Lee Zeldin tapped to lead Environmental Protection Agency under Trump
Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) President-elect Donald Trump has tapped former Rep. Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.
In a statement on Monday, Trump praised Lee’s background as a lawyer and said he’s known the former New York congressman for a long time.
“He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet,” Trump said. “He will set new standards on environmental review and maintenance, that will allow the United States to grow in a healthy and well-structured way.”
Zeldin confirmed he had been offered the job in a social media post.
“It is an honor to join President Trump’s Cabinet as EPA Administrator,” Zeldin wrote on X. “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”
Zeldin represented Long Island’s Suffolk County in the House of Representatives for eight years. He ran for governor against Democrat Kathy Hochul in 2022, earning Trump’s endorsement but falling short of Hochul by 6 points.
Zeldin previously criticized the Biden-Harris administration for canceling a key permit needed for the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline and rejoining the Paris climate agreement after Trump withdrew. During his gubernatorial bid, he wanted to reverse New York state’s ban on hydraulic fracking.
Zeldin will need to be confirmed by the Senate to lead the EPA.
Trump’s pick of Zeldin comes less than a week after Election Day and as Trump’s new administration begins to take shape.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — Immigration advocacy groups and Democratic leaders are seeking to disrupt President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants by pre-drafting lawsuits that could be filed as soon as he takes office.
Trump has vowed carry out what he calls “the largest deportation operation” in the country’s history, and has pledged to reinstate and expand his controversial ban on people coming into the U.S. from certain majority-Muslim countries as part of his immigration policy.
On Monday, he re-emphasized on Truth Social that he is prepared to declare a national emergency and use military assets to carry out his promise of mass deportation.
Several immigration advocates and Democratic leaders told ABC News they have spent months preparing for the prospect of another Trump presidency and the expected crackdown on immigrants that Trump and his newly tapped border czar Tom Homan have promised.
Homan, who has embraced Trump’s pledge to undertake mass deportations on “Day 1” of the new administration, oversaw the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) during the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” enforcement that separated parents from their children at the border.
“In California, we’ve been thinking about the possibility of this day for months and in some cases, years, and been preparing and getting ready by looking at all of the actions Trump said he will take,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta told ABC News.
Bonta said his team has prepared briefs on several immigration issues that Trump mentioned on the campaign trail. including mass deportations, birthright citizenship, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and sanctuary cities.
“There will be pain and harm inflicted by him. It is not all avoidable, but to get to our immigrant communities in ways that are in violation of the law, they’re going to have to go through me, and we will stop them in courts using our legal tools given to us,” Bonta said.
The California attorney general claims that 80% of the state’s legal challenges against the immigration executive orders and policies from Trump’s first term were successful.
“We’re very confident that we will block major efforts by the federal administration, that we will be able to blunt some of the worst of it,” Bonta said.
The 24 Democratic state attorneys general across the United States hope to present a unified front to block the Trump administration’s immigration policy by using his first term as a blueprint, according to Sean Rankin, the president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association.
“When we look at immigration, we know that that is something that the president has talked about over and over and over again,” Rankin told ABC News. “At this point, we’re not connecting dots. We’re following flashing arrows. It’s very easy to see where they’re going to go.”
One of Homan’s targets in his mass deportation plan are sanctuary states and cities — places that have enacted laws designed at protecting undocumented immigrants. The policies, which vary by state, generally prohibit city officials from cooperating with the federal immigration authorities.
“They better get the hell out of the way,” Homan said last week, regarding the governors of sanctuary states. “Either you help us or get the hell out of the way, because ICE is going to do their job.”
Leaders in several sanctuary cities have said they are going to fight back using all the tools legally available to protect immigrant communities.
“We have been doing the work in this office to prepare for a lot of different hypotheticals and we will be prepared to face those with every tool that we have,” said Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson at a press conference last week.
Ferguson told reporters that between 2017 and 2021, his legal team defeated 55 “illegal actions” and policies from the Trump administration. But while his office has been preparing litigation for months, Ferguson said he believes the second Trump administration will also be better prepared than the first one.
“One of many reasons why we were successful with our litigation against the Trump administration was they were often sloppy in the way they rolled out and that provided openings to us to prevail,” Ferguson told reporters. “In court this time around, I anticipate that we will see less of that, and that is an important difference.”
In addition to considering the use of the military to carry out deportations, Trump and his allies have suggested using an obscure section of the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts — a set of 18th century wartime laws — to immediately deport some migrants without a hearing.
Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told ABC News that they have been preparing for the potential use of the military to conduct deportations.
“They’re going to try and use the military, under the alien enemies act, to summarily deport people,” Gelernt said. “We will try and challenge it immediately.”
