We’re starting to see members of Congress react to the supreme court ruling that many of Donald Trump’s global tariffs are illegal.
Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, said that no decision can “undo the massive damage that the Trump tariffs have done to small businesses, to American supply chains, and especially to American families forced to pay higher prices on everything from groceries to housing”.
She added that there is “no legal mechanism for consumers and many small businesses to recoup the money they have already paid”.
“Giant corporations with their armies of lawyers and lobbyists can sue for tariff refunds, then just pocket the money for themselves. It’s one more example of how the game is rigged,” said Warren, who is the ranking member on the Senate banking committee. “Any refunds from the federal government should end up in the pockets of the millions of Americans and small businesses that were illegally cheated out of their hard-earned money by Donald Trump.”
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Haha. Also note, he’s true to form of accusing his opposition of what’s true about himself and his cult.
In his remarks today, Trump lambasted the liberal supreme court justices today, as well as those who concurred with the opinion that the use of IEEPA was illegal.
“The Democrats on the court are thrilled,” Trump said. “They’re against anything that makes America strong, healthy and great again. They also are a frankly, disgrace to our nation, those justices.”
He went on to criticize “certain” members of the court, which would include justices he nominated to the bench – such as Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
“They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our constitution,” Trump added. “It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think,” he said without citing any evidence for his claims.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.
Alexander Smirnov entered his plea to a felony charge in connection with the bogus story, along with a tax evasion charge stemming from a separate indictment accusing him of concealing millions of dollars of income.
An attorney for Smirnov, 44, declined to comment after the hearing in Los Angeles federal court.
Prosecutors and the defense have agreed to recommend a sentence of between four and six years in prison when he’s sentenced next month.
Smirnov will get credit for the time he has served since his February arrest on charges that he told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015.
Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said.
But Smirnov had only routine business dealings with Burisma starting in 2017, according to court documents. An FBI field office investigated the allegations and recommended the case be closed in August 2020, according to charging documents.
No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes as president or in his previous office as vice president.
While Smirnov’s identity wasn’t publicly known before the indictment, his claims played a major part in the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped spark a House impeachment inquiry into Biden. Before Smirnov’s arrest, Republicans had demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations, though they acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if they were true.
During a September 2023 conversation with investigators, Smirnov also claimed the Russians probably had recordings of Hunter Biden because a hotel in Ukraine’s capital where he had stayed was “wired” and under their control — information he said was passed along to him by four high-level Russian officials.
But Hunter Biden had never traveled to Ukraine, according to Smirnov’s indictment.
Smirnov claimed to have contacts with Russian intelligence-affiliated officials, and told authorities after his arrest this year that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden.
The case against Smirnov was brought by special counsel David Weiss, who also prosecuted Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges. Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced this month after being convicted at a trial in the gun case and pleading guilty to federal charges in the tax case. But he was pardoned this month by his father, who said he believed “raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
The FBI interviewed one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims four times over her allegation that Donald Trump assaulted her when she was underage.
Nathan Howard/Getty Images
The Department of Justice spoke four separate times to a woman who credibly accused Donald Trump of having sex with a minor he met through Jeffrey Epstein—but most accusations against the president appear to have been removed from the government’s documents on the alleged sex trafficker.
A 21-page slideshow buried in the massive trove of Epstein-related documents included allegations that sometime between 1983 and 1985, Trump forced a woman to give him oral sex when she was in her early teens. When the woman bit down on Trump’s exposed penis, he allegedly punched her in the head and kicked her out. That same woman told the DOJ that Epstein had introduced her to Trump in 1984.
Yet last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that there was “no evidence” that Trump had committed any crime—adding to the growing pile of denials from Trump officials that constitute a sweeping cover-up of the president’s alleged wrongdoing.
Justice Department records indicate that the FBI spoke to this woman not once but at least four separate times, according to independent journalist Roger Sollenberger. Now those records appear to have been removed from public viewing—despite the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires all documents relating to the alleged sex trafficker to be made public.
