee. "With each person that comes, there's an opportunity to do something different, and I hope that [Gates] chooses to do that."

Committee chair Rep. James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, told reporters that he has been meeting with survivors and asking them to read the transcripts of the depositions.

"If the survivors see any things that were said in the depositions and interviews that aren't true, we're working with them to try to get evidence to figure out if the witnesses were lying," he said.

What's next for the committee's probe

On Tuesday, the committee interviewed Epstein's longtime assistant, Lesley Groff. Groff's name appears in thousands of Epstein documents, and was involved in scheduling meetings and planning times for girls to meet with Epstein. Groff denied any knowledge or participation in Epstein's crimes.

Along with Gates and Groff, this summer the committee plans to interview billionaire investor Leon Black, former Bill Clinton aide Doug Band, former Goldman Sachs lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler, and former Barclays CEO Jes Staley, according to Comer. Comer also said on Wednesday that he would be asking law professor Alan Dershowitz to come for an interview.

Garcia said he also wants to subpoena both acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel to testify in the investigation. Comer said on Wednesday he wants Blanche to come before the committee in July, but emphasized that Blanche also spoke before the committee with then-Attorney General Pam Bondi for a briefing in March. Democrats walked out of that briefing.

The Gates Foundation is a financial supporter of NPR.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Updated June 10, 2026 at 6:33 AM PDT

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It's a problem the labor movement has decried for years: After a successful union election, it takes far too long — an average of 465 days, according to Bloomberg Law — for workers and their employers to reach a first contract.

In some cases, it takes even longer. Neither the Buffalo, N.Y., Starbucks baristas who unionized in late 2021 nor the Staten Island Amazon warehouse workers who unionized in the spring of 2022 have a contract.

Now, by a vote of 230 to 193, the House has approved a bill that would force employers to the table, allow federal mediators to get involved if a deal is not reached within 90 days, and — if needed — settle the matter through arbitration shortly thereafter.

Twenty Republicans joined Democrats in voting on Tuesday evening to pass the measure, called the Faster Labor Contracts Act.

"No more stop the steals. You got an election, you can get a contract," said New Jersey Democrat Donald Norcross, a union electrician and the bill's sponsor, at a press conference last fall.

Norcross says the measure would be the most significant new protection for workers since before World War II, an assertion echoed by labor leaders.

"This is one of the most consequential labor bills to come before Congress in generations," said Teamsters General President Sean O'Brien in a statement earlier this year. "It has the potential to hold Corporate America accountable for endlessly dragging out negotiations and denying workers the first union contracts they deserve."

Republicans opposed to the bill described it as government overreach, something that would be bad for employers, employees and the economy.

A discharge petition got the bill to the House floor

The bill reached the House floor via a procedural tactic known as a discharge petition — the same tactic used to force a House vote on the release of the Epstein files. Democrats have increasingly turned to discharge petitions, which require a simple majority, to circumvent House Speaker Mike Johnson. Seven Republicans joined Democrats in signing the discharge petition to get the Faster Labor Contracts Act to the House floor.

Now, the measure heads to the Senate, where it faces steeper odds, although it does have the support of several Republicans, including Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, one of the bill's sponsors.

An expedited timeline to get to a contract

For years, Democrats have unsuccessfully pushed for far more sweeping reform to federal labor law through a bill called the PRO Act. The Faster Labor Contracts Act replicates one provision of that bill, creating an expedited timeline for what has to happen once workers vote to unionize.

Within 10 days, employers must begin contract negotiations. If no agreement is reached after 90 days, either party can bring in the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, a federal agency tasked with handling labor disputes, both within government and in the private sector.

If there is still no agreement after another 30 days, the dispute would be settled by a three-member arbitration panel, which would take into consideration the employer's financial status, the employees' cost of living, and the wages and benefits at comparable companies, among other factors. The agreement would be binding for two years or until the two sides settle on something else.

Opponents say it's a "draconian" measure

The CHRO Association, which represents chief human resource officers at 350 large corporations, called the measure "draconian" in a letter to Speaker Johnson.

"Sometimes [contract negotiations] do take time, as frustrating as it is," says Gregory Hoff, the association's general counsel, noting that union contracts can run hundreds of pages long and be in place for years. "It's very, very important to get these things right the first time."

While the CHRO Association does support some kind of reform to speed up the negotiation process, Hoff says giving the government the ability to impose a contract so soon after a union election is not the right solution.

"It's not their fault, but it's unreasonable to expect that the government arbitrator would have a better idea of what's going on on the ground than people who actually work there along with their union representatives, along with the employer," Hoff says.

Another complication is that the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service has been diminished by the Trump administration. The agency is now down to about 90 employees, less than half of what it was before President Trump signed an executive order targeting a number of entities to be "eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law."

"When you think about all the first contracts that might pop up in even just a given year… I think the idea that they could handle all this is highly optimistic," says Hoff.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Updated June 10, 2026 at 9:16 AM PDT

Federal agencies responsible for immigration enforcement are set to receive tens of billions more dollars after Congress voted to fund them not just for the year, but through the rest of President Trump's term.

The House narrowly voted on Tuesday to direct roughly $70 billion to the Department of Homeland Security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, the second multi-billion dollar infusion of money to the agencies in the last year muscled through by Republicans alone.

The measure passed by a vote of 214 to 212. Trump signed the bill on Wednesday.

The vote marks the end of a 115 day standoff over immigration policy. After federal officers shot and killed two protesters in Minneapolis earlier this year, Democrats refused to back more funding for ICE and Border Patrol, with the goal of forcing changes to immigration enforcement tactics.

But as negotiations fell apart, Republicans moved to circumvent Democrats using a special procedure known as reconciliation to fund the agencies without acquiescing to any of the reforms they were demanding.

In the Senate last week, one Republican joined all Democrats in an unsuccessful attempt to block the measure. The lopsided votes highlighted a Republican caucus continuing to endorse Trump's immigration agenda as Democrats warn that Congress has ceded its ability to provide oversight by funneling these agencies billions of dollars with few strings attached.

ICE gets more than three times its annual funding

Through this legislation, Congress is giving ICE more than three times its last annual budget. Though technically this funding is meant to cover three years, unlike a traditional annual funding bill, the money comes with few stipulations on how and when it should be spent.

While most annual spending measures provide funds for just that fiscal year, this measure includes lump sums that need to be spent only by the end of fiscal year 2029, including:

• $38 billion for ICE to hire, pay, train and equip its officers and agents. That includes $7 billion for Homeland Security Investigations and $31 billion for immigration enforcement work like hiring more attorneys, supporting local law enforcement who coordinate with ICE and technology like body cameras;
• $22 billion for Border Patrol to pay, train, recruit and equip agents and personnel. That includes $13 billion specifically for immigration enforcement work;
• $5 billion for border security technology and screening, including artificial intelligence;
• $350 million for enforcement in localities that do not coordinate directly with ICE.

Legislation passed in April to fund most of DHS except ICE and Border Patrol did include provisions that would provide funding for the agency to purchase body cameras, stipulate congressional oversight of detention centers and deescalation training for officers and agents.

Lawmakers agreed to separate funding for ICE and Border Patrol as Republicans and Democrats struggled to reach a compromise on reforms even as a record-long DHS shutdown dragged on.

But now ICE and Border Patrol will be funded without the changes Democrats were demanding, including requiring judicial warrants to enter homes and prohibiting officers from wearing masks. The package also lacks reforms with bipartisan support, such as requiring officers to wear body cameras.

Neither measure included funding for internal oversight offices that conduct investigations into detention center conditions; however, the April measure to fund all of the agency included $20 million for the DHS inspector general to specifically conduct oversight of detention facilities.

Not only is this standoff ending without Democrats achieving the reforms they pressed for, the agencies will be insulated from additional pressure through the appropriations process for three years.

More dollars after an unprecedented boost

Both ICE and CBP received a massive influx of funding last year, also passed by Republicans through the budget reconciliation process, that has allowed both agencies to largely continue operating even as Democrats refused to provide them annual funding for the last several months.

ICE's usual annual budget is about $10 billion. The $75 billion boost last summer made ICE the highest funded federal law enforcement agency and enabled a hiring surge that doubled its ranks in a matter of months.

Former agency leaders, Democrats and even some Republicans have warned that the surge of money limits the ability of Congress to provide oversight when it comes to how that money is spent and how the agency operates.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, was the only Republican to vote against this latest funding measure in the Senate last week. She wrote in a statement that by appropriating funding for three fiscal years instead of the usual one, the measure "weakens the normal budgeting process and sets another precedent for avoiding it when we find ourselves in disagreement."

"In doing so, it reduces Congress' ability to apply reasonable checks on immigration policy for the remainder of this administration and into the next," she wrote.

Other Republicans say they were left with no choice once Democrats decided to withhold funding for these agencies as leverage to extract reforms.

"We're attempting here to fund ICE and CBP at last year's operating budget plus inflation, that's all we're talking about here," House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, said shortly before the vote. "This is not a slush fund, it's regular, normal funding. And we're going to do it not for one year, but for three years so we don't end up here again."

ICE "got a shopping list" 

ICE officials have been gearing up for the potential new cash for months.

"Apparently we're going to get more reconciliation money, so I got a shopping list," said Matt Elliston, ICE assistant director for law enforcement systems and analysis, speaking on a panel at the Border Security Expo in Arizona last month.

Among the items on his list are wearable headset displays so that officers do not need to be on their phones during an operation and data to help identify where someone targeted for arrest lives.

Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said absent the reconciliation funds, the agency was struggling to correctly pay its employees and fulfill contracts.

While the agencies welcome the funds, immigration advocates are concerned that funding the agency outside the normal appropriations process means provisions that tell the agency how to do its work are not included.

Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said in the past DHS annual funding bills included specific guardrails on the spending including requirements for the agency to report data on who it is detaining and specific treatment of pregnant women in custody.

"It's very dangerous," Altman said. "And it means that the agency will move forward with even fewer accountability mechanisms than we've seen in the past."

Altman also raised concerns about the $350 million dedicated to immigration enforcement in areas that are not "qualified cooperating jurisdictions," meaning a locality that is not a part of programs that allow local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law.

"The DHS secretary has wide discretion to just say these are not sufficiently cooperating with the White House's mass deportation agenda," she said. "So it's concerning in terms of where the money will go."

Politics of immigration enforcement 

After the two killings in Minneapolis, Democrats and a contingent of Republicans in Congress said they wanted to take action to reign in the tactics of federal immigration officers.

For weeks this winter, debate over President Trump's immigration policy consumed Capitol Hill. But despite the protracted fight over immigration enforcement funding, that discussion has largely subsided.

Republicans criticized Democrats for pushing an unserious list of demands. Democrats criticized Republicans for dismissing attempts at meaningful reform.

A new DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, has dialed back some of the aggressive enforcement operations that drew the national spotlight. And other controversies, like the war in Iran, have overtaken the immigration policy debate.

So much so that when Senate Republicans finally moved to approve the $70 billion for ICE and Border Patrol, much of the debate focused on an unrelated fund proposed by the Trump administration to compensate people who claim to have been wrongfully targeted by the government.

Reflecting on what followed after the two deaths in her home state, Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., says it has been hard for her personally to come to terms with the reality that Democrats were unable to extract the policy changes they demanded.

And meanwhile, Smith says Minnesotans are still dealing with the fallout from the crackdown — like kids who did not return to school or businesses that never reopened — even as public attention shifted away.

"This is the way it goes, Americans have really busy complicated lives, they're trying to figure out how to pay rent and buy groceries, but what they saw, I don't think they're going to forget it," Smith says. "And that's what I mean when I say we've lost these votes but that doesn't mean we've lost the fight."

Even if public opinion on Trump's immigration agenda does help Democrats' take control of Congress next year, Democrats' ability to extract changes through the appropriations process will be limited now that the agencies have resources to last until 2029.

Copyright 2026 NPR

A deadlocked San Diego County Board of Supervisors Tuesday failed to advance a transparency measure to end the practice of creating ad-hoc subcommittees with little public insight or knowledge.

Supervisors Joel Anderson and Jim Desmond voted in favor of Anderson's proposal, while their colleagues Paloma Aguirre and Monica Montgomery Steppe were opposed.

Board Chair Terra Lawson-Remer was absent from Tuesday's meeting.

The measure will return to the board on June 25, unless the item is moved to another date.

Montgomery Steppe raised concerns about possible public safety and privacy issues for some who appear at ad-hoc subcommittee meetings, such as family members who spoke at one focusing on juvenile justice.

"If we create the same rules for different situations, then we will not have as robust policy discussions that we should have and owe the public," the board vice chair explained. Montgomery Steppe said she didn't realize the possibility of retaliation until the juvenile justice ad-hoc committee began its work.

"Sometimes you don't know where you end up going when you start," she added.

Anderson said it was possible to have a more open process while also making sure residents were protected. "I've made my best pitch — if you have to vote no, I certainly understand it," he responded. However, he added: "We say we're for transparency, and then we find all the reasons under the sun not be transparent."

Anderson recently said the board has used secret committee meetings in the past to conduct important public business behind closed doors.

"Good government happens in the sunshine," Anderson said. "San Diego County residents should not have to wonder where major policy decisions are being shaped. If these subcommittees are helping develop policies that impact millions of taxpayer dollars and the daily lives of our residents, the public deserves the opportunity to see that process, follow it, and participate in it."

The proposal follows discussion regarding subcommittees that have met "without publicly posted agendas, minutes or recordings," despite influencing significant policy discussions, according to Anderson's office.

For example, Lawson-Remer and Montgomery Steppe formed an ac-hoc subcommittee in March after the board voted 4-1 to move forward on overhauling a program that serves residents who can't afford insurance and don't qualify for Medi-Cal. The changes would entail adjusting eligibility standards, eliminating lien requirements and reviewing costs.

The supervisors said the reforms will be presented to the board within 60 days after the fiscal year 2026-27 budget is adopted.

Anderson's proposed board policy would require public meeting notices, advance agendas, recordings, minutes and public access to meeting materials through a centralized county website. The proposal would "also establish clear operational standards and accountability measures for all board-created ad hoc subcommittees," a statement from Anderson said.

During Tuesday's meeting, most residents who spoke were in favor of Anderson's proposal.

One woman said she had difficulty finding materials from a standing committee meeting focusing on flood control held on April 9 "that are supposed to be available to the public." She added that she emailed a county contact requesting the materials, but hasn't heard back from them.

Another resident said that along with greater transparency, ad-hoc committee reform "will create more avenues of public access and public participation."

"So often, I hear community members say, `You can't fight the county,' so they disengage," he said. "After all, no one really wins in a fight. Let's change that culture from `fight' to `work"' to improve the democratic process and residents' lives, he added.

Desmond suggested that if county ad-hoc committees are dealing with sensitive material, no one would fault members for clearing a room if needed.

The proposal presented Tuesday is very reasonable, and "we're looking for ways to vote against it," he added.

Aguirre, citing her experience on the juvenile justice ad-hoc committee, said the work focuses not on hiding anything, but on letting family members "speak their truth."

Such flexibility lets the ad-hoc subcommittee produce information for the Board of Supervisors, said Aguirre, who noted her work with Anderson on a finance-related subcommittee.

She added that if the process is taking too long, then the subcommittee can be changed into a full one to apply with the Brown Act, a state law that allows for public attendance, participation and recording of local governmental bodies.

"I just think that the way the argument has been presented is a bit of a fallacy," in terms of a perception that there has been secrecy in the meetings, Aguirre said.

Following a lengthy and at times combative process, the San Diego City Council will vote Tuesday on the fiscal year 2026-27 budget during a special session.

The proposed budget is based largely on Mayor Todd Gloria's May revisal, which found additional revenue sources to help preserve some library and recreation center hours, shoreline bathrooms and "December Nights," compared to the initial proposal.

"Even in a difficult budget year, we continued looking for ways to protect neighborhood services responsibly," Gloria said. "My May revise restores targeted services in some of our historically underserved communities while still maintaining our focus on the fundamentals for San Diegans: keeping you safe, fixing infrastructure, reducing homelessness and building more homes."

Gloria's proposed additions include protecting recreation center and library hours in Council Districts 4, 8 and 9, Monday hours at Carmel Valley Library and preventing the North Clairemont Library Branch from closing, protection of staffing support for December Nights planning and operations, another $500,000 for youth drop-in centers, and allocating opioid settlement funds toward treatment and support programs through UC San Diego and the San Diego LGBT Community Center.

