Voting rights advocates say that the FBI’s actions in Fulton County, Georgia today – where the bureau has executed a search warrant for records related to the 2020 election – represent an attempt by the Trump administration “to see what they can get away with elsewhere”.

“We now live in a country where the sitting president attempts to undermine elections when he doesn’t like the results,” said Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, an organization focused on reducing barriers to voting. “By seizing ballots in Fulton County, the FBI is doing the president’s bidding to placate his delusions about the 2020 election. Six years later, they still can’t come to grips with the fact that they lost, and now they’re willing to tear down the American election system out of pure spite.”

“If they’re allowed to take ballots here, then what would stop them from seizing ballots or voting machines in any future election in a county or state where their preferred candidates lose? The Trump administration’s tactic has been clear from the beginning: If the results don’t go our way, we’re going to make up lies and see what sticks,” she added.

A federal judge in Minnesota has canceled a contempt of court hearing for a lead ICE official, but also noted that the agency has failed to comply with nearly 100 court orders since 1 January.

Chief US district judge Patrick J Schiltz in Minneapolis canceled acting ICE chief Todd Lyons’s appearance after the agency released a wrongly detained Ecuadorean man. At the same time, Schiltz noted that ICE had failed to comply with 96 court orders in 74 cases.

“ICE is not a law unto itself. ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this court, but, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated,” he said in the order.

Here’s a bit more on the third No Kings protest announced today and planned for 28 March.

My colleague Lex McMenamin reports:

A third No Kings protest will be held on 28 March, organizers announced on Wednesday. Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, one of the groups coordinating No Kings, said that he expected it to be “the biggest protest in American history”.

Protests will be held nationwide, with a flagship event in Minnesota’s Twin Cities – Minneapolis and St Paul – where this month federal immigration agents killed two residents, Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, amid their escalated operations in the region.

Levin said No Kings 3 was a response to many Americans’ growing outrage over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) “reign of terror” in communities across the country. The coalition behind the No Kings protests also hosted a mass mobilization “weekend of action” immediately following Good’s death, which included more than 1,000 protests, vigils and other events. According to recent polling from YouGov, more Americans now support abolishing ICE than oppose it.

Donald Trump has announced the formation of a new National Fraud Enforcement division of the justice department and has nominated a justice department official, Colin McDonald, to lead it as a new assistant attorney general, in a post on his social media platform.

Trump said he had created the division to “catch and stop FRAUDSTERS that have been STEALING from the American People” and said his administration had “uncovered Fraud schemes in States like Minnesota and California”, both states whose Democratic governors Trump has feuded with.

The nomination, for a new post that will require Senate confirmation, was previewed earlier this month by JD Vance, the vice-president, at a White House news conference. Vance’s announcement attracted attention at the time because he said the new justice department division “will be run out of the White House under the supervision of me and the president of the United States”. Currently, fraud cases are handled by the justice department’s criminal division.

In that 8 January news conference, Vance boasted of what he called the success of the effort to crack down on benefit fraud in Minnesota and said “we also want to expand this”.

He added:

We know that the fraud isn’t just happening in Minneapolis. It’s also happening in states like Ohio. It’s happening in states like California. And so, what we’re doing, in order to help coordinate this remarkable interagency effort from the Trump administration but also to make sure that we prosecute the bad guys and do it as swiftly and efficiently as possible, is we are creating a new assistant attorney general position who will have nationwide jurisdiction over the issue of fraud.

Now, of course, that person’s efforts will start and focus primarily in Minnesota, but it is going to be a nationwide effort, because unfortunately the American people have been defrauded in a very nationwide way … We’ve never seen fraud like this in the history of our country …

We’re going to make the nomination hopefully in the next few days … But this is the person who is going to make sure that we stop defrauding the American people. Here’s one final thing I’ll say about this. I’ve heard a lot of people say that we need a special council to investigate fraud in the United States of America.

