Donald Trump latest: Trump 'to take a look' at whether to deport Elon Musk; US president visits 'Alligator Alcatraz'
After finishing his news conference, Donald Trump is wrapping up his visit to "Alligator Alcatraz".
The detention centre is a symbol of the White House's determination to deport migrants from America which it says do not have a right to be in the country.
Located on a mostly abandoned airport once built to house supersonic jets, detainees would have to "know how to run away from an alligator" to escape the facility, Trump said..
But for critics, it's a dehumanising "theatricalisation of cruelty" that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to run each year.
'Music to my ears': Trump reacts as Senate passes spending bill
Back to Florida now, where Donald Trump has been asked for his reaction to his "big beautiful bill" being passed in the US Senate.
"Wow, music to my ears," the US president told reporters after he was told the result of the vote.
The bill narrowly passed after vice president JD Vance made his tie-breaking vote.
"He's doing a good job," Trump said.
The bill now goes to the House of Representatives, where it will be debated and voted on tomorrow.
Tesla share value falls as Musk and Trump reignite war of words
By Sarah Taaffe-Maguire, business and economics reporter
Elon Musk's fresh attack on Donald Trump's "insane" spending bill - followed by the reaction of the US president - appears to have hit the share price of Tesla.
Musk's latest outburst on the spending bill - that has now been passed by the US Senate - reignited the tit-for-tat insults between the former close allies.
Mr Trump has said he will "take a look" at whether to deport the Tesla founder and has threatened to cut subsidies for the billionaire's space and satellite businesses.
The reignited row has not gone unnoticed by investors, and Tesla's share value has tumbled more than 5%.
Previously, after months of share price tumbles and protests at Tesla showrooms, Musk left his work with the Trump administration in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Signs of a more politically occupied Musk appear to again be spooking investors.
US Senate passes Trump's spending bill
The US Senate has passed Donald Trump's sweeping tax and spending bill, sending it to the House of Representatives.
The legislation narrowly passed after vice president JD Vance cast his tie-breaking vote.
The bill includes $4.5trn in tax cuts, according to the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis.
This includes his no tax on tips campaign pledge.
The CBO said the package would increase the deficit by nearly $3.3trn over the next decade.
The package rolls back billions of dollars in green energy tax credits, which Democrats warn will wipe out wind and solar investments.
It imposes $1.2trn in cuts, largely to Medicaid and food stamps, by imposing work requirements on able-bodied people, including some parents and older citizens.
It slashes funding for education, public housing, environmental programs, scientific research and some national park and public land protection.
Additionally, the bill provides $350bn for border and national security, including for deportations.
The "big beautiful bill" is the main subject in today's episode of Trump100 - our team breaks down what it's all about...
US Senate begins voting on Trump's spending bill
While Donald Trump is speaking in Florida, senators have started voting on the US president's sweeping tax and spending bill.
Earlier, Trump told reporters "I think it's going to be the greatest bill ever passed".
We'll keep across any developments from the vote and will bring you updates on this live page.
Trump says detention centre will host 'some of the most vicious people on the planet'
Donald Trump is speaking again as he takes his seat for a news conference at the "Alligator Alcatraz" detention centre in Florida.
Trump says that name is "very appropriate because I looked outside and that's not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon".
He says the facility will soon have some of the most "menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet".
"We're surrounded by miles of treacherous swamp land and the only way out is really deportation, and a lot of these people are self-deporting back to their country they came from," he adds.
Trump says the most impactful step that the US can take is to "fully reverse the Biden migration invasion".
"We've never had an invasion like this and we have some very bad people out there looking to do big harm," he says.
In pictures: Trump shown around 'Alligator Alcatraz' detention centre
We're now getting these pictures from inside the "Alligator Alcatraz" detention centre in Florida, where Donald Trump is being shown around.
He's joined by Florida governor Ron DeSantis and US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem.
Trump warns Musk against 'playing that game with me'
Donald Trump has also been asked whether he's concerned Republicans are going to be swayed by Elon Musk, who has been critical of the spending bill.
"No, I don't think so," Trump replies.
"I think what's going to happen is DOGE is going to look at Musk."
The US president goes on to say "we're going to save a fortune" and ends with a warning for Musk.
"I don't think he should be playing that game with me," he says.
Trump insists spending bill will be 'greatest bill ever passed'
As usual when Donald Trump speaks to the media, he covers a wide range of topics.
That was no different as he fielded questions ahead of his visit to the "Alligator Alcatraz" migrant detention centre in Florida.
Trump was asked about his "big beautiful bill" with senators in a marathon "vote-a-rama" (see 12.00 post).
"We're doing well, Ron," Trump said as he turned to Florida governor DeSantis.
But Trump refused to say whether he was confident over the bill passing.
"I don't know, what is confident?" he replied.
"I think it's going to be the greatest bill ever passed.
"Even for you," he told DeSantis.