Sollenberger discovered a record of four separate interviews, which took place in the summer of 2019, in a separate database of documents downloaded from the government’s public files on Epstein. That document indicated that the first of the four interviews was conducted on July 24, 2019, and the last conducted on October 16, 2019. That document was given to Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers as part of her trial, though the specific allegations predated Maxwell’s involvement with Epstein, Sollenberger wrote.
The woman’s first interview was entered into the FBI’s case files on August 9, 2019, just one day before Epstein was found dead in his jail cell. FBI agents typically have a deadline of five working days to file interview write-ups, indicating an abnormal 16-day gap, Sollenberger noted.
ICE was desperate not to have another death in their concentration camps especailly a baby. This was a dilerberat attempt to kill the child. They left them stranded on the other side of the border. Think of it. They were lucky they were allowed to keep the money they had because I have read of ICE people taking the money before releasing the person. How can anyone support this? But maga wont know about this because right wing media won’t report on it and maga doesn’t go outside their media bubble. How can we live with this? How do the people who did this live with themselves? Do they have no humanity, no empathy? I am tearing up simply posting this, they did the act. A two month old child might well die do to the actions of the US government and the gang thugs they hire. Deep sadness. Hugs
Juan Nicolás had ended up in the hospital while in ICE detention. Now he’s in Mexico.
Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
ICE has deported 2-month-old Juan Nicolás with his mother and father to Mexico, despite the baby suffering from bronchitis while in ICE detention.
Nicolás’s mother spoke to Univision’s Lidia Terrezas by phone Tuesday, saying that they were left at the Mexican border with no phone and only the money they had in their commissary at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, an ICE facility where they were previously detained.
Terrezas said in an Instagram post that Nicolás is still sick and that his mother was only able to contact her because someone in the street let her use their phone.
“She is in distress, she’s panicking. They were sent to the same place they fled from,” Terrezas said.
In a follow-up post, Terrezas said that the family was able to pay for a hotel with their commissary money, adding that a GoFundMe is in the works to assist them. Texas Representative Joaquin Castro, who has been advocating for Nicolás and his family, said that he spoke with the family’s attorney and that they had just $190, in a post on X.
“To unnecessarily deport a sick baby and his entire family is heinous. My staff and I are in contact with Juan’s family. We are laser-focused on tracking them down, holding ICE accountable for this monstrous action, demanding specific details on their whereabouts and wellbeing, and ensuring their safety,” Castro said.
Nicolás had been vomiting and experiencing breathing issues while detained in an ICE facility known for unsanitary conditions, which also had a measles outbreak earlier this month. While the baby was sent to a hospital late Monday night, he was guarded by armed federal agents and released after only one day. His mother had to appear before an immigration judge the same day, where she was told they would be deported. Now Nicolás and his family have to fend for themselves.
Bigotry and racism pure and simple. It was once illegal in the US. But under Stephen Miller and tRump it is flourishing and supported. We must fight for acceptance and tolereance for those who are not white. So many gains since the 1960s are being erased illegally. Imagain being a kid, a preteen and having a bunch of masked men stop you and threaten you. Hey we keep being told that ICE is going after the worst of the worst to protect the public. Tell me what horrific crime could that child have done that would harm the public? According to ICE, he was not white and that is dangerous enough to the white racists who make up ICE and support them. Hugs
“The government’s decision is deeply disturbing and is just the latest example of the Trump administration targeting the LGBTQ+ community.”
John Russell (He/Him)February 18, 2026, 11:07 am EST
After elected officials raised a Pride flag on a temporary flagpole, activists raise the flag on the permanent flagpole at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City Feb. 12, 2026. Thousands gathered at the monument to see the flag raised after President Donald Trump had ordered the flag to be removed earlier in the week. | Seth Harrison/The Journal News / USA TODAY NETWORK
The Trump administration violated federal law when it removed the LGBTQ+ Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument in New York City, according to a lawsuit filed by several nonprofit groups on Tuesday.
