House Republicans are ‘the only thing standing’ in the way of ending DHS shutdown, Hakeem Jeffries says – as it happened

The actor Jane Fonda joined journalists, musicians and writers outside Washington’s John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in urging US citizens to “break your silence” and “stand tall against authoritarianism”.

At a damp but defiant rally hosted by Fonda’s Committee for the First Amendment on Friday, around a hundred invited guests gathered to hear speakers and singers rail against book bans, political censorship and other threats to free speech under Donald Trump.

“Today, books are being banned, plaques and monuments depicting historical events this administration wants to forget are being removed,” Fonda said from a stage under a grey, rainy sky. “Museums, the National Endowment for the Arts, state arts councils, public broadcasting – they’re all being defunded.”

The choice of the Kennedy Center as a backdrop was pointed: the US president has seized control of the national arts complex, targeted so-called “woke” programming, had his name added to its marble facade and announced that it will close for two years of renovations. Dozens of layoffs began this week.

Fonda observed: “This beloved citadel of the arts has become a symbol of what is happening. The centre has been effectively silenced after artists refused to bow to ideological demands and the racist erasure of history.

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Further delays are expected at DC area airports after a ground stop was issued amid an issue at a main air traffic control facility, according to an alert by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The FAA issued the alert on Friday evening, citing the reason as an “environmental” problem at the Potomac Consolidated TRACON, which controls the airspace over Andrews, BWI, Ronald Reagan, Dulles, Richmond and other airports. The stops for Dulles and BWI have since been lifted, but remain in place for DCA.

Reuters is reporting that an odor was detected at the air traffic control tower, which is located in Virginia.

Politico reported that the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Todd Lyons, has been hospitalized at least twice for stress-related issues over the past seven months.

The stress stemmed from carrying out Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda, which led to hospitalizations in September and December, according to the outlet, which cited two current and two former administration officials.

Politico’s sources said that they saw Lyons “break out into a full sweat, with his face turning deep red,” according to the report. Sources also told Politico that Stephen Miller yelled at Lyons during daily morning phone calls, which was partially to blame for the stress.

In a statement to Politico, Lyons said that his stress was not related to other Trump officials, and he did not address the two alleged hospitalizations.

It looks like TMZ’s callout for photos of US lawmakers boarding planes during the partial government shutdown is working, just as they head out for a two-week Easter recess.

“If anybody goes to Disney World with their family for spring break or goes to a beach somewhere or anywhere on vacation, and you see one of the 535 members of Congress, take a picture and send it to us at TMZ,” requested TMZ’s executive producer Harvey Levin in a video posted on social media on Thursday.

Today, TMZ posted a picture of Texas senator Ted Cruz on board a plane departing Washington DC. The outlet also shared a video from Fox News of Senate majority leader John Thune, seen at the Reagan National Airport in the nation’s capital. TMZ also posted a video of senator Marsha Blackburn walking through Reagan National Airport on Thursday night.

Lawmakers are departing as the House prepares to vote around 10:30 pm ET tonight on legislation to fund the department of homeland security through 22 May.

At a major Saudi investment conference in Miami, President Donald Trump recommended that investors bet big on artificial intelligence.

“The one that they’re going crazy about is AI,” he said during a Q&A session. “If you want to say one thing, AI, and just hope that it works.”

On a question related to Africa, Trump pointed to the region’s “tremendous potential.”

“It’s got tremendous Earth. It’s got tremendous value underground,” he said. “Africa has tremendous value in its land, and if they can unify and get together, I think it’s got tremendous potential.”

During a speech in Miami on Friday, President Trump pointed to his administration’s military intervention in Venezuela earlier this year and said: “Cuba is next, by the way. But pretend I didn’t say that.”

Here’s a video of that moment, posted by journalist Aaron Rupar.

Concerning the strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s busiest oil shipping channels, President Trump demanded that Iran “open it up” before he referred to the waterway as the “strait of Trump.”

“We’re negotiating now,” Trump said. “But they have to open it up. They have to open up the strait of Trump. I mean Hormuz. Yes, excuse me. I’m so sorry. Such a terrible mistake. The fake news will say ‘he accidentally said’. There’s no accidents with me.”

President Trump is delivering remarks at the Future Investment Initiative, a Saudi business conference in Miami. It’s his second time addressing the conference.

He began by praising the US military, and called Iran a “bully” that was participating in “nuclear blackmail.”

“We’re closer than ever to the rise of the Middle East that is finally free, at last, from Iranian terror aggression and nuclear blackmail,” he said. “For 47 years, Iran has been known as the bully of the Middle East, but they are not the bully any longer.”

Just a reminder: My colleague Lucy Campbell is covering the latest developments in the Middle East for The Guardian’s live blog.

Democrats have accused Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr of using his agency’s powers to target personalities and programs who oppose Donald Trump. In a speech to CPAC, he did not entirely deny the charge.

