Former Olympian David Hearn pleads not guilty to charge in Reflecting Pool case

(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge on Friday denied the Department of Justice’s request to lift an order requiring the removal of President Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center.

The Trump administration still faces a deadline of Friday to remove Trump’s name from the building.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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(NEW YORK) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is on Capitol Hill Wednesday for what is formally billed as a routine hearing on the Pentagon’s budget request.

But the appearance — the first before Congress for Hegseth since the war in Iran began in February — lands just two days before a 60-day deadline to wind down hostilities.

It also comes amid intensifying questions on the Hill about how quickly the Pentagon is depleting weapons stockpiles, and as lawmakers continue to scrutinize Hegseth’s unusual spate of firings of senior defense officials without a public explanation.

Questions over civilian casualties in the Iran war, as well as whether the U.S. was properly prepared for retaliatory strikes, and broader questions over the strategic rationale for the conflict, are likely to be a key part of committee members on both sides of the aisle questioning of Hegseth, multiple congressional aides explained.

This week marks Hegseth’s first return to Capitol Hill in nearly a year — with testimony Wednesday before the House Armed Services Committee and Thursday on the Senate side — and his first exposure to sustained scrutiny since the war with Iran began. He is joined by Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff at both hearings.

While Hegseth has appeared before the press since the conflict began in late February, he has largely limited engagement to reporters viewed as sympathetic to the administration.

At the center of this week’s hearings is the administration’s request for $1.5 trillion in defense spending, the largest amount in the Pentagon’s history and a jump of 50% over current levels, which would mark the largest single-year increase in a generation.

The proposal would triple spending on drones and related technologies to more than $74 billion, while directing over $30 billion toward munitions procurement. But that budget request was developed months ago: not account for spending in the war with Iran.

“The overlap, you’ll see, is the request for munitions, which is something we always need,” Jules Hurst III, acting undersecretary of defense and the Pentagon’s comptroller, told reporters last week. “We always need to increase our magazine depth. But outside of that, there aren’t any operational costs in here from Iran.” Hurst is set to join Hegseth and Caine at the Senate hearing on Thursday.

That means the Pentagon may require additional funding to cover the cost of the vast quantities of munitions being expended as U.S. forces have struck more than 13,000 targets in Iran since February, along with other significant war-related expenses.

Defense experts have long raised concerns about stockpile constraints even before the war with Iran, with some estimates of a potential conflict with China suggesting the United States could exhaust long-range missile inventories within the first few weeks of fighting.

In less than two months of exchanging fire with Iran, the U.S. has used roughly half of certain missiles and other munitions, according to an analysis published last week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Retired Col. Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at CSIS and an author of the report, said Operation Epic Fury “does create a window of vulnerability” for a period of as many as four years – the time it would take to replenish stocks.

“The United States has enough munitions to fight this war if it stubs up again,” Cancian said. “But the risk is in a future war with China, where inventory levels are far below where war planners would like them to be.”

Pentagon officials have maintained the U.S. has enough ammo to fight Iran. Though rearming the force with new munitions can take years, with some missiles requiring one to two years to build, reflecting an inherent limit on how many complex munitions the defense industry can produce each year, spurring much of the interest in huge investments in relatively cheap, easier-to-produce drones, which the Pentagon continues to surge into the Middle East.

Hegseth is also likely to face questions on his unprecedented firing or sidelining of two dozen senior military officials, particularly during a time of war, where he recently fired Gen. Randy George, who was the Army’s top officer and John Phelan, the Navy secretary.

Hegseth has also fired numerous lower-profile generals, without explanation, including Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., who was the chief of the Army Chaplain Corps, a collection of clergy from different faiths within the service. He has also blocked the promotion of four colonels to brigadier general, two of whom are women and two are Black, according to two U.S. officials, who both described a secretary of defense intervening in promotions as unprecedented.

Meanwhile, Democrats have failed in their multiple attempts to rein in President Donald Trump’s authority to wage war in Iran without Capitol Hill’s approval.

The 1973 War Powers Resolution gives the president latitude to conduct military strikes for a 60-day window, which closes Friday. The law allows for a one-time 30-day extension for the president to act without the consent of lawmakers, though it is unclear whether Trump intends to do so or whether Republicans will take into account the ceasefire in a way that relieves any deadline pressure.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court appears poised to allow President Trump to turn away asylum seekers who approach ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border, a decision which would reverse a lower court ruling that the policy likely violates federal law and international treaties.

