WND

Democratic Texas Senate candidate Taylor Rehmet defeated Trump-endorsed Republican Leigh Wambsganss in a Saturday special election for a seat the president won by double digits three times, multiple outlets project.

Rehmet, a union leader and Air Force veteran, won 57.2% of the vote compared to Wambsganss’s 42.8%, with 95% of the vote in, according to The Associated Press (AP). Texas Senate District 9 — which is entirely based in Tarrant County and includes parts of Fort Worth and Arlington — was last represented by former Republican State Sen. Kelly Hancock who resigned in June 2025 to work for the Texas Comptroller’s Office.

Under its current boundaries, District 9 voted for Trump by 17 percentage points in 2024, 13 points in 2020, and 23 points in 2016, according to data from Dave’s Redistricting App (DRA).

We’re in the New York Times!

Voters are fed up with extremist agendas that prioritize culture wars over the doing whats best for Texans.

On Saturday, we will flip this seat and get to work fighting for the issues that actually matter to YOU! pic.twitter.com/r9r9qRhIzl

— Taylor Rehmet (@TaylorRehmetTX) January 29, 2026

Rehmet’s campaign website describes him as a “a union president, veteran, and working-class Texan running for State Senate to fight for public schools, affordable housing, and real results for everyday people.”

Meanwhile, Wambsganss received a last-minute endorsement from Trump.

“The Radical Left Democrats are spending a fortune to beat a true MAGA Warrior, Leigh Wambsganss,” the president wrote in a late Friday post to Truth Social. “You can win this Election for Leigh, who has my Complete and Total Endorsement.”

The defeated Republican candidate is a prominent conservative activist and the chief communications officer of Patriot Mobile, a phone company branding itself as “America’s only Christian, conservative wireless provider.”

Firebrand Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett quickly congratulated Rehmet, calling her a “friend” in an early Sunday morning X post.

Congratulations to my friend and our newest State Senator from Tarrant County, Taylor Rehmet! I met Taylor almost two years ago through Labor.

Don’t tell us what can’t be done in Texas. When we show up #TexasTough, we change the game. This is a seat no Democrat has held since… pic.twitter.com/Y69Ug460us

— Jasmine Crockett (@JasmineForUS) February 1, 2026

Rehmet’s victory is the latest in a string of Democratic upsets in state legislative seats that typically favor Republicans during Trump’s second term. In 2025 alone, Democratic Pennsylvania State Sen. James Malone, Democratic Iowa State Sens. Mike Zimmer and Catelin Drey, and Democratic Georgia State Rep. Eric Gisler all won special election victories in seats Trump carried by double digits the previous year.

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Virtually everything the Democratic Party does these days is grounded in some sort of deceit. That’s true of a lot of politics generally, and Republicans have their own cowardly versions of it, but the Democrats have made it their modus operandi.

First, the use of mobs.

The violent protests taking place in Minnesota right now purport to be about opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but the timing is convenient. Citizen journalist Nick Shirley shocked the country a few weeks ago when he revealed that hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer monies have been given to fraudulent “businesses” owned by Somali immigrants in Minnesota. In my column two weeks ago, I wrote that these transfers are part of a modern-day Marxist scheme of wealth redistribution from Americans to the world’s poor. These highly organized “protest” events have been ginned up by those who want to distract the public’s attention away from the money laundering that is taking place under the guise of government “grants” to nonexistent day care centers, adult care facilities and health care transportation companies. And investigative journalist Cam Higby has produced substantial evidence that government officials may be helping to organize and coordinate the violence.

This is something of a pattern.

The peaceful protests in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, were infiltrated by activists whose role it was to foment chaos and violence. This would temporarily shut down the Electoral College vote count that was going on at the Capitol, where several state delegations intended to lodge objections to the presidential election results in their states. More saliently, the J6 violence turned the public’s attention away from claims of election irregularities in multiple states and enabled the Biden administration to dismiss those claims and characterize the protest as an “insurrection,” and the protesters as “insurrectionists.”

The existence of illegal immigrants is, in fact, a vital part of election fraud. In 14 states (almost all reliably blue) and the District of Columbia, there is no requirement of identification or proof of citizenship to vote. Rules allowing ballot drop boxes, mailed-in ballots being counted for days after election day, ballot harvesting and “vouching” for the eligibility of other voters (as Minnesota law permits) are vehicles for cheating.