Migrant detention centre has 'cops in form of alligators', says Trump
Speaking to reporters after arriving in Florida, Donald Trump thanks the state's governor Ron DeSantis, saying he "did great" to help construct the "Alligator Alcatraz" facility in eight days.
"You don't always have land so beautiful and so secure," Trump says.
"You have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops in the form of alligators. You don't have to pay them so much, but I wouldn't want to run through the Everglades for long."
Trump tells reporters he was surprised by the size of the Everglades as he flew over, saying "we did a little circle... that's a big piece of land".
He asks DeSantis whether there is potential for enlargement or additional facilities, to which Florida's governor says "there may be".
"I think what we're doing is, because this is an important part of Florida, we're using the existing footprint of this airport," DeSantis adds.
He also praises Trump over his work on America's borders, saying: "You did that so quick, which is great."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
6 minutes ago
- The Guardian
How Trump's big bill will supercharge his immigration crackdown
Thousands of new immigration enforcement officers. Tens of thousands of new detention beds. New fees on asylum applications. And new construction on the border wall. Donald Trump's sweeping spending bill would vastly expand the federal government's immigration enforcement machinery and, if passed by the House, supercharge the president's plan to carry out what he has vowed will be the largest deportation campaign in US history. The measure would authorize what analysts and advocates describe as a level of immigration enforcement spending without precedent in American history. Trump's so-called 'big, beautiful bill' dedicates roughly $170bn for immigration and border-related operations – a staggering sum that would make US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the federal government, and that critics warn will unleash more raids, disrupt the economy and severely restrict access to humanitarian protections like asylum. 'We've already seen aggressive, indiscriminate immigration enforcement across the country – and protests in reaction to how horribly it's been carried out,' said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. 'And we're going to see such a massive increase that most people can't even begin to wrap their heads around it.' The 940-page bill passed the Senate on Tuesday, with JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. It now returns to the House, which approved an initial draft by a single vote in May. While some elements of the spending package could still change, the immigration-related provisions in the House and Senate versions are largely aligned. And despite mounting public backlash over the Trump administration's sprawling immigration crackdown – which has separated families and even swept up US citizens – the proposal's 'unimaginable' border enforcement spending has received notably less scrutiny than its tax cuts and deep reductions to social safety net programs like Medicaid. 'It's going to fundamentally transform the immigration system,' said Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council (AIC). 'It's going to transform our society.' The Senate-passed bill would authorize $45bn to build and operate new immigration detention centers – including facilities for families – marking a 265% increase over Ice's current detention budget and enabling the detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens daily, according to an analysis by theAIC. Experts say language in the bill could allow families to be detained indefinitely, in violation of the Flores settlement, the 1997 consent decree that limits the amount of time children can be detained by immigration officials. The measure would allocate $46.6bn for border wall construction – more than three times what was spent on the barrier during Trump's first term – and provide billions in grant funding to support and expand state and local cooperation with Ice. Though the legislation allots $3.3bn to the agency that oversees the country's immigration court system, it caps the number of immigration judges at 800, despite a massive backlog with millions of pending cases. It also imposes a series of new or elevated fees on immigration services. Asylum seekers – those fleeing persecution – would now be subject to a $100 application fee, plus an additional $100 for every year the application is pending. (The original House bill proposed a $1,000 fee.) Currently there is no fee, and experts warn that the added financial burden would in effect restrict asylum access to those who can afford it. The legislation would also levy new or heightened fees on work permits, nonimmigrant visas and Temporary Protected Status applications, essentially imposing what Orozco calls a 'wealth test' on some of the world's most vulnerable people. An analysis by David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, argues that even without new funding, immigration enforcement spending was already 'extreme'. Congress had allocated nearly $34bn for immigration and border enforcement in fiscal year 2025 – more than double the combined budget for all other federal law enforcement agencies. That amount, according to the report, is about 36 times the IRS's budget for tax enforcement, 21 times the firearms enforcement budget, 13 times the drug enforcement budget, and eight times more than the FBI's. As the bill heads to the House, it has drawn opposition from some fiscal conservatives, who are furious over projections that the package would add $3.3tn to the national deficit over the next decade, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). In a recent report based on the House's plan, Bier said CBO fails to account for the lost tax revenue from millions of immigrants who would otherwise contribute more in taxes than they receive in public benefits. He projects that mass deportations enabled by the bill could add nearly $1tn to the deficit – roughly a quarter of the bill's total price tag. The White House insists the enforcement spending is worth it. Before the Tuesday Senate vote, Vance dismissed concerns about social safety net cuts and deficit projections, writing on X: 'The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits.' He added that the president's policy package 'fixes this problem'. The proposed spending surge comes as the Trump administration moves aggressively to scale up arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants. Despite promising a 'worst first' approach focused on violent offenders, Ice arrests of immigrants without any criminal history have skyrocketed since the start of Trump's term, according to a Guardian analysis of federal data. The number spiked even more dramatically after a meeting in late May, during which Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and chief architect of Trump's hardline immigration policies, set a target of 3,000 arrests a day, or one million per year. 