The Florida Everglades immigration detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” has served its purpose, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday, closing the makeshift facility heralded by the Trump administration and denounced as inhumane by civil rights groups.
DeSantis said the center, which opened in July 2025, was always meant to be only temporary until more permanent detention centers could be secured and federal officials now have that capacity.
“We stepped up because there was a gap, but my hope is that they’ll be able to handle that,” the Republican governor said at a news conference at the facility.
Officials announced a temporary closure of the facility earlier in June and sent all of the detainees to other facilities, saying hurricane season made it unsafe to keep them in the Everglades.
Immigration advocates said the center’s tents were never safe or humane for holding people. Detainees at the facility have talked about their difficulty accessing lawyers and described poor physical conditions, including worms in the food, toilets that didn’t flush, floors flooded with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects everywhere.
They described large white tents with rows of and rows of bunk beds surrounded by chain-link cages. The air-conditioning could shut off abruptly in the sweltering Florida heat. Detainees could go days without showering or getting prescription medicine.
Advocates for immigrants said the closure of “Alligator Alcatraz” does nothing to stop the harm to people who spend months in custody as their families suffer. The Florida Immigrant Coalition said the only winners were corporations and contractors who profited millions of dollars as Republicans pushed an immigration emergency that does not exist.
The detention center of tents and trailers was built by DeSantis’ administration in a matter of days. The governor and President Donald Trump said the center was critical to Republican efforts to return people in the country illegally back to their home countries.
“There is no question this mission has made the state of Florida safer,” said DeSantis, noting that 21,000 people were deported through the facility.
Even with the closure of the facility, Florida continues to play a key role with other detention centers and an increased role in helping with immigration enforcement, White House border czar Tom Homan said at Thursday’s news conference.
“Gov. DeSantis did a good job, and he’s going to continue doing what he’s doing to help us make this country safe again,” Homan said. “This isn’t the end of relationship. This is a continuation.”
Lawyers for the immigrants at the facility said their clients suddenly started leaving for other facilities in South Florida, California, Arizona, Louisiana, and Texas earlier this month, disappearing for about a week before their attorneys and families were told where they were sent.
DeSantis said the Everglades airstrip the facility was built around will continue to be used.
Environmental groups sued over the detention center, saying Florida officials never got the proper permits or did required reviews on its impact.
The state and federal governments built the site with no oversight and closed it with no input, but they will still be held responsible even with the site is closed, said Paul J. Schwiep, an attorney for Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity.
“The administration believes it can quietly walk away and leave its mess for others to clean up. The law will not allow them to escape accountability. We will ask the courts to ensure that the environmental damage is fully addressed,” Schwiep said in a statement Thursday.
NEW YORK — Harvey Weinstein won’t face a fourth trial on a New York rape charge. Prosecutors dropped the #MeToo-era case on Thursday after his accuser said she could not bear to testify again.
Jessica Mann, a hairstylist and actor, spent days on the witness stand at all three trials, telling jurors that Weinstein raped her in a Manhattan hotel in 2013 and being questioned extensively about the complex relationship she had with him before and afterward. The Oscar-winning producer denied the charge and said everything that happened between him and Mann was consensual.
In a letter that prosecutor Nicole Blumberg quoted in court Thursday, Mann said she could “no longer endure going through this,” adding that the 8-year-old case has “put me through more harm than good.”
Blumberg told the court that prosecutors believe Mann and hail her “bravery, strength, courage and inspiration” to other survivors, but given her feelings about proceeding, “dismissal is appropriate.” With that, Judge Curtis Farber formally dismissed the case.
Weinstein left court with a neutral expression, returning to jail to await a September sentencing on a New York sexual assault conviction involving a different woman. Prosecutors are seeking a 20-year prison term.
Once Weinstein finishes whatever punishment he gets in New York, he’s due to serve 16 years in California, where he was convicted of raping a third woman, who’s an Italian actor. He is appealing both convictions.
Weinstein’s lawyers said he was relieved by the dismissal of the case surrounding Mann’s allegation.
“These charges should never have been brought to begin with,” lawyer Jacob Kaplan said outside court. “He is innocent.”
Mann has testified that she had a consensual, on-and-off relationship with Weinstein, who was married at the time.
But she told jurors she repeatedly tried to leave and said no to any sexual activity as he cornered her in a hotel room on March 18, 2013. They had planned to meet in the lobby for breakfast, but he had spontaneously taken a room.
She said he persevered, demanding that she undress and grabbing her arms, until she was afraid to keep protesting.
The latest trial, this spring, took a visible toll on Mann, 40. During five days of testimony, she was questioned for the first time about a diarylike, soul-baring note she wrote two days after the alleged rape, which the note did not mention. At one point during her testimony, Mann said she was struggling to focus, prompting court to wrap up early for the day.
In her letter to the court Thursday, she said she had suffered a concussion shortly before her testimony, had headaches and other symptoms on the stand and ultimately “disassociated.” It was a humiliating addition to an already crushing experience, she wrote.
“I have been fragmented, silenced, defamed and traumatized. I’ve paid the price of my reputation,” Mann wrote. Slamming the court, the media and Weinstein, she said her experience showed that “pursuing justice is better left a pipe dream.”
