Two teenagers who pledged allegiance to ISIS tried to detonate bombs outside Gracie Mansion on Saturday, hurling improvised explosive devices into a crowd of protesters. The bombs failed to go off. A five-count federal complaint was unsealed Monday afternoon, charging Emir Balat, 18, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19, with using a weapon of mass destruction while supporting a foreign terror group, among other charges.
New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch was direct about what happened. She called it "ISIS-inspired terrorism" and made clear these were not toys or props.
"These were not hoax devices, nor smoke devices. It is, in fact, an improvised explosive device that could have caused serious injury or death."
The devices contained triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, an explosive compound known as the "Mother of Satan." Cops initially believed the devices were merely homemade smoke grenades. The FBI took over the investigation on Sunday and searched both suspects' homes in Bucks County, just outside Philadelphia.
According to the complaint, Balat allegedly told detectives he hoped the casualty count would surpass that of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. When informed that the attack killed three people, his response was chilling.
"No, even bigger. It was only three deaths."
That is the voice of someone who wanted a body count.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York City, first addressed the attack on Sunday, the New York Post reported. His statement opened not with the bombing attempt, not with the ISIS allegiance, not with the fact that two individuals tried to murder people outside his own residence. It opened with the protest.
"Yesterday, white supremacist Jake Lang organized a protest outside Gracie Mansion rooted in bigotry and racism. Such hate has no place in New York City. It is an affront to our city's values and the unity that defines who we are."
The protest, organized by far-right agitator Jake Lang and dubbed "Stop the Islamification of NYC," was an anti-Muslim demonstration. Mamdani called it "a vile protest rooted in white supremacy." He said he found it "appalling" but would not waver in defending its right to occur. Fine. That's a reasonable position on free speech.
But notice the structure. The protest received four sentences of specific moral condemnation. The bombing attempt that followed got folded into the passive construction of "what followed was even more disturbing." The two men who allegedly tried to kill New Yorkers in the name of ISIS were described in the language of a parking violation.
"Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, it is reprehensible and the antithesis of who we are."
No mention of ISIS. No mention of radical Islam. No mention of the ideology that animated the attack. Just "violence at a protest."
By Monday morning, when Mamdani delivered prepared remarks at a press conference, the federal complaint had not yet been unsealed, but the nature of the attack was already well understood. Tisch had already identified it as ISIS-inspired terrorism. Mamdani acknowledged the suspects threw devices at the crowd and that police had determined they were improvised explosive devices "made to injure, maim, or worse." He said the pair were "suspected of coming here to commit an act of terrorism."
"Let me say this plainly: Anyone who comes to New York City to bring violence to our streets will be held accountable in accordance with the law."
After the federal complaint was unsealed Monday afternoon, Mamdani issued another statement.
"Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi have been charged with committing a heinous act of terrorism and proclaiming their allegiance to ISIS. They should be held fully accountable for their actions."
He managed to say ISIS. He managed "heinous." He managed "fully accountable." What he did not manage, across three separate statements over three days, was to name the ideology. Not once did the words "radical Islam" or "Islamic extremism" cross his lips. He dodged questions on Monday. He treated the ideological motivation like furniture in a room he was trying not to bump into.
Consider what Mamdani was willing to name and what he wasn't:
The mayor had no trouble diagnosing the ideology of the protest. He had every word he needed for that. But when two ISIS supporters allegedly tried to blow people up outside his home, ideology suddenly became unspeakable. The specificity vanished. "Terrorism" stood alone, scrubbed of its modifier, as if the attack emerged from nowhere in particular.
This is a familiar pattern in progressive politics. Hate has a name when it comes from the right. When it comes wrapped in a crescent, it becomes "violence" or "extremism," stripped of origin, floating free of any ideology anyone might be expected to confront.
One detail that deserves attention: Mamdani was not home when the bombs were thrown at his residence on Saturday. He and his wife spent the day at the New York City Sign Museum in Brooklyn. There is nothing wrong with a mayor being away from Gracie Mansion. But the fact that ISIS-aligned attackers targeted the home of America's first Muslim mayor, and that mayor then declined to name the ideology behind the attack, tells you something about the distorted incentives of progressive identity politics.
Mamdani acknowledged as much himself, noting that "anti-Muslim bigotry is nothing new to me, nor is it anything new for the 1 million or so Muslim New Yorkers." He's right about that. And one of the most corrosive forms of that bigotry is the assumption that Muslim communities cannot withstand honest conversation about extremism within their own ranks. The refusal to name radical Islam doesn't protect Muslim New Yorkers. It insults them by implying they can't distinguish between their faith and its most violent distortions.
Mamdani said the right things about accountability. He said the suspects should be "held fully accountable." He said New York would "not tolerate terrorism or violence." These are fine sentences. They are also the bare minimum expected of any mayor whose city was just targeted by ISIS supporters carrying bombs nicknamed the Mother of Satan.
The question isn't whether Mamdani condemned the attack. He did. The question is why the condemnation was so carefully hollowed out. You cannot fight what you refuse to name. You cannot lead a city through a threat you will only describe in the vaguest possible terms while reserving your sharpest language for the protest that preceded it.
Two men came to New York City to kill in the name of ISIS. The bombs didn't go off. Next time, they might. New Yorkers deserve a mayor who will say so plainly, all of it, including the part that makes progressive coalition politics uncomfortable.
President Trump declared Sunday that he will refuse to sign any legislation until Congress passes the SAVE America Act, putting election integrity at the front of the Republican agenda and daring lawmakers to blink.
The president posted the ultimatum on Truth Social, calling the bill "an 88% issue with ALL VOTERS" and demanding the full version of the legislation, not what he called "THE WATERED DOWN VERSION." He outlined exactly what he expects in the final product: voter ID, proof of citizenship, tight restrictions on mail-in ballots, a ban on men in women's sports, and a prohibition on what he termed "transgender mutilization for children."
