Democratic Virginia gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger said one of her first moves in office would be rolling back Virginia law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Spanberger, if elected in November, has vowed to rescind an executive order issued by term-limited Republican Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin that requires state police and local jails to assist ICE efforts in the commonwealth. The Democratic nominee’s pledge to scrap state law enforcement’s work with federal immigration authorities comes as ICE has conducted more than 4,000 arrests across Virginia since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term.
“I would rescind his executive order, yes,” Spanberger told the Virginia Mercury in an interview published Wednesday. “The idea that we would take local police officers or local sheriff’s deputies in amid all the things that they have to do, like community policing or staffing our jails or investigating real crimes, so that they can go and tear families apart … that is a misuse of those resources.”
Spanberger served three terms in the House of Representatives between 2019 and 2025 prior to running for governor. She notably opposed House Republicans’ comprehensive border security legislation known as H.R.2, the Secure the Border Act, in May 2023. The bill would have required the federal government to resume construction of the southern border wall, placed new restrictions on the asylum process and blocked illegal immigrants from the U.S. workforce by mandating employers to verify the legal status of their staff.
Republican Virginia Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, the GOP nominee for governor, torched Spanberger’s vow to not assist the Trump administration’s illegal immigration crackdown.
“Abigail Spanberger voted against the Laken Riley Act after Laken was murdered by an illegal immigrant,” Earle-Sears wrote on the social media platform X on Wednesday. “Now she says her first act as governor will be to stop State Police from helping ICE.”
“Abigail puts criminals over Virginians,” Earle-Sears continued. “Every. Single. Time.”
Earle-Sears has previously blasted Spanberger for organizing a campaign rally in April during which Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid participated. The northern Virginia sheriff has refused to cooperate with federal immigration officials.
Youngkin also excoriated Spanberger in a post on the social media platform X on Wednesday.
“In her very first act as governor, @SpanbergerForVA promises to turn Virginia into a sanctuary state for dangerous illegal immigrants,” Youngkin wrote. “@winwithwinsome promises to keep dangerous criminals off our streets.”
“Could the choice be any more clear, Virginia?” Youngkin added. “Your safety is on the ballot this November.”
The race between Spanberger and Earle-Sears has significantly tightened ahead of the final sprint of the November gubernatorial contest, according to a Republican-aligned Co/efficient poll released Wednesday.
The pollster found that Earle-Sears trails Spanberger 43% to 48% with 7% of voters undecided. The survey of 1,025 likely voters was conducted from Aug. 23 to Aug. 26 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.06%.
“Earle-Sears is nipping at Spanberger’s heels in a race the Democrats thought they had in the bag,” a press release from the Earle-Sears campaign touting the survey’s results states.
A spokesperson for Spanberger did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
https://dailycaller.com/2025/08/27/abigail-spanberger-virginia-governor-ice-immigration-enforcement
President Donald Trump‘s proposal for a new national census that excludes people living in the United States illegally could reduce Texas’ political power by reducing both its number of Electoral College votes and seats in the House of Representatives.
Why It Matters
The Trump administration is pushing for a new census despite the next one not being due until 2030. Excluding those in the U.S. illegally from the figures would reduce the political representation of states with disproportionately high illegal migrant populations, such as California and Texas.
Citing “two people with knowledge of the effort,” The Texas Tribune reported that the administration’s primary goal behind the new census was to boost Republicans politically, though some experts have expressed skepticism over whether this would happen.
What To Know
On August 7, Trump said he had instructed the Department of Commerce to begin work on a new national census that would exclude illegal migrants, using data from the 2024 presidential election as a baseline.
Census Bureau data is used to determine how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives and also how many Electoral College votes it gets during presidential elections. So if a state loses population disproportionately once illegal migrants are excluded, it would see its political influence decrease.
In 2024, the Department of Homeland Security estimated that in January 2022 there were 10,990,000 people residing in the U.S. illegally. It found that California had the largest illegal migrant population with 2,600,000 people, followed by Texas with 2,060,000, Florida with 590,000 and New Jersey with 490,000.
Speaking with Newsweek, Joshua Blank, who heads the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said a new census without illegal migrants would reduce the state’s population and therefore its House representation. He added that Texas “did nothing to promote census participation” in 2020.
