The White House quietly deleted a video that used Sabrina Carpenter's "Juno" to promote ICE raids.
Earlier this week, Carpenter slammed the Trump administration for using her song.
"This video is evil and disgusting. Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda," she wrote in a response to the White House post on X.
"Here's a Short and Sweet message for Sabrina Carpenter: we won't apologize for deporting dangerous criminal illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from our country," a White House official said. "Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?"
But by Friday, the original video had been quietly removed — without explanation.
The White House later posted another video that used a clip of Carpenter speaking on Saturday Night Live.
Protesters in New Orleans made it nearly impossible for Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino to lead an operation to detain undocumented immigrants.
As Bovino and his men walked throughout the city on Friday, protesters used their First Amendment rights to blow whistles, effectively warning immigrants that law enforcement was in the area. Ukrainian-American journalist Oliya Scootercaster recorded the circus-like atmosphere.
"Good to be back here in the friendly South," Bovino told one reporter. "We just know that there's been a lot of criminals that have been released onto the streets there from individuals such as mayors, and things like that that wanted them to release, we're now cleaning them up."
"You're scaring everybody!" one protester yelled.
During an operation in Chicago last month, a judge said Bovino admitted lying about the use of tear gas on protesters.
A law professor bashed Stephen Miller for pushing discriminatory immigration restrictions in America that have long been gone.
Miller, the Trump administration's immigrant policy architect and Homeland Security Advisor, has tried to revive "nationality-based discrimination" policies that formally embarrassed the United States, Amanda Frost, a University of Virginia law professor who specializes in immigration law, wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times published Friday.
The Trump administration announced that it has "indefinitely" stopped immigration policies for all Afghan nationals after a Nov. 26 National Guard shooting involving an Afghan suspect who shot two troops — one fatally — in Washington, D.C.
Frost slammed Miller's harsh immigration policy and described how it harkened to the "nativist fervor culminated in 1924 with the Immigration Act," which aimed to try and slow down immigration from countries that were deemed "undesirable." It capped immigration to make it 2% of the nationality's population in the U.S. in 1890.
"It proved impossible to unwind Americans’ tangled ancestry, but no matter. The law was used to justify giving the majority of visas to Northern and Western Europeans, while strictly limiting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe — a change celebrated by the Ku Klux Klan for keeping out Catholics and Jews. The door remained almost entirely closed to people from Asia and Africa," Frost wrote.
Miller has appeared to make a similar move in his response to immigration.
"Mr. Miller and others in the Trump administration do not appear to know that those 1924 immigration restrictions are no longer on the books. Abolishing national origin discrimination was a sea change in law that stands alongside the Voting Rights Act as one of our most important pieces of civil rights legislation," Frost explained. "That 1965 law allocated visas based primarily on family reunification and an applicant’s ability to contribute to the labor market. Every immigrant is individually vetted, and immigration is capped worldwide, but no longer are any nationalities automatically restricted."
The writer argued that the suspect should be investigated and punished if he is found guilty of the attack.
"But collective punishment is just the sort of bigotry that the nation rejected decades ago," Frost added.
"It’s also likely to be illegal. As the Supreme Court explained when upholding Mr. Trump’s first travel ban back in 2018, the president has statutory authority to suspend entry into the United States based on national origin, at least for some period of time. But that does not permit him to deny visas, cancel green cards or denaturalize immigrants based on nothing more than their country of origin," Frost wrote.
Several groups affiliated with President Donald Trump's MAGA movement are now applying pressure to Republican state legislators in Indiana, who have yet to pass a heavily gerrymandered congressional redistricting map.
Politico reported Friday that Turning Point Action — the electoral arm of slain MAGA activist Charlie Kirk's organization — is descending on the Hoosier State to push Indiana state senators to approve the map after previous attempts failed. The group pledged to spend more than $10 million to run candidates in Republican primaries if sitting GOP lawmakers didn't vote in favor of the new maps.
