'Our superpower': Trump confronted by diverse, robust pushback on 'a million' different fronts

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So this is one of those stories that starts far away,

but then it comes right here, right home at the end.

So stick with me.

All right, you might remember a few weeks ago, we showed you images, kind of overwhelming protest shots from Europe, from Serbia.

Do you remember this?

Serbia has a president that is kind of their version of Donald Trump.

And protests against him like this have been sweeping that country.

They started small and week after week they just grew and grew to the point where,

frankly, it has become hard to imagine that that Serbian president is going to be able to stay in office given the size and the sort of the breadth of the opposition to him in his country and their persistence at saying that he must go.

These massive, very impressive, repeated protests in Serbia are also,

I think, a good reminder for us and for everybody around the world that part of the reason it's not good to have a strongman leader, part of the reason you really don't want your country turned into some version of an authoritarian dictatorship is because authoritarians and dictators are always, always

corrupt.

Why do you think they want to get rid of the rule of law anyway, right?

So they don't have to abide by the law because they're crooks.

Always and everywhere, dictators and authoritarians are stealing from the people.

They are crooks, they are corrupt, it is an axiom.

And in the case of these huge, impressive protests in Serbia, these started over something that at first

was billed as an accident.

Started over something that happened in November.

of last year.

A roof, kind of a canopy at a train station collapsed and 16 people were killed.

And that

event, that tragedy, sparked protests against the authoritarian government in that country.

Because even though that might have seemed like an accident, everybody knows that authoritarians are, say it with me now, always corrupt.

And so the protesters in this country realized instantly that had they had a good government, a not corrupt government, that concrete canopy at the rail station would have been built by a qualified contractor, not just the one who was connected or the one that paid the biggest bribes.

In a country with a rule of law in effect, in a well-run country, the contractor who built that thing would have had to comply with building codes for safety's sake, rather than, say, being able to pay somebody off to avoid those building codes.

And so in this country, after that collapse at that rail station, the people of that country made that connection, right?

You may or may not care about politics.

You may or may not have a pre-existing opinion about our strongman leader.

But if for no other reason, can't we all agree that we need to get rid of our authoritarian president so that we can have a government within the law, so we can have the law, so we can have real building codes, so our freaking newly built train stations stop collapsing on our heads and killing us by the dozen.

And that simple connection started this very broad-based protest movement.

It was like students for a day, and then it was everyone.

And it has just built and built and built every week from there.

And in the face of those protests in that country, the eldest son of the President of the United States, Donald Trump Jr., has made multiple trips to Serbia

to try to shore up their very Trumpy president against these calls from the millions of people in the streets demanding that that guy resign.

Why would Donald Trump Jr.

like that guy so much?

Why would Donald Trump Jr.

be willing to travel all the way to Serbia more than once to try to shore this guy up while

All his own people are in the streets week after week demanding that he go?

What does Donald Trump Jr.

care about this guy?

Guess.

So in the middle of the capital city of Serbia, there is a ruined building.

Used to be the headquarters of what was then the Yugoslav army, is now the Serbian Army.

And in 1999, that army headquarters building was bombed by NATO.

All but destroyed it, that bombing.

That was 26 years ago.

And that country has never repaired that building right in the center of their capital city.

They have preserved that wrecked building as a memorial to what happened in the war in the Balkans, to what happened in the NATO bombing campaign against their country.

That ruined building is preserved officially as a national heritage site, a protected monument in that country.

And Donald Trump would like to tear that monument down and build a luxury hotel and apartment tower there,

literally on that site.

You know,

there is a Trump Tower in Istanbul.

Istanbul, famously, is right on the Bosporus Strait.

It's right on the border between Europe and Asia.

But that is as close as the Trump family has ever gotten to having a Trump Tower in Europe.

Their Serbia plan to have the first ever Trump Tower in Europe.

Their Serbia plan is to tear down the most recognizable national heritage site monument in that entire country and turn it into Trump Tower Belgrade, you know, Trump Tower Serbia or something.