However, arts funding could still be gutted based on the May revise. Last week, City Council President Pro Tem Kent Lee was joined by Budget Committee Chair Henry Foster III with County Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe and representatives of the Prebys Foundation to announce a public- private proposal to restore San Diego's arts funding, which would have the foundation put up $3 million for arts and culture programs slashed in the current proposed budget.

"Arts are essential to our city," Lee said. "Music, film, artistic expression — this is what makes us human, and it's what transforms a city into a community. Our arts programs create jobs, attract visitors and help define what it means to be a San Diegan. This is not about funding some abstract luxury, it's about protecting one of San Diego's greatest strengths."

The proposal also would adopt recommendations from the city's Independent Budget Analyst's office to shift $6 million from San Diego's Transient Occupancy Tax — essentially a hotel tax — to arts programs, as well as restoring $1.3 million in grants.

"Arts and culture belong in all of San Diego and this funding supports local artists, small businesses, jobs and the community spaces that keep our neighborhoods connected," Foster said. "In District 4, the San Diego Black Arts and Culture District shows why this work matters by honoring history, creating opportunity and making sure culture isn't forgotten. As budget chair, I truly believe this proposal is a responsible way to protect funding that matters to our residents and our local economy."

It would cover around $10.35 million of the nearly $12 million cut under the proposed budget as the city looks to tighten its belt around a $118 million structural budget deficit.

"Our investment is intended to encourage the city to restore arts funding, honor the competitive grants process already underway and strengthen regional support for arts and culture," said Grant Oliphant, CEO and president of the Prebys Foundation. "For decades, San Diego's artists and cultural organizations have been promised a reliable source of public funding. It is time to deliver on that promise, and today marks an important step forward."

Gloria said new sources of revenue to cover the non-art additions include an increase in tourism occupancy tax — charged to those who stay in the city's hotels — and a $4.3 million boost to revenue by recovering rent from the city's golf courses.

"Every private golf course in San Diego pays rent for the land it sits on," he said. "Our public courses sit on public land owned by the people of San Diego. The new legal guidance allows us to properly account for the value of that land, and to make sure the public benefits when the courses succeed."

George Duardo, president of the San Diego City Firefighters, said some cuts slated for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department were worrying — such as bomb squad staffing, the community resource officer, the recruitment and retention officer, fire information officer position and fire academy instructor.

"While (it's) good the city found additional money in the budget, it is unfortunate that it wasn't directed to reverse the proposed cuts to Fire- Rescue staffing and operations," he said. "We are hopeful the council and mayor can truly make public safety a priority and not compromise fire staffing and response times via the cuts on the table."

Council members will also have to weigh significant decisions made Monday evening, when the council voted unanimously to end paid parking at Balboa Park by the end of the year and reduce trash fees for single-family homes.

Paid parking will end on Dec. 31 and the trash fees will be reduced to $38.75 starting next year for the "typical" 95-gallon bin bundle — a number adjusted for inflation from the initial proposal in 2021. Those using 65-

or 35-gallon bins will pay "proportionally less." That amount will increase to $39.91 on July 1, 2028.

The decisions Monday mean the city must find the lost revenue — or slash existing services — from somewhere else. A possible reduction of services includes the elimination of bulky item pickup and delay of an electric vehicle rollout.

"Today's City Council action reflects a compromise reached to protect the city from prolonged litigation and the risk of even deeper financial consequences that could have resulted in far more significant cuts to core services," Gloria said.

"Faced with the potential total loss of more than $150 million and the prospect of additional cuts to police, fire protection, libraries, parks, and neighborhood services, I supported a compromise that helps protect the city's financial stability and allows us to avoid a much more damaging outcome."

The city will immediately stop selling yearly passes for the parking, will stop selling quarterly passes on Sept. 30 and monthly passes by Nov. 30. Those who have already purchased a yearly pass will get a prorated refund from the city.

Single-family refuse pickup is funded by the city's general fund, which all residents pay into through property tax — whether they rent or own a single-family home, a condominium or an apartment. The city takes away 300,000 tons of trash and 150,000 tons of recycling, compostables and yard waste annually.

The San Diego City Council will convene at 1 p.m. Tuesday to discuss and vote on the budget.

Updated June 10, 2026 at 4:21 AM PDT

The U.S. completed strikes on Iran Tuesday night in response to the downing of a U.S. Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday. President Trump blamed Iran for the incident. Iran responded to the wave of U.S. strikes early Wednesday by targeting U.S. military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, dealing a blow to efforts to end the war.

The U.S. strikes were described as a "proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression," by U.S. Central Command on social media.

The U.S. struck "Iranian air defense, ground control stations, and surveillance radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz," CENTCOM said, adding, "U.S. forces remain vigilant and postured to defend against unjustified Iranian aggression."

Iranian Revolutionary Guard said it conducted drone and missile attacks on the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet in Bahrain, launched missiles toward the F35 fighter jet hangars and the command and control center of the U.S. Army in Al-Azraq, Jordan, and targeted the Ali Al-Salem military base in Kuwait, which hosts the U.S. forces, according to statements carried by Iranian state media.

Iran said it hit the majority of its targets, but authorities in Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, where sirens sounded overnight and governments urged residents to seek shelter, said their air defense systems intercepted the Iranian missiles.

Jordan said it shot down five Iranian missiles, adding that shrapnel from the interceptions caused no damage or casualties.

Iran said among the targets hit by the U.S. were reservoirs that provide drinking water to 20,000 people.

President Trump announced the intent to strike earlier in the day, saying the U.S. "must" respond to Iran's attack on the US Apache helicopter.

"I have just been informed by our Great Military that last night the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache Helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz," Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

"Nevertheless, the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack," Trump said.

In response to the latest U.S. strikes, Iran's foreign minister said: "Our Powerful Armed Forces will leave no attack or threat unanswered." Soon after, Iran responded to the U.S. action by launching attacks in Bahrain and Kuwait. Iran also said it had targeted an air base in Jordan hosting U.S. forces.

Last week, Trump was asked about a report that his red line for ending the tenuous ceasefire with Iran would be if American troops were killed and he said: "It would be a good reason, I'd be honest with you."

The incident shows the high-stakes nature of Trump's current position - trying to navigate an end to the war that is straining global economies and tanking his popularity, while ensuring American military credibility.

Iran's parliament speaker posted on X after Trump's statement on a U.S. response:

"We prefer the language of diplomacy, but we speak other languages far more fluently. Break your commitments, and we'll switch to what we speak best," Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf said.

It's unclear what this means for the overall ceasefire that's been in effect since April. Both sides have continued peace talks despite several flare ups in the region, including recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon.

But the talks haven't resulted in any movement toward a deal, despite Trump repeatedly saying one is close.

"I think it's going well," he said of the negotiations late Monday night, adding a peace deal could come within two to three days.

"We have a good chance of doing it. We should be able to do it in one hour … I don't think there are sticking points," he said.

Jane Arraf in Beirut and Aya Batrawy in Dubai contributed to this report.

Copyright 2026 NPR

San Diego’s budget process for the next fiscal year is wrapping up but the latest proposal still leaves the city with a deficit that’s expected to grow.

The city faced a $118 million deficit for the fiscal year, which could be as high as $146 million when including another $26 million for legal mandates, settlements, FEMA accreditation and other fixed expenses, according to CalMatters.

That led Mayor Todd Gloria to propose cuts to nearly every department in his initial proposal. Among them were cuts to arts and culture funding and park and library hours, and eliminating the multimodal team of traffic engineers who design safe bike infrastructure.

Gloria said in a social media post about the proposed budget, “We’re staying focused on the fundamentals and prioritizing what San Diegans rely on most.”

Those priorities were, in order, fixing the roads; keeping communities safe; reducing homelessness; and building more homes.

After public outcry, the mayor’s May Revise restored some funding for recreation centers and library hours, focused on underserved council districts.

Last week city leaders announced a partnership with San Diego County and the Prebys Foundation to restore nearly all funding for arts and culture that was cut in the initial proposal.

And at Friday’s budget review committee meeting, City Council members were supportive of an idea to redirect a small amount of road repaving funds to maintain the multimodal team of traffic engineers.

The decision to cut the multimodal team was one of the most discussed topics among public comment at Friday’s meeting. At least 12 speakers asked council members to restore this funding, saying it was critical for bike and pedestrian safety.

Aria Grossman, policy manager at Circulate Planning and Policy, praised Councilmembers Joe LaCava, Stephen Whitburn and Raul Campillo for including the restoration of funds for the multimodal team in their budget priority memos.

“I think this reflects an accurate assessment of the public safety crisis that is traffic violence, and a real commitment to actually do something about it,” Grossman said.

According to Grossman, the trade-off would be 12 fewer miles of slurry seal road repairs to fully fund the multimodal team.

“I think that 12 fewer miles and new overlay is worth making the remaining over 250 miles safer as we repave,” Grossman said.

The ultimate decision on that plan will come at Tuesday’s City Council meeting. But Councilmember Henry Foster III of District 4 questioned the necessity of a dedicated bike lane team on Friday.

In regards to the multimodal team,” Foster said, “I'm not understanding how we have a transportation department, how we have transportation engineers, and yet we are reliant, totally, upon this one team, when we are obligated to design our streets to specific standards.”

“To come here and say, because we don't have a multimodal team, that we are impacting street safety, (is) totally unacceptable,” Foster continued.

Even after the recommendations from the Independent Budget Analyst office, the city still faces a $15.3 million deficit in the FY ‘27 budget that the council will have to close.

“There is still a structural budget deficit in the budget that was proposed that was not resolved in the May Revise; it is not resolved entirely in our recommendations either,” Independent Budget Analyst Charles Modica said at Friday’s meeting.

That “structural” budget deficit will grow to around $30 million next year, according to Modica, considering the loss of parking revenue at Balboa Park and reduction in trash fees for single family homes due to a city settlement reached last month.

The deficit, Modica said, “is likely to expand because you will have the additional need to further subsidize trash collection for single family homes, and you will no longer be having revenue coming in from paid parking at the park, provided that the action on Monday, is consistent with the tentative settlement agreement that was reached.”

Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera of District 9 told KPBS last week the city needs to find more sustainable sources of revenue to avoid this same budgeting fiasco next year.

“I know that we can find the resources, and I think part of that conversation, happens in this budget cycle, and then there's a bigger, broader conversation as well about demanding that those who, who make the most here in San Diego, who take the most from San Diego, actually contribute their fair share,” Elo-Rivera said. “Because you know, they're getting wealthier and wealthier, corporations are making record profits, and at the same time, we're having conversations about which libraries we can keep open, which rec centers have to close, and whether or not we can provide any funding at all for arts and culture.”

Mayor Gloria could not be reached for comment. A city spokesperson declined to comment on the IBA recommendations, but said Gloria will work with the council on a budget “that protects core (city) services.”

“The City Charter requires the City to adopt a balanced budget, and Mayor Gloria remains committed to working with the City Council to achieve that outcome,” the spokesperson said in a statement. "We respect the budget process and are not commenting on individual IBA recommendations as deliberations continue. The Mayor looks forward to working collaboratively with Council to adopt a balanced budget that protects core services, addresses residents' priorities, and reflects the City's fiscal realities.”

The City Council is set to vote on a final budget on Tuesday. You can view the agenda and leave public comments here.

Today's primary contests stretch from Maine to North Dakota, South Carolina and Nevada, where voters will decide on races for the U.S. Senate, House, governor and more.

A lot is riding on the Senate race in Maine, where political newcomer Graham Platner, facing a series of controversies, is the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who has had the job for 30 years.

Another Republican incumbent, Nevada's Gov. Joe Lombardo, is facing a tough challenge in November.

And in a field of MAGA-devoted Republicans in South Carolina, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette was the one to grab President Trump's endorsement in the race for governor.

Here, reporters from the NPR network tell us about the key races to watch.

Maine U.S. Senate seat | Maine's 2nd Congressional District | Maine governor | Nevada governor | South Carolina governor

You can also check out voter resources for the June 9 primaries from the NPR network.

Maine's primary winners will set up crucial November races

— Kevin Miller and Steve Mistler, Maine Public 

Maine's U.S. Senate seat

If Democrats want control of the U.S. Senate come November, they almost certainly need to take five-term Republican Sen. Collins' seat in Maine.

The outcome of the pivotal race could hinge on whether voters value Collins' clout and ability to secure federal dollars over Democratic insurgent Platner's call to upend a political system he says is rigged against working-class Americans.

The first-time Democratic candidate has so far run a barnstorming campaign that's already pushed his Democratic rival, Gov. Janet Mills, out of the race.

After recent accusations published by The New York Times that he was physically threatening in a past relationship, and previous revelations that he sexted with several women early in his marriage, some are wondering if he still has enough support to flip the seat in November. In an interview with Maine Public, Platner denied the accusations.

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Maine's 2nd Congressional District

In a district that has voted for Trump three times, four Democrats are vying to replace retiring Democratic Rep. Jared Golden. Whoever wins the primary will face former Republican Gov. Paul LePage in the fall.

The Democratic nominee in this congressional district will offer a sense of what kind of candidates primary voters think can succeed in hard-to-win seats.

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Maine's governor

The race to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Janet Mills is likely to go to a Democrat, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report, but it's still a question of who. There is a five-way Democratic race for the nomination, seven active candidates on the GOP side and both races have the potential to go to a ranked-choice runoff.

The affordable housing crisis, rising property taxes, access to health care and standing up to President Donald Trump have emerged as central themes in the primary contest.

Recent polls show former Maine CDC Director Dr. Nirav Shah in the lead, though former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson appears to be surging in popularity ahead of the ranked-choice primary election.

The presumptive frontrunner in the GOP contest is Bobby Charles, an attorney and former Navy intelligence officer.

In November, State Sen. Rick Bennett will also be on the ballot running as an independent.

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Nevada's GOP governor faces a tough November

Paul Boger, Nevada Public Radio

Trump's economic policies are so unpopular in Nevada that the incumbent governor, Republican Joe Lombardo, is facing what could be a tough November election. Cook rates the race as a toss-up, and the candidate who may have the best shot against Lombardo, former Clark County Sheriff, is the state's top cop, Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford.

With a sizeable war chest, Lombardo should sail through the primary. Still, it may not be enough in November to assuage Nevadans worried about increasing costs in a tourism-based economy that is welcoming fewer domestic and international visitors every month.

Ford's path to the Democratic nomination isn't guaranteed. He's drawn criticism from Republicans for his extensive domestic and international travel as attorney general. And from his main Democratic opponent in the primary, Washoe County Commissioner Alexis Hill, for Ford's support of data centers, which are an existential concern in the country's driest state.

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The governor's race in South Carolina tests Trump's endorsement power

— Gavin Jackson, South Carolina Public Radio

The crowded race for governor in South Carolina doesn't have a clear frontrunner, even though the president has endorsed Republican Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, a longtime supporter of his, in Tuesday's primary.

Evette's biggest challenger is another Trump enthusiast, four-term Attorney General Alan Wilson. Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who claims her vote for more transparency of the Epstein files cost her Trump's endorsement, is also on the ballot. The race is widely expected to go to a runoff.

Three Democrats are vying for their party's nomination: Columbia state Rep. Jermaine Johnson, Charleston lawyer Mullins McLeod and Greenville businessman Billy Webster.

After Trump lost his first primary endorsement race last week in Iowa, political watchers are sure to have a close eye on how votes shake out in South Carolina.

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Voter resources for the June 9 primaries from the NPR Network

Maine | Nevada | North Dakota | South Carolina

Copyright 2026 NPR

Updated June 9, 2026 at 10:22 AM PDT

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is rejecting President Trump's claims of voter fraud in the state's primary elections, where ballots are still being counted.

"Truly embarrassing, unhinged, wild-eyed, dangerous, reckless, desperate," Bonta said when asked about the president's comments. "What's your evidence for the bold claim you've made? He has none."

With midterm elections approaching, Bonta told Morning Edition he expects more election-related misinformation, including from government officials.

Listen to the full conversation by clicking the play button in the blue box above, and read highlights from the conversation below.

Officials are preparing for more election claims

Bonta reacted to a recent announcement from Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, who said on X that his office is conducting multiple election fraud investigations.