Blank said: “While, ostensibly, this move would reduce Texas’ population size for the purpose of congressional districts, it’s probably the case that it’s less than it would if Texas were to have engaged in a serious effort to get a good count in the first place.”
In terms of the nationwide political effect, Blank added: “This would apply to other states, including other states with large immigrant populations, and those that actually sought to get an accurate count, like California. So the overall exchange of seats, since the number of overall congressional seats remains fixed, is pretty hard to game out.”
Trump’s new census plan would almost certainly face legal challenges, with critics arguing that it violates the 14th Amendment, which states that seats in the House should be based on “counting the whole number of persons in each State.”
What People Are Saying
Gil Guerra, an immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, told Newsweek: “These numbers matter enormously for apportionment—states like California, Texas, and Florida have substantial undocumented populations that currently contribute to their congressional representation.”
Speaking with The Texas Tribune about the president’s new census proposal, Robert Warren, a demographer at the Center for Migration Studies, said: “It wouldn’t shift enough [House] seats to make any difference, and that’s been true for five straight censuses.”
President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on August 7: “I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024. People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
A Department of Commerce spokesperson told Newsweek: “The Census Bureau will immediately adopt modern technology tools for use in the Census to better understand our robust Census data. We will accurately analyze the data to reflect the number of legal residents in the United States.”
What Happens Next
If Trump pushes ahead with his plan, it will almost inevitably spark a major legal battle. Even if the courts approve, experts agree that the overall effect on American politics is hard to determine, though states with a high illegal migrant population—such as Texas—will likely lose some influence.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-new-census-could-bad-news-texas-2114326
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Thursday his plans to hold a special election in November to redraw the state’s congressional districts in response to Texas’s attempts to redraw their own maps to help the GOP cling to its narrow majority in the House of Representatives.
Arriving in Los Angeles for the planned press conference/rally at the Japanese American National Museum in the early hours of Thursday morning, I thought it would be a fairly standard press event. Newsom and other state and federal lawmakers would make their remarks, lay out their plans for the new congressional maps, and make their case to voters as to why this drastic move was necessary.
The morning started off normal enough. For those who don’t work in the news or media business, covering a press conference may seem an easy, by-the-books type of thing. However, that is rarely the case, especially for any events involving political leaders. First, you must lay all bags and equipment down in a designated area for a bomb sniffing dog to sweep them, and second, depending on your position, whether it be TV cameraperson, still photographer, videographer, or print journalist, you have to jockey for position in the press area. This is particularly important for still photographers. It comes as Newsom’s press conference [was] stormed by masked Border Patrol guards with guns.
As we were ushered into the press area by Newsom’s staff, we were given specific instructions for both parts of the event. The first part, Newsom and several other state and national Democratic leaders would deliver their remarks, including Sen. Adam Schiff, Sen. Alex Padilla, and Rep. Maxine Waters. That would be followed up by a traditional press gaggle where the governor would take questions from reporters.
The day took an unexpected turn as the 30 or so reporters from every major national and local news outlet crammed into the small auditorium inside the Japanese American National Museum. Word began circulating that U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agents had appeared outside the museum. While I couldn’t confirm it then, I kept my eye on my phone to see if anyone posted about it on social media. As the event began, speakers from various labor unions and activist groups delivered remarks supporting redistricting efforts. That was until one of the speakers confirmed that Border Patrol agents were intact outside. As Sen. Schiff spoke at the podium, I decided the story had shifted from inside the event to outside.
I quickly went outside to find no Border Patrol agents in sight. (I later learned they had arrested one person and quickly departed.) What I did find was a gaggle of reporters surrounding one person. So, as any reporter would do, I quickly ran over to the area, only to find Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass sounding off at the situation, denouncing President Donald Trump, and accusing him of intentionally sending the agents to the event.
“He [Trump] did this intentionally to disrespect the governor, to disrespect this iconic museum, and to disrespect our state. Now, why is this helpful to anybody at all? At this point, this doesn’t have anything to do with immigration. This is about causing trouble in our city,” Bass said.