It will be a joint operation between the Kushner family and the Trump family.

Now, how can they do this, given that it's a national heritage site and protected under law?

Ah, well, that's one of those times where it comes in handy that there's no rule of law.

Somehow, the very Trumpy authoritarian president of that country, somehow, he was able to come up with some kind of waiver, waiver, some kind of permission slip that said, actually,

that site is no longer a protected national heritage site.

The president said he got an opinion from a national heritage site expert, which said basically, meh, who cares about that site anyway?

Go ahead, tear it down.

And they said that expert opinion gave them the legal basis they needed to approve this big project for Donald Trump.

And with that expert opinion in hand, with that being the legal basis for getting rid of the National Heritage Site designation, I mean, jackpot, right?

Jackpot for some.

The Trump and Kushner families thereby get permission to bulldoze the Serbian equivalent of Mount Rushmore in order to build themselves on that site a $500 million luxury development.

While the regular people of that country get to be killed by collapsing train stations.

A few weeks ago, on the anniversary of the bombing campaign that destroyed that army headquarters in the first place, there was a whole new round of protests in Serbia, specifically against this deal,

against that country's president trading away a site of national, cultural, and historical significance

for a development deal that personally benefits Donald Trump and his family.

But now,

guess what has happened?

Amid the relentless, just unrelenting, ever-increasing, ever-broadening, totally persistent, creative, totally unafraid pressure campaign from that country's citizens who have turned out into the streets again and again and again,

this whole mess is all now falling apart.

Headline, Trump-Kushner Hotel Project in Serbia hits snag.

Alleged forgery.

Forgery?

What?

Quote, the Trump family's $500 million luxury hotel project in Serbia, slated to be built on the site of a bombed-out defense ministry building, has run into an embarrassing complication.

A key document the Serbian government has relied on to deliver this deal was forged.

said officials this week.

The leader of the Serbian agency charged with protecting cultural monuments admitted to authorities that he had forged a document allowing the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense headquarters in Belgrade to be demolished and replaced with the Trump Hotel.

Officials said the agency's leader fabricated an expert opinion to justify the government's decision to strip the site of its cultural heritage status.

The forged document served as the legal basis for lifting protection from the complex.

The official has served as acting director of the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments since June.

he now faces charges, criminal charges, of abuse of office and forgery of official documents.

Darn that rule of law!

If it wasn't for the remaining rule of law and for those meddling kids.

Now maybe there never will be a Trump Tower in Europe, quote, Mr.

Kushner's company said in a statement, quote, we will review this matter and determine next steps.

Womp, womp.

Sad trombone.

Yeah, it's amazing

how corruption makes things go so well and so easy and so fast for a second

before it all goes to heck, right?

Before the people

absolutely caught into what you're doing and they figure out a way to stop it.

And as the people of that country keep marching, keep peacefully protesting, it's hard not to believe ultimately that they're going to win.

I mean, look at the geniuses they're up against.

The great American city of Chicago is so big

and so dominant in its influence in its part of the country that the whole area around Chicago for miles and miles is called Chicagoland.

I've always loved that.

You know, nobody talks about New York land or San Francisco land, right?

For all of the swagger of those American cities, only Chicago has enough swagger that its whole region is Chicagoland.

It's a very Chicago designation.

The city of Aurora, Illinois is,

I think fair to say, sort of on the edge of Chicagoland.

It's about 30 miles from downtown Chicago.

And this weekend, There were 15,000 people who signed up to join hands, to literally line up next to each other, to cover that whole 30-mile distance between Chicago and Aurora, Illinois, all to protest President Donald Trump and the actions of the Trump administration.

15,000 people in a single line

over 30 miles.

They called it hands across Chicagoland.

This weekend, there were big protests in California against Trump shutting down the Department of Education and against his cuts to education, big protests simultaneously in San Diego and also in San Francisco and also in Sacramento.