The lawsuit, led by the Gilbert Baker Foundation — which honors the artist who created the original, eight-striped rainbow Pride flag in the 1970s — alleges that the administration’s “arbitrary and capricious” removal of flag earlier this month violates the Administrative Procedures Act and that the administration “misinterpreted” its own policies as a pretext for the flag’s removal.
“The policies the government says require removing the Pride flag expressly permit the [National Parks Service] to fly other flags that provide historical context to national monuments—which is precisely what the NPS official Pride flag did at Stonewall for many years,” the lawsuit states.
As the New York Times notes, an NPS-sanctioned Pride flag that has for years flown in Christopher Park, the site of the Stonewall Monument in New York’s Greenwich Village, was removed sometime during the night of February 8 with no notice or explanation. NPS later cited new guidance issued by the Trump administration in January mandating that “only the U.S. flag and other congressionally or departmentally authorized flags are flown on NPS-managed flagpoles, with limited exceptions.”
But according to the lawsuit, neither the Department of the Interior policy on flag displays nor the administration’s January directive require the removal of the Pride flag.
“The Policy permits officials to ‘authorize the flying of flags and pennants, other than [U.S. and DOI flags], as appropriate, provided flags and flagpole space are available for this purpose” and “the Directive provides an exemption for flags that ‘provide historical context,’” according to the complaint. “Under the policies that they are purporting to be implementing, Defendants had discretion to allow the Pride flag to be displayed at the Stonewall memorial.”
“This was no careless mistake. The government has not removed other historical flags at other national monuments, most notably Confederate flags,” that lawsuit alleges. “Meanwhile, the assault on Stonewall is the latest example in a long line of efforts by the Trump Administration to target the LGBTQ+ community for discrimination and opprobrium.”
“These actions alone support a strong inference of animus against the LGBTQ+ community and that Defendants’ reasons for removing the flag were pretextual,” the lawsuit argues. “Because Defendants’ reasons were pretextual and based on an impermissible reason, i.e., animus toward the LGBTQ+ community, they are arbitrary and capricious.”
The lawsuit notes that while local lawmakers restored a Pride flag in Christopher Park last week, “Defendants have not restored the NPS-sanctioned Pride flag” and “continue to prohibit its display.”
The Gilbert Baker Foundation and other plaintiffs are asking the court to issue an order requiring the administration to restore the officially sanctioned Pride flag to the monument and to permanently enjoin the administration from removing it without, at minimum, taking into account the effect such a change would have, in accordance with the National Historic Preservation Act.
“The government’s decision is deeply disturbing and is just the latest example of the Trump administration targeting the LGBTQ+ community,” Alexander Kristofcak, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said according to Courthouse News Service. “At best, the government misread its regulations. At worst, the government singled out the LGBTQ+ community. Either way, its actions are unlawful.”
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This is horrific that a young person has had to live with racism all his life and now has to protect his family and others from a racist gang of thugs who only want to hurt brown people like him. He is doing a great thing but he shouldn’t need to do this in the land of the free. Hugs.
Cesar Vasquez, who has supported families of undocumented immigrants since age 14, has become a community lifeline – and a known ICE target
While most 18-year-olds worry about college papers and spring break plans, Cesar Vasquez drives through coastal California farm towns scanning for unmarked SUVs before dawn. He flips down his driver’s seat visor to look at a taped list of license plates he has already identified as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles, and jots down a few new ones he suspects could be. His phone buzzes constantly – tips from neighbors, text chains from volunteers alerting to ICE activity – all in an attempt to keep his community safe from being swept up in federal agents’ widening dragnet.
This is what organizing looks like for this son of undocumented immigrants. In his home town of Santa Maria, a small farming town on California’s central coast where over 80% of farm workers are undocumented, Vasquez has become both a crucial community lifeline and a known target of federal immigration enforcement.
