WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Friday he wants acting director of national intelligence Bill Pulte to begin the process of firing a large number of employees as part of a shake-up of the U.S. intelligence community. 

Trump told the Journal he privately told Pulte that he believes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees 18 federal intelligence agencies and units, is “unnecessary and or too big.”

“I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump was quoted as saying.

The White House did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Trump tapped Pulte to take over as interim director of national intelligence when Tulsi Gabbard leaves the post on June 30.

On Thursday, Trump indicated he will not nominate mortgage regulator Pulte to be the nation’s intelligence chief once his temporary appointment expires early next year.

Pulte has faced a backlash from Democrats and some key senators of his Republican Party over the Trump loyalist’s lack of national security experience.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington and Costas Pitas in Los Angeles; additional Reporting by Gnaneshwar Rajan in Bengaluru; editing by Susan Heavey)

By Bo Erickson

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump is bringing his affinity for mixed martial arts to the White House, staging a night of cage fighting on the South Lawn on June 14 — his 80th birthday — as part of celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.

The seven-bout Ultimate Fighting Championship event, dubbed “UFC Freedom 250,” will blend sport with political spectacle, highlighting Trump’s long-standing ties to a league whose leaders and many of its fans have backed him for more than a decade. 

WHY UFC?

Trump’s alliance with UFC dates to the early 2000s, when he agreed to host events at his since-bankrupt Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, as other venues spurned the sport.

Trump “gave us our start when nobody would talk to us,” UFC CEO Dana White told Fox News in 2018.

White became a close ally, using the sport’s popularity — particularly with younger male fans — to support Trump’s campaigns dating back to his first run in 2016.

In 2019, Trump became the first sitting president to attend a UFC match. His appearances have become part of the spectacle, often featuring a highly choreographed walk-in and ringside seats.

SOUTH LAWN CAGE MATCH

Now Trump is bringing the fighting to the White House. The South Lawn has been outfitted with an octagon-shaped cage and hulking metal arena structure called “the Claw” by White.

Trump suggested holding such an event while ringside with White at a fight days after his 2024 election win, Time magazine reported.

The seven bouts on June 14 will feature eight Americans and six others from four countries, all men. The main event will feature lightweight champion Ilia Topuria of Georgia defending his title belt against American challenger Justin Gaethje.  The pair will enter the arena from the Oval Office, White told the magazine. Weigh-ins will be held at the Lincoln Memorial.

THE CROWD

Trump has touted the fights as the “hardest ticket” to come by of his presidency.

Trump, his family and senior government officials will sit around the ring, and approximately 4,000 seats are being installed on the lawn for invited guests. The White House deferred questions about the guest list to UFC, which did not immediately respond.

A fourth of the tickets are reserved for active military members. Troops must meet the military’s physical standards and wear their short-sleeve dress uniforms to attend, the Washington Post reported.

White has invited numerous celebrities, including Adam Sandler, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Tom Brady, according to Time. 

The UFC expects about 85,000 fans to gather outside the White House perimeter to watch on big screens.

THE BILL AND THE BUSINESS

The White House has said the UFC is paying for the event.

UFC parent company TKO Group Holdings expects to spend $60 million on production and fighter payouts, said company president Mark Shapiro, according to Sports Business Journal. Shapiro and White have said the cost is worth the publicity.

Sponsors include Crypto.com, a cryptocurrency company that in August 2025 announced a strategic partnership with Trump Media, the company that runs the president’s social media platform, Truth Social. 

The event will be broadcast by Paramount media company, which began a $7.7 billion deal with UFC in February. 

Paramount’s mega-deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for $110 billion is undergoing regulatory review by Trump’s administration.

In May, Trump’s financial disclosure form of thousands of recent stock trades showed a March 25 purchase between $15,001 and $50,000 in TKO Group Holdings while Trump promoted the White House event. The White House referred questions about the trades to the Trump Organization.

A spokesperson for the Trump Organization said Trump’s investment holdings are managed by independent third-party financial institutions.

“Neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization has any role in selecting, directing, approving, influencing or soliciting specific investments,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

(Reporting by Bo Erickson, Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Nia Williams and Andrea Ricci )

By Nate Raymond

June 5 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Friday ruled that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had adopted a series of unlawful policies that have barred people from 39 countries from receiving decisions on applications for asylum, work permits, green cards and citizenship.

Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, struck down a slate of policies that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had adopted that he said left people from dozens of African, Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries in “indeterminate legal limbo.”

He said the immigrants had adhered to the legal processes that Congress had enacted and USCIS had adopted by regulation, yet had been “stuck waiting, for months on end, for benefit requests that USCIS refuses to adjudicate.”

The judge, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, said it adopted the policies without statutory and regulatory authority and based on “anti-immigrant sentiments that it is forbidden from letting influence its decision-making.”

“USCIS’s hold on adjudications cannot be attributed to anything that these individuals did wrong; rather, it arises solely by the happenstance of their birth,” he wrote.

The ruling marked a victory for a coalition of immigrant service organizations and labor unions that in March sued to challenge policies adopted by USCIS, which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“This ruling reaffirms a basic principle: the federal government cannot shut down lawful immigration pathways or discriminate against people based on where they come from,” said Skye Perryman, the head of the liberal legal group Democracy Forward, which represents the plaintiffs.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.   

USCIS adopted the policies as part of a ramped-up immigration crackdown the Trump administration carried out after the November shooting of two National Guard members stationed in Washington, D.C., which prosecutors say was carried out by an Afghan immigrant.

The man, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, has pleaded not guilty.

In the wake of that incident, Trump vowed on social media to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover,” and he expanded the number of countries now subject to full or partial travel bans under his administration to cover 39 nations.

Countries subject to full travel bans included Afghanistan, Iran, Haiti, Somalia, Venezuela and Syria. The administration justified the travel restrictions on vetting and security grounds.

The policies USCIS adopted placed a hold on processing immigration benefit applications from people from those 39 countries, which McConnell said “placed the lives of countless individuals on hold—solely by virtue of their countries of birth.”

“But the rule of law has to apply to everyone equally and, as evident here, USCIS has neither ‘followed the law’ nor ‘done things the right way,'” he wrote. “Indeed, the agency has violated the very immigration laws that Congress has charged it with administering, as well as the administrative laws that govern the agency’s actions.”

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Howard Goller and Aurora Ellis)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The last time Washington, D.C., residents chose a new delegate to Congress and a new mayor in the same election, gas was $1.33 a gallon and George H.W. Bush was president.

This fall they will do it again — under starkly different circumstances.

As the city heads toward pivotal primaries this month to pick candidates for those roles, President Donald Trump’s influence on the nation’s capital is shaping up as a major campaign issue. The fresh slate of candidates is weighing how best to approach Trump’s Republican administration and congressional control over the heavily Democratic city’s affairs.

“It’s going to be a big sea change in city politics, no matter how the elections shake out,” said Amanda Huron, a professor at the University of the District of Columbia who teaches courses on D.C. history and politics. But Washington’s lack of full autonomy brings “all sorts of peculiarities around the city’s governance.”

Since Trump returned to office last year, the National Guard is on an open-ended deployment as part of what he calls a crime-fighting mission. He is putting his personal imprint on the city’s storied landmarks. And major cuts to the federal workforce have compounded economic pressures on the capital, which has one of the country’s highest unemployment rates.

The city has long had a unique, if fraught, relationship with the federal government: While residents can vote for their local leaders, they are limited by Washington’s status as a federal district in how much influence they can actually have on the city’s affairs. That limited autonomy has been further squeezed under Trump and his federal law enforcement takeover, launched last year.

This fall, current council members Janeese Lewis George and Kenyan McDuffie are the frontrunners vying to replace Mayor Muriel Bowser, elected in 2014. The leading candidates in the race to succeed long-serving congressional Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton are Robert White Jr. and Brooke Pinto, also D.C. council members.

