A new Trump administration report condemned the Biden administration for its treatment of Christians.
The initial report of the Department of Justice’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias has been released, and it categorized what it called “numerous instances of anti-Christian bias during the Biden administration.”
“Joe Biden weaponized the full weight of the federal government against Christians and trampled on their fundamental First Amendment rights,” White House representative Taylor Rogers said, according to Fox News.
“Unlike Joe Biden, President Trump is protecting Christians, not punishing them,” Rogers said.
The report said that in recent years, America’s Christian underpinnings have been “undermined. The political, social, and humanitarian contributions of Christians have been devalued, their beliefs marginalized, and their communities unlawfully targeted by their own government.”
“A review of federal departments and agencies revealed a consistent and systematic pattern of discrimination against Christians during the Biden Administration. Where there should have been ‘equal justice under law’ there was unequal treatment — policies and practices that singled out Christian people, Christian houses of worship, and Christian convictions for disfavored treatment,” the report said.
The report included the task force’s vow that “the federal government will never again be permitted to turn its power against people of faith.”
“Under President Trump and Attorney General Bondi’s leadership, in partnership with all members of this Task Force, the rule of law will be enforced with vigor, and every religion will be treated with equality in both policy and action. The days of anti-Christian bias in the federal government are over. Faith is not a liability in America — it is a liberty,” the report said.
The report cited various departments that imposed prejudicial actions against Christians.
For example, it said, the Department of State “provided limited humanitarian relief to Christians relative to other populations and offered muted responses to attacks on Christians compared to other groups.”
In the State Department, “preferential employment practices were afforded adherents of non-Christian religions, while Christian employees were disfavored. It was particularly concerning that employees were less likely to be permitted leave for observation of certain Christian holidays as opposed to non-Christian ones.”
It also “imposed radical LGBTQ gender ideology on foreign governments and State employees, including the forced usage of preferred pronouns and rainbow flags, violating the sincerely held religious beliefs of many Christians and other Americans of faith.”
The Department of Justice “arrested and convicted approximately two dozen individuals under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for praying and demonstrating outside abortion facilities. Yet, the same DOJ refused to apply the FACE Act to protect places of worship and crisis pregnancy centers,” per the report.
Over at the Department of Education, “The Biden Administration’s ‘book ban coordinator’ role within ED, investigated school boards for removing age-inappropriate materials from school libraries, typically in response to religious objections by parents.”
“Though these investigations remain in their early stages, the evidence uncovered is unmistakable: during the Biden Administration, people of faith, particularly Christians, were repeatedly subjected to anti-religious bias at the hands of their own government,” the report’s conclusion noted.
“By eradicating anti-Christian bias in the federal government, the Task Force is reaffirming a principle older than the Republic itself, that freedom of religion is not granted by government but guaranteed against it.
“America must remain One Nation Under God if she is to remain Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for All. The Task Force will never permit the federal government to be used as a weapon against faith.”
When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced earlier this month that he would return a Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery, he blamed “woke lemmings” for it having been taken down. Created by the sculptor Moses Ezekiel, the statue in question, which Hegseth described as “beautiful and historic,” features sentimental images of Confederate soldiers and loyal Black slaves. It was first installed in the cemetery in 1914 and was removed in late 2023, as part of the Biden administration’s larger effort to remove memorials that glorified the Confederate cause and to rechristen bases whose names lionized traitors to the United States. The war against the Confederacy killed more than 300,000 members of the military that Hegseth leads—a grim fact that the defense secretary trivializes in his efforts to score political points against the left.
Hegseth’s move is one of several by the Trump administration to bring Confederate commemorations back ….
President Donald Trump’s Department of Energy withdrew a $715.8 million loan the Biden administration promised to a New Jersey utility company to help finance a proposed power line transporting offshore wind power to the grid, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
According to three Energy Department officials, the agency withdrew the loan after negotiations with leaders of Jersey Central Power & Light (JCPL), the company behind the project. JCPL leaders, they said, acknowledged the project was likely no longer feasible in light of recent offshore wind project cancellations in New Jersey—in other words, the power line would be rendered useless without offshore wind projects.
The officials, who spoke with the Free Beacon on the condition of anonymity, added that the loan didn’t conform with the Trump administration’s energy agenda, which prioritizes traditional power generation over weather-dependent electricity like wind and solar.
“The Trump administration is done subsidizing projects that ultimately raise energy prices and that are bad investments for the American people. This decision should come as no surprise,” one of the officials said.