David McIntosh, who is president of the well-heeled conservative group Club for Growth, also pledged to join the effort to primary Republican incumbents depending on how they voted. He gave a "final warning" to Indiana Senate president pro tempore Rodric Bray – who Trump has singled out in multiple Truth Social posts — threatening to oust him from office if he didn't marshal enough support for the mid-decade redistricting push.
"[F]ailure to get this done means you and any other opposition will be defeated and removed from office in your next election," McIntosh said.
While the Indiana House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of the new maps — which would change Indiana's current maps from a 7-2 Republican advantage to a 9-0 GOP-friendly map — the Indiana Senate has consistently declined to pass them. This is despite Republicans controlling 40 of 50 seats in the state senate. Politico reported the last vote in the senate resulted in a 19-19 stalemate.
Bray has previously said he didn't have enough votes within his own party to approve the maps, meaning that at least 16 Republicans joined the chamber's 10 Democrats in opposition. One of those senators is Michael Bohacek (R), who said he would not be voting for the new maps due to Trump's use of a slur aimed at intellectually disabled people.
"This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences," Bohacek wrote on his Facebook page in November. "I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority."
MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec suggested that former President Barack Obama has been working behind the scenes to insert gay propaganda into Netflix's hit show, "Stranger Things."
Posobiec spoke out about his theory in a segment on Real America's Voice on Friday, following Netflix's announcement that it would acquire Warner Bros.
"This would become this massive behemoth taking up so much of the audience base," Posobiec explained. "Why do they want to do that? Well, it's very simple because all the way back in 2018, Netflix signed a huge deal with who? Barack and Michelle Obama, and then they put Susan Rice on the board of Netflix."
"Does anyone remember around 2018?" he continued. "Where shows that were good, all of a sudden became super woke. You needed LGBT themes and everything. You needed racial themes and anything. Why did that happen? Why? All you have to do is go back and look that it was 2018 was a year when Barack Obama and Michelle Obama signed a massive deal with Netflix."
Posobiec noted that the first two seasons of "Stranger Things" aired before the deal with the Obamas. Following that deal, the MAGA influencer outlandishly claimed the show became "pedo programming."
"I'm angry, I'm outraged because, you know, you're seeing this stuff where Netflix, which has just been an absolute atrocity when it's like a war crime in terms of, you know, entertainment media pushing wokeness. It's one of the biggest propaganda pushers of wokeness, of lies," he remarked. "Again, another Netflix show, gayness injected in everything for kids."
"There's the 'Stranger Things' piece and the WB piece," Posobiec said. "'Stranger Things,' now essentially gay Darth Vader and gay Luke Skywalker. I think it is apparent that that was probably not the intention in season one, and they have gone back to have created this. That was the pre-Obama Netflix."
"I'm sorry, like, you just can't look at the first two seasons of 'Stranger Things'... were done prior to Obama's involvement with Netflix and like the Obamas and Susan Rice the whole enterprise and then suddenly season three, season four just get a little bit weirder," he said.
Posobiec's bizarre rant continued, claiming the show continued to get "a little bit gayer" in later seasons before ultimately comparing season five to "Hentai Japanese tentacle porn."
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) started the year largely holding the GOP caucus together — but now his leadership style, more hands-off than his predecessor Mitch McConnell, is hitting its limit as the party sinks into faction-fighting, leaving many senators frustrated and wishing he would exert more control.
This is the assessment of Punchbowl News' Andrew Desiderio, who covered the growing tension in an analysis on Friday in a post to X.
"Thune’s leadership style is facing its biggest stress test yet amid GOP deadlocks on health care, approps & more," wrote Desiderio. "His 'let the members decide' philosophy, a key element of his campaign to lead Senate R’s, helped him notch wins on OBBB, Cabinet noms, rules changes & more; but that strategy is failing to break major impasses & Thune is taking heat from multiple factions at once, reviving long-standing tensions among Senate R’s."
The health care issue in particular is rapidly approaching its deadline, as GOP leadership promised a vote on a plan to address the end of Affordable Care Act subsidies — either extending them or coming up with an alternative plan to replace them — as a condition of ending the federal government shutdown.
