Biden gives farewell remarks: ‘We’re not leaving the fight’
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(WASHINGTON) — Former President Joe Biden told his staffers, “We’re not leaving the fight,” during farewell remarks following Trump’s inauguration on Monday.
Biden referenced President Donald Trump’s inauguration remarks, which offered a scathing rebuke of the Biden administration while laying out Trump’s immediate plans upon returning to office.
“We have a lot more to do. We heard the inaugural address today,” Biden said in his remarks at Joint Base Andrews before getting on a plane with former first lady Jill Biden.
“We’ve got a lot more to do,” Biden continued, before making the sign of the cross to laughs.
The former president urged his staffers to stay “engaged,” whether that’s in the public or private sector, academia or running for office themselves.
“We’re leaving office, but we’re not leaving the fight,” Biden said. “You’re smart, you’re skilled, you’re passionate and the country needs you again.”
He said his dad taught him that a measure of a person is how quickly they get back up after getting knocked down.
“That’s what we have to do right now. We’ve always done our best as Americans. We never, never, never give up, ever,” he said.
He said he hopes his staffers look back on the past four years with “the same pride I have of all you’ve done.”
“You did it upholding core values of honesty, decency, integrity,” he said. “You represent the best of who we are as Americans. And that’s not a joke. That’s real.”
Biden also expressed optimism that their term wouldn’t be undone.
“Just as I’ve said of the laws we’ve enacted, our seeds are gonna grow and bloom for decades to come,” he said.
He closed by expressing his gratitude for his staffers and their families and the chance to serve with them.
“I’ve been doing this for 50 years, you’re the best group of people,” Biden said to cheers. “It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president.”
He also quoted from the Seamus Heaney poem, “The Cure at Troy,” saying, “Once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice will rise up and hope and history rhyme.”
“You made it rhyme louder than it’s rhymed in a long time,” he said. “We’re on the cusp of real change, so let’s help hope and history rhyme.”
(NEW YORK) — In what appears to be part of the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against sanctuary cities, the Justice Department is investigating a sheriff in upstate New York who released an undocumented man later taken into custody by federal agents.
The US Attorney’s office for the Northern District of New York “is looking into the circumstances” surrounding the release by Tompkins County Sheriff Derek Osborne of Jesus Romero-Hernandez, a 27-year-old Mexican citizen.
Romero-Hernandez pleaded guilty to a state assault charge and was sentenced to time served, necessitating his release. He left local custody in Ithaca before Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived to pick him up on a federal complaint charging him with illegally re-entering the United States after a prior removal.
Ithaca adopted a sanctuary law in 2017.
ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service and Homeland Security Investigations later apprehended Romero-Hernandez.
“The Tompkins County Sheriff’s Office in Ithaca, NY, a self-described sanctuary city, appears to have failed to honor a valid federal arrest warrant for a criminal alien with an assault conviction,” Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said. “I applaud the U.S. Attorney’s commitment to investigate these circumstances for potential prosecution.”
Tompkins County and the Tompkins County Sheriff’s office issued a joint statement refuting the DOJ’s claims.
The officials said ICE was “notified of when the individual in question was going to be released and had every opportunity to come to the jail to obtain the individual in question without any need for a pursuit or other incident.”
“There was no interference with federal immigration enforcement efforts. DOJ’s assertion that the Tompkins County Sheriff did anything to put federal law enforcement officers in danger is false and offensive,” the offices said.
Bove convened all 93 US attorney’s offices on a phone call on Thursday to convey that they should focus on surging resources toward immigration enforcement. He likened the threat posed by undocumented immigrants to the threat posed by terrorists.
It represents a significant shift for the Justice Department redirecting law enforcement resources away from previous national security priorities and toward immigration enforcement.
(WASHINGTON) — Several LGBTQ rights organizations sued the Trump administration on Thursday, alleging that the president’s executive orders aimed at dismantling diversity and equity programs are unconstitutional and will cripple critical programs used by Americans.
The lawsuit, filed by civil rights groups the Legal Defense Fund and Lambda Legal on behalf of several nonprofits, is one of dozens filed against the new administration one month into office. All of the plaintiffs receive federal funding to support their work.
They challenge three executive orders signed by President Donald Trump that call for an end to government funding tied to diversity, equity and inclusion programs and what the administration calls “gender ideology.”
“The government is attempting to erase a very specific group of people. Transgender and non-binary folks in our country are being singled out as individuals who are being told that they don’t exist,” Tyler TerMeer, one of the plaintiffs and CEO of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, told ABC News in an interview Thursday. “So this moment is us going to the courts and saying, ‘We won’t be silenced.'”