“We’re happy to work with these utilities. We just want to do things that actually solve the problem of fixing higher prices and making us more energy secure,” a second official told the Free Beacon.
It’s a significant blow to the offshore wind industry and adds to the growing list of setbacks the industry has faced since Trump took office seven months ago. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has rescinded wind energy subsidies, curbed preferential treatment for wind developers, added environmental requirements for wind projects, launched an overhaul of existing regulations that make it easier for wind projects to receive quick approvals, and paused an under-construction wind farm off the coast of Connecticut.
Those actions fulfill Trump’s promises to block green energy development, which he says has led to higher electricity prices and damages the environment. “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar. The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” he wrote on Truth Social last week.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, issued its conditional loan commitment for JCPL’s power line project—the so-called Clean Energy Corridor project—just days before Trump took office in January, stating that it would help add “clean, resilient power” to the grid and support New Jersey’s green energy mandate laws.
It was one of dozens of green energy loans worth a total of more than $80 billion that Biden officials issued after Trump was elected in November.
The Department of Energy terminated another one of those loans, a conditional commitment worth $4.9 billion to help finance the Grain Belt Express power line in the Midwest. That project, like JCPL’s Clean Energy Corridor, was designed to transport wind energy.
“The last guys rushed all these things out, knowing that they didn’t really make sense. And they tried to bind us,” one of the Energy Department officials said. “We’re not going to fall for it—it’s not the way to behave if you’re a fiduciary for the American people.”
In a statement to the Free Beacon, JCPL said it has “no new updates” on the status of the loan.
Arlington Public Schools and Fairfax County Public Schools filed lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Education on Friday, seeking to bar the federal agency from freezing funds to the districts in response to an ongoing debate over a policy supportive of transgender students.
The move is the latest in a fight between the Education Department and five Northern Virginia school districts over policies that allow students to use facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity.
Earlier this month, school officials in Arlington, as well as Alexandria, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties, declined to comply with a call from the Education Department to rescind the gender policies after an investigation determined they violate Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination.
In response, the Education Department said it would start the process to “suspend or terminate” funding from the five districts. The following week, the department announced it placed the school districts on “high-risk” status, which would make it harder for the systems to receive future federal funds.
“States and school districts cannot openly violate federal law while simultaneously receiving federal funding with no additional scrutiny. The Northern Viriginia[sic] School Divisions that are choosing to abide by woke gender ideology in place of federal law must now prove they are using every single federal dollar for a legal purpose,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote in a statement.
The new complaints from the Arlington and Fairfax school district, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, seek immediate relief from the court to reverse that decision.
In a news release, Arlington schools said the federal money supports academics, counseling, and free and reduced meals for students.
Leaders from the Northern Virginia districts have stood behind policies they say satisfy state and federal antidiscrimination laws and create welcoming environments for students. Revoking their transgender student policies, the school districts argue, would put them in violation of the law.
The Education Department launched its investigations after a Title IX complaint was filed by America First Legal — a conservative group founded by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
The Justice Department plans to scrap longstanding rules and qualifications for immigration judges and create a new policy where it can appoint any lawyer it wants to temporarily preside over cases, reported Government Executive on Wednesday.
“The change gives Attorney General Pam Bondi wide latitude in selecting officials to oversee asylum and other cases pending before the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that runs the nation’s immigration courts,” said the report. “That authority could provide President Trump with additional power to withhold legal status from immigrants and expedite his mass deportation efforts.”
Immigration judges are different from typical so-called “Article III” judges, like the Supreme Court, courts of appeals, and district courts, who are constitutional officers appointed for life; they are instead “Article I” judges who were authorized by Congress to serve at the pleasure of the presidential administration and hear narrow types of subject matter issues.
“Since 2014, the department has allowed only former immigration judges, administrative law judges from other agencies or Justice attorneys with at least 10 years of experience related to immigration law to serve as temporary immigration judges, or TIJs,” said the report. “In its update, to be issued Thursday as a final rule, EOIR called those parameters overly restrictive, noting it has hired fewer than a dozen temporary judges since the Obama administration put them into place.”
The shortage of immigration judges available to hear cases has been a contentious issue for years, and was part of the reason for the massive backlog of cases for the surge of migrants in the years prior to the Trump administration.
A bipartisan immigration deal cut in the final years of the Biden administration would have established more funding for immigration courts to operate on an expedited basis; however, Trump worked behind the scenes to tank the deal among Republican lawmakers.
