After leaving the Chicago area in November, U.S. Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino made an unexpected return on December 16, along with several hundred federal agents and a film crew. Returning to the same aggressive tactics that sparked protests earlier this year, local officials criticized Bovino for using immigration operations as a form of political theater. ....

But this is not the first time a federal agency has filmed immigration operations for political theater. In addition to being tasked with carrying out record levels of deportations, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under President Donald Trump has seemingly been transformed into a propaganda arm to sell the public on the president's increasingly unpopular immigration policies. Examples include a video posted on X by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem of agents raiding a South Shore apartment building on September 30 and a video posted on the DHS' official Instagram account depicting various immigration arrests.

As Bovino and the DHS have embraced the power of cinema to document immigration arrests and promote current policies, the Trump administration is also cracking down on individuals who choose to record immigration operations. In a December 4 memo, originally leaked by journalist Ken Klippenstein, the Justice Department encourages federal prosecutors to press "domestic terrorism" charges against people for "doxing" law enforcement officers. While undefined in the memo, "doxing" in this context is understood to mean the publishing of information that identifies law enforcement officers, which the Justice Department insinuates is a threatening activity used to "silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.".....

But the right to free speech isn't taken away when someone says or does something that the government disagrees with. Attempting to define who is and isn't protected by the First Amendment is not only unconstitutional, but also a strategy that could put even Trump's allies at the mercy of federal prosecutors.

The president of the Kennedy Center’s board is once again lashing out at critics of President Donald Trump – this time targeting a veteran jazz musician who abruptly canceled a Christmas Eve performance following the center’s MAGA-style renaming to the “Trump-Kennedy Center.”

Richard Grenell, a Trump ally who has led the board since February, blasted musician Chuck Redd after the drummer and vibraphonist withdrew from his long-running holiday “Jazz Jams” performance at the venue, a tradition he has overseen since 2006, Politico reported Friday.

In a sharply worded letter shared with The Associated Press, Grenell accused Redd of engaging in “classic intolerance” and called the cancellation a “political stunt” that he claimed would cause significant financial harm to the nonprofit arts institution.

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” Grenell wrote in the letter, adding that he intends to seek $1 million in damages over the last-minute withdrawal.

Redd told the AP on the day of his scheduled performance that he canceled the performance after seeing Trump’s name added to the building and website.

“When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd said, as reported by Politico.

In light of Donald Trump’s obsession with self-glorification, it wasn’t too surprising when the president’s handpicked allies claimed they had renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last week. But surprising or not, the absurdity got messy in a hurry.....

In fact, Rep. Joyce Beatty did not vote for the change, and as The New York Times reported, the Ohio Democrat filed suit on Monday, hoping to force the removal of the Republican president’s name.

Ms. Beatty’s lawsuit names as defendants Mr. Trump and the loyalists he appointed to the center’s board. The suit contends that the board’s vote to change the name last week was illegal because an act of Congress is required to rename the building.

Ms. Beatty is represented by Norman Eisen, a White House ethics counsel in the Obama administration, along with Nathaniel Zelinsky, his co-counsel of the Washington Litigation Group.

The Times added that, by law, a handful of congressional lawmakers from both parties sit on the Kennedy Center’s board, and Beatty is an ex officio member who tried to participate in Thursday’s board meeting. When she tried to object to the process, the congresswoman found that she had been placed on mute.

Time will tell what becomes of the litigation, but in the meantime, the administration apparently has a new talking point on the burgeoning controversy......

Indeed, Daravi’s argument proves the opposite of the intended point: Biden and his team followed a law approved by Congress; Trump and his team ignored a law approved by Congress. It’s why the latter is controversial and the subject of litigation, while the former is not.

Beatty’s lawsuit was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Watch this space.