Weinstein was one of the movie industry’s most powerful figures, a producer of such tastemakers and hits as Shakespeare in Love, Pulp Fiction, and Chocolat.
The rape charge in this case was a low-level felony punishable by up to four years in prison — less time than Weinstein, 74, already has served.
Weinstein didn’t testify at any of the trials, though he complained during and after the 2025 New York retrial that it was unfair; the judge disagreed.
His lawyers have maintained that all his accusers had completely consensual sexual liaisons with a movie studio boss who could help them go places in show business. Weinstein himself has said he “acted wrongly, but I never assaulted anyone.”
The Associated Press does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted, unless they choose to be named, as Mann has done.
LA GUAIRA, Venezuela — Venezuelans searched for survivors beneath collapsed buildings Thursday and rescue teams raced to northern areas rocked by a pair of powerful earthquakes that officials say killed at least 188 people and left more than 200 trapped.
More were feared dead from the 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes that struck Wednesday evening — among the strongest in Venezuela in more than a century and felt throughout the region. Some 1,500 people were injured, thousands were reported missing, and buildings were evacuated as far away as Brazil’s Amazon.
In cities across northern Venezuela, panicked residents poured out into the streets and searched for the missing in the debris. Injured children, animals and civilians covered in dust and blood were pulled out of concrete rubble.
One mother sobbed and collapsed in grief as the bodies of her 3- and 10-year-old children were wrapped in blankets and carried away. Others screamed the names of missing loved ones. Some stood in silent shock.
The coastal region of La Guaira — north of the capital, Caracas — suffered some of the heaviest damage and casualties, and it’s there that the country’s main airport was damaged and closed, complicating aid efforts.
Retired schoolteacher Juan Alberto Mendaño climbed through wreckage in La Guaira and past a dead body when he spotted a woman who was trapped and signaling with her hand for help.
“May God rescue her as quickly as possible,” said Mendaño. “When we heard the scream, there was nothing we could do.”
Offers of help poured in from around the world, including from the United States, which seized Venezuela’s then-president Nicolas Maduro at the beginning of the year in a surprise military operation.
The natural disaster is just the latest challenge for acting President Delcy Rodríguez, the former vice president who took office in January after Maduro’s capture. Venezuela has been facing economic disarray for more than a decade, and many people reject the legitimacy of the political movement Rodriguez represents.
Rescue teams head to heavily damaged coastal region
Venezuelan authorities said they were diverting rescue teams from other parts of the country to La Guaira, which is no stranger to natural disasters; a 1999 mudslide there, considered one of the country’s worst natural disasters, killed thousands.
Rodríguez appealed to businesses Thursday to make heavy construction equipment available for rescue operations, while a United Nations spokesperson said search and rescue teams were just hours away.
“We are currently carrying out intensive rescue operations to save lives,” said Rodríguez, who referred to La Guaira as a “disaster zone.”
Jorge Rodriguez, the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly and brother of the acting president, gave updated figures for the numbers of dead, trapped, and injured.
While Venezuela sits near multiple fault lines, its position straddling the South American and Caribbean plates makes strong earthquakes much less common than in other parts of Latin America.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the first earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.2, hit west of Moron on the Caribbean coast, about 105 miles west of Caracas. It had a depth of about 14 miles. Just a minute later, USGS reported a second 7.5 magnitude earthquake, with a depth of about 6 miles and an epicenter 10 miles southwest of Moron.
The one-two punch of the quakes, combined with the shallow seismic movements, amplified the destruction, said Marcos Ferreira, a geophysicist and researcher at the Geological Survey of Brazil.
“It is as if I am screaming and then someone starts screaming, too. That amplifies the vibration and adds to the potential hazard,” Ferreira said.
Venezuela residents reeling from two strong quakes
During the quakes, people ran from swaying buildings. Many were stunned Thursday morning as they saw buildings reduced to skeletons, furniture hanging out of windows and helicopters circling overhead.
In La Guaira, Cristian Carreño stared at his charred apartment building tilting precariously to one side.
“I lost everything,” he said. “There are people still inside, I imagine, that couldn’t get out. It’s incredibly devastating.”
Dayana Delgado, mother of three children, said she was desperate because her 8-year-old son was missing. Delgado asked where the heavy machinery was that government officials had promised, pointing out that neighbors were the ones digging through the rubble.
“I want to know where my child is, if he’s trapped or in a shelter,” she said.
Authorities warned people against returning to homes with structural damage. In downtown Caracas, hundreds spent the night huddled in parks, parking lots and other open spaces.
“We were afraid the buildings would collapse on us,” said María Cristina Díaz, a 41-year-old janitor. “My mother, my daughter, and I were cold. We didn’t sleep a wink.”
“It was awful. We cried, we screamed. Thankfully, we’re alive,” she added.
Parts of the capital lost power and cell phone service, Rodríguez said. Subway services were suspended and natural gas was shut off, she said. Classes will also be canceled for several days, and the Ministry of Education said some school buildings would be used as shelters and donation centers.
