More and more, climate change is taking a toll not only on communities, the environment, and the economy, but also on human minds. In recent years, researchers have been describing what they variously label eco-distress, exo-anxiety, or even eco-grief—a suite of symptoms including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder—linked to experiencing severe weather events or simply living in a world in which climate change is becoming a growing crisis. Whatever name the phenomenon goes by, it spares no one; simply by dint of being exposed to a warming world, you have cause to feel distress about it. Last year was the warmest one on record, edging out 2023, which had briefly held the number one spot. The top 10 warmest years have all occurred since 2014. Extreme weather and other disasters linked to climate change—including wildfires, droughts, floods, and hurricanes—are all on the rise. Experts are finding, however, that one demographic may suffer more than others: young people. A recent flurry of papers has documented significant and growing levels of climate anxiety in the 25-and-under group, with even preschoolers sometimes showing symptoms. “You come across it in children as young as three,” says Elizabeth Haase, a founding member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance and a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Nevada School of Medicine. “You find them on TikTok, sobbing about losing their teddy bears or sobbing that animals they loved got killed” in an extreme weather event. Now, researchers in peer-reviewed studies are putting empirical meat on those anecdotal bones. In one April 2025 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists surveyed nearly 3,000 young people in the U.S. aged 16-to-24 and found that approximately 20% of them were afraid to have children—worrying about bringing a new generation into a steadily warming world. That figure jumped to over 30% among young people who had experienced a severe-weather event first hand. An earlier 2021 study in The Lancet surveyed 10,000 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries, and came up with even more concerning results. Overall, nearly 60% of respondents described themselves as very or extremely worried about climate change and nearly 85% were at least moderately concerned. More than 45% of the total said that those feelings adversely affected their daily functioning. Fully 75% said that they think the future is frightening and 83% said that they believe the adults in charge have failed to take care of the planet—leaving the problem to the generations to follow. Advertisement “I think it’s different for young people,” said one 16-year-old cited in the study. “For us, the destruction of the planet is personal.” “It’s the people who have contributed the least to the problem who are facing the challenge of dealing with the consequences,” says Emma Lawrance, Climate Care Center lead at Imperial College London and a co-author of the PNAS paper. “They’ve been let down by the adults who were supposed to keep them safe.” If kids are being hit especially hard by the ravages of climate change it’s in part because of one of the great gifts of youth—a nimble, pliable, very plastic brain. That can be handy when it comes to learning new things and acquiring new skills, but it carries a potential price in mental health, because a nimble brain is also an impressionable one. According to Lawrance, the large majority of mental health problems—up to 75%—begin before the age of 24. The 2021 Lancet study surveyed its 10,000 subjects on a whole range of emotional metrics and found that they were indeed being hit hard—and early in life—by climate-related distress. Two-thirds of them reported that they were feeling sadness related to climate change; nearly 51% described themselves as feeling helpless; 62% were anxious; 67% were afraid; and just 31% said they were optimistic that the climate problem could be solved. Significantly, another 57% said they were angry over the mess the world has become. “We see kids having more reactive or situational depression,” says Haase. That is the type of depression that arises—sometimes quite rationally—from a current set of problems or circumstances, and is different from endogenous, or persistent, free-floating depression. Looking further into the downstream effect of climate trauma, one 2024 paper in Preventive Medicine Reports surveyed nearly 39,000 high school students living in 22 urban public-school districts in the U.S., to determine how they were faring emotionally two years, five years, and 10 years after a severe weather event or disaster. Overall, those 22 districts endured a total of 83 federally declared climate-related disasters in the decade leading up to the study. The investigators were looking for signs of mental distress, defined as feeling prolonged sadness or hopelessness or suffering from short sleep duration. Across the sample group, they found that the young people who had experienced the highest number of disasters had a 25% greater rate of mental distress when they were exposed to a disaster within the previous two years, and a 20% higher rate at five years. There was no significant difference when the disaster took place 10 years in the past. Advertisement “We were alarmed to find that climate-related disasters already were affecting so many teens in the U.S.,” says Amy Auchincloss, associate professor of epidemiology at Drexel University School of Public Health and the lead author of the paper. “Disasters can upend adolescents’ lives for extended periods, for example [by] interrupting school and social and physical support services. And their family’s material circumstances could worsen.” Some of the distress young people experience can be either ameliorated or exacerbated by the people around them, especially adults, when the kids seek to talk about their climate anxiety. A 2024 paper in The Lancet surveyed nearly 16,000 young people in all 50 states and asked them, among other things, about the perceived and desired