Democrats now favored in key midterm races that could give them control of US Senate, new projections find – US politics live

California leaders are furious at Trump over his remarks at a Nebraska campaign rally.

“I don’t think he was joking,” said state senator Mark González, a Democrat representing downtown LA and other parts of the city.

Trump is “very intentional about his comments, and especially about targeting Los Angeles,” González said at a campaign event in Koreatown for Xavier Becerra, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee. “He’s been targeting Los Angeles and Southern California since his presidency started on Day One, treating it like a political playground. When you think about ICE, when you think about the policies that he’s carried out or the things that he has said.”

“Using Los Angeles as your collateral damage is un-American. It’s unpatriotic and it’s disgusting,” he said.

Congressman Pete Aguilar, a California Democrat and the House caucus chair, said the president was “just trying to overcompensate for this reckless and irresponsible war” that he started without congressional authorization.

“He might think it’s a joke, but to his supporters, he’s not joking, right?” Aguilar said at the Becerra event. “He wasn’t joking when he told folks to overrun the Capitol either. It’s incredibly dangerous rhetoric. You shouldn’t be making any jokes about giving up California, giving up Los Angeles and San Diego.”

In a post shared to X, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said that the outrage to Donald Trump’s rally comments are “not rooted in reality”.

“The media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality. He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped,” Cheung posted.

“America is safer because of the President. Iran has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money”, he concluded.

At a rally in Nebraska on Monday, the president said that Iran could “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego, and it would be “a small price to pay for keeping the world safe”.

Kilmar Ábrego García is expected back in court today as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues its battle to carry out his deportation to Liberia.

The DHS is seeking to vacate a preliminary injunction put in place by US District Judge Paula Xinis, preventing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from detaining and deporting Ábrego Garcia.

The Trump administration has asked a federal appeals court to reinstate criminal charges against Kilmar Ábrego García that were dismissed in May by a judge who said the prosecution of the man who unwittingly became a symbol of the White House’s mass deportation campaign was “vindictive in nature”.

In a filing to the US sixth circuit court of appeals, the justice department insisted that human smuggling allegations against Ábrego are genuine – and not retaliation for challenging his wrongful deportation to El Salvador in March 2025.

Ábrego García’s case grew national attention after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials admitted to his deportation as an error during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Donald Trump’s justice department has moved to strip the citizenship of 40 naturalized citizens accused of crimes in what authorities describe as “the largest” such initiative over a single period during his administration.

US justice department officials on Monday announced the filing of “denaturalization actions” against more than three dozen people alleged to have committed such offenses as “acting as an agent for a foreign government, committing voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special‑needs man”.

The denaturalization requests in question were submitted in multiple federal courts between 21 August and 2 October, according to the justice department.

The federal Immigration and Nationality Act allows for naturalized US citizenship to be revoked by a federal court if the government proves that it was illegally obtained through concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation.

Lawyers for the former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who was charged and dismissed over damage to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, are urging two government watchdogs to examine what they say was a flawed investigation.

Hearn’s lawyers said in a letter to the inspectors general for the departments of Justice and Interior that watchdog investigations were needed “to determine what happened inside their agencies that led to the shocking and indefensible treatment” of their client.

Judge Todd Edelman, of the DC superior court, dismissed the case days ago, siding with Hearn’s lawyers over the office of the US attorney Jeanine Pirro, which had wanted to keep the option of refiling.

Pirro, a Donald Trump ally, publicized the charges at a press conference in July. Later that month her office moved to drop the case, conceding that the damage resulted from flawed installation rather than anything Hearn did.

On the whistleblower’s complaint that I reported on earlier, it’s worth noting that Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat, sent a letter to Todd Blanche, the attorney general, and Kash Patel, the FBI director, referencing a specific allegation.

According to the whistleblower, Donald Trump reportedly viewed a TikTok video of protestors in Alhambra, California – that alerted neighbors about the presence of federal immigration officers and advised them of their legal rights. The White House then instructed Patel to direct the Los Angeles Field Office to initiate an investigation into those demonstrating in the video.

In the letter, Padilla also asks Blanche and Patel dozens of questions about the reported investigations, including whether they resulted in arrests, how many directives of this kind the justice department has received from the president and how many investigations are still open.

