Trump suddenly halts confirmation hearing for DNI pick Jay Clayton
Jay Clayton, US attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), during the Bloomberg Global Credit Forum in New York, US, on Wednesday, June 3, 2026. (Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump said that Wednesday’s confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton to be the next Director of National Intelligence has been canceled and will not continue until his pick to replace Clayton as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jamie McDonald, is confirmed.
“Regarding the approval of our Great Patriot, Jay Clayton, we are cancelling the Senate Hearing RE: DNI today, and will not be going forward until Jamie McDonald is approved to be U.S. Attorney,” Trump posted on social media. “In the meantime, Bill Pulte will remain as the Acting Director of National Intelligence.”
Trump also repeated that he wanted both his SAVE America Act bill and an extension to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lapsed over the weekend after an extension vote failed in the House last week, to pass together after more than a dozen Republicans voted against a short-term extension.
Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigned from her post last month, saying that she was stepping down after her husband of 11 years, Abraham Williams, was diagnosed with “an extremely rare form of bone cancer,” according to a resignation letter she posted to social media.
Her departure marked another Cabinet-level shakeup during Trump’s second term after departures by former Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this year.
Gabbard’s tenure was marked by two major conflicts abroad, politically charged election-related investigations at home and the unresolved tension between the anti-war message that first defined her rise in politics and the national security office she later came to hold.
Trump selected Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence, but Democrats in both chambers signaled objections to him, saying that he does not have any national intelligence experience.
Pulte is best known in the Trump administration for launching probes into several of the president’s perceived political enemies over allegations of mortgage fraud and possible misuse of authority. Targets of the investigations include Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff and former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell. They’ve all denied wrongdoing.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said last week that reversing Pulte’s temporary appointment would only be a “starting point” to convince Democrats to pass FISA, but making another change at DNI wouldn’t be enough on its own to sway Democrats.
“It’s a step in the right direction, because it reverses something that is clearly out of bounds, unacceptable, and cannot be allowed to occur,” Jeffries said.
President Donald Trump previously nominated Lance Schroyer, a longtime law enforcement officer from Oklahoma, to be his nominee for ICE director. (Oklahoma Highway Patrol)
(WASHINGTON) — The White House has withdrawn the nomination of Lance Schroyer to be the next Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director, according to a notice posted on the White House website Thursday.
The agency has not had a Senate-confirmed director since 2017. Former acting ICE Director Todd Lyons retired in May and David Venturella, a former private prisons executive, has been running the agency since then.
Schroyer, a former Oklahoma state trooper and close confidant of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, was nominated in June but faced pushback from the president’s base and Democrats over what they said was his lack of qualifications for the job. His nomination had stalled in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The White House did not give a reason for withdrawing Schroyer’s nomination. ABC News has reached out to the White House for comment.
ICE’s more than $75 billion budget is the largest of any law enforcement agency in the country.
The agency has become a focal point of the president’s second-term deportation push and the Republican-controlled Congress has given the agency the resources to carry out the administration’s agenda.
ICE has come under scrutiny during its push to deport those in the country illegally for what some Democrats say are heavy-handed tactics and a rush to hire candidates that weren’t qualified for the job.
In nominating Schroyer in June, Trump touted his 29 years of service as a law enforcement officer in Oklahoma and said Schroyer will enforce the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Schroyer, who served in the Marine Corps, is currently a senior adviser to Mullin, a former senator from Oklahoma. Schroyer was Mullin’s pick to lead ICE, a source with knowledge of the decision told ABC News.
Video tripods sit empty on the White House grounds on Sept. 21, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Reporters from MS NOW, CNN, and Politico have been blocked from accessing the White House since September 19th after President Trump said he was banning the three outlets from the property. Those news organizations are now suing President Trump, alleging that it violates the First Amendment. (Finn Gomez/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The three news outlets banned from the White House by President Donald Trump on Monday filed a First Amendment lawsuit to restore their access, according to a joint statement published by CNN, MS NOW and Politico.