"Every count, recount, hand count, audit and court case has demonstrated there is no widespread voter fraud," Bonta said. "It is very unfortunate that we're in a place now where people disregard inconvenient facts, manufacture their own facts."

He points to misinformation spread by reality TV personality Spencer Pratt, who is running for mayor of Los Angeles. City council member Nithya Raman surpassed Pratt on Monday and will face incumbent Mayor Karen Bass in November.

"He's suggesting that some of the votes that went to his opponent … belong to homeless individuals," Bonta said. "So misinformation and disinformation abounds. It's irresponsible and dangerous, especially for those who propagate it knowingly or without doing some critical thinking of their own."

Transparency and public trust

Some of the doubt around elections, Bonta said, comes from a lack of understanding about how votes are counted and why results can take time, especially in California, where final tallies do not come the next day.

Mail-in ballots take longer to process than in-person ballots, because officials must scan bar codes, remove envelopes and check signatures against those on file. In California, around a quarter of the electorate returns their ballots on Election Day, which means officials don't start processing millions of votes until then.

"In LA County, the registrar of voters is completely transparent. You can go online right now and look at the livestream of the vote counting. You can go visit the registrar of voters as they're counting ballots to take a look around. The light of day is shining bright on the operations of the vote counting in LA County," Bonta said.

"But some don't want to understand," he continued. "And Trump has basically taken the position that if he wins or the person that he supports wins, the election was fair. If he lost or the person he supported lost, it was rigged. And that's just not right."

'The danger is the action that follows the lie'

Bonta says the best strategy for state officials to counter false claims is simply confronting them.

"The best counter to misinformation and disinformation is calling it out, confronting it, providing the facts that show that it's demonstrably false," he said. "So I immediately went to my own platforms to share how Trump is lying. The facts rebut everything and contradict everything that he said, and it's important that he be called out for it, because it's wrong and it's not true."

"I'm worried about what he might do. Will he deploy the military? Will he deploy ICE to the polls? Will he interfere with the U.S. Postal Service in the November election, and the vote-by-mail ballots that move through the U.S. Postal Service?" he said.

"All those things are possible, and they rest on this lie, this fabrication that there's widespread voter fraud," Bonta added.

"So, the danger is the action that follows the lie," he added. "And we're prepared. We've been tabletopping, preparing our response, our action for each of those scenarios."

A new legal fight over Trump's election order

Bonta's warnings come as he co-leads a multistate lawsuit challenging Trump's latest elections-related executive order, which he says unlawfully tries to interfere with states' constitutional authority to run elections by restricting voter eligibility and mail voting to federally preapproved lists.

The lawsuit, filed with a coalition of more than 20 other attorneys general and Pennsylvania's governor, asks a federal court to block key provisions of the order, which they say would force states to rapidly overhaul election procedures and create confusion and chaos.

White House responds but offers no evidence

NPR reached out to the White House, asking for evidence of the president's claims of voter fraud in California's primary.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote back that "countless Americans share the same concerns as President Trump" and added the president is pushing for legislation that would establish "a uniform photo ID requirement for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting and end the practice of ballot harvesting."

The response did not include specific evidence to support the president's allegation of voter fraud in California's primary.

Copyright 2026 NPR

BOSTON — A federal judge on Monday struck down the Trump administration's $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas, contradicting an earlier federal court ruling upholding the fee hike.

The administration announced the much-higher fee as a way of preventing foreign workers from taking American jobs.

But U.S. District Court Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston sided with 20 states and struck down the visa policy, concluding that the executive branch exceeded its authority and violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.

"The Court finds that the Policy imposes a tax on H-1B petitions without the requisite delegation by Congress," Sorokin wrote.

H-1B visas are meant for high-skilled jobs that are difficult to find American workers to fill. Deep-pocketed technology companies are the biggest users, with nearly three-quarters of approvals going to workers from India. The states argued that using the H-1B program to fill vacancies for much-needed doctors and teachers was already difficult before the higher fee.

Most H-1B visa applications cost several thousand dollars before the announced increase set off a wave of panic among confused employers, students and workers in the United States and abroad and led to several lawsuits, including in Boston.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also sued, in federal court in Washington, D.C., and has appealed a denial of a summary judgment against the fee hike. That left the higher fee in effect, at least until September 2026, when it is scheduled to expire. Monday's ruling is also a summary judgment, to the opposite effect. Still another lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Francisco, by religious groups and labor organizations, setting up the possibility of divided rulings in three appellate court circuits.

In the Boston case, the states argued that the policy impedes their ability to hire primary and secondary school educators and to staff public colleges and universities, will stymie academic research and will lead to a decline in medical workers.

"Today's victory protects the integrity of the H-1B visa program as a tool to address severe labor shortages in vital industries like education, healthcare, and medical research," Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said in a statement. "In Massachusetts, this win will ensure we can fill critical vacancies and hire world-class faculty and researchers at colleges and universities across the Commonwealth."

Bobby Mukkamala, the president of the American Medical Association, called the ruling "a victory for patients."

"At a time when communities across the country face physician shortages and growing barriers to care, we should be removing obstacles — not creating new ones — to attract talented physicians and other highly skilled professionals," Mukkamala said. "International medical graduates play a vital role in caring for patients, particularly in underserved and rural areas."

A Department of Homeland Security statement said the agency disagrees with "this blatant judicial activism dismantling President Trump's historic efforts for immigration reform."

"Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, our immigration system is being reformed to serve American citizens, American workers, and American families and to preserve our national identity — not to rapidly import foreigners who take American jobs, commit crimes, burden our welfare system, and erode our cultural and social fabric," the statement said, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

In a separate statement, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said the administration "is confident this order will be reversed on appeal."

Copyright 2026 NPR

The San Diego City Council will vote Monday to partially reduce trash fees for single-family homes and roll back entirely paid parking in Balboa Park.

The decisions might be a foregone conclusion, with the council agreeing on paper to take those actions last month in order to prevent potentially losing all the revenue in lengthy lawsuits.

However, the items will still be discussed in a public forum for the first time and are subject to the council's vote.

The decision behind closed doors on May 20 was a win for opponents of the hotly debated fees, but also represented a compromise by requiring a collection of homeowners suing the city over the trash fees to drop efforts to repeal the fees via ballot measure this fall.

However, it also means the city must find the lost revenue — or slash existing services — from somewhere else, as a tense budget process for the 2026-27 fiscal year enters its final weeks.

"The settlement is a compromise that resolves multiple existing threats that could have forced more than $150 million in additional cuts," Mayor Todd Gloria said. "To reach this agreement, both sides had to make concessions.

"It is not perfect or ideal, but my responsibility is to protect what matters most for San Diegans, and on the whole, this agreement does that by protecting San Diegans from far deeper cuts to essential services like police, fire protection, libraries, and parks."

The homeowners sued the city following the passage of Measure B, which ended more than 100 years of free trash pickup services for single-family homes. The plaintiffs alleged the fees violate Proposition 218, an initiative approved by California voters in 1996 that holds utility fees cannot exceed the costs of providing those services.

Former San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre, one of the attorneys representing the homeowners, said that while voters approved a monthly fee of between $23 and $29, the City Council approved imposing a nearly $44 monthly fee.

"This is draining money from people's homes and if they are not able to pay, they are terrified that they will be foreclosed on," Aguirre told Superior Court Judge Euketa Oliver earlier this month. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the trial over the trash fees was recessed on Wednesday and will likely be dismissed this week.

If passed Monday — and again at a second reading in several weeks — the fees will not be reduced to $29 per month, but they will be reduced to $38.75 starting next year — a number adjusted for inflation from the initial proposal in 2021.

In June 2025, the City Council passed the solid-waste fee, breaking a 106-year-old precedent of the city not charging single-family homeowners a fee for trash pickup. The Lincoln Club Business League began collecting signatures this winter to place the issue on the ballot.

The People's Ordinance, as the free trash pickup was nicknamed, had been criticized for years by activists for being inequitable because although every household pays property tax either directly or through rent, only single- family households received trash pickup at no additional charge. In 2009, a San Diego County grand jury concluded that the ordinance had "outlived its usefulness in a 21st century society."

Three years ago, Jessa Davis had an epiphany: After she came out as a trans woman, remaining in deep-red Texas felt untenable. So, she sold her house in Odessa and moved to the liberal bastion of Seattle, Wash.

Davis describes herself as a trans refugee. Back in Texas, she says, lived in a "pretty hostile and frankly dangerous" place. "I had a lot of close calls, a lot of threats."

Davis volunteered with organizations advocating for trans and queer rights in Odessa and remembers thinking, "I've got one life and I don't want to spend the next 20 years of [it] fighting a battle that I'm not sure we're going to win in a place like Texas."

Her fight for LGBTQ rights continues, but it feels more manageable in a city she views as welcoming and supportive. After arriving, Davis quickly became active in local issues and now serves as co-chair on a commission advising the city on LGBTQ issues. She and other commissioners have urged Seattle to declare a state of emergency to provide more resources for the growing number of people relocating there to escape anti-LGBTQ laws and hostile social climates elsewhere in the country.

Davis' case reflects what sociologists call "ideological sorting" — the tendency to choose communities aligned with one's political and cultural values. Popularized in the 2008 book The Big Sort, it sets out to explain the widening divide between red and blue America.

In a country that's growing ever-more polarized, the shifting demographics cut in both directions — and it is happening across the country. In one study from 2022, researchers concluded that "at no point since the Civil War have partisans been as clustered within individual states as today."

Research in recent years, however, suggests that the story is more complex and nuanced — and that simply seeking out like-minded neighbors is more often than not just one factor among several driving the shift.

From blue state to red

As Davis and others arrive in Seattle seeking refuge from hostile laws and rhetoric, some of Seattle's longtime residents, like Kirby Wilbur, have moved out, fleeing to conservative enclaves.

Wilbur also describes himself as a "refugee." He relates an experience that is a virtual mirror image of Davis'. In Seattle, the local conservative talk show host — who also briefly served as Washington state Republican chair — felt like a stranger in a strange land.

As he neared retirement, he and his wife Trina began thinking about an escape plan. A friend told them about McKinney, Texas, a conservative Dallas-Fort Worth suburb. Wilbur had never heard of McKinney, but decided to have a look.

"There were like 3,000 square foot homes with a pool for $300,000," he says.

In Texas, Wilbur met with Paul Chabot in 2020, who runs a specialty realty service, Conservative Move. Started in 2017, the company has helped thousands of people relocate from blue states to red states, Chabot says.

But the Wilburs still weren't ready. Then came the 2020 George Floyd protests in Seattle. Kirby Wilbur says after the mobs, looting and vandalism, he and Trina had their own epiphany. "We looked at each other and said, 'No, we can't live this way. This is it.'"

Chabot, a retired U.S. Navy commander, says Wilbur — who has since become a part-time realtor with Conservative Move — is like most of his clients, who "feel like they can't talk politics with people on their street."

Conservative Move assists a lot of families with children who say they want a better quality of life for their kids — things like lower crime, stronger schools and lower taxes, according to Chabot. They also want to be somewhere they don't feel judged for their political beliefs, he says.

"It's not like people are leaving just because they hate Democrats. They don't like Democrat policies, but they really feel like they're alone, alienated, ostracized," he says.

Chabot's counterpart on the left is Bob McCranie. In 2020, McCranie started a web page called Flee Texas. "Very quickly… it got overwhelmed by people from all sorts of other places saying, 'Oh my gosh, talk to me,'" he says.

As a result, he broadened the reach a few years later, launching Flee Red States. Since then, he says he has 40 closings related to the project and more than 875 people on a mailing list. He says he's even helped people move out of the country.

McCranie says for some of his clients, the stakes are much higher than simply whether they can have a political conversation over the back fence. "People are moving because they don't feel safe in their own state, in their own country," he says.

For instance, some conservative groups are trying to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 2015 ruling that established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right. McCranie says some of his clients are wondering, "Where would we be safe as a couple and as a family?"

U.S. Census Bureau data for 2024 indicates that almost exactly as many people moved from Texas to Washington as went the other direction. However, a nationwide Stateline analysis paints a more one-sided picture. Republican counties, defined by the 2020 presidential election vote, gained 3.7 million people from mid-2020 to mid-2023, while blue counties lost the same amount — a time period that encompasses pandemic dislocations and lockdowns and the rise of remote work, Stateline notes.

But those broad trends can belie individual experiences. Rachelle Vega, interviewed last year by NPR, moved from Austin — widely considered the most progressive city in Texas — to Santa Fe, N.M., which has some of the country's strongest LGBTQ protections. Vega wanted a more welcoming environment for her two adult trans children. In her new home, "There's this sense of live and let live that is pervasive," she told NPR.

This political sorting is not only occurring from state to state, but on a city, county and neighborhood level, according to Bruce Desmarais, a professor of political science and social data analytics at Penn State University. In a 2019 study, Desmarais and colleagues found that "people tend to be moving from one very sort of left-leaning city to the next" — like Vega — and the same is true, Desmarais says, for people moving from one right-leaning area to another.

Ticking the boxes beyond party affiliation

Take Stefanie Chiappetta's experience. Four years ago, she and her husband, Samuel, moved from Middleborough, Mass., to Conway, S.C., and politics were the main reason.

In solidly blue Massachusetts, the town of Middleborough is an exception. It went for President Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris by a comfortable margin in 2024.

Chiappetta says "more conservative" was "box one" on her list when looking for a fresh start after retirement. Second was taxes. She and her husband had been paying nearly $7,000 a year in property taxes in Massachusetts, but in Conway, it's a fraction of that, she says. The last important item was the weather. Chiappetta says she and her husband both have back issues. The cold weather "was making us more miserable," she says.

Although Chiappetta puts politics at the forefront, her weighting of other factors illustrates a key caveat, says Steven Webster, an associate professor of political science at Indiana University.

"Americans do have a preference for living near co-partisans," Webster, who has also researched ideological sorting, says. However, "things like the affordability of homes [and] living in a good school district far outweigh any explicit partisan-based motivation for choosing one location over another."

The neighbor agreeing with you about President Trump is "the cherry on top," he says.

Just as Chiappetta gravitated to a lower-tax city and state — which often tend to be conservative — "a Democrat might move to an area with good access to public transportation," Webster says.

"While desiring access to public transportation may correlate with being a Democrat, one's decision to move to that area is based [on] that desire rather than being with other Democrats," he says.

"Places shape people more than people sort into places," he concludes.

Political birds of a feather

Some researchers put more weight on party realignment — a long-term shift in the political landscape caused by voters changing their allegiances – than voter migration to explain the biggest share of the ideological sorting.

"Southern whites converted Republican, suburbs of major cities converted Democratic, and the political map redrew itself without most people moving," notes Josh Zhang, an assistant professor of sociology at Stony Brook University.

In 2023, Zhang and colleagues published a study that looked at ideological sorting on a granular level. Using anonymized cell-phone data and other real-time information, they found that "people in heavily Democratic or Republican neighborhoods tend to visit places — religious institutions, schools, restaurants — whose other visitors lean the same way."

James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, points out that while the general trend is understood, "geographic sorting is rarely, if ever, going to be absolute. Despite aggregate sorting, there are always going to be individual exceptions in a given area."

Despite Wilbur's decision to move to be closer to fellow conservatives, he readily acknowledges that such ideological sorting is a negative for the country as a whole. "Nobody talks to each other anymore," he says. The divisions in our political discourse have increasingly led to physical division, he says.

Davis is also concerned about "isolating ourselves in bubbles" and recalls the rare occasions when she was able to break through to someone in Odessa. She argues that physical sorting reduces those opportunities for connection.

"That's the importance of being able to sit down with someone, share a beer in a dive bar in West Texas, and have a conversation about why I'm leaving — what's happening, and why I feel I have to go."

Copyright 2026 NPR

Updated June 8, 2026 at 1:07 PM PDT

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In the race to the midterms this year, neither party is untouched by scandal.

Texas Senate GOP hopeful Ken Paxton has faced legal battles and criminal investigations for years, along with allegations of infidelity, a public divorce and an impeachment by the Texas House.

In Maine, Democrat Graham Platner has pushed past controversies including a report that he sent women sexually explicit messages while married and sported a tattoo of an emblem used by Nazi SS units; he says he did not know what it was when he got it and has since covered up the tattoo.