I actually agree and that’s what this position does. It has all the benefits, all the resources, all the authority of a special counsel, but with two crucial differences. Number one, it will be run out of the White House under the supervision of me and the president of the United States. And number two, it’s actually constitutionally legitimate.

As you guys may know, the special counsel statute has some major constitutional questions. When we get the bad guys, we want to make sure we get them permanently and they don’t have some legal technicality they can get out of which is why we set it up as an associate attorney general.

Shortly after she appeared alongside Donald Trump this afternoon, musician Nicki Minaj posted a photograph on social media of her new Trump Gold Card.

Launched in December, the program allows wealthy foreign individuals to buy a US “golden visa” for $1m.

An official government webpage promises US residency “in record time” with the new “Trump Gold Card” – once applicants have paid a $15,000 processing fee to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), passed a background check and paid up $1m.

We report more on the “gold card” here:

Joining Omar in Minneapolis today is Ayanna Pressley, a Democratic congresswoman. The Massachusetts representative repeated the ongoing calls for the impeachment of the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.

“We need to abolish ICE and dispense the systems of oppression that have gotten us to this point,” Presley said.

At the Karmel Mall of Somalia in Minneapolis, Representative Ilhan Omar addressed residents and the press a day after she was attacked at a town hall event.

In her opening remarks, the Democratic congresswoman didn’t reference the attack, but condemned the ongoing immigration surge in the Twin Cities.

“We know this not about public safety … It’s political retribution,” she said.

Omar also said the killings of two US citizens, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, were “entirely avoidable”.

“No immigration enforcement agent should ever be allowed to act as a judge, jury and executioner,” she added.

Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s “border czar”, is scheduled to hold a press conference in Minneapolis on Thursday, just two days after he arrived in the city and took over the federal immigration enforcement surge in the Twin Cities from Gregory Bovino.

He’s set to speak to reporters at 7am CT/8am ET.

An immigration judge has granted asylum to Chinese national Guan Heng, who secretly filmed human rights abuses at detention facilities in Xinjiang.

Guan, who applied for asylum after entering the United States in 2021, has been in custody since he was picked up during an immigration enforcement operation in August 2025. Despite the judge’s ruling, Guan will remain in custody while the Department of Homeland Security decides whether it will appeal the judge’s ruling, which it has 30 days to do.

The parents of Alexi Pretti have retained a former federal prosecutor who helped Minnesota’s attorney general convict police officer Derek Chauvin of murder after he kneeled on George Floyd’s neck, killing him.

Pretti’s family has retained Steve Schleicher, a partner at the Minneapolis firm Maslon. Schleicher served as a special prosecutor in the 2021 trial over Floyd’s murder. Schleicher has taken on the case pro bono, PBS News reports.

Earlier this month, the family of Renee Good, who was also killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, retained another lawyer involved in the George Floyd case – the Chicago-based firm Romanucci & Blandin, which represented Floyd’s family.

The No Kings Coalition has announced it will hold another mass mobilization event on 28 March, centered around a flagship event in the Twin Cities.

The coalition, which brought together millions of Americans to protest Donald Trump’s presidency in 2025, launched an “Eyes on ICE” training program earlier this week, to train Americans to safely document federal law enforcement.

“The events in the last few weeks in Minnesota make clear what is at stake in America today,” said the American Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten, one of the leaders of the coalition. “We have a leader who acts like an unbridled king, as opposed to a president who abides by a legal and moral responsibility to the people of our country. Americans are fighting back, peacefully, with signs, whistles and cameras – from thousands in the bitter cold in Minnesota to millions across the country last October. It’s clear that courageous, everyday citizens refuse to be intimidated by our government’s abuse of power.”

During a press conference this afternoon, congressman Joaquin Castro provided more details on his meeting with five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father.

“His father said that Liam has been very depressed since he’s been at Dilley. That he hasn’t been eating well,” Castro said. “His father said that Liam has been sleeping a lot. That he’s been asking about his family, his mom and his classmates.”

Castro added that Liam seemed lethargic during their 30-minute meeting in the Dilley detention center’s courtroom, where Liam rested in his father’s arms.