The riots of summer 2020 – purportedly spontaneously erupting in response to the death of George Floyd in police custody (again, in Minneapolis) – are another example of creating civil unrest to obscure important facts the public should be focusing on. Despite public health lockdowns ordered in cities across the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, protests that subsequently turned into riots were permitted to take place. The violence, arson, destruction of property, widespread injuries and dozens of deaths conveniently moved the national conversation away from the issue of the origin of SARS-CoV-2, whether it had emerged from the International Virology Lab in Wuhan, China (as it is now almost universally acknowledged to have done), and whether the United States had been funding so-called “gain of function” research – the process of trying to modify animal-borne viruses to see if they can be made to jump species to humans – which government documentation definitely shows we were.

In other words, if the Left’s machinations are threatened with widespread exposure, it’s time for the latest edition of Rent-A-Mob. (Comes complete with premade signs, irate white people and lyrics for recommended chants. Molotov cocktails and vehicles for ramming law enforcement sold separately.)

But mobs and mayhem aren’t the only devices Democrats use to get their way. There’s also the increasingly popular use of candidates who run as “moderates,” only to serve as willing patsies after being elected for the most extreme leftists in the party – as Virginians are now finding out to their chagrin.

Newly elected Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger ran as a “moderate.” But with Democrats in control of the Virginia House and Senate, she is expected to rubberstamp the extreme left-wing bills they’ve already introduced. These would (among other things):

• Raise the top state income tax rate from 5.75% to 13.8%, which would then be the highest in the country;

• impose new taxes on home repairs and dry cleaning, and a new 4.3% tax on all deliveries of online purchases, including Amazon, UberEATS and DoorDash;

• remove mandatory minimum sentences for most felonies, including rape, manslaughter, possession of child pornography and repeat violent felonies, and eliminate victim statements in criminal trials;

• make hand-counting ballots illegal, extend the time mailed-in ballots that arrive after election day can be counted, and permit voting over the internet;

• ban gas-powered lawn equipment, and impose a new tax on electric equipment;

• make it illegal for a government dispensing grant monies to nongovernmental organizations to ensure that the charitable organizations actually qualify for those grants (also known as the “Make Virginia Minnesota” bill);

• and legalize abortion on demand throughout all nine months of pregnancy.

Virginians who voted for Spanberger’s opponent, former Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, certainly did not vote for this. But there are those who say Spanberger never professed support for any of these policies during the campaign, and so no one truly voted for them.

With respect, Spanberger’s vapidity was on display for all to see in the debate with Earle-Sears. When asked perfectly logical questions, Spanberger stood like a stroke victim, silent, staring straight ahead, unmoving, unresponsive. And was no one (in Virginia, of all places) paying attention to the four years of the “Biden administration”? Spanberger is like former President Joe Biden was and like so many Democrat politicians are today: a plant; a puppet; an empty vessel who will do what she is told.

The campaign claim of “moderate” is just one more deception.

“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun,” King Solomon famously observed in the Koheleth (Book of Ecclesiastes). Truer words have never been written. Look no further than the present anarchic tumult in Minnesota.

On Jan. 12, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison initiated a lawsuit on behalf of the North Star State, along with municipal co-plaintiffs Minneapolis and St. Paul, against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons and the rest of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement apparatus. In his press conference announcing the suit, Ellison emphasized the same basic arguments as his formal complaint: Namely, that ICE’s enforcement “surge” in Minnesota amounts to a “violation of the Tenth Amendment and the sovereign laws and powers granted to states.”

In essence, Ellison and his Minnesota’s Democratic Party leadership confreres argue that the constitutional federalism articulated in the Tenth Amendment and its corollary of “states’ rights” can shield the Land of 10,000 Lakes from the long enforcement arm of federal immigration law. Ellison and Minnesota Democrats claim that by declaring their state and cities to be illegal alien “sanctuaries,” they can “nullify” federal immigration law. Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.

Democrats in America have a long and inglorious history of invoking “states’ rights” and shirking federal law. It has never ended well.

