pelespirit

• The FBI Director

Before becoming FBI director, Kash Patel appeared eight separate times on a podcast hosted by far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, who promotes Holocaust denial. Peters posted a photo of himself holding Hitler's Mein Kampf with the message "visionary leadership." In recent days, he attacked the founder of Barstool Sports, Dave Portnoy, with antisemitic vitriol.

• The White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security

Paul Ingrassia, currently serving as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, has ties to multiple figures widely known for promoting antisemitism.

• The communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget

Before joining the Trump administration as the communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget, Rachel Cauley served on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project. The nonprofit group was founded in direct response to the arrest of Hale-Cusanelli on Jan. 6 charges.

• An official at the Department of Justice

Trump appointed conservative activist Ed Martin to multiple Department of Justice roles, after his nomination for U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, failed. Martin's ties to Hale-Cusanelli played a key role in the collapse of his nomination to that role.

For too long, healthcare has been dictated by insurance companies and hospital corporations. Healthcare decisions need to be made by physicians and advanced practice clinicians (APC), not by administration looking at what a patient is costing them. We are striking to have a voice in our working conditions to ensure we can provide the best care for our patients.

She told staff that, in nearly two weeks, ICE investigators had visited 1,500 residences of unaccompanied minors. Agents had uncovered a handful of instances of what she said were cases of sex and labor trafficking. Salazar did not provide details but said identifying even one case of abuse is significant.

“Those are my marching orders,” Salazar told staffers. “While I will never do something outside the law for anybody or anything, and while we are operating within the law, we will expect all of you to do so and be supportive of that.”

Salazar said she expected an increase in the number of children taken from their sponsors and placed back into federal custody, which in the past has been rare.

Since Salazar took charge, ORR has instituted a raft of strict vetting rules for sponsors of immigrant children that the agency argues are needed to ensure sponsors are properly screened. Those include no longer accepting foreign passports or IDs as forms of identification unless people have legal authorization to be in the U.S. The resettlement agency also expanded DNA checks of relatives and increased income requirements, including making sponsors submit recent pay stubs or tax returns. (The IRS recently announced that it would share tax information with ICE to facilitate deportations.)

A judge in the US state of Wisconsin has been charged for allegedly helping a Mexican man evade immigration officials through a back door during an arrest attempt.

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested in April. Now a federal grand jury has approved the two charges against her, which could see the judge face a prison term.

It marks a further escalation of Donald Trump's sweeping crackdown on immigration, and has provoked an outcry from Democrats, who accuse the Trump administration of attacking the judicial system.

The OMB (Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President) memo gives agencies until May 19 to start collecting building occupancy data. That data includes a summary of daily occupancy totals for each day of the week and the average occupancy of each building based on a two-week average. OMB expects full implementation by July 4.

The OMB memo rescinds a 2024 Biden administration memo that also set targets for reducing underutilized office space.

“Even in corporate headquarters or law firms, it’s unusual to find more than 70% utilization on a given day, because people are sick, on travel or visiting a project site,” the former official said.

Republican lawmakers repeatedly pressed the Biden administration for federal building occupancy data as agencies gradually relaxed pandemic-era remote work and telework policies. But the former GSA real estate official said occupancy data is a constantly moving target.

“On a given day, some people may have just been hired, some people may have quit. There are contractors who occupy government space. They don’t typically get counted in your head count, so you’re not exactly sure how many of those people there are,” the official said. “This metric is difficult.”

The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it is cutting an additional $450 million in grants to Harvard University through eight federal agencies, on top of the $2.2 billion already frozen last week.

In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it “briefly slowed aircraft in and out of the airport while we ensured redundancies were working as designed.

“Operations have returned to normal.’’

That came after Duffy announced plans to reduce the number of flights arriving and departing from Newark for the “next several weeks” and would meet with the airport’s major carriers to discuss the issues. Flight reductions, he said, would target the hours when international flights arrive.

Duffy said he wanted to raise the mandatory retirement age for air traffic controllers from 56 to 61, to help offset a shortage of about 3,000 air traffic controllers. After the first Newark failure, on 28 April, the union representing air traffic controllers said several members were placed on trauma leave.

“While we cannot quickly replace them due to this highly specialized profession, we continue to train controllers who will eventually be assigned to this busy airspace,” the FAA said earlier in May.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announces he is placing a hold on all DOJ nominees after AG Pam Bondi signed off on President Trump accepting a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar's royal family. Schumer also calls on Bondi to testify.

The broad wording of the proposal would prevent states from enforcing both existing and proposed laws designed to protect citizens from AI systems. For example, California's recent law requiring health care providers to disclose when they use generative AI to communicate with patients would potentially become unenforceable. New York's 2021 law mandating bias audits for AI tools used in hiring decisions would also be affected, 404 Media notes. The measure would also halt legislation set to take effect in 2026 in California that requires AI developers to publicly document the data used to train their models.

The Qatari Defense Ministry is talking to the White House about transferring the luxury-configured Boeing jet to the Pentagon, which would oversee its retrofitting into a makeshift Air Force One. But a private contractor would have to rip it apart to turn the jet into a flying White House for the president with secure communications and classified upgrades, according to former Air Force officials and lawmakers, an expensive and complicated prospect that could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

“This isn’t really a gift,” said Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, which oversees executive airlift. “You’d basically have to tear the plane down to the studs and rebuild it to meet all the survivability, security and communications requirements of Air Force One. It’s a massive undertaking — and an unfunded one at that.”

The two officials—Paul Perkins, an associate deputy attorney general, and Brian Nieves, a deputy chief of staff and senior policy counsel—were seeking access to the U.S. Copyright Office but were denied entry at around 9 a.m., sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity told The New York Times.

Despite Trump’s appointment of Blanche as acting librarian of Congress, library staff have reportedly been recognizing Robert Newlen as their interim replacement instead, according to The Times’ sources. Newlen was principal deputy librarian and Hayden’s second-in-command.

Staff seem to be waiting for direction from Congress, with Newlen additionally sending an email to employees saying he did not recognize Blanche’s appointment as valid, according to Politico.

The Trump administration has accused the current South African government of pushing racist, anti-white policies through affirmative action laws and a recently passed land expropriation law that Trump claims allows for the wrongful seizure of Afrikaners’ land.

Chrispin Phiri, a spokesperson for South Africa’s Foreign Ministry, called the administration’s allegations “unfounded” in a statement released last week, saying they “do not meet the threshold of persecution required under domestic and international refugee law.”