Two words closed the post: "DO NOT FAIL!!!"
Trump's move is extraordinary in its simplicity. By refusing to sign anything else, he transforms every piece of pending legislation into leverage for the SAVE America Act. Every appropriations rider, every bipartisan pet project, every must-pass authorization now sits behind a single gate. If Republican lawmakers want the president's pen on anything, they know what has to come first.
The post also singled out election integrity activist Scott Presler, praising his advocacy for the bill and his appearance on "Fox & Friends," where Presler discussed using the filibuster, or a talking filibuster, to force the act through the Senate. Presler, who serves as founder and executive director of Early Vote Action, has been working to get the legislation across the finish line. His case for urgency is blunt. In February, he put it this way:
"If we don't change the way that we vote and fight fire with the gosh darn flame thrower, well, we're going to keep losing elections."
He's not wrong. Republicans have watched election after election where the rules of engagement favored mass mail-in voting, loose verification, and legal gray zones that made accountability nearly impossible. The SAVE America Act is designed to close those gaps before the next cycle, Breitbart reported.
This isn't a fringe priority. A February 25-26 Harvard-Harris poll of 1,999 registered voters found that 71 percent support the SAVE America Act. The breakdown is striking:
When half the opposing party's voters agree with you, you're not looking at a partisan wish list. You're looking at a consensus that Washington has been too slow or too cowardly to act on. The political class treats voter ID and proof of citizenship as controversial. Actual voters treat them as common sense.
The gap between elite opinion and public opinion on election integrity has been one of the defining features of the post-2020 landscape. Media outlets treat any call for verification as coded voter suppression. Voters across party lines treat it as basic civic hygiene. Trump is betting, correctly, that the public is on his side.
Trump has reportedly told Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Sen. John Cornyn that he wants the SAVE America Act on his desk before he will make an endorsement in the Texas Senate race. That's not a casual aside. A Trump endorsement in a contested primary carries enormous weight, and withholding it creates a vacuum that concentrates minds.
According to Breitbart News, Trump considers the legislation a "must-do," calling it "a Country Defining fight for the Soul of our Nation." The outlet noted that with Trump still weighing the Texas endorsement, "all eyes turn to Cornyn and Senate GOP leadership to see whether they take action on the SAVE America Act, which has robust bipartisan support among registered voters."
The specifics Trump outlined in his post tell you what he considers non-negotiable. Voter ID. Proof of citizenship. Mail-in ballots are limited to military personnel, the ill, the disabled, and travelers. These aren't exotic demands. Most functioning democracies worldwide require some form of identification to vote. The United States is an outlier, and not in a way that inspires confidence.
Perhaps the most telling line in Trump's post is the insistence on the full bill. Washington has a long tradition of passing headline-friendly legislation that sounds tough but changes nothing. A voter ID bill without proof of citizenship requirements. A mail-in ballot reform that exempts the states where it matters most. Trump is telling Congress he's not interested in a symbolic win he can hold up at a rally. He wants the substance.
That distinction matters. Republican voters have watched their party campaign on bold promises and govern on cautious compromises for decades. The frustration isn't abstract. It's the accumulated weight of every bill that got softened in committee, every provision that got traded away for a floor vote, every reform that arrived at the president's desk so diluted it barely qualified as change.
The legislative calendar just reorganized itself. Every senator with a priority bill now has a personal reason to push the SAVE America Act forward. Every committee chair who wants floor time for their own legislation understands the sequencing. Nothing moves until this moves.
For Democrats, the calculus is uncomfortable. Opposing voter ID when half your own voters support it is a losing position. Opposing proof of citizenship when the country is watching millions of illegal immigrants interact with government systems strains credibility. The usual playbook of calling election integrity "voter suppression" works in editorial boards and faculty lounges. It polls terribly everywhere else.
Trump has made his position clear, public, and absolute. No hedging, no fallback, no quiet negotiation. The SAVE America Act goes to the front of the line, or the line doesn't move.
Congress has its orders.
President Donald Trump signed a proclamation Saturday formally launching the "Americas Counter Cartel Coalition" at a summit of Western Hemisphere leaders in Doral, Florida, vowing to destroy drug cartels with lethal military force and warning that Cuba's communist regime is next on the list.
The "Shield of the Americas" summit at Trump National Doral brought together leaders from over a dozen countries, including Argentinian President Javier Milei, Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz Pereira, Chilean President-elect Jose Antonio Kast, and Honduran President Tito Asfura. The gathering carried unmistakable momentum, arriving on the heels of the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and ongoing U.S. military action in Iran.
Trump did not mince words about what comes next in the Caribbean.
"Cuba's at the end of the line. They're very much at the end of the line. They have no money. They have no oil. They have a bad philosophy. They have a bad regime that's been bad for a long time."
He went further, framing the island's future in stark terms:
"But Cuba's in its last moments of life as it was. It'll have a great new life, but it's in its last moments of life the way it is."
No operational details were offered. None were needed. The message landed on its own.
The Americas Counter Cartel Coalition represents something Washington has struggled to build for decades: a multilateral commitment in the Western Hemisphere anchored not in diplomatic niceties but in the willingness to use hard power against transnational criminal networks. The coalition's stated core is a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy cartels and terrorist networks, as ABC News reports.
Trump put it plainly to the assembled leaders:
"The heart of our agreement is a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks once and for all. We'll get rid of them. We need your help."
The roster of attendees tells its own story. Presidents and prime ministers from Paraguay, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Guyana, Costa Rica, and Trinidad and Tobago all appeared alongside Trump. Even Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who had traded barbs with Trump earlier, was present in spirit if not body. Following the Jan. 3 Venezuela raid, the two appeared to patch up their differences, with Trump inviting Petro to the White House and the two issuing complimentary statements.