responses they got when they tried to give voice to their feelings. Nearly 62% reported that they at least tried to talk to others about climate change, and nearly 58% said they felt ignored or dismissed. Over 70% said they wished others would be more open to discussing the problem, and over 66% said they wanted their parents’ and grandparents’ generations to understand their feelings. Advertisement “One of the things that’s very damaging to children across the spectrum on any issue is invalidation,” says Haase, who was not involved in the study. “A child expresses a profound emotion and the parent dismisses it or shows contempt for it; this is very damaging in a global psychological way.” Listening is not the only way adults can help the young people in their lives cope better. For those kids who are already receiving psychological counseling or considering it, Haase urges therapists to work in what she describes as a “climate-aware” way. “I think we really need to know exactly what therapeutic techniques are going to help most,” she says. “There is not [yet] a manual or developed psychotherapy for working with youth with climate distress.” Helping kids find a better balance between fretting about the future and remaining hopeful about it can also be a powerful tool. “How do they sit with some of those difficult emotions?” Haase says. “How do they have space for those challenging emotions but also look to a future that they want and that there is still so much to be joyful about?” It is up to adults to help kids find that middle road. Auchincloss also stresses the particular importance of practicing these interventions in lower-wealth communities that often get hit harder by climate-related disasters, such as flood-prone regions in the developing world or city centers that suffer from urban heat islands in the summer. If there is anything good that can come from all of this distress it’s that a worried or anxious or angry person can become a very motivated person, taking action through public protests or boycotts or reducing carbon use or simply voting out politicians who are resistant to taking climate action. “Many young people have channeled their despair into action and become world leaders in the movement to preserve a livable climate,” says Auchincloss. “They have been calling for a radical re-envisioning of business-as-usual.” A problem not of the children’s making will require—unjustly—a generation of activists to set the world to rights.
The Mellon Foundation on Tuesday announced $15 million in emergency funding for state humanities councils across the country, throwing what advocates say is a crucial lifeline after the cancellation of federal support had left some in danger of collapse. The new funding, which will support humanities councils in all 50 states and six jurisdictions, comes a month after the National Endowment for the Humanities abruptly cut off federal funding for the councils, as well as most of its existing grants. The endowment, which had a budget of $207 million last fiscal year, is the nation’s largest public funder of the humanities, providing crucial support to museums, historical sites, cultural festivals and community projects. The $15 million from the Mellon Foundation will offset only a portion of the $65 million the state councils were set to receive this year from the humanities endowment, as appropriated by Congress. But Elizabeth Alexander, the foundation’s president, said it would help preserve humanities programs, particularly in rural states without a robust base of private philanthropy. “The projects that fall under the rubric of the humanities are of an extraordinary range,” she said. “It would be terrible if countless people across the country lost access to all the things that help us understand what it is to be human, in history and in a contemporary community.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The money from the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of arts and humanities projects overall, with an annual grant-making budget of about $550 million, is a one-time infusion. Every council will get $200,000 in immediate operational support. Most of the remainder will come in the form of $50,000 challenge grants, which must be matched by other sources. When the humanities endowment canceled virtually all of its existing grants earlier this month, after a review by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, it told recipients that it was redirecting its funding toward “the President’s priorities.” Last week, the agency announced it was committing $17 million to support the National Garden of American Heroes, a patriotic sculpture park that President Trump first called for during his first term. (Another $17 million will come from the National Endowment of the Arts.)While humanities councils may have a low profile, they support book festivals, literary events, local history projects and historical sites. They are also drivers of local economies, including tourism; according to the federation, every $1 of federal support results in $2 in private investment. The Mellon Foundation, whose assets totaled about $7.9 billion at the end of 2023, has taken emergency action before. In 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic threatened the survival of many cultural organizations, it increased its annual grant making, to $500 million from about $300 million. In June of that year, it also announced a “major strategic evolution” that would prioritize social justice. Alexander, a poet and literary scholar who has led the foundation since 2018, said that recent cuts across the federal government, not just at the humanities endowment, had inflicted devastating impacts on many of its grant recipients. The foundation was considering other emergency aid, she said, but it could not replace all lost federal support. “Philanthropy itself is not able to plug all of those holes,” Alexander said. “For the humanities in particular, we thought this was someplace we had a responsibility to do what we could.”