Also this weekend, also in California, there was a big joyous and sort of gleefully foul-mouthed anti-Trump demonstration at the Nixon Library in Yorbelinda, California.

I say foul-mouthed.

It was mildly foul-mouthed.

They held signs like,

like, way worse than the last

nickname for Richard in the White House.

Also this one, which pictures Richard Nixon himself saying, I can't believe they let Trump get away with all this

stuff.

This weekend, there were anti-Trump protests in Buffalo, New York, and in Austin, Texas at the Texas state capitol.

There were anti-Trump protests this weekend in Ogden, Utah, where people were standing up for immigrants.

Also, along the same lines, people standing up against Trump Trump and for immigrants.

In Watertown, Massachusetts, people standing up against Trump this weekend in Nashville, Tennessee, particularly protesting against ICE raids and arrests in that community.

There are protests against Trump this weekend in Los Osos, California and in Williamsburg, Virginia.

In Omaha, Nebraska, Save the U.S.

Post Office, no to privatization.

In Wyandotte, Michigan, hands off the VA and defend the rule of law.

There's actually a second protest in Omaha, I should mention, against the Medicaid cuts in the Trump Republican budget.

There was also a big protest in Hawthorne, California this weekend at the headquarters of SpaceX, which is owned by the president's top campaign donor, Elon Musk.

People protested at a gazillion Tesla dealerships this weekend, again, including these in Tucson, Arizona, and Lynnhurst, Ohio, and Charlotte, North Carolina.

That was a big one in Charlotte, Irvine, California, Albemarle County, Virginia, Tysons, Virginia.

People are also branching out and coming up with new ideas.

As schools get out and people start heading out on summer vacations, the lefty political group More Perfect Union has put up 300 billboards all across the country pushing back on Trump for his cuts to our beloved national parks.

Greetings from Gateway Arch National Park now with reduced staff

made possible by Doge

attacking Trump for the cuts to the national parks, which have resulted in closed sites, long waits, reduced services, miserable staff.

After weeks of protests and boycott campaigns against Avello Airlines for taking a big, lucrative contract with the Trump administration to do their deportation flights for them, one Democratic state lawmaker in New Hampshire crowdfunded a few thousand dollars online to put up billboards criticizing Avello.

Avello then threatened him and the billboard company with legal action if the billboards didn't come down.

Now that state lawmaker, his name is Seth Miller, is suing Avello in the state of Nevada where the company is headquartered.

He's suing them simply so he can put the billboards back up.

So when people write about the history of this moment in the United States, when they write the history of what was happening in the 2020s,

When democracies in some cases were falling into authoritarianism and dictatorship, when lots of democracies around the world started sliding in that direction and then fought their way back.

What will the story be about us and our country in 2025?

I mean, what will they say about what motivates our protest movement here against Trump?

It's not

like it is in Serbia, right?

You can't trace it to, you're not going to be able to trace it to

the one railway station collapse like they had, right?

Serving as the catalyst for that movement that just caught fire and took over the country.

For us, it's a million things.

I mean, your mileage may vary.

Maybe for you, it is that Avello Airlines decision to keep marketing themselves to U.S.

customers for pleasure trips while they're also using their planes and their pilots to fly deportation flights for Trump for profit.

Maybe it's the cuts to Medicaid.

in the Trump Republican budget.

You know, there is a reason they keep scheduling the votes on this thing at 11 o'clock last night on Sunday.

And the next vote is 1 a.m.

on Tuesday night slash Wednesday morning.

That's their next vote on it.

I wonder why they keep scheduling the votes at times like that.

Well, polling from Data for Progress says there isn't a single congressional district in the entire country where cutting people off their Medicaid health insurance is popular.

But Trump and the Republicans are trying to pass this thing to take health insurance away from at least, at least 5 million Americans and likely millions more than that.

Maybe that's it.

Maybe for you it's the National Weather Service's offices being cut so being so cut down by Trump that in many places they can now no longer

staff our National Weather Service offices overnight.