In generations past, any one of those scandals could be enough to end a campaign or career. Just ask Gary Hart, who was once seen as the frontrunner for Democrats' presidential nominee, before he dropped out after reports of an affair — or Republican Rep. Chris Lee, who resigned the same day an article was published in 2011 detailing a shirtless photograph he sent to someone on Craigslist.

"The fact politicians are more likely to survive scandals now is a condition of the world we live in," said Brandon Rottinghaus, political science professor at the University of Houston and author of Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era.

That scandals are no longer a surefire death knell for politicians is something he attributes to changing norms, hyperpolarization, partisan loyalty and deep distrust of the media.

"The strategy for politicians facing scandal these days is — dig in, blame your opponents and hold on tight," Rottinghaus said.

"The reason this works is because it leverages distrust of media and politicians, which allows for politicians to survive in ways they couldn't in the past because those elements weren't present," he said.

Partisanship prevails 

Kevin Madden, a longtime Republican political strategist, was communications director to then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2005, when DeLay was facing his own scandal. DeLay was found guilty of funneling corporate money to Texas candidates; that conviction was later overturned.

"It's like — how quaint," Madden said, comparing it to the scandals du jour. "It's almost like watching the silent era of film when you think about what was considered a scandal back then."

He ascribes the change in large part to an upended media environment — recalling how there used to be a regimented and fairly uniform news diet for the public.

"Scandals had an ability to endure in that type of information landscape," he said. "If you look at the information landscape we're in now, which is hypersonic and supercharged due to digital platforms, we're in this constant, cluttered and fragmented media ecosystem."

Put another way? "If Nixon had a Fox News or a social media army of Nixon devotees to mobilize on his behalf, it could have been a much different outcome," he said.

Undergirding this is an environment where partisanship seems to outweigh almost everything.

"These scandals become a political inkblot," Madden said. "If you're on the left, you see it through the lens of somebody on the left. If you're on the right, you see it through the lens of somebody on the right. And that's where you decide whether it's something to either be outraged about or something you want to defend or dismiss."

He notes there are always exceptions to the trend. California Democrat Eric Swalwell resigned from Congress in April after backlash to allegations of sexual assault and misconduct — allegations he has denied. Texas Republican Tony Gonzales also resigned that month, in the midst of a congressional ethics investigation into his conduct and the possibility of a congressional expulsion vote over an affair with a former staffer that he admitted to.

"The moral floor is descending to a certain extent," said Eben Burnham-Snyder, former longtime Democratic aide on the Hill and in the Obama administration. "But even within that, there still is the essential question of the sin and the sinner."

But overall, he said, the political calculus has shifted.

"Increasingly the electorate is more willing to forgive as long as they can ultimately reach heaven, which is electoral victory," he said. "I think after a lot of missteps by Democrats in how they handled certain scandals, what they've decided is the cost of enforcing norms is higher than the cost of winning with a flawed candidate."

As an example of just how much things have changed, he points to the pressure former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken faced from fellow Democrats to resign after allegations of sexual misconduct.

A little more than eight years later, some of those same senators have been much less vocal about allegations against Platner.

"If Democrats could go back in time, would they act differently? And I think what you're seeing play out with Platner is yes — the answer to that is yes," Burnham-Snyder said.

Madden agreed.

"There's no doubt that somewhere Andrew Cuomo and Al Franken are sitting there and watching what happened to the governor of Virginia, for example," he said, referencing former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who refused calls to resign after a photo surfaced from his medical school yearbook depicting someone in blackface and the other in a Ku Klux Klan robe. "All he did was wait it out and essentially let the news cycle wash out the scandal. And there's no doubt that many [other politicians] thought, 'if I could go back, I would.'"

The Trump factor 

Rottinghaus said there's a temptation to credit the shifting scandal standards to President Trump, who forged ahead through the Access Hollywood scandal weeks before he was elected in 2016 and has continued to weather controversies throughout his two terms.

"Donald Trump didn't make scandals less important. He was just living in a world where that was true," Rottinghaus said. "He took advantage of the fact that we see this partisan schism, that we have this fragmentation in the media, and that people have very strong opinions politically about their team and about the other team. He didn't invent these things, but he did to some degree perfect them."

Trump's playbook to survive scandals — blaming opponents and not backing down — is now one that politicians routinely try to replicate.

Trump is arguably the most successful at fundraising off of his controversies as well. He and the GOP raised nearly $53 million in the first day after Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in a criminal hush money trial.

"Politicians can use scandals as a badge of honor to say that they've been in the fight, and the reason that they've been caught in the scandal is that they've been fighting for the people, for their base," Rottinghaus said. "A lot of politicians will simply frame a scandal as a partisan attack or as misinformation or as a witch hunt."

Sound familiar?

In Texas, Paxton described his impeachment as a "politically motivated sham" and has framed his Senate race as a fight against the media and political establishment.

In an interview with Maine Public Radio, Platner cast his ever-unfolding controversies as a result of fighting against the establishment.

"We knew that the machine itself ... the whole political pundit class combined with the political establishment itself was going to fight us tooth and nail, because what we are building here is something substantial," Platner said.

What does it mean if scandals matter less? 

Rottinghaus argues scandals serve an important role in the political system.

"There's a lot of evidence that if you weaken the power of scandals, you reduce the institutional accountability that we need in democracy to make it function properly," he said.

Watergate exposed abuses of executive power and ultimately, Congress increased oversight, made government records more accessible and strengthened rules around campaign finance disclosure.

The Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920's led to stricter congressional oversight of federal leasing.

The Pentagon Papers scandal helped lead Congress to pass the War Powers Resolution.

"Scandal is like a canary in the coal mine. They tell us there's something wrong with a politician, with a rule, with a system. Those are things we can fix," Rottinghaus said. "Now, the canaries have flown away and the cage is open."

Copyright 2026 NPR

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. (AP) — President Donald Trump is dismissing the idea that launching the war with Iran this year betrayed his refrain of "No new wars" that he made repeatedly as he campaigned again for the White House.

Trump, in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," said he "didn't guarantee" there would be no wars if he were back in office.

"First of all, I didn't guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?" Trump said.

Trump also defended plans for a now-scrapped $1.8 billion fund that would have compensated allies of the Republican president and he repeated his baseless claims of mass fraud in California's drawn-out vote count from Tuesday's primary. He ended the interview abruptly when he became frustrated with pushback from NBC's Kristen Welker.

Iran 'is not an endless war'

In his 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly cast his Democratic opponents as warmongers and said he was a president who started "no new wars" and would bring an era of peace.

But Trump said in the NBC interview, taped Friday in Wisconsin, that as a candidate, "I didn't promise anything."

"I don't like these endless wars. This is not an endless war. We've been doing this for three months," he said of the war with Iran, which began Feb. 28.

Trump said he was "doing the world a service" and "doing our country a service" because he had to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon. But elsewhere in the interview, Trump repeated a contradictory message where he said U.S. strikes last year "obliterated" Iranian nuclear sites.

He also defended his decision in his first term to withdraw from Democratic President Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, an agreement he has heavily criticized, without negotiating the "better deal" he has promised to reach.

"It takes years to do these things," Trump said.

Trump without evidence claims fraud in California vote

California's notoriously prolonged vote count has been a magnet for election conspiracy theories, and Trump since Tuesday's election has claimed without evidence that Democrats are rigging the election. The Trump-appointed top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles said Friday that his office had opened "multiple election fraud investigations."

Late-tallied Democratic-leaning mail ballots have eaten into the vote totals for Trump's preferred candidates for governor and Los Angeles mayor. While Trump has often said that changes to vote totals as late ballots are counted are a sign of fraud, they are merely a reflection of a slow vote-counting process.

Trump in the interview kept claiming that it was a sign of "cheating" and "a rigged election," and grew increasingly frustrated as Welker pressed him for evidence to support that.

"All I have to do is look. All I have to do is look," Trump said.

"But that's not evidence," Welker responded.

"And I listen. And I listen to people. And let's see what happens," Trump replied.

'Anti-weaponization' fund

Trump defended plans that his Department of Justice said it has now abandoned to create a $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" as part of a settlement to resolve Trump's lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Wednesday that the department was scrapping the plan. That announcement came after the plan was paused by a judge and after both Democrats and some Republicans said they were concerned about the fund's lack of oversight and the possibility of payouts being made to participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

Trump told NBC he thought the fund was "a great idea" and that he would be "disappointed" if it were not approved.

When asked if he thought people who attacked police officers on Jan. 6 should get a payout, Trump said, "I wouldn't be inclined to say so, but I have to see it." He then began making unfounded and false claims about the riot and those who stormed the Capitol. Trump granted a sweeping pardon on his first day back in office in January 2025 to the more than 1,500 people prosecuted over Jan. 6.

Rain interruptions and an abrupt end

The NBC interview was conducted in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, before Trump was set to speak at a roundtable event with farmers. The interview was repeatedly interrupted as waves of heavy rain fell on the metal roof of the barn where the taping took place, making it difficult at times to hear.

At the end, Welker pressed Trump on the settlement fund and his claims about the California election. Trump raised his voice and began calling Welker and the media "crooked," attacking her credibility and complaining about what he called "the fake, dirty press."

As Welker tried to switch subjects, Trump continued on and there was cross talk between the two. Trump ended the interview, saying said, "Let's call it quits." He took off his microphone, telling Welker, "Thank you, darling. Have a good time." He said he had given the interview enough time, stood up and walked away.

Welker said during the broadcast that she spoke to Trump on Saturday and he agreed the rain had caused complications and said he would do another interview in the future.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Updated June 8, 2026 at 7:02 PM PDT

As vote tallies in the Los Angeles mayoral election trickled in slowly over the last week, unsubstantiated claims exploded on X that a fraudulent plot was underway to deprive the MAGA-backed former reality TV star Spencer Pratt the second-place slot to advance to the November runoff against incumbent Democrat Karen Bass.

A portion of these unfounded conspiracy theories pointed to changing betting odds for the three top candidates on prediction market sites Kalshi and Polymarket to suggest something sinister is afoot with the vote count. Some influencers supercharging such fraud claims online did so in posts sponsored by the companies themselves.

"They are actually doing it. They are counting votes until SPENCER LOSES. Someone DO SOMETHING," Trump-aligned influencer Mila Joy wrote to her half a million followers a day after the election as she reshared a Polymarket post with a graph showing that Pratt's betting odds were falling on the site.

"Is CA cheating to get Spencer Pratt out?" questioned commentator David Freeman, who posts under the handle Gunther Eagleman on X, as he shared a Kalshi post showing the odds between Pratt and progressive Democrat Nithya Raman. The Associated Press called the second-place spot for Raman on Monday afternoon after her vote share overtook Pratt's on Sunday.

At the bottom of both X posts, the words "paid partnership" appear in tiny font, a subtle reference to the millions of dollars Kalshi and Polymarket have pumped into programs that pay influencers to reshare corporate posts as a way to boost engagement.

The Los Angeles mayoral race is the clearest example yet of how prediction market posts about changing betting odds for candidates are being weaponized on X to sow doubt about the integrity of elections.

It's likely a preview of what's to come this year ahead of the midterm election. Kalshi and Polymarket are increasingly pervading ever more corners of daily life. Their rise has set off dozens of legal battles and raised novel questions about the ways betting on just about anything can have real-world consequences. Now it appears they are driving the latest battlefield in political misinformation wars on X.

"From the perspective of the influencer looking to get rich, their only job is to attract attention," Emerson Brooking, a disinformation expert at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, wrote in an email. "They will do this by sharing markets that align with what their audiences want to see. And if the betting markets are wrong, it is much wiser for them to allege fraud (and keep the lucrative promotions contract) rather than acknowledge that the gambling sites got it wrong."

In recent days, Kalshi and Polymarket have attempted to rein in some of their paid influencers. After NPR asked Kalshi about several partnership posts on Friday, the company said it told the influencers to take the posts down. Some of the posts, including Freeman's post questioning "CA cheating," have been deleted. Semafor first reported on Kalshi's crackdown.

On Monday, Polymarket told NPR it, too, is pulling back its sponsorship of some creators who were spreading election falsehoods. Joy's post is still live on X with the "paid partnership" tag, but the tag has been removed from posts by two other influencers paid by Polymarket.

"Companies shouldn't be paying people to spread misinformation," said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, who has reviewed the sponsored posts that flew across X. "In the Trump Republican Party, fraud allegations are going to be often received with a lot of enthusiasm, especially when people often get confused about the difference between the odds of someone winning and vote share."

Inside Kalshi and Polymarket paid partnerships 

Paying influencers as social media promoters is a type of "growth hacking" tech startups often deploy to maximize the reach of their brand in an attempt to drive more users to the services.

"It's a high-risk, high-reward situation," said Seton Hall University's Jess Rauchberg, who studies digital media culture. "But it's a strategy that gets people talking about the brand."

Kalshi and Polymarket have offered creators as much as $500 per post, according to two people who formerly worked on partnerships at Kalshi and Polymarket and who were not authorized to speak publicly about the programs.

Inside Kalshi, the approach has sparked debate over what responsibility the company has when creators promote its site by spreading misinformation and other harmful content across X, according to the former Kalshi employee.

A Kalshi spokesperson confirmed on Monday that the company now prohibits anyone in its affiliate program from questioning the integrity of an election or undermining a legal ruling or official determination about an election.

Previously, the company took a mostly hands-off approach to what its affiliate creators posted to boost one of Kalshi's markets, according to the former Kalshi employee.

Before the recent controversy, one of the only times Kalshi cut ties with a paid creator over a post promoting the company was when one of their contributors posted to X celebrating the death of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, the former Kalshi employee said.

Similarly at Polymarket, affiliate posts were given wide latitude, as long as the person posting plugged the company's markets, according to the former Polymarket employee. And there appeared to be little vetting of creators, with Polymarket tapping former Rep. Matt Gaetz as one of its paid contributors. The U.S. House Ethics Committee found Gaetz paid an underage girl for sex.

On Monday, Polymarket said that while it does not have language specifically banning creators from posting election-related disinformation, any post denying the result of an election would violate its rules against spreading false and misleading information.

Polymarket told NPR posts from two of the creators it works with have lost the "paid partnership" tag. It has not asked creators to delete any posts, but told them about the company's content guidelines.

While the company would not specify which creators, NPR confirmed "paid partnership" tags have been removed from Jun. 4 posts by right-wing influencers Benny Johnson and Kangmin Lee sharing the same Polymarket post about Raman's rising odds on the betting site.

Seton Hall University's Rauchberg said the crackdowns are just the latest example of how the rival companies are constantly trying to one-up each other.

"They want to spread this rhetoric that 'Kalshi is for everyone, Polymarket is for everyone,'" she said. "They want to give the impression that they don't have a political affiliation, but consumers are becoming more savvy that both companies are engaging in a type of 'purity politics,' each trying to outdo the other over which is the best app to use."

Not disclosing whether a social media post was sponsored is illegal under rules the Federal Trade Commission adopted in 2024. The Trump administration has not rolled back these rules, but it has also not announced any enforcement actions.

Why California vote counting attracts fraud claims

The Los Angeles mayor race was particularly vulnerable to becoming the focus of election conspiracy theories for a number of reasons. Prediction market data may have been one of them.

Pratt, an outsider candidate who received outsized attention and engagement on X, was favored for second place on betting markets on both Kalshi and Polymarket's sites in the days before the election — even when the largest polls of likely voters showed him in third place.

While the city's mayor is a nonpartisan office, a registered Republican like Pratt faced a challenge in heavily Democratic Los Angeles. But some social media commentators cited his favorable betting odds as evidence he could reach the November runoff.

Posts about what betting markets are saying about a candidate can confuse voters who may not understand the difference between betting behavior and a poll, said Zarine Kharazian, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, who studies online rumors related to elections.

"It runs the risk of confusing people into thinking that, 'Okay, these markets have the pulse on public sentiment about the election and who's going to win,' when that's not necessarily the case," Kharazian said.

Heading into the Jun. 2 primary, election experts were already worried that California's notoriously slow ballot count would provide the opportunity for baseless fraud allegations to blossom.

A large portion of voters in the state use mail-in ballots, a form of voting President Trump has tried to associate with fraud. Election officials must verify mailed-in and dropped off ballots, making them slower to count. The state accepts ballots that are postmarked on the day of the election that arrive within seven days.

Ballots that are counted later in the process typically skew Democratic since more voters from that party embrace voting by mail. This phenomenon has been the basis for unfounded allegations of fraud in recent years, including by Trump.

