Ocasio-Cortez says unconditional US military aid to Israel ‘enabled a genocide in Gaza’
At a Munich security conference panel which just concluded, Hagar Shezaf of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if she thinks “the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2028 elections should re-evaluate military aid to Israel”.
“To me this isn’t just about a presidential election,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, “personally, I think that the United States has an obligation to uphold its own laws, particularly the Leahy laws.
“I think that, personally, the idea of completely unconditional aid, no matter what one does, does not make sense,” she added. “I think it enabled a genocide in Gaza, and I think that we have thousands of women and children dead … that was completely avoidable.
“So I believe that enforcement of our own laws, through the Leahy laws, which requires conditioning aid in any circumstance when you see gross human rights violations is appropriate,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded.
The Leahy laws are two statutory provisions, named for the former senator Patrick Leahy who introduced them in the 1990s, which prohibit the US defense department and state department from providing funds to “units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights”.
But, according to Charles Blaha, the former director of the state department office that leads Leahy vetting of foreign security units, while state “department officials insist that Israeli units are subject to the same vetting standards as units from any other country. Maybe in theory. But in practice, that’s simply not true.”
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Updated at 22.15 GMT
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Trump threatens to impose voter ID for midterm elections, ‘whether approved by Congress or not!’
In a series of messages posted on his social media platform from Air Force One on Friday, Donald Trump threatened to impose a requirement that US voters present photo identification before being allowed to cast ballots in the upcoming midterm elections.
This change, Trump insisted, would be made even if Congress fails to pass a law to alter voting requirements in a way that would seem to violate the US constitution, which leaves the conduct of elections to the states.
“There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” Trump posted.
“Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel,” the president added, untruthfully, since there is no popular majority for banning vote by mail.
In fact, polling conducted last year showed the exact opposite: that 58% of Americans favor allowing any voter to cast their ballot by mail if they want to.
Although the president claimed to have an unspecified legal argument that would allow the federal government to take unprecedented control of elections run by the states, in a second post during his flight to his Palm Beach resort, he offered more hyperbole than facts, is a long diatribe punctuated with all-caps words.
“We cannot let the Democrats get away with NO VOTER I.D. any longer. These are horrible, disingenuous CHEATERS,” Trump wrote.
“If we can’t get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order,” Trump added.
“I hope the Supreme Court realizes, as they ‘painstakingly’ review the very simple topic of Country Saving Tariffs … that these Corrupt and Deranged Democrats, if they ever gain power, will not only be adding two States to our roster of 50, with all of the baggage thereto, but will also PACK THE COURT”, the president posted.
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Updated at 22.37 GMT
Ocasio-Cortez says unconditional US military aid to Israel ‘enabled a genocide in Gaza’
At a Munich security conference panel which just concluded, Hagar Shezaf of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if she thinks “the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2028 elections should re-evaluate military aid to Israel”.
“To me this isn’t just about a presidential election,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, “personally, I think that the United States has an obligation to uphold its own laws, particularly the Leahy laws.
“I think that, personally, the idea of completely unconditional aid, no matter what one does, does not make sense,” she added. “I think it enabled a genocide in Gaza, and I think that we have thousands of women and children dead … that was completely avoidable.
“So I believe that enforcement of our own laws, through the Leahy laws, which requires conditioning aid in any circumstance when you see gross human rights violations is appropriate,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded.
The Leahy laws are two statutory provisions, named for the former senator Patrick Leahy who introduced them in the 1990s, which prohibit the US defense department and state department from providing funds to “units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights”.
But, according to Charles Blaha, the former director of the state department office that leads Leahy vetting of foreign security units, while state “department officials insist that Israeli units are subject to the same vetting standards as units from any other country. Maybe in theory. But in practice, that’s simply not true.”
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Updated at 22.15 GMT
Ocasio-Cortez says Ukraine should lead on peace talks but ‘we shouldn’t reward imperialism’
Asked to define what victory in Ukraine should look like, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that the Ukrainians should lead any peace talks. “There’s no conversation about Ukraine that can happen without Ukraine. So they of course lead in terms of setting their terms,” she said. “Overall as a principle, we shouldn’t reward imperialism.
“I don’t think that we should allow Russia or any nation to continue violating a nation’s sovereignty and to continue to be rewarded,” the congresswoman added.