They don't have staff there at night because, oh, you know, who cares?

Obviously, dangerous weather always confines itself to business hours, right?

Maybe it's the ongoing disaster at Trump's FAA,

where our nation's air traffic controllers are losing communication with planes over and over and over again now at multiple major airports.

Maybe it's the Trump Republican plan in this budget to sell off thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of U.S.

public lands.

lands that belong to the American people, that we will never get back after they sell them them off.

Maybe it's the fact that Trump has now got inexplicable AI chat bots answering the phones at the Social Security Administration.

Chat bots that appear designed simply to make you hang up in frustration without ever getting the help you need to, say, locate your missing check.

Maybe it's that

Trump is cutting the program that helps babies born with health defects.

Maybe it's that Trump is stopping stopping support for Narcan, Narcan, which does nothing except save the lives of people who are overdosing.

Maybe it's the fact that Trump is sending hundreds of tons of perfectly good food, enough to feed a million people for three months.

He has sent that food to instead rot.

in four government warehouses in Dubai and Djibouti and Houston and South Africa because the sign-off to allow that food to be given to starving people is sitting on the desk of a 28-year-old with zero government service experience who has nevertheless been put in charge of the fate of a million people at least because of his connection to the president's top campaign donor.

Yet maybe it is any of those things.

Maybe it's the fact that Trump just effectively legalized machine guns.

You heard me right.

Trump just effectively legalized machine guns.

He is allowing the sale of something called a forced reset trigger.

You'll now be allowed to buy those and possess those in this country.

What's a forced reset trigger?

It turns basically any AR-15 style rifle into a machine gun.

Just hold the trigger down and fire all your ammo.

Trump's attorney general says they are now allowing those devices to be sold.

Again, effectively legalizing machine guns in the United States because she says, in her words, it will, quote, enhance public safety.

Machine guns.

So when the history books are written about our generation in this moment, what will they say is our cause in standing up against the Trump administration?

Turns out we don't have just one.

And I think that might be part of our superpower here, because it allows for protests of various kinds and various stripes, nonviolent protests of every imaginable variety in every state in the country just about every single day.

And sometimes they are massive.

I think what we're going to see on June 14th is going to be massive.

Sometimes they are a few people.

Sometimes they are 15,000 people across 30 miles of Illinois.

But whatever we're doing, The various forms of pushback against Trump are also working in various ways every day.

Today, for example, a federal judge ruled that Trump acted in a manner that was blatantly unlawful

when he shut down the U.S.

Institute of Peace and effectively tried to steal their building, even though the Institute itself owns the building and not the U.S.

government.

The U.S.

Institute of Peace put out a statement tonight saying they look forward to restarting their work now that a judge has shut down Trump for unlawfully trying to shut them down.

This weekend, a judge ruled over and over and over again, hundreds of times, that the so-called military zone that Trump has set up across three states on the southern border is effectively

legally meaningless.

And just because Trump has declared that a military zone, it doesn't give him the right to have people arrested there for trespassing on military property.

Today at Columbia University in New York City, Mohsen Madawi walked at his graduation to accept his diploma.

After a huge movement of his friends and his community in Vermont and in New York, culminated in a federal judge in Vermont ordering him freed from prison.

He is a legal permanent resident.

He is a green card holder.

He has never been accused of a crime.

Trump had his immigration agents arrest him

exclusively for his constitutionally protected political speech.

But that did not stand.

He was freed by court order, and today he graduated from Columbia and got a huge standing ovation.

Tonight, the bizarre criminal charges against the mayor of the largest city of New Jersey, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Ross Baraka, for the crime of showing up outside the controversial immigration prison in his city, those charges tonight were dropped.

Although they say they are now charging a member of Congress who was on the same scene that day.

This is no time to check out, and do not sleep on the power of protest and the power of pushback.

And every country has its own history and every country has its own navel-gazing ways, right?