The challenge has been particularly stark this year because so many Californians waited until Election Day to drop off their ballots, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

State officials are "doing what they've always done — counting all the ballots, under transparent observation from the candidates and parties, and reporting each batch as soon as they can," Becker said, "yet the profiteers and grifters are loudly echoing our foreign adversaries in spreading lies designed to delegitimize our transparent election process."

President Trump himself has claimed without evidence that there was fraud in the Los Angeles mayoral's race. He called the election race "rigged" in a Truth Social post early Monday, and wrote it was "not possible" for Pratt to lose to Raman after his initial lead when vote counting began. The first assistant U.S. Attorney for the Los Angeles area, Bill Essayli, announced on X days earlier that his office had multiple election fraud investigations underway.

Over the weekend, Essayli debunked one popular conspiracy theory circulating on X — that Pratt had received zero votes in a ballot count update — as false.

Election experts say the baseless fraud allegations in California do not bode well for the upcoming November midterm season.

"I think we're going to get punched in the face so badly on election denialism in November," said Stephen Richer, the former Republican recorder for Maricopa County, Arizona, who dealt with baseless fraud allegations in the aftermath of the 2020 election. He is now a legal fellow at the Cato Institute and a senior fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

Richer recalled that during the 2020 election, people trying to undermine the election results latched on to graphs that showed a blue line representing former President Joe Biden's totals suddenly jump higher as ballots were counted.

"And so now it seems that they're using these prediction market graphs to tell a similar story," Richer said.

Copyright 2026 NPR

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (RNS) — Pope Leo XIV said the war in Iran does not qualify as a "just war" according to Catholic teaching.

"I believe it has been already declared clearly," Leo said while answering questions from journalists aboard the papal plane for his six-day visit to Spain.

"There is no just war there," he said, referencing the conflict in Iran.

The question referred to U.S. Vice President JD Vance's remarks in April, where he used just war theory to justify the war in Iran. On that occasion, Vance said the pope should "be careful" when talking about theology.

"When the pope says that God is never on the side of people who wield the sword, there is more than 1,000-year tradition of just war theory," he said. President Donald Trump later said Leo was "weak" on war in a post on Truth Social.

Leo pointed to his most recent encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity), which says that just war theory has "too often been used to justify any kind of war" and is "now outdated."

"The problem is that the just war theory comes from centuries past when we couldn't imagine the weapons, human beings' ability for destruction," Leo said.

The document urges alternative ways to overcome conflict — "dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness" — condemning the use of force which disproportionately harms civilians.

The pope has made "overcoming the theory of the 'just war'" one of the themes of the first summit of cardinals he convened at the Vatican June 26-27, called a consistory.

It wasn't the first time Pope Leo has spoken out against the war in Iran. He has issued repeated appeals for peace and dialogue since the conflict began in February.

Aboard the plane on Saturday, Leo also weighed in on the war in Ukraine, especially after Russian President Vladimir Putin recently refused to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. "I am worried for Ukraine," Leo said. "We must really push to reach an end to the conflict and the war and find a solution," he added, calling for continued negotiations.

"Already, four years and a half have passed. We must reach a solution," he said, recognizing the United States' efforts to mediate a peace.

The pope also said he is in contact with religious leaders in Lebanon, whom he met when he visited the country in November. "The situation is very complex," he said, as Israel continues its offensive in the southern part of the country.

This story was produced via a collaboration between NPR and Religion News Service.

Copyright 2026 NPR

When Chris Davis first started working in law enforcement over 30 years ago, elections would come and go relatively unnoticed.

"Election Day was something, as a police officer, you may not even realize was happening," he said. "It wouldn't even come up on roll calls."

Davis is now chief of police in Green Bay, Wis. And elections have rapidly become a big part of his job, something he plans for year-round.

"I think a lot of that is just because we're right in the middle of the Wisconsin battleground," Davis said. "I remember really being struck when I came here at just how, almost, nervous a lot of city staff were about elections."

Davis' experience reflects a trend experts have noticed across the country: Since the 2020 election, local law enforcement has increasingly been playing a bigger role in helping local officials secure elections.

"The number of threats that election officials face, that jurisdictions face, that election workers face all mean that law enforcement does have a heightened role to play and a longer-term role to play," said Katie Reisner with the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center. "It's not a matter of just tapping in for Election Day and tapping back out."

According to a survey of local election officials conducted earlier this year by the Brennan Center for Justice, 32% of local election officials reported experiencing "threats, harassment, or abuse because of their job."

Threats and harassment increased notably for election officials after President Trump's unfounded claims that the 2020 election was rife with fraud. The last few years have also seen historic rates of turnover among voting officials.

In Green Bay, Davis said it became clear to him after talking to city officials that the police department needed to take "a more proactive role" during elections.

But collaboration between local agencies is not just happening in battleground states. According to the Brennan Center survey, a whopping 89% of election administrators said prior to the 2026 midterms they plan to "coordinate with at least one other agency or department to ensure safe and secure elections."

"A never-ending conversation"

To ensure coordination, Reisner said local election officials and local enforcement need to start talking to each other — and often. And to start making plans well before elections take place.

"What we encourage folks to avoid is trying to find the name of their election official, you know, on Election Day. No one wants that," she said. "But what is really productive is to have really intergovernmental, cross-functional collaboration well in advance of Election Day."

Tina Barton, co-chair of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, worked as an election administrator for two decades — almost half the time in Michigan, another battleground state.

She also said communication between election officials and law enforcement should be "a never-ending conversation."

"There are elections that are taking place all year long all across the country," Barton said. "So, this is something that we are always in planning mode for the next election cycle. It's important to start those conversations at the minute that you even think you should start doing it."

In Green Bay, Davis says such conversations led him to realize that he and his department didn't really know much about election laws.

They weren't sure about laws around electioneering, for example. Wisconsin also has a law that allows voters to challenge the eligibility of another voter at a polling site.

"I could see if that actually happened, that could turn into a disturbance where the police get called pretty quickly," Davis said. "We're already in a really tense environment around elections, and it's not going to take much for one of these situations to turn into something that a police officer is going to show up at."

Local police are proving to be particularly helpful with a rise in bomb threats.

During the 2024 election, officials received a record number of bomb threats, though Barton said elections went very smoothly, mostly because officials were prepared.

"For the average American, they probably think '24 was a pretty quiet election cycle," she said, "but that was because of all of these tabletops, and all of the training, and all the hard work that election officials and law enforcement and other stakeholders put in doing this training and planning and practicing over the last few years."

Police urged to "keep a light touch" at polling sites

Police involvement in elections, though, does raise some concerns among voting rights advocates.

These concerns are particularly heightened this year, due to some mixed messages from Trump officials and allies about federal law enforcement, particularly immigration officials, being near polling locations.

There are also worries that some local law enforcement could overstep. In Riverside County in California, the local sheriff — and a Republican gubernatorial candidate — seized hundreds of thousands of ballots, sounding alarm bells throughout the election administration community.

California lawmakers have since expressly banned such interference, but there are worries that even a visible police presence around elections could be a problem.

Reisner of States United said police could "inadvertently contribute to voter suppression," by intimidating some voters, and that anywhere voters are casting ballots is where law enforcement "is going to want to keep a light touch" and mostly stay behind the scenes.

"That's what we don't want," she said. "We don't want anyone to feel that by coming in and exercising their civic right and responsibility to cast their ballot that they are in any way, you know, putting themselves at risk or entering a highly securitized space."

In Green Bay, Davis said he and his officers have figured out the "right balance" for how present they should be while people are voting.

"We have to realize that we can have an impact on somebody's voting experience, and we certainly don't want to do that," he said. "I think we've been able to find the right balance for our community. … Police professionals who are planning for elections [need] to figure out what that looks like and get it right for your individual community, because that varies a lot."

Col. James Grady II, director of the Michigan State Police, said his organization doesn't man election sites. Troopers would have to be called to a location in order to have a presence there.

"Of course, if there is a complaint where someone has some inappropriate behavior or someone is being attacked, anything like that, the state police will respond," he said. "But … we don't want someone to feel uncomfortable because law enforcement is there in a uniform."

Police presence around elections can depend on state law. Barton said some states require law enforcement at the polls, while others prohibit it.

Reisner said there are election-related sites — where voters are not casting ballots — that could be aided by a police presence, like tabulation centers where ballots are counted.

"Ballots often will come in from outlying precincts and come into the vote count facility," she said. "[I]n recent election cycles, we've seen these vote count centers become the targets of heightened protest activity, heightened threats, and so heightened disruptions, all of which could pose, you know, distractions or other kinds of impediments to folks getting their work done."

Evolving threats

Green Bay Chief Davis said he expects the needs of election officials to evolve from one cycle to the next. He said this is something he's gotten used to.

"One of the things a career in police work teaches you is: This isn't going to be the same job in five years [as] it is now," he said. "And it teaches you to just adapt and meet the challenge, the next challenge as it gets here. And there's a little bit of forward thinking that we have to do."

In Michigan, Colonel Grady said even though a lot of these kinds of threats are somewhat new, tension around elections isn't a new thing for many Americans.

"Sometimes I do think that people forget that this country does have a past where there was a history when there were certain people that weren't allowed to vote," he said. "And now those things have changed. You know, there's a different threat out there now."

Copyright 2026 NPR

When dead trees fall in Baltimore, the city doesn't pay thousands of dollars to dump them in landfills like some cities do. The trees are transported to a sorting and recycling facility that turns the old wood into furniture, flooring and other products.

The facility makes money for Baltimore and has become a model for other cities. But Shaun Preston, who runs the site, called Camp Small, said it might have imploded without operational research support from U.S. Forest Service scientists based in the agency's office in Baltimore.

"When this program started, the U.S. Forest Service was right there to offer expertise to help us with research, to help develop ideas," said Preston. "And then the Forest Service was like, let's look at how we can grow Camp Small and take it to the next level."

More than 1,000 Forest Service employees work in hundreds of Research and Development facilities and structures located across the country. Staff work out of greenhouses, laboratories and cabins in urban areas like Baltimore and in more rural offices near the 193 million acres of national forest and grassland that the agency manages. The employees work on a range of projects, from restoring native trees in Hawaii after invasive species take over to learning how to prevent wildfires in Montana. Those projects often include local partners like Camp Small, Forest Service employees said, and theirs is the largest forestry research network in the world.

But on March 31, the Forest Service announced a reorganization of the agency that would close facilities used for research, including the one in Baltimore. Three days later, President Donald Trump's 2027 budget proposed allocating $0 for Forest Service research, down from $309 million in 2026. More than 100 facilities are now being evaluated for potential closure, according to an NPR analysis.

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At a budget hearing on April 16, Forest Service Chief Schulz said the agency was "trying to achieve fiscal responsibility" and that the changes were meant to bring the people who work for the agency closer to the land they are meant to manage. As part of the reorganization, Schulz also proposed moving the agency's headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah, and closing all nine of the agency's regional offices, where employees work on permitting and land management.

"We are prioritizing the fundamentals of managing our national forest for their intended purposes and ensuring maximum value to the American taxpayer," Schulz told lawmakers at the hearing. "We've got to make sure that we live within our means."

More than 200 employees work in the facilities slated for closure, according to the Forest Service Council of the National Federation of Federal Employees, the federal labor union that advocates for Forest Service workers. The Forest Service has denied that the pending closures are intended to force workers to quit and has suggested that employees in the facilities being evaluated for shut down would be consolidated into one location in Colorado.

But documents obtained by NPR, and interviews with current and former Forest Service researchers, show that much of the agency's research is already cheap and local – and closing research facilities could make it less so, while encouraging workers to leave the agency. The government already owns most of the facilities it is proposing to shutter, internal Forest Service documents reviewed by NPR reveal. Of the remaining buildings the Forest Service leases that are being evaluated for closure, some cost the government less than $1 in rent a year, leases obtained by NPR show.

"In my laboratory, we own the land outright and we own the buildings outright, so we're a pretty good deal," said Dr. Paul Hessburg, a Senior Research Ecologist who works in a Pacific Northwest Research Station lab in Wenatchee, Wash., one of the facilities being evaluated for closure.

The government does have to pay to maintain the buildings it owns. Deferred maintenance costs for those buildings amount to almost $3 billion, agency documents show. But the Forest Service also owns a range of other assets that it has to maintain that are more expensive. The deferred maintenance costs for those assets, which include roads, trails, bridges and dams, total more than $8 billion, according to the documents. Roads alone cost the agency more than double what it has to pay to maintain its facilities.

"Just because you're taking away the deferred maintenance cost of the research [buildings], it doesn't mean that area is going to become a zero-sum," said a current Forest Service employee who helps maintain the agency's infrastructure. "Because you still have the roads there. You could have a dam there. You could have a communication system there."

Current employees of the Forest Service requested that NPR not use their names because they are not permitted to speak publicly and said they feared retribution for doing so.

One of the buildings that the Forest Service does not own is the location in Fort Collins, Colo., where the agency has proposed to move researchers from facilities that are closing. That building costs the Forest Service $1 million a year in rent, documents reviewed by NPR show. Meanwhile, buildings the agency is proposing to shutter cost the Forest Service almost nothing in rental fees.

The lease that permits Forest Service scientists to use a 30,000 acre lot in Hilo, Hawaii, for instance, was signed in 2002, between the Department of Agriculture and the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources, and is valid through 2067. For renting the land located at the University of Hawaii for 65 years, the federal government paid a one-time fee of $1, the lease obtained by NPR shows.

The government does have to pay to maintain some of the buildings that it leases there, too, but there is no additional rental fee for the remainder of the term, the Hawaii lease states.

"They're only paying a dollar in rent to the university because they have a great agreement with the university," said Rachel Riemann, a former Forest Service research scientist who was based in New York and worked with the Forest Inventory Analysis arm of the agency. "And yet that one's on the list for closure."

The Forest Service currently leases two properties in Michigan, from Michigan Technological University, in Houghton and L'Anse. Both are being evaluated for closure.

The lease for the five acre property in Houghton was signed in 1963 for a 49-year period, then extended for another 49 years in 2014. In 1963, the federal government paid Michigan Technological University a one-time rental fee of $1, "but no rental fee thereafter," according to the lease documents obtained by NPR. In addition, Forest Service researchers have access to Michigan Technological University's "instruments and laboratories at no cost" other than maintenance, the lease states. For the second facility in Michigan, in L'Anse, the Forest Service pays $600 a month to rent two rooms.

"All this tells me is that no one bothered to look at what we owned versus what we don't," said the Forest Service maintenance employee. "They picked locations that they wanted to move people to rather than looking where we already had assets and caused huge panic amongst staff by doing so."

Scientists say they won't move

Dr. Morgan Grove was one of the Forest Service scientists who supported Camp Small, the wood recycling facility in Baltimore. He also jumpstarted the cleanup of a 10-acre forest behind an inner city church and worked with other scientists to study the regeneration of white oak trees in plots at a public arboretum in Baltimore.

Oak trees were planted there three years ago and need about thirty years to grow, Grove said. The saplings can't be transplanted to new sites without disrupting the project, Grove added, since the intention of the research was to study how the trees survive for the next few decades under the specific environmental conditions in Baltimore.

"So how easy would it be to do that from Denver? Not happening," Grove said. "Remotely, it's really hard to provide sufficient support for how to manage a forest."

Then there's the relationships that are required between federal scientists and their partners, like the Baltimore pastors and the sawmill workers at Camp Small, said Grove, who retired from the Forest Service in 2025.

"It's important to recognize that in the Forest Service, we end up being kind of the convener of different interests," said Grove. "And if you're trying to convene from Denver or Salt Lake City, they no longer see you as being part of their community."

Moving to a new location would also disrupt and stop their research, four current Forest Service scientists from research facilities across the East and West coasts interviewed by NPR agreed.

"The research being done is hyperlocal. It's unique to the landscapes that it's supporting and then also the data sets that are in each of these buildings," said a current Forest Service scientist. "Closing these offices is going to result in the loss of irreplaceable data sets, which contain just vital information that has been gathered."

Some of the science the agency does is not optional. The agency's Forest Inventory Analysis program is mandated by Congress to collect data to assess the condition of forests in the United States. About one third of all Forest Inventory Analysis staff work at facilities being evaluated for closure, according to Forest Service research scientists. Those employees would have to travel to continue to monitor forests, which could cost the agency more than $2,000 per person per month if standard per diem rates for federal employees are followed, said Riemann, the former Forest Inventory Analysis employee.