It was an unusual display on the North Lawn of the White House: 88 yard signs with the faces of people the Trump administration says are criminals who had been arrested by immigration agents. President Donald Trump has launched harsh immigration actions in his first 100 days in office—detaining more people for immigration violations, allowing arrests outside schools and courthouses, and sending more than 200 Venezuelan men to be imprisoned in El Salvador. Trump is ramping up raids on workplaces to find those in the country unlawfully, and on Monday, signed an order directing his Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to send him a list of so-called sanctuary cities that aren’t doing enough to cooperate with his deportation efforts, according to Trump officials. The number of immigration arrests at workplaces has tripled since Trump took office, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said Monday. “It’s going to triple again,” Homan said. Trump vowed on the campaign trail to bring back workplace raids, after the Biden administration had largely put a stop to such enforcement tactics. With the new order, Trump is threatening to cut federal funds to cities and states his Administration decides are blocking his mass deportation effort. In the executive order he signed Monday, Trump gave Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a May 28 deadline to publish a list of cities, counties and states that are obstructing "the enforcement of federal immigration laws” and told every agency to identify federal funds “for suspension or termination” that would otherwise be sent to those places identified as “sanctuary jurisdictions.” If Trump follows through with cutting federal funding to local governments, it would be just the latest example of his Administration usurping powers given to Congress under the Constitution. Already in his first three months in office, Trump has cut federal jobs and funding to agencies that were appropriated by Congress. Trump used incendiary language in his order, saying that state and local officials who obstruct immigration efforts are engaged in an “insurrection.” State and local officials, he wrote, “continue to use their authority to violate, obstruct, and defy the enforcement of Federal immigration laws. This is a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law and the Federal Government’s obligation to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States.” Legal experts have warned that Trump’s comparing illegal immigration to an “invasion” and his painting those who oppose him as treasonous could be used as a false pretext for unlocking extraordinary presidential powers, including the Insurrection Act of 1807 and other laws designed for leading the nation in times of extreme national disasters and war. Over the past week, the Trump administration has increased the tempo of its immigration crackdown. Law enforcement agencies in Florida worked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Miami office to arrest 800 people last week who were allegedly in the country unlawfully. And the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security arrested 100 people and allegedly seized drugs and weapons in a joint raid Sunday on a night club in Colorado Springs, Colo., that the Trump administration says was being used by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The new actions come as the Trump administration tries to push through barriers to its deportation actions. Trump’s Justice Department arrested a county judge in Wisconsin on Friday for allegedly helping an undocumented immigration avoid federal deportation officers, and the Trump administration is facing alarm and scrutiny for deporting three U.S. citizen children with their mothers. And Trump has flouted a Supreme Court order that he "facilitate" the release from prison in El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia after he was mistakenly deported from Maryland. In an April 22 interview with TIME, Trump said he had not asked El Salvador President Nayib Bukele to return Abrego Garcia “because I haven’t been asked to ask him by my attorneys”
A former athletic director at a Baltimore area high school who was accused of using artificial intelligence to create a racist and antisemitic audio clip impersonating the school’s principal was sentenced on Monday to four months in jail as part of a plea deal, according to prosecutors. The former director, Dazhon Darien, 32, pleaded guilty to disturbing school operations, a misdemeanor charge, according to the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office. Mr. Darien had previously faced additional charges, including theft, stalking and retaliating against a witness. According to The Associated Press, Mr. Darien entered an Alford plea to the disturbing school operations charge, which allows defendants to maintain their innocence while pleading guilty. Mr. Darien, the former athletic director of Pikesville High School, fabricated an audio clip that included a rant about “ungrateful Black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag” and disparaging comments about Jewish students, according to a statement of facts in the case used to support the guilty plea. According to police records, the audio was an attempt to smear the school’s principal, Eric Eiswert. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT According to the statement of facts, Mr. Eiswert said that there had been “conversations” with Mr. Darien about his contract not being renewed because of “his poor performance at the school, his inability to follow clearly laid out procedures and his unwillingness to follow the chain of command.” Problems with Mr. Darien began in late 2023, leading up to the audio’s release, according to the statement. A lawyer listed for Mr. Darien did not respond to calls and messages on Tuesday. The Baltimore County Public Schools district declined to comment on the case. Efforts to reach Mr. Eiswert on Tuesday were unsuccessful. After his sentencing, Mr. Darien was returned to federal custody as he is facing charges that he sexually exploited children and received child pornography. The fabricated recording, which was posted on Instagram in January 2024, quickly spread, roiling Baltimore County Public Schools, which serves more than 100,000 students. While the district investigated, Mr. Eiswert, who denied making the comments, had multiple threats to his safety, the police said. He was also placed on administrative leave, the school district said. According to police documents, Mr. Darien developed a grievance against Mr. Eiswert in December after the principal began investigating him. Mr. Darien had authorized a district payment of $1,916 to his roommate, the police said, “under the pretense” that the roommate was working as an assistant coach for the Pikesville girls’ soccer team.Soon after, the police said, Mr. Darien used the school district’s internet services to search for artificial intelligence tools, including from OpenAI, the developer of the ChatGPT chatbot, and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December 2023, for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.) A public defender representing Mr. Darien declined to comment on the case. It has never been easier to make realistic fabricated videos, often called deepfakes. Where it once took elaborate software to put one person’s face onto another’s, many of those tools are now common and can be found on smartphone apps. This has put some A.I. researchers on edge about the dangers the technology poses.