That trajectory is worth noting. When American strength is visible, even reluctant partners find reasons to cooperate.
The summit also formalized a significant personnel move. Trump announced he was removing Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from her post and shifting her to a new role as special envoy for "The Shield of the Americas." Noem emailed DHS staff overnight Thursday, stating that her official final day at the department would be March 31.
In her email, Noem framed the transition as a natural extension of the work she had already been doing:
"In my new role, I will be able to build on the new partnerships and national security expertise I forged over my time as Secretary of Homeland Security."
At the summit's working lunch, Noem outlined the mission in direct terms:
"Our objectives are going to be to destroy the cartels, to go after these narcoterrorists that are destroying our people, killing our children and our grandchildren. We're also going to keep our adversaries at bay."
She offered to give attending leaders her personal cell phone number, a gesture that sounds informal but signals something operationally significant: short lines of communication between sovereign leaders and the person Trump trusts to coordinate hemisphere-wide counter-cartel operations.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio introduced Noem to the assembled leaders and made clear she would not be a figurehead. He told the room, "You will see a lot of her," and elaborated:
"She'll be very involved with each of you at a personal level and on a daily and weekly and monthly level to ensure that what we talk about here today and the work we do together continues on, and we can build upon that."
Trump used the summit to connect the dots between the administration's various military engagements, framing them not as scattered interventions but as the natural output of a rebuilt fighting force. He pointed to U.S. military action in Iran and the operation to capture Maduro as proof of concept.
"We're doing something. I built the military and rebuilt it and made it really strong. And my first administration, along with a lot of other things we did, we had a great first term, and now we're using it, unfortunately, we have to, but you're seeing how great it is."
The tone was confident but measured. Trump acknowledged the necessity of force without glorifying it, a distinction that matters when addressing a room full of leaders whose domestic populations are watching closely.
He also singled out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with characteristic directness, telling him, "we want your personality for war" and adding simply, "you're just perfect."
The administration's approach to the hemisphere is now visible in full. It rests on three pillars:
For years, Latin American policy in Washington oscillated between two modes: neglect and lectures. Republican administrations focused elsewhere. Democratic administrations showed up with condescending talking points about "root causes" and development aid that evaporated into the bureaucracies of corrupt governments. Neither approach dislodged the cartels, slowed the flow of fentanyl, or gave regional leaders a reason to align with American interests.
What Saturday's summit offered was something different. Not a promise to study the problem. Not a pledge of foreign aid contingent on progressive benchmarks. A room full of national leaders, a signed proclamation, and a commitment to kill the people poisoning two continents.
Trump's Cuba remarks carried the most forward-looking weight of the day. He tied them explicitly to the Venezuela operation, framing Havana as the next domino:
"As we achieve a historic transformation in Venezuela, we're also looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba."
He offered no timeline and no specifics. But the phrasing, "great change that will soon be coming," was not the language of a man issuing a diplomatic communiqué. It was a warning delivered in front of the hemisphere's most consequential leaders, with the credibility of a recent military operation backing it up.
Cuba's regime has survived on two things for sixty years: Soviet subsidies and then Venezuelan oil. The Soviets are gone. Maduro is gone. Trump's assessment that Cuba has "no money" and "no oil" is not rhetoric. It is an inventory of a regime that has run out of lifelines.
What happens next depends on whether Havana reads the room. Over a dozen hemispheric leaders just sat in a conference room in Florida and agreed that lethal force against the cartels is on the table. The man hosting the summit captured a sitting head of state two months ago. Cuba's leadership can do the math, or they can wait for the math to be done for them.
The Shield of the Americas is not an aspiration. It is a structure, with a signed proclamation, a dedicated envoy, and a coalition of willing partners. For the first time in a generation, the Western Hemisphere has an organizing principle that isn't built on wishful thinking.
Tyler Jaggers, a U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmer stationed in Astoria, Oregon, died early Friday morning, roughly a week after he was critically injured during a medical evacuation about 140 miles off Cape Flattery on the coast of northern Washington near the Canadian border.
The Oregonian reported that the Coast Guard Helicopter Rescue Swimmer Association announced the death. Jaggers had been on life support since the Feb. 27 incident, first at Victoria General Hospital in British Columbia, then at Madigan Army Medical Center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma. His parents were by his side.
The Coast Guard posthumously awarded Jaggers the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Details remain limited. The Coast Guard did not specify what happened, citing an ongoing investigation.
Rick McElrath, board president and founder of the Coast Guard Helicopter Rescue Swimmer Association, said Jaggers fell as he was being lowered to the deck from a helicopter. The mission was a medical evacuation for a stroke victim.
That's as much as the public knows right now. A young man trained to jump out of helicopters into open ocean so that strangers might live was lowered toward a vessel deck, and something went catastrophically wrong.
The investigation will eventually produce a report. It will not produce an outcome that changes anything for the people who loved Tyler Jaggers.
On Thursday, one day before the announcement of his death, Jaggers' partner Cassandra Weaver posted on social media with a story that distills the cost of this loss into something no official report ever could.
"What I didn't realize was that he had recently told some of his closest buddies that he was getting ready to propose."
"So yesterday, surrounded by the people who love him most, his family carried out the proposal on Tyler's behalf."
Weaver said she always told him she didn't care if he proposed with a Ring Pop.
"I said yes."
There is nothing to editorialize about that. It simply is what it is.
Oregon Sen. Suzanne Weber, R-Tillamook, shared her support for Jaggers' family during Friday's Senate session, honoring other rescue swimmers and the risks they take in the process.
"Rescue swimmers train relentlessly and deploy into the most demanding environments with a single purpose: to save others."
"Colleagues, this is personal for many in my district and for my office. Along Oregon's coast we know firsthand that if not for U.S. Coast Guard and the bravery of swimmers like Tyler, many more lives would have been lost at sea. Our thoughts are with his family, his air crew at station Astoria and the entire United States rescue swimmers' brotherhood during this incredibly difficult time."
Weber told Jaggers' family directly that "Oregon stands behind you" and that they are "not alone."
Jaggers joined the Coast Guard in January 2022 and arrived at the Astoria Air Station in April 2024. He was not a decades-long veteran coasting toward a pension.
He was early in a career defined by one of the most physically and mentally punishing specialties in the U.S. military. Coast Guard rescue swimmers are volunteers within an already volunteer force. They choose the water. They choose the storm. They do it knowing the math doesn't always work.
Stories like this rarely command the national attention they deserve. There is no political controversy to fuel a cable news cycle. No viral moment. No faction to blame. Just a man who trained to save lives, deployed into danger to do exactly that, and didn't come home.
Americans talk frequently about honoring service. It is easy to do when it costs nothing. The harder form of honor is attention: knowing the name Tyler Jaggers, understanding what rescue swimmers do, recognizing that the Coast Guard operates in conditions most people will never see and never think about.
The investigation into what happened on Feb. 27 will continue. The Distinguished Flying Cross now bears his name. His fiancée said yes to a question he never got to ask.
That is the price, and someone pays it every time.
Sri Lanka has assumed control of the Iranian fleet supply ship IRIS Bushehr after its captain handed the vessel over to Sri Lankan authorities in the country's territorial waters. The 1970s-era oiler will be towed to the historic port of Trincomalee and interned for the duration of hostilities, marking the first time a neutral nation has interned a belligerent warship since the Second World War.
Sri Lankan authorities sent a craft to receive the ship, removed 208 officers and men according to local media, and began preparations to relocate the vessel away from Colombo, the country's primary commercial port. The internment follows by a day the destruction of the Iranian frigate IRIS DENA by the United States Navy in international waters to the south of Sri Lanka, a sinking that the U.S. Department of War documented with published periscope footage.
That sinking itself was a historic marker: the first officially acknowledged such event anywhere since 1982.
Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake framed his government's decision as a humanitarian measure wrapped in diplomatic neutrality, according to Breitbart. He said his government had selected Trincomalee to avoid disrupting maritime traffic near Colombo, and offered a statement clearly designed for an international audience:
"We are not taking sides in this conflict, but while maintaining our neutrality we are taking action to save lives."
It's a carefully worded position, and one that happens to serve Sri Lanka's interests perfectly. Colombo is a vital commercial hub. Parking a belligerent warship there would invite exactly the kind of attention a small island nation cannot afford. Trincomalee, with its deep natural harbor and military history stretching back to the British Empire, is the obvious choice for keeping a problem vessel out of the way.
But Dissanayake's neutrality isn't just a posture. It may have been the only option that kept Sri Lanka out of the crossfire, literally.
The internment carries weight far beyond symbolism. Under established principles of naval warfare, a belligerent vessel is entitled to spend 24 hours in the waters of a neutral country without fear of attack. After that window closes, the neutral state faces a binary choice: intern the vessel or risk the consequences of failing to enforce its own neutrality.
The International Red Cross has articulated the stakes clearly:
"It is generally accepted that if belligerent forces enter neutral territory and the neutral authority is unable or unwilling to expel or intern them, the adverse party is entitled to undertake their hot pursuit and attack them there. It may even seek compensation from the neutral State for this breach of neutrality."
In plain terms, had Sri Lanka not interned the IRIS Bushehr within 24 hours, the United States would have been within its rights to pursue and destroy the ship even inside Sri Lankan territorial waters or harbors. The Iranian captain, watching what had just happened to the IRIS DENA in open water a day earlier, evidently did the math.
Neither Sri Lanka nor Iran has yet officially confirmed that the ship was surrendered by her captain. But the facts on the ground speak clearly enough. The crew is ashore. The ship is in Sri Lankan hands. And the vessel is headed to Trincomalee, not back to sea.
The timing of the Bushehr's surrender cannot be separated from what happened to the DENA. When the U.S. Navy destroyed an Iranian frigate in international waters south of Sri Lanka, and the Department of War released the periscope footage for the world to see, the message was not subtle. It was not meant to be.
Publishing that footage was a deliberate choice. It communicated to every Iranian naval commander in the region that American forces were present, capable, and willing to act. For the captain of the Bushehr, a 1970s-era oiler with no realistic capacity to survive an engagement, the calculus was straightforward. Fight and die, flee and likely die, or seek the protection of a neutral port.
He chose the port.
Something is clarifying about watching the old rules of naval warfare reassert themselves in real time. For decades, international law governing belligerent vessels in neutral waters has been a subject for academics and war college seminars. The last time a neutral nation interned a warship under these principles, the world was fighting fascism.
Now those dusty legal frameworks are operational again, and they are functioning exactly as designed. A belligerent vessel entered neutral territory. The neutral state acted within the 24-hour window. The crew was removed. The ship was secured. The adverse belligerent did not need to violate neutral sovereignty. Every party followed the script that international law wrote for precisely this scenario.
That the system worked is noteworthy. That it needed to work at all tells you something about the current state of the world.
The IRIS Bushehr had visited Colombo on a formal port call as recently as February 2024, when she arrived under the command of Captain Mahdi Balvardi with a crew of 270. That visit was diplomatic theater, a flag-showing exercise meant to project Iranian naval reach into the Indian Ocean.
The contrast between that visit and this one could not be sharper. In 2024, the Bushehr sailed into Colombo under her own power for a formal reception. Now she sits stripped of her crew, awaiting a tow to internment, her complement reduced from 270 to 208 officers and men. Whatever Iran intended its Indian Ocean presence to communicate, the message received by the world this week is rather different.
One Iranian warship is on the ocean floor with American periscope footage documenting its final moments. Another is interned in a foreign port, surrendered by its own captain. The Iranian navy's ability to project power beyond its immediate waters has been publicly, decisively diminished.
The foreign policy establishment spent years insisting that confrontation with Iran would destabilize the region, that military strength would provoke escalation spirals, and that diplomacy without teeth was the only responsible path. What this week demonstrated is simpler and older than any think tank white paper: credible force produces surrender. Weakness produces adventurism.
The captain of the IRIS Bushehr did not surrender because someone convened a multilateral dialogue. He surrendered because the ship next to him was at the bottom of the ocean.
Sri Lanka's neutrality was maintained because it acted decisively within the legal framework. The United States' position held because it backed its demands with demonstrated capability. Iran's position collapsed because bluster without capability is just noise.
Sometimes the old rules work because they were built on truths that don't change.
Sean Plankey, President Trump's nominee to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, was escorted out of U.S. Coast Guard headquarters late Monday and had his access badge confiscated. No explanation followed. DHS offered nothing beyond a terse non-answer.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told reporters only this:
"We have no personnel matters to announce at this time."
Plankey, a retired Coast Guard officer, had been serving as a senior adviser to the homeland security secretary for the Coast Guard while awaiting Senate confirmation. He helped the service branch secure roughly $25 billion in funding in the most recent appropriations bill. Now he's locked out of the building.
The backstory here is a case study in how the confirmation process chews up qualified nominees. Trump first nominated Plankey to lead CISA, but at the end of last year's legislative session, the nomination expired along with a pile of others that never received a Senate vote. Trump renominated him in January, CBS News reported.
Then things got strange. Multiple people familiar with the process claimed the renomination was an "administrative error." A White House official contradicted them, saying the renomination was intentional. That kind of conflicting background noise doesn't happen by accident. Someone, somewhere, didn't want Plankey in the job.
Florida Sen. Rick Scott placed a hold on the 2025 nomination, adding another layer of obstruction. The Senate has been the graveyard for Trump nominees before. This looks like a familiar pattern.
The circumstances behind Plankey's removal remain officially unclear, but the picture that emerges from sources is one of prolonged internal dysfunction.
People familiar with CISA's internal dynamics described "longstanding tensions" between Plankey and Madhu Gottumukkala, who served as the agency's acting director until he was recently replaced. Those tensions reportedly escalated in recent months during disagreements over cybersecurity contracts. One person briefed on the dispute said Plankey pushed for certain contracts to move forward, while Gottumukkala was uncomfortable approving them.
Gottumukkala comes with his own baggage. Reporting revealed that he uploaded sensitive but unclassified government documents marked "for official use only" to a public version of ChatGPT. He previously worked in South Dakota before his time at CISA. Last month, he was replaced as acting director by Nick Andersen, the agency's executive assistant director for cybersecurity.
So the acting director who clashed with Trump's nominee was also the one feeding government documents into a commercial AI chatbot. That's the caliber of leadership Plankey was supposedly in conflict with.
While Washington sorts out its personnel drama, the threats keep coming. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security issued a Critical Incident Report to law enforcement partners warning that the Cyber Islamic Resistance, an Iran-aligned hacktivist group, has called for cyberattacks against the United States and Israel. The report finds that Iran-aligned actors may conduct operations, including website defacements and distributed denial of service attacks.
CISA exists for moments like these. It is the federal government's primary civilian cybersecurity agency, and right now it is operating without a confirmed director, without its most prominent nominee in the building, and with a recent track record of internal chaos.
Some cybersecurity officials and industry experts have raised concerns that the turmoil risks undermining CISA's standing at exactly the wrong time. That concern isn't partisan. It's operational.
Another obstacle emerged Tuesday during Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's testimony before the Senate. GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina took the opportunity to fire a warning shot over unanswered inquiries regarding immigration enforcement and disaster response funding in his state:
"If I don't get an answer that you've had a month to respond to, and the remaining ones … as of today, I'll be informing leadership that I'm putting a hold on any en bloc nominations until I get a response, and in two weeks, if I don't get a response, I'm going to deny quorum and markup in as many committees as I can until I get a response."
Tillis isn't a bomb-thrower. When a Republican senator from a safe seat starts threatening to gum up committee business over basic constituent correspondence, it signals a real breakdown in communication between DHS and the Hill. That's a problem the department needs to fix quickly, because the confirmation pipeline for Trump's nominees depends on functional relationships with the Senate majority.
The federal bureaucracy has a long history of resisting nominees it doesn't want. Internal friction, mysterious leaks to the press about "administrative errors," holds from individual senators, and contract disputes that conveniently become flashpoints. These are the tools of institutional inertia.
Plankey is a retired Coast Guard officer who was doing substantive policy work and helping secure billions in funding for a service branch that desperately needs it. Whether the escort out of headquarters reflects a genuine personnel issue or something more political remains to be seen. DHS isn't talking, and the sourcing is all anonymous.
What is clear: the nation's primary cyber defense agency has been leaderless, unstable, and distracted by internal feuds for months, while adversaries like Iran-aligned hackers are actively planning attacks against American targets.
The building needs a confirmed director. The Senate needs to act. And whoever decided to strip Plankey's badge owes the public more than silence.
The U.S. Supreme Court on March 2 temporarily blocked California from enforcing policies that prohibit public school teachers from notifying parents about a student's sexual orientation or gender identity. The order reinstated a lower court ruling that had sided with parents and educators, effectively halting the state's ability to keep mothers and fathers in the dark while their children undergo social gender transitions during school hours.