According to Desiderio, "Some GOP senators are wondering whether Thune should go 'full McConnell' if the current headaches persist — ruling the conference with an iron fist." However, Thune does not seem interested in changing course for now.
All of this comes as Republicans in the House face a breakdown of unity of their own, with many members in open revolt and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) facing a new level of career peril.
The Indiana House voted Friday to pass a Republican-backed bill to redraw its congressional districts, and it will now move to the Senate.
The bill was expected to face additional opposition by the state's Senate as several Republicans have said they are against the redistricting move pushed by President Donald Trump, WTHR reported.
Trump initiated the efforts to redistrict the midwestern state in an effort to keep GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives ahead of the midterm elections in 2026.
President Pro Tem and Republican Rod Bray has repeatedly said there are not enough votes to pass the redistricting bill.
Indiana state Senate Minority Leader Shelli Yoder argued in a statement that "this bill tears apart communities, strips voters of representation they voted for and hands control to national figures who are more interested in cementing absolute power rather than solving any problems. Hoosiers should pick their leaders. Politicians should not redraw the map to pick the voters. Hoosiers don't cheat and this bill does."
Indiana Gov. Mike Braun announced that he wanted the Senate to quickly approve the redistricting efforts.
"Fair maps are essential to protecting Hoosiers’ voices in Washington, and today the House voted to do just that, delivering a strong congressional map. I commend Speaker Huston and his caucus for having the courage to protect Hoosier voters. I urge the Senate to move quickly next week and adopt this map so Indiana can move forward with confidence," Braun wrote on X.
A district court judge and two magistrate judges in Alexandria, Virginia, said in an open court to prosecutors that they didn't think Halligan's name should be on any of the new criminal case filings, including guilty plea documents or indictments, following a decision last week that stated she is not the U.S. attorney, CNN reported.
Magistrate William Fitzpatrick said at a criminal hearing this week that filing criminal charging papers “under Ms. Halligan’s name” was “simply not acceptable,” according to a transcript obtained by the outlet.
Removing her name shouldn't be complicated, Miles Taylor, former Trump administration official and founder of defiance.org, told CNN anchor Boris Sanchez on Friday. He added that the cases are most likely to be thrown out by these judges and that "...there's almost no other conclusion you can come to here other than the U.S. Department of Justice has decided to thumb their noses at the courts. And I got to be honest with you, put everything else aside about the controversies here, I am not sure it's the best strategy to go win cases to off federal judges, but that is what they are doing here."
A judge two weeks ago said that Halligan was never officially appointed to her position.
"It's not a matter of interpretation. This is black and white. And so the Trump Justice Department has made a decision. They're going to pretend that was never said," Taylor said. "This is the type of thing, Boris, folks have been worried about. Is the administration just starting to defy the orders of the courts? Now, folks may think this is a small one because they're defying the order of a court about the appointment of one person to a job. But that's a slippery slope. And my fear is it leads to other defiance of court orders."
And that wasn't his only concern.
"But the problem here, Boris, is still that the process is the punishment," Taylor said. "So if the president's loyalists, his hardcore political loyalists, are put in these jobs to bring obvious revenge prosecutions, then they are still able to upend these people's lives, blacklist them, force them to spend money on lawyers, force them to spend time in court. They can destroy people's lives. Before you even get to the point where a judge says, 'Hey, we told you guys this person wasn't lawfully appointed, we're throwing this case out.' That's a big deal. And I know that this Justice Department thinks they can still do that."
"And look, I think that what you just saw with Letitia James is going to be another forcing function is we've got a person that's accused of breaking the law here, but who apparently isn't breaking the law," Taylor said. "Letitia James, it looks to me personally more like it's people at the Justice Department breaking the law. And here's what I mean by that, Boris. We all see what's happening here with these cases. To me, these are very obvious revenge prosecutions."