FEMA employees were abruptly placed on administrative leave Tuesday—just 24 hours after they signed an explosive open letter warning Donald Trump that the agency is being dragged back to its pre-Katrina dark ages.
The letter, signed by 191 current and former FEMA staffers, was sent to Congress and top officials on Monday. Its message was blunt—the people now running FEMA are inexperienced, politically driven, and dismantling the very programs that keep Americans safe when disaster strikes.
The writers warned that, left unchecked, the agency could stumble into catastrophe. By Tuesday evening, FEMA’s administrator’s office had fired back with suspension letters.
The employees were told they would remain in “non-duty status” but keep their pay and benefits, effectively being benched for speaking out.
The letter also cited decisions made by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi “ICE Barbie” Noem as a reason the agency could fail to manage disaster responses.
FEMA confirmed that multiple employees were placed on immediate leave, though the exact number remains unclear. Of the nearly 200 signatories, only about 36 revealed their names publicly, The Washington Post and CNN reported.
“It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform. Change is always hard. It is especially for those invested in the status quo, who have forgotten that their duty is to the American people not entrenched bureaucracy,” a FEMA spokesperson told the Daily Beast.
“Under the Biden Administration, the American people were abandoned as disasters ravaged North Carolina, and needed aid was denied based on party affiliation in Florida. Our obligation is to survivors, not to protecting broken systems. Under the leadership of Secretary Noem, FEMA will return to its mission of assisting Americans at their most vulnerable.”
Former President George W. Bush was heavily criticized for his administration’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina particularly in New Orleans, where much of the city was left underwater. In its aftermath, Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 (PKEMRA), which added safeguards to prevent another botched response.
The letter from FEMA employees warns that the Trump administration is rolling back those protections and calls on Congress to intervene. Their demands include shielding FEMA from “further interference” from the DHS, stopping “illegal impoundments of appropriated funding,” and protecting FEMA workers from “politically motivated firings.”
Noem, whose department oversees FEMA, was already under fire in July over the response to flooding in Texas that left about 135 people dead. Critics blamed a new rule she insisted upon, which required her personal sign-off on any contract or grant over $100,000, which delayed the deployment of an Urban Search and Rescue team by at least three days.
At least two FEMA staffers placed on leave had been part of that Texas flood response, The Washington Post reported.
Jeremy Edwards, a former FEMA press secretary who signed the “FEMA Katrina Declaration,” said the number of signatories “signifies the severity of the problem.”
“They are that scared of us being so inadequately unprepared. It speaks a lot to the situation right now,” Edwards told The Post.
The Trump administration also placed about 140 Environmental Protection Agency employees on leave in July after they signed a letter protesting the agency’s management and the treatment of federal workers.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
President Donald Trump on Monday said he would target former President Joe Biden’s circle, calling them “evil people.”
“There were some brilliant people,” Trump said, referring to Biden’s allies in his White House. “But they’re evil people, and they’re going to be brought down. They have to be brought down ’cause they really hurt our country.”
Trump’s threat to have his political opponent’s allies “brought down” marks his latest move to potentially target political adversaries in a pattern that has alarmed critics who paint the president as pursuing retribution and say he is weaponizing the Justice Department — a claim the president has made about the Biden administration.
Biden’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump made the comments during lengthy remarks in the Oval Office, where the president and his allies made a series of claims about the impact of his anti-crime efforts in D.C. and top officials took turns heaping praise on him. While signing executive orders that aim to do away with cash bail, Trump repeatedly focused on the murder rate in the city, saying it had not seen a single person killed in 11 days — a change that he has been brandishing in recent days as he touts his administration’s efforts to address D.C. crime. That push has included federalizing the D.C. police force, deploying the National Guard and stepping up the federal law enforcement presence in the city.
Trump claimed that it has been “many years” since D.C. went a week without a murder. Publicly available crime data from the Metropolitan Police Department, however, indicate that D.C. went 16 days without a murder earlier this year, from Feb. 25 to March 12.
Trump argued that the city’s restaurants are experiencing a “boomtown,” a comment that is uncertain, as restaurant employees in a D.C. neighborhood with a large immigrant community told NBC News last week that business was declining due to Trump’s policies. His deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who attended the signing with Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, claimed that people in D.C. had resumed wearing jewelry and carrying purses because of Trump’s anti-crime push.
“They’re wearing jewelry again. They’re carrying purses again,” Miller said. “People had changed their whole lives in this city for fear of being murdered, mugged and carjacked. It is a literal statement that President Trump has freed 700,000 people in this city who were living under the rule of criminals and thugs.”