“I let him know that his school and his community, his family and our country love him and we’re praying for him,” Castro said. “Liam Ramos should be released immediately.”

Congressman Joaquin Castro met with five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father at the Dilley detention center in Texas today.

In a post on social media, Castro shared a photograph of Liam resting in his father’s arms. Castro added that he told Liam “how much his family, his school, and our country loves him and is praying for him”.

Liam became a symbol of the wide reach of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in Minneapolis last week when he was detained on his way home from preschool. A photograph captured Liam in ICE custody while wearing a blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack.

Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of Liam’s school, said Liam and his father had been apprehended on their way home from school. An agent had taken Liam out of the car, led the boy to his front door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in, “in order to see if anyone else was home – essentially using a five-year-old as bait”, she said in a statement.

Senator Jon Ossoff has denounced a search warrant that FBI agents executed at a Fulton county elections office near Atlanta today, saying the Trump administration is still seeking to prove that Donald Trump falsely won the state of Georgia in the 2020 election.

“After losing Georgia in 2020, Donald Trump demanded state officials ‘find’ votes to change the outcome, tried to use DOJ to overturn it, and spread conspiracy theories that led to the Jan 6 sacking of the US Capitol. I suspect today’s raid is a continuation of this sore loser’s crusade, despite repeated audits and independent reviews confirming that Donald Trump was indeed defeated,” Ossoff said. “From Minnesota to Georgia, on display to the whole world is a President spiraling out of control, wielding federal law enforcement as an unaccountable instrument of personal power and revenge.”

My colleagues Sam Levine and George Chidi reported earlier today on the FBI search warrant:

Donald Trump lost Georgia in the 2020 election, and his false claims about voter fraud in Fulton county, home to Atlanta, were central to his efforts to try to overturn the election. Trump and allies repeated false claims that election workers pulled ballots out of suitcases after counting had ended. Those claims were debunked and Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s lawyers, was ordered to pay two election workers $148.1m in damages as part of a defamation suit.

Trump allies have nonetheless continued claiming something was amiss in Fulton county. The justice department’s civil rights division filed a lawsuit against the county in December seeking to force officials to turn over ballots from the 2020 election.

An image of Donald Trump holding hands with musician Nicki Minaj earlier today shows the president using concealer to cover something on his hand.

Minaj made a short appearance alongside the president ealier, after the president announced “Trump Accounts”, individual investment accounts for US children that will take effect in July as part of Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

As my colleague Carter Sherman reported, Minaj’s “comments mostly focused on how people are ‘bullying’ Trump, with whom Minaj briefly held hands”.

A closeup photograph of the two, shows concealer on Trump’s hand. In recent months, frequent discoloration on the president’s hands has prompted concerns about Trump’s health. The White House has claimed that the bruises are from shaking too many hands.

Ilhan Omar’s office believes that she was sprayed with apple cider vinegar at her town hall last night in Minneapolis, her spokesperson has told NBC News citing a preliminary report.

CNN earlier reported that forensic examiners had determined with high probability that the substance was apple cider vinegar, citing a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation.

The US Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged after its first rate-setting meeting of the year today, resisting enormous pressure from the White House to lower rates.

A majority of members in the Fed’s federal open market committee (FOMC) voted to pause interest rate cuts after slashing rates three times in the fall. Rates currently sit at a range of 3.5% to 3.75%.

The Trump administration has put unprecedented pressure on the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, to cut rates, with Donald Trump launching personal attacks on Powell and the justice department opening a criminal investigation into his handling of the refurbishment of the central bank’s offices.

The FOMC has 12 voting members and meets just eight times a year to set interest rates. The stakes of each meeting have been high during Trump’s second term. Though economists say that the Fed’s independence, as the US central bank, is key for economic stability, the president has unabashedly tried to bend the Fed to his economic agenda.

More on this story here:

Here is video filmed from inside Ecuador’s consulate in Minneapolis that shows an ICE agent trying to enter the building but being prevented by consulate staffers, according to the country’s foreign ministry.

