President’s eldest son says ‘that calling is there’ while speaking at the Qatar Economic Forum
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and will be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.
Let’s start with the news that president Donald Trump‘s eldest son Donald Trump Jr said in Qatar on Wednesday that he could maybe run for president one day, adding “that calling is there.”
The Trump administration said it will permit use of Covid vaccines by adults over 65 and those with certain medical conditions in the fall, raising questions about whether some people who want a vaccine will be able to get one. The FDA framework, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, urges companies to conduct large, lengthy studies before tweaked vaccines can be approved for healthier people.
A federal judge said that the Trump administration appeared to have violated his April court order by deporting a Burmese immigrant to South Sudan without giving him sufficient time to contest the removal, especially given the risk of being sent to a country that is not his own. Judge Brian E Murphy in Boston made the remarks during a hearing in Federal District Court after immigration attorneys raised alarm that at least one other immigrant may also have been deported to South Sudan without due process.
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered a “comprehensive review” of the United States’ chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, an evacuation operation in which 13 US service members and 150 Afghans were killed at Kabul’s airport in an Islamic State bombing. It was unclear how Hegseth’s review would differ from the many previous reviews that have been carried out – including by the US military, the state department and even Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives.
The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told the Senate foreign relations committee that the number of visas he has revoked was “probably in the thousands”, adding that he believed there was still more to do. “I don’t know the latest count, but we probably have more to do. A visa is not a right, it’s a privilege.”
The Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, couldn’t correctly state what habeas corpus is when pressed to define the concept by the Democratic US senator Maggie Hassan. Asked what habeas corpus is, Noem claimed it’s “a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to –”.
A group of fired federal workers held a sit-in on the House-side steps of the US Capitol in an effort to pressure members of Congress to do more to reign in Doge’s “harmful and illegal cuts to federal programs”. According to the Fork Off Coalition, the group includes “federal employees illegally terminated by Doge; contractors on cancelled federal contracts; and other workers harmed by Doge”.
Donald Trump defended the justice department’s decision to charge the Democratic representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey for allegedly assaulting law enforcement officers earlier this month. McIver faces a felony assault charge over a physical confrontation with Ice officials outside an immigrant detention facility in New Jersey.