"Almost any lease would cost less than being in permanent travel status," Riemann said.

All four of the researchers NPR interviewed who are currently working for the Forest Service said they would quit the agency if told to move and said many of their colleagues feel the same way.

"I'm not moving to Fort Collins," said one researcher who works in a facility slated for closure. "The whole point was to do long-term, place-based ecological research."

Officials have said that they are still evaluating information about facilities slated for closure. When NPR requested an interview with the agency about that process, the Forest Service declined, but provided a statement.

"The transition will occur in phases. Employees will receive clear information about relocation timelines, available options, and resources to support their decisions," a USDA spokesperson said. "The number of relocations beyond those already identified in the National Capital Region is unknown at this time."

The union representing Forest Service employees argues the agency's proposed reorganization violates a law that states government funds cannot be reprogrammed without advance notification and approval by House and Senate appropriations committees.

"We had this language specifically put in there on purpose so that they wouldn't do any kind of reorganization and they're absolutely going against that," said Steven Gutierrez, one of the union's representatives, who said the committees were not notified in advance and did not authorize the Forest Service's proposal to close facilities.

The union is currently negotiating with Forest Service leadership, Gutierrez said. But if the reorganization of the agency's research division is carried out as it has been proposed, it will be the end of the Forest Service's strong science legacy, current employees believe.

One scientist called the proposed reorganization a "death blow" to research. Another scientist predicted that the proposed changes and the large loss of employees that would ensue, on top of the thousands of Forest Service employees lost last year, would cause the system to "entirely collapse." The reorganization would result in the public receiving less information about how to keep national forests healthy, protect communities from wildfires, and preserve green spaces in cities for people to enjoy, agency scientists said.

Hessburg, the researcher in the Pacific Northwest, has worked in forestry for 40 years. He said the cuts to research would cause long-term damage to lands that belong to the public.

"It takes an awful lot to manage nearly 200 million acres of national forest system land," said Hessburg. "If you eliminate the largest [forestry] research organization in the world, it has impacts."

NPR would like to hear from more people with information about federal agencies and the proposed reorganization of the Forest Service. You can send an email to the reporter of this article, Chiara Eisner, at ceisner@npr.org, or contact her on the end-to-end encrypted platform Signal, here. Her username is: ceis.78. 

Copyright 2026 NPR

Democrat Xavier Becerra has advanced to the general election for California governor after pitching himself as an experienced choice to lead the nation’s most populous state.

Becerra leaned on his more than 35 years in public office — including as state attorney general and U.S. health secretary — to argue that he was the most qualified candidate in a crowded field.

“I am ready to lead the fight to uphold California’s promise to make sure we have the governance worthy of our gifts,” he said on election night.

Once an afterthought in the race, he surged in the final months and vowed he would maintain the state’s mantle as a chief antagonist to President Donald Trump.

As attorney general Becerra filed more than 120 legal actions against the first Trump administration on everything from immigration to climate policy.

During the campaign, his rivals scrutinized his leadership as health secretary during the COVID-19 pandemic and unaccompanied migrant children crisis in 2021, when Becerra’s Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for shelters where they were housed. Some of them were criticized as having inadequate living conditions, and there were also concerns about authorities failing to thoroughly vet sponsors with whom some children were placed.

If elected, Becerra said, he would declare states of emergency to address high energy costs and housing shortages and to freeze home insurance rates.

Though California is one of the nation’s most diverse states, almost all its governors have been white men. Becerra would be the first Latino to hold the office since the late 1800s.

Early results from Tuesday’s primary election show voters in El Centro and Westmoreland overwhelmingly rejected Carlos Duran’s bid for the Imperial Irrigation District Board of Directors. Instead, they voted to reelect incumbent director Alex Cardenas, who has served in the role since 2018.

As of Friday morning, Cardenas had over 1,700 votes, nearly double Duran’s total of approximately 900 votes. In a phone call, Cardenas said he saw the results as a sign that voters valued experience, ethics and transparency.

“The voters and the rate payers and water users spoke loud and clear,” Cardenas said. “They want a transparent government that doesn't placate to special interests.”

IID is the primary provider of power and water in the region. The utility delivers electricity to more than 160,000 customers throughout the Imperial and Coachella Valleys.

The agency also oversees the generations-old claims of Imperial Valley farmers to water from the Colorado River and is currently engaged in urgent talks over the river basin’s future.

Duran’s defeat was a blow for Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing (IVCM), the Huntington Beach-based developer backing his campaign.

The company is trying to build a 950,000-square-foot artificial intelligence data center complex in the Imperial Valley. It had spent $30,000 to support Duran, a local journalist and online personality who had previously worked for the company as a spokesperson.

Cardenas, by comparison, raised around $20,000 from a mix of small donors, farmers and loans from himself.

The coalition of residents who oppose data center development in the Imperial Valley celebrated Duran’s defeat. Francisco Leal said Duran had sharply criticized IID’s current leaders but hadn’t explained his own plans.

“He drilled really hard on just bashing and talking bad about his opponent,” said Leal, a resident of the City of Imperial and a lead organizer of the coalition, known as NIMBY Imperial. “When he should have been campaigning on ways to improve and do good things for the community.”

Duran did not respond to an interview request.

The race for IID’s Division 1 seat has become one of the most prominent examples of how the nationwide data center boom and surging opposition have emerged as a driving political force in the Imperial Valley this year.

Developers such as IVCM have looked to the Valley for its energy infrastructure and availability of industrial land. Late last year, IVCM Chief Executive Officer Sebastian Rucci told KPBS he also hoped to provide tax revenue and some jobs for the region, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in California.

But IVCM needs the utility to agree to provide energy to get their project up and running. In March, Rucci told KPBS that Duran would support their plans if elected.

“In my view Carlos Duran is an excellent candidate,” Rucci said in an email. “He is not running to spare the data center of its obligations, on the contrary, he has my blessing to secure every voluntary improvement from our project.”

Duran’s candidacy, however, alarmed many Imperial Valley residents who have deep concerns about the proposed data center, which could need nearly double the amount of power that the entire county used in 2024 and 750,000 gallons of water per day.

The company has prioritized speed in its efforts to build its massive AI computing complex between the cities of Imperial and El Centro, designing it to avoid an in-depth environmental analysis.

Rucci did not respond to an interview request Thursday.

Some other utility officials said they were excited and relieved by the results. Earlier this year, IID Chairwoman Karin Eugenio said she saw Duran’s campaign as an open bid for political power in the Imperial Valley.

“I was terrified,” Eugenio told KPBS Thursday. “What that would do to the integrity of our board and how that could compromise the safety of our county.”

Eugenio, an outspoken critic of IVCM’s data center project, was also up for reelection this week. She currently holds a strong lead over her opponent, Eric Rodriguez.

City Council President Pro Tem Kent Lee was joined by Budget Committee Chair Henry Foster III on Friday with County Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe and representatives of the Prebys Foundation to announce the proposal, which would have the foundation put up $3 million for arts and culture programs slashed in the current proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget.

"Arts are essential to our city," Lee said. "Music, film, artistic expression — this is what makes us human, and it's what transforms a city into a community. Our arts programs create jobs, attract visitors and help define what it means to be a San Diegan. This is not about funding some abstract luxury, it's about protecting one of San Diego's greatest strengths."

The proposal would also adopt recommendations from the city's Independent Budget Analyst's office to shift $6 million from San Diego's Transient Occupancy Tax (essentially a hotel tax) to arts programs, as well as to restore $1.3 million in grants.

"Arts and culture belong in all of San Diego and this funding supports local artists, small businesses, jobs and the community spaces that keep our neighborhoods connected," said Foster III. "In District 4, the San Diego Black Arts and Culture District shows why this work matters by honoring history, creating opportunity, and making sure culture isn't forgotten. As Budget Chair, I truly believe this proposal is a responsible way to protect funding that matters to our residents and our local economy."

This would cover around $10.35 million of the nearly $12 million cut in the proposed budget, as the city looks to tighten its belt amid a $118 million structural budget deficit.

"Our investment is intended to encourage the city to restore arts funding, honor the competitive grants process already underway, and strengthen regional support for arts and culture," said Grant Oliphant, CEO and president of the Prebys Foundation. "For decades, San Diego's artists and cultural organizations have been promised a reliable source of public funding. It is time to deliver on that promise, and today marks an important step forward."

Following up on a May decision by the San Diego County Board of Supervisors to allocate millions in county funding to bolster the region's arts and culture scene, county leaders on Friday announced plans to explore a regional alliance to advance the arts.

"Arts and culture are essential to the identity, vibrancy, and economic vitality of our region," said Montgomery Steppe. "The county has been focused on building a strong and sustainable foundation for arts and culture well before the current budget discussion. I'm encouraged to see leaders from across government, philanthropy, and the arts community coming together around a shared commitment to support the creative ecosystem that enriches all of our communities."

County initiatives include funding for artists from underserved communities, creating or maintaining affordable creative spaces and strengthening cross-border ties with artists in Baja California.

A regional initiative to combine funding, effort, or both would be "more stable and sustainable," the speakers said Friday.

"Year after year, it's the same budget battle over the arts. We envision a better way, a collaboration where our whole region works together to support the arts," Lee said. "We want to secure the level of investment the arts deserve and create a system that does not force organizations to rebuild their future one budget cycle at a time."

The proponents said a regional approach could "help grow investment in arts and culture, strengthen the region's cultural economy, expand access to arts programming in every community and ensure future generations continue to benefit from a vibrant creative sector."

Friday's coalition asked the San Diego City Council to approve the proposal as part of next week's budget actions and urged Mayor Todd Gloria to sign the proposal into law.

WASHINGTON — Water is flowing back into the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, after a controversial painting job kept it closed for weeks. And to many onlookers, it doesn't look much different.

"The pool gets completed at 4 o'clock and the water will start to flow in … and it's going to be beautiful," President Trump told reporters in the Oval office on Wednesday.

The next day, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum shared a video of water bubbling up through a grate on the freshly-darkened pool floor. Trump had the pool's surface darkened to a shade he calls "American flag blue." For the last century, he's said, the pool was "just gray … the color of concrete and stone."

By Friday morning, the 2,028 foot-long shallow pool had collected a stripe of water down the middle, just wide enough to reflect the Washington Monument across from it. The refilling continued under the bright sun, as one worker stood in the middle of the pool, with his pants rolled up above his knees, wielding a hose.

As the temperature neared 90 degrees, tourists, cyclists and joggers paused at the top of the nearby steps to snap photos and observe the process. Many welcomed the return of the water — and the ducks that play in it — but said they couldn't immediately tell a difference in the color.

"The more water it fills, the more similar it looks [to before]," said Luisa Córdoba, a D.C. resident and avid runner who says she's been coming to check on the pool every day since work started. "I'm just happy it's not that bright blue that we saw the first days, which was so alarming … if it stays like this, it's fine."

Early renderings — as well as preliminary coats of paint when the project started in late April — had critics worried the historic landmark would end up looking more like a swimming pool. But Friday's observers didn't find that to be the case.

"I'm colorblind, so it doesn't look blue — yet," said Terry Barzanti, a Maryland resident who works nearby.

"I'm not colorblind and it doesn't look blue," laughed his coworker Edgar Sadsad, who found it more grey.

Other passersby described it as closer to black, and said the difference might be more noticeable once the pool is fully refilled. Even so, Sadsad and Barzanti were among those who praised the project, saying the pool already looked cleaner and more appealing.

Trump has for months complained about the state of the pool, saying he made it a priority after an unnamed friend visiting from Germany called it "filthy" and "not representative of the country," according to the president.

The pool, which first opened in 1923, last underwent major renovations between 2010 and 2012. But it has continued to suffer from broken pipes and water leaks that merit costly refills, according to the Department of the Interior.

Trump has said this project sealed crevices in the stone to prevent leaks, and removed 12 truckloads of garbage from the pool, though it's not clear that it addressed the broken pipes.

"It'll last for 50 to 100 years before you have to do anything with it," he said.

Questions remain about the project's funding 

The resurfacing took significantly longer than Trump's initial estimate.

He said in late April that the project would be done in a week or two, though the Department of the Interior told NPR it would take closer to a month.

In mid-May, the nonprofit Cultural Landscape Foundation sued the administration to stop work on the pool, saying it had bypassed federally required historic preservation reviews. A judge heard arguments later that month, but hadn't made a decision by the time the administration informed the court on Wednesday that work had been completed.

The project also appears to cost more than Trump said it would.

He gave the price tag as $2 million, which he said, without specifics, was significantly less than he had been quoted previously. But Interior Department records obtained by The New York Times show the administration plans to pay $13.1 million to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the Virginia firm that Trump picked for the project.

"It's kind of sad where our tax dollars are going. I mean, it was fine before, by my knowledge," said Samantha Sorokin of Arlington, Va., who was taking her parents on a tour.

It's not clear how much of the money is coming from taxpayers. A large sign affixed to the construction site fence, on National Park Service letterhead, informed visitors that "these improvements are being completed using your fee dollars."

(The Washington Post reported this week that the Trump administration is diverting at least $90 million from national park entry fees to fund its July 4th fireworks display and other D.C. beautification projects.)

When asked for comment about the cost and where the money is coming from, the Department of the Interior — the park service's parent agency — told NPR that it has "many funding sources available to spend on deferred maintenance."

"Unlike Barack Obama who spent millions upon millions in taxpayer-funded Great Recession recovery aid that should have gone to struggling families, the Trump administration is looking at different funding mechanisms which include endowment funds and revenue brought in from the sale of park passes," the unnamed spokesperson wrote over email.

The two-year renovation of the reflecting pool that ended in 2012 was funded by $34 million from an Obama-era economic stimulus package.

Trump's campaign to spruce up D.C. 

Trump is hoping to make many changes to D.C., ranging from massive undertakings like his proposed triumphal arch (which got preliminary approval from a second federal agency this week) to smaller changes like installing new statues and restoring park fountains.

"We have many monuments and fountains all over Washington, and we're just about completed with all of them," he said Wednesday.

The Interior Department referred NPR to a White House post on X listing those accomplishments, which include "500 instances of graffiti removed," "134 rat-resistant trash cans installed" and "250 truckloads of debris from ponds removed."

Much of that work is being carried out by National Guard troops deployed to D.C., whose numbers are set to double ahead of the country's 250th birthday celebrations on and around July 4th. That's also the deadline — or at least impetus — for many of Trump's renovation projects.

Maria Sorokin, who was visiting her daughter from Pennsylvania, is skeptical that the 250th anniversary warrants major changes like the reflecting pool resurfacing.

"It is a special anniversary and it should be spruced up, but I'm not sure if this was necessary," she said, looking at the pool slowly refilling. "If it's not broken, don't fix it."

But some area residents, like Barzanti, embrace the cleanup and beautification efforts.

"We walk down here for lunch breaks," he said. "People come from all over the world to see our nation's capital. So we should show it off, we should take care of it."

Some changes are going over better than others.

Several locals at the reflecting pool, including Córdoba, mentioned that they were thrilled to see the fountains at Meridian Hill Park — a popular spot about 1.5 miles north of the White House — flowing with water for the first time in seven years.

Maryellen Thornton, who lives near the park, says the fountain restoration has been "amazing for the community," describing the picnic blanket-packed grass "like nirvana." It's also one of the reasons she and her husband Brad Thornton came to see the reflecting pool.

"We're just fascinated with how fabulous it is to have all of these water features being restored in the district," she said. "It just brings so much happiness to everybody."

Brad is also excited to see the return of water to the fountain outside Union Station, Washington's major transport hub, and hopes the newly filled reflecting pool will build on that momentum.

"A little bit of spraying water goes a long way," he said. "It shouldn't be about politics. It's just about enjoying it. We're in the city. We need some green space."

Copyright 2026 NPR

Updated June 9, 2026 at 2:48 PM PDT

Former Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino was the face of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. In late May, he appeared alongside neo-Nazis and white nationalists at the Remigration Summit in Porto, Portugal. At the conference, he endorsed the organizers' immigration agenda, which some researchers have compared to ethnic cleansing.