Reuters confirmed the location as the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis, from the doors, windows, walls, ceiling fixtures and building across the street that are seen in the video, which matched file imagery of the consulate and the area. The date was verified by Ecuador’s ministry of foreign affairs that said an ICE agent attempted to enter the consulate’s facilities in Minneapolis on Tuesday.

Also in that ABC News interview last night, Donald Trump called senators Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, and Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, “losers” after they became the first Republican lawmakers to call for the DHS secretary, Krisi Noem, to lose her job.

They’re terrible senators. One is gone and the other should be gone. What Murkowski says – she’s always against the Republicans anyway. And Tillis decided to drop out. So you know, he lost his voice once he did that.

Tillis told CNN this morning he was “thrilled” that Trump thinks he’s a loser, adding: “That makes me qualified to be homeland security secretary and senior adviser to the president.”

As we’ve been reporting, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has confirmed that the two officers involved in the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti on Saturday have been placed on administrative leave as “is the standard protocol”.

But it’s currently unclear exactly when they were placed on leave. As others have pointed out, federal law enforcement officers who have been involved in a shooting are typically placed on administrative leave for the course of the investigation.

This would directly contradict what border patrol commander Greg Bovino said in the aftermath of the shooting. On Sunday, he told a press conference that “all agents that were involved in that scene are working, not in Minneapolis, but in other locations, that’s for their safety.”

I’ve reached out to CBP for clarification and I’ll update you here when I hear back.

Senator Rand Paul, a Republican, said on Fox News this morning that “no American believes that” Alex Pretti was “assaulting the officers”.

“When people watch that video and the government tells them, ‘Well, he was assaulting the police officers,’ nobody with any objectivity believes that’s what’s happening,” Paul, who represents Kentucky, said.

“No American believes he was assaulting the officers, in fact, the opposite appears to be true,” he added. “So we have to get some rules of the game.”

Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar and Massachusetts representative Ayanna Pressley will hold a news conference tonight in South Minneapolis.

A statement from Pressley’s office says:

At the invitation of Congresswoman Omar, Congresswoman Pressley will be in Minneapolis to meet with organizers and community members impacted by ICE’s violent operation in Minnesota, where they have murdered bystanders, terrorized schools and small businesses, and abducted children and parents.

The announcement adds that Omar and Pressley will take a tour of Karmel Mall on Wednesday, a hub holding over 100 small businesses and community organizations, and will “meet with these small business owners and hear firsthand how ICE’s actions are affecting tenants’ ability to sustain their businesses.”

The news conference is set to take place after the visit, it adds.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has reacted to last night’s attack on Representative Ilhan Omar, and said that Omar “showed incredible courage by continuing her town hall after being attacked last night”.

“It is shameful that, instead of condemning the attack, Trump escalated his rhetoric and targeted her once again,” Sanders added. “No more hatred and racism. This country belongs to ALL of us.”

Bruce Springsteen has released a new song in response to what he described as “the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis”.

Springsteen said in a statement on Tuesday that he wrote the song on Saturday and recorded it on Tuesday.

He said that the song, titled Streets of Minneapolis, is “dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good”.

He concluded his brief statement with: “Stay free, Bruce Springsteen.”

Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, has responded to Trump’s earlier comment that he is “playing with fire” after Frey said yesterday that “Minneapolis does not and will not enforce federal immigration laws”.

Frey wrote on X:

The job of our police is to keep people safe, not enforce fed immigration laws.

I want them preventing homicides, not hunting down a working dad who contributes to MPLS [Minneapolis] & is from Ecuador.

It’s similar to the policy your guy Rudy had in NYC. Everyone should feel safe calling 911.

Trump ally Rudy Giuliani was the Republican mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001. At the time, Giuliani was a prominent and fierce advocate for the rights of undocumented migrants, and defended the city’s sanctuary policies.