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Updated at 21.49 GMT
Ocasio-Cortez says radical changes in US foreign policy undermines trust of allies as we ‘play hokey pokey’ joining and leaving agreements
Asked at the Munich security conference about declining trust in the United States as a reliable ally, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed that it has been damaging to have radical shifts in US policy, as Trump first withdrew from international agreements during his first term, then Biden rejoined pacts only for Trump to return and pull the US out again.
“US foreign policy and some of our more basic and foundational values-based commitments seem to be enacted based on the partisanship of whoever is elected,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“We play hokey pokey,” the congresswoman continued, “with USAID, with the Paris Climate agreement, with many of our commitments, and I don’t think that is good for the country. I think that what is best is for when we sign an agreement, and we’re a part of it, we stay in it so they know that our commitments are reflective of our nation’s values in a way that transcends partisanship.”
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Updated at 21.50 GMT
Speaking in Munich, Whitmer focuses largely on Michigan
Despite speculation that she might enter the 2028 race for the presidency, Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, has focused her remarks at the Munich security conference largely on the impact of Trump’s trade war with Canada on her own state.
“Michiganders love Canadians and we are absolutely interwoven,” Whitmer said as she discussed what she described as intense anger from Canadians at Trump’s tariffs.
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In Munich panel, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gretchen Whitmer assail Trump for damage to US standing in the world
Two potential Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2028, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman, just criticized the damage Donald Trump has done to US foreign relations in their opening remarks on a panel discussion now in progress at the Munich security conference that just started.
Whitmer focused on the impact to her state’s economy by the tariffs Trump has imposed on Canada, and mentioned the economic importance of the auto manufacturing that takes place across the border between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario.
Trump has recently threatened to block the opening of a new, Canadian-financed bridge between Detroit and Windsor that he supported in his first term.
Ocasio-Cortez began by saying that the United States is “very much in a compromised position” as a result of Trump’s policies, which have “strained” relations with European allies and abandoned a committment to human rights.
“Tariffs of course have hurt Americans,” she added, and further damaged relations with US allies.
“We are shocked at the president’s destruction of our relationship with our European allies,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “his threatening over Greenland is not a joke, it is not funny, it threatens the very trusted relationships that allows peace to persist.”
“The vast majority of the American people do not want to see these relations frayed,” the New York congresswoman said.
The third member of the panel, defending Trump’s foreign policies is Matthew Whitaker, who served in the first Trump administration and is now US ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
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Updated at 21.28 GMT
Here’s a recap of the day so far
Lawmakers in the House and Senate left Washington as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) careens towards another as shutdown stopgap funding lapses tonight. Nearly all Democrats blocked a second attempt to pass the annual DHS appropriations bill as negotiations for guardrails on federal immigration enforcement have stalled.
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem announced the end of temporary protected status (TPS) for Yemen on Friday. According to the National Immigration Forum, there are about 1,380 Yemeni nationals living and working in the country with TPS. The designation will officially terminate for Yemeni immigrants 60 days after the notice is published in the Federal Register.
The annual rate of US inflation eased in January, according to the latest data consumer price index report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Over the last 12 months, the cost of goods has increased by 2.4% – down from 2.7% in last month’s report.
The Department of Justice filed a new lawsuit against Harvard University, accusing it of failing to hand over documents and comply with a federal investigation into alleged racial discrimination in its admissions process. Harvard stressed in a statement that it was responding to inquiries “in good faith” and prepared to engage “according to the process required by law”. The justice department accuses Harvard of failing for over 10 months to comply with the government’s request to provide documents, including applicant-level admissions data, and other records and information pertaining to the investigation.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) expects to spend an estimated $38.3bn on a plan to acquire warehouses across the country and retrofit them into new immigration detention centers with capacity for tens of thousands of detainees, according to documents the agency sent to the governor of New Hampshire. The documents, published on the state’s website yesterday, disclose that the Department of Homeland Security estimates it will spend $158m retrofitting a new detention facility in Merrimack, plus an additional estimated $146m to operate the facility in the first three years.
A federal judge has ordered the DHS to guarantee that immigrants held at the Bishop Henry Whipple federal building can speak with a lawyer before they are transferred out of Minnesota. Judge Nancy Brasel, a Trump appointee, chided the administration and called its failure to provide detainees at the Minneapolis holding facility a meaningful chance to consult counsel an “unconstitutional infringement”.