At a rally in Michigan on Tuesday, April 29, held to mark the first 100 days of his second term, President Donald Trump smiled as the crowd chanted “three,” a call for the President to serve a third term. In response, Trump said: “Well, we actually already served three, if you count. But remember, I like the victories, I like the three victories which we absolutely had. I just don't like the results of the middle term.” Trump, who won his first election in 2016 but then lost to former President Joe Biden in 2020, appeared to once again be denying the results of the 2020 election. In actual fact, 2020 saw Trump fall short in key battleground states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, where he was on Tuesday. During his rally, he also incorrectly stated that he won Michigan three times. Trump has repeatedly claimed that he won the 2020 election, arguing that voter fraud occurred. Two days after election day, whilst vote counting was still ongoing, he posted on social media “STOP THE COUNT!” And once major news outlets had confirmed Biden as the 46th President, Trump again remarked: "This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election." Amid this election denial, the riots of Jan. 6, 2021, occurred. Meanwhile, Trump’s comments at the rally come after much discussion and teasing of a possible third term, only strengthened by the fact the Trump Store is now selling “Trump 2028” merchandise. Read More: Will Trump Seek a Third Term? The President Settles Ongoing Speculation Due to the 22nd Amendment of the U.S. constitution, this is the second—and final—term that Trump can serve. But this has not stopped him and his Administration from talking about a third. In an interview with TIME on April 22, marking his first 100 days back in office, Trump was asked about the possibility of seeking a third term and how he had recently said he was “not joking” about pursuing that avenue. He said: “I'd rather not discuss that now, but as you know, there are some loopholes that have been discussed that are well known. But I don't believe in loopholes. I don't believe in using loopholes.” It echoed what he told NBC in an interview at the end of March, in which he said there are methods available to do it, something he emphasized he was not joking about. But in an interview with the Atlantic, published on April 28, Trump said that running for a third term in 2028 is not something he is looking into. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also recently shared a similar message, saying that Trump running for a third time “is not something that he is thinking of,” whilst joking that Trump 2028 hats are “flying off the shelves.”