Speaking to witnesses, I learned that the agents had arrested one person. I later learned that it was a delivery driver delivering produce to a local restaurant in Little Tokyo. By the time I got back inside, Newsom had already begun speaking. He also called out Trump, accusing him of intentionally sending the agents to the event.
“We can’t stand back and watch this democracy disappear district by district all across the country,” Newsom said. “We are not bystanders in this world. We can shape the future. Donald Trump, you have poked the bear, and we will punch back.”
Since I don’t cover events like this regularly, it’s always bizarre to see people you’re used to seeing on TV up close in person. And having even the chance to ask the governor questions during the press gaggle was a big deal to me.
As Newsom finished his remarks, the press were taken to a separate room to set up for the press gaggle. Taking my position near the front of the pack, I set up my camera to get some decent original footage. As Newsom made his way into the room, he began taking questions. My hopes of posing a question to the governor quickly vanished, as it became apparent I was a small fish in a big pond. The TV reporters barked their questions out faster than I could form the words in my mouth. Another reporter luckily asked the question I wanted to ask, regarding the Border Patrol agents converging on the event.
“Well, I think it’s pretty sick and pathetic, and it said everything you need to know about the setting that we’re under. That they chose the time, manner, and place to send their district director outside right when we’re about to have this press conference,” Newsom told reporters. “It said everything you know about Donald Trump’s America, and that was top down, you know that for a fact.”
Newsom took several more questions regarding the special elections and the new congressional maps, which he said would be presented to the public and voted on by the legislature next week. Rep. Waters also gave remarks to the gaggle but declined to take any questions.
As Newsom’s staff began to wrap things up we all were ushered outside even as many reporters, including myself, tried to follow Newsom and continue asking questions. I made my way outside, headed to my car and like most of the reporters, quickly wrote the story I would file later that day. It comes after a bizarre internet image exposed how Trump looks without his fake tan and iconic hairdo.
https://www.themirror.com/news/us-news/i-went-gov-gavin-newsoms-1332122
A former CIA officer who helped lead the intelligence assessments over alleged Russia interference in the 2016 presidential election has said Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is ignorant of the practices of espionage after she accused Barack Obama and his national security team of “treasonous conspiracy” against Donald Trump.
Susan Miller, the agency’s head of counter-intelligence at the time of the election, told the Guardian that Gabbard’s allegations were based on false statements and basic misrepresentations of discoveries made by Miller’s team about Russian actions, which she insisted were based on multiple trusted and verified sources.
Gabbard has accused Obama and his former national security officials of “manufacturing” intelligence to make it appear that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, had intervened on Trump’s side when they knew it was untrue. The goal, she insisted, was to make Trump’s election win appear illegitimate, thus laying the basis of a “years-long coup against him”.
She has passed the matter to Pam [Bimbo#3] Bondi, the attorney general, who last week announced a justice department “strike force” into the affair. However, reports have suggested that Bondi was caught off-guard by Gabbard’s request that her department examine the matter.
Gabbard has called for criminal prosecutions against numerous officials involved, including Obama himself.
Obama last week denounced the allegations as “outrageous and ridiculous”, and part of an attempt to distract attention from the Jeffrey Epstein files, in which Trump’s name reportedly appears.
Until Wednesday, none of the other high-level officials named in Gabbard’s recent report – including James Clapper, her predecessor as national intelligence director; John Brennan, the former CIA director; or the ex-FBI director James Comey – had responded publicly to her allegations. Clapper and Brennan broke their silence for the first time on Wednesday with a jointly written op-ed article in the New York Times in which they called Gabbard’s allegations “patently false” and accused her of “rewrit[ing] history”.
In an interview, Miller – who is not named in the national intelligence director’s public narrative – questioned Gabbard’s grasp of intelligence matters.
Gabbard, who has never worked on the House intelligence committee while she was a member of Congress, has criticized the “tradecraft” of agents who compiled the assessment of Russia’s election activities.
“Has she ever met a Russian agent?” asked Miller, a 39-year agency veteran who served tours as CIA chief of station abroad. “Has she ever given diamonds to a Russian who’s giving us, you know? Has she ever walked on the streets of Moscow to do a dead drop? Has she ever handled an agent?
