Senate again fails to pass homeland security funding as department shutdown nears one month – live | US Congress
Senate again fails to pass DHS funding bill as shutdown nears a month
The Senate again failed to pass a funding bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), amid a partial shutdown that has lasted almost a month.
By a vote of 51-46, mainly along party lines, lawmakers in the upper chamber remain at an impasse over stronger guardrails on federal immigration enforcement.
Only one Democrat, senator John Fetterman, broke with his party to vote for the appropriations bill that would fund DHS through September.
This is the fourth time the Senate has failed to clear the 60-vote threshold needed to pass a DHS funding bill this year.
Key events
Iran begins laying mines in strait of Hormuz, surprising Trump administration – reports
Iran started to lay mines in the strait of Hormuz on Thursday, a crucial Persian Gulf passage for 20% of the world’s oil supply, US officials told the New York Times.
While Donald Trump has boasted that the US military has destroyed Iran’s navy, officials said that Iran has started using smaller boats to place mines and enforce the closure of the strait it has imposed on its gulf neighbors, sending oil prices sky high.
Iran’s move to close the crucial shipping passage has long been an expected move by war planners in previous administrations, but apparently took the Trump administration by surprise.
CNN reported on Thursday that senior Trump administration officials told lawmakers in recent classified briefings that they did not plan for the possibility of Iran closing the strait in response to strikes by the US and Israel.
“Planning around preventing this exact scenario… has been a bedrock principle of US national security policy for decades,” a former US official who served in Republican and Democratic administrations told CNN. “I’m dumbfounded.”
Trump posts old photo of himself in uniform as military academy high school student
For no obvious reason, Donald Trump, the US commander in chief who dodged the Vietnam War draft and never served in the armed forces, just posted an old photo of himself in uniform, as a teenage high school student at the New York Military Academy.
As US forces in Iraq search for survivors of an air force refueling aircraft that crashed in western Iraq on Thursday as part of the war on Iran Trump launched from his Florida beach club, the president took time to share the image of himself in the early 1960s with his social media followers, captioned: “At Military Academy with my parents, Fred and Mary!”
The president’s post was quickly shared by an official White House account.
The old family photo is the same one that Trump previously posted on Facebook in 2013, when he captioned it: “Myself with mother and father at New York Military Academy. See, I can be very military. High rank!”
CBS News reports that a US military medical evacuation flight on Thursday brought 19 injured service members from Saudi Arabia to a US base in Germany. Two were reportedly injured by a drone that exploded next to their vehicle.
“Looks like we fought Iran and Russia won,” Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, just wrote in a social media comment on the US treasury decision to temporarily lift sanctions on Russian oil on Thursday, in response to spiking oil prices caused by the US attack on Iran.
US treasury issues new license to permit more Russian oil sales despite sanctions
The US temporarily suspended sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on Thursday, issuing a Treasury Department license to allow the sale of Russian crude oil and petroleum products loaded on vessels through April 11, according to a letter posted online by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees sanctions.
The sale of Russian oil has been sanctioned by the US in retaliation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, cast the windfall for Russia as one of a series of steps taken by Donald Trump “to promote stability in global energy markets and working to keep prices low as we address the threat and instability posed by the terrorist Iranian regime.”
The new license, which covers oil and petroleum products loaded on vessels as of March 12, comes one day after the US announced that it would release 172 million barrels of oil from its strategic petroleum reserve in an effort to keep oil prices from further spiking from the supply shock after Iran closed the strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the globe’s oil supply normally passes.
Iran has reportedly continued to export oil, which is now more valuable since it responded to the US and Israeli attack by blocking other Persian Gulf countries from shipping their oil to the rest of the world.
Last week, the US treasury issued a 30-day waiver specifically for India, to allow the country to buy Russian oil stuck at sea.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen call for Pete Hegseth to be fired over killing of Iranian schoolgirls
Two Democratic senators, Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen, called for the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, “to be fired immediately” over the killing of dozens of seven to 12-year-old Iranian schoolgirls in a missile attack on the first day of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
In a joint video statement posted on social media on Thursday, Warren noted that a preliminary Pentagon investigation indicated that the US was responsible for the bombing of a girls school, killing about 175 people, mostly children.
Van Hollen then pointed out that Hegseth, the former Fox weekend anchor now leading the Pentagon, had previously “put our troops at risk” by sharing secret attack plans in a Signal group chat which included a journalist, and has overseen the bombing of suspected drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean, including a strike in which defenseless survivors were killed, a textbook war crime.
“With no accountability”, Warren added.
“He has no idea what he’s doing in this war in Iran, and now an American missile hit an Iranian school killing about 150 innocent school kids,” Van Hollen said.
Warren then pointed out that she and Van Hollen have been working for years on policies intended to limit the harm to civilians from Pentagon attacks.
“We helped build into the law certain restrictions,” Warren said, to ensure that the Pentagon would take steps to minimize the risks of harming civilians in planned attacks.
