Biden news - live: GOP senator claims ‘fake’ Trump supporters caused riot as distracted Ted Cruz taps on phone

Asked if the White House would be watching Donald Trump’s CPAC speech expected to focus on the looming migrant crisis, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the former president wasn’t in a position to speak with moral authority on immigration policy.

“We’re not looking to former president Trump or any of his advisers as a model for how we’re approaching immigration, in fact we’re in the circumstance we’re in because not only was their approach inhumane, it was ineffective,” she says.

“So we’re going to forge our own path forward, we’ll see what he says, but our focus is certainly not on what Mr Trump is saying at CPAC.”

Asked if the White House considered the level of migrants on the southern border, press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration wasn’t going to put “new labels” on it.

The question comes after The Washington Post reported government agencies considered the situation at crisis levels.

“Certainly having unaccompanied minors travel across the border, and so many that we have had to open new facilities, is something that we take incredibly seriously and we are eager to of course address humanely, and with the focus of keeping them safe,” Psaki says.

“I don’t think I’m going to put new labels on it from here or from the podium, but it is a priority of the administration, it’s a priority of our secretary of homeland security and certainty of the president who’s kept abreast of developments.”

There are concerns that construction is continuing along the US-Mexico border on the wall which Donald Trump promised his supporters but never finished.

On his first day as president, Joe Biden paused all wall construction within seven days, after vowing to voters not to build “another foot” of it. The executive order said taxpayer money would no longer fund the project as “a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution”.

President Biden gave his administration two months to determine how much it would cost to cancel construction contracts and devise a plan on how to redirect the money.

Louise Boyle reports.

US Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman argued to maintain increased law enforcement presence at the Capitol ahead of Joe Biden’s first address to Congress, following warnings from militia groups that she says want to “blow up the Capitol and kill as many members as possible” in connection with the president’s upcoming State of the Union.

She told members of the House Appropriations subcommittee on Thursday that her agency is aware of far-right militia groups that participated in the Capitol insurrection on 6 January that have “stated their desires that they want to blow up the Capitol and kill as many members as possible with a direct nexus to the State of the Union, which we know that date has not been identified.”

“So based on that information, we think that it’s prudent that Capitol Police maintain its enhanced and robust security posture until we address those vulnerabilities going forward,” she said.

Donald Trump has been accused of treating White House staff like a “concierge” service during his time in the executive mansion.

Jonathan Lee, who served in the calligrapher’s office in the White House until he was fired in 2017, told The New Yorker that the former president and his family treated staff like a “twenty-four-hour concierge desk”.

Mr Lee, who served in a political role under the former president, Barack Obama, made the claim in a feature about the role of White House staff that was published on Wednesday.

James Crump reports.

The lieutenant governor of Texas has blamed the state’s hard-hit residents for higher energy prices accrued throughout last week’s winter storm.

When more than four million Texans lost power as the crisis hit, the state’s Public Utilities Commission raised the cap on electricity prices to $9 (£6) per kilowatt-hour, to force users to switch off to try to protect the over-run grid.

Thousands of people’s bills were pushed up in the process, as the New York Times reported, with some resorting to their life savings to pay off the sudden debt.

Gino Spocchia reports.

A woman turned her ex-boyfriend into the police for taking part in the Capitol riots, after he called her a “moron” for not believing false claims that 3 November’s presidential election was “stolen”.

According to court documents released earlier this week, Richard Michetti, of Philadelphia, joined a mob of pro-Trump supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January, as he and several others allegedly breached the building causing House members to barricade themselves inside offices.

The insurrection took place shortly after Donald Trump spoke at a “Save America” rally nearby, where he made false claims about widespread fraud in 2020’s presidential election and told his supporters to “be strong”.

James Crump reports.

This one has made the younger Trump rather upset.

“There’s nothing that won’t be cancelled to satisfy the woke mob,” he says.

The president is expected to begin his remarks shortly.

Follow live with The Independent.

“The more people that get vaccinated the faster we’re going to beat this pandemic,” Biden says.