Good morning.
This morning, Trump has canceled Iran peace talks and called a Situation Room meeting as a new Iranian proposal sits on the table. His Justice Department sent a letter demanding a historic preservation group drop its lawsuit over his $400 million White House ballroom — within hours of a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, using the attack as justification. Immigration courts are being packed with unqualified loyalists hired to rubber-stamp deportations. And inside a private prison in Texas, two children are collecting empty water bottles and hitting each other over the head with them because there is nothing else to do. Their family has been detained for three months. The girl just turned 11. There were no candles on her birthday cake. Corporate media is not giving these stories the weight they deserve. The FCC chair has made sure of that. And the Ellisons are remaking what used to pass for news. Let’s get into it.
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Trump Cancels Iran Talks, Calls Situation Room Meeting as New Proposal Sits on Table
Trump canceled the planned weekend trip by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan after deciding the 18-hour flight wasn’t worth it. “I see no point of sending them on an 18-hour flight in the current situation,” he told reporters Saturday. “The Iranians can call us if they want. We are not gonna travel just to sit there.”
He is now convening a Situation Room meeting Monday with his national security team to assess where things stand.
Iran has reportedly submitted a new proposal that would allow the Strait of Hormuz to reopen, with nuclear negotiations to follow after the blockade is lifted. That sequencing is the sticking point. The administration wants nuclear commitments first. Iran wants the blockade lifted first. One official told reporters that Iran’s latest offer still falls “well short” of the administration’s red lines. Another said the team is growing optimistic the naval blockade is working as pressure, while simultaneously growing skeptical that a negotiated deal is achievable.
The Strait has been effectively closed since the war began in February. Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil passes through it. Gas prices are sitting above $4 a gallon nationally. And Trump, who has repeatedly claimed the war is nearly over and that Iran has “agreed to everything,” cannot declare victory while the waterway stays shut.
A commander in chief who treats nuclear diplomacy like a hostage standoff, refusing to send envoys because the flight is too long, has stopped being a negotiator and started being a performance artist. The modern history of the Middle East is littered with American presidents who confused looking tough with being effective, and the bill always comes due in oil prices, in body bags, or in both.
The White House told reporters the U.S. “will not negotiate through the press.” What it will do, apparently, is hold a Situation Room meeting and wait for the Iranians to call.
The DOJ Used a Shooting at the Correspondents; Dinner to Demand a Historic Preservation Group Drop Its Lawsuit
On Saturday night, a gunman ran through a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner before being tackled by law enforcement. Trump and members of his cabinet were evacuated.
By Sunday morning, Trump was on Truth Social demanding that the National Trust for Historic Preservation drop its lawsuit challenging his $400 million White House ballroom project. By Sunday afternoon, his Acting Attorney General had sent the group’s lawyers a letter threatening to move to dissolve the lawsuit’s injunction by 9 a.m. Monday if they did not voluntarily dismiss the case.
“Put simply, your lawsuit puts the lives of the President, his family, and his staff at great risk,” the letter read.
Todd Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney before becoming Acting Attorney General, posted the letter on X with the caption: “It’s time to build the ballroom.”
This is the oldest authoritarian playbook there is. You take a crisis, real or convenient, and you use it to bulldoze whatever rule of law happens to be standing between you and what you want. The Department of Justice is supposed to represent the American people, not function as a billionaire president’s personal demolition crew working overtime to clear the lot for his ballroom.
The argument the DOJ is making is that if the ballroom existed, Trump would not have needed to attend events at outside venues like the Washington Hilton, where the shooting occurred. Critics pointed out immediately that a president cannot be confined to a bunker for all public events and that the argument collapses under any scrutiny. “The argument is an absurdity,” said one public interest attorney.
A federal judge had previously ruled the ballroom cannot proceed without congressional approval. A federal appeals court has allowed construction to continue while litigation plays out. Republican senators and House members are now pledging to introduce legislation to authorize and fund the project directly, with the shooting serving as the stated justification.
Trump himself, when asked about online conspiracy theories that the whole event was staged, said the theorists were “more sick than they are con people,” but added, “usually they wait about two or three months to start saying that.”
Trump Is Packing the Immigration Courts with Unqualified Loyalists
The Justice Department has fired more than 100 immigration judges since Trump took office, an unprecedented purge. A similar number have retired or resigned. More than 140 new judges have been appointed to replace them.
Two-thirds of the new judges have no immigration law experience listed in their biographies, a sharp break from prior practice. Only 24 percent had worked for DHS, ICE, or the immigration courts. Training has been cut from five weeks to three.
The recruitment campaign is explicit about its goals. The Justice Department has been advertising for applicants to become a “deportation judge” and help “define America for generations.” New hires are being offered signing bonuses of up to 25 percent, salaries of up to $207,500, the ability to work from home, and even the flexibility to keep their day jobs and moonlight as judges on the side.
The Founders built an independent judiciary because they understood that the difference between a republic and a dictatorship often comes down to whether the judge in front of you owes their job to the law or to the man in charge. Trump isn’t abolishing the immigration courts. He’s doing something more dangerous, which is filling them with people whose entire incentive is to deport first and ask questions never.
One military lawyer who became a whistleblower after witnessing the process firsthand wrote to Congress that the truncated training is “completely inadequate and highly biased” and that the overall message was “pushing as many cases as possible, with little regard for scheduling, due process, or procedural rights.” He was fired after two months.
