Trump reportedly open to deal on DHS funding as shutdown sees ICE agents deployed to US airports – US politics live

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Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, is scheduled to testify in a federal court on Tuesday in the trial of former Florida congressman, David Rivera, who is accused of secretly lobbying for Venezuela’s socialist government during Donald Trump’s first presidency.

Rubio and Rivera are longtime friends, having worked together in Florida state politics. It will mark the first time in more than four decades that a sitting cabinet member testifies in a criminal trial.

Prosecutors allege that Rivera and a co-defendant, Esther Nufehr, tried to influence the first Trump administration on behalf of the then Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and his foreign minister, Delcy Rodriguez, with the goal of lowering tensions and having US sanctions lifted.

The timing of the case seems paradoxical, in view of the fact that Maduro is now in US custody after being seized by US forces in a raid on his compound in Caracas in January and awaits trial on narco-trafficking charges. Rodriguez is now interim president, having apparently reached an agreement with the administration in which Rubio plays a prominent role.

The two defendants were indicted in 2022 in on money-laundering charges and for failing to register as a foreign agent. Prosecutors allege that they were recruited on a $50m contract for three months of lobbying work in 2017 for a US-arm of a Venezuela state oil company, PDVSA, which operates under the name CTGO.

The indictment accuses Rivera and Nuhfer of attempting to lobby Rubio - at a time when he was a Republican senator from Miami – and then White House adviser Kellyanne Conway on behalf of people in the top echelon of the Venezuelan government.

Bob Woodward, the doyen of Washington insider reporting, is brining out a new book that promises to lift the veil on half a century of unearthing political secrets.

“Secrets: A Reporter’s Memoir” will shine a light on how a lifetime of Woodward’s reporting on Washington’s movers and shakers, spanning Watergate – a story he helped break along with fellow Washington Post reporter, Carl Bernstein – to the Donald Trump era.

Publishers Simon & Schuster say the new memoir will come out on 29 September and will “lift the lid” on decades of reporting and interviews with the major figures in US politics over the decades.

Woodward, who turns 83 this week, has chronicled every presidency since Richard Nixon’s, which he and Bernstein helped to bring to a premature end.

He has written two books on Trump’s presidency, “Rage” and “Fear”, but has expressed doubts about authoring any further works on the current president, citing his high media exposure.

“I think we know who he is,” Woodward told AP. “He’s so transparent. He’s out there talking, two or three hours a day.”

Secretary of state Marco Rubio will meet with Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers in France on Friday for talks on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Middle East situation stemming from the US-Israel war on Iran, the state department said.

US allies are dealing with the fallout from president Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran late last month, which triggered strikes from Iran against its Gulf neighbors and against shipping that have stopped most transit through the strait of Hormuz.

Rubio, Trump’s top diplomat and national security advisor, will attend the G7 foreign affairs ministerial meeting taking place in Cernay-la-Ville, outside of Paris, principal deputy spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in a statement issued on Tuesday.

Trump used mail-in ballot despite trying to restrict mail-in ballots

President Donald Trump, who has been urging senators to limit mail-in voting by pushing through his Save America Act, cast his own ballot by mail in Tuesday’s special election in Palm Beach County.

Records from the county elections office show Trump, registered at his Mar-a-Lago residence, voted by mail in a race between Democrat Emily Gregory and Republican Jon Maples for a state legislative seat.

Officials confirmed the information is accurate, the Washington Post reported.

The vote comes as Trump pushes the Save America Act, a sweeping election reform proposal that includes restrictions on mail-in voting.

The bill would also require voters to provide proof of citizenship when they register and to present approved identification when they go to the polls, among other new rules that Trump and his most loyal supporters are pushing as part of an effort to assert more federal control over elections.

Trump may be open to deal on DHS funding - report

Senate Republicans believe Donald Trump may be open to a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after a White House meeting Monday night, signaling a shift from his earlier refusal to negotiate without action on the Save America Act.

Lawmakers briefed on the talks said Trump is willing to accept a package that does not fully fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including separating some enforcement funding to win Democratic support, The Hill reported.

Under the proposal, Republicans would later seek additional ICE funding through the budget reconciliation process and attempt to advance elements of the Save America Act in a follow-up bill.

“I think we showed him that we can run a parallel process where we can fund DHS now and have a second reconciliation bill that would put a down payment on some of the Save [America] Act,” said a person familiar with the meeting.

Supreme court to weigh Trump's power to limit asylum processing

The US supreme court is set on Tuesday to hear a defense by president Donald Trump’s administration of the government’s authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem US-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle more claims, Reuters reports.

The legal dispute centers on a policy called “metering” that the Republican president’s administration may seek to revive after it was dropped by Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden.

The policy allowed US immigration officials to stop asylum seekers at the border and indefinitely decline to process their claims.

The Trump administration has appealed a lower court’s finding that the policy violated federal law.

This policy is separate from the sweeping ban on asylum at the border that Trump announced after returning to the presidency last year. That policy also faces an ongoing legal challenge.

Under US law, a migrant who “arrives in the United States” may apply for asylum and must be inspected by a federal immigration official.

The narrow legal issue in the current case is whether asylum seekers who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border have arrived in the United States.