A federal judge on Monday kept in place a temporary order prohibiting the Trump administration from re-detaining Kilmar Abrego García, saying she wants officials to tell her their intentions while she considers how to rule next because she doesn’t trust that he won’t again be deported illegally.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said she was concerned the administration might try to take Abrego back into custody “in the middle of the night” before she could take steps to ensure due process in his case, and she dressed down a Justice Department lawyer for repeated misrepresentations by the U.S. government.

“Once again, I’m making a finding that these representations, which are misrepresentations, are in bad faith,” she told Justice Department lawyer Ernesto H. Molina Jr., saying she was “beyond impatient” with government lawyers putting false information in their legal briefs.

Xinis said the bar against the longtime Maryland resident’s rearrest will remain in place until his lawyers and the government have each filed further legal briefs. Her rebuke marked another tense moment in a long-running legal showdown between the White House and the federal courts.

President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social account on Friday evening to rage against the latest release of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files — and claim the whole controversy is a fabrication by Democrats.

"Now 1,000,000 more pages on Epstein are found. DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax," wrote Trump. "When do they say NO MORE, and work on Election Fraud etc."

Trump's "election fraud" remark may be a reference to a conspiracy theory emerging on the far right, and amplified by Trump himself earlier this week, that over 300,000 ballots in Georgia were "counted twice" — a falsehood based on a misunderstanding of new reporting about ballot tabulators.

"The Dems are the ones who worked with Epstein, not the Republicans. Release all of their names, embarrass them, and get back to helping our Country!" Trump continued. "The Radical Left doesn’t want people talking about TRUMP & REPUBLICAN SUCCESS, only a long ago dead Jeffrey Epstein - Just another Witch Hunt!!!"

Trump's move to blame Democrats for the Epstein files releases comes even though the Epstein Files Transparency Act had bipartisan sponsors, that every Republican except one voted for the bill across both the House and Senate, and that Trump himself signed the bill into law — albeit after spending months fruitlessly trying to persuade Republicans to stand down.

Donald Trump's much-hyped new battleship fleet, named after himself, "will never sail," a group of experts told CNBC in a new report, owing to the outdated design that will make them a "bomb magnet" in a real conflict.

Earlier this week, the president unveiled a new "Trump-class" of US Navy battleships, which he touted as "some of the most lethal surface warfare ships" and "the fastest, the biggest, and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built." Despite his enthusiasm from Trump about maintaining "American military supremacy," CNBC on Friday noted the "glaring problem" putting them at odds with reality: "battleships have been obsolete for decades."

"The last was built more than 80 years ago, and the U.S. Navy retired the last Iowa-class ships nearly 30 years ago," CNBC explained. "Once symbols of naval might with their massive guns, battleships have long since been eclipsed by aircraft carriers and modern destroyers armed with long-range missiles."

The outlet conceded that Trump's labeling of these new ships with the outdated model name could be a "misnomer," and the actual ships might be more in line with modern sensibilities. Speaking to several experts about the ships, however, CNBC found that the "Trump-class" fleet is still out of step with naval realities, with Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, arguing that they "would take too long to design, cost far too much and run counter to the Navy’s current strategy of distributed firepower."

"A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water," Cancian said, also adding that "there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail."

The Republican-led Congress managed to land quite a few achievements in 2025, but not necessarily the ones that lawmakers consider commendable.

With fewer than 40 bills signed into law as of Monday, the House and Senate set a modern record for lowest legislative output in the first year of a new presidency, according to data maintained by C-SPAN and Purdue University.

Despite that lack of productivity, the Senate held more roll-call votes (659) than any odd-numbered year of this century, with almost 60 percent of them focused on advancing President Donald Trump’s nominations to the executive and judicial branches.

The House, meanwhile, set a 21st-century record for fewest votes cast (362) in the first session of a two-year Congress. It held barely half as many votes as in 2017, which was Trump’s first year in office and when Republicans held the majority.

Perhaps not surprisingly, an unusually large number of House members — 24 Republicans and 19 Democrats — have decided to leave the chamber either to retire or run for other office. That places the chamber on pace to set a 21st-century record for retirements in one Congress, according to C-SPAN and Purdue.