In 1798 and 1799, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison – members of the Democratic-Republican Party, the partisan predecessor to today’s Democratic Party – penned the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. The Resolutions, a direct response to the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts championed by President John Adams, argued that when Congress passes an unconstitutional statute, the states are permitted to declare the law null and void within their own jurisdictions. According to this argument, if a state’s constitutional officers deem a federal law to be unconstitutional, the Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the Constitution – which normally establishes federal law as “the supreme law of the land” over state law – simply does not apply.

This sentiment was taken to its logical conclusion during the antebellum period. During the nullification crisis of 1832-33, South Carolina passed the Ordinance of Nullification, declaring the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 to be unconstitutional and unenforceable in the Palmetto State. South Carolina even took initial steps to organize the militia, in anticipation of attempted federal mobilization. In ensuing decades, South Carolinian John C. Calhoun emerged as the most passionate advocate for state nullification. Calhoun argued not only for a state’s “right” to nullify federal law but also to secede from the Union, if necessary, to secure its sovereignty. The result was the 1861 attack on Fort Sumter and the 600,000-plus slain in the Civil War.

For nearly a century after the Civil War, Calhoun’s ghost lingered. As the civil rights movement gained steam, segregationists invoked nullification and “states’ rights” as justifications for defying federally mandated civil rights. The Southern Manifesto, signed by dozens of U.S. senators and congressmen in 1956, took the position that the Tenth Amendment permitted states to defy the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision of 1954. In the Little Rock Crisis of 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus relied on the same principles when he ordered the Arkansas National Guard to block Black students from attending Little Rock Central High School. Faubus lost his showdown when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division to forcibly desegregate Little Rock.

In echoing the discredited theories of yesteryear, Ellison, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and the rest of the state’s top Democratic brass have emerged as modern reincarnations of Jefferson Davis and George Wallace. They wouldn’t see it that way, naturally. Nor would Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recognize that her own “race-infused worldview” and belief in “racial determinism,” as Justice Clarence Thomas accused her of harboring in his Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) concurrence, is an updated version of Calhoun’s vile life outlook. But that’s precisely what it is.

On Thursday, Trump border czar Tom Homan announced that the administration is prepared to draw down federal personnel in Minnesota if the state cooperates. We’ll see if that transpires, but I have my suspicions. Historically, Democratic Party subversives and insurrectionists have not been known for their cooperation with the feds. The good news for President Donald Trump is that he has a clear legal precedent for how to respond, if the neo-Confederate uprising in Minnesota continues apace. On April 15, 1861, in response to the attack on Fort Sumter three days prior, President Abraham Lincoln invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807. Trump has recently been musing about doing the same.

Will Trump pull the trigger? Maybe. After all, there’s nothing new under the sun.

The Treasury Department announced Monday that it is canceling all contracts with consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton, citing the firm’s link to a massive data breach that led to the leak of President Donald Trump’s tax returns to the press.

Treasury has 31 separate contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton that will be cancelled, totaling roughly $4.8 million in annual spending and $21 million in overall obligations. Between 2018 and 2020, Booz Allen Hamilton employee Charles Edward Littlejohn stole and leaked the confidential tax returns and return information of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers, including Trump.

“President Trump has entrusted his cabinet to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, and canceling these contracts is an essential step to increasing Americans’ trust in government,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a statement. “Booz Allen failed to implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including the confidential taxpayer information it had access to through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service.”

Littlejohn allegedly applied to work as an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) contractor with the hope of accessing and disclosing Trump’s tax returns. He later admitted to leaking the president’s tax records to The New York Times, as well as those of other wealthy individuals, including Elon Musk, to other outlets.

Littlejohn pleaded guilty to felony charges for unlawfully disclosing confidential tax information and was sentenced in January 2024 to five years in prison. The IRS has since determined that the breach affected approximately 406,000 taxpayers, significantly more than its initial estimate of 70,000.

“We have consistently condemned in the strongest possible terms the actions of Charles Littlejohn, who was active with the company years ago,” Booz Allen Hamilton said in a statement Monday. “Booz Allen has zero tolerance for violations of the law and operates under the highest ethical and professional guidelines. When Littlejohn’s criminal conduct occurred over 5 years ago, it was on government systems, not Booz Allen systems.”