On June 16, primaries will be held for those roles, which in an overwhelmingly Democratic city usually dictate who will take the top spot come November.

Washington, unlike other cities, does not control its fate.

What choices voters have is through a limited home rule agreement passed by Congress in 1973 that allowed residents to elect their local government leaders.

But Congress retains control over local affairs, including the approval of the budget and laws passed by the city council. Congressional members elected by voters from thousands of miles away routinely introduce measures to impact city affairs.

That has meant local leaders must balance pressures from their constituents with the demands of Congress and the administration — an act Bowser was forced to perform repeatedly.

During Trump’s first term, she ordered the painting and naming of Black Lives Matter Plaza, just north of the White House, in 2020. Just months after Trump’s inauguration to his second term, she agreed to remove it in response to pressure from congressional Republicans.

That act, the decimation of the federal workforce by the Department of Government Efficiency and the surge by federal law enforcement and the National Guard into the city have emerged as central themes in the election season. Right now, about 3,500 troops are in the city — a number authorities say will climb to 5,000 as the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations approach.

Trump has routinely said his intervention has made Washington “one of the safest” and most beautiful cities in the country, enjoying a historic drop in crime.

George told The Associated Press that her top priority is addressing “the affordability crisis here in D.C., which the Trump administration has only made worse by unjustly firing federal employees en masse and militarizing our streets.”

McDuffie said his top priority is public safety as crime continues to be an issue. He has said he would add 1,000 police officers over four years, fully staff the 911 call center after years of chronic staffing shortages and take a public health approach to violence reduction.

“We cannot have an affordable city,” he said, “without public safety as its foundation.”

Both said they would bolster the city’s legal defenses against federal overreach and said Bowser should have been less cooperative with federal authorities as they targeted members of the city’s immigrant communities.

Alex Dodd, co-founder of Free DC, an activist group supporting city independence, said the organization endorsed George because of her willingness to be more aggressive in opposing Trump and congressional Republicans.

“When our leaders comply with this administration before being forced, they are giving this regime an enormous advantage,” he said.

Pat Wheeler, a native Washingtonian and communications consultant who served as a department head at Morgan State University, applauded Bowser for cooperating with the Trump administration on some aspects. She noted failure to do so could have sparked retribution and a loss of what little control city officials have.

“Trump can snap his finger and the whole Republican Congress will say, ‘Let’s put a federal control board over the mayor,’” she said.

The D.C. delegate position is a nonvoting one, but it grants the nearly 700,000 people of the district, who have no other representation in Congress, a voice through speechmaking on the House floor and bill introduction.

But critics said the 88-year-old Norton was diminished during the second Trump administration and not visible enough in the fight against administration and congressional overreach on the city’s autonomy. She filed paperwork to end her campaign for reelection in January.

Norton, who has served 18 terms, has had a storied career. She and her predecessor, Walter Fauntroy Jr., both had national standing coming out of the civil rights era.

“Eleanor Holmes Norton is maybe one of the last major political figures who comes out of the civil rights movement,” said Matt Dallek, a political historian at The George Washington University. “It’s a real passing of the torch.”

The campaigns of candidates running to replace her have centered on local control, Trump and affordability. Frontrunners and council members Pinto and White have also engaged in personal skirmishes questioning the origins of campaign contributions and connections to Republicans.

Pinto told the AP her top priority for the city is self-governance, something that has “never been a true reality for the people of D.C.”

She said affordability for the middle-class and working families is another concern.

White’s campaign has said he’s “not willing to continue to see our tax dollars used to allow DC police to cooperate and conspire with federal agents to trample our constitutional rights and to terrorize our communities.”

Brenda Manley, a longtime resident of Ward 7, an area with a storied Black history across the Anacostia River, said the city was well managed despite the tensions with Trump. But she said she hoped all the candidates would spend more time on the campaign focusing on programs that are beneficial to all residents, like a tuition grant program championed by Norton or major strides made in education during Bowser’s tenure.