In the complaint, the nonprofits claim that the executive orders are a violation of their Fifth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution that “[n]o person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Among the plaintiffs is the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, which helps communities affected by HIV. The group expected to receive more than $641,000 in federal funds this budget year, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit lists as defendants the Departments of Justice, Labor, Housing and Health, along with several administration officials.
“The executive orders, in essence, require our organizations or non-governmental entities to certify that they don’t engage in DEI work or engage in what they call radical gender ideology in any of their work,” Jose Abrigo, senior attorney at Lambda Legal, told ABC News in an interview Thursday.
“So, this case particularly is really important … it prevents the government from forcing their viewpoint on essentially private nonprofits who are serving the community for good.”
The GLBT Historical Society, another plaintiff in the suit, operates a museum of LGBTQ+ history and culture in San Francisco — the first of its kind in the U.S. The organization receives at least $130,000 in federal funding and would not be able to advance public knowledge without it, it alleged in the suit.
The Legal Defense Fund and Lambda Legal also filed a lawsuit on Wednesday on behalf of the National Urban League, the National Fair Housing Alliance and the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, alleging that the administration is violating the organizations’ rights to free speech and due process and is engaging in intentional discrimination by issuing and enforcing the orders, according to Lambda Legal.
The White House did not immediately return ABC News’ request for a statement and the DOJ declined to comment on either suit.
ABC News Contributors Sabina Ghebremedhin, Anne Flaherty, Molly Nagle and Alex Mallin contributed to this report.
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(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. military is tracking strong early-year recruiting figures across the services, a signal it will meet or exceed 2024 performances, military officials told ABC News.
The Army and Navy, the two largest services and the most ailing from recruiting challenges, both say they’ve recruited at promising rates in the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, which began on Oct. 1. However, neither the Army nor the Navy could readily point out a reason, and the Navy said it is too early in the fiscal year to evaluate.
“We’ve seen momentum unlike anything we’ve [had] in a decade,” said Gen. James Mingus, the Army’s vice chief of staff, at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, March 12 — when he disclosed that five months into its recruiting year the Army had already signed up close to 73% of the year’s annual goal of 61,000 recruits.
The upward recruiting trends for the military services began last summer and have continued at a high pace. Some service chiefs projected then that the numbers would quickly surpass this year’s annual recruiting goals and build up the pool of recruits needed to start off the new recruiting year in October.
From 2023 to 2024, during the final year of the Biden administration, recruitment across the services jumped 12.5%, according to the Department of Defense.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said increased recruitments after President Donald Trump’s election were a reflection of a new mindset the Pentagon would promote to service members — a “warrior ethos” that Hegseth has said would focus away from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives he said were a distraction from a focus on military lethality.
“I think we’ve seen enthusiasm and excitement from young men and women who want to join the military actively because they are interested in being a part of the finest fighting force the world has to offer and not doing a lot of other things that serve oftentimes, too often, to divide or distract,” Hegseth said after becoming secretary.
At his confirmation hearing to be secretary, Hegseth said the military’s strongest recruiting asset was the commander in chief himself. “There is no better recruiter in my mind for our military than President Donald Trump,” he told senators.
One commanding general of recruitment, Air Force Brig. Gen. Christopher Amrhein, told ABC News that “there is no one silver bullet” for recruiting, but he said the Air Force had “honed in on the right ingredients, and they’re all working.”
Alex Wagner, a former senior Pentagon official in the Biden administration, said Hegseth’s conception of recruiting by promoting a warrior ethos amounted to “little more than a restatement, not even a rebranding, of existing efforts.”
Hegseth’s approach brings “nothing new of any substance,” said Wagner, who, as Air Force assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, was a civilian leader in recruiting.
“People want to come into the military for a number of reasons, but one of the key reasons is to be something bigger than yourself and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he added. “I think we’ve long been building a warrior ethos.”
In his address to a joint session of Congress earlier this month, Trump said the U.S. Army “had its single best recruiting month in 15 years.”
That claim may be a reference to the Army’s recruiting success this past January. A defense official told ABC News that in January, the Army recorded the highest average growth in contracts per day since January 2010.
Mingus attributed the turnaround to changes in “who you recruit, where you recruit, how we recruit, more professionalizing of our recruit[ing] force [and] expanding the population.”
