The supreme court today said it will review whether the Trump administration can enforce its policy of denying bond hearings for immigrants to determine whether they should remain detained while their cases are adjudicated.
The novel move to impose mandatory detention is another feature of Trump’s hardline immigration crackdown during his second term in office, and has now made its way to the top court after several appeals court judges ruled that the policy violated federal law and fails to provide immigrants with due process.
However, those decisions conflict with rulings by the fifth and eighth circuits – which ruled that immigrants accused of illegally entering and remaining in the US must be detained while their deportation cases are pending.
The case that will be part of the supreme court’s docket for the 2026-27 term focuses on Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, a citizen of Brazil, who authorities say he entered the US illegally two decades ago and applied for asylum in 2016 and was granted a work permit.
He sought a bond hearing after an immigration judge determined that his detention was mandatory after his September 2025 arrest. After Barbosa da Cunha sued, a federal judge ordered that be provided a hearing or released. An immigration judge found that Barbosa da Cunha did not present a flight risk or danger to persons or property, and ordered him released on bond. The administration appealed against the decision.
The number of people in immigration detention has shot up since Trump returned to office. It was more than 65,000 in July 2026, up from about 40,000 at the end of Joe Biden’s administration.
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
-
In remarks to supporters in Texas and Oklahoma, Donald Trump lied that James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate who is challenging Republican Ken Paxton, is a vegan, a word he mispronounced “vaygan”.
-
The White House refused to let CNN travel with Trump, but the president did stop to take questions from reporters for partidan rightwing outlets who were permitted to fly with him on Air Force.
-
Lawyers for Rebecca Cooke, a Wisconsin Democrat running for Congress, have threatened to sue Republican congressman Derrick Van Orden for posting AI-generated deepfake videos of her on social media.
Lawyers for Rebecca Cooke, a Wisconsin Democrat running for Congress, have threatened to sue Republican congressman Derrick Van Orden for posting AI-generated deepfake videos of her on social media.
The letter pointed to one recent clip posted by Van Orden on X, apparently created with Grok, which showed an AI version of Cooke apparently admitting to corruption.
A second deepfake created a fictional version of Cooke shouting at voters and calling them “peasants”. “I am the Anointed One. You will comply and you will vote for me,” the fake version of the candidate says. “That is an order from your DC masters.”
“Apparently unable to run a campaign based on the issues, you have made AI deepfakes a centerpiece of your attacks on Ms. Cooke, posting myriad such videos,” the letter to Van Orden reads.
It goes on:
Take, for example, the video posted to your X account on August 4, 2026. It purports to show Ms. Cooke speaking “on the campaign trail” in Eau Claire with former President Biden seated behind her. The video attributes to Ms. Cooke the statement that she seeks “to take advantage of as much corruption as possible and give every illegal alien free healthcare.” The video is pure fiction. The events depicted did not occur. Ms. Cooke never made the statements attributed to her. She does not support, and has never supported, the positions ascribed to her in this deepfake. You are airing this false content to attempt to fool the voters of Wisconsin into believing she said something she did not to harm her reputation for your own political gain.
Donald Trump’s remarks to supporters in Oklahoma on Thursday night repeated much of what he’s said at previous rallies, including a few hours ago in Texas.
The president did, however, add an aside about his favorite shows on two partisan conservative networks, Fox News and Newsmax, which perhaps helps to explain how genuinely baffled he appears to be at his plunging poll numbers.
“You know, I watch some of the shows – like Sean Hannity, Jesse, Laura,” Trump said, referring to the whole Fox primetime lineup of opinion hosts who openly support him: Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters and Laura Ingraham.
He then added three Newsmax hosts: “Greg Kelly, Rob, I mean… take a look at Finnerty. You take a look at Schmitt.”
“There are a lot of great shows,” the president said before adding: “We have more support than you think.”
“We have such great support,” Trump said, reflecting his impression that praise from cable news hosts is the true barometer of popularity. “But I wish we could have more, I wish we could have more the media support.”
Later in the speech, as if to illustrate that he does, indeed, live inside a rightwing media bubble, Trump told the crowd about how happy he was to see three men waiting to enter the arena praising him on television.
The president then had his aides play the clip for the crowd, before calling the men to the stage.
As Trump watched the clip along with the crowd, he did not appear to react to the fact that the interview included a mention of the fact that Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, had been caught on audio recently suggesting that Trump’s support for him was a drag on his campaign.
Later in the speech, Trump told the crowd more about his television viewing habits. “A person was on the other night, a beautiful woman defending me, and she was defending me against the radical left lunatics,” Trump said. “And she said, you know, ‘he did this, he did that, he did that, that, that, that’. And then she said … ‘I was writing the stuff last night for the show, and I ran out of paper’ … it was sort of cool.”
Donald Trump has begun speaking to supporters at a rally in Oklahoma, near the state’s border with Texas.
He began his remarks by repeating the same lie about Democrat James Talarico he told in Texas earlier: that the Senate candidate is a vegan who only pretends to eat meat. As he did in Texas, Trump repeatedly mispronounced vegan, as “vaygan”.