“Those type of programs matter,” Manley said.

By Nolan D. McCaskill, Richard Cowan and Jonathan Landay

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) – A showdown over U.S. President Donald Trump’s pick of loyalist Bill Pulte as acting U.S. spy chief sharpened on Friday, as concerns over his fitness for the post held up renewal of a foreign surveillance law in the Senate.

By a vote of 47-52, the Senate refused to begin debate on a law that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor emails and other communications of foreigners located outside the United States without individual judicial warrants.

Seven Republicans joined all but one of the Senate’s Democrats to vote against opening deliberations on renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act before it expires on June 12. 

Democrats had warned that they would not provide the votes to reauthorize the provision unless Trump reversed his choice of Pulte, a loyalist with no national security background, to replace Tulsi Gabbard as acting director of national intelligence when she leaves on June 30.

Some Republican opponents have sought greater protections for Americans’ information inadvertently collected when foreigners’ communications are monitored without warrants, while others have long voiced concerns about surveillance programs in general.

Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune said the Trump administration will have to consider whether Pulte’s appointment is an impediment to reauthorizing the warrantless surveillance authority.

While the timing of Pulte’s appointment “arguably wasn’t the best,” Thune said, “I still don’t think it ought to derail something that’s this important.”

The White House said the surveillance law should not be delayed.

“Holding FISA hostage puts America’s national security at risk and it is shameful that some Democrats are threatening to put partisan politics ahead of the safety of the American people,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said.

As the head of a low-profile mortgage regulator, Pulte accessed confidential data to push for mortgage fraud probes against several of the president’s perceived foes. No criminal charges have been brought against any of them.

Democrats have raised concerns that Pulte would misuse his authority as the nation’s top spy to target people who Trump believes have persecuted him.

Some lawmakers also worry that Pulte could continue Gabbard’s involvement in efforts to prove Trump’s debunked claim that he lost the 2020 election due to fraud.

Trump has said he does not intend to nominate Pulte to fill the position permanently, though he will be able to remain in the post through the November midterm elections, when control of Congress is at stake.

Comments that Trump made to the Wall Street Journal on Friday could harden Democratic opposition to Pulte.

He said that he wants Pulte to release classified documents related to issues such as the 2020 election. 

Pulte’s interim status would leave him “less shackled,” Trump said. “It sort of gives you more power, you know, for a limited period of time.”

(Reporting by Jonathan Landay and Nolan D. McCaskill; Editing by Andy Sullivan, Michael Learmonth, Chizu Nomiyama and Cynthia Osterman)

By Nandita Bose and Bo Erickson

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump will travel on Friday to central Wisconsin where his Republican Party hopes to hold on to a congressional seat in this year’s midterm elections.

The stop in Chippewa Falls highlights the Wisconsin seat’s crucial role in Republicans’ strategy to maintain control of the U.S. House of Representatives, as the party faces political headwinds with voters frustrated by higher costs of living amid the United States’ conflict with Iran. 

The president on Wednesday said that progress in negotiations with Iran could come within the next few days, but hope for a resolution has come and gone several times since the conflict began more than three months ago. 

The district’s incumbent, Representative Derrick Van Orden, is closely aligned with the president and touts the Trump administration’s focus on rural America as a benefit.

But Van Orden won reelection in 2024 by less than three points, making him a top target for national Democrats who hope to flip the slim 217-212 Republican House majority.  

During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump vowed to cut inflation, but prices have risen following Trump’s sweeping tariffs enacted last year and the Iran war’s effect on energy prices. 

U.S. consumer sentiment dropped to a record low in May, as disrupted shipping in the Middle East caused a surge in gas prices. Wisconsin’s average gas price of $4.04 per gallon this week is $1.08 higher than a year ago, according to the American Automobile Association. 

The political implications of energy costs do not create more pressure to reach a peace deal with Iran, Trump said recently.