“Pete Hegseth, he came in and dismantled the whole system we helped to build,” Van Hollen said. “He said they were ‘stupid rules of engagement’.” Those rules, he added, were there “to prevent civilian harm, they’re to prevent war crimes.”
George Chidi
Lines have doubled the normal clearance time for security checkpoints at Miami International Airport in the hours following the Senate’s rejection of a bill to fund TSA agent salaries, guaranteeing that agents will miss a paycheck.
Asked how many of his coworkers had called out, one agent replied, “Not enough. Nothing happens until the public feels some pain.”
Nonetheless, the checkpoints remained staffed.
Praharsha Pinninti, a recent college graduate heading home to Raleigh, found the pay issue “insane”.
“I think that’s extremely unfair.” Department of Homeland Security agents who will go unpaid, the traveler noted, “are the first line people that greet people coming into our country. You want them to be the most well paid, or at least paid on time.”
Pinninti described the legislative standoff as “a test of time, and it’s a test of patience, and it’s a test of our integrity as an issue.”
Lauren Gambino
The suspect who killed one person and injured two others at Old Dominion University on Thursday was identified by authorities as Mohamed Jalloh, a former member of the army national guard who pleaded guilty in 2016 to attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State.
Dominique Evans, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Norfolk field office, told reporters the suspect had attempted to commit an “act of terrorism” and shouted “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire. He was subdued and killed by members of the university’s ROTC program in a university classroom, she said, praising them for demonstrating “extreme bravery and courage” and preventing further loss of life. (ROTC is a college-based program that allows students to train to become a US military officer while also earning a college degree.)
Kash Patel, the FBI director, said the bureau was investigating the incident as an “act of terrorism”.
“Earlier today, an armed individual opened fire at Old Dominion University, leaving one person dead and two others wounded,” Patel said on social media. “The shooter is now deceased thanks to a group of brave students who stepped in and subdued him – actions that undoubtedly saved lives along with the quick response of law enforcement.
Evans did not provide further details on how the suspect died except to confirm the gunman was not shot. She said the ROTC students “rendered him no longer alive”, adding: “I don’t know how else to say it.”
FBI says Michigan synagogue attack being investigated as ‘a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community’
The FBI special agent in charge of its Detroit field office, Jennifer Runyan, just said at a news conference on the man who rammed his vehicle into a Michigan synagogue on Thursday that the bureau is “leading the investigation right now as a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community”.
“There was one subject involved in this incident who is now deceased,” Runyan added. “We’ve had no victim fatalities.”
She declined to address the suspect’s potential motivation, saying that it remains under investigation.
As our colleague Lucy Campbell reports on the Guardian’s Middle East crisis live blog, US Central Command, which oversees the offensive on Iran from its headquarters in Tampa, Florida, said in a press release that a US refueling plane has crashed in Iraq.
“US Central Command is aware of the loss of a US KC-135 refueling aircraft,” the Pentagon statement says. “The incident occurred in friendly airspace during Operation Epic Fury, and rescue efforts are ongoing. Two aircraft were involved in the incident. One of the aircraft went down in western Iraq, and the second landed safely.”
The US military statement insisted that the crash “was not due to hostile fire or friendly fire”.
Trump celebrates Trump at Women’s History Month event
The White House celebration of Women’s History Month, which ended a few minutes ago, was unusual in that the spotlight was mainly focused on a man: Donald Trump.
The president, who spoke for about half an hour after his wife, Melania Trump, made introductory remarks of less than four minutes, turned the event into a celebration of what he calls his legislative achievements and used it an opportunity to air grievances, like his claim that he did not lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden, despite getting 7 million fewer votes, and losing every swing state.
The president who seized the spotlight at Thursday’s event was previously found liable of sexually abusing one woman, the writer E. Jean Carroll, in court, and convicted of falsifying business records to conceal from voters that he paid hush money paid to a porn actor, Stormy Daniels, who said they slept together just after his wife gave birth to their son.
While Trump invited a series of women to make brief remarks from the podium on Thursday, they were all carefully chosen to celebrate aspects of his domestic policy agenda, giving the event the feel of a midterm campaign rally.
At the end of the remarks, the president signed a proclamation described as a celebration of women’s history but the text was mainly devoted to celebrating Trump administration domestic policies.
As he did so, he repeated a wisecrack intended to belittle Joe Biden, by pointing out to the attorney general, Pam Bondi, he previously urged to investigate his predecessor for using an autopen to sign some documents, that he was not using that device. “No autopen, right Pam? Am I allowed? No autopen,” Trump said.
In fact, as video of the 2024 White House event for Women’s History Month shows, Biden also sat down to personally sign that year’s proclamation, on camera. In contrast to Trump, Biden spoke at that event for about 10 minutes, after about 30 minutes of remarks from his vice-president, Kamala Harris, his first lady, Jill Biden, and the former first lady of California, Maria Shriver.
At the end of Thursday’s event, Trump could be seen wading into the crowd of female supporters and aides to show them the medal gifted to him by the US Olympic bobsledder, Kallie Humphries.
