Appeals court rejects Trump bid to reinstate federal funding freeze – National & International News – TUE 11Feb2025
Appeals court rejects Trump bid to reinstate federal funding freeze.
Senate Republican: Trump border czar “begging” for more money.
Netanyahu: Gaza war will resume if Hamas doesn’t release hostages Saturday
NATIONAL NEWS
Appeals court rejects Trump bid to reinstate federal funding freeze
The 1st circuit Court of appeals has rejected the Trump administration’s request to lift a lower court’s restraining order pausing a federal funding freeze while the challenge works its way through the courts.
The three-judge panel wrote that “defendants [the Trump administration] do not cite any authority in support of their administrative stay request or identify any harm related to a specific funding action or actions that they will face without their requested administrative stay”.
On Monday, a district judge in Rhode Island blocked the funding freeze and ordered the administration to “immediately restore frozen funding”. This came after 22 States sued the Trump administration over a Jan. 27 memo issued by the White House Office of Management and budget (OMB) ordering an immediate freeze of federal grants and loans.
This memo created confusion as it was not specific in which programs were to be halted and which programs would be allowed to continue. The White House has since rescinded the memo, but has not discontinued the order.
Today’s ruling is the latest in a series of legal setbacks faced by the Trump administration.
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Senate Republican: Trump border czar “begging” for more money
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan and director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill this week to seek urgent funding to finance Trump’s immigration crackdown and deportation agenda. The projected price tag for these efforts has steadily gone up. Pre-inauguration, Congressional Republicans thought it would cost $80-100 billion. Last week, a cost of $150 billion was floated, and now the figure is pinned at $175 billion.
These funds will go to raids and detention by immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as deportation and repatriation. These costs are quickly ballooning. Not only has the cost of detention increased due to the sheer volume of detainees, plans are also underway to build a new facility at Guantanamo Bay, which Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem says will house about 30,000 detainees. Additionally, the Trump administration has been using military aircraft to deport detainees to their home countries. These flights, in some cases, cost three times as much to operate as the commercial charter flights that were previously used by DHS.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC), who chairs the Senate budget committee, spoke to reporters after meeting with Homan and Vought. “Tom Homan said, ‘I am begging you for money,'” Graham told reporters. “Russ Vought said that ‘we’re running out of money for ICE. We can’t rob other accounts any longer.'”
Homan and Vought are urging Congressional Republicans to pass a standalone reconciliation bill (which would override a Democratic filibuster) to fund these programs. This request conflicts with the plans of House Republicans who want to pass a single bill with all of Trump’s legislative priorities, including a 10-year extension of his 2017 tax cuts. Senate Republicans, including Graham, prefer these initiatives to be broken up into smaller bills.
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INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Netanyahu says Gaza war will resume if Hamas doesn’t release hostages Saturday
Yesterday, Hamas announced that it was suspending the release of further Israeli hostages until further notice, citing numerous violations of the ceasefire by Israel. Today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel will resume its military onslaught on Gaza if the hostages were not released by noon on Saturday. It does not appear that Netanyahu was demanding the release of all the hostages on Saturday, as Trump did yesterday- only the nine scheduled to be released.
Hamas’s announcement yesterday was also a response to a diplomatic impasse in the ongoing negotiations in Qatar. Israel has delayed negotiation on the implementation of phase two of the ceasefire, which requires Israel to withdraw all of its remaining troops from Gaza. They have also sought to insert new conditions which they appear to be hoping Hamas will reject.
A separate statement from Hamas yesterday said that the “door remains open” to continue negotiations in good faith. It is not clear at this point whether or not these negotiations are proceeding.
Jordan reaffirms rejection of Gaza displacement plan
Meanwhile in Washington DC, President Trump hosted King Abdullah II of Jordan at the White House. Trump has been pushing to gain support for his plan to remove all Palestinians from Gaza and redevelop the entire strip as a “Riviera of the Middle East”. He has repeatedly insisted that Israel’s neighbors Jordan and Egypt will agree to take in Gaza’s roughly 2 million inhabitants to make his plan possible.
Egypt and Jordan have both publicly rejected Trump’s assertion. Both Egypt and Jordan have security concerns about absorbing a large refugee population. Additionally, the Arab countries have presented a united front in opposing what amounts to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
After his meeting with Trump today, King Abdullah reaffirmed his opposition to accepting large numbers of Palestinian refugees. However, he said that Jordan would immediately accept 2000 very sick children from Gaza. King Abdullah declined to comment further on Trump’s Gaza Riviera plan, saying he did not want to publicly weigh in before consulting with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Despite this, President Trump appears undeterred in his plans for the US to “own” Gaza and rebuild it from the ground up, without its current inhabitants.