“This morning, we notified the government that we are filing a lawsuit today to protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes,” the outlets’ joint statement said.
“Without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting. Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference,” it added.
Trump said in a social media post following the news on Monday that the barring of journalists was not “an assault on the Free Press” but instead “an assault on the FAKE NEWS,” which he claimed was a national security “threat.”
Trump said in a post to social media on Friday, “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America.”
At an event in the Oval Office shortly after he posted his message, the president suggested there may be more restrictions on other outlets. Trump told reporters he supports a free press, but that “you need a fair and honest press.”
“It’s sick. I mean, there’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stuff. Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine. But I don’t have to let them into my, into the people’s house,” Trump said.
Journalists from the three outlets were turned away from the White House over the weekend. A reporter from CNN said on air that she was told by a Secret Service agent that her badge had been deactivated.
The three outlets are challenging the legality of the president’s ban on multiple fronts, according to the lawsuit, a copy of which was shared in Politico’s morning Playbook newsletter on Monday.
According to the document, the lawsuit will argue the ban violates the outlets’ reporters’ due process rights, that it unlawfully retaliates against their protected speech and that it violates the First Amendment by barring them from a nonpublic forum for unlawful reasons.
“This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles,” the news outlets wrote.
The lawsuit warns of a cascading effect for other news organizations should Trump seek to expand the scope of the ban, as he said he may do in his Friday remarks in the Oval Office.
“The ban is already severely impeding the ability of CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO to cover the President and his administration,” according to the lawsuit. “Every day, critically important news is breaking at the White House and in the press pool: President Trump is the commander in chief of a country at war; he is traveling to New York today to address the United Nations General Assembly tomorrow; he is meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping at the White House on Thursday; and he is steering national policy on the ever-advancing technology of artificial intelligence. And the ban inflicts an injury on all news media organizations—who now risk a similar fate if they engage in reporting the President deems insufficiently favorable.”
The full D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court have yet to establish settled precedent in the wake of Trump’s earlier attempted ban on The Associated Press from being part of the press pool and attending certain White House events last year.
While a D.C. District court judge backed the AP, a three-judge panel with the D.C. Circuit put the ruling on hold and later wrote that “restricted presidential spaces are not First Amendment fora opened for private speech and discussion.”
Monday’s lawsuit is expected to cite a 1977 ruling in which the full D.C. Circuit found that the White House cannot arbitrarily deny a journalist a press pass without due process.
“As the D.C. Circuit has long held, the interest that members of the press have in their White House hard passes is ‘protected by the first amendment’ and ‘undoubtedly qualifies as liberty which may not be denied without due process of law under the fifth amendment,'” the attorneys wrote, according to the court papers shared by Politico.
ABC News’ Fritz Farrow contributed to this report.
Students walk through the halls between classes at Rippowam Middle School on September 14, 2020 in Stamford, Connecticut. (John Moore/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Nayleen Escalante-Villatoro, a sixth grader at Brookland Middle School in Washington, D.C., has struggled significantly with attending school.
She said whenever there are family problems that force her mother to take off work, she has to step in.
“Me and my older sibling stay home to watch the little ones,” Nayleen told ABC News, adding, “It makes me feel stressed because I’m missing school and I’m not learning.”
This not only frustrates Nayleen, but it also impacts her studies: “I have to do a lot of makeup work after all the missing assignments that I haven’t done,” she added.
Kids like Nayleen face a multitude of challenges at school — when they’re there.
From the rigors of learning how to read and write to addressing mental health concerns and outside distractions, students juggle more than just their classroom workloads. A combination of these issues and other societal factors has fueled an attendance crisis that’s led to a spike in student chronic absenteeism — defined as missing at least 10% of the school year — in recent years, according to experts who spoke to ABC News.
While one in three students nationwide experienced chronic absenteeism during the 2021-2022 academic year, the rate is declining, from up to 30% to roughly 24% by the start of the past school year, according to estimates from the Return 2 Learn tracker reviewed by ABC News.