“Booz Allen stores no taxpayer data on its systems and has no ability to monitor activity on government networks,” the statement said. “Booz Allen fully supported the U.S. government in its investigation, and the government expressed gratitude for our assistance, which led to Littlejohn’s prosecution. We look forward to discussing this matter with Treasury.”

Despite the canceled Treasury Department contracts, the move represents only a small fraction of its total business with the government. The company won $7.5 billion in total obligations from agencies in fiscal 2025, according to the Federal News Network.

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In the wake of the death of Alex Pretti, the White House categorically rejected the suggestion from some Republicans – including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel – that U.S. citizens do not have a right to carry firearms while protesting.

President Trump “absolutely” supports the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told RealClearPolitics at Monday’s press briefing.

“While Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms,” she clarified, “Americans do not have a constitutional right to impede lawful immigration enforcement operations.”

Carrying a firearm increased the “assumption of risk and the risk of force being used against you” when confronted by law enforcement, she concluded, “And again, that’s unfortunately what took place.”

Pretti, a registered nurse with a concealed carry permit, was wrestled to the ground, pepper-sprayed, and shot by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis on Saturday while he filmed ongoing deportation operations. He was reportedly carrying a Sig Sauer P320 9mm pistol. Video of the incident shows agents seizing the holstered weapon before shots were fired.

Pretti was not carrying identification, including his CCW, at the time of his death. Gun experts note, however, that failure to show a permit is punishable only by a $25 fine.

Both Homeland Security and the FBI are now investigating what the White House described as “an unfortunate tragedy.” But the leaders of those agencies, Noem and Patel, were both quick to suggest that it was illegal to bring a firearm to protest.

Noem told reporters on Sunday that Pretti should not have come armed to the protest and that “this individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism. That’s the facts.”

Patel was similarly definitive when he told Fox News the same day, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, meanwhile, said in a Saturday social media post that approaching law enforcement while armed meant there would be “a high likelihood” of a “legally justified” shooting.

Constitutional law and gun rights advocates say otherwise, however. Before the White House weighed in, the Trump administration faced intense backlash from some of its strongest supporters for the arguments advanced by Essayli, Noem, and Patel.

The National Rifle Association slammed the comments from Essayli as “dangerous and wrong.” Gun Owners of America released a statement reiterating that “the Second Amendment protects Americans’ right to bear arms while protesting – a right the federal government must not infringe upon.”
Dana Loesch, a conservative columnist and former NRA spokeswoman, defended the rights of protestors to carry firearms and argued that “anyone who tells you otherwise is an anti-Second Amendment statist.”

Until the White House stepped in to clarify the president’s position, the Pretti shooting had confused the ideological battle lines, with many Republicans suddenly adopting the gun control talking points of Democrats. But gun owners remain some of the most loyal Trump supporters. The comments from Leavitt contradicting Noem and Patel demonstrate the influence of that lobby.

And while Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller described Pretti as “a domestic terrorist,” Leavitt declined to use that term and called his death “a tragedy.” The White House maintains that the fastest way to end the chaos in Minnesota, including the bloodshed, was for Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Fey to allow local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE.

The Trump administration does not, however, believe that the solution is to curtail the gun rights of U.S. citizens.

It can be hard to explain to a general audience how important the release of the World Energy Outlook (WEO) is to policymakers, energy companies and investors who make hundreds of billions of dollars in investment decisions worldwide each year.

The Outlook is published yearly by the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), one of the world’s most preeminent authorities on energy data. The IEA was formed in 1974 by many of the world’s most developed countries to provide better information on oil and gas demand forecasts in the wake of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo.

Beginning in the early 1990s, the Outlook included a Current Policies Scenario (CPS) that forecast future oil and natural gas demand over the coming decades based on current laws and government energy policies. This scenario was then used by banks and companies to extrapolate how many billions of dollars they must invest to satisfy coming energy demand.

The IEA’s all-star reputation made the CPS the benchmark for global energy supply and demand forecasts for decades – until recently.

In 2020, under its long-time Executive Director Fatih Birol, the IEA decided to abandon the CPS, “in part due to pressure from European nations and green campaigners,” according to Bloomberg energy analyst Javier Blas. Most of these green campaigners were interested in using climate policies to permanently displace oil and coal production.