Outside the ICE office in Santa Maria, California, Cesar Vasquez and a group of activists gather to decide who will patrol each neighborhood.
Vasquez began volunteering with the 805 Immigrant Rapid Response Network as a high school senior. Last August, he was hired full-time as a rapid response organizer, covering North Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, overseeing volunteers, supporting families and tracking ICE activity.
Routinely, he visits the families of detained immigrants. “There have been so many occasions where I walked through the door, and a kid was expecting their father or mother,” Vasquez said wistfully. “And it was just me, and I had to explain what happened to their parents.”
Other times, for Vasquez, the reality is personal. He recalled in December, speaking with families waiting for news about their detained relatives outside the immigration enforcement office in Santa Maria, when an ICE vehicle slowed down in front of them. The agent’s voice crackled from the car’s speaker, loud enough to carry through the open window: “How’s your mother, Cesar? We’ll go visit her soon.”
Vasquez drove straight home and found his mother washing clothes.
“I took her car keys and told her to stop everything she’s doing. My hands were shaking,” Vasquez said. “I then moved her to a secret location that I have precisely for this moment.”
As the sun rises in Santa Maria, Vasquez continues monitoring ICE activity in his neighborhood. The 18-year-old says he spends more time in his car than anywhere else these days.
Growing up as a birthright citizen of undocumented parents
Vasquez’s mother is one of the thousands of undocumented farm workers in Santa Maria whom he is trying to protect. She left her home in a tiny town in Mexico to cross the US-Mexico border at age 13 in search of a better life. Vasquez’s biological father was one of the first people she encountered – a Guatemalan American whose family was settled in California and who held US citizenship. He was also abusive and never legally married her, keeping her from accessing US citizenship, Vasquez said. When Vasquez was an infant, his mother ran away with her three children to Santa Maria, a town about 150 miles (240km) north of Los Angeles, where she found work in the strawberry fields. She has been trying to secure documentation for more than a dozen years now.
Vasquez distributes flyers on immigration rights to farmworkers in Santa Maria on 6 February.
Strawberry picking is physically demanding work, and the pay is minimal. Pickers spend hours bent over in the fields under the California sun, with no benefits, no sick days and no guaranteed work once the season slows between October and March. Climate change has made the labor even more precarious, disrupting growing cycles and shrinking paychecks. Rising costs of living – rent, food, transportation – have squeezed families further. In Santa Maria, where a two-bedroom apartment can cost $3,000 a month, many families crowd into single rooms or garages.
Built on an economy of strawberries, lettuce and wine grapes, Santa Maria has long depended on undocumented labor while rendering those workers largely invisible. Many arrived during waves of Mexican migration in the 1980s and 90s, settling into a community where immigration enforcement and workplace exploitation became routine. Before Donald Trump’s recent immigration priorities, ICE enforcement in the region tended to be more targeted – focusing on people with criminal convictions or referrals from local jails, rather than broad community sweeps. ICE didn’t even have a holding facility in Santa Maria until 2015.
But since 2025, enforcement has intensified dramatically with rapid‑response trackers documenting more than 620 immigration arrests across Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties, with Santa Maria often at the center of daily apprehensions. These high‑profile raids – often carried out with unmarked vehicles and tactical gear, drawing protests and criticism from community leaders – reflect a broader national surge in immigration enforcement under Trump.
Vasquez holds his mother along the river in Santa Maria. He keeps a feather with him, which he says brings spiritual cleansing when he burns sage.
When Trump was first elected, Vasquez was only nine years old. He was already well-acquainted with the repercussions of growing up in a mixed-status household.
“I mean, it’s common for most children of immigrants to be doing things for their parents like filling out their legal forms, right?” Vasquez said. “But in fourth grade, I had to learn what a warrant looked like and what rights I had.”