'Right now you have masked agents on the streets, collaborating with other federal law enforcement agencies and local law enforcement agencies, to try to meet these quotas for mass deportation,' Orozco said. 'We're just going to see that at a massively larger scale if this bill gets passed.' Following protests that erupted last month in Los Angeles against the administration's immigration sweeps, Trump has directed immigration officials to prioritize enforcement operations in Democratic-run cities. A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that a majority of Americans – 54% – say they believe Ice operations have gone 'too far' while nearly six in 10 do not agree that the administration's deportation policies are making the country safer. 'There's virtually no support for this mass deportation effort outside of [Trump's] rabid Maga base,' said Matt Barreto, a Democratic pollster who studied Latinos and voter sentiment on immigration for decades. 'Other than that, people want immigrants to work here and to be here and to contribute to America.' As the Senate debated the bill on Tuesday, Trump was in Florida, touring the state's new migrant detention camp built in a remote area of the everglades, known as 'Alligator Alcatraz'. 'This is a model,' Trump declared, 'but we need other states to step up.' Critics say there's little evidence to support the White House's contention that mass deportations will benefit the American workers. 'They're going to be deporting not just workers, but also consumers,' Costa said. 'That's a pretty big share of the workforce that you're going to be impacting.' An analysis published on Tuesday by his colleague at EPI, economist Ben Zipperer, estimates mass deportations would result in the loss of nearly 6 million jobs over the next four years, both for immigrants and US-born workers. 'There is no upside to the mass deportations enabled by the Republican budget bill,' Zipperer wrote. 'They will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone.'
The Guardian
9 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Fears AI factcheckers on X could increase promotion of conspiracy theories
A decision by Elon Musk's X social media platform to enlist artificial intelligence chatbots to draft factchecks risks increasing the promotion of 'lies and conspiracy theories', a former UK technology minister has warned. Damian Collins accused Musk's firm of 'leaving it to bots to edit the news' after X announced on Tuesday that it would allow large language modelsto write community notes to clarify or correct contentious posts, before they are approved for publication by users. The notes have previously been written by humans. X said using AI to write factchecking notes – which sit beneath some X posts – 'advances the state of the art in improving information quality on the internet'. Keith Coleman, the vice president of product at X, said humans would review AI-generated notes and the note would appear only if people with a variety of viewpoints found it useful. 'We designed this pilot to be AI helping humans, with humans deciding,' he said. 'We believe this can deliver both high quality and high trust. Additionally we published a paper along with the launch of our pilot, co-authored with professors and researchers from MIT, University of Washington, Harvard and Stanford laying out why this combination of AI and humans is such a promising direction.' But Collins said the system was already open to abuse and that AI agents working on community notes could allow 'the industrial manipulation of what people see and decide to trust' on the platform, which has about 600 million users. It is the latest pushback against human factcheckers by US tech firms. Last month Google said user-created fact checks, including by professional factchecking organisations, would be deprioritised in its search results. It said such checks were 'no longer providing significant additional value for users'. In January, Meta announced it was scrapping human factcheckers in the US and would adopt its own community notes system on Instagram, Facebook and Threads. X's research paper outlining its new factchecking system criticised professional factchecking as often slow and limited in scale and said it 'lacks trust by large sections of the public'. AI-created community notes 'have the potential to be faster to produce, less effort to generate, and of high quality', it said. Human and AI-written notes would be submitted into the same pool and X users would vote for which were most useful and should appear on the platform. AI would draft 'a neutral well-evidenced summary', the research paper said. Trust in community notes 'stems not from who drafts the notes, but from the people that evaluate them,' it said. But Andy Dudfield, the head of AI at the UK factchecking organisation Full Fact, said: 'These plans risk increasing the already significant burden on human reviewers to check even more draft Notes, opening the door to a worrying and plausible situation in which Notes could be drafted, reviewed, and published entirely by AI without the careful consideration that human input provides.' Samuel Stockwell, a research associate at the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security at the Alan Turing Institute, said: 'AI can help factcheckers process the huge volumes of claims flowing daily through social media, but much will depend on the quality of safeguards X puts in place against the risk that these AI 'note writers' could hallucinate and amplify misinformation in their outputs. AI chatbots often struggle with nuance and context, but are good at confidently providing answers that sound persuasive even when untrue. That could be a dangerous combination if not effectively addressed by the platform.' Researchers have found that people perceived human-authored community notes as significantly more trustworthy than simple misinformation flags. An analysis of several hundred misleading posts on X in the run up to last year's presidential election found that in three-quarters of cases, accurate community notes were not being displayed, indicating they were not being upvoted by users. These misleading posts, including claims that Democrats were importing illegal voters and the 2020 presidential election was stolen, amassed more than 2bn views, according to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.
The Independent
12 minutes ago
- The Independent
An object may have just come to us from another solar system, scientists say
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story. The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it. Your support makes all the difference.
