US News

A Republican gubernatorial candidate in Colorado claims that thousands of members of the Venezuelan transnational criminal gang Tren de Aragua are operating in the state — but dozens of law enforcement officials beg to differ.

According to 9 News, state Rep. Scott Bottoms "said Colorado is under siege from a 'foreign criminal army' of 45,000 to 50,000 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) operating in Colorado." The problem is, that would be about ten times as many Tren de Aragua members as exist in the entire world, according to the most liberal estimates of the National Counterterrorism Center.

A Texas law that would allow state and local police to arrest people suspected of having crossed the southern border illegally is once again halted, a day before it was supposed to take effect.

Senate Bill 4, passed in 2023, makes the illegal crossings of the Mexico-Texas border a state crime. It also requires state magistrate judges to order those arrested for illegal entry to leave the country for Mexico if they are convicted, or in lieu of prosecution.

Democrats are fretting as several members of their caucus were absent for a crucial vote on President Donald Trump's war powers in Iran, Axios reported on Thursday.

"Any lawmaker could have tipped the outcome — and half a dozen were absent," noted the report, with Democrats privately raging and one member telling Axios, "People cannot miss votes."

President Donald Trump is expected to drop his massive, $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, but not for reasons some might expect, according to a new report.

ABC News reported on Thursday that Trump plans to drop the lawsuit in exchange for creating a $1.7 billion fund that he can use to pay allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration. Those allies include recently pardoned Jan. 6 rioters like the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers, as well as lawmakers who were investigated by Biden's Department of Justice.

A former lawmaker from a red state warned that something ominous is hiding behind the latest "five-alarm fire" from the Supreme Court, according to a new report.

G.K. Butterfield Jr., a former Democratic representative from North Carolina, told The Atlantic recently that the Supreme Court's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais is a "five-alarm fire" for voting rights. The ruling allowed states to gerrymander their maps for partisan purposes, even if there is a racially discriminatory effect from the move, which effectively gutted the last remaining section of the Voting Rights Act that protected minority voters.

A federal magistrate judge tore into the Trump administration for mismanaging the discovery process in their criminal case against former CNN reporter Don Lemon and the protesters at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The protest erupted over the fact that a pastor working for the church had ties to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, during a period of mass deportations that included a bloody federal takeover of neighboring Minneapolis. Trump's Justice Department filed charges against them for disrupting a church service, using a federal statute, the FACE Act, normally used against disruptive abortion clinic protesters, and included Lemon in the charges, although he insists he was just there as a reporter to document the event.

Fox News host Jesse Watters sparked outrage on Thursday after he uttered a "trash" claim about the Voting Rights Act during a segment on the show he co-hosts, "The Five."

During the segments, Watters claimed that Black people don't have enough babies to justify their proportionate share of representation in Congress. He made the claim at a time when the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that states can gerrymander their maps for partisan purposes, even if there is a racially discriminatory effect. Red states like Louisiana, Florida, and Tennessee have all passed new maps since the ruling that eliminated Democratic seats held by Black representatives and cracked majority Black voting districts.

President Donald Trump's trip to China was billed as a high-stakes diplomatic summit with President Xi Jinping, but with one notable exception: the first lady was nowhere to be found.

Melania Trump, who had attended the 2017 Xi summit and appeared alongside both leaders and their spouses, sat this one out entirely because, according to her office, she was attending the six-month anniversary of an unnamed initiative connected to children and foster care programs. The announcement flabbergasted legal and political commentator Michael Popok, host of the podcast "The Intersection with Michael Popok," who said on a new episode on Thursday that he had no clue what Melania Trump was referring to.

Rick Jackson is running to be the Republican nominee for governor in Georgia — but his wife may have different allegiances.

According to filings from the Federal Election Commission, Melody Jackson, the candidate's spouse, gave a $1,000 contribution to Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in February 2025 — a key Democratic lawmaker that Republicans were hoping to seriously contest this year.

Wisconsin Democrats are considering a scorched-earth mid-decade redistricting if they win unified control of the state government this year, which would potentially net Democrats four new House seats.

This follows a wave of Republican redraws in the South to chop up and eliminate Black seats in the wake of the Supreme Court making it harder to challenge this under the Voting Rights Act, which has Democrats around the country champing at the bit to retaliate.