Families began posting missing-person flyers with photos of loved ones, while others shared handwritten lists of names as they searched for those still unaccounted for. Venezuelans living abroad struggled to make contact with relatives.
Shortly after U.N. officials in Venezuela called on the government to lift social media restrictions so people can get potentially life-saving information, Venezuelans in the country were able to access X. The site had been blocked by Maduro since August 2024, in an attempt to suppress the exchange of information among those who rejected his claim of victory in the July presidential elections.
Several governments offered assistance
Rodríguez declared a state of emergency in an address to the nation late Wednesday. She said the government was creating a $200 million reconstruction fund for damaged hospitals and homes.
Countries from across the world — from Qatar to Mexico — began to send aid to Venezuela.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had spoken to Rodríguez following the quake, said the United States is “immediately” deploying search and rescue teams, medical resources other assistance, though he acknowledged the closure of the country’s main airport was creating some logistical challenges.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for the Trump administration to potentially revive an immigration policy once used to turn back migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The justices, in a 6-3 decision, overturned a lower court order blocking the practice that limited the number of people who could apply for asylum each day, first under the Obama administration and then expanded during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Advocates said the tactic created a humanitarian crisis as thousands of people settled in unsafe makeshift shelters to await their turn. The Trump administration said it was necessary to deal with an increase of asylum seekers at the border.
The policy is not in place now, though authorities have imposed other restrictions on asylum seekers. The Department of Homeland Security did not say if they plan to revive it, but applauded the ruling. “This decision opens up an important tool to continue securing our southern border,” said James Percival, the agency’s general counsel.
The administration argued that metering is a critical tool that’s been used by presidents of both parties and should stay available. Federal attorneys say people turned away at the border could come back later, though lines were thousands of people long when the policy was in place before.
The case is one of several immigration suits the court is considering this term, including Trump’s push to end restrict birthright citizenship. The high court also allowed his administration to end deportation for migrants fleeing instability and armed conflict on Thursday.
Under federal law, migrants who arrive in the U.S. must be able to apply for asylum and be screened for fear of persecution in their home countries.
The Justice Department argued that people stopped by authorities haven’t arrived in the country, so immigration agents don’t have to let them apply.
The court’s conservative majority agreed. “A guest does not arrive in a house when he knocks on the front door,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote.
But attorneys for people seeking asylum say the law has long meant anyone arriving at a port of entry should be screened, and blocking arrivals disregards the nation’s ideals.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the bench, saying that the majority’s opinion “regrettably and tragically extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”
In an unusual exchange, Alito voiced a response after she finished speaking. He expressed surprise that she had read her dissent out loud and defended his opinion by pointing out that the policy had been used during two presidential administrations. “I won’t add anything more to that,” Alito said.
Metering was first used under President Barack Obama when large numbers of Haitians appeared at the main crossing to San Diego from Tijuana, Mexico. It was expanded to all border crossings from Mexico during Trump’s first term in the White House.
It ended in 2020 when the government introduced greater restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, and President Joe Biden formally rescinded it in 2021.
The same year, a California-based federal judge found that metering violated the asylum seekers’ rights and the law requiring screening. A divided appeals court panel affirmed the ruling but nearly half of judges on the full San Francisco-based court voted to rehear it, a strong signal that might have caught the attention of the Supreme Court.
Attorneys with the group Democracy Forward first brought the case, and condemned Thursday’s ruling. “We are disappointed in the Court’s decision and call on all Americans to demand that our government protect the families the Court today decided to keep in harm’s way,” said President and CEO Skye Perryman.
They represented the group Al Otro Lado, whose executive director said the decision would mean a “hardening of borders to keep out the most vulnerable,” that is “sure to result in many more lives lost.”
U.S. law allows people seeking refuge to apply for asylum once they are on American soil, regardless of whether they came legally. To qualify for asylum, they must show a fear of persecution in their homeland for specific reasons, like race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.
People who are eventually granted asylum can’t be deported. They can legally work, bring in immediate family, apply for legal residency and seek citizenship.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and natural disaster in Haiti and Syria, exposing hundreds of thousands more people to potential deportation.
It marked another victory at the high court for Republican President Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration. Though the conservative-dominated court has put the brakes on some of Trump’s immigration policies over the last year, it handed him a second win Thursday in a decision clearing the way for the revival of a policy restricting immigrants seeking asylum.
The court’s conservative majority found that immigration authorities have sole authority over the program, and the law doesn’t allow judges to intervene.
The majority opinion from Justice Samuel Alito also brushed aside arguments that derogatory comments from Trump about Haitians showed the decision was unlawfully tinged by prejudice. He called the statements “insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people.”
Justice Elena Kagan forcefully disagreed, calling Trump’s comments “so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.” She pointed out that Trump had said Haitians in the U.S. “probably have AIDS,” and he also amplified false rumors during the 2024 campaign that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were abducting and eating dogs and cats.
Lawyers said Haitian immigrants would be in serious danger if they are sent back. “Simply put, the Supreme Court’s ruling will directly result in thousands of innocent people dying violent, needless deaths,” Geoff Pipoly and Andy Tauber said.