Former CDC director Tom Frieden criticized the body, and told CNN that he was hopeful that health leaders, including pediatricians, OBGYNs, nurses and other specialists, will continue to administer that vaccine — which has been part of the universal recommendation for children's vaccine schedule. He urged that experts "ignore what this hand-picked, unscientific group of people" have done.
"This is a big mistake that would endanger American children. Don't mess with success," Frieden said. "The universal recommendation, since it's been applied, has not resulted in any significant harm to children."
A CDC panel and agency led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Friday it would end its recommendation for the vaccine, which started in the early 1990s.
"It has prevented thousands, maybe millions of children from being infected," Frieden added. "And let me be very clear, hepatitis B is a serious infection. And it's not only spread from the mother. That's why universal birth dose is the standard of care."
The CDC has planned to further discuss the vaccine schedule as a whole.
"This is basically infusing fiction-based rather than fact-based recommendations into the protection of our children... And what I hope will happen is that insurers, states, cities, obstetricians, pediatricians will look at this and say there is no scientific credibility to this recommendation. It's a violation of all of the basic principles of effective protection. Every vaccine is given with informed consent," Frieden said.
A federal grand jury this week has turned down a Justice Department bid to reindict New York Attorney General Letitia James, a perceived political adversary of President Donald Trump.
The failure to make a second attempt at indicting James occurred about two weeks after a judge tossed out a similar mortgage fraud case against James because the prosecution by Trump appointee and real estate lawyer Lindsey Halligan was deemed unlawful, National Review's senior editor Andrew C. McCarthy noted Friday.
"While the case against James should never have been brought in the first place, the grand jury’s no true bill is not necessarily the end of the matter," McCarthy wrote. "The Constitution’s double-jeopardy safeguard protects a person from being tried multiple times on the same charges, not from being charged multiple times. Consequently, Thursday’s filing of a no true bill does not bar the Trump DOJ from trying to convince another grand jury to indict."
James has argued that the president's attacks on her are personal — a result of her fraud case against Trump. And it appears she was right, McCarthy added.
"As is typical of lawfare in Trump’s second term as president, the allegations against James have nothing to do with the abuse of power that drew the president’s ire," McCarthy wrote.
It could be time for the administration and Attorney General Pam Bondi to end their attack on one of Trump's nemeses.
"This is a humiliating development nevertheless for Attorney General Bondi and her department. She should try to persuade her headstrong boss that enough is enough. But the rest of us ought not hold our breath," McCarthy wrote.
A well-known conservative commentator has a warning for the Republican Party: take action now or face a repeat of the 2018 midterms when the GOP lost 41 House seats in a landslide. And this time, he says, the Senate could go to the Democrats as well.
Award-winning writer and journalist Bernard Goldberg reminded readers at The Hill that in 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term, “Republicans got walloped … and a good chunk of that had President Trump’s name written all over it.”
Trump’s “approval ratings were in the low 40s, and independents — the folks who usually decide elections — had seen enough. They broke hard for the Democrats,” Goldberg noted. “Now here we are, staring down 2026, and you can almost hear history clearing its throat, getting ready to repeat itself.”
Goldberg noted that Trump’s approval rating is currently the lowest it’s been this term.
“Among Republicans, his support dropped from 91 percent right after the 2024 election to 84 percent last month. Among independents, it cratered — from 42 percent to just 25 percent.”
“If the trend continues,” he warned, “Republicans could be headed for another blue wave — and this time, it could wash away not just the House majority, but control of the Senate too.”
Why?
“It’s the economy — still,” he wrote.
“Trump is out there saying the economy is humming. Biden said the same thing before him. But voters didn’t buy it then, and they’re not buying it now. Why? Because it’s not GDP numbers that matter. It’s affordability,” Goldberg noted.
He pointed to a Karl Rove Wall Street Journal column and wrote: “The Republicans may have ‘avoided disaster’ in Tennessee, but the result should be a wake-up call for Republicans. He’s right.”
Goldberg asked: “Will anyone in the Republican Party actually pick up the phone?”
