Live updates: Top Trump homeland security officials to face questions at Senate oversight hearing – NBC News

As the Trump administration prepares to close the Kennedy Center for a two-year renovation, the head of Washington’s performing arts center has warned its staff about impending cuts that will leave “skeletal teams.”

In a Tuesday memo obtained by The Associated Press, Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell told staff that “departments will obviously function on a much smaller scale with some units totally reduced or on hold until we begin preparations to reopen in 2028,” promising “permanent or temporary adjustments for most everyone.”

Over the next few months, he wrote, department heads would be “evaluating the needs and making the decisions as to what these skeletal teams left in place during the facility and closure and construction phase will look like.” Grenell said leadership would “provide as much clarity and advance notice as possible.”

The Kennedy Center is slated to close in early July. Few details about what the renovations will look like have been released since Trump announced his plan at the beginning of February. Neither Trump nor Grenell have provided evidence to support claims about the building being in disrepair, and last October, Trump had pledged it would remain open during renovations.

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Alex Bores, a New York state lawmaker at the center of the political fight over the future of artificial intelligence, released an eight-point plan for a national AI framework yesterday, wading further into the issue that is defining his campaign for Congress.

Bores, one of about a dozen contenders seeking the Democratic nomination in New York’s deep-blue, open 12th Congressional District, unveiled the plan as he faces opposition from some of the biggest national players in AI, as well as support from some others.

The dynamic has elevated him in his House contest, where he has already faced seven figures worth of attack ads from a super PAC funded by AI industry leaders — and raised hundreds of thousands from workers at other AI companies.

In an interview with NBC News, Bores said that given how quickly AI is advancing, there’s a chance most of the plan will need to be reworked. That’s the reality of how different the state of the technology might be by then and a big reason why he wanted to put his ideas on paper now.

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Six survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse and two members of another accuser’s family said they felt “degraded” during yesterday’s contentious House Judiciary Committee hearing, at which Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to face them and apologize.

Several Epstein survivors and their relatives were on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers grilled Bondi for over five hours about several matters, including the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein case. She was specifically questioned about why released files were heavily redacted and why several survivors’ names were not.

“There was such a lack of empathy today. There was such a lack of, honestly, humanity today,” Dani Bensky said on NBC’s “Hallie Jackson NOW.”

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Trump’s policies and personal conduct regularly generate fierce backlash from his political adversaries. But over the last two months, fresh counterblasts are coming from an unexpected quarter: his allies.

Three House Republicans joined Democrats on Tuesday on a rare procedural vote to rebuke the president and GOP leadership, which paved the way for more GOP lawmakers to vote for a resolution to block Trump’s Canada tariff yesterday. The final head count of Republicans who backed that resolution as it was adopted, with mostly Democratic votes: six.

A Republican governor who leads a national association representing governors of both parties said this week that the group would not attend a typically bipartisan White House meeting because Democrats were not invited. Trump later said all Democratic governors were also invited — with two exceptions.

And last week, Republicans inside and outside Washington rebuked Trump for sharing a social media video that depicted former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes.

The dynamic is playing out across the country and around the globe — on issues from Trump’s posts about the Obamas and slain Hollywood director Rob Reiner to the tactics of his mass deportation campaign and the implementation of his tariffs. But the wave of pushback may be most noteworthy as an indicator of where Republicans stand heading into the midterm elections in November.

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The Environmental Protection Agency today plans to repeal the legal framework that underpins its power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

“President Trump will be joined by Administrator Lee Zeldin to formalize the rescission of the 2009 Obama-era endangerment finding,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a briefing earlier this week. “This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history, and it will save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations.”

Known as the endangerment finding, the EPA’s 2009 decision says that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are heating the Earth and that warming threatens public health and welfare. It therefore functions, under the Clean Air Act, as the linchpin for rules that set emissions standards for cars and trucks and require fossil fuel companies to report their emissions, among others.

The move is expected to upend most U.S. policies aimed at reducing climate pollution — if the repeal can withstand court challenges from environmental groups, which had already been preparing to sue.

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Leaders of a right-wing separatist movement in Canada say they’ve discussed everything from switching over to U.S. currency to creating a new military in conversations with U.S. officials from the State and Treasury departments at three meetings in the past year.

Leaders of the Alberta Prosperity Project seek to place a referendum on separating Alberta — the conservative-leaning province often referred to as the Texas of Canada — from the rest of the country on the ballot this year. They said a fourth meeting with Trump administration officials in Washington, D.C., is tentatively planned in the coming weeks to further discuss a transition process should their effort prove successful.

“For those of us who are very much in support of Alberta becoming a sovereign country, it’s heartening to us at each of the three meetings that we’ve had with the U.S. administration to be informed that the entire U.S. administration is supportive of Alberta becoming a sovereign country,” Dennis Modry, a co-founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project, said in an interview.

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The Trump administration is dramatically expanding an effort to revoke U.S. citizenship from foreign-born Americans as it works to curb immigration, according to two people familiar with the plans.

Over the past several months, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency within Homeland Security that’s responsible for legal immigration, has been sending experts to its offices around the country or reassigning staff to focus on whether some citizens processed through those offices could now be denaturalized, these people said.

The goal of the emphasis on naturalized citizens is to supply the office of immigration litigation with between 100 to 200 possible cases per month, one of the people familiar with the plans said. Such cases have typically been very rare, involving people who concealed criminal history or previous human rights violations during their application process. The quota that was first reported by The New York Times. 

By comparison, throughout the four years of President Donald Trump’s first term, the administration formally filed a total of 102 such cases, according to the Justice Department.

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Top Trump immigration enforcement officials will testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this morning.

Lawmakers will question Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE; Rodney Scott, the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection; and Joseph Edlow, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The three men testified before House lawmakers earlier this week, where they faced questions about the Trump administration’s aggressive and deadly immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota and elsewhere.