US democracy has settled into diminished state, experts find

The health of American democracy, as measured by those who study it most closely, has settled into a diminished state – stabilizing after a sharp decline last year, but still well below the levels recorded at any point before the start of Donald Trump’s second term, according to a new survey released on Tuesday.

The findings, by the nonpartisan democracy-tracking project Bright Line Watch, which surveys hundreds of US scholars at American colleges and universities, suggest that the erosion of norms detected after Trump’s return to the White House last year has hardened into a new baseline.

The public also holds a dim view of American democracy, the most recent survey found, but are sharply divided along partisan lines over how well the system is functioning.

The report draws on two waves of surveys. The first was conducted in late December and early January, a volatile period in which the Trump administration ramped up its immigration crackdown in Minnesota and US military forces bombed Venezuela and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

Given the gravity of both events, the researchers opted to field a second survey in February and early March to account for any shifts in perceptions, rather than release potentially outdated findings.

In the initial findings, experts’ views of US democracy rose to 60 on a scale of 100, up from a record-low of 53 in the early months of Trump’s second term.

The researchers suggest the uptick may be attributed to Democrats’ success in a string of off-year elections – a sign that “the playing field had not been tilted against the opposition and that free and fair elections were still possible”, the report states.

Following the toppling of Maduro, experts’ ratings slipped back to prior levels – 56 – and remained consistent in the second survey at 57.

Rubio to testify in ex-congressman's Venezuela foreign agent case

Secretary of state Marco Rubio is expected to testify on Tuesday in former congressman David Rivera’s criminal trial on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro’s government.

Rubio’s testimony will briefly take him out of Washington, where he has been engaged in high-level diplomacy around president Donald Trump’s war in Iran, and into the federal courthouse in downtown Miami, his hometown and where his political career began, Reuters reported.

Prosecutors say Rivera, who represented southern Florida in the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2013, lobbied politicians in 2017 to relax pressure on Maduro without disclosing that he was paid $20 million by a subsidiary of a Venezuelan state-owned company, a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Among the politicians both prosecutors and Rivera’s defense lawyers say he met with at the time was Rubio, his onetime roommate and then a senator for Florida.

Rubio and Rivera are both Cuban-American Republicans who have been outspoken critics of left-wing governments in Cuba and Venezuela throughout their careers.

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon says ICE agents at airports is 'test run' for polling station rollout

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

The former White House strategist and podcaster Steve Bannon has suggested the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers at airports is a “test run” for using them at polling stations in the midterms later this year.

Speaking to conservative lawyer Mike Davis on his ‘War Room’ podcast, Bannon asked:

We can use what’s happening with these ICE [officers] helping out at the airports, we can use this as a test run, as a test case to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections, sir?

Davis replied:

Yeah, I think we should have ICE agents at the polling places, because if you’re an illegal alien you can’t vote, right? It’s against the law, it’s a federal crime for you to vote in federal elections.

And so, if you’re an American citizen, you should be happy that ICE is there, because you’re not going to have illegal aliens canceling out your vote.

“Pick ‘em out of line starting today, and maybe the lines will get shorter,” Bannon added, as reported last night by The Hill.

Steve Bannon speaks during the Semafor World Economy Summit 2025 at Conrad Washington on April 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photograph: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

Security lines stretched for hours on Monday at US airports where unpaid Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) screening agents refused to report for duty and ICE agents deployed by Donald Trump were reportedly seen in a dozen cities.

ICE agents were seen at airports such as Atlanta, Newark, New Orleans and New York’s John F Kennedy. CNN reported nine other airports where ICE agents were seen.

In other developments:

• The US Senate confirmed Markwayne Mullin to serve as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, elevating the Republican senator to a role where he will be among the public faces of Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. The Republican controlled chamber confirmed Mullin largely along party lines, with a vote of 54-45. More here.

• Donald Trump has claimed there have been talks between the US and Iran over the past day in which the two sides had “major points of agreement”, appearing to avert a potentially severe escalation of the conflict. Tehran has denied the claim, in which Trump also speculated that a deal could soon be done to end the war. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson said no talks had been held with the US since the bombing campaign began 24 days ago. More here.

• The US supreme court appeared poised to curtail how mail-in ballots can be counted if they arrive after election day, which would affect laws in more than a dozen states during a midterm election year. The justices are considering Watson v Republican National Committee, a challenge over a Mississippi state law that was brought in 2024 by the Republican party. More here.

• California attorney general Rob Bonta said he has sued the US energy department to stop it from using a cold-war era law to restart the long-disputed Sable Offshore pipeline system linking the Santa Ynez offshore platform to California refineries. US energy secretary Chris Wright earlier this month restarted the pipelines using powers granted to him by Donald Trump through an executive order that invoked the Defense Production Act to supersede state laws. More here.

• Prediction markets are facing fresh bipartisan scrutiny in the US Senate as companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket continue to battle state-led efforts to regulate online betting. A bill was introduced in the US Senate on Monday that would ban federally regulated platforms from allowing wagers on sporting events, what would be a huge blow to marketplaces where billions of dollars have been traded on major events like the Super Bowl and the NCAA’s March Madness. More here.