South African president meets Trump at White House; administration faces questions over South Sudan deportations – live

Ramaphosa says he wants to “recalibrate relations”, saying the two have geopolitical issues to discuss and adds that South Africa’s critical minerals are on the table for trade discussions.

Ramaphosa says South Africa and the US are “longstanding partners” and he wants to “reset” the relationship in light of Trump’s trade announcements.

The US has formally accepted the highly controversial gift of a luxury jet from the Qatari royal family, according to the New York Times.

We’ll bring you more on this as we get it.

Trump has begun this meeting with some (backhanded?) compliments for Ramaphosa, who he says is “respected in some circles, not as respected in others”.

He adds the South African president is “considered controversial in some circles”.

After complimenting South African’s golfers, Trump says the two leaders will be discussing “some things you’ve read in the media” including the G20, and says: “We’ll see if we can help on some things in South Africa.”

This Oval Office meeting has the potential go full Zelenskyy, noted Politico this morning, given the months-long feud that has been brewing between Trump and Ramaphosa on a number of issues.

You will remember that last week the Trump administration admitted 49 white Afrikaners to the US as refugees, with Trump repeating the falsehood that South Africa’s white minority faces “genocide” at home, a claim echoed by South African-born Elon Musk. Trump will no doubt press the South African president on this issue today. Per the Washington Post:

Trump has for years focused on the plight of Afrikaners descended from the colonists who built and led the nation’s brutal apartheid regime. Trump’s focus on South Africa’s relationship to its White minority appears to center on a new law that allows the government to expropriate land without compensation in rare cases — a measure leaders have cast as a ‘moral, social and economic imperative’ intended to help dismantle the legacy of racial apartheid.

Cyril Ramaphosa himself has said the Trump administration has “got the wrong end of the stick” on this issue of the legacy of the racial injustice of apartheid and his government’s efforts to rebalance South African society in the face of inequalities that persist three decades after white minority rule ended.

Indeed, the Trump administration has taken a number of aggressive actions on South Africa since Trump returned to power, which Politico notes include expelling its ambassador, ending all US aid to the country, and threatening to boycott the G20 summit that will be hosted by the nation later this year.

What is more, the GOP more generally has taken issue with South Africa’s approach to holding Israel to account for its assault on Gaza, via its role in leading a case against Israel at the UN’s International Court of Justice which alleges that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

It’s bound to be interesting, and I’ll bring you all the key lines here.

Donald Trump has just greeted the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House, where the two leaders will hold bilteral talks expected to focus on trade and tariffs, but also on Trump’s perception of South Africa’s treatment of its white Afrikaner minority.

Republican House speaker Mike Johnson and conservatives from the House Freedom Caucus will go to the White House this afternoon over Donald Trump’s tax and immigration bill, Associated Press reports.

Members of the House Freedom Caucus said progress is being made toward an agreement, but that they are not ready yet to support the package.

Andy Harris, a Maryland congressman and the group’s chair, said the White House had offered a proposal late on Tuesday that would be acceptable to his members, but that he did not think the package would be done by Wednesday. “The runway is short,” he told reporters.

Chip Roy, a Texas congressman and another member of the far-right caucus, said “there’s a long way to go”.

The justice department has reportedly opened a criminal investigation into Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor and current frontrunner in the New York City mayoral race.

The investigation was launched after Republicans accused Cuomo of mishandling the state’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, multiple outlets reported on Tuesday.

In a criminal referral made by James Comer, a Republican representative of Kentucky and chair of the House committee on oversight and government reform, Comer recommended Cuomo be “charged with making false statements to Congress”, saying that Cuomo lied on “numerous occasions about material aspects of New York’s Covid-19 nursing home disaster and the ensuing cover-up”.

Cuomo faced widespread calls for his resignation in February 2021 after allegations emerged that his administration was underreporting Covid-19-related deaths across the state’s nursing homes by as much as half.

The US army will change the records of transgender soldiers to show only their sex at birth, according to a report.

The army considers a person’s sex to be “unchanging during a person’s life”, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters. It states:

Commanders will take immediate measures to update personnel records and administrative systems to reflect biological sex for all individuals.

The memo states that pronoun use when referring to individuals “must reflect their biological sex”, and that access to “intimate spaces” will be determined by an individual’s biological sex.

The move is the latest by the Trump administration taking aim at trans members of the military despite years of service alongside all the other 2 million US troops.

Here’s more on the Trump administration’s acknowledgment that it deported eight migrants after reports of a migrant flight to South Sudan.

In a briefing on Wednesday, immigration authorities said the eight migrants had been convicted of crimes in the United States, the Associated Press reported.

The eight men were from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan, homeland security officials said, Reuters reported.

Authorities said they had been convicted of murder, armed robbery and other serious crimes, according to Reuters. It cites homeland security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin as saying:

We conducted a deportation flight from Texas to remove some of the most barbaric, violent individuals illegally in the United States. These are the monsters that the district judge is trying to protect.

Immigration authorities refused to say what the migrants’ final destinations would be, but said their home countries had refused to receive the migrants.

US district judge Brian E Murphy in Massachusetts ordered an emergency hearing on Wednesday after immigrant rights advocates accused the Trump administration of deporting about a dozen migrants from countries including Myanmar and Vietnam to South Sudan in violation of a court order.

Judge Murphy ruled that the Trump administration must retain custody and control of those “currently being removed to South Sudan or to any other third country, to ensure the practical feasibility of return” if he finds such removals were unlawful.

A homeland security official said on Wednesday that the US is seeking to deport eight migrants convicted of serious crimes, Reuters reports, but declined to confirm an allegation raised in federal court that the deportees were bound for South Sudan.

We’ll bring you more on this as we get it.