The ruling arrived in Mirabelli v. Bonta, a case brought by a group of educators and parents who sued California in federal court. A federal trial judge had previously sided with them and blocked enforcement, but an appeals panel put that ruling on hold. The Supreme Court's order reversed that pause, restoring the trial court's protection for parents while litigation continues.
Peter Breen, executive vice president and head of litigation at the Thomas More Society, did not mince words:
"California built a wall of secrecy between parents and their own children, and the Supreme Court just tore it down."
The unsigned majority opinion grounded its reasoning in both parental rights and religious liberty. The Court acknowledged that parents challenging the policy hold sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender and feel a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs, the Catholic Review noted.
But the most striking language from the majority went further than the religious liberty claim. The Court described the practical reality of what California's policy created:
"Gender dysphoria is a condition that has an important bearing on a child's mental health, but when a child exhibits symptoms of gender dysphoria at school, California's policies conceal that information from parents and facilitate a degree of gender transitioning during school hours."
Read that again. The highest court in the land just stated plainly that California was not merely withholding information. It was actively facilitating gender transitions behind parents' backs. The Court then concluded that these policies "likely violate parents' rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children."
That word, "likely," matters. This is a temporary order while the case proceeds, not a final ruling. But the signal is unmistakable. A majority of the Supreme Court looked at California's policy framework and saw a constitutional problem.
Justice Elena Kagan dissented, but notably, her objections were procedural rather than substantive. She argued the Court relied on "shortcut procedures on the emergency docket" and that the "ordinary appellate process has barely started; only a district court has ruled on the case's merits." Kagan complained that the Court "receives scant and, frankly, inadequate briefing about the legal issues in dispute," calling the situation an example of "how our emergency docket can malfunction."
The complaint is familiar. Liberal justices have long objected to the Court's use of its emergency, or "shadow," docket when it produces outcomes they dislike. But the emergency docket exists precisely for situations where rights are being actively violated while courts take their time. Parents whose children were being socially transitioned without their knowledge or consent were not in a position to wait years for the appellate process to run its course.
Kagan did not argue that parents have no right to this information. She argued they should have to wait longer to get it.
The scope of what California constructed deserves attention. This was not a passive policy of discretion. It was an affirmative system designed to exclude parents from decisions about their own children's mental health and identity. Teachers were not simply permitted to stay silent. They were effectively directed to conceal what was happening from the very people with the greatest stake in a child's well-being.
According to Becket, the religious liberty law firm that filed an amicus brief in the case, Catholic families involved in the litigation discovered that their children had been socially transitioned at school without their knowledge or consent.
Consider the architecture of that arrangement:
Mark Rienzi, Becket's president and CEO, framed the stakes clearly:
"California tried cutting parents out of their children's lives while forcing teachers to hide the school's behavior from parents. We're glad the Court stepped in to block this anti-family, anti-American policy."
California's policy reflects a deeper ideological commitment that has become standard in progressive governance: the belief that the state knows better than parents. It is the same impulse that drives school boards to hide curricula from families, that treats parental objections to graphic material as bigotry, and that frames any questioning of gender ideology as a threat to children rather than a protection of them.
The left insists it champions transparency and consent. It demands informed consent for medical procedures, consumer products, and corporate disclosures. Yet when it comes to a child's psychological and social development, the same crowd builds elaborate systems of concealment aimed squarely at the people who love that child most.
No one elected a school counselor to make decisions about a child's identity. No teacher signed up to become a secret-keeper working against the family unit. California forced them into that role anyway.
The case arrived at the Court through a religious liberty claim, and that framing matters. The majority emphasized the sincerity of the parents' religious beliefs and their obligation to raise children in accordance with their faith. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine released guidance in March 2023 warning that certain interventions "involve the use of surgical or chemical techniques that aim to exchange the sex characteristics of a patient's body for those of the opposite sex or for simulations thereof."
The bishops' guidance went further:
"Any technological intervention that does not accord with the fundamental order of the human person as a unity of body and soul, including the sexual difference inscribed in the body, ultimately does not help but, rather, harms the human person."
But the Court's language extended beyond religious liberty alone. By stating that these policies "likely violate parents' rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children," the majority invoked a principle that applies to every parent, religious or not. The right to know what is happening with your child at school is not a denominational claim. It is a foundational one.
The temporary block holds while litigation in Mirabelli v. Bonta continues. The case will work its way through the appellate courts, and it may well return to the Supreme Court for a final ruling. But the temporary order itself reshapes the legal landscape. Lower courts now know where a majority of the justices stand. States considering similar secrecy policies have been put on notice.
Breen called it "a groundbreaking ruling" that "will protect parents' rights to raise their children as they see fit for years to come." That may prove optimistic or prophetic, depending on how the full case develops. But the direction is clear.
California told parents they had no right to know. The Supreme Court disagreed. For now, that wall of secrecy has a hole in it, and the light is getting through.
Two of the Supreme Court's conservative justices pushed back Monday against the federal government's argument that marijuana users can be stripped of their Second Amendment rights, raising pointed questions about the legal coherence of prosecuting gun owners for cannabis use in an era when most states have legalized the drug in some form.
The case, United States v. Hemani, centers on Ali Danial Hemani, a Texas man who argued he shouldn't have been charged with a crime because he owned a gun and smoked marijuana a few times a week. The Trump administration had asked the court to revive the criminal case against Hemani under a federal law that bans all illegal drug users from owning guns.
During oral arguments, Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch voiced skepticism of the government's position, and a majority of justices appeared to lean toward a narrow ruling. The court is expected to decide the case by the end of June.
According to Newsweek, Barrett cut straight to the evidentiary problem at the heart of the government's case:
"What is the government's evidence that using marijuana a couple of times a week makes someone dangerous?"