My colleagues will be answering your questions about how the Iran war is shaping the midterms, as the conflict enters its eighth month and we head into the final stretch of campaigning.

Our team of reporters has helped readers understand the costs of the war and political consequences for Trump and candidates running in November. Join the live Q&A now (12pm ET) at the link below.

Donald Trump ordered the FBI to investigate protesters in Los Angeles who were demonstrating against the president’s immigration crackdown, according to a whistleblower complaint that was submitted to the Senate judiciary committee.

Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat who represents California and serves on the committee, said his office had received a copy of the complaint.

“These allegations are deeply alarming,” Padilla, who also serves as the top Democrat on the border security and immigration subcommittee, said in a statement. “Using the FBI to target Americans for exercising their first amendment rights directly undermines our nation’s foundational values. I won’t rest until we get answers.”

NBC first reported on the allegations after viewing a copy of the complaint, which identifies the whistleblower as Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, who made the complaint following the federal response to anti-ICE demonstrations around the city’s federal buildings, and in residential area, early last year. Fields ultimately resigned from the bureau last year.

According to NBC, Fields alleges that Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, told the head of the field office to open an investigation into activities outside the federal building even though Fields says the activities were protected free speech. Fields also says the White House gave a directive to FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate a group of protesters using megaphones during immigration enforcement operations after agents had initially declined to open an investigation.

Per NBC, Fields also claims that agents were taken agents based in Los Angeles were taken off active cartel cases to carry out the White House’s requests.

Today we’re also keeping an eye on several key debates in competitive statewide races ahead of the November midterms.

• In Georgia, we’ll see Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, and Republican Rick Jackson, a healthcare executive, face off in a gubernatorial debate at 8pm ET.

• In Michigan, Jocelyn Benson, the secretary of state and Democractic nominee for governor will debate Republican nominee and current congressman John James at 7pm ET.

• And in Maine’s US Senate race, Susan Collins, the five-term Republican incumbent, and Troy Jackson, the lumberjack and Democratic nominee, will come face-to-face for the first of two televised debates this week. That will kick off at 7pm ET.

The New York governor, Kathy Hochul, declared a state of emergency on Monday in response to a dramatic spike in measles cases in the state.

Hochul’s administration said the emergency declaration was in response to a “growing number of measles cases across rural areas of New York and neighboring states”, including Pennsylvania, which has been grappling with a deadly outbreak that is its largest in more than three decades.

The declaration expands the pool of people who can administer vaccines against measles and allows more individuals to order testing.

It comes as there have been 108 confirmed cases of measles in New York so far for the year, up from just one reported case in 2023. In Pennsylvania, which neighbors New York, five people have died after contracting the disease, and there have been 198 hospitalizations.

The Trump administration health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has been criticized for his response to the measles outbreak. Before his appointment as health secretary, Kennedy was a noted anti-vaccine activist.

Kennedy headlined an anti-vaccine conference in Washington DC in mid-September, as measles cases surged. He told the crowd there that they had a “strong and steadfast friend at the White House”.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, has called Kennedy “incompetent”, as the health secretary has publicly questioned whether the state’s recorded fatalities were directly caused by measles. The CDC – which Kennedy oversees – currently lists two measles deaths in the US this year.

Donald Trump has spent much of his morning on Truth Social touting the success of his rallies – claiming Republicans are “flipping races all over the place” despite the president’s approval rating reaching a new low.

Trump also chided his once-favored network, Fox News, for not doing enough to spotlight his rallies.

The president said the “crowds and enthusiasm are unbelievable” at his rallies, and they are “SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY”. But also accused Fox of spending time covering “Dumocrat candidates”, his insult for Democrats, than they do the “good old fashioned Republicans”.

He once again, used a racist epithet to describe Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, calling him a “jihadist” and blamed Fox for spending time talking about him on air.

“They don’t show my record breaking Rallies the morning after, but others do, and that’s what MAGA is watching. Fox is promoting the Dumocrats, not the Republicans and MAGA,” Trump wrote.

The White House’s rapid response account has reposted and refuted the Los Angeles Times’ reporting of last night’s rally – where Donald Trump said that Iran could “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego, and it would be a “small price to pay”.

On X, the White House called the outlet “buffoons” and insisted that Trump was saying the US is “fighting to STOP Iran from having the ability to take out LA and San Diego with a nuclear weapon – which they would if they had the chance.”