They urged the Senate to approve an extension of deportation protections for Haitians that’ passed the House on a rare bipartisan vote in April.
“Families are here, kids are going to school, parents are going into work, folks are trying to commute, and it’s like the Supreme Court just put all those activities on stop and put folks in limbo,” said Viles Dorsainvil, who runs a support center for Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, called the “a devastating betrayal of Haitian families who have lived, worked, and contributed to this country for years — only to be cast out based on anti-Black immigration sentiment.”
Haitians with TPS are also a key part of the workforce in long-term care facilities. “This would be a dreadful loss for all seniors in our community,” said Rita Siebenaler, a resident at Goodwin Living, a senior living community in Virginia.
The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court after judges postponed the end of the program for about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. The high court sided with the administration before and allowed the end of the program for people from Venezuela.
Federal authorities deny prejudice played a role. They also cited a Supreme Court decision from Trump’s first term that rejected bias claims based on his social media posts and upheld a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries.
James Percival, DHS general counsel, applauded Thursday’s ruling. He said the program had, in many cases, become “de facto amnesty. This is a win for the rule of law and common sense.”
Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, Homeland Security has ended the protections, including some that had been in place for more than a decade, for people from 13 countries.
The terminations were made even though countries such as Haiti and Syria remain dangerous, immigration lawyers said. Four Haitian women who were deported from the United States in February were found beheaded and dumped in a river several months later, lawyers said in court documents.
The United States first granted protections to Haitians in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake and extended them multiple times amid ongoing gang violence that has displaced more than a million people, according to court documents.
Syrians were first granted protected status in 2012, during a civil war that lasted for more than a decade before the fall of President Bashar Assad’s government in late 2024.
“Today, many of our community members they feel lost,” Farrah AlKhorfan of Immigrants Act Now said about Syrian immigrants losing TPS protections. “They are trying to understand … what this decision means for them and how it will be implemented and how much time they will have to prepare for what comes next.”
The program was created by Congress in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters, civil strife and other instability. It allows people already in the country to stay with work permits in increments of up to 18 months, but it does not provide a path to citizenship.
NEW YORK — David Clayton-Thomas, the lead singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose husky, high-strung tenor on “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die,” and other hits helped make the so-called “brass rock” band among the most popular acts of the late 1960s, has died at age 84.
Spokesperson Eric Alper said that Mr. Clayton-Thomas died “peacefully” Wednesday at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Alper did not cite a specific cause.
Mr. Clayton-Thomas was a onetime street fighter and petty thief from Canada who briefly became a rock superstar, the front man of a nine-member group that sold millions of records and won two Grammys for Blood, Sweat & Tears, which beat out the Beatles’Abbey Road for best album of 1969. Calling out amid a jazzy parade of horns, keyboards, and percussion, Mr. Clayton-Thomas’ urgent shout was a signature voice of the era, preaching love on the Motown cover “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” a lasting legacy on Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die,” and a cool head on his own “Spinning Wheel.” Meanwhile, Blood, Sweat & Tears helped inspire a wave of horn-led bands, among them Chicago, the Electric Flag, and Ten Wheel Drive.
“A lot of the guys [in Blood, Sweat & Tears] would play a Broadway show matinee, then go up to Harlem and play Latin music or R&B and funk at night, or come down to the Village and play pure jazz the next night,” Mr. Clayton-Thomas told bestclassicbands.com in 2023. “I was just a blues player: give me three chords and I’ve got a song.”
At its peak, Blood, Sweat & Tears’ appeal was so broad it helped lead to the band’s downfall.
Hip enough to perform at the 1969 Woodstock festival, where they were among the highest paid acts, they also were known enough to the establishment to tour Eastern Europe the following year on behalf of the State Department. When Mr. Clayton-Thomas and other band members denounced the Communist regimes on the other side of the Cold War, Rolling Stone’s David Felton wrote that “the State Department got its money worth.” Yippies would turn up at a 1970 Blood, Sweat & Tears show at Madison Square Garden, carrying obscene banners outside and dumping manure by the front gate.
The band had practical reasons for going along with the government: Mr. Clayton-Thomas, who had allegedly wielded a gun at his girlfriend, had been denied a green card and faced deportation. But after topping the charts in 1970 with the album Blood, Sweat & Tears 3, their appeal soon faded. A burned out Mr. Clayton-Thomas left the group in 1972, and neither he nor the remaining musicians ever regained their old stature. Blood, Sweat & Tears would continue recording over the next few years, and even briefly reunited with Mr. Clayton-Thomas, who went on to release more than a dozen solo albums and tour on his own for decades.
Mr. Clayton-Thomas was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1996. “Spinning Wheel,” covered by everyone from James Brown to TV star Barbara Eden, was voted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame a decade later.
Mr. Clayton-Thomas is survived by his daughters, Ashleigh Clayton-Thomas and Christine Graham.
Up from the streets
Born David Henry Thomsett in Surrey, England, and raised near Toronto and Ottawa, he was the son of a Canadian World War II veteran and of a pianist-entertainer who helped inspire her son’s interest in music. Thomsett was lucky to have the chance. He fought violently with his father, was living in the streets by his mid-teens and by age 20 was serving time in a reformatory for vagrancy, assault and other crimes.