One of the organizers of the Remigration Summit was Martin Sellner, an Austrian white nationalist and former neo-Nazi widely credited with popularizing the term "remigration." Sellner calls for expelling most people of color from Europe, including permanent residents and citizens.

In his speech, Bovino thanked Sellner for inviting him and addressed him directly. "Your ideas, we talked a lot on that. And again, those ideas mirror each other. It's almost — it's very suspicious how we've never talked before — face to face, that is — until yesterday, and we were on the same sheet of music almost immediately," Bovino said.

The recording of his speech was shared with NPR by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit that researches transnational far-right extremist movements.

"It's a major coup for the remigration folks to have a former Trump administration official, a person who was in charge of mass deportations, to come and speak with them [and] say he's on the same page, and that Trump's policies are essentially remigration," said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

Sellner agreed. "It was obviously a huge endorsement and honor for us because I think he's the single most famous Border Patrol officer in the world right now," he told NPR in an interview after the conference.

Bovino did not respond to NPR's request for comment. Since the conference, he has mentioned the term "remigration" multiple times on social media.

European white nationalists get an American boost

Bovino oversaw raids in Los Angeles and Chicago before being promoted to commander-at-large of the Border Patrol. He left the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year after two U.S. citizens were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis.

Although the Department of Homeland Security's new head, Markwayne Mullin, recently said Bovino is "irrelevant," his endorsement of remigration still carries weight, Beirich said. She told NPR that the influence of remigration-related policy proposals is growing in Europe, in part thanks to the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign in the U.S.

Bovino wasn't the only notable American boost the conference received: an anonymous "Catholic-American" with ties to a speaker donated to help cover conference costs, Sellner said, though he would not identify the person. The donor also attended the summit, he said. "He's not connected to any institution or any state official, [he's] just a private donor who's coming from the traditional Catholic community."

Sellner said such transatlantic connections are important to his movement, even as he remains focused on Europe. He claimed he talks privately with some Americans who "are definitely also part of the [administration]," but would not provide further details.

Changing culture via online influencers

Both Sellner and Bovino have talked about recruiting social media influencers to their causes, because they believe content creators play an important role in shifting public discourse.

"One of the things we did there in our city-hopping campaign was ... having our media apparatus outwork [our opponents'] media apparatus," Bovino said in his conference speech, referring to the immigration raids he led across various American cities.

Sellner is setting up a new organization called the Institute of Remigration, which will be part think tank, part political advocacy group. He said media outreach is one of the organization's focuses. "To push the same agenda," Sellner said, he plans to establish a fellowship for politicians, activists and influencers to coordinate messaging.

Sellner is savvy about media and messaging, said Beirich, the extremism expert. "He's achieved something no other white nationalist has, which is to get the White House to repeat his phrase, 'remigration.'" She said Sellner "thinks a lot about [what] he calls 'metapolitics,' this idea that you have to influence the culture to get to the policy."

Sellner told NPR he wants to replicate his success in pushing the term "remigration" with other "terms, concepts and narratives."

"This was done by repeating ['remigration'] over and over again in demonstrations, writing books, in reels," he said. "It's a multi-domain effort of memes, subculture ... political activism, to bring this into the public consciousness and then slowly into the mainstream." For the term "remigration," the repetition was partially organic, partially planned, he said.

Trump administration actions in sync with Sellner's goals

The Trump administration has adopted the term "remigration": President Trump and DHS have posted the phrase multiple times on social media. The State Department has created an Office of Remigration, although the office's operations have remained opaque.

In a statement to NPR, an unnamed State Department spokesperson said the Office of Remigration is "carrying out the President's promise" to "reverse the Biden-era invasion of illegal aliens and once again make America a country for Americans."

Just last month, the White House X account posted an image of the president, above the words "replacement migration" which are crossed out and replaced with "remigration" in larger font.

It mirrors how proponents of remigration see it as a solution for the so-called "great replacement" conspiracy theory, which falsely claims that there is a deliberate effort to encourage immigration from non-white countries to dilute the identity and culture of Western countries. That conspiracy theory has inspired multiple terror attacks in the U.S. and around the world.

In his book Remigration, Sellner calls for expelling most people of color from Europe in three stages: first undocumented immigrants, then visa and green card holders, and finally, citizens deemed "unassimilable."

It's an agenda that shares similarities with the Trump administration's approach to immigrants in the country legally, which has included trying to push out visa holders, permanent residents and some naturalized U.S. citizens.

Copyright 2026 NPR

With only a few days until the primary election and voting already underway, the top Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, Graham Platner, is answering if he should remain in the race after numerous concerns over his past have come to light.

Platner has maintained frontrunner status to unseat longtime Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins. It's an election Democrats almost need to win if they want to take control of the Senate come November. But after The New York Times published a story where previous romantic partners called Platner's behavior "toxic" and described him as someone who "does not respect women," some wonder if his candidacy is kaput.

Platner doesn't think so, though.

"The whole point of these stories is to make sure we're not talking about healthcare, it's to make sure we're not talking about raising taxes on the rich, it's to make sure we're not talking about getting money out of politics," he told Maine Public in an interview on Friday.

He also said no one from the National Democratic Party has told him to drop out of the race.

The New York Times article hasn't been the only thorn in the campaign's side though. When the combat veteran turned oyster farmer announced he was running for Senate, Platner's tattoo of a Nazi-symbol came to light. Platner has said many times that he didn't know the skull and crossbones resembled a Nazi SS sign and that he was drunk with his fellow Marines when he got the tattoo in 2007. Platner's old and since deleted Reddit comments that were racist and others made blaming sexual assault vicitms also came to light.

Then, the Wall Street Journal reported Platner, who is married, exchanged sexually explicit messages with several women early into the campaign in 2025. His wife, Amy Gertner, has since defended her husband and their marriage.

The New York Times story followed. In that story, one of Platner's ex-partners, Lyndsey Fifield, who has worked for conservative causes and on Republican campaigns, described instances and recounted a time when Platner locked her in a room and said she would remain there until she was "calm."

Platner told Maine Public that the allegations were "just not true." He also discredited the status of his relationship with Fifield, stating they never dated and she was "someone I had a casual relationship with." Instead of seeing the article as damaging to his campaign, he took it as a sign they're doing something right.

"To read in the New York Times, like someone gossiping about Amy and I's marriage, that's painful, but at the exact same time, it's almost a sign that we're on the right path," Platner said.

"I mean, people would not expend this amount of money and resources and energy trying to rip through every single part of our lives if they didn't feel threatened."

In a social media post made on X the day after The New York Times story published, Fifield said Washington's culture towards victims of abuse hasn't changed and that she came forward because she wants to set an example for her daughters.

"I'm so done. This just cannot keep happening. I will not one day send my daughters to go work in a congressional office if this culture is not radically transformed," she wrote. "People need to know they can and should speak up when they're abused or when they see abuse—and know there will be no point scoring about what party affiliation they have."

The campaign of Sen. Susan Collins did not immediately respond to Maine Public's request for comment.

Platner has been upfront about his mental health struggles. After his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Platner said he lived with undiagnosed and untreated PTSD and depression. As a result, he admits that he drank too much and that it was, as he told Maine Public, "the darkest time of my life." Platner said his mental health improved once he started getting help from the VA and participating in therapy in early 2017.

Platner told Maine Public that he expected his past to be dug up, but that he didn't believe it would be to the extent that it has become.

"When Amy and I decided we were going to do this, we knew that our lives are going to get ripped apart. We knew that people were going to lie," he said.

But he added that he knew the "whole political pundit class" and the "political establishment" was going to fight the campaign "tooth and nail" because they are building "something substantial."

Platner is confident that voters will see past his controversy if he continues to meet Mainers where they're at.

"I very firmly believe that if I go out and continue to engage with people and continue to talk about the reality that Mainers are living in, the struggles of regular everyday people – that's why we're going to win this thing," he said.

Copyright 2026 NPR

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For all the talk of a governor’s race between two Republicans, or even two Democrats, it’s looking like voters are in for a typical partisan matchup in November.

In predictably Democratic California, there’s no need for a political science degree or a crystal ball to confidently predict the result of a general election face-off between Xavier Becerra, the current Democratic front-runner, and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican.

Despite the top-two primary system in which the two highest vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party, likely Democratic cakewalks abound further down the ballot after Tuesday’s election.

So why is it so rare in California, which hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006 and where Democratic voters outnumber registered Republicans almost two-to-one, to put two Democrats on the ballot in the general election?

For all its political reputation as the left coast, California is simply not overwhelmingly Democratic enough to regularly advance two Democrats to the general election, said Andrew Sinclair, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College who has studied the effects of California’s top two.

With Democratic candidates regularly earning roughly 60% of the statewide vote, the electorate is sufficiently left-leaning to make the outcome of Democrat-versus-Republican general elections fairly predictable. But Democrats don’t make up quite enough of the vote share to push two Democratic candidates through the open primary except in somewhat unusual circumstances, he said.

“After about 60% to 65% Democratic vote share, it starts to get much more likely to get D-on-D races,” he said. In recent statewide races, the percentage of votes cast for the Democratic candidate has hovered around 60%, “right in the electoral dead zone,” said Sinclair.

The promise of top two

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

California’s unusual “top two” election system puts every candidate on the same primary ballot; the first and second place winners progress to the general election. The idea, approved by voters in 2010, was advertised as an engine of both political moderation and more meaningful choice. Both the Democratic and Republican parties were opposed.

Proponents argued that pulling candidates out of a purely partisan primary system would encourage them to appeal to voters across the ideological spectrum, rather than just the party base.

The new voting scheme would “change the dysfunctional political system and get rid of the paralysis and the partisan bickering” in California politics, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who championed the proposition, said at the time.

In districts where one party dominates the field, allowing multiple candidates from that same party to compete was meant to make general elections competitive.

But if current election results hold — and with so many ballots still left to count, they may not — Californians don’t appear likely to see many competitive statewide races in November.

In Tuesday’s races for lieutenant governor, attorney general, controller and treasurer, a series of high-profile, well-financed Democrats are competing against Republicans who range from long- to longer-shot. In congressional contests in West Los Angeles and Napa Valley, where upstart progressives challenged moderate incumbents, the upstarts appear to have been boxed out, leaving the two veteran Democratic representatives, Mike Thompson and Brad Sherman, to face ill-fated Republicans.

A notable exception is the insurance commissioner’s race, in which two Democrats — Jane Kim and Ben Allen — hold the two top spots. The 2018 lieutenant governor’s race was also a Dem-on-Dem contest. It’s happened a few times in U.S. Senate races. But in most cases, a reversion to the polarized partisan norm is the rule.

That’s in part thanks to the primary electorate itself.

Fewer voters tend to turn out in June elections, and those who do tend to be committed partisans prepared to vote for one party or another. Though the top-two system is officially nonpartisan, Democratic voters treat it like a partisan primary, herding around the person they consider the strongest representative of their party, with Republicans doing the same, said Eric McGhee, a political researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.

There may be a handful of “pure independents in the middle” who will swing between parties, moderating the outcome and potentially crossing party lines to put a centrist over the top.

But such voters are rare — especially in June.

Case in point: Matt Mahan, the moderate Democratic mayor of San Jose who ran for governor criticizing “extremism on both sides.” With his focus on pocketbook issues and promises to limit his own party’s state spending, Mahan was the “poster child” for a top-two system designed for “all those so-called people who are going to come to the middle,” said Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio.

“He got 4%,” said Maviglio, a top-two critic who voted for Mahan. “Voters are partisan, at the end of the day.”

Does the system create more moderates?

Californians are much more likely to see same-party general election contests in local races, where an individual district is more likely than the state as a whole to be overwhelmingly dominated by one party.

In congressional races in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and across Los Angeles and in legislative races in liberal enclaves across California, two Democrats are on track to head to November.

USC political science professor Christian Grose said over the last decade, about a third of legislative general election races have been between two members of the same party.

Removing the choice between parties from the general election can have benefits like allowing voters to choose based on true policy differences or perceptions of competence rather than simply siding with a party, he said. But it can also invite voters to make choices based on "things not related to governance," like gender or race.

In a 2020 paper, Grose found that congressional candidates in top-two states have an incentive to tack toward the center, suggesting the top-two system works as intended whether or not the candidates end up competing in a same-party general election.

And in a newly created purple district that runs northeast of Sacramento, former Republican turned independent Rep. Kevin Kiley appears to have claimed first place in his race. Running without official party backing may be easier under a nonpartisan primary system.

Shutouts and cynical games

There are obvious downsides.

Tom Charron, co-founder of the California Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, says the top-two primary system is vulnerable to “cynical gaming” in which one candidate boosts the candidate they consider easier to beat in the general election.

Newsom did that in 2018 by tacitly steering Republican voters toward Republican John Cox, whom he viewed as a weaker opponent than fellow Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa.

Likewise, in the 2024 primary, a super PAC backing Democratic U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff put millions of dollars behind Republican candidate Steve Garvey, undercutting Democratic former Rep. Katie Porter’s chances.

Another possible problem popped up early in the life of the reform. In 2012, the first cycle after voters approved the top two, four Democrats crowded into a race to represent San Bernardino in Congress. Two Republicans did the same. The Democrats ended up slicing up the left-of-center vote so thinly that the Republicans won the top two spots, despite Democrats holding a modest voter registration edge.

A more egregious example took place 10 years later when too many Republican candidates vying to represent a deeply conservative state Senate district east of Fresno divided the GOP vote, leaving Democrats in the top two.

That perverse outcome was top of mind for many Democratic voters earlier this year when a glut of Democrats running for governor threatened to leave the top two spots to Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Bianco.

'In some sense, the Democratic Party did everything they possibly could to make (a shutout) happen.'Andrew Sinclair, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna CollegeWith Becerra and fellow Democrat Tom Steyer well ahead of Bianco in the vote count, the shutout didn’t happen, showing how unlikely it was, said Claremont McKenna’s Sinclair.

“In some sense, the Democratic Party did everything they possibly could to make (a shutout) happen,” Sinclair said. He pointed to a “low-quality field of candidates” likely to divide the vote evenly, the abrupt exit of front-runner Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and the failure of the party or any of its California luminaries to endorse anyone.

If nothing else, the fear among highly engaged Democratic voters may have led a decisive number to vote strategically to avoid a shutout, Sinclair said.

Changes on the way?

Even though it was eventually averted, the prospect of a Republican governor in California in 2026 has led some to reconsider the top two.

Maviglio has filed a proposed ballot measure to repeal the top-two system and return to partisan primaries.

"The fact that there are any (same-party general elections) is simply undemocratic," Maviglio said. "People have the choice between only one party, like they're in the Soviet Union?"

In theory, Democrat-on-Democrat races are supposed to give voters a choice between distinct ideological options within the same party — a business-backed moderate, say, and a Bernie-boosting progressive.

In practice, voters are quite bad at making such distinctions, said McGhee at PPIC.

“The evidence we have of how voters view these contests is that they don't have a clue who the moderate or the liberal is,” he said. “It’s always a good bet that voters are way way way less tapped into the nuances of what’s going on than you are if you’re interested in politics.”

Others are pushing for a third option — ranked-choice voting.

Charron, with the Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, said his group is advocating for California to move toward an Alaska-style voting system in which the top four or five primary finishers advance to a ranked-choice general election.

Ranked choice allows voters to rank their candidates by preference. If a voter’s top choice doesn’t receive enough votes to win, their vote goes to their second preference, then third, and so on. Several California cities already use it for mayoral contests, including Oakland and San Francisco.

Charron said the system encourages a more diverse field of candidates and gives voters more choice, since few would worry about being a “spoiler” for a fellow party member.

In May, the nonpartisan nonprofit Independent Voter Project helped launch a group aimed at bringing ranked choice to California via a constitutional amendment that could go before voters in 2028.

“It's very exciting for us right now that these conversations are coming up because of some of the risks that we've seen in this primary season, in particular,” said Charron.

Kate Wolffe contributed reporting for this story.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

After a marathon 18-hour vote, Senate Republicans advanced roughly $70 billion in funding for immigration enforcement agencies that had been carved out of an earlier funding deal to reopen the rest of the Department of Homeland Security. The funds would extend through the remainder of President Trump's time in the White House.

One Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted against it.

The package now heads for a vote in the House of Representatives, which could happen as early as next week.

While the Senate passage is a victory for Republicans, who have been trying to pass immigration enforcement for months, the overnight vote-a-rama exposed rifts within their ranks.