I don't think Serbia much cares about what's happening here.

I don't think that, you know, we care most, we care more about other countries than we do about ourselves.

But it's the same kind of guy.

doing the same kind of politics for the same kind of reasons in all of these places.

And when the people see through it, we see through it the same way in every country.

We recognize like and like.

And so these authoritarians have effects on one another, and the protest movements against them have effects as well.

After Trump was elected, Canada, for example, changed their mind and decided they would not elect their own Trumpy candidate.

They would elect someone else who would stand up to Trump instead.

They did a U-turn in that election.

Same thing happened in Australia right after it happened in Canada.

This weekend, same thing happened in Romania.

A huge upset.

The Trumpy candidate had long been expected to win and win by a lot.

The people of that country turned around and said nope and elected the centrist mayor of Bucharest instead.

Authoritarians fight hard to make change seem difficult, to make ousting them seem impossible, to make opposing them seem hard or pointless or dangerous.

But everybody else knows better all over the world,

including here.

Much more to come tonight.

Stay with us.

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Gail Davis was in her bedroom watching the news when the storms came through Friday afternoon.

And I looked and I seen all this debris mixing.

And I said, Oh, we really, we really, we really, we really in it.

She saw the tornado come down her street and ran to the basement.

Everything was like,

only just popping glass.

And I was so scared.

The tornado opened up the roof over the very bedroom she was just sitting in.

One very scary story from that huge, deadly tornado that struck the beautiful city of St.

Louis on Friday.

Seven people died in Missouri during Friday's severe weather.

The mayor of St.

Louis says the damage is estimated at more than $1.6 billion in her city.

I'm sorry to say the city of St.

Louis is bracing for more storms tonight.

These new storms are expected to be less severe, but a lot of rain and high wind is going to be dangerous in a city that is littered with loose debris like you see here.

St.

Louis's mayor told MSNBC today that her city is definitely going to need federal help, including from FEMA from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

FEMA has told St.

Louis that they'll have people from the agency, they'll have assessors on the ground in a couple of days by Wednesday.

Hopefully that means St.

Louis will start getting some of the federal help it so obviously needs.

But what's looming over this is, of course, that FEMA may not be at their best right now.

Earlier this month, the acting head of FEMA was fired and then immediately escorted out of the agency's headquarters for daring to say that the agency he was tasked with running should exist.

He was asked at a congressional hearing about Trump's desire to abolish FEMA.

He said he didn't think that was a good idea, and so they fired him immediately and frog-marched him out.

The replacement head of FEMA has no background in emergency management at all.

He greeted his new staff by telling them he will, quote, run right over anyone who resists him at the agency.

He also told them to expect firings, expect layoffs.

FEMA employees tell the Wall Street Journal the agency is months behind schedule in preparing for hurricane season, which starts less than two weeks from now.

And it's not just the agency that responds to severe weather that's under strain right now.

It's also the agency that tells us what the weather is, that predicts and tracks and warns us about severe weather.

As tornadoes struck Missouri on Friday, very, very severe storms also battered Kentucky.

One tornado in southeastern Kentucky killed 19 people.

The government agency that provides weather data for every weather station and every weather app and monitors storms and sends out emergency alerts for all kinds of severe weather is the National Weather Service.

And the National Weather Service in Kentucky has three offices.

None of them is fully staffed because of Trump's cuts to the National Weather Service.

The office that handles forecasts for Eastern Kentucky, where Friday's tornado struck, it's short seven staff members, which means that, among other things, the office no longer has an overnight staff at all.

Because again, obviously, we would hope that severe weather has the decency to only strike during business hours.

At any of the three offices in Kentucky, there is no meteorologist in charge now.

Now, to be clear, we don't know if those staffing shortages in Kentucky had any effect on the ability of the Weather Service to manage and predict and send out appropriate alerts about Friday's storms.

There's no reason to think that the Weather Service was anyway at fault for what happened in terms of the devastating impact of those storms.