Gelernt, who led the ACLU’s legal response to family separations in Trump’s first term, said he expects the upcoming Trump administration to be “worse for immigrants” than the first.
“The Trump team has apparently been preparing for four years to implement anti-immigrant policies, and the rhetoric in the country has gotten so much more polarized than it was in 2016,” Gelernt said.
During Trump’s first term, Gelernt said groups like the ACLU were caught off-guard with some of his executive orders like the travel ban — but this time around, the organization has been preparing litigation for almost a year. In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s controversial ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, which the Biden administration later eliminated. Since then, Trump has appointed two Supreme Court justices.
“We are plotting out our challenges with much more advanced preparation, and we are doing our best to coordinate among all the various NGOs [non-governmental organizations] around the country,” Gelernt said.
“As litigators, we’ve been convening, we’ve been preparing, we’ve been trying to anticipate the unimaginable as we walk into the next four years,” said Alina Das, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at the New York University School of Law.
Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., shared details of how he is helping GOP vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance prepare for his upcoming debate on Tuesday with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Majority Whip Emmer, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, was invited to stand in for Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, to help Vance prepare to take on the governor’s “folksy” personality.
Speaking exclusively to “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz on Sunday, Emmer said he’s spent the last month analyzing Walz’s previous debate performances.
“I’ve known Tim probably since he was first elected almost 20 years ago, and I worked with him directly for four years, I spent the last month just going back, all of his old stuff, to get his phrases down, his mannerisms, that sort of thing,” Emmer said. “My job was to be able to play Tim Walz so JD Vance knows what he’s going to see.”
Asked by Raddatz if he has participated in any mock debates yet and has officially played Walz, Emmer said he didn’t want to get ahead of Vance in sharing those details.
“The debate is on Tuesday night, so I’ll let your viewers decide that, I’m not going to get ahead of JD and the team,” Emmer told Raddatz. “If they want to talk about exactly what we did when we did it. How many times they can do that. For me, I did my job or have been doing my job in helping JD see what it is he’s going to be dealing with on Tuesday night.”
Emmer praised Vance, saying the Ohio senator will do a “great job” on Tuesday night and that “he’s got the issues on his side.”
“Vance could talk about the economy that Donald Trump fixed and that Harris and Biden broke. He can talk about the border that Trump fixed and they broke. He can talk about peace and stability around the world, which they don’t even have a clue [about]; they’ve caused all of this disruption,” Emmer said. “Once he understands that Tim Walz is just going to try and deflect and go into this folksy whatever, he’ll hold him accountable.”
As Vance heads into Tuesday night’s debate, he continues to struggle with his favorability numbers in national and state polling.
A recent AP-NORC poll found that Walz is viewed more favorably among registered voters than Vance.
In the poll, Walz has a 42% favorability rating among registered voters while Vance is at 27%. Along partisan lines, Walz also has better numbers — he has a 72% favorability rating among Democrats while Vance is at 51% among Republicans.
Pressed by Raddatz about what Vance needs to do to change Americans’ perception of him, Emmer rejected the polling.
“I think JD is very likable, and I think he’s well-liked, and I don’t buy into these snapshot polls that are being done for a specific reason,” Emmer said. “Once people get to know who [Walz] is and they know what his policies are, he’s more radical than Kamala Harris, people do not like him once they get to know him and JD will expose that on Tuesday.”
At his rally Saturday night in Prairie du Chien, Wis., Trump disparaged Harris’ mental acuity.
While attacking Harris over the situation at the southern border, Trump said: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”
Asked if he agrees with or approves of that language, Emmer did not answer directly.
“I think Kamala Harris is the wrong choice for America. I think Kamala Harris is actually as bad or worse as the administration, that we’ve witnessed for the last four years, Martha,” he said.
Pressed again by Raddatz if he agrees with Trump’s description, Emmer said, “I think we should stick to the issues.”
“The issues are, Donald Trump fixed it once. They broke it. He’s going to fix it again. That – those are the issues,” he said.
On Friday, Harris visited the southern border for the first time in more than three years, where she announced several border policies she would pursue as president, including barring migrants who illegally cross the border from reentering the country for five years and enacting stricter criminal penalties for repeat offenders.
When asked if he opposes these policies that Harris is proposing, Emmer argued that Harris has had several years to act on the border issue and is only taking action now because of how critical the issue is for voters heading into the election.
“This is too little too late. Nobody can believe her because her actions have said something completely different for four years.”
(NEW YORK) — Republicans in North Carolina and nationally are assessing the potential fallout for former President Donald Trump from a bombshell report alleging that Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the party’s gubernatorial nominee, posted disturbing and inflammatory statements on a forum of a pornographic website.