Government officials are also collecting data on K-12 chronic absenteeism but the Department of Education recently told ABC News it couldn’t yet provide it. Its National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) told ABC News in 2023 that chronic absenteeism increased from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, there’s been no silver bullet to the problem. Different states have taken their own approach, from going door-to-door to check on students to providing high-impact tutoring at school. Education and health experts also emphasize family engagement, community relationships, extracurricular activities and outdoor recreation are potential solutions for chronically absent students.
Hedy Chang, CEO of Attendance Works, a nonprofit focused on addressing absenteeism, said that when kids aren’t showing up to school, it’s an indication that engagement isn’t happening.
“When you treat it as a matter of engagement, that’s when we build the relationships with families, which make them trust schools and it builds a relationship so that we can actually find out what are the underlying causes of why kids aren’t showing up,” Chang told ABC News.
United Family Advocates Executive Director Joanna Lack is calling for more attention to those underlying causes. Lack worked on the issue for many years as the chief performance officer in Camden, New Jersey, and has since transitioned to the non-profit organization dedicated to keeping families safe and together.
“We’ve been looking at the wrong problem instead of opening up the hood and saying ‘What’s actually going on here?'” she said.
Home life among ‘constellation’ of issues
Student absenteeism is often correlated with household or child welfare problems that impact the student’s school life, according to UFA’s Lack.
“Chronic absenteeism is like the symptom that you experience, but it’s not the disease, and we’ve been treating it like it’s the disease,” Lack said.
The Department of Health and Human Services does not have a specific initiative targeting chronic absenteeism. However, Head Start and the Family Opportunity, Resilience, Grit, Engagement-Fatherhood (FORGE) program under the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) both aim to improve outcomes in child welfare and enhance early childhood education, according to HHS officials.
Chang said there isn’t an urgent need for new federally funded programs or aid, just better use of ones that are available.
“I need existing programs to think about how they use chronic absence data to collaborate and work together to support kids and families and make sure the kids who need their resources, or the schools that need their resources, are getting it,” she said.
There’s a “constellation” of issues that contribute to increased absences, from child welfare involvement to unstable housing, but Lack noted that families are complex and kids don’t come in silos.
Activity makes a ‘huge difference’
Nayleen is one of the thousands of students across the country who participate in extracurricular activities through the SCORES program, which creates safe environments where young people can build connections with their communities, according to its website. She said DC SCORES — which provides soccer, poetry, and service-learning programs — has helped her return to class more regularly.
She explained that playing soccer with DC SCORES has empowered her and she looks forward to talking to her coach after attending school.
“It helps me because whenever I’m going through stuff he will understand me,” she said. “Sometimes he will help me. He will sit down and have a talk with me,” she said, adding, “Whenever I’m down, he will ask me if I’m OK.”
At the last month’s inaugural National Executive Forum on Health and Outdoor Recreation, which combined outdoor recreation industry and health leaders to promote using recreation as a pillar of public health, experts told ABC News that recess makes a “huge difference” for holistic growth in adolescents.
Outdoor Recreation Roundtable President Jessica Turner emphasized that being outside is fundamental to student health.
“We’ve stepped back so far from incorporating the outdoors into our lives and to step back into it doesn’t take very much,” Turner told ABC News. “It’s not a heavy lift.”
Schools supporting parents and kids
Chang, of Attendance Works, said chronic absenteeism isn’t inevitable.
She stressed that schools are starting to adopt more effective family engagement strategies for those dealing with attendance issues.
Shavar Jeffries, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, which operates the largest public charter school network in the nation, has utilized some simple yet effective solutions to correct absenteeism.
Jeffries told ABC News that when a student doesn’t show up, they call the family “immediately.”
“‘Johnny, Mary, didn’t come to school today. We really need them because they are going to miss an opportunity to learn,'” he said, adding “Then, frankly, sometimes we also say: You got to figure it out.”
“Get your baby to school because they can’t learn to fulfill that potential if you’re not able to do that,” Jeffries added.