“You know, he’s a vaygan in Texas,” Trump said. “But now he’s trying to pretend he’s not a vaygan.”
In fact, Talarico is not a vegan and has frequently been photographed eating meat.
“I said it just before, I hate to bore you if you’ve heard it,” the president said, aware that he was repeating himself. “So he goes out and he goes to barbecues and he has meat. And every time he goes up, he says, ‘excuse me just for a moment’. He goes to the back of the tent and he throws up all of it.”
Trump told this same imaginary tale at the midterm Republican convention in Dallas last month, despite the fact that there is no evidence that Talarico ever said or did anything like this.
On Thursday evening, the Department of Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin primed a crowd of Oklahoma supporters awaiting Donald Trump with a conspiracy theory: Democrats are plotting a communist takeover of the nation.
“In order for them to take us to a socialist country and move us right into a communist country, they have to create chaos… they’ve got to change the demographics,” Mullin said, referring to the presence of undocumented immigrants.
“They’ve got to usher in chaos. And then they’ll come out and say ‘Hey look this government doesn’t work. You need us to take charge.’ And that’s how you end up with a communist country.”
Mullin spoke at the rally for about 15 minutes, urging the attendees to vote for what he framed as an existential battle over the nation’s future.
A federal law, known as the Hatch Act, is supposed to bar government officials from taking part in partisan campaign events, but the law is supposed to be enforced by the US Office of Special Counsel, which is currently run by a former staffer for the Republican chair of the Senate judiciary committee.
While complaints against Trump officials have been disregarded, the office recently announced sanctions against five officials who served in the Biden administration in 2024.
Good news, at least for those of you wanting to hear more from Donald Trump tonight: his motorcade has arrived at the Choctaw Event Center in Oklahoma after speeding there from his last speech outside Dallas.
According to Ana Ceballos, a Los Angeles Times correspondent who is serving as the print pool reporter on the trip, the van she was in reached 98 mph at one point during the drive.
We are still waiting for Donald Trump’s second rally speech of the day, at the Choctaw Event Center in Durant, Oklahoma.
According to a reporter traveling with the president, the event has been delayed by bad weather, which has forced Trump to drive there from his previous stop in Denton, Texas, rather than fly by helicopter.
The two locations are at least 90 minutes apart by car, so we might be waiting a while for Trump to join Mike Mazzei, the Republican candidate for Oklahoma governor who has spoken already.
The rally crowd is currently being treated to a Guns N’ Roses cover of Live and Let Die, according to a local news station’s livestream of the rally. Trump’s White House was criticized for using that song at rallies in 2020, as he downplayed the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In what is shaping up to be a good midterm for Democrats in most of the US, the governor’s race in Oregon could prove to be an exception.
Republican state legislator Christine Drazan is backed by 46% of voters, according to a new poll commissioned by Oregon Public Broadcasting, as the Democratic incumbent governor Tina Kotek hovered close behind with 44%.
A Republican has not been elected to the state’s top office in over four decades.
Kotek defeated Drazan in the 2022 governor’s race, winning 47% of the vote to Drazan’s 43.5%, and making history as one of the first two openly lesbian governors elected that year, along with Maura Healey of Massachusetts.
That race, however, featured a prominent third candidate, Betsy Johnson, a conservative Democrat, who is not on the ballot this year and took 8.6% of the vote.
As OPB reports, in 2022, Drazan led most public polls through November, only to see her lead collapse in the final days of the contest.
In the current rematch, Drazan has taken Kotek to task over her inability to curb homelessness in Oregon and the recent exodus of major corporate hubs during her tenure. Meanwhile, Kotek has accused Drazan of being more loyal to Trump than to Oregonians.
Donald Trump’s remarks in Texas, weeks before the midterm elections his party is in danger of losing, have just concluded with the ritual playing of YMCA.
Trump’s speech veered very far away from a discussion of the virtues of the Republican Senate candidate he was there to praise, Ken Paxton, and devolved instead into a typical rally speech, in which the president recited a number of boasts and false claims that he has made previously.
Among other things unrelated to the Texas Senate race, Trump once again claimed that the Saudi king told him, during his visit to the kingdom in May 2025, that the United States was “dead” during the presidency of Joe Biden.
“American trucking is back. Two years ago, our country was dead. You know, this was said to me by the king, by the leader, by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia,” Trump said.
The president has made this claim, that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, told him the US was “a dead country” before he returned and instantly made it ”the hottest country in the world”, dozens of times since he returned from Riyadh in early 2025. In fact, a review of video from Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia reveals that he made this remark to the Saudi crown prince in a televised speech, rather than the other way around.
Trump then repeated the complaint he has been making for at least six years: that reporters went so easy on Biden that they repeatedly asked him what his favorite flavor of ice cream was.