“Because if Republicans don’t wake up — and fast — they’re going to find out the hard way what happens when you keep rerunning the same movie and expecting a different ending. To lose in 2026, all they have to do is nothing. And right now, that’s pretty much what they’re doing.”
The U.S. Supreme Court is officially taking up a review of whether President Donald Trump's executive order abolishing birthright citizenship is constitutional, Axios reported Friday.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees a right to citizenship for anyone born in the United States and "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" — which courts and legal scholars have always interpreted to mean anyone subject to the laws of the country, which would mean everyone except foreign diplomats, invading armies, or indigenous people enrolled in tribal nations.
President Donald Trump, however, declared in an executive order that he would no longer apply this right to the children of noncitizens, either, making it official U.S. policy to deny the children of noncitizens access to passports and other federal documents that would establish their citizenship.
A series of lower courts blocked the implementation of this order earlier this year, prompting the Trump administration to challenge the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions in the first place. That case went to the Supreme Court, which decided to limit the use of injunctions in certain circumstances — but left the core issue of whether Trump's birthright citizenship order was constitutional in the first place unresolved for the time being.
After that order, another federal court blocked Trump's citizenship order following the guidelines the Supreme Court laid out, which has now brought that issue before the justices.
"The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted to grant citizenship to newly freed slaves and their children — not to the children of temporary visitors or illegal aliens," the Justice Department argued to the court.
Slate's Mark Joseph Stern has noted this is not true, and the amendment was understood even by lawmakers at the time to grant citizenship to children of immigrants as well.
“In the 2008 comedy Role Models, Paul Rudd’s character … tries to understand his awkward teenaged mentee’s interest in medieval-themed live-action role-playing (known in the community as ‘LARPing’),” said Warren. “… I’ve been reminded of those LARPing scenes several times recently with the news about some of the Trump administration’s top law enforcement and security officials who have appeared in the field, performing their duties with agency-appropriate clothing and gear — and always with a camera in tow, ready to post on social media.”
Warren said it “may have all started” with U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who got on horseback and patrolled the southern border with Border Patrol agents in February. Later that spring, she began joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on their raids across the country, complete with protective gear and sometimes wielding her own firearm. In April, Warren noted that Noem posted a video of herself on X, flanked by two ICE officers, with her rifle barrel threatening the head of one of the officers.
That love of performance appears to be trickling down, said Warren, with The Atlantic reporting that ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan featured herself in several framed photos of ICE raids that hang outside the agency’s executive offices. Sources told The Atlantic that Sheahan had been asking for her own firearm and badge, despite having no experience in immigration enforcement prior to joining the agency months earlier.
“The LARPing, unsurprisingly, doesn’t do much to endear these political appointees to their employees,” said Warren. “According to Ben Terris of New York magazine, some officials at ICE called Sheahan ‘Fish Cop’ because of her previous experience running Louisiana’s department of wildlife and fisheries. According to that Atlantic article, one frustrated ICE official dismissed Noem’s flamboyant rap videos and publicity stunts as ‘cowboy s——.’”
A recent report from an anonymous group of former and current FBI officials shows that the bitterness is getting obvious.
“Written to appear like an intelligence assessment, the 115-page report is labeled a ‘pulse check’ on the FBI over the last six months and cites specific sources currently working at the FBI. The overall conclusion is that the agency is a ‘rudderless ship’ and that [FBI head Kash] Patel is ‘in over his head’ in the job.”
The report, addressed to Republican chairs of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, also includes a number of embarrassing anecdotes about Patel, including one source describing refusing to “disembark from the plane without an FBI raid jacket” in the middle of the Charlie Kirk assassination. Deputy director Dan Bongino later had to call the Salt Lake City field office’s special agent in charge to apologize after one of Patel’s “expletive-laden tirade.”
If the anonymous report about the FBI reflects wider views in the agency, Warren warned, “there is a lot of consternation” about the primping posers Trump has put into command of some important offices.
As one source speaking to anonymous report authors: “stop talking, stop posting, and just be professional.”