He was in a Halloween costume shop, age 14, when it clicked that his fears and concerns weren’t just his own. He overheard a woman at the register, saying she had saved all year to buy her son a costume, but it didn’t fit. The store wouldn’t take it back. Her shirt was stained with strawberries, her exhaustion visible. He’d seen his own mother do the same thing countless times, so he offered to buy the woman’s son the costume.
Building a network at 14
At age 14, Vasquez founded La Cultura Del Mundo, an entirely youth-led organization that eliminates what he calls the “red tape” associated with traditional aid. They prioritize direct, unrestricted support to families in need, asking, “How much do you need?” rather than requiring forms. The group then rapidly mobilizes whatever the family requests, whether that’s cash assistance, groceries, rent help or other essential support.
In August, La Cultura Del Mundo drew national attention when Vasquez organized La Marcha De La Puebla, a national protest against ICE raids that involved nearly 30 cities across 17 states, drawing about 10,000 participants.
Seventeen-year-old Claudia Santos is one of the many young people Vasquez has inspired. “My sister and I heard about a school walkout and just decided to go. After that, Cesar told us about a meeting at city hall, and that’s how I got involved,” Santos said. “I did it because I feel like the kids coming here from Mexico deserve a good future too.”
Vasquez packs up flyers to hand out to the immigrant community as they head to work in Santa Maria.
While Vasquez was organizing in high school, he was simultaneously struggling with his own mental health. He commuted by bus an hour each way to a school in a predominantly white neighborhood with good academic prospects.
When he told his counselor that he had anxiety, “she couldn’t understand that I was uncomfortable because I was brown in a white school, where the principal was racist and the students were racist. It led me to become really suicidal.”
Being misunderstood drove him closer to his community. He transferred to his local school and graduated early. Despite being accepted into San Diego State University, he deferred enrollment.
Most kids who grow up in Santa Maria look forward to leaving. One of Vasquez’s older sisters became a teacher in Los Angeles, the other a graduate student in the UK. But Vasquez likes that the impact of his work is immediate.
Tina van den Heever, one of his teachers from Santa Maria high school, said it was clear Vasquez was a leader with great potential: “To be honest, I worry about his safety, because as we’re seeing, the United States tends to silence people who stand up in the way that he does.”
‘I think about the kids being left behind’
During a four-day raid in late December, Vasquez’s uncle was among the 118 people detained.
“I think about the kids being left behind,” Vasquez said. “The children home for winter break whose parents never returned because of the December raids. And there was no way to know what happened to them because school didn’t reopen until days later.”
Vasquez distributes flyers on immigration rights to parents.
During the raids, flower vendors disappeared from the streets. When Vasquez later visited the area, the children of a family he had gotten close to told him they had gone inside after hearing his warning. They were safe.
The work – the constant alertness, the phone calls at all hours, the weight of knowing families depend on his network – has taken a toll. But he sees no alternative.
“I’m continuously preparing for the worst,” Vasquez said. He keeps a “to-go bag”, extra clothes and cash in his car.
Every time ICE picks up someone in the Central Coast valley, Vasquez plays the same song in his car: Hasta La Piel (Down to My Skin) by the Mexican American artist Carla Morrison. The lyrics speak to having and losing, wanting and not being able to say, intense love and desperate fear of loss – an homage to those who have been detained.
“They want us to be afraid,” he said. “But fear is what keeps people isolated.”
In the back seat of his car, a whiteboard filled with encouraging messages for Vasquez sits alongside an American flag.
Jennifer Chowdhury reported this story while participating in the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s Kristy Hammam Fund for Health Journalism
Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
After elected officials raised a Pride flag on a temporary flagpole, activists raise the flag on the permanent flagpole at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City Feb. 12, 2026. Thousands gathered at the monument to see the flag raised after President Donald Trump had ordered the flag to be removed earlier in the week. | Seth Harrison/The Journal News / USA TODAY NETWORK
Cesar Vasquez, who has supported families of undocumented immigrants since age 14, has become a community lifeline – and a known ICE target
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