A majority of the court’s conservative justices signaled during oral arguments in the case Tuesday that the administration should have broad leeway over border control and that asylum seekers who have not yet stepped foot on U.S. soil probably do not have a legal right to file a claim seeking protection.

“Do you think someone who comes to the front door of a house and knocks at the door has arrived ‘in’ the house?” Justice Samuel Alito asked. “The person may have arrived ‘at’ the house.”

Immigrant advocates insist the Immigration and Nationality Act, which says a noncitizen who “arrives in the U.S. … at a designated port of arrival” must be allowed to apply for asylum, includes those who have “reached the threshold” of America.

“If an immigration officer determines that an alien who is arriving in the United States has expressed a fear of future persecution, then the immigration officer shall refer them for a credible fear interview,” argued Kelsi Corkran, an attorney supporting asylum seekers.

From the start of his second term, Trump has effectively blocked the entry of all noncitizens at the southern border, including those seeking to apply for refuge from credible fears of violence and persecution.

“You can’t ‘arrive in’ the U.S. while you’re still standing in Mexico,” argued Assistant Solicitor General Vivek Suri. “It is entirely lawful for the executive branch to prevent aliens from reaching U.S. soil and claiming those protections.”

The dispute largely turns on competing interpretations of what it means to “arrive in” the country.

“How close do you have to be to the border?” asked Justice Amy Coney Barrett. “If it’s not crossing the physical border, what is the magic thing or the dispositive thing that we’re looking for where we say, ah, now that person we can say arrives in the United States?”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that regardless of where the line is drawn, the law stipulates that the government can prevent people from filing an asylum claim if it wants to. “The government’s presumably going to stop you on the other side of that line and prevent you from getting to wherever the line is. Right?” he asked.

The court’s three liberal justices were critical of the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law.

“Imagine a polite asylum seeker who wants to do everything by the book,” posited Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “He approaches the border but does not cross, precisely because the law says you are not supposed to enter the U.S. without authority. Why on earth would Congress have intended or meant for his asylum request to be discarded, not taken seriously, not entertained, but someone who manages to enter the U.S. unlawfully…and requests asylum gets their application entertained? “

“That doesn’t seem to me to make any sense,” Jackson added.

At the heart of the case is the so-called “turn back” policy from Trump’s first term that kept asylum seekers waiting in Mexico as a method of “metering” access at border crossings that faced overcrowding. Border officials contend it was a temporary policy, imposed only when conditions required.

While the administration voluntarily discontinued the practice in 2021 after a lower court deemed it unlawful, the government now wants the justices to approve the ability to reinstate the policy if necessary. Trump has invoked alternate legal authorities to support his current border crackdown.

Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, an immigrant rights group representing several asylum-seeker plaintiffs, said a ruling for the administration could have a major impact, even if not immediate.

“We have no doubt the administration is seeking a decision that will give them even more leeway to restrict the rights of people seeking asylum,” Crow said.

Tens of thousands of asylum seekers who arrived at the U.S. southern border during Trump’s first term were forced to remain in Mexico for weeks or months in sometimes harrowing conditions in hopes they might have a chance to be interviewed about their fears of persecution.

Nicole Ramos, border rights project director at Al Otro Lado, an immigrant rights group and plaintiff in the case, says Congress had a more nuanced view when it drafted the law following the U.S. failure to accept Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.

“The right to seek asylum at the border is a legal right and a moral right,” Ramos said. “The stakes are not theoretical. They are measured in lives.”

One of those lives was Benito, a Mexican asylum seeker who declined to give his last name to protect his identity and spoke through a translator at an event hosted by Al Otro Lado.

“I was partially tortured, had a lot of lesions, and emotional harm, and traumas and I’m still healing from that,” he said of the violence he was trying to escape. “I knew I could apply for asylum in that moment, on the side of Mexico, and so I did everything correctly. I came close; I told the [U.S.] immigration agents that I needed to apply for asylum because I was scared and thought I would be killed.

“I had scars on my body, on my face, and my head,” he said, “but they said to me that they couldn’t help me, couldn’t accept me.”

The court is expected to issue a decision on the Trump administration’s bid to resurrect the “metering” and “turn back” policy by the end of June.

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