“They thought they were going to outwait me,” Trump said at a White House cabinet meeting last week, referring to Iran’s leadership. “You know, ‘We’ll outwait ​him. He’s got the midterms.’ I don’t care about the midterms.”

Trump’s Wisconsin trip is at least the fourth visit to this district by top administration officials in the last year, following visits by Vice President JD Vance in August and February, and a stop by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this week. 

(Reporting by Bo Erickson; Editing by Sergio Non and Cynthia Osterman)

By Mike Scarcella

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) – A lawyer for U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration told an appeals court on Friday that construction of a $400 million ballroom on the site of the White House’s demolished East Wing had gone too far to be stopped, in a case testing the limits of presidential authority.

Justice Department attorney Yaakov Roth told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the courts have no role in weighing the project, and that it would have been improper to block it at any point.

“So if this were complete lawlessness by the government, it couldn’t be stopped?” Judge Patricia Millett asked Roth. He said: “On these theories, I think that’s right.”

Roth also said “architectural preference” should not take precedence over national security concerns. “We have evidence here that the old East Wing was not adequate to protect the safety and security of the President and others in the White House leadership of the executive branch,” he said.

Millett suggested that the administration’s argument that the challengers did not sue in time amounted to “move fast and break things and nobody has standing.” 

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit group that campaigns to protect significant American sites, sued last year after the Trump administration tore down the East Wing in October 2025 and began building a 90,000-square-foot (8,360-square-meter) ballroom without seeking authorization from Congress.

Trump’s ballroom plan is part of a broader push by the Republican leader to reshape central Washington’s landscape of government buildings and national monuments. The East Wing, part of the White House complex in Washington, traditionally housed the offices of the first lady and her staff.

A lawyer for the preservation group, Thaddeus Heuer, told the court on Friday that the government was “entirely wrong” that the courts did not have a say in the ballroom project. He said the president has no “free-floating” power to build without appropriations.

“They just don’t want to go to Congress,” Heuer said. He urged the court to stop construction and allow Congress to voice its desires for the site. “Congress has the right to determine what happens with federal property,” he told the panel.

CONSTRUCTION BLOCKED IN LOWER COURT

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, appointed by Republican former President George W. Bush, twice blocked above-ground construction on Trump’s ballroom while allowing underground work to continue.

Leon said no federal statute even “comes close to giving the President” the required authority to construct the ballroom without approval by Congress.

The administration’s appeal is being heard by Democratic-appointed D.C. Circuit judges Millett and Bradley Garcia alongside Trump-appointed Judge Neomi Rao. In an order last month, the appeals court allowed construction to continue during the legal battle without ruling on the merits of the case. 

The panel, which heard arguments for more than two hours, could issue a more significant ruling in the next few weeks, which could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Preservationists have pushed back against the government’s contention that the ballroom is needed for national security. The National Trust for Historic Preservation contends that the D.C. Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court have never allowed a president to “usurp powers vested in Congress by the Constitution based on nothing more than his claim of necessity.”

Trump also intends to erect a ​250-foot (76-meter) arch near the National Mall, the tree-lined strip between the U.S. Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, and renovate the Kennedy Center performing arts complex.

A federal judge last week ordered Trump to remove his name from the iconic Kennedy Center building and blocked his plans to close it for renovations. 

Trump has said his planned ballroom is scheduled to open around September ​2028.

(Reporting by Mike Scarcella; Editing by David Bario, Sanjeev Miglani and Andrea Ricci)

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) – A majority of the U.S. Senate on Friday voted to pass legislation providing an additional $70 billion for migrant law-enforcement operations, including President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation program.

The bill still must be voted upon by the House of Representatives.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Toby Chopra)

A runoff election Sunday will allow Peruvians to choose their ninth president in just 10 years, either the conservative daughter of a disgraced former president or a nationalist congressman.

Keiko Fujimori and Roberto Sánchez beat 33 other candidates in an April contest with promises to end rising crime, the top priority for Peruvians who have seen the country’s homicide rates double and cases of extortion soar this decade. Still, each received less than 20% of support.

