Key events
Robert Tait
Democrats on Capitol Hill offered apologies and promises of accountability on Tuesday amid often harrowing testimony from people who had experienced violent encounters with federal agents engaged in Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
With Republicans conspicuously absent, the forum of senators and representatives heard from Luke and Brent Ganger, the brothers of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, who was shot dead by an Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE) officer in Minneapolis on 7 January as she tried to drive away from agents.
Luke Ganger said he and his brother were there “to ask for you help” and suggested the sense of loss his family felt had been deepened by subsequent events in Minneapolis, where a protester, Alex Pretti, also aged 37, was shot dead by two border patrol agents on 24 January.
“The deep distress our family feels at Renee’s loss in such a violent and unnecessary way is complicated by feelings of disbelief, distress and desperation,” he said.
“In the last few weeks, our family took some consolation, thinking that perhaps Nee’s death would bring about change in our country. It has not. The completely surreal scenes taking place are beyond explanation.
“This is not just a bad day or a rough week or isolated incidents. These encounters with federal agents are changing the community and changing many lives, including ours. I still don’t know how to explain to my four-year-old what these agents are doing when we pass by.”
His daughter, Ganger added, “knows that her aunt died and that somebody caused it to happen”.
Lauren Gambino
Democrats are launching an aggressive campaign to win back voters they lost, not to Donald Trump, but to the proverbial “couch,” as they look to regain support ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) rolled out a new initiative called Local Listeners with the goal of targeting over one million “infrequent” voters in key battleground districts. Seeking to build on the party’s string of off-year election victories, which extended into 2026 with an upset in Texas last weekend, the DNC is betting that early, localized outreach will be crucial in winning back these voters’ trust – and their ballots – this time around.
“If we want to keep earning back the trust and support of voters, we have to listen to them,” DNC chair Ken Martin said in a statement, shared in advance with the Guardian. “This program modernizes the way we are talking to and hearing from the voters that we need to win elections now and for years to come. The Democratic Party is done with waiting until the last minute to engage voters – these conversations need to happen early and often.”
The program marks the DNC’s most ambitious early voter outreach effort for a midterm cycle, according to the organization. More than 2,000 volunteers have already signed up to participate in what the groups says is a sign, of “renewed grassroots energy” for the party.
Volunteers will undergo a seven-week training program on how to better engage these voters, including sessions on “active listening” and “having difficult conversations about politics”.
The goal is to engage voters who cast ballots for Joe Biden in 2020 but sat out in 2024, with volunteers aiming to conduct at least 250,000 phone conversations and host more than 50 grassroots events in key congressional districts by the end of March.
Trump calls for Americans to ‘move on’ from Epstein files
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
President Donald Trump has made a fresh plea for Americans to move on from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, even as it left a prominent British politician facing a criminal probe.
Former British ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson has resigned from the upper house of UK parliament amid allegations he passed market sensitive information to the late sex offender Epstein while in government.
The fallout from the latest release of millions of documents linked to Epstein continued in the US too, where former president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary will testify in Congress later this month.
Trump insisted once again that he had been cleared by the latest trove of files as he faced renewed questions at the White House over the disgraced financier, AFP reported.
“Nothing came out about me other than it was a conspiracy against me, literally, by Epstein and other people. But I think it’s time now for the country to maybe get on to something else like health care or something that people care about,” Trump said.
Trump added that it was “not a Republican, it’s a Democrat problem,” in a bid to turn the issue back to the Clintons, and away from the mention in the files of allies including his commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and billionaire Elon Musk.
In other developments:
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Donald Trump suggested on a conservative podcast released on Monday that Republican state officials “take over” and “nationalize” elections in 15 states to protect the party from being voted out of office. Trump framed the issue as a means to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting. Claims that noncitizens are voting in numbers that can affect an election are a lie. But it raises concerns about potential efforts by the president to rig the November midterm elections.
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A message from Donald Trump celebrating the 19th-century US invasion of its southern neighbour – and the subsequent loss of more than half its territory – has touched a historical nerve in Mexico, with some seeing it as a veiled threat of future incursions. Reacting to the US president’s statement, which described the invasion as “a legendary victory”, Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, said during her morning news conference on Tuesday: “We must always defend our sovereignty.”
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Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is running her own review into the 2020 election with Donald Trump’s approval, working separately from a justice department investigation even as she joined an FBI raid of an election center in Georgia last week.
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The US military says it shot down an Iranian drone that “aggressively” approached the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. The Iranian Shahed-139 drone was flying toward the carrier “with unclear intent” when an F-35 fighter jet shot it down, US Central Command said on Tuesday.
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Donald Trump has announced that his administration is seeking $1bn in damages from Harvard University, the latest step in a long-running battle with the university over allegations of antisemitism. In a Truth Social post late on Monday, Trump accused the Ivy League school of being “strongly antisemitic”, adding that Harvard president Alan Garber “has done a terrible job of rectifying a very bad situation for his institution and, more importantly, America itself”.