It's a question that deserves a serious answer, and the government apparently struggled to provide one. Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris argued that the law is a reasonable measure to keep firearms out of the hands of potentially dangerous people. But "potentially dangerous" is doing an extraordinary amount of work in that sentence. The federal government is, in effect, asking the court to accept the premise that casual marijuana use, something tens of millions of Americans engage in, constitutes a sufficient predicate to nullify a constitutional right.
Gorsuch zeroed in on the absurdity of the federal government's own conflicted posture:
"What do we do with the fact that marijuana is sort of illegal and sort of isn't and that the federal government itself is conflicted on this?"
He's right. A growing number of states have legalized cannabis while it remains illegal at the federal level. The result is a legal patchwork where a person can walk into a licensed dispensary in one state, make a perfectly legal purchase under state law, and become a federal felon the moment they touch a firearm. That's not the rule of law. That's a trap.
Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to approach the case from a different angle, expressing concern about the judiciary overstepping into territory that belongs to the political branches:
"It just seems to me that this takes a fairly cavalier approach to the necessary consideration of expertise and the judgments we leave to Congress and the executive branch."
Roberts has a point about institutional roles, but that framing also highlights the real failure here: Congress wrote a sweeping prohibition that treats every illegal drug user identically, whether they're a cartel trafficker or a guy who takes a gummy before bed. Erin Murphy, an attorney for Hemani, made a version of this argument, noting that many cannabis users regularly take gummies as sleep aids and are perfectly capable of making safe decisions about firearms.
The law, as applied to casual marijuana users, does not distinguish between genuine threats to public safety and ordinary Americans exercising two choices that, in most of the country, are individually legal. It criminalizes a status, not conduct. And it does so at the expense of a right the Constitution explicitly protects.
The case has drawn an unusual coalition of supporters for Hemani. Both the ACLU and the NRA back his position. Everytown, the gun control organization, opposes it. Cecillia Wang, national legal director at the ACLU, framed the stakes bluntly:
"Anyone one of them who also owns a gun for self defense could be charged with a felony. This law violates the Second Amendment and puts far too much power in the hands of federal prosecutors, with the risk of arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement."
When the ACLU and the NRA agree that a federal law gives prosecutors too much power to strip Americans of constitutional rights, that should tell you something about the law.
The concern about prosecutorial discretion is not abstract. Millions of Americans use marijuana, often legally under state law. Any one of them who also owns a firearm is technically a federal criminal. That kind of mass criminalization doesn't enhance public safety. It creates a reservoir of selective enforcement, the kind of power that can be aimed at anyone, anytime, for any reason.
The court's ruling could determine whether the government can prosecute marijuana users for possessing a firearm. Given the tenor of Monday's arguments, a narrow ruling seems likely, though the scope remains uncertain. Some justices appeared concerned about going too far in either direction.
The deeper issue won't be resolved by this case alone. Congress built a prohibition regime around marijuana that no longer reflects the legal or social reality of the country. The federal government itself can't decide whether cannabis is a menace or a misdemeanor. Until the political branches reconcile that contradiction, courts will keep getting cases like this one.
Americans who have committed no act of violence, threatened no one, and broken no state law will keep facing the prospect of felony charges for exercising a constitutional right.
Three U.S. service members are dead, and five more are seriously wounded following combat operations inside Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury, U.S. Central Command confirmed Sunday.
The joint U.S.-Israeli military operation launched Saturday against the Islamist regime in Tehran, representing one of the largest regional concentrations of American military firepower in a generation. The cost of that operation is now measured in American blood.
CENTCOM provided minimal detail about the circumstances surrounding the deaths, noting only that major combat operations continue and the response effort remains ongoing. Several additional service members sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions and are in the process of returning to duty.
The facts are spare, and deliberately so. CENTCOM explained its reasoning plainly, according to Breitbart:
"The situation is fluid, so out of respect for the families, we will withhold additional information, including the identities of our fallen warriors, until 24 hours after next of kin have been notified."
That restraint is appropriate. Somewhere in the United States right now, families are receiving the worst news of their lives, or they are about to. The names will come in time. What matters first is that three Americans went to war and did not come home.
No unit designations have been released. No specific engagement details have been disclosed. The operational picture remains fluid, which is military language for: this is still happening.
It is easy, in the scroll of breaking news alerts and political commentary, to lose sight of what a combat death actually means. It means a folded flag. It means a knock on the door. It might mean children who will grow up learning about a parent from photographs and secondhand stories.
Three service members volunteered for this. They raised their right hands, swore an oath, trained for years, deployed to one of the most dangerous theaters on earth, and gave everything. Five more are seriously wounded, facing recoveries that may reshape the rest of their lives. Others are already rotating back to duty with shrapnel wounds and concussions, because the mission continues and someone has to carry it forward.
This is the reality of military force. It is not an abstraction debated on cable news panels. It is not a hashtag. It is young men and women absorbing the violence that their country decided was necessary.
The United States launched its major military operation alongside Israeli forces against the Iranian regime on Saturday. Details about the scope, objectives, and progress of Operation Epic Fury remain tightly held, as they should be during active combat.
What is publicly known is that this represents a decisive escalation, the kind of military commitment that does not happen without serious deliberation at the highest levels of government and military command. The concentration of American firepower in the region has been described as generational in scale.
For years, Iran's regime has operated as the central banker of Middle Eastern terrorism, funding proxies, arming militias, and destabilizing every country within reach. Whatever triggered the timing of this operation, the underlying cause has been building for decades. The regime in Tehran has spent a generation testing American resolve. Now it has an answer.
CENTCOM's statement that "major combat operations continue" tells us the most important thing: this is not over. More casualty reports may follow. The fog of war is thick, and the information environment will be unreliable for days, perhaps longer.