“No. She’s never done any of that. She clearly doesn’t understand this.”
Miller told the Guardian she was speaking out because Gabbard’s claims besmirched her work and and that of her team of up to eight members who worked on the Russia case.
“My reputation and my team’s reputation is on the line,” she said. “Tulsi comes out and doesn’t use my name, doesn’t use the names of the people in my team, but basically says this was all wrong and made up, et cetera.”
Miller and her former team members have recently hired lawyers to defend themselves against charges that could put them in jail.
Miller has hired Mark Zaid, a prominent Washington defense attorney, to represent her.
The scenario reprises a situation she faced in 2017, when – still a serving officer – Miller hired a $1,500-an-hour lawyer to represent her after being told she might face criminal charges for her part in authoring the same intelligence report now being scrutinized by Gabbard.
Investigators interviewed her for up to eight hours as part of a trawl to ferret out possible law-breaking under Obama that eventually that culminated in Bill Barr, the attorney general in Trump’s first administration, appointing a special counsel, John Durham, to conduct an inquiry into the FBI’s investigation of links between the Trump campaign and Russia.
“They were asking things like: ‘Who told you to write this and who told you to come to these conclusions?’” Miller recalled.
“I told them: ‘Nobody did. If anybody had told us to come to certain conclusions, all of us would have quit. There’s no way, all none of us ever had a reputation for falsifying anything, before anything or after.’”
No charges were brought against her, but nor was she told the case was closed.
Durham’s 2023 report concluded that the FBI should never have launched its full investigation, called “Crossfire Hurricane” into the alleged Trump-Russia links. But his four-year investigation was something of a disappointment to Trump and his supporters, bringing just three criminal prosecutions, resulting in a single conviction – of an FBI lawyer who admitted to altering an email to support a surveillance application.
It is this ground that is now being re-covered by Gabbard in what may be a Trump-inspired bid for “retribution” against political enemies who he has accused of subjecting him to a political witch-hunt.
But the crusade, Miller says, is underpinned by false premise – that the Russia interference findings were a “hoax”, a description long embraced by Trump and repeated by Gabbard in her 18 July report.
“It is not a hoax,” she said. “This was based on real intelligence. It’s reporting we were getting from verified agents and from other verified streams of intelligence.
“It was so clear [the Russians] were doing that, that it was never in issue back in 2016. It’s only an issue now because Tulsi wants it to be.”
Briefing journalists at the White House last week, Gabbard cited a 2020 House of Representatives intelligence committee report – supported only by its Republican members – asserting that Putin’s goal in the election was to “undermine faith in the US democratic process, not showing any preference of a certain candidate”.
Miller dismissed that. “The information led us to the correct conclusion that [the interference] was in Trump’s favor – the Republican party and Trump’s favor,” she said. Indeed, Putin himself – standing alongside Trump at a news conference during a summit meeting in Helsinki in 2018 – confirmed to journalists that he had wanted his US counterpart to win.
Rebuffing suggestions that she or her team may be guilty of pro-Democrat bias, she said she was a registered Republican voter. Her team consisted of Republicans, Democrats and “centrists”, she said.
Gabbard has claimed that agents were pressured – at Obama’s instigation – into fabricating intelligence in the weeks after Trump’s victory, allegedly to raise questions about its electoral legitimacy and weaken his presidency.
“BS [bullshit]. That’s not true,” said Miller. “This had to do with our sources and what they were finding. It had nothing to do with Obama telling us to do this. We found it, and we’re like, what do we do with this?”
At the core of Gabbard’s critique are two assertions that Miller says conflates separate issues.
One is based on media reports of briefings from Obama administration officials a month after Trump’s victory, including one claiming that Russia used “cyber products” to influence “the outcome of the election”. Gabbard writes that this is contradicted by Obama’s admission that there was no “evidence of [voting] machines being tampered with” to alter the vote tally, meaning that the eventual assessment finding of Russian interference must be false.
Miller dismisses that as a red herring, since the CIA’s assessment – ultimately endorsed by other intelligence agencies – was never based on assumptions of election machine hacking.