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. It’s still April, but President Donald Trump is already letting Americans know that the October day widely acknowledged to be Columbus Day will in fact be Columbus Day, thank you very much. The move, announced over the weekend as the newest side dish on the culture-war buffet, is merely the latest signal to Trump’s MAGA base that he won’t bend to political correctness or progressive ideology that favors Indigenous Peoples Day, which under President Joe Biden co-existed on that date. Christopher Columbus—who never set foot in the United States yet nonetheless is taught in schools as having “discovered” America—is right up there among “cancelled” American icons with Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee. For Trump and his basic understanding of history, Columbus is as core to the United States’ DNA as apple pie and Betsy Ross, and the interloper Indigenous Peoples Day is a pernicious effort to hijack it like a cancer. “The Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much,” the President posted Sunday on Truth Social, his alternative to the platform formerly known as Twitter. “They tore down his Statues, and put up nothing but ‘WOKE,’ or even worse, nothing at all! Well, you’ll be happy to know, Christopher is going to make a major comeback. I am hereby reinstating Columbus Day under the same rules, dates, and locations, as it has had for all of the many decades before!” To be clear: Trump does not have the power to unilaterally declare a national holiday. Nor did anyone “destroy” the holiday; Biden issued proclamations acknowledging Columbus Day annually. At the same time, he recognized Indigenous Peoples Day, but Congress has not designated it into a federal holiday. Similar action would be needed to delist Columbus Day from the ranks of federal holidays. Congress has not done so. Members of Congress tried a couple of times to demote Columbus by changing the holiday’s name, but those efforts fell short. Several statues of Columbus have been removed in recent years, but it’s not as if Ohio is going to rename its capital anytime soon. Even in true-blue Manhattan, Columbus Circle still has its 76-foot tall namesake at its center, a monument developed in response to the violent lynchings of Italian-American immigrants. October the 13th was always going to be Columbus Day, no matter what Trump said or did or tweeted. And, while implicitly saying Indigenous Peoples Day is no more, the President did not technically go that far. But his base sure heard what it wanted to. The presidency has always been a largely performative task, undertaken with the expectation that the public-facing aspect of the job requires a show. The gig is a 24/7 act, but Trump takes it to a new level as he nurses grievances and fuels division for his own movement’s gain. His latest announcement is a naked appeal to voters who feel a new era of politics is excluding them by de-elevating a colonizing explorer who, per elementary-school understanding, in 1492 “sailed the ocean blue.” The reality is far more complex for a figure who opened the door for a European expansionism that led to the decimation and enslavement of native-born Americans. As many as 56 million native-born Americans died as result of Europeans’ arrival here between 1492 and 1600, but the elementary-school poem is as catchy as ever. Political memory, similarly, has always been ripe for weaponization. There’s a dark link between history and nationalism, with the two feeding off each other to paint an ideal that can, at times, turn violent in defense of both an imagined past and systemic inequality. Just look at the rise of white Christian nationalism in the last half century that accompanied increasing civil rights—and the violence it has unleashed. It’s almost impossible to imagine the MAGA present in the absence of a nativist, nationalist antecedent. But the irony is that Columbus never stood on what is today mainland North America, despite becoming a rallying point after Italian-American immigrants were lynched in the 1890s. Columbus was a stand-in for the nation’s hagiographic origin story, much like the Mayflower or its Western pioneers. As Stephen Sondheim so wisely observed, children will listen to the tales they are told, and those myths are tough to shake once they take hold. It’s why everyone is Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day, and next Monday will see lines out the doors of our local taquerias for Cinco de Mayo—two holidays that barely rank in their purported homelands. All of which suggests that Trump is less interested in correcting history or justifying a holiday-weekend mattress sale than nudging his faithful to feel aggrieved—and then emboldened. With a wink and a bullhorn, Trump is teaching his base to never back down from their dug-in stances—even those based on invented histories they were taught in kindergarten.
Donald Trump wants the U.S. to be a leader in artificial intelligence. In January, he signed an executive order intended to enhance America’s "dominance" in AI. In early April, his Administration directed every federal agency to find and hire more people with experience designing and deploying artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, he signed yet another executive order on AI, this one about integrating it into the nation's schools. “AI is where it seems to be at," Trump said. But Trump’s erratic purge of the federal workforce has undermined those very efforts. The Biden Administration moved aggressively in its final 18 months to convince more than 200 AI technology experts to forgo the private sector for the federal workforce, through what was called the ”National AI Talent Surge.” The new hires were deployed throughout the government and used AI to find ways to reduce Social Security wait times, simplify tax filings, and help veterans track their medical care. Most of them were quickly pushed out by the new administration, multiple former federal officials tell TIME. The shift, say the former officials, represents an enormous waste of federal resources, as agencies across the Trump Administration are looking to draw workers with the very experience they just let go. It also means agencies may have to increasingly rely on costlier outside companies for that expertise. The White House and the Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment. Much of the loss of those AI experts came about when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency fired hundreds of recent technology hires as part of its broader termination of thousands of employees on probation or so-called “term” hires, former officials who worked in those offices said. Others were fired when Musk’s team subsumed the U.S. Digital Service and when Musk eliminated a technology office at the General Services Administration. That office, called 18F, had helped various government agencies spin up new services, including the IRS’ popular free tax-filing program Direct File. Federal agencies are