At the center of it all is the Trump administration's proposed $1.8 billion fund to distribute taxpayer dollars to people who allege they have been politically targeted by the government, perhaps including Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

The fund originated as part of an out-of-court settlement to resolve a $10 billion lawsuit brought by President Trump against his own government over the 2019 leak of his tax records. It has been unpopular among congressional lawmakers, including Republicans — many of whom were present at the Capitol when it was attacked in 2021.

"We have a lot of members who are concerned, obviously," Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters last month.

"People are concerned about paying their mortgage or rent, affording groceries and paying for gas, not about putting together a $1.8 billion fund for the President and his allies to pay whomever they wish with no legal precedent or accountability," Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., wrote on X. Cassidy recently lost his reelection race to a Trump-backed primary challenger.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, sought to ease such concerns during testimony in the House on Tuesday, telling lawmakers the administration was dropping plans for the fund. But President Trump introduced new uncertainty on Wednesday, telling reporters in the Oval Office he was unsure.

"I'd have to ask the lawyers," he said. "I don't know."

An effort from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer Thursday night to send the bill back to the Senate Judiciary Committee to kill the fund was open for several hours on the floor, and had support from three Republicans up for re-election this November: Susan Collins of Maine, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Jon Husted of Ohio.

Republican senators also offered amendments to limit the fund, including an effort from Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., to redirect funds towards fraud enforcement.

Eight GOP senators supported an amendment that would prevent payouts from the fund to Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

Repeated delays

The fight over the weaponization fund was only the latest controversy to sidetrack the immigration enforcement package, which the president originally asked Congress to pass by June 1.

Republicans were forced to use a special procedure known as reconciliation to skirt the Senate's de facto 60-vote threshold for most legislation and fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol after Democrats refused to lend their support.

Democrats were hoping to force negotiations over reforms to immigration enforcement practices, including restrictions on face-coverings and a body camera mandate, after federal agents killed two American citizens in Minnesota earlier this year. The fight led to the longest agency shutdown in U.S. government history. The Department of Homeland Security was shuttered for 76 days.

Copyright 2026 NPR

WASHINGTON — The Senate passed legislation to fund President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement agencies early Friday morning, after weeks of delays and fierce backlash to an unrelated $1.776 billion settlement fund that threatened to derail the bill.

Senators voted 52-47 for the $70 billion legislation to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol for the next three years, through the end of Trump's term. The final vote came just before 5 a.m., after Republicans narrowly defeated multiple attempts by Democrats and Republicans to add language to the bill that would permanently ban Trump's settlement fund for political allies who believe they have been politically persecuted.

Republicans cleared a major hurdle overnight when they defeated an amendment proposed by one of their own members, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, that would have redirected payments from the settlement to members of law enforcement who were injured in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

The amendments were a test of party unity that complicated what should have been an easy vote for Republicans who wanted to keep the focus on immigration enforcement in an election year. Instead, they spent almost a full day haggling among themselves over whether to block the settlement fund, even after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had said earlier this week that it would not go forward.

"This would have been done several hours ago if we weren't having to deal with some of the issues around the fund," Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said shortly before midnight.

Thune himself has criticized the judgement fund, which was part of a settlement that resolves Trump's lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns and has angered many of his GOP colleagues. But he has been pushing GOP senators for weeks to keep the bill focused on the funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, which Democrats have blocked since early this year, and to avoid adding new provisions that could complicate its passage in the House.

Still, a group of Republican senators pushed all day and into the night to block the settlement's payouts through legislation. That effort came after Trump raised new doubts about the settlement's future Wednesday afternoon — just after the Senate had voted to start debate on the immigration bill — when he told reporters that the settlement is "very important" and said "I don't know" whether it is dead or on hold.

"I'd have to ask the lawyers," he said.

Senators push back multiple attempts to ban settlement fund

The first vote on Thursday morning, a Democratic effort to ban the settlement, was held open for several hours as three senators, including Cassidy, decided whether to support it. The Democratic motion was narrowly defeated when Cassidy eventually voted against it and the two other GOP senators — Jon Husted of Ohio and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, both of whom are up for reelection this year — voted for it.

The Senate then rejected a second amendment from Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina that would also have banned the settlement fund but moved the money to a separate anti-fraud fund at the Department of Justice. Most Democrats voted against the amendment, guaranteeing its defeat, but more than 10 Republicans supported it.

Tillis said the fund is a political liability for the party.

"If Blanche says this is largely inoperative, why not use this moment to codify that?" Tillis said. "Otherwise, you're exposing every one of our members who are in cycle to having to deal with this between today and Election Day, and that makes no sense for something that the DOJ says they're not moving forward with."

Cassidy's amendment to compensate the injured police officers was a pointed rebuke, as payouts from Trump's fund could have potentially gone to Trump supporters who beat police and attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Despite Blanche's comments, Cassidy said that the fund is still part of an active settlement and "absolutely can be used."

The Senate rejected several other Democratic efforts to try to block or limit the fund, including amendments to ban payments to Jan. 6 defendants who injured law enforcement officers.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Republicans are now "leaving taxpayers to rely on nothing more than a promise from Donald Trump's personal fixer. That is not accountability. That is a permission slip."

ICE and Border Patrol money has been delayed for months

Enactment of the roughly $70 billion bill to fund ICE and the Border Patrol would end the blockade by Democrats who demanded policy changes after the fatal shootings of two protesters by federal agents in January. The bill would fund the agencies for three years, through the end of Trump's term.

Senate Republicans used a complicated procedural maneuver to get around the filibuster and pass the budget legislation with no Democratic votes. But it took weeks to get the bill to the Senate floor as Republicans navigated various obstacles to passage created by Trump and the White House — including a $1 billion proposal for White House security and Trump's ballroom that they eventually scrapped and the fierce bipartisan backlash to the settlement fund.

Democrats say any funding bill for the Homeland Security Department should place restraints on federal immigration authorities, including better identification for federal officers and more use of judicial warrants, among other asks.

After federal agents shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Trump agreed to a Democratic request that the Homeland Security bill be separated from a larger spending measure that became law. But bipartisan negotiations went nowhere, and the department funding lapsed in mid-February with no agreement on changes to the Trump administration's immigration enforcement tactics.

Congress eventually funded the rest of the Homeland Security Department at the end of April with Democratic support, but ICE and Border Patrol has remained without regular funding.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Updated June 12, 2026 at 6:47 PM PDT

Minority voters are left with limited alternatives for combatting racial discrimination in redistricting, after the U.S. Supreme Court's latest undermining of the federal Voting Rights Act.

Remaining options for protecting the collective power of racial-minority voters include state-level voting rights acts and map-drawing strategies, likely in Democratic-controlled states, yet they cannot fully replace the nationwide provisions under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that many legal experts say are now practically impossible to enforce.

This week, the high court decided to allow Alabama to use a congressional map that a lower court found intentionally discriminates against Black voters. That ruling has also heightened concerns about the future of racial-minority representation in government — particularly in Southern states where voting is polarized between a white, Republican-leaning majority and a Black, Democratic-leaning minority.

"Today the bulk of Black people live in the states of the old Confederacy. And that is exactly where you're seeing the worst types of retrenchment," says Wilfred Codrington III, professor of constitutional law at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law.

Still, some voting rights advocates are pushing forward with what they see as short-term solutions ahead of a longer-term project of rebuilding the federal Voting Rights Act or even the overall system for electing members of Congress.

State-level voting rights acts provide some of the protection offered by the federal law 

State-level voting rights acts offer various anti-discrimination protections for racial-minority voters that go beyond the federal law, and in the month since the Supreme Court's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, supporters of these legal protections have reignited calls for more states to enact them.

Democratic lawmakers have recently advanced bills in states including Michigan and New Jersey. The Delaware John Lewis Voting Rights Act was introduced Thursday.

But unlike the federal Voting Rights Act, its state-level counterparts generally cover only state and local elections. And while around a dozen states have passed these kinds of laws, no state with a unified Republican or divided government has done so, making it unlikely that bills introduced in the Deep South will become law.

Some court watchers are now concerned that enacted state voting rights acts may ultimately be weakened or struck down.

"I'm nervous that the Supreme Court may sort of have those in its crosshairs as well," says Codrington, the Cardozo law professor.

Just over a week after the court's conservative supermajority issued its Callais decision, the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a federal lawsuit over the Illinois Voting Rights Act of 2011, arguing that the law is unconstitutional because it requires an improper use of race in state legislative redistricting.

More lawsuits against these state laws may be coming.

In a social media post on X in April, Jesus Osete, principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, appeared to signal that the Trump administration is paying attention to this fallout.

Osete responded to Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore's post about signing state voting rights act protections into law the day before the Supreme Court's decision. Moore said: "Even if Washington won't protect your vote, I will."

And Osete replied: "Who's gonna tell him?"

The DOJ's public affairs office did not respond to NPR's request for comment about Osete's post.

Democratic-controlled states could partisan gerrymander without sacrificing minority representation in Congress

With the ongoing congressional gerrymandering fight expected to continue for the 2028 election, some redistricting observers have raised the possibility that Democratic-controlled states may join Republican-controlled states in breaking up districts where minority voters have a realistic opportunity of electing their preferred candidate.

For Democratic map drawers, that could allow them to spread minority voters who tend to support Democrats into other districts and try to gain additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But Nick Stephanopoulos, an election law professor at Harvard Law School, says partisan gerrymandering by Democrats doesn't have to come at the expense of racial-minority representation.

"This tradeoff should not be present in big blue states like Illinois, New York, California and so on," says Stephanopoulos, who wrote an upcoming Columbia Law Review article on the topic. "It should generally be possible to design maps that are more skewed in a Democratic direction, but that at least maintain current levels of minority representation."

While not the same as a legal protection, such moves could provide a type of safeguard for some minority voters.

Stephanopoulos says the key behind this redistricting strategy is for mapmakers to distribute Democratic voters "in ways that make more districts reasonably safe, but not overly safe" for Democratic candidates.

The example to follow, Stephanopoulos says, is California's new congressional map, which Democrats drew to flip five Republican-held seats without eliminating any minority-opportunity districts. The Trump administration argued that the map is "tainted by an unconstitutional racial gerrymander," but the Supreme Court ultimately allowed California to use it.

That redistricting strategy, however, would not address the court's weakening of protections for minority voters in Republican-controlled Southern states.

"Only federal action would respond to the vacuum that's left in the South," Stephanopoulos says.

Voting rights advocates face longer-term projects

Any federal action is expected to take years, if not longer, given that bipartisan support in Congress for minority-voter protections has dissipated in recent decades.

The path to a shored-up federal Voting Rights Act would likely require Democrats to regain control of both Congress and the White House.

"We will not rest until the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act becomes the law of the land and we end the era of voter suppression in America once and for all," Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said in a statement released hours after the Supreme Court issued its Callais ruling.

The court's conservative supermajority, however, may prove to be the ultimate hurdle for a strengthened federal law, according to Stephanopoulos, the Harvard law professor.

"That's why indirect approaches like tackling partisan gerrymandering might be more sensible right now," Stephanopoulos says.

During the Biden administration, the then-Democratic-controlled Congress was unable to pass national bans on partisan gerrymandering and mid-decade redistricting that were part of voting rights bills that couldn't surpass Republican opposition in a closely divided Senate.

Still, Jeffries said in a MS NOW interview last month that passing voting rights protections and exploring "massive judicial reform, state by state and at the federal level" are among the Democrats' priorities if they win back the U.S. House this November.

Some election reformers are also calling for structural changes in Congress — specifically how voters elect House members. Supporters of replacing the current single-member, winner-take-all districts with a proportional representation system say that the change could help ensure fairer representation of people of color and other minority voters. But such a major shift would require changing a federal law that currently bans it.

In the meantime, Codrington of Cardozo Law School says it's still worthwhile for states and local communities to move ahead with any attempts for "some measure of fairness" in elections, whether they be new state laws or redistricting strategies.

"States are in this unique position to do some things," Codrington says. "But we need a federal government to be involved and invested in this problem if we're going to have any sort of wide promotion of democracy across the United States."

Edited by Benjamin Swasey

Copyright 2026 NPR

Recommendations from the Office of the Independent Budget Analyst (IBA) include partial restorations to arts programs, homeless shelters and the Office of Child and Youth Services.

The IBA recommended that the city could reallocate up to $6 million in hotel tax revenue meant for the San Diego Convention Center to free up funds for arts and culture grant programs.

Independent Budget Analyst Charles Modica said this recommendation was months in the making.

The mayor’s draft budget slashed funding for the arts, resulting in public outcry and opposition from all nine council members.

“We have a very significant misalignment between the revenues that are coming into the city and the services and infrastructures that residents of the city expect us to provide,” Modica said. “Our revenues do not allow for us to provide the services and infrastructure that are expected. In order to kind of square that circle means that we need to look for additional resources, which is what this is.”

The mayor’s draft budget would cut 200 to 250 beds from the 16th and Newton homeless shelter. But the IBA said this would cause a systemwide shelter intake freeze, resulting in service disruptions.

Modica said the IBA's latest recommendation would result in a reduction of only 50 beds at this shelter and avoid some disruptions by removing city funding for the Lighthouse Interim Shelter. The non-city funded portion of this shelter would continue to operate.

The IBA also recommends the city restore a program coordinator for the Office of Youth Services. The current draft budget would cut this office entirely.

“The city historically has been very bad at supporting children and youth and families, we've pretended as if it's just the school district's job to take care of young people and that is an abdication of responsibility that I think is actually pretty shameful,” Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera said. “We've made that correction a couple of years ago, we invested in this position. It's brought millions of dollars in funding into the city. It's connecting youth to important resources and services.”

A spokesperson in the mayor’s office declined to comment on the IBA’s recommendations.

Modica said his recommendations take into account feedback from council members, city staff and the public. Councilmembers will discuss the recommendations at a hearing tomorrow, before a final vote is held on Tuesday, June 9.

Human rights advocates rallied Thursday in San Diego as part of a statewide effort to prevent Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed cuts to healthcare coverage for low-income Californians, known as Medi-Cal.

“These cuts aren't just a temporary fix to a difficult budget season. They represent a moral failing, one that can take years, if not decades, to recover from,” said Nicole Lillie, executive director of the San Diego-based youth advocacy nonprofit Our Time to Act.

The governor’s budget proposed several changes to healthcare coverage, including excluding undocumented immigrants, including refugees, asylum-seekers and survivors of violence, from most health care services. For example, the policy proposes cutting dental care as a covered benefit and imposing $50 monthly premiums.

It would also significantly cut asset limits. When people apply for coverage, the state checks what they own that has value. The current limit is $130,000, but the proposed budget suggests lowering it to $2,000 for seniors and adults with disabilities.

Michelle Krug, a San Diego resident and member of the California Alliance of Retired Americans, said the lower limits would force people to spend their emergency savings.

“Seniors (who are) disabled, on a fixed income, if we have $2,000 that we're trying to save, for example, to fix a leak in our own our roof or pay or repair on a car, and then we suddenly are not eligible for health care or don't get health care that winds up affecting every other part of our life,” she said.

Newsom has argued that the cuts are necessary due to a looming multi-billion-dollar state deficit. At a news conference announcing updates to the proposed budget last month, he said California has done more than other states to help undocumented immigrants but that deciding to slash expensive services is “called reality. It's called math.”

The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated that Medi-Cal spending reached an all-time high of $200 billion during the 2025-26 fiscal year budget.

Medi-Cal, the state’s version of the federal Medicaid program, enrolls more than 14 million Californians. According to data from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the UC Berkeley Labor Center, about 210,000 recipients in San Diego County could lose their health care coverage if the changes are adopted.

In San Diego, the rally took place outside state Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson’s Office.

“Our state leaders have a choice ahead of them this June,” Lillie said. “Right now is their chance to put the state’s money where our morals are. Now is a chance to say no to cuts to our healthcare.”

In a statement, Weber Pierson, a physician-turned lawmaker, said, in part, that she understood access to Medi-Cal is fundamental to Californians, especially the most vulnerable communities.

“As budget negotiations continue, I am focused on ensuring that we protect access to care, maintain stability in coverage, and try to avoid policies that would create new barriers for patients who are already medically vulnerable,” she said.

Lawmakers have until June 15 to agree on a budget and begin final negotiations with the governor. The new fiscal year begins July 1.