To do this, IEA inserted new scenarios that considered policy ambitions and aspirations that had not yet become law. This analytical misdirection allowed Paris Accord-era net-zero emission goals to become a concrete forecasting reality. As a result, these forecasts showed peak global oil demand only an additional 3 million to 106 million barrels a day by 2030 before permanently declining.

Riding on IEA’s reputation, these forecasts helped the Davos crowd churn elite public opinion toward the Net-zero and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) framework in the early 2020s, which played a role in the ultimate suppression of billions of dollars in investment in carbon and hydrocarbon resources.

The IEA reinstated the Current Policies Scenario for 2025 after pressure from the Trump administration, while confirming that no peak in global oil demand should be expected until at least 2050. This is a welcome decision, but not before much damage was done, according to a recent report published by the National Center for Energy Analytics (NCEA).

The report, written by Neil Atkinson, a NCEA Visiting Fellow and the former head of the IEA’s Oil Industry and Markets division, and Adam Sieminski, former administrator for the U.S. Energy Information Administration, found that while reinstatement of the CPS in the 2025 WEO “has gone a long way toward answering that its scenarios are divorced from reality,” the IEA must still do more to reverse past mistakes.

The latest critique found that the IEA is still making a series of unsupportable market assumptions, including:

Electric Vehicles: Forecasts of electric vehicle adoption remain overly optimistic, leading to overestimates of oil demand destruction for light-duty vehicles.

Aviation: A forecast for even a small reduction in aviation fuel use remains overly aggressive.

Marine shipping: The IEA continues to present overly aggressive forecasts of a significant decline in crude oil use for global oceangoing shipping.

Even if the IEA fixes its methodological problems and appoints a new Executive Director, damage from the five-year absence of the Current Policies Scenario could last for a long time. Sieminski and Atkinson estimate that as much as $1.5 trillion of underinvestment in oil and natural gas exploration is expected over the next decade. Underinvestment in the oil patch leads to supply shortfalls, which inevitably brings about a spike in energy prices and a new, much higher price plateau.

By projecting a 2030 demand peak for oil, the IEA sacrificed its credibility, giving succor and elite air cover to organizations like the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a UN-backed group whose members topped out at 140 banks with trillions of dollars in assets, pledging to align their portfolios with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

It is unknown exactly how much international investment banks withdrew from funding Arctic oil and coal resources, but many went on the record saying they did. The collapse of the Banking Alliance in the fall of 2025, driven by a combination of political pressure and market realities, will not make up for the consequences of a self-inflicted, years-long supply-demand lag.

The report’s authors do not go so far as to directly accuse the IEA of sneakily undermining the investment climate enough to create future recession-causing price spikes, but energy experts know that similar production shortfalls in the past have done exactly that.

In the 1970s, a barrel of oil went from $4 to a new plateau of about $32 a barrel by 1981, a seven-fold rise in the nominal price that crashed many national economies. In the super-spike era between 2004 and 2013, long-term oil prices roughly tripled while playing an underappreciated supporting role in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

If another major upward price correction arrives in the coming years, don’t forget to include the IEA’s willful errors when making a list of perpetrators. All government institutions are political, no matter how much structure is insulated from direct influence. Let’s hope the IEA has learned a lesson or two about the costs of believing there is a “right side of history” to be on.

 

William Murray is a former chief speechwriter for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the past editor of RealClearEnergy from 2015-2017, and has covered energy and environmental policy in Washington D.C., as a journalist and analyst for the past two decades.

A federal court in Hawaii has ruled that a state attempt to impose its political bias by censoring satire and parody it didn’t like violates the First Amendment and the law cannot ever be enforced.

The fight was brought by The Babylon Bee satire publication and others against the state’s law that banned the distribution of “materially deceptive media” that can portray politicians in ways that risk harming “the reputation or electoral prospects of a candidate.”

The court ruling said, “Upon review of the record in conjunction with the relevant legal authorities, the court finds that Act 191 discriminates based on content and speaker and, in doing so, restricts constitutionally protected political speech, making Act 191 presumptively invalid and subject to strict scrutiny.”

The opinion continued, “The First Amendment, applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, prohibits laws that abridge the freedom of speech.”

It said, “Accordingly, a government cannot ‘restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.’”