“They never used to ask him hard questions,” Trump told the crowd, before recreating what he claimed was a frequent interaction the press had with Biden. “You remember, they’d always say, how many times have you heard them say, ‘what’s your favorite ice cream’? That was the hardest question, ‘Mr President sir, sir, what’s your favorite ice cream’? ‘Vanilla’. ‘Thank you sir’”.
While Biden was frequently seen eating ice cream, and took criticism for dodging questions from reporters, particularly during his term in office, the idea that he was never asked uncomfortable questions by reporters is false – as is the claim Trump makes every time he tells this story, that Biden’s favorite flavor is vanilla.
During his 2020 campaign against Trump, Biden did share a letter sent to him by a young boy who asked what kind of ice cream he liked. Biden replied that the boy should enjoy some “chocolate chip ice cream, my favorite flavor”.
Trump also repeated his false claim that the former Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, had “emptied his prisons into the United States of America. All of his prisoners were emptied into Texas.” There is no evidence that any such thing happened, despite Trump’s repeated claims that it did.
Late in the speech, Trump again repeated his false claim that Paxton’s opponent, Democrat James Talarico, is a vegan – which he again mispronounced as ‘vaygan’.
In his ongoing remarks in Texas, Donald Trump just told an entirely false story about James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate who is challenging Republican Ken Paxton.
As he has in the past, Trump asserted, falsely, that Talarico is a vegan, a word he continues to mispronounce as “vaygan”.
“We got to get this guy elected,” Trump said of Paxton, who is in the crowd. “You got a freak show that’s running against him.”
“You notice the way all of a sudden he’s eating meat,” Trump said of Talarico. “He doesn’t eat meat – he’s a vaygan,” the president said, meaning vegan.
“You know what a vegan is? Vegans don’t do well in Texas,” Trump went on.
“Okay, so now he goes to a barbecue, he eats meat,” Trump said, recounting an entirely imaginary tale for which there is no evidence. “You know what he does after he eats? He says, ‘excuse me’. He goes behind the tent and he throws up. He throws up, he gets rid of the meat. He doesn’t want meat.”
Donald Trump is speaking now at the Peterbilt Motors plant in Denton, Texas.
He just repeated his claim that the US economy under his stewardship is in great shape, even as fuel prices spike due to his war on Iran, and consumer sentiment craters as inflation persists.
The president repeated his claim that he is doing a great job as president but suffers only from bad public relations.
“We have the greatest numbers of any president in the history of our country, and I can’t get the word out,” Trump told autoworkers. He then ran through what he called statistics that point to his success.
“We have the best poverty numbers, the lowest numbers on poverty in the history of our country,” Trump said. “The stock market is through the roof. And why that’s good is your 401 K’s are higher than they’ve ever been before. And it’s never been close. So we’re doing great. But I can’t get the word out.”
Donald Trump has not taken the stage yet, but he arrived at the Peterbilt Motors plant in Denton, Texas about 20 minutes ago and has been touring the facility.
According to the print pool reporter who arrived just after the president, a handful of protesters were outside with signs, including two that read: “Release the Epstein files” and “$5,000 doesn’t buy my vote”.
The White House refused to let CNN travel with Donald Trump to Texas and Oklahoma on Thursday, but the president did stop to take some questions from reporters who were permitted to fly with him on Air Force after landing in Texas.
The exclusion of CNN meant that video of the president’s brief exchange with reporters on the tarmac was posted on social networks by the White House and two outlets, Real America’s Voice and One America News, that are openly partisan in their support of Trump and were invited to cover him, alongside non-partisan journalists from Reuters, NPR and the Los Angeles Times.
When he approached the traveling press corps, Trump called on Taylor Mitchell of the far-right Real America’s Voice, which was created to host Steve Bannon’s podcast, to ask him the first question. She invited him to share his talking points about the economy.
The president then turned pointed to Alexandra Ingersoll, the far-right One America’s News White House correspondent, to ask the next question.
“Mr President, diesel prices have indeed started to trend downward even from last week,” Ingersoll said. “How do you plan to underscore the message of the growth that we’ve seen this term, in your in your remarks?”
“Thank you for the question, really, I appreciate it,” Trump replied. “The question is- I wish more people would ask that question. We have great numbers. We’re doing a great job”.
Later in the brief exchange, there was an even more obvious example of how soft the coverage of Trump can be when his aides pick the reporters who are allowed to ask him questions.
“What do you have to accomplish tonight in Oklahoma?” a reporter asked.
“Just a speech; we’re going to give a speech on how well we’re doing”, Trump replied.
“They’re excited to see you, Mr President,” a member of the pool told him. “You won every county in Oklahoma, 77 counties. You won all all of those counties in Oklahoma, all of them. They love you there, Mr President.”
The brief gaggle ended with one of the partisan journalists teeing Trump up to hit Democrats.
“Mr President, how deleterious will the Democrats be to the growth that we’ve seen in your term if they take the House and the Senate?” the correspondent asked.
“I think if the Democrats get in, we will end up in a financial depression. We will go into a depression the likes of which we’ve never seen before. It’ll be 1929,” Trump replied.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
