A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from re-detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in this morning.
A group of states have announced they’re suing the Trump administration over a fee increase for foreign workers to obrain H-1B visas.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Andrea Joy Campbell of Massachusetts led Democratic attorneys general from 18 other states in a lawsuit in federal court that alleged a proclamation Trump signed in September requiring companies to pay a $100,000 fee to obtain H-1B worker visas violates the Administrative Procedure Act and the U.S. Constitution. They say it renders the program inaccessible for government and nonprofit employers who lean on H-1B visa holders to provide key services, Bonta’s office said in a news release today.
“President Trump’s illegal $100,000 H-1B visa fee creates unnecessary — and illegal — financial burdens on California public employers and other providers of vital services, exacerbating labor shortages in key sectors,” Bonta said in a statement.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers defended the new fee.
“President Trump promised to put American workers first, and his commonsense action on H-1B visas does just that by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down American wages, while providing certainty to employers who need to bring the best talent from overseas,” Rogers said in a statement.
“The administration’s actions are lawful and are a necessary, initial, incremental step towards necessary reforms to the H-1B program,” she added.
Speaker Mike Johnson is eyeing a vote on the House floor “next week” on a package of health care policies, according to House Republican leadership aides, as their alternative to Affordable Care Act enhanced subsidies that are slated to expire.
The core bill will include a series of ideas popular among conservatives, including:
— Codifying Association Health Plans (AHPs) and “choice arrangements” that allow several employers to join forces and buy coverage at preferential group rates.
— Appropriating money for cost-sharing reduction payments (CSRs) to end the insurance practice of “silver-loading” plans on the exchanges.
— PBM transparency that it “would require pharmacy benefit managers to be more transparent with employers” and employer small businesses in negotiations.
There are no specifics on timing beyond “next week.” The House is expected to go on recess for the holidays after finishing up next week.
The GOP leadership aides said they are working on an “amendment” that that will include some sort of an extension of ACA subsidies. It’s unclear how long an extension it would be, and what policies would be attached to it. But it’d come up as an amendment to the underlying bill.
“I can’t give you the details on their amendment, but I expect it will be some approach to ACA enhanced PTC [premium tax credit] extension,” one of the Republican aides told NBC News when pressed for details.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trump held a phone call yesterday, their third such call since Trump doubled tariffs on the South Asian nation in part to pressure New Delhi to cut purchases of Russian oil.
“We reviewed the progress in our bilateral relations and discussed regional and international developments,” Modi said in a post on X, without giving details.
Modi described his conversation as “very warm and engaging,” which came as his government seeks relief from the levies, which are as high as 50% on some products and are affecting several industries, including textiles and chemicals.
Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Rick Switzer met with Indian officials this week in New Delhi, as Trump pushes India to cut back on Russian oil as a way of punishing Moscow for its war on Ukraine.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, criticized an executive order Trump signed yesterday aimed at blocking states from regulating artificial intelligence, saying in a statement today that the directive breached states’ rights.
“As generative artificial intelligence has advanced, I have been proud to adopt AI-powered tools to improve government services and attract new investment and jobs to our state. However, President Trump’s Executive Order attempting to interfere with state-based regulation on AI will hamper our efforts and violates states’ rights,” Murphy said.
“I remain committed to cementing New Jersey’s responsible leadership in the realm of AI and to working with my fellow governors on both sides of the aisle to mitigate the impacts of this order,” he added.
Trump’s order directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to establish a task force focused on challenging state-level AI laws that are viewed as conflicting with Trump’s agenda for limiting restrictions on the industry.
Vice President JD Vance will visit Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Dec. 16 to discuss the economy and lowering prices amid nationwide concerns about the cost of living.
The visit comes after President Donald Trump delivered remarks in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, located in a midterm battleground district, earlier this week to tout his economic record.
The series of events focused on the economy comes as congressional Republicans have publicly and privately raised concerns about the party’s strategy to address Americans’ cost-of-living concerns. An October poll by NBC News found that nearly two-thirds of voters say Trump hasn’t lived up to expectations on cost of living and the economy.
The United States is ramping up its pressure campaign against Venezuela with the Treasury Department imposing new sanctions on the country’s oil-based economy and on members of authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro’s family, specifically targeting three of his nephews. The escalation comes as the U.S. is moving to keep tens of millions of dollars’ worth of oil from the tanker it seized yesterday. NBC News’ Peter Alexander reports for “TODAY” from the White House.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States filed a lawsuit this morning against the Trump administration over the demolition of the East Wing and the planned White House ballroom.
“No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever—not President Trump, not President Biden, and not anyone else,” attorneys for the trust wrote. “And no president is legally allowed to construct a ballroom on public property without giving the public the opportunity to weigh in. President Trump’s efforts to do so should be immediately halted, and work on the Ballroom Project should be paused until the Defendants complete the required reviews—reviews that should have taken place before the Defendants demolished the East Wing, and before they began construction of the Ballroom—and secure the necessary approvals.”