“For centuries, humor and satire have served as an important vehicle to deliver truth with a smile, and this kind of speech receives the utmost protection under the Constitution,” explained Mathew Hoffman, a lawyer for ADF, which handled the case.

“The court is right to put a stop to Hawaii’s war against political memes and satire. The First Amendment doesn’t allow Hawaii to choose what political speech is acceptable and censor speech in the name of ‘misinformation.’ That censorship is both undemocratic and unnecessary.”

The Bee is noted for its satire and parody, attracting a huge audience with its daily pokes and prods at self-satisfied politicians and their kind.

“This decision marks yet another victory for the First Amendment and for anyone who values the right to speak freely on political matters without government interference,” said The Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon.

It was Gov. Josh Green that signed the speech violation into law in 2024. It called for jail time, large fines and lawsuits for those who spoke what the state disliked.

“Political speech, of course, is at the core of what the First Amendment is designed to protect,” the court wrote. “Rather than require actual harm, [S2687] imposes a risk assessment based solely on the value judgments and biases of the enforcement agency—which could conceivably lead to discretionary and targeted enforcement that discriminates based on viewpoint.”

Lawyers for the Bee won a similar fight in California, where a court there permanently halted that state from enforcing its censorship scheme.

 

A federal judge on Saturday rejected an emergency effort to block Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis.

Earlier this month, Minneapolis, St. Paul and the State of Minnesota filed a lawsuit to stop Operations Metro Surge.

U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez, a Biden appointee, denied a request for an emergency injunction to stop ICE’s Operation Metro Surge.

Judge Menendez, citing an Eighth Circuit Court ruling, said the plaintiffs failed to meet the high legal bar required to stop the massive immigration enforcement operation.

“The Eighth Circuit has recently reiterated that entry of an injunction barring the federal government from enforcing federal law imposes significant harm on the government,” the judge wrote in a 30-page order reviewed by The Gateway Pundit.

“And Defendants have presented evidence that entry of the injunction requested by Plaintiffs would harm the federal government’s efforts to enforce federal immigration laws,” Menendez wrote.

“Balancing the harms described by Plaintiffs against the interests of Defendants is not as straightforward as Plaintiffs suggest,” the judge said.

“Ultimately, the Court finds that the balance of harms does not decisively favor an injunction. Paired with the Court’s finding of an insufficient likelihood of success on the merits, the Court need not further weigh the competing interests of the parties,” the judge wrote.

The Department of Homeland Security said more than 3,000 dangerous illegal aliens have been arrested in Minneapolis thanks to ICE’s Operation Metro Surge.

“Today, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released the following statement and information regarding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests of dangerous criminal illegal aliens in Minneapolis, Minnesota over the weekend including murderers, rapists, gang members, and perpetrators of fraud,” the DHS said last week.

“We have arrested over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children and reigning terror in Minneapolis because Tim Walz and Jacob Frey refuse to protect their own people and instead protect criminals,” said Secretary Kristi Noem.

“In the last 6 weeks, our brave DHS law enforcement have arrested 3,000 criminal illegal aliens including vicious murderers, rapists, child pedophiles, and incredibly dangerous individuals. A huge victory for public safety,” Noem said.

BREAKING…

[Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on The Gateway Pundit.com]

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner said Thursday that illegal immigration is squeezing housing supply and driving up rents and home prices for American families.

Appearing on “The Record with Greta Van Susteren,” Turner said more than 12 million illegal immigrants have entered the country without adequate screening, adding immediate pressure to already constrained housing markets. He said that when millions of people arrive outside the legal system, demand spikes while supply fails to keep pace, driving up rents and home prices for working families.

“You have 12 million or more illegals coming across our border that have been unchecked and unvetted. When you come in, that hurts the housing supply,” Turner told host Greta Van Susteren. “It makes the cost of housing go up. In certain cities around our country, in particular L.A. and New York, 100% of the increase in rental demand is because of illegal immigration.”

Turner said the administration has responded by redirecting federal housing policy toward American households.

WATCH:

“And so we’ve been taking measures at HUD to make sure that any HUD funds that pertain to housing are for the American people and American people only. The president has taken bold action, as you’ve seen, in banning institutional investors from buying up single-family homes,” Turner added.