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Jeffries says Democrats will respond to ‘latest unserious’ offer from GOP on DHS funding bill, as shutdown looms
The top Democrat in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, said that the looming shutdown is the fault of Republicans. He noted that the House speaker Mike Johnson has honored the week of recess and sent lawmakers home on Thursday.
Jeffries also said that he expects that Democrats will respond to the “unserious” offer that Republicans have made when it comes to a full year of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding that “clearly omits things that need to happen”. This includes a demand that federal immigration agents have judicial warrants in order to conduct raids or arrests on private property. “Then it will once again be in the hands of Donald Trump and Republicans to decide what’s next,” Jeffries said.
“We haven’t called for a direct meeting at this point, but again, we’re ready to sit down with anyone, anytime, anyplace, if they are serious about the types of dramatic reforms that are necessary to get ICE under control,” Jeffries said, while noting that any future discussions need to include lawmakers from both sides of the aisle and both chambers, as well as the White House.
“Every single change needs to be ironclad and part of the law,” he added, emphasizing that Tom Homan’s announcement that the administration will draw down federal immigration agents in Minnesota is not a sufficient promise for Democrats.
Hakeem Jeffries answers questions during a press conference at the US Capitol on Thursday. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty ImagesShare
Updated at 20.53 GMT
Macron urges Europe to ‘show unwavering commitment to defend interests’ with swipes to the US
Jakub Krupa
During his address at the Munich security conference today, French president Emmanuel Macron continued his call to reassert Europe’s position globally, and added some swipes at the US trade and foreign policy towards Europe.
If we want to be taken seriously on the European continent and beyond, we must show the world our unwavering commitment to defend our own interests. It starts, of course, with continuing to extend our support to Ukraine, but it could nicely follow with fanning off unjustified tariffs and politely declining unjustified claims on European territory.
This is what we did and this is what we will [continue to] do.”
He appeated to refer to the US threat of tariffs and Trump’s plans to annex Greenland.
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Updated at 20.13 GMT
A reminder that while the crux of this funding battle is about implementing further guardrails on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), federal immigration enforcement has already received a $75bn cash infusion, thanks to the Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that he signed into law last year. This means those key agencies are likely to be unaffected by the looming shutdown.
Instead, as my colleague Robert Tait notes, disruption is likely to fall on services such as the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Secret Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).
TSA workers, who include airport security staff and baggage handlers, are expected to continue working over the weekend without pay, to minimize the travel disruption that marked last year’s 43-day government shutdown, the longest in US history. Many Fema workers are expected to be furloughed without pay, limiting its ability to work with local and state partners. Officials have warned that the funding lapse could impede the agency’s ability to respond to natural disasters.
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Updated at 20.38 GMT
Before the president left for Fort Bragg earlier, he weighed in on the breakdown in negotiations over the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill. The agency is heading towards a shutdown tonight after Democrats demanded greater guardrails on federal immigration enforcement.
Donald Trump said of Republicans, “I know what they want, I know what they can live with.” He continued, adding that Democrats – who have pushed for body-worn cameras, barring officers from wearing masks while on duty, and requiring the use judicial warrants – have “gone crazy”.
“They’re radical left lunatics. That’s why their cities are so unsafe,” Trump said.
ShareGeorge Chidi
On the brink of her department being shut down in a congressional impasse over the conduct of immigration agents in her charge, Noem held the press conference in a secure facility in Arizona, bussing journalists to the building.
Noem said she spoke with Maricopa county recorder Justin Heap before the press conference held in Arizona. County supervisors – Republicans and Democrats – have threatened to remove the former Republican state representative from office after a year of contentious relations, in which Heap has refused to respond to questions from elected officials and his chief of staff discussed picking sides “in the coming civil war”.
Heap has expressed an intent to give Noem access to the county’s voter rolls, which is strongly opposed by elected leaders out of concern for protecting personal information from disclosure.
Noem also met with state senator John Gillette, a far-right Republican and army veteran who In September 2025 called for Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington to be executed for encouraging anti-Trump protests.
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Updated at 19.19 GMT
George Chidi
The Save America Act would require all voters to present proof of citizenship at the time of registration and photo ID to vote. The Brennan Center estimates that 21 million US citizens of voting age have neither a passport nor a copy of their birth certificate readily available.