The nonprofit argues that the administration was required to submit construction and environmental plans to the National Capital Planning Commission, the Commission of Fine Arts and Congress for review before it began work, but it has yet to do so.
The Trump administration, they say, is “depriving the public of its right to be informed and its opportunity to comment on the Defendants’ proposed plans for the Ballroom Project. This public involvement, while important in all preservation matters, is particularly critical here, where the structure at issue is perhaps the most recognizable and historically significant building in the country.”
The trust would like a federal judge in Washington to block continued work on the ballroom project until the necessary federal commissions have reviewed and approved the project’s plans, an environmental review has been conducted, and Congress authorizes it.
In response to the lawsuit, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said, “President Trump has full legal authority to modernize, renovate, and beautify the White House — just like all of his predecessors did.”
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced it has filed federal lawsuits against Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Nevada for failure to produce statewide voter registration lists upon request, bringing the DOJ’s nationwide total to 18 lawsuits.
The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is also suing one locality — Fulton County, Georgia — for records related to the 2020 election.
The DOJ’s move to sue Fulton County comes as Trump and his allies have made numerous false claims that the Georgia 2020 election was stolen. In 2023, the then-former president was indicted alongside 18 other defendants on felony charges related to efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results. A Georgia judge dropped the charges last month after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was disqualified from the case.
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said. “At this Department of Justice, we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee today released a second batch of images from the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s estate.
The batch includes pictures of Epstein with a number of high-profile figures, including President Donald Trump, longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, former President Bill Clinton, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, businessman Bill Gates and movie director Woody Allen. They do not appear to show illegal activity by these individuals.
Read the full story here.
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has endorsed former Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes’ bid for governor.
“Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes is exactly the kind of bold leader we need to take on the Trump Administration,” Schiff said in a statement to NBC News. “He knows how badly the president has betrayed working people, raising their costs instead of lowering them, and enriching himself in the process. Mandela knows what middle class Americans need, because their story is his story too.”
The endorsement was first reported by NBC News.
Barnes, who lost a 2022 Senate race in the perennial battleground, is running in a crowded Democratic primary for the state’s open governorship.
The U.S. imposed sanctions on three nephews of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, among others, yesterday as Trump looks to inflict further pressure on the South American nation.
The new sanctions on Franqui Flores, Carlos Flores and Efrain Campo come a day after Trump announced that the U.S. had seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. Also included in the sanctions are Panamanian businessman Ramon Carretero, six firms and six Venezuela-flagged ships accused of transporting Venezuelan oil.
Read the full story here.
A federal judge blocked the government from re-detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia at a scheduled Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in this morning.
The intervention came after the same judge ruled Thursday that the Trump administration lacked the legal authority to continue holding Abrego in an immigration detention center.
Abrego was detained during a similar scheduled check-in in August.
Read the full story here.
Millions of Americans could see a massive spike to their health insurance premiums with federal subsidies for people who use the Affordable Care Act marketplace set to expire at the end of the year as lawmakers on Capitol Hill remain deadlocked on a deal. The Democrats’ plan would have allowed the vast majority to keep their benefits for three more years, while the Republicans wanted to scrap them in favor of boosting health savings accounts, but both bills failed. NBC’s Ryan Nobles reports for “TODAY.”
Ukraine has presented the U.S. with a revised 20-point framework to end its war with Russia, the country’s president said yesterday, adding that the issue of ceding territory remains a major sticking point in negotiations.
Speaking to reporters in Kyiv, Zelenskyy said the U.S. is offering as a compromise to create a “free economic zone” in the Ukraine-controlled parts of the eastern Donbas, which Russia has demanded that Ukraine cede.
Read the full story here.
The Indiana Senate voted against a new Republican-drawn congressional map yesterday, rejecting a bid led by Trump to boost the party in next year’s midterm elections.
The vote was a rare and stunning instance of elected Republicans rebuking Trump, who had pressured Indiana lawmakers for months to pass new district lines. The GOP leaders of the state Senate had long resisted joining the unusual mid-decade redistricting battle playing out across the country, saying there wasn’t enough support in the chamber for a new map that was designed to dismantle the state’s two Democratic-controlled districts.
They ultimately agreed to hold a vote to settle the issue, as Trump and national Republicans pledged to back primary challengers to those who opposed the map and as a growing number of Indiana lawmakers faced violent threats and harassment.
Read the full story here.
Wisconsin has quietly emerged as the latest front in the national redistricting fight — and a never-before-used legal process seems likely to determine the state’s congressional lines in the midterm election.
The saga unfolding in the critical Midwestern battleground has the potential to put more districts in play for Democrats ahead of next year’s midterms. But unlike in other states that have redrawn their congressional maps mid-decade in recent months, the push toward a new map in Wisconsin is now hinging on a little-known law the GOP-controlled state Legislature enacted 14 years ago.
Days before Thanksgiving, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered a pair of three-judge panels to oversee two lawsuits that allege that the state’s current congressional map is unconstitutional and seek a redraw. Both panels will meet for the first time today for initial hearings.
Read the full story here.
NBC News