An old guitar, left behind by a fellow inmate, changed his life. He taught himself to play and began spending extensive time in the early 1960s around Toronto’s Yonge Street music “strip,” where peers included the American rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins, a mentor to Robbie Robertson and other future members of the Band and a guide for Thomsett early in his career.
Anxious to reinvent himself, he changed his last name to Clayton-Thomas while leading his own groups. In the mid-60s, he released such albums as Sings Like It Is and had a hit single with the anti-war rocker “Brainwashed.” He would also befriend a rising star, Joni Mitchell, whose childlike “Circle Game” helped inspire “Spinning Wheel,” and the venerable John Lee Hooker, who would indirectly contribute to Mr. Clayton-Thomas’ breakthrough in the U.S.
America beckons
Hooker had encouraged Mr. Clayton-Thomas to move to New York, where the American bluesman had an engagement at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. When Hooker unexpectedly departed for a tour of Europe, club owner Howard Solomon needed a replacement and recruited Mr. Clayton-Thomas.
“So I played him a couple songs on the guitar,” Mr. Clayton-Thomas told bestclassicbands.com. “He said, ‘Do you have a band?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and went out into Greenwich Village looking for anybody carrying a guitar case or even looking like a musician, and we put together a little band and we opened there that night. We ended up staying there for several months.”
Around the same time, session man-producer Al Kooper was looking to a form jazz-rock group and was joined by such musicians as guitarist Steve Katz, drummer Bobby Colomby, and horn players Randy Brecker and Jerry Weiss. They called themselves Blood, Sweat & Tears, releasing the debut album Child Is Father to the Man early in 1968. Although praised by Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner as “a fine, exemplary group,” members were torn between those allied with Kooper and those who thought his vocals too weak to attract a substantial audience.
By the end of the year, Kooper and others had departed, and the band was seeking a new singer. After Judy Collins saw Mr. Clayton-Thomas perform, she recommended him to Colomby.
“I got home and just a couple of days later, Bobby Colomby called me up and said, ‘Hey, Kooper’s gone. We got four guys left out of the nine. And we still got a record contract with Columbia. Do you want to come down and try out for the band?”’ Mr. Clayton-Thomas told bestclassicbands.com. ”I said, ‘You’re damn right.’ I knew [bassist] Jim Fielder real well and I knew they were superb musicians. So I was on the next plane. We had a rehearsal that afternoon, an audition, and it was instant magic. We just knew right off the bat.”
Acting director of national intelligence Bill Pulte, installed Friday by President Donald Trump, has at Trump’s urging begun trimming his organization, which coordinates the nation’s 18 spy agencies.
This week Pulte fired a half-dozen political appointees and notified several dozen career officers on loan to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that they were being sent back to their home agencies.
Pulte’s immediate predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, had already culled hundreds of personnel, boasting that she had slashed the staff by 40%. Trump has long been distrustful of what he calls the “deep state” intelligence community, and the cuts by Pulte are the latest in a series of shocks that have roiled the ODNI.
Gabbard, who left office last week, had a stormy tenure, falling in and out of favor with Trump’s White House. Current and former officials criticized as ham-handed her release of files related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. She selectively declassified data on Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election and other matters that supported Trump’s views.
In recent months, the ODNI has seen a number of high-level resignations and a roller coaster of leadership announcements by Trump.
The agency “is being so hollowed out that its new name might become DNR — do not resuscitate. It’s on life support already,” said Beth Sanner, a former ODNI deputy director who served as Trump’s intelligence briefer in his first administration.
While a number of current and former intelligence officials note that there are merits to shrinking the ODNI, the Trump administration, they say, has gone about it in a haphazard way that could undermine the intelligence coordination that Congress created the agency to do.
“Reasonable people can debate ODNI’s size and mission, but sacking dozens of seasoned officers in your first week isn’t reform — it’s performative firing to please a president who treats his own intelligence community as the enemy within,” said Julia Curlee, who served as a director for intelligence programs in Trump’s White House until last year and recently resigned from the CIA after 20 years as an analyst.
Pulte asked program heads for a rank-ordered list of personnel to guide decisions on who could be let go, according to former intelligence officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
One apparent casualty of the personnel moves that began under Gabbard is the National Intelligence Council, which was staffed primarily by career officers on loan from other agencies, such as the CIA. The NIC is considered the most authoritative intelligence analysis unit, producing in-depth reports on key topics for top government officials using information gathered by multiple spy agencies.
About 20 NIC personnel have been removed or have chosen to leave, including several senior officers who oversaw the production of analysis on Russia, China, and Europe.
The deputy director for mission integration, Will Ruger, who effectively led the council, was placed on administrative leave, according to three former intelligence officials.
It is unclear whether and to what extent the vacancies will be filled. When the principal deputy intelligence officer for Russia left last year, the position was kept open.