Turner said federal housing officials are pairing that effort with measures aimed at lowering borrowing costs, including large-scale purchases of mortgage-backed securities designed to ease pressure on interest rates.

“These homes are meant for American families and not institutions. Also working with Director [William] Pulte over at FHFA [Federal Housing Finance Agency] to buy $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities to bring down the cost of borrowing. And so, as you’ve seen, there’s bold action taking place not only on the rental side but also to help people in America to be able to afford to buy a home,” Turner said.

Trump said Jan. 7 that his administration will block large investment firms from snapping up single-family houses, arguing that speculative buying has pushed homeownership further beyond reach, particularly for younger Americans. Economists previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the deeper problem lies in a persistent shortage of available homes, which continues to strain affordability nationwide.

U.S. homeowners paid a median price of $415,200 for an existing house in October 2025, up sharply from $271,100 five years earlier, according to Yahoo Finance. The central bank said Wednesday that it kept benchmark interest rates unchanged at 3.5% to 3.75% after cutting rates three times earlier in 2025.

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The Senate approved a mammoth government spending package Friday evening funding vast portions of the federal government and a separate stopgap measure temporarily funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Lawmakers voted 71-29 to approve the funding package, which was endorsed by President Donald Trump. Five Republicans — Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Rick Scott of Florida — opposed the measure.

The cohort includes leading fiscal hawks and Republicans who were critical of the appropriations package for not funding immigration enforcement for the full fiscal year.

The passage of the massive spending package came after the White House and Senate Democrats reached a deal Thursday to separate the DHS measure — funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — from five additional spending bills that passed the House on Jan. 22. Under the agreement, a stopgap funding measure, known as a continuing resolution, would fund DHS for two weeks and five appropriations bills that fund nearly 80% of the federal budget would be signed into law

The funding deal hit a snag after several senators, including Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, held up a vote for nearly 24 hours until various policy concerns were resolved. Graham secured commitments from Senate Majority Leader John Thune to hold a vote on sanctuary cities legislation and a provision allowing him and other senators to sue the government in response to former special counsel Jack Smith’s probe.

Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, unanimously opposed funding the DHS for the remainder of the fiscal year absent reform, citing the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday.

The White House, appearing eager to avoid a government shutdown after the record-breaking 43-day funding lapse in late 2025, signed off on a two-week extension for DHS funding sought by Democrats while negotiations regarding reforms to federal immigration enforcement.

Trump implored lawmakers to pass the spending agreement in a Truth Social post Thursday, citing the need to avoid another “long and damaging” shutdown.

“Hopefully, both Republicans and Democrats will give a very much needed Bipartisan ‘YES’ Vote,” Trump wrote.

Every Democrat — and seven Republicans — voted against advancing a House-passed six-bill appropriations package including the DHS funding Thursday afternoon. That failed vote meant the Senate had to change course to shorten the duration of the shutdown set to begin Saturday at 12:01 a.m.

A partial shutdown is all but certain to occur because the House of Representatives will have to approve the Senate agreement. As of Friday, the House of Representatives is not scheduled to hold votes until Monday evening.

The spending agreement negotiated with the White House may not come without political risks for Schumer, who previously enraged the Democratic Party’s far-left flank for supporting a Trump-backed funding bill in March 2025.

Left-wing activist groups slammed Schumer for striking a deal to temporarily fund DHS at current spending levels.

“Leader Schumer should ask the Minnesotans who are watching their neighbors get killed in cold blood if a deal with no plan to stop ICE is enough right now,” MoveOn spokeswoman Britt Jacovich said Thursday.

In an effort to whip support for the bill, The White House noted the spending package funds a 3.8% pay raise for U.S. service members and invests in U.S. shipbuilding among other provisions.

It is unclear whether the White House and GOP leaders will agree to Schumer’s demands to substantially reform federal immigration enforcement in the next several weeks. The lead Democrat wants immigration officers to take off their masks, end roving patrols and enact new rules on warrants.

However, even some GOP lawmakers acknowledged that public opinion is in favor of overhauling federal immigration enforcement.

“The mood of Congress is that ICE needs to be reformed,” Republican Arkansas Sen. John Boozman said Thursday. “I think that’s the mood of the country right now. So that’s the direction that we’re moving.”

Caden Olson contributed to this report.

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