Supreme Court hands Trump administration big win with rulings on key immigration cases – live

 LIVE – Updated at 03:00

Justices allow Trump administration to end protections for Haitians and Syrians and pave way to turn back asylum seekers at southern border.

Closing summary

03:00

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

The supreme court ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s bid to strip temporary protected status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians, who were legally in the US and protected from deportation.

The White House has requested Congress approve $87.6bn in new funding, much of which would go towards the costs of Donald Trump’s war against Iran, but a top Democrat has signaled the party will not support paying for an unpopular conflict that lawmakers never authorized.

The White House claims video shot 10 days after the alleged vandalism of reflecting pool vindicates Trump - it does not.

New evidence has emerged that Robert F Kennedy Jr was on a vaccine-related “mission” when he visited Samoa ahead of a deadly measles outbreak in 2019, raising further questions about whether the US health secretary lied to the Senate when he said the trip had “nothing to do with vaccines”.

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story,” vice-president JD Vance said during a discussion of his new book at the Richard Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda, California. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” Vance also praised Nixon during the discussion, not mentioning that he had called the late president “a cynical asshole” in 2016.

The White House claimed on Thursday that a brief video clip of a woman pulling what looked like a small piece of the lining of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool out of the water on 19 June, 10 days after damage to the pool was reported to US Park Police, somehow vindicates Donald Trump’s very different account of a 350-ft long “slit” having been cut in the newly applied lining by vandals.

On social media, and in an email sent to reporters, the White House pointed to 22 seconds of surveillance video, which the park police said was recorded on the afternoon of 19 June, that showed a young woman reaching into the pool and removing what appeared to be a small piece of the new polyurea liner.

A slightly longer version of the clip, provided to Fox News and posted on social media by the White House, showed that the woman dipped her hand into the water in full view of workers in the pool and gave no indiction that she, or a man with her, had any sort of knife.

The date of the video, confirmed by the government, matters, because that means the incident took place one day after journalists, including Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Jen Bendery of HuffPost and the photojournalist Andrew Leyden first reported that chucks of the liner had peeled off and were floating on the surface of the pool, just a week after the renovation was called complete.

As Bendery also reported that day, pieces of the floating liner had already become attractive as souvenirs to people who were tearing off small chunks to commemorate the failure of Trump’s $14.2m renovation.

Importantly, the date of the video presented by the White House as proof that “Trump was right” also contradicts the timeline for the alleged vandalism offered to a federal court on Wednesday in a sworn statement from a National Park Service official.

In that court filing, the park service’s deputy operations director, Frank Lands, wrote:

On June 9, 2026, after the rehabilitation project was substantially complete, the U.S. Park Police responded to an NPS report of damage to the reflecting pool, including a caulk over the foam sealant that was cut with a sharp knife or razor and destruction of delaminating surface material.

Clearly, the woman seen in the video recorded on 19 June could not have been, as a Fox News report blasted out by the White House on Thursday claimed, caught “in the act” of causing damage to the pool liner that was first noticed on 9 June.

There are other problems with the White House timeline too.

First, the video shows the woman removing and holding up just a small piece of material, not much bigger than her hand, while Trump told reporters that there were “pictures” of vandals cutting a 350-ft gash in the lining. Visitors to the pool had been photographed tearing off similarly small strips of the peeling liner the day before, but there is no evidence that anyone cut the polyurea sealant loose in the first place.

Second, the woman in the video grabbed this apparent souvenir in broad daylight, one day after multiple pieces of debris had been spotted by reporters, at a time when multiple workers were in the pool, attempting to clean it of debris and algae, and the area was being guarded by federal officers, park police and national guard troops.

There is also evidence, from news photographs taken on 19 June, that at least one critic of the 47th president stuck their hand in the pool that day for another reason: to use the algae covered pool liner as a slate to express their desire for his presidency to end.

Third, on 9 June, when the park service first reported damage to the reflecting pool to the US Park Police, the renovated reflecting pool had not yet been opened to the public, and was still fenced off as workers power-washed the walkways around the pool.