Earlier this morning, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, and his wife visited the memorial to Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, becoming very emotional as they paid their respects.

Asked by an ABC reporter if he thought there would be a shift in tone from the administration after his conversation with Donald Trump on Monday, Walz replied:

I’m not so interested in shift in tone. We just need them out of here, and we need accountability for what’s happened.

“You see the trauma in this community,” Walz told an NBC News reporter as he was leaving, adding that Minnesotans are “demanding justice” and want agents to leave.

He said that since his call with the president after the killings of Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents, he had seen no evidence of ICE withdrawing from the city.

Once again, to Renee and Alex’s family, Minnesota has a responsibility to get you justice. And Minnesota has a responsibility to show the rest of the nation just how wrong this is.

Non-profit hunger-relief organizations in Minnesota are calling for an immediate end to Operation Metro Surge, saying that the “chaos and violence” ICE has brought to the state has left people scared to leave their homes and impeded efforts to get food to people who are “stranded and hungry”.

The letter, signed by close to 100 organizations, states that “with so many Minnesotans staying home for fear of being racially profiled, unlawfully detained, separated from their families or worse, we have had to scramble to find new ways to get emergency food to where it’s needed most”.

Minnesotans have shown up to keep one another fed. Yet at every turn, ICE has made it harder to get food to hungry neighbors, including by following volunteers doing food deliveries, standing outside food shelf entrances, staging from our parking lots or near our facilities, and, in at least one instance, detaining a volunteer. This is on top of the impact on child hunger from missed school meals.

“Every human being deserves to eat,” the letter goes on. “This not should be a controversial statement, and it certainly isn’t a political one.”

For the above reasons, and out of deep concern for our neighbors, we stand united in calling for an immediate end to the surge in federal immigration activity in our state so that we can safely deliver food to neighbors in need and ensure that they can freely attend school and access healthcare and other lifesaving services without fear. Operation Metro Surge is hurting our neighbors, it is making us less safe, it is further dividing our communities, and it is making it harder to get food to Minnesotans in need. Our communities deserve better.

Democratic representative Ro Khanna, of California, has joined other lawmakers in calling for the Trump administration to condemn last night’s attack on Ilhan Omar and to “tone down the rhetoric targeting her”.

In a post on X, he said:

It is time @JDVance to not just condemn unequivocally the violent attack on @IlhanMN last night but to genuinely tone down the rhetoric targeting her. This is no longer about political debate. There are members of Congress who fear for their lives.

Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen, of Maryland, has said he is “relieved” that Ilhan Omar is alright after she was attacked at her town hall last night.

In a post on X, he added:

But Trump’s response was shameful — & Republicans should say so.His baseless & racist attacks against her have no doubt endangered her. His inability to condemn the attack is appalling.

Donald Trump, in a Truth Social post Wednesday morning, threw a warning shot at Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey after he said the city would not change its sanctuary policies to get federal authorities out of Minneapolis.

“Could somebody in his inner sanctum please explain that this statement is a very serious violation of the Law, and that he is PLAYING WITH FIRE!” Trump posted.

Representative of Nebraska Don Bacon is the latest on a small list of Republicans to speak out about the attack against representative Ilhan Omar.

“Political violence is always wrong,” he wrote on social media. “We always have the right to free speech and to petition the government, but political violence must be dealt with sternly”.

He added that the attacker “needs to spend sometime (sic) behind bars.”

The man accused of assaulting congresswoman Ilhan Omar has a reported history of sharing political posts, including one that criticised Omar, on social media.

According to CNN, the 55-year-old Minneapolis resident, who has been identified as Anthony James Kazmierczak through jail records, has shared political posts in the past, in. In 2021, he shared a political cartoon criticising Omar’s stance on security spending amid calls to defund police.

The outlet reports that he also reposted transphobic content made by conservative social media commentator Ben Shapiro. Also, after the death of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk in September, the accused attacker changed his social media profile picture to an image of Donald Trump speaking at a Turning Point USA event, later replacing it with a photo of Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk alongside Trump.