Trump told the Wall Street Journal this month that he’d like to see a “smaller” ODNI. “I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump said, noting that he was referring to holdovers from the Biden and Obama administrations.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton said on the Senate floor Wednesday that “mass firings” were not taking place. He said Pulte told him that “a small handful of front-office personnel” were leaving, “which is not at all uncommon when a senior leader leaves an agency or one comes into an agency.” He added that “around 45 or 50 career officers” were returning to their home agencies.
“I think that’s a step in the right direction,” said Cotton, who has long called for shrinking the ODNI and last year proposed legislation that would cap its full-time staff at 650.
Some agency insiders have heard that there could be subsequent rounds of cuts and that keeping each round relatively small will help avoid congressional blowback, according to one former intelligence official.
Trump’s appointment of Pulte, who has no intelligence or national security experience, has alarmed Democratic lawmakers, as well as some Republicans. Some current and former intelligence officials fear he will use the post to further Trump’s agenda, including weaponizing intelligence against the president’s enemies.
As head of a federal mortgage regulation agency, Pulte has launched mortgage fraud probes of people Trump considers adversaries, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) and Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook.
Government reorganization efforts under Trump have been marked by chaos and missteps, such as when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency last year dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and conducted mass firings at the State Department and other agencies.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created by Congress in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, after investigations found that the CIA, the FBI and other agencies had failed to share critical information about al-Qaeda plots.
The ODNI had a little more than 2,000 employees at the start of Trump’s second term. By the time Gabbard left last week, the number had shrunk to 1,300, according to congressional aides.
Morale was shaken last year when Gabbard dismissed the chair and vice chair of the NIC after it produced a report that found that the Venezuelan government was most likely not directing the activities of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang that Trump has vilified. The finding contradicted his rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act and deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process.
“Getting [the agency] smaller makes sense, but this isn’t the way to do it,” said John Sipher, a 28-year veteran CIA operations officer and former Moscow station chief, who has argued that the ODNI should be dismantled.
Sipher said the ODNI’s problem is that it suffers not just from bureaucratic bloat, but from political interference. “The office that was meant to safeguard intelligence from fragmentation has become another perch from which intelligence can be politicized and bent toward partisan narratives,” he wrote in the Bulwark.
This week’s cuts do not appear to have significantly affected the agency’s largest component, the National Counterterrorism Center, which was set up by Congress to be the government’s primary organization for analyzing international terrorism and which in its heyday had more than 1,000 personnel, according to former senior intelligence officials.
Trump has nominated Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney and former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, to be the permanent director of national intelligence.
But last week, Trump abruptly froze Clayton’s nomination, prompting the Senate to postpone a confirmation hearing, in a fit of pique over lawmakers’ failure to pass unrelated election legislation.
BOSTON — A federal judge on Thursday halted President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to create a federal voter list and limit who can receive a mail ballot.
U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, who was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama, sided with a coalition of nearly two dozen states that challenged the Republican president’s order in granting a summary judgment. Her ruling applies to this year’s midterm election cycle.
Plaintiffs argued in two lawsuits, both filed in federal court in Boston, that Trump’s order should be found unconstitutional because the states and Congress, not the president, have the power to set election rules. The judge agreed, noting in her ruling that the provisions of Trump’s order “unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.”
It was the second ruling in as many days against executive orders Trump has signed seeking oversight of the nation’s elections. A separate ruling Wednesday prohibited an executive order he had signed last year that would have required people to show documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote.
The administration, in its motions to dismiss the lawsuits challenging the order seeking to establish a federal voter list, argued that the motions are premature and that plaintiffs lacked the legal basis to bring their claim based on the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.
But in an interim order before Thursday’s ruling, Talwani said the motions pertaining to this year’s election cycle were relevant: “In light of the EO’s specific deadlines over the next three months, and the reality that elections will be occurring throughout this period with the November 3, 2026 midterm occurring in just five months, postponing judicial review is impracticable and may inflict significant hardship on Plaintiffs,” she wrote. That order denied the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss the challenges.
Trump’s executive order, the second one aimed at elections during his second term, comes as he continues to raise the specter of widespread voting by noncitizens as a reason to change election rules. But states already have detailed processes aimed at keeping their voter rolls accurate, and voting by noncitizens has been shown to be rare. It also is a felony that can be punishable by deportation.
Trump issued his second order in March after a bill he supported to overhaul voting stalled in Congress. The order would have had the federal government create a list of eligible voters and then directed the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to those on the list. Election officials argued that it was ripe for abuse and could cause chaos, and the postal union has objected to the idea of mail carriers policing ballots.
The Postal Service has published a proposed rule required by Trump’s executive order in the Federal Register. Among other things, the rule would not apply to primary elections or overseas ballots.
The lawsuit seeking summary judgment was filed by Democratic attorneys general representing 22 states and the District of Columbia. Also signing on were attorneys representing Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, which has a Republican attorney general.
“Donald Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional Executive Order sought to undermine eligible voters’ ability to make their voices heard in our democracy,” Pennsylvania Shapiro posted on X Thursday. “Our Constitution is clear: the authority to set our election rules belongs to the states.”
The states also told the court that the move imposes a costly burden on election officials to comply and would spread fear about the possibility of prosecution. Stephen Pezzi, a lawyer for the Trump administration, had argued that no one would be prosecuted for violating the order.