routinely on the lookout for tech workers, whose skills are in high demand and who can often draw far better salaries in the private sector. Hiring AI experts into government has been a major challenge, says Julie Siegel, who was a senior official in Biden’s Office of Management and Budget. “Everybody is trying to hire AI specialists, so AI was really hard, but we did this big push,” Siegel says. The Trump administration has laid out its own ambitious goals for recruiting more tech talent. On April 3, Russell Vought, Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, released a 25-page memo for how federal leaders were expected to accelerate the government’s use of AI. “Agencies should focus recruitment efforts on individuals that have demonstrated operational experience in designing, deploying, and scaling AI systems in high-impact environments,” Vought wrote. Putting that into action will be harder than it needed to be, says Deirdre Mulligan, who directed the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office in the Biden White House. “The Trump Administration’s actions have not only denuded the government of talent now, but I’m sure that for many folks, they will think twice about whether or not they want to work in government,” Mulligan says. “It’s really important to have stability, to have people’s expertise be treated with the level of respect it ought to be and to have people not be wondering from one day to the next whether they’re going to be employed.” In early 2024, Biden officials hired Angelica Quirarte, who had spent years pitching tech experts on becoming public servants. Quirarte says that coders and engineers are natural problem-solvers and are attracted to the challenge of working with huge data sets that can improve services for millions of people. Previously, she orchestrated a non-profit effort called Tech to Gov that recruited hundreds of technologists to work in federal and state government. In less than a year, Quirarte tells TIME, she helped hire about 250 AI experts. After Trump’s actions, she estimates about 10% of that cohort are still with the federal government. “It’s going to be really hard” for the Trump administration to hire more tech workers after such haphazard layoffs, Quirarte says. “It’s so chaotic.” Quirarte had initially intended to stay on during the Trump Administration and continue working to help improve federal hiring and expand AI training for the federal workforce. She had previously spent years in senior roles in California state government under different administrations. “I think transitions are healthy for democracies, when they’re approached with good intent and honor, and most of my work is not political,” Quirarte says. After 23 days in the Trump Administration, Quirarte decided she had had enough and resigned. “It was not an environment where you assumed good intent—you’re operating out of fear,” she says. “That’s not an environment where you can get good policy and good governing work done.”
On the eve of Canadians gearing up to vote in a federal election, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed President Donald Trump’s previous comments about making Canada the “51st state.” During an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, April 27, host Kristen Welker questioned Rubio on whether or not the State Department has “taken any steps to carry out” Trump’s plans “as he has said, to annex Canada.” “What the President said, and he has said this repeatedly, is he was told by the previous Prime Minister [Justin Trudeau] that Canada could not survive without unfair trade with the United States, at which point [Trump] asked, ‘Well, if you can't survive as a nation without treating us unfairly in trade, then you should become a state,’” Rubio said. When asked if the U.S. still wants to make Canada the 51st state, Rubio responded with: “I think the President has stated repeatedly he thinks Canada would be better off as a state.” Rubio’s comments come after a back-and-forth between Canada’s former Prime Minister Trudeau and Trump about how Canada should deal with the pressures felt by Trump’s tariffs. Canada has also countered with a 25% tariff on goods imported from the U.S. Read More: These Are the U.S. Cities Most Vulnerable to Canadian Tariffs, a New Report Finds Trump has repeatedly said both on social media and to reporters that Canada could become the 51st state of the U.S. When asked in the Oval Office by reporters in February if there was anything Trudeau could “give” to Trump amid ongoing tariff discussions, Trump reiterated that as a state, there would be no tariffs on the country. “What I’d like to see; Canada become our 51st state,” Trump said. “If people wanted to play the game right, it would be 100% certain that it would become a state.” Canada's current Prime Minister Mark Carney has also spoken out on Trump's persistent comments about annexing Canada. He said Trump raised the matter during a phone call in March. Speaking at a campaign press conference, Carney said: "To be clear, as I've said to anyone who's raised this issue in private or in public, including the President, it will never happen. In an April 22 interview with TIME, Trump doubled down on his previous statements and said he was “really not trolling” about making Canada the 51st state, arguing that America doesn’t “need anything from Canada.” “We’re taking care of their military. We're taking care of every aspect of their lives, and we don't need them to make cars for us. In fact, we don't want them to make cars for us. We want to make our own cars. We don't need their lumber. We don't need their energy. We don't need anything from Canada,” Trump said. “And I say the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state.” Trudeau—who announced his plans to step down in January as Canada’s Liberal Party leader—has previously told lawmakers and business leaders to take the threat of annexation seriously, with several outlets reporting that at a Canada-U.S. Economic Summit in Toronto in February, Trudeau suggested that Trump wants access to Canada’s critical minerals. “Mr Trump has it in mind that the easiest way to do it is absorbing our country and it is a real thing," he said. As mentioned, Rubio’s new comments land a day before Canada’s April 28 federal election, which could see a new leader in place for negotiations about tariffs with the United States. Trump’s comments have weighed heavily on the Canadian elections thus far, with the Liberal Party utilizing a Canadian wave of nationalism that has resulted from the ongoing trade concerns. The country’s next leader could decide the fate of Canada’s critical relationship with the U.S. and how that will look moving forward. “They're going to have a new leader. We'll deal with a new leadership in Canada,” Rubio said. “There are many things to work cooperatively with Canada on, but we actually don't like the way they treated us when it comes to trade, and the President has made that point when he responded to the previous Prime Minister.”