The agency says the Jackson office was staffed overnight for that one night on Friday because of the expected severe weather.

Officials, including Kentucky's Democratic governor, say they've seen no evidence that the the weather service performance was impaired in this instance.

But even if it wasn't in this instance, these kinds of cuts just systematically reduce our ability to cope with something as inescapable and inevitable as severe weather.

And did I mention that hurricane season starts in two weeks?

Joining us now is one of the meteorologists the National Weather Service has just lost in recent months until less than three weeks ago.

Brian Lamar served as the meteorologist in charge of the Tampa Bay Area Weather Forecast Office in Florida.

But as the Trump administration slashed staff at the Weather Service, Mr.

Lamar accepted an early retirement at the end of last month.

Mr.

Lamar, thank you very much for being here.

I really appreciate you making the time.

Hey, thank you, Rachel.

And I really appreciate all the highlight and spotlight you placed on the stories.

uh before the lead-in and the national weather service as you know and all the viewing audience knows we're a public safety agency And especially as we go into severe weather season, which we're in now, hurricane season coming up in two weeks, as you mentioned, it's so important to really understand more about the National Weather Service and make sure it has the support that it really needs moving into the future.

I feel like, I mean, I can't speak for everybody, but I don't know anybody in this country who doesn't have respect and admiration for the National Weather Service

and their staff, and the service that they provide, and the sort of creativity and

diligence with which they have worked to always be at the cutting edge of what they do, to constantly be improving, constantly be improving not only their science, but also the way they communicate to the public about what's going on.

I just don't know anybody who has a beef with the Weather Service at all.

That is making it very hard for me as a sort of political observer to understand what percentage there is for anybody

in

the attacks on the the weather service and the gutting of the National Weather Service staff that we have seen from this administration.

When this administration took over, did you foresee that it would mean large-scale cuts to the agency?

No, I don't think it was a surprise to us.

I think there's a plan out there, a 2025 plan that kind of outlined certain cuts that were going to be proposed and enacted.

And I think we're still working through that.

But I think it's also important to really put things into perspective.

You know, when I first started with the National Weather Service over 31 years ago, we were an agency that had about anywhere between 5,000 and 6,000 people.

And we had over 250 offices across the country.

But over the years, we actually saw a downward trend in the staffing of the National Weather Service over the past, I'd say, 20 years.

And we had over 250 offices, field offices across the country when I first started in the early 90s.

And we had a modernization and restructuring going on right when I joined the National Weather Service.

It was a very exciting time.

And we actually had tremendous support from Congress in terms of additional funding, a significant investment from the American people into the National Weather Service.

We saw Doppler radars that were fielded across the country.

We saw new science and technology.

And we hired a lot of people in the National Weather Service, but we actually consolidated from over 250 offices to about our current 122 offices that that we have in place right now.

And the men and women that serve in the National Weather Service, I can't think of a more dedicated group.

You know, I really liken the group of people, their dedication to say like law enforcement, firefighters, the medical community.

It is a 24-7, 365-day job.

And it's a passion because as public servants, the National Weather Service employees and throughout my career, like I said, over 30, 30 years, you know, it's really been about how can we help other people make decisions when severe weather strikes.

What are you most worried about, Brian, in terms of the cuts?

We've got offices that don't have staffing overnight.

We've got multiple offices that have no meteorologist in charge.

We've got mass firings of probationary workers, young hires in their first, in many cases, first year or two on the job.

What do you think the public should be aware of in terms of what's most dangerous in those changes?

I think you mentioned a couple of them right there, Rachel, in terms of the terminations terminations of the probationary employees, because that's your lifeblood.

That's the future of the agency.

That's the new generation.

Those are the wonderful, young, innovative minds that are coming out of college.

They're also wanting to come into the National Weather Service from broadcast media, from the military, from private sector.

And that's really the future of the agency.

So I think that's one significant impact right there, because there was so much innovation and talent that was actually helping this agency modernize and go through what we call a transformation in the National Weather Service.

But I think what worries me most is really the hiring freeze and the lack of significant investment that we're looking at in the National Weather Service.

So I would think it for everyone listening tonight, it's really about focusing more on additional resources needed for the National Weather Service.

Like I said, over 30 years ago, we were going through a modernization restructuring.

We actually downsized the number of offices, but we increased our technology.

We added more meteorologists and hydrologists, electronics technicians, admin support.

It takes everyone.

It's not just about the meteorology.

It's about the entire scientific spectrum.

And you may have heard of the phrase, an integrated warning team.

That's what the National Weather Service has a foundation with.

And that's really going to be the National Weather Service, our core partners in emergency management, and also the media.

You know, the three groups work together to help people protect themselves.

And as we saw over the past three days,

killer tornado outbreaks across significant portions of the country.

You mentioned earlier, there's severe weather going on as we speak.

And as we approach the hurricane season, we really have to make sure that everyone is prepared.

And if we start seeing additional cuts, then that's really going to be starting to chip away at that preparedness across the country.

Brian Lamar, former meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Tampa Bay, Florida.

Thank you for your years of government service.

Thanks for helping us understand this tonight, Brian.

I appreciate it.

Thank you, Rachel.

Thank you.

All right.

More More news ahead here tonight.

Stay with us.

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Today, the U.S.

Supreme Court gave the Trump administration a green light to strip nearly 350,000 people who are currently in this country of their legal right to live here.

These are people who came here legally from the nation of Venezuela.

The U.S.

government gave them protected status to come here because of desperate conditions in their home country, a country that just last week, the U.S.

State Department reissued a level four do not travel advisory about.

Quote, do not travel to or remain in Venezuela due to the high risk of wrongful detention, torture and detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, and civil unrest.

Arbitrary enforcement, you say?

With this Supreme Court ruling, roughly 350,000 people who came to this country legally, and as of this morning, were in this country legally, they are going to bed tonight knowing that the Trump administration is now declaring them to be here illegally, which of course, in the Trump administration's eyes, presumably means that all of those people are liable to forcible arrest and immediate deportation.

One immigration expert today calling this the single largest mass illegalization event in U.S.

history.

In Florida, which is the U.S.

state that has the most Venezuelan immigrants, the Miami Herald has been running a live blog today and tonight giving readers updates piecemeal as they get them.

As the Herald describes the situation, quote, the Supreme Court's stunning and unprecedented move has sparked nationwide fear, confusion, and outrage.

No official timeline or guidance has been provided, leaving these immigrants and and their families and their employers in legal limbo.

Joining us now is Dara Lynn.

She's a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

Dara, thank you very much for being with us tonight.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

So I'm still sort of absorbing what this means.

This is an unprecedented ruling.

Did I misstate any of that or getting any of that the wrong way around?

So, I mean, the only thing is that the way temporary protected status works is that people who are in the United States, who may not have legal status, who may be on temporary status, but may not have options after that expires, are allowed to stay for 12 or 18 months at a time.

And so the Biden administration, on its way out the door, said, Hey,

if you got TPS from Venezuela in 2023, you can extend it now.

You can apply again and have it until next fall.

The Trump administration clawed that back, said, Actually, we'd prefer not to do that, and we think there was a paperwork error.

So we're going to say that actually your TPS expires in April.

That's what this whole litigation has been about.

So these people have gone from thinking they were, they had protections for another year and a half, to thinking they didn't, to thinking they did when a federal judge ruled that that couldn't go forward, to now with the Supreme Court thinking again that they don't have legal status here.

So somebody who's

on temporary protected status from Venezuela in this country right now, what's their likely timeline in terms of their status and in terms of their ability to be in this country legally from here on out?

I mean, to be honest, what we've seen under this administration is that there is a certain extent of arrest them and then sort them out.

We definitely have heard, I've heard cases going back to February of people with valid TPS being detained.