“When the Democrats were in charge of the FCC, they did not apply the law in an even-handed way,” Carr told the annual gathering of conservatives held this year in Grapevine, Texas.

“They weaponized it, and what I think we should do is not weaponize it, but also not just sit on our hands. We should take the authorities we have and apply it in a fair and even handed way, and we’re doing it.”

Carr’s approach to the FCC’s authorities exploded into the public eye last September, when he pressured television stations to “take action” against Jimmy Kimmel over comments he made about murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Kimmel was temporarily taken off the air, leading to complaints from Democrats, as well as a handful of Republicans, that Carr was advocating censorship.

Carr touched briefly on that episode in his speech to CPAC, describing it as a moment where local broadcasters acted as a check on media firms Comcast and Disney.

“You saw that in the instance with Jimmy Kimmel … you had local TV stations for the first time push back and say, ‘We don’t want to run that program in our community.’”

He also cheered instances of conservatives gaining influence in media firms, calling them evidence that Trump was “winning”.

“PBS: defunded. NPR: defunded. Joy Reid gone from MSNBC, sleepy eyes Chuck Todd gone, Jim Acosta gone, John Dickerson gone, [Stephen] Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough, CNN has got new ownership as well,” Carr said.

“We’re not on the point yet of raising the mission accomplished flag, but President Trump is taking on the fake news media, and President Trump is winning.”

A Republican sheriff in California has confiscated additional ballot materials from a special election, escalating his conflict with state lawmakers who say he is conducting a baseless investigation into claims of voter fraud.

On Tuesday, Chad Bianco, the Riverside county sheriff who is running for governor, was already at the center of a legal controversy after seizing 650,000 ballots from last year’s special election. Earlier this week he ordered his office to seize 426 additional boxes of ballot materials as part of the alleged criminal investigation, prompting criticism from lawmakers including Rob Bonta, California’s Democratic attorney general.

Bianco’s ballot seizures have triggered several lawsuits against him, including one filed with the California supreme court by voters represented by the UCLA Voting Rights Project. The lawsuit seeks to block his recount of last year’s vote on Proposition 50, a measure to redraw California’s congressional districts in ways that favored Democrats.

Prop 50 was introduced by Gavin Newsom in response to Donald Trump’s efforts to gerrymander additional Republican seats in red states, and was passed overwhelmingly by voters last November.

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Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky, told CBS Sunday Morning that he was considering running for president in 2028.

When asked about a Washington Examiner article hinting at his presidential run, he said: “I don’t know yet.”

“So maybe they know something I don’t know. We’re thinking about it and I would say 50-50. We’ll make a decision after the election,” he said in a snippet of an interview slated to air on Sunday.

Since last year, Paul has clashed with Trump over military disagreements, especially amid the airstrikes off Venezuela’s coast leading up to President Nicolás Maduro’s capture, and most recently, the military strikes against Iran.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, joined by Democratic whip Katherine Clark and Democratic caucus chair Pete Aguilar, told reporters on Friday that he and his colleagues back the bill passed by the Senate to fund most of the department of homeland security, noting that House Republicans are “the only thing standing” in the way of ending the chaos at airports nationwide.

“House Democrats are prepared to support the bill to end the Trump Republican shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security,” said Jeffries.

His remarks come shortly after House speaker Mike Johnson rejected the Senate-passed DHS funding bill, calling it “a joke.”

“None of this is a joke,” Clark said. “All of this has real-world consequences for American families.”

President Donald Trump continued his demand on Friday for Republicans to rid themselves of the Senate filibuster in a post on Truth Social.

“The Republicans should TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and VOTE!,” the president wrote. “Haven’t they had enough of this nonsense from the Radical Left Lunatics that are looking to destroy our Country?”

It’s been a frequent request by Trump since the current partial shutdown began on 14 February, with some Republicans on board and others not so much.

“I’m not sure how things could get much worse by ending the filibuster,” senator Ron Johnson wrote in an op-ed. “The status quo certainly isn’t working.”

Meanwhile, senate majority leader John Thune told the Washington Examiner that he doesn’t “think that serves anybody’s interest,”referring to ending the filibuster.

• House Republicans have formally rejected the Senate’s compromise deal to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including the TSA.

• Speaker Mike Johnson, in announcing the rejection said, “this gambit that was done last night is a joke” of the Senate-passed bill that made its way to the House in the predawn hours.

• Johnson also announced that House Republicans are instead going to put forward a stopgap spending bill to fund the entire DHS at current levels for two months.

• However, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has already said that the House’s stopgap funding measure is “dead on arrival” in the chamber. Senators are also on a two-week recess, so there is little hope of another deal passing quickly in Congress.

• Amid the tumult on Capitol Hill and airports nationwide, the DHS says TSA workers will start seeing paychecks as early as Monday.

• More than 3,450 TSA officers nationally, nearly 12% of the workforce, had called off work by Thursday. At least 510 had quit. TSA officers have not been paid since mid-February due to the partial DHS shutdown.