CNN reported Thursday that Robinson, behind an anonymous username he allegedly used elsewhere, made the comments more than a decade ago, including supporting slavery, calling himself a “black NAZI” and recalling memories of him “peeping” on women in the shower as a 14-year-old.
ABC News has not independently verified the comments were made by Robinson, and he insisted in a video posted to X prior to the story’s publication that “those are not the words of Mark Robinson.”
But Robinson, a Donald Trump ally, already has a history of incendiary remarks about Jews, gay people and others, and elections in North Carolina, one of the nation’s marquee swing states, rest on a knife’s edge, raising questions of how much the latest news will impact his race and other Republicans on the ballot with him — including the former president.
“I think this only heightens the level of toxicity that the Robinson campaign has, and the real question becomes, what’s the radioactive fallout at the top of the ticket along with down the ballot for Republicans here in North Carolina” asked Michael Bitzer, the Politics Department chair at Catawba College.
“This cannot be something that the voters aren’t going to recognize and probably play more into softening the Republican support. Is it isolated only to Robinson’s campaign, or does it start to impact Trump? Does it impact other statewide executive Republicans as well? We’ll just have to wait and see, but this feels like a pretty significant event in North Carolina politics.”
Robinson, who casts himself as a conservative family man and is running for North Carolina’s open governorship against Democratic state Attorney General Josh Stein, is already behind in the polls.
While he holds statewide office and has broad name recognition, Robinson boasts a highly controversial record, including calling the Holocaust “hogwash” and homosexuality “filth,” and he drew claims of hypocrisy when he admitted this year that he had paid for his wife to get an abortion, seemingly in contrast with his stated opposition to the procedure, which he’d previously likened to “murder” and “genocide.”
North Carolina’s gubernatorial race is still considered competitive given the state’s tight partisan divide, but Republicans in the state told ABC News they had already viewed him as trailing, and that Thursday’s report won’t help.
“He’s already got a lengthy history of publishing comments like that on the internet. These are perhaps a little more graphic. In terms of does this by itself serve as a guillotine, I don’t know. But it feels like the cumulative weight is starting to add up now,” said one North Carolina GOP strategist. “It flies in the face of everything he presents of himself publicly. So, cumulatively plus the hypocrisy of this, it’s obviously hurtful to him.”
Republicans were more divided on what it means beyond Robinson’s own candidacy.
North Carolina is a must-win state for Trump, and losing it would impose significant pressure on him to perform in other swing states.
Trump is already running ahead of Robinson — while polls show Robinson trailing, they also show a neck-and-neck race in the state between the former president and Vice President Kamala Harris. The main question now is whether the news depresses Republican turnout in a state where even a small nudge in turnout one way or the other can make decide the victor.
“[Robinson] was already toast. The question is if it hurts Trump, something the campaign is very worried about,” said Doug Heye, a veteran GOP strategist with experience working in North Carolina. “It doesn’t directly cost him voters, but his endorsed pick continues to be a big distraction and has no money to drive out the vote.”
“He’s a baby blue anchor around Trump’s chances in the Tar Heel State,” added Trump donor Dan Eberhart. “This is not good news for Trump’s campaign at all.”
Democrats are already seizing on the news to try to connect Robinson to Trump, who has repeatedly praised him, even calling him at one point “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Kamala HQ, an X page that serves as one of the Harris campaign’s rapid response tools, posted a slate of videos featuring Trump speaking positively about Robinson.
“His campaign was toast before this story, so the real impact is on all of the Republicans who have endorsed and campaigned alongside him,” said Bruce Thompson, a North Carolina Democratic fundraiser.
However, Trump has been able to navigate his own headwinds, including felony convictions in New York, questioning Harris’ race and more to remain the leader of his party and a viable presidential candidate, leading some Republicans to doubt that Robinson’s struggles will impact the presidential campaign.
“Doubt it impacts at all down-ballot,” said Dave Carney, a GOP strategist who chairs a pro-Trump super PAC.
“I don’t think it helps, but it won’t hurt,” added Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary.
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt sounded a confident note, saying in a statement that the former president’s team would “not take our eye off the ball.”
“President Trump’s campaign is focused on winning the White House and saving this country. North Carolina is a vital part of that plan. We are confident that as voters compare the Trump record of a strong economy, low inflation, a secure border, and safe streets, with the failures of Biden-Harris, then President Trump will win the Tarheel State once again,” she said.”
Still, sources familiar with the matter said the Trump campaign was bracing for a story to come out about Robinson and is planning on putting more distance between the former president and the embattled nominee Robinson — but initially did not have plans to call on him to drop out.
“He seems to not be impacted by what’s going on down-ballot underneath him,” the North Carolina Republican strategist said of Trump. “There’s no way it helps him. But does it hurt him? I don’t know, I think that’s an open question.”