Fellow lawmakers have called Gerry Connolly, who died this morning, a tireless public servant, and noted his work in recent months as his constituents – many tied to the federal government – grappled with cuts from the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Doge task force.

“Even as he battled a difficult cancer diagnosis, Ranking Member Connolly continued to push back against the unprecedented attacks on the federal workers in his district and across the country,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement.

Virginia’s Republican governor Glenn Youngkin also offered his condolences in a post on X: “His decades of public service reflect a deep commitment to Virginia.” He did not say what steps would be taken to fill the House seat.

The US justice department is abandoning efforts to secure court-approved settlements with Minneapolis and Louisville, despite its prior finding that police in both cities routinely violated the civil rights of black people, Reuters reports.

Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the department’s civil rights division, said in a statement that her office will seek to dismiss the pending litigation against the two cities and retract the department’s prior findings of constitutional violations.

Overbroad police consent decrees divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs, turning that power over to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, often with an anti-police agenda.

She also announced that the department will be closing out investigations and retracting prior findings of wrongdoing against the police departments in Phoenix, Arizona, Memphis, Tennessee, Trenton, New Jersey, Mount Vernon, New York, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and the Louisiana state police.

The move comes four days before the 25 May five-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a black man who was murdered in Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer who knelt on his neck as Floyd repeatedly pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. His killing, as well as the killing of Breonna Taylor who was shot to death by Louisville Police executing a no-knock warrant, sparked worldwide protests about racially-motivated policing practices during the final year of Donald Trump’s first term.

Louisville and Minneapolis were the two most high-profile cities to be investigated during the Biden administration for systemic police abuse, and were the only two cities that agreed in principle to enter into a court-approved settlement with the DOJ known as a consent decree. Minneapolis also separately entered a similar type of settlement with the state of Minnesota to reform its police practices.

Congress authorized the justice department to conduct civil investigations into constitutional abuses by police, and the civil rights division launched 12 such “pattern or practice” investigations into police departments including Phoenix, New York City, Trenton, Memphis and Lexington, Mississippi. But during those four years it failed to enter into any court-binding consent decrees, an issue that legal experts warned could put the department’s police accountability work at risk of being undone.

Under Dhillon’s leadership, the civil rights division has lost more than 100 of its attorneys through deferred resignation agreements, demotions and resignations. And last month, she demoted senior attorneys who handled police abuse investigations to other low-level assignments, such as handling public records requests or adjudicating internal discrimination complaints.

Those moves are part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to upend the civil rights division’s traditions of pursuing cases to protect the civil rights of some of the country’s most vulnerable and historically disenfranchised populations.

Since January, it has paused probes of alleged police abuse, launched its first investigation into whether Los Angeles violated gun rights laws, and following Trump’s lead, changed the department’s stance on transgender rights and probed alleged antisemitism at US colleges involving pro-Palestinian protesters.

The department also recently ended a decades-old school desegregation order in Louisiana that came about in the wake of the supreme court’s Brown v. Board of Education case.

A federal judge has ordered US officials to appear at an emergency hearing today to answer questions about their apparent deportation of immigrants to South Sudan and other countries, The Associated Press reports.

US district judge Brian E Murphy in Massachusetts ruled late on Tuesday that the Trump administration must retain custody and control of those “currently being removed to South Sudan or to any other third country, to ensure the practical feasibility of return” if he finds such removals were unlawful. Lawyers for the immigrants said the administration appears to have begun deporting people from Myanmar and Vietnam to South Sudan despite a court order restricting removals to other countries.

The judge left the details to the government’s discretion, but said he expects the migrants “will be treated humanely”.

Attorneys for the migrants told the judge that immigration authorities may have sent as many as a dozen people from several countries to parts of Africa. The lawyers say that violates a court order that people have a “meaningful opportunity” to argue that sending them to a country outside their homeland would threaten their safety.

The apparent removal of one man from Myanmar was confirmed in an email from an immigration official in Texas, according to court documents. He was informed only in English, a language he does not speak well, and his lawyers learned of the plan hours before his deportation flight, they said.

A woman also reported that her husband from Vietnam and up to 10 other people were flown to Africa on Tuesday morning, attorneys from the National Immigration Litigation Alliance wrote.

The lawyers asked Murphy for an emergency court order to prevent the deportations.

Murphy previously found that any plans to deport people to Libya without notice would “clearly” violate his ruling, which also applies to people who have otherwise exhausted their legal appeals.

The judge summoned US officials to court today to identify the migrants impacted, address when and how they learned they would be removed to a third country and what opportunity they were given to raise a fear-based claim. He also ruled that the government must provide information about the whereabouts of the migrants apparently already removed.

South Sudan’s police spokesperson major general James Monday Enoka told AP on Wednesday that no migrants had arrived in the country and that if they do, they would be investigated and again “redeported to their correct country” if found not to be South Sudanese.

The state department’s annual report on South Sudan, published in April 2024, says “significant human rights issues” include arbitrary killings, disappearances, torture or inhumane treatment by security forces and extensive violence based on gender and sexual identity.

South Sudan’s diplomatic relations with the US grew tense in April when a deportation row led to the revocation of visas and a ban on South Sudanese nationals.

Donald Trump has chosen Darryl Nirenberg, a lawyer and former Senate staffer, to serve as the next US ambassador to Romania, Reuters reports.

The White House and state department have yet to comment on the outcome of Romania’s presidential election on Sunday, which was won by the centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicusor Dan, who defeated a far-right candidate.

Nirenberg, a longtime Washington lawyer currently at Steptoe LLP law firm, was chief of staff for late Republican senator Jesse Helms and was a counsel for the Senate foreign relations committee.

The nomination requires approval by the Senate.