And some of that is because of the interaction of the Alien Enemies Act, which says it doesn't matter if you have legal status, if we think you're a gang member, we can deport you anyway, although that is, of course, on its own Supreme Court hold.

But I think that it's there's so much uncertainty.

And Venezuelans, frankly, even before today, felt that the temporary court order wasn't really enough to give them a firm grounding.

And now they've been unfortunately proven right.

Can you help us understand what precedent this sets?

I mean, Venezuela, as I understand it, is one of 17 countries that the U.S.

has designated for this TPS for temporary protected status.

What does this mean for people who are here from any of those 16 other countries?

Under the first Trump administration, they were very aggressive in saying, if you have TPS, we're not going to keep extending it.

You need to go home.

It's over.

Most of those decisions got held up in court because they were found to have violated the laws governing how you can make decisions like that.

They weren't considering conditions in those countries.

They were just saying, no, we don't want them, send them home.

This is even more aggressive than that.

It's saying a grant you had already been given is getting clawed back.

So

they've already done things to reduce the extent to which Haitians can be here under TPS.

And yeah, deadlines that are coming up, I think it's reasonable to expect that very few of those are going to be extended.

And people who don't have other options for legal status are going to have to be figuring out whether they want to leave or stay as unauthorized immigrants.

Dara Lynn, Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, thanks for helping us understand this tonight.

Really big deal.

Thank you.

All right.

We'll be right back with new details on a breaking news story.

We brought you earlier in this show.

Stay with us.

That's next.

Okay, on Friday night, you might have seen the Washington Post publish this headline.

Trump Justice Department considers removing key check on lawmaker prosecutions.

The Post reporting on a proposal inside the Justice Department to make it so federal prosecutors across the country could indict sitting members of Congress without getting approval from lawyers in Maine Justice's public integrity section.

So any random U.S.

attorney anywhere in the country could indict a sitting member of Congress on their own say-so without even needing to run it by anyone in Washington.

That story broke on Friday, and it's obviously a big deal, right?

One of the reasons the public integrity section exists at DOJ is to prevent prosecutors from bringing politically motivated charges.

With this change, prosecutors could indict members of Congress on their own with no oversight and no check against politically motivated prosecutions.

But like I said, as of Friday, the Washington Post was just reporting this as a proposal.

Well, now tonight we got this news.

I mentioned it at the very top of the show.

Two weeks ago, Democratic Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ross Baraka, was arrested by

shambolic, unprofessional, very obviously out-of-the-depth masked homeland security officers while the mayor was protesting outside of an ICE detention center in his city.

At the time, Trump's newly appointed U.S.

attorney for New Jersey charged the mayor with one count of trespassing.

Tonight, that U.S.

attorney, her name is Alina Haba.

She's one of Trump's old defense lawyers.

Before that, she represented like parking garage companies.

Tonight, she dropped the case against Mayor Ross Baraka, but then she brought a new charge against a Democratic member of Congress.

Congresswoman LaMonica McIver was with Mayor Baraka at the ICE detention center when he was arrested.

Alina Haba has now charged Congresswoman McIver with assault, claiming that she assaulted, impeded, and interfered with law enforcement at the ICE facility.

Congresswoman McIver has responded with this statement:

Earlier this month, I joined my colleagues to inspect the treatment of ICE detainees at Delaney Hall in my district.

We were fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities as members of Congress have done many times before.

The charges against me are purely political.

They mischaracterize and distort my actions.

They are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight.

And indeed, federal law explicitly protects the rights of members of Congress to inspect federal detention centers for immigrants, even with zero notice that they are doing so.

Now, this story only just broke.

We reached out to Alina Haba's office, the U.S.

Attorney's Office for the state of New Jersey, to ask if they got approval from the public integrity section at Maine Justice for these charges they have now brought against a sitting congresswoman.

We have yet to hear back.

We'll let you know when we do.

All right, that is going to do it for me tonight.

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