The legislation requires states to share their voter rolls with the Department of Homeland Security to compare it with federal databases, while placing no restrictions on what the department might do with the information. If passed, the law would also subject elections officials to as much as five years in prison if they registered someone to vote without the required documentation, even if the registrant is a citizen and eligible to vote.
Implementation of the requirements in the original bill, including the proof of citizenship requirements, would take effect immediately, leaving states scrambling to align their voting systems to the new law.
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Updated at 19.11 GMT
George Chidi
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem touted the virtues of the Save America Act, a package of election legislation passed largely by Republicans in the US House this week that is almost certainly dead on arrival in the Senate.
“Although the constitution gives states the primary responsibility for running their elections, Congress also gives authorities and duties to the federal government,” Noem said at a press conference in Scottsdale, Arizona on Friday. “Now, as the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, those authorities lie within my department and the responsibility lies with me.”
Noem described the legislation as “commonsense” and “extremely popular with American citizens”, citing polls showing strong public support for voter ID. “It’s a fact that non-citizens have been voting in our elections. They’ve been registered and they have voted from state to state,” she added, citing incidents in Maryland and Kansas.
Kristi Noem speaks to press in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Friday. Photograph: Caitlin O’Hara/AP
Noem and other administration officials have argued against existing evidence that non-citizens are voting in meaningful numbers.
Audits by several states have consistently shown that the number of incidents has been in single or double digits, with many people registering by mistake and never voting at all. For example, a 2022 audit of voter rolls in Georgia following conservative reaction to Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden showed just 20 non-citizens enrolled out of 8.2 million people. Only nine had voted.
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Updated at 19.12 GMT
Trump addresses military families at Fort Bragg
Donald Trump is now addressing military families at the Fort Bragg military base in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
The president claimed that if Democrats win big in the 2026 midterm elections, the US military will be “severely disturbed”.
“We rebuilt it in my first time, and now we’re making it stronger, bigger, better than ever before,” he added.
Donald Trump speaks during a visit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on Friday. Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/ReutersShare
Updated at 19.12 GMT
Lucy Campbell
The Department of Justice filed a new lawsuit against Harvard University, accusing it of failing to hand over documents and comply with a federal investigation into alleged racial discrimination in its admissions process, in the latest escalation of Donald Trump’s long-running legal pursuit of the nation’s oldest university.
Harvard stressed in a statement that it was responding to inquiries “in good faith” and prepared to engage “according to the process required by law”.
In its lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Massachusetts on Friday, the justice department accuses Harvard of failing for over 10 months to comply with the government’s request to provide documents, including applicant-level admissions data, and other records and information pertaining to the investigation.
“Harvard has thwarted the Department’s efforts to investigate potential discrimination,” the justice department claimed in the filing. “It has slow-walked the pace of production and refused to provide pertinent documents relating to applicant-level admissions decisions … The repeatedly extended deadlines for document production have long passed.”
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Updated at 18.56 GMT
Trump is ‘tearing apart’ transatlantic partnership, AOC warns
Jakub Krupa
In a Q&A during a panel on populism earlier, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked about her presence at the Munich Security Conference and the signal she wants to send by being involved in these discussions here.
She said:
“I think this is a moment where we are seeing our presidential administration tear apart the transatlantic partnership, rip up every democratic norm, and … really calling into question, as was mentioned by Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum, the rules based order that we have, or, question mark, do we have?”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks during the Munich Security Conference. Photograph: Liesa Johannssen/Reuters
She laid out her pitch for the need to address hypocrisies in the international order:
“But that does not mean that the majority of Americans are ready to walk away from a rules-based order and that we’re ready to walk away from our commitment to democracy.
I think what we identify is that in a rules-based order, hypocrisy is vulnerability.
And so I think what we are seeking is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates the hypocrisies … when, too often, in the west, we’d look the other way for inconvenient populations to act out these paradoxes, whether it is kidnapping a foreign head of state, whether it is threatening our allies to colonise Greenland, whether it is looking the other way in a genocide.
Hypocrisies are our vulnerabilities and they threaten democracies.
And so I think many of us are here to say we are here and we are ready for the next chapter, not to have the world turn to isolation, but to deepen our partnership on greater and increase commitment to integrity to our values.”
She got a good reception from the audience here with a round of applause.
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Updated at 18.37 GMT