A former ICE official who was herself hired as an immigration judge under Biden and then fired before she could hear a single case described the effort plainly: “They’re trying to create a malleable workforce that will do what they want without question.”
These are the judges who will decide whether families are deported. Many of them have never handled an immigration case. Some of them have other jobs.
Two Children in a Texas Detention Center Are Passing the Time Hitting Empty Water Bottles on Each Other’s Heads
Manpreet is 11. Her brother Guri is 12. Their family has been held at the Dilley immigration detention center in Texas since February, after they showed up for what they believed was a routine check-in appointment to update photos for their immigration file.
Their father, Jagdish, converted from Sikhism to Catholicism in India and says the family fled persistent threats and violence because of his faith. They arrived in the United States in 2022 seeking asylum and settled in Los Angeles near family. When they received a notice to check in at an immigration office, they assumed it was about updated photos of the kids, who were growing fast. An officer told them they were being detained.
Three months later, Manpreet has lost at least six pounds after repeated vomiting. Guri has been noticing blood in his stools but cannot get a referral to a specialist. Their mother Gurwinder’s arthritis has become so severe that Manpreet helps her out of bed each morning, fixes her hair, and gets her dressed. Gurwinder’s diabetes has become harder to control because the steroids she was prescribed to manage the arthritis interfere with it. Jagdish is managing leg pain from a prior car accident with over-the-counter painkillers.
On Manpreet’s birthday, her parents assembled a cake from commissary snacks. The cafeteria sang happy birthday. There were no candles. If there had been, she said, she would have wished to get out.
Every generation in American history gets asked what it tolerated, and the answer for ours is being written right now inside a private prison in Texas where an 11-year-old girl wished on a birthday cake she didn’t have candles for that her family could simply go home. A country wealthy enough to build $400 million ballrooms cannot pretend it lacks the resources to treat asylum-seeking children with basic dignity, and a country that does both at the same time has a moral accounting coming.
The children cannot find English-language books in the library. The school classes are taught primarily in Spanish. Guri stopped attending after his mother’s health deteriorated because he could not concentrate. He and his father spend most of their days watching TV. In the evenings he plays volleyball with other detained children. He gets sad, he said, each time one of his new friends is released.
“It makes me think about how I wish we could leave too.”
The facility is operated by the private prison company CoreCivic. DHS did not respond to specific questions about the children’s access to education, food quality, or medical care.
Jagdish began to cry when asked what he worries about most. “I worry I came here to save myself,” he said, “and I ended up ruining three lives.”
This Is Why Raw America Exists – and Why We Need You
Let’s be honest about what this morning looks like.
A president is using a shooting at a press dinner to bulldoze a lawsuit protecting a historic landmark. Immigration courts are being staffed with people who have never handled an immigration case, hired specifically because they will not push back. Two children are in a detention center hitting empty water bottles on each other’s heads because there is nothing to read and nowhere to go. And the press that is supposed to cover all of this is being bought by the billionaires who benefit from the silence, threatened by regulators who have spelled out what happens to broadcasters that step out of line, and handed to Trump allies who have said directly that the coverage will change once the deals close.
Raw America was built to be the thing that doesn’t get bought.
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STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Supreme Court Allows Texas to Use Gerrymandered Map for 2026 Midterms. On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States greenlit Texas’ mid-decade redistricting map that redraws five previously Democratic-held districts to be more favorable for Republicans. Voting rights groups had sued over the maps, arguing that they purposefully disenfranchised racial minorities in violation of the Voting Rights Act and the 14th and 15th Amendments.
Trump Erupts at Norah O’Donnell After She Reads from Shooter’s Manifesto. During a Sunday interview with 60 Minutes’ Norah O’Donnell, President Donald Trump lashed out at the CBS anchor when she read portions of alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter Cole Tomas Allen. When she read Allen’s claim that he felt compelled to act because he didn’t want a “pedophile, rapist and traitor” to govern on behalf of Americans, Trump insisted “I didn’t rape anybody” and called O’Donnell “disgraceful” multiple times. A New York jury in 2023 found Trump civilly liable for the sexual abuse of journalist E. Jean Carroll in 1996.
Republican Raises Alarms About Security Failure at Correspondents’ Dinner. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) is calling on the Trump administration to reconsider having multiple members of the presidential line of succession present in the same toom after the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. McCaul pointed out to CNN host Dana Bash that Trump, Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) were all present at the time of the shooting, and had there been an explosive device in the room, Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Grassley would have been president in their stead.
Melania Trump Points Finger at Jimmy Kimmel for WHCD Shooting. First Lady Melania Trump is now lashing out at ABC late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel for the most recent attempt on the president’s life. On Thursday night, prior to the incident, Kimmel performed a parody of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and joked that the first lady had the “glow of an expectant widow.” Melania later wrote on her official X account that Kimmel was a “coward” who “deepens the political sickness within America.”
California Billionaire Tax Likely to Appear on November 2026 Ballot. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is the main organizer behind California’s proposed billionaire tax, recently announced that it obtained more than 1.5 million petition signatures in favor of putting the proposed billionaire tax on the California ballot. If the state deems 875,000 of those signatures to be valid, the proposal would be put up to a vote in November. The tax would impose a one-time tax of five percent on all assets in excess of $1.1 billion, with most of the revenue going toward healthcare.