The appropriate response from the American public is not to politicize these deaths before the families have even been notified. It is to recognize that the men and women conducting this operation are doing so at extraordinary personal risk, and that three of them have already paid the ultimate price.
There will be time for analysis of strategy, for debate about objectives, and for assessment of outcomes. That time is not now. Now is for the fallen, the wounded, and the families bracing for a world that just changed forever.
Three warriors went forward. They did not come back. Honor them first. Everything else can wait.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday in a case that could determine whether millions of Americans who use marijuana are automatically stripped of their Second Amendment rights. The Justice Department is asking the justices to revive a criminal case against Ali Danial Hemani, a Texas man charged with a felony because he had a gun in his house and acknowledged smoking marijuana every other day.
At the center of the dispute is a federal law that bars people who regularly use marijuana from legally owning firearms. The conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government's case, finding that only people who are intoxicated while armed can be charged with a crime.
Now the full weight of the question lands on the Supreme Court. And it has produced one of the strangest coalitions in recent memory.
The NRA and the ACLU don't agree on much. The Second Amendment Foundation and NORML occupy entirely different political universes. Yet all four have lined up on the same side of this case, arguing that the federal ban sweeps too broadly.
On the other side, the Trump administration's Justice Department finds itself aligned with Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control organization that rarely sees eye to eye with any Republican White House.
These alignments tell you something important: this case doesn't break along the usual partisan fault lines. It cuts across them because it sits at the intersection of two issues where the right has strong convictions: gun rights and the growing absurdity of federal marijuana policy, as AP News reports.
FBI agents found a firearm and a small amount of cocaine in Hemani's home during a broader investigation. He acknowledged smoking marijuana every other day. For that, the federal government charged him with a felony.
Not for violence. Not for brandishing a weapon. Not for using a firearm while intoxicated. For possessing one in the same home where he used a substance that is legal for medicinal purposes in most states and for recreational use in about half the country.
The 5th Circuit wasn't buying it. Drawing on the Supreme Court's landmark 2022 decision that expanded gun rights, the appeals court held that the historical tradition of firearms regulation in America only supports disarming people who are actually intoxicated while armed, not people who happen to use a substance on their own time.
Lawyers for the Second Amendment Foundation put it plainly in court documents:
"Americans have traditionally chosen which substances are acceptable for responsible recreational use, and the fundamental right to keep and bear arms was never denied to people who occasionally partook in such drugs — unless they were carrying arms while actively intoxicated."
That distinction matters enormously. There is a world of difference between a man who fires a weapon while high and a man who owns a gun and also smokes marijuana on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The federal statute collapses that distinction entirely.
The government's argument leans heavily on tradition. Government lawyers wrote in court documents that "habitual illegal drug users with firearms present unique dangers to society," particularly because they "pose a grave risk of armed, hostile encounters with police officers while impaired."
Everytown for Gun Safety echoed the point, arguing in its own filing that restricting firearm use by illegal drug users is "as old as legislative recognition of the drug problem itself."
Both arguments share the same flaw: they treat marijuana users in 2026 the same way the law treated opium addicts in 1920. Cannabis policy in America has moved dramatically. President Trump has signed an order to fast-track marijuana's reclassification as a less dangerous drug. The federal government itself is signaling that the old framework is outdated. Yet the Justice Department simultaneously asks the Court to enforce a criminal penalty rooted in that very framework.
The tension is obvious. Washington is reclassifying marijuana with one hand and prosecuting people for possessing it with the other.
Beyond the Second Amendment question lies a due process issue that should concern anyone who cares about the rule of law. The ACLU's legal director, Cecillia Wang, said the law violates the Second Amendment and is unconstitutionally vague about what it even means to be a drug user.
"Millions of Americans use marijuana and there is no way for them to know based on words of this statute whether they could be charged or convicted of this crime because they own a firearm."
Wang also warned about the prosecutorial power the statute hands the government:
"We're deeply concerned with the potential of this statute to basically give federal prosecutors a blank check."
She's not wrong. When a law is so vague that a citizen cannot determine whether their conduct is criminal, the law becomes a tool of selective enforcement. It criminalizes not a specific act but a status. You don't have to do anything dangerous. You just have to be someone the government decides to charge.
Conservatives should recognize this pattern. It is the same kind of sprawling federal authority that has been used to entrap, overcharge, and selectively prosecute Americans on everything from paperwork violations to process crimes. The principle doesn't change because the defendant smokes pot.
It's impossible to discuss this case without noting that Hunter Biden was convicted of buying a gun when he was addicted to cocaine under the same legal framework. That conviction put liberals in the awkward position of either defending a gun restriction or defending a president's son. Most chose the latter.
Now the shoe shifts. If the Supreme Court narrows or strikes down the federal prohibition, it would retroactively vindicate the argument Hunter Biden's own lawyers made. The political irony is thick enough to cut.
But irony isn't a reason to uphold a bad law. If the statute is unconstitutionally vague and historically unsupported, that's true regardless of who benefits from the ruling.
Joe Bondy, chair of the board of directors for NORML, didn't mince words:
"It's laughable to think that by outlawing cannabis users possessing firearms you'll minimize the problem with gun violence."
He's right, and the data behind America's actual gun violence crisis bears it out. The people driving violent crime in this country are not baby boomers with a medical card and a hunting rifle. They are repeat offenders in a revolving-door justice system that progressives have spent a decade making worse.
This federal statute doesn't target dangerous people. It targets a category of people and assumes they are dangerous. That is precisely the kind of reasoning the Supreme Court rejected in its 2022 landmark decision. The conservative-majority Court has shown it can uphold firearms restrictions when they are historically grounded; it upheld a federal law disarming people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. The question is whether marijuana use, standing alone, clears that same bar.
The 5th Circuit said no. The answer shouldn't change just because the case moved upstairs.