Sunday’s results are expected to be tight, and the final outcome may not be known for days. Electoral authorities took more than a month to officially declare Fujimori — daughter of the late and convicted former president Alberto Fujimori — and Sánchez — ally of the imprisoned former President Pedro Castillo — the winners of the April 12 vote.

Here’s what to know about the election.

Voting is mandatory for Peruvians from the ages of 18 to 70. More than 27 million people are registered, and of those, about 1.2 million are expected to cast ballots from abroad, mainly in the United States and Argentina.

Many among them have signaled that they remain undecided.

“There is a large group of undecided voters … I think that’s where the emotionally driven anti-votes will play out the final battle,” political analyst Iván García said.

Peruvians’ main concern is surging crime, particularly extortion, which has led to frequent protests. A 2025 national survey carried out by the state’s National Institute of Statistics and Informatics found that 84% of respondents in urban areas feared becoming victims of a crime in the following 12 months.

Experts attribute the increasing power of organized crime in Peru to the profits that decades-old criminal groups are earning from illegal gold mining in the Andes and the Amazon. In 2025, Peru exported 100 tons of illegally mined gold, nearly on par with its exports of gold mined legally.

In the last five years, extortion complaints across the country increased fivefold, reaching 28,948 cases last year, while killings doubled, reaching 2,226 in 2025, according to official data.

The Ministry of Economy estimated in July that crime costs Peruvians some $5 billion annually. This figure includes state investment to fund police operations, but also private spending on surveillance cameras and security guards.

Peru’s economy, however, has defied both crime and the political instability stemming from a revolving door of presidents, having had three since October alone. Aided by its status as the world’s second largest copper producer, the country posted more than 3% growth in 2024 and 2025.

Fujimori, 51, is on her fourth attempt to become president.

Throughout the campaign, she promised to crack down on crime with an iron fist. Her proposals include implementing technology to track extortions, militarizing borders and increasing the presence of police and military personnel in high-risk areas. She has also said that prisoners will be required to work and “repay society.”

In the only debate prior to the runoff, Fujimori defended her father’s government and promised to defeat crime just as he defeated the Shining Path terrorist group.

She told voters that should she win, they will see “cheaper chicken, affordable gas cylinders, reasonably priced fertilizers for your crops” and will “return home safe and sound.”

In recent weeks, however, Fujimori has also attempted to soften her tough-on-crime image with friendly gestures toward former political adversaries, such as former President Pedro Kuczynski, who defeated her in the 2016 elections.

Kuczynski resigned in 2018 amid calls for his removal, driven by Fujimori’s party, who later apologized to him for generating instability.

“I know that throughout my political life I have made mistakes, and I have learned from them,” Fujimori said during the debate.

Meanwhile, Sánchez, a former minister, has tried to ease the concerns his candidacy is generating among investors, saying he will not nationalize any assets of transnational companies that extract minerals or gas from Peru.

He has also pledged to combat corruption within the police force and promote reforms that would enable the military to support security efforts.

During the debate, Sánchez, who is popular with rural voters, said he would be open to “all options to generate jobs and progress” but also emphasized his support for Chinese investments.

He told The Associated Press that he will seek to renegotiate mining contracts, including the one for Las Bambas, one of the world’s largest copper mines, controlled by the Chinese state-owned company Minmetals.

The 57-year-old, who wears a wide-brimmed peasant hat given to him by Castillo, has also distanced himself from ultranationalist ally Antauro Humala — a former military officer and brother of the imprisoned former President Ollanta Humala — who proposes applying the death penalty in corruption cases.

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Follow AP’s Latin America coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate passed legislation to fund President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies early Friday, after weeks of delays and fierce backlash to an unrelated $1.776 billion settlement fund that threatened to derail the bill.

Senators voted 52-47 to pass the $70 billion legislation to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol for the next three years, through the end of Trump’s term, after Democrats blocked the money for months. The bill will now head to the House, which is expected to take it up next week.