It was an unusual display on the North Lawn of the White House: 88 yard signs with the faces of people the Trump administration says are criminals who had been arrested by immigration agents. President Donald Trump has launched harsh immigration actions in his first 100 days in office—detaining more people for immigration violations, allowing arrests outside schools and courthouses, and sending more than 200 Venezuelan men to be imprisoned in El Salvador. He plans to do more in the coming weeks. Trump is ramping up raids on workplaces to find those in the country unlawfully, and on Monday, signed an order directing his Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to send him a list of so-called sanctuary cities that aren’t doing enough to cooperate with his deportation efforts, according to Trump officials. The number of immigration arrests at workplaces has tripled since Trump took office, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said Monday. “It’s going to triple again,” Homan said. Trump vowed on the campaign trail to bring back workplace raids, after the Biden administration had largely put a stop to such enforcement tactics. With the new order, Trump is threatening to cut federal funds to cities and states his Administration decides are blocking his mass deportation effort. In the executive order he signed Monday, Trump gave Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a May 28 deadline to publish a list of cities, counties and states that are obstructing "the enforcement of federal immigration laws” and told every agency to identify federal funds “for suspension or termination” that would otherwise be sent to those places identified as “sanctuary jurisdictions.” If Trump follows through with cutting federal funding to local governments, it would be just the latest example of his Administration usurping powers given to Congress under the Constitution. Already in his first three months in office, Trump has cut federal jobs and funding to agencies that were appropriated by Congress. Trump used incendiary language in his order, saying that state and local officials who obstruct immigration efforts are engaged in an “insurrection.” State and local officials, he wrote, “continue to use their authority to violate, obstruct, and defy the enforcement of Federal immigration laws. This is a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law and the Federal Government’s obligation to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States.” Legal experts have warned that Trump’s comparing illegal immigration to an “invasion” and his painting those who oppose him as treasonous could be used as a false pretext for unlocking extraordinary presidential powers, including the Insurrection Act of 1807 and other laws designed for leading the nation in times of extreme national disasters and war. Over the past week, the Trump administration has increased the tempo of its immigration crackdown. Law enforcement agencies in Florida worked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Miami office to arrest 800 people last week who were allegedly in the country unlawfully. And the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security arrested 100 people and allegedly seized drugs and weapons in a joint raid Sunday on a night club in Colorado Springs, Colo., that the Trump administration says was being used by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The new actions come as the Trump administration tries to push through barriers to its deportation actions. Trump’s Justice Department arrested a county judge in Wisconsin on Friday for allegedly helping an undocumented immigration avoid federal deportation officers, and the Trump administration is facing alarm and scrutiny for deporting three U.S. citizen children with their mothers. And Trump has flouted a Supreme Court order that he "facilitate" the release from prison in El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia after he was mistakenly deported from Maryland. In an April 22 interview with TIME, Trump said he had not asked El Salvador President Nayib Bukele to return Abrego Garcia “because I haven’t been asked to ask him by my attorneys” Polling shows that Trump’s immigration actions are losing public support. A Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll on Friday showed 46% of Americans approved of Trump’s immigration policies, down from a 50% approval rating on the topic in February. A New York Times/Siena College poll released Friday, showed 47% approved and 51% disapproved of his handling of immigration.