At the start of the operation, though, crime in D.C. was down 26% compared to last year. Many city residents, too, have slammed the deployments and said it is scaring Washingtonians.
The president has frequently claimed that Democrats weaponized the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies against him, pointing to his criminal indictments related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents, as well as his conviction related to falsifying business records, which were dropped when he was elected to a second term. Trump repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the cases against him.
Democrats have gone after Trump’s comments, arguing that the Trump administration’s several investigations into his political foes constitute the exact weaponization that he claimed they pursued against him.
The Justice Department is investigating Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and New York Attorney General Letitia James on allegations of mortgage fraud.
James led a civil fraud case against Trump, and Schiff served as the lead House manager in Trump’s first impeachment trial. They denied any wrongdoing.
NBC News has also previously reported that the Justice Department is in the initial stages of an investigation into James’ handling of her civil fraud case against Trump, which her attorney likened to a “political retribution campaign.”
Trump also threatened Friday to fire a Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook, if she did not resign after facing separate accusations of mortgage fraud. Cook said she won’t step down.
On Monday night, Trump said he was removing Cook from her post. Trump has been highly critical of the Federal Reserve for not adjusting interest rates as he would like.
And late last week, the FBI searched the home of former national security adviser John Bolton. A source familiar with the matter told NBC News at the time that the search was part of a “national security investigation in search of classified records.” Bolton did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment Friday.
Also on Monday, Trump left the door open to investigating former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a staunch critic of Trump who was among the Republicans who ran against him for president. Trump was referring to a 12-year-old scandal called “Bridgegate.“
“If they want to look at it, they can,” Trump said, responding to a question about whether the White House planned to investigate Christie. “You can ask Pam. I think we have other things to do, but I always thought he got away with murder.”
On Sunday, after Christie criticized him on ABC News’ “This Week,” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social, “For the sake of JUSTICE, perhaps we should start looking at that very serious situation again?”
Meanwhile, Trump’s allies in Congress have pushed to hear testimony from Biden’s circle about his mental acuity while in office, which Trump and Republicans claim was in decline but was covered up by the former president’s team. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has sought testimony from Biden’s former White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor and former White House aides, including his domestic policy adviser, Neera Tanden and his deputy chief of staff, Annie Tomasini.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/-going-brought-trump-vows-go-bidens-advisers-rcna227019
As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ramps up hiring, one of the first stops new officers make is to a training center just outside of Savannah, Georgia.
The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) is preparing to train up to 10,000 new ICE officers, as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s deportation efforts, and members of the media were given access to see the “lifecycle of a recruit.”
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, a graduate of the FLETC training course in 2007, told ABC News the agency is confident they’ll be able to staff up 10,000 new officers by the end of the year.
“We are taking a whole of government approach,” he told ABC News. “We have to be cognizant of who we are hiring, but I think it is an achievable goal.”
The process starts with a security screening and background check, once that passes, the entire time can take as little as eight weeks from training to an officer is on the street, according to ICE.
The training center is run by former ICE Acting Director Caleb Vitello, who said the agency cut the Spanish language portion of the training to speed up the hiring timeline.
Instead, ICE uses Spanish language software in the field which is faster, according to Vitello.
“The recruits here know the staff training them are professionals, and experts in the job they do,” Lyons said while standing outside of the recruit obstacle course.
Both Lyons and Vitello stressed that they did not want to compromise the quality of officers for quantity. The training academy runs more classes and goes six days a week, according to ICE, and they have four different sites around the country in which they run training.
Lyons said ICE can be picky about who is recruited because of the more than 121,000 applications the agency has received.
ABC News observed the Special Operations Team, a 12-person elite tactical training team, clear a house that is used for training purposes. That team is deployed when the threat levels are high and when they need to serve a warrant. There is one in every field office around the country, according to ICE.
Other law enforcement agencies, such as the Bureau of Prisons, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), also train at the center.
Lyons was also asked by ABC News about the masks worn by ICE officers. He said they are necessary because of the doxxing — the malicious sharing of personal information — he says agents are facing.
“I wish our officers didn’t have to wear them,” Lyons said. “You have this crazy rhetoric where people are calling for threats against ICE officers and threats to agents.”
During the Biden administration and at the beginning of the Trump administration, Lyons said ICE officers weren’t wearing masks, but he said now the threat has increased.
“People are trying to identify them and post their photos online, dox them, threaten their families, it’s totally unacceptable,” Lyons said. “What we need is elected officials to work with us to hold these people accountable that dox ICE agents.”