“That’s not where [the Russians] were trying to do it,” she said. “They were trying to do it through covert action of press pieces, internet pieces, things like that. The DNC [Democratic National Committee] hack [when Russian hackers also penetrated the emails of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and passed them to WikiLeaks] … is [also] part of it.
“That’s why we came out with the conclusion that 100% the Russians tried to influence the election on Trump’s part, [but] 100%, unless we polled every voter, we can’t tell if it worked. If we’d known anything about election machines, it would have been a very different thing.”
Miller also denied Gabbard’s claim that the intelligence community’s “high level of confidence” in Russian interference had been bolstered by “‘further information” that turned out to be an unverified dossier written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, which suggested possible collusion between Russia and Trump.
“We never used the Steele dossier in our report,” she said. The dossier – which included salacious allegations about Trump and Russian sex workers – created a media sensation when it was published without permission in January 2017 days before Trump’s inauguration.
Miller said it was only included in an annex to the intelligence assessment released in the same month on the insistence of Comey, the FBI director, who had told his CIA counterpart, Brennan, that the bureau would not sign off on the rest of the report if it was excluded.
“We never saw it until our report was 99.99% finished and about to go to print. We didn’t care about it or really understand it or where it had come from. It was too poorly written and non-understandable.
“But we were told it had to be included or the FBI wouldn’t endorse our report. So it was put in as an addendum with a huge cover sheet on it, written by me and a team member, which said something like: ‘We are attaching this document, the Steele dossier, to this report at the request of the FBI director; it is unevaluated and not corroborated by CIA at this time.’”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/30/tulsi-gabbard-obama-russian-intelligence
The American Revolution was a result of the tyranny experienced by colonists under the British monarchy. Many Americans had fled from Europe where they had been persecuted under the rule of powerful monarchs. The government produced by the revolution was designed to ensure no such tyranny could be reproduced in the newly formed United States.
The framers of the constitution created a checks-and-balances system of government to ensure that no single branch of the federal government (executive, judicial or legislative) could dominate the others. Each branch has powers to curtail or empower the others.
However, some Americans are concerned about a return of absolute rule due to the steps taken by Donald Trump’s second administration. This has sparked around 100 “no kings” protests all over the US, organised to coincide with Trump’s birthday on June 15.
https://www.alternet.org/trump-doesn-t-think-of-himself-as-the-president
Snopes has a lengthy discussion of claims by F’Elon Musk (DOGE) and Robert “Brainworm” Kennedy Jr. that they found 8M people fraudently on Medicaid. Their conclusion:
These numbers don’t add up to 8 million …
Like almost everything else involving DOGE, the math doesn’t work out.
You can click the link below to read the article:
As many Americans were still sleeping Thursday morning, the House of Representatives passed a bill whose text they hadn’t read, Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The bill’s sweeping cuts to Medicaid, contributing to 14 million fewer people having health coverage by 2034, have received wide coverage. Less well known, however, is the bill’s dire implications for Medicare recipients. If the House version of the bill becomes law, Medicare payments to medical providers would be slashed by more than $500 billion over the next 10 years. This would have serious implications for tens of millions of older adults and providers and may even cause hospitals to close.
The explanation of how these automatic cuts to Medicare spending would work:
Though the GOP bill doesn’t explicitly call for Medicare cuts, it would trigger them under the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act. Congress passed Stat PAYGO in 2010 to discourage policymakers from enacting tax cuts and spending that would increase federal deficits.
Under Stat PAYGO, the Office of Management and Budget must keep “PAYGO scorecards” for five-year deficit impacts and 10-year deficit impacts. PAYGO stipulates that when any legislation is enacted, the average cost of the legislation for the next five years is entered into each year of the five-year scorecard and the average cost for the next 10 years is entered into each year of the 10-year scorecard. At the end of each session of Congress, if there is a cumulative deficit in that fiscal year on either scorecard, there is an automatic spending reduction (sequestration) to offset the larger of the two deficits. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the House Republican bill, if enacted, would increase the deficit by $2.3 trillion over 10 years, and trigger sequestration.
Some types of funding, including many mandatory spending accounts like Social Security, are exempt from the automatic cuts, but Medicare provider payments are not.
In short, though Trump and House Republicans promised this bill would not touch Medicare, at the moment that promise is broken.