In a separate lawsuit filed against the executive order, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., in May agreed with the Trump administration that it was too early to block the order because it had yet to be implemented. That lawsuit was brought by Democratic and civil rights groups, who have appealed.
Congress has failed to address the workforce disruption that artificial intelligence could generate. The White House, excited about the upside for stocks and investment, has downplayed the potential for widespread job losses.
Now, amid growing public anger over AI and a debate over how to regulate it, a group of employers, state governors, and foundations has raised $500 million to try to answer some of those questions themselves.
The funders include AI labs preparing to go public, like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as established corporate giants such as Bank of America and Amazon. Their new nonprofit, called Raise Us, is led by Gina Raimondo, a former commerce secretary and Rhode Island governor who since leaving office has called for companies and the government to do more to orient American workers in a new AI era.
Tech companies and other corporate giants have signed on to an effort called Raise Us led by Gina Raimondo, former commerce secretary and Rhode Island governor.
“This is an independent effort,” Raimondo said. “It’s the first one I know of where competitors in the tech industry have put aside their competition to say, ‘We’re going to write big checks and, in the service of our country, do what we can to figure out this transition.’”
Estimates of the magnitude of job dislocation in store for the American workforce vary widely, from half of all entry-level white-collar jobs to a few thousand jobs here and there. Although layoffs are currently very low across the economy, the employee ratings site Glassdoor has found that worker sentiment toward AI has been worsening. Companies have made headlines by citing AI as a reason for deep job cuts. They include Workday and IBM, which are part of the new nonprofit, as well as Meta and Oracle, which are not.
The organization will work primarily with governors, starting with those in Utah, Arkansas, Maryland, and Connecticut. The theory: States generally control their community college systems, which can translate workforce policy through course offerings and industry partnerships. The bulk of the budget will fund pilot programs overseen by about 15 staff members and consultants.
For example, Maryland will establish a “service year” for recent high school graduates to provide experience in fields where there are shortages, such as healthcare. In other states, Raise Us hopes to offer “wage insurance” for workers who take lower-paying jobs rather than dropping out of the workforce entirely.
The group plans to furnish technical assistance for companies that want to retain workers as AI changes their roles, rather than eliminating them. Microsoft, one of the companies backing the organization, said it had already found a promising model: cross-training its entry-level lawyers in different parts of the organization and equipping them with AI skills in order for them to be repositioned as technology evolves.
“You can think of doing that with almost any job we have,” said Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft. “It creates an opportunity to transfer people from jobs that are being eliminated to jobs that are being created.”
Retraining displaced workers has always been a difficult task, and historically not a very successful one. Raimondo called past efforts “ineffective.”
Sam Manning, a senior research fellow with GovAI, a think tank, said the new group’s work offered a new opportunity to learn about what could work best.
“This model — of let’s work within states and try to do pilots and demonstration programs, build more evidence, learn what works for different types of workers with different constraints — does seem to me like a pretty good thing to do,” Manning said.
Congress has slashed funding for its flagship workforce development law since passing it in 1973. Planned overhauls of the statute have sputtered out. Research has found that while federal workforce programs do help place workers in new jobs, their long-term success is limited by the lack of high-paying positions for workers without college degrees.
Jane Oates ran the Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration under President Barack Obama. Despite funding cuts, she said, states as disparate as Texas and Massachusetts have found ways to raise private capital and work with employers to meet their talent needs.
“I don’t know that she’s been anywhere else to look at the amazing, innovative things that are done in small and large places around the country,” Oates said of Raimondo.
Part of the Raise Us mission is to adapt existing budgets to the particular challenges of AI-driven disruption. The nonprofit includes a policy lab, funded by philanthropies rather than corporations, that will incubate new ideas that governments may carry out down the line.
Raimondo also serves as a chair on a commission, organized by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and the left-leaning Urban Institute, that will come up with policy recommendations to address the effect of AI on the workforce and the demands it may create. That effort is funded by Google.
On the policy front, the groups join a crowded landscape. The air has been thick in recent months with proposals for minimizing the potential downsides of AI while harnessing its benefits.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) has suggested confiscating half of the stock value of top AI companies and depositing it in a publicly owned fund. Others have floated the idea of shifting the tax burden from payroll taxes to the computing power that is necessary to run sophisticated AI models. The Raise Us board includes Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the labor federation, which has a technology institute that has emphasized protections for workers as AI develops.
Raimondo’s initiatives, underwritten by corporations that have much at stake, may seem ill-positioned to make recommendations that would burden the engines of America’s AI dominance. But Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy who is part of the joint American Enterprise Institute-Urban Institute commission, said its members would not shy away from doing so.
“I don’t think we’re going to hesitate to talk about resources,” Holzer said. “If the AI companies and tech companies start making money hand over fist, there might be an excess-profits way of dealing with that.”
Raimondo and her colleagues are not fans of a universal basic income, an idea that has gained popularity in Silicon Valley as an answer to job disruption. They emphasize that work provides more than just wages, and plan to focus on helping people find pathways to new jobs.