“All of those things [that] we’ve been working [on] for the last 18 to 24 months, we believe are coming to fruition,” he said.
The president took the credit for steady recruiting gains among the services, falsely claiming in the address to Congress that “it was just a few months ago where the results were exactly the opposite.”
“I’m straight-up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles — it hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated,” Hegseth said on the “Shawn Ryan Podcast” in November.
Critics have worried it could have a chilling effect on recruitment for groups including women and non-white men.
“In recent weeks, for the very first time, I’ve heard from a number of women, both in the service and who would consider the service, questioning whether or not the military is a place for them,” Wagner said. “Clearly this stems from the secretary’s firing of the military’s two most senior women, who earned their positions — and the respect of their peers — based solely on merit.”
Asked for demographic data on the first quarter 2025 figures, only the Air Force was able to answer ABC News’ query. A spokesperson said Air Force officials “weren’t tracking any significant demographic change” at this point.
A Navy spokesperson said it was “too early to tell” about demographics but pointed to successful early-year figures. Comparing the first quarter of fiscal year 2025 to that of fiscal year 2024, the Navy contracted 4,000 new sailors and shipped 5,000 more to boot camp, the spokesperson said.
It set its recruiting goal at its highest in 20 years, a turnaround from the pandemic era, when benchmarks and enlistments slumped.
“We are on pace to exceed recruiting goals in 2025,” said Adm. James Kilby, the Navy’s vice chief of naval operations, in the congressional hearing on Wednesday, March 12. “We’ve made some progress in the Navy, as the other services have. We have stopped the problem.”
The Navy spokesperson said the service makes assessments on figures on an annual basis but noted that some policies that enlarged the pool of recruits, including a preparatory course that helps potential sailors meet Navy academic and physical standards, have helped the effort.
The Navy’s prep course followed the success of the Army’s Future Soldier Preparatory Course that contributed close to a quarter of last year’s Army recruiting goal of 55,000 recruits.
“We did open up the aperture a little bit for people that want to serve in uniform, and we expanded various policies to increase opportunities for qualified candidates,” the spokesperson said.
Policies that open the aperture enable services to tap into a wider range of potential recruits — and the prep courses are intended to help them reach the academic or physical shape to meet standards.
Katherine Kuzminski, the director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, said the Army and Navy prep courses act as a sort of “pre-basic training” program.
Only 23% of youth are eligible based on service standards to serve in the military, and 9% of youth are interested in signing up, Kuzminski said, narrowing the pool to a “Venn diagram [that] does not necessarily overlap.”
The Air Force has also had a recruiting success story, said an Air Force Accessions Center spokesman, due largely to more recruiters in the field. The Air Force, under which the tiny Space Force is folded, has hiked its recruiting goals by 20% in 2025.
Wagner said the Biden administration had “initiate[d] a comprehensive review of military [entry] standards to ensure they made sense in the year 2025,” paving the way for it to meet its 2024 goals and even adjust them higher before the fiscal year ended.
Part of the approach was “making sure that our requirements were realistic, rather than an outdated vestige of a different era,” said Wagner, who also served under secretaries of defense in the Obama administration.
The Air Force during the Biden administration loosened body fat standards, which were stricter than the Army and Navy standards, he said, and it lifted a lifetime ban for airmen who tested positive for THC, as other military services had after recreational marijuana was legalized in parts of the United States.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin, in a March 3 post on X, said recruitment for December, January and February were at 15-year highs and that the delayed entry program, or the DEP, is at its largest in nearly 10 years.
The DEP, which allows services to recruit future service members and ship them to boot camp at a later date, is a product of sustained work, Wagner said.
“I mean, you don’t build the healthiest DEP in a decade over the course of five weeks, right?” he added.
It’s unclear whether early success for military recruiters is a consequence of Biden administration policies such as the prep courses or enthusiasm for the new president — or a combination of both.
It is too early to assign credit, Kuzminski said.
“We can’t dismiss the fact that perhaps [the current administration] did affect either American youth’s decision to join the military or, more likely, their parents’ willingness to let them go into the military, for some portion of those folks,” she said.
“But the reality is that over the last three years, we’ve seen a lot of structural changes that improved the recruiting enterprise as a whole,” she added.
The smallest military service, the U.S. Marine Corps, has been historically resilient to recruiting shocks like the pandemic.
A Marine official said in a statement to ABC News that the Marine Corps “consistently meets its required accession mission.” That “enduring success,” the official said, “is directly attributed to the hard work of our Marine Recruiters.”