The final vote came just before 5 a.m., after Republicans narrowly defeated multiple attempts by members of both parties to add language to the bill that would permanently ban Trump’s settlement fund for allies who believe they’ve been politically persecuted.

Republicans cleared the last major hurdle overnight when they defeated an amendment proposed by one of their own members, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, that would have redirected payments from the settlement to members of law enforcement who were injured when a mob of Trump supporters seeking to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The amendments were a test of party unity that complicated what should have been an easy vote for Republicans who wanted to keep the focus on immigration enforcement in an election year. Instead, they spent almost a full day haggling among themselves over whether to block the settlement fund, even after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had said earlier this week that it would not go forward.

“This would have been done several hours ago if we weren’t having to deal with some of the issues around the fund,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said shortly before midnight.

Thune himself has criticized the fund, which was part of a settlement that resolves Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns and has angered many of his GOP colleagues. But he has been pushing GOP senators for weeks to keep the bill focused on the funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol and to avoid adding new provisions that could complicate its passage in the House.

Still, a group of Republican senators pushed all day and into the night to block the fund’s payouts through legislation. That effort came after Trump, who has been at odds with the Senate in recent weeks, raised new doubts about the fund’s future on Wednesday when he told reporters that it is “very important” and said “I don’t know” whether it is dead or on hold.

The final 52-47 vote on the bill was nearly party line, with Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska the only Republican to oppose it. Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado missed the vote.

The first vote on Thursday morning, a Democratic effort to ban the settlement fund, was held open for several hours while Cassidy and two other Republican senators decided whether to support it. The Democratic motion was narrowly defeated when Cassidy eventually voted against it and the two other senators — Jon Husted of Ohio and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, both of whom are up for reelection this year — voted for it.

The Senate then rejected a second amendment from Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina that would also have banned the settlement fund but would have moved the money to a separate anti-fraud fund at the Department of Justice. Most Democrats voted against the amendment, guaranteeing its defeat, but more than 10 Republicans supported it.

Tillis said the fund is a political liability for the party.

“If Blanche says this is largely inoperative, why not use this moment to codify that?” Tillis said. “Otherwise, you’re exposing every one of our members who are in cycle to having to deal with this between today and Election Day, and that makes no sense for something that the DOJ says they’re not moving forward with.”

Cassidy’s amendment to compensate the injured police officers was a pointed rebuke, as payouts from Trump’s fund could have potentially gone to Trump supporters who beat police and attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. Cassidy lost reelection last month after Trump endorsed a primary opponent.

He said that, despite Blanche’s comments, the fund is still part of an active settlement and “absolutely can be used.”

The Senate rejected several other Democratic efforts to try to block or limit the fund, including amendments to ban payments to Jan. 6 defendants who injured law enforcement officers.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Republicans are now “leaving taxpayers to rely on nothing more than a promise from Donald Trump’s personal fixer. That is not accountability. That is a permission slip.”

Enactment of the bill to fund ICE and the Border Patrol would end the blockade by Democrats who demanded policy changes after the fatal shootings of two protesters by federal agents in January.

Senate Republicans used a complicated procedural maneuver to get around the filibuster and pass the budget legislation with no Democratic votes. But it took weeks to get the bill to the Senate floor as Republicans navigated various obstacles to passage created by Trump and the White House — including a $1 billion proposal for White House security and Trump’s ballroom that they eventually scrapped and the fierce bipartisan backlash to the settlement fund.

Democrats say any funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security should place restraints on federal immigration authorities, including better identification for federal officers and more use of judicial warrants, among other asks.

After federal agents shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Trump agreed to a Democratic request that the Homeland Security bill be separated from a larger spending measure that became law. But bipartisan negotiations went nowhere, and the department funding lapsed in mid-February with no agreement on changes to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.

Congress eventually funded the rest of DHS at the end of April with Democratic support, but ICE and Border Patrol have remained without regular funding.

___

Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.