But it’s unclear whether AI will create jobs at the rate that it will destroy them. Jack Malde studied workforce policy for the Bipartisan Policy Center and is now going to work for the Windfall Trust, another AI-focused think tank. He said long-term income support might be necessary, even if better models for transitioning workers were found.
“The truth is, there’s still a lot of uncertainty,” Malde said. “What we think is resilient now might not be resilient later. We’re not going to get everything right, so we’re going to need those strong safety-net programs.”
Eventually, the backers of Raise Us think, federal action will be necessary to replicate successful policies across states and employers who aren’t early adopters. Raimondo said she had been in touch with the acting labor secretary, Keith Sonderling, whose department is establishing its own data hub for AI effects.
But at the moment, she thinks that there’s no time to wait for alignment from Washington. As a historical parallel, she cited the Committee for Economic Development, an organization formed by big businesses in 1942 with the goal of absorbing American soldiers back into the economy after World War II ended and defense production was scaled back. It encouraged ways to fight inflation and foster full employment, helping to head off postwar stagnation.
“I think this technology will lead to more productive people, new jobs and new industries, and I want to get there,” Raimondo said. “But I also worry about the transition, and a window where people could get hurt. The politics could get uglier. So I just want to get started now to build the infrastructure to be prepared to manage the transition.”
The minimum wage would be raised to $25 an hour under a new bill to be introduced by Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) on Thursday, in a bid to enthuse the working-class voters who have abandoned the Democratic Party.
The legislation, dubbed the Living Wage for All Act, has a companion bill already introduced in the House.
Murphy, whose name is frequently floated as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, said he is pushing his party to take more aggressive stances on affordability, following its punishing defeats in the 2024 elections.
“Democrats need to offer solutions that are as big as the problems people are facing,” Murphy said in an interview. “The way you solve people’s basic economic problem — not having enough money to pay the bills — is by making a minimum wage be a living wage.”
The bill would incrementally increase the minimum wage from its current rate of $7.25, with the first jump to $12 an hour in the first year of enactment. Major corporations would have six years to work up to a $25 minimum wage, while smaller employers would have a 13-year runway. The legislation would also do away with subminimum wages for tipped workers, such as restaurant servers, youth workers and workers with disabilities. Nearly half of the American workforce makes less than $25 an hour.
The legislation is unlikely to get very far in this Congress, with Republicans in control of both chambers, but the $25-an-hour push is one of the more significant proposals aimed at boosting Americans’ wages, which have been rising but not as quickly as inflation, especially in recent months.
Some 34 states, territories or districts, including Washington, D.C., have increased the minimum wage above the federal minimum, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, a left-leaning advocacy group that worked with Murphy on the bill, credited support for a $25 minimum wage for primary wins in competitive races in Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California. She said she has heard support for the proposal from liberal and MAGA voters alike.
The $25 figure was drawn from calculations by MIT that analyzed a living wage, which takes into account costs such as food, childcare, healthcare, housing and transportation.
Democrats have long advocated raising the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25, but Murphy’s bill would set the highest floor of any proposal in the Senate. Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D., Ill.) is leading a House version of the bill, which she introduced earlier this year with wide support across the Democratic caucus. A similar bill by Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind., Vt.) would set a $17 minimum wage and has 33 Democratic senators as cosponsors, including Murphy.
Murphy’s bill also has the backing of Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut), Andy Kim (New Jersey), and Ron Wyden (Oregon).
Congress has not raised the federal minimum wage since 2009, though only about 1% of workers make $7.25 an hour or less.
Business groups have often campaigned against raising the minimum wage, suggesting that the economy works best when employers are responsive to market forces.
A higher federal minimum wage could create “really damaging consequences,” including businesses closing or cutting jobs, especially in rural areas where the cost of living is low, said Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute.
He said the rising average wage shows that state and local governments are already responding to market changes.
“I think it makes much more sense for it to be set at a local level where policymakers have a better sense of the local industries,” Bourne said.
Murphy called those kinds of arguments a “red herring,” saying cities that have already established a $15 minimum wage have not seen major adverse effects. He said the staggered adoption would help assuage employers’ concerns.
“The business community cried murder, and the job losses they predicted did not materialize,” Murphy said.
Alex Jacquez, the chief of policy and advocacy at the left-leaning Groundwork Collaborative and a former Sanders aide, helped craft a $15 minimum wage proposal that Democrats attempted to include in their climate and economic policy bill in 2021. He said the surge in wage growth as the economy recovered from the coronavirus pandemic has led more liberal policymakers to believe that a $15 minimum wage would now be too low.
“It’s also an organizing tool,” he said. “It’s something big and bold that people can hang on to and run on and be able to see the Democrats are fighting for them.”
So far, most congressional action has tried to address affordability through tax cuts, including the child tax credit, covid-era Affordable Care Act credits or the numerous tax cuts in Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill.
While Murphy supports programs such as the child tax credits and student loan forgiveness, he said tax cuts have proved insufficient in motivating voters.
“People don’t want to be written a check. People want to work for pay,” Murphy said. “[Tax breaks] are designed to compensate for a rigged system. Why don’t we just unrig the system?”
