Trump targets Greenland and Panama as international students urged back to campus before inauguration: Live

A Democratic congressman is calling for the United States to decriminalize sex work nationwide in response to damning findings released by the House Ethics Committee about Matt Gaetz.

Illinois Rep. Shri Thanedar said to the government show work to “maximize sex workers’ legal protection and their ability to exercise other rights, including unionization, justice, and health care. Decriminalization and regulation would prevent trafficking and exploitation of minors.”

More from The Independent’s John Bowden:

The Trump administration is planning to jail immigrant families together in detention centers before they are removed from the country.

“We’re going to need to construct family facilities,” Tom Homan told The Washington Post in a recent interview. “How many beds we’re going to need will depend on what the data says.”

Trump and Homan have repeatedly said that even U.S. citizen children of non-citizen parents are expected to be deported along with their families.

“Here’s the issue,” Homan told The Post. “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position.”

Trump’s inaugural fund is projected to raise more than $150 million, breaking the previous $107 million inauguration fundraising record that was set during the president-elect’s first inauguration.

Trump acolyte and self-proclaimed “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer is threatening to tell MAGA to “stay home” during the next midterm elections amid an escalating feud with “tech bros” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy over Silicon Valley’s reliance on foreign-born workers.

Justin Baragona reports:

A video from aspiring Republican political figure Valentina Gomez shows her firing a handgun into the back of the head of a dummy tied to a chair with a black bag over its head.

“It’s that simple, public executions for any illegal that rapes or kills an American. They don’t deserve deportation, they deserve to be ended,” she says.

The widely derided video has been condemned for glorifying “the type of vigilantism that has led to deadly consequences in our nation and feeds into the anti-immigrant lie,” according to League of United Latin American Citizens, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights group.

“LULAC denounces violent crime in our nation and expresses its deepest condolences to its victims and their loved ones,” the group’s presidet Roman Palomares said in a statement.

“However, we believe in the Christian principles of justice, not retribution. Using public executions as a hook to a politically motivated message fuels blind hatred. This kind of language is intended to appeal to an extreme base of individuals who believe the lie that all immigrants are here to harm others.”

More on the backlash to the Gomez’s latest stunt:

Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the leaders of the Trump administration’s incoming Department of Government Efficiency, blamed a series of 1990s TV sitcoms for what he saw as a decline in U.S. dynamism in science and technology, leading tech companies to hire more qualified foreign-born and first-generation workers over their mentally lazy American counterparts.

His comments follow wider tensions within the Trump coalition, which includes both far-right anti-immigration views, and an increasing embrace of the tech industry, whose workforce is highly diverse and made up of many immigrants and first-generation Americans.

The Independent’s Josh Marcus reports:

Embattled former New York City mayor and Trump’s one-time attorney Rudy Giuliani will face a contempt hearing on January 3 related to his court-ordered turnover of his property to a pair of election workers he defamed.

In a series of court filings on Christmas Eve, Giuliani pleaded with a judge to reject their demands for sanctions.

The latest on Giuliani’s legal woes:

Vivek Ramaswamy, who is working with the incoming Trump administration alongside Elon Musk to recommend drastic cuts in government spending, wrote a lengthy post on X arguing that the dominance of pop cultural tropes about “nerdiness” and veneration of “jocks” explains why tech companies rely on foreign workers.

“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer),” he wrote. “That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

His comments follow Elon Musk’s support for H-1B visas, non-immigrant visas that allow companies to hire foreign workers. His Tesla is among the leading employers for foreign-born engineers and scientists, receiving 742 approved H-1B petitions in 2024, according to Forbes.

Musk, a prominent anti-immigration activist who was born in South Africa, also is the recipient of an H-1B visa.

“As a reminder to Vivek, Saved by the Bell went off the air in 1993, just three years after Congress last made any major changes to the legal immigration process,” reminded Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “The world he’s describing hasn’t existed for decades.”

It’s unlikely Donald Trump will be able to realize his campaign promise that all remaining Bitcoin will be made in the U.S., according to observers who know the industry.

The Independent’s Josh Marcus explains:

A new Associated Press poll finds that most Americans are worn out since Donald Trump’s electoral victory and have tuned out from political news.

The Independent’s Justin Baragona takes a look: