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Trump administration deporting parents without children in apparent violation of its own policies
Maanvi Singh
The Trump administration is deporting a significant number of parents without asking them if they have children or allowing them to decide whether to bring their children with them, in apparent violation of its own policies, a major report has found.
In interviews with dozens of parents deported to Honduras, as well as physicians and psychologists, government officials and staff at reception centers for deportees, researchers found that many parents were deported quickly after they were detained, without a chance to arrange for the care of their children.
According to the report by the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), parents were forced to leave their children under the informal care of friends or family members who were also vulnerable to deportation. Others were separated from young children and toddlers – including a mother who was deported without her two-month-old baby.
Immigration officials “didn’t ask me anything”, one 22-year-old mother told researchers in Honduras, where she was sent without her two-year-old child. “They never said: ‘You have a daughter, you can bring her,’ because I would have brought [my daughter], she is very attached to me.”
Some pregnant and postpartum women, meanwhile, had arrived at reception centers in Honduras displaying “extremely high levels of emotional distress” including symptoms of anxiety and panic, according to staff at the centers.
A working lunch between president Donald Trump and visiting Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi has been cancelled, Jiji news agency said on Thursday.
It is understood the cancellation is to allow their summit meeting in the White House to last longer, citing unnamed Japanese government sources.
Democratic lawmakers move to impeach Pam Bondi after ‘fake’ Epstein briefing
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Furious Democratic lawmakers have moved to impeach attorney general Pam Bondi after walking out of a closed-door briefing about the Jeffrey Epstein files on Wednesday.
California congressman Robert Garcia branded the briefing “an outrageous fake hearing” after Bondi refused to commit to honoring a subpoena to testify under oath.
The committee voted to subpoena Bondi earlier this month, with five Republicans joining Democrats to demand that the attorney general answer questions about the justice department’s failure to properly release files from the federal investigations into Epstein.
“She is building a record,” Democratic representative Suhas Subramanyam, an Oversight Committee member, told Axios.
“She basically set up a fake hearing under the guise of a briefing, she has defied subpoenas that we’ve put out already and then she has continued to be evasive and combative with us.”
Representative Summer Lee said she had introduced impeachment articles “because [Bondi] has already been obstructing justice”. Lee is the second Democrat this month to introduce articles of impeachment against Bondi after Shri Thanedar.
Democratic representatives Yassamin Ansari and Rashida Tlaib are co-sponsors, while Lateefah Simon indicated support for the measure.
Bondi and deputy attorney general Todd Blanche went to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to try to quell bipartisan frustration over the justice department’s handling of millions of files related to Epstein’s sex trafficking investigation. But less than an hour into the briefing, Democrats walked out in protest of the arrangement.
Speaking outside the hearing room, Florida congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost said:
We asked her multiple times, are you going to come and speak with us under oath? She would not say yes. Filibuster, filibuster, filibuster, would not say yes.
Read our full report here:
In other developments:
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Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee pressed Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to explain why her deputy, Joe Kent, said in his resignation letter on Tuesday that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation”, which contradicts weeks of statements to the contrary by Donald Trump.
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Senator Markwayne Mullin fielded questions from his colleagues in a confirmation hearing to take over as Donald Trump’s new homeland security secretary.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation has started buying location data on Americans, the FBI director, Kash Patel, said under oath at the Senate intelligence committee worldwide threats hearing on Wednesday.
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Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, argued that the changes to election law Republicans call the Save America Act will make it more difficult for US citizens to vote
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By a vote of 53-47, Senate Republicans blocked a war-powers resolution that would have limited Donald Trump’s ability to prosecute the war on Iran he started last month.
