AAMER MADHANI Associated Press

Biden's library team has the daunting task of raising money for the 46th president's legacy project at a moment when his party has become fragmented. WASHINGTON — Former President Joe Biden has decided to build his presidential library in Delaware and has tapped a group of former aides, friends and political allies to begin the heavy lift of fundraising and finding a site for the museum and archive. The Joe and Jill Biden Foundation this past week approved a 13-person governance board that is charged with steering the project. The board includes former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, longtime adviser Steve Ricchetti, prolific Democratic fundraiser Rufus Gifford and others with deep ties to the one-term president and his wife. Biden's library team has the daunting task of raising money for the 46th president's legacy project at a moment when his party has become fragmented about the way ahead and many big Democratic donors have stopped writing checks. It also remains to be seen whether corporations and institutional donors that have historically donated to presidential library projects — regardless of the party of the former president — will be more hesitant to contribute, with President Donald Trump maligning Biden on a daily basis and savaging groups he deems left-leaning. The political climate has changed “There’s certainly folks — folks who may have been not thinking about those kinds of issues who are starting to think about them,” Gifford, who was named chairman of the library board, told The Associated Press. “That being said ... we’re not going to create a budget, we’re not going to set a goal for ourselves that we don’t believe we can hit.” The cost of presidential libraries has soared over the decades. The George H.W. Bush library's construction cost came in at about $43 million when it opened in 1997. Bill Clinton's cost about $165 million. George W. Bush's team met its $500 million fundraising goal before the library was dedicated. The Obama Foundation has set a whopping $1.6 billion fundraising goal for construction, sustaining global programming and seeding an endowment for the Chicago presidential center that is slated to open next year. Biden's library team is still in the early stages of planning, but Gifford predicted that the cost of the project would probably “end up somewhere in the middle” of the Obama Presidential Center and the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. Biden advisers have met with officials operating 12 of the 13 presidential libraries with a bricks and mortar presence that the National Archives and Records Administration manages. (They skipped the Herbert Hoover library in Iowa, which is closed for renovations). They've also met Obama library officials to discuss programming and location considerations and have begun talks with Delaware leaders to assess potential partnerships. Private money builds them Construction and support for programming for the libraries are paid for with private funds donated to the nonprofit organizations established by the former president. The initial vision is for the Biden library to include an immersive museum detailing Biden's four years in office. The Bidens also want it to be a hub for leadership, service and civic engagement that will include educational and event space to host policy gatherings. Biden, who ended his bid for a second White House term 107 days before last year's election, has been relatively slow to move on presidential library planning compared with most of his recent predecessors. Clinton announced Little Rock, Arkansas, would host his library weeks into his second term. Barack Obama selected Jackson Park on Chicago's South Side as the site for his presidential center before he left office, and George W. Bush selected Southern Methodist University in Dallas before finishing his second term. One-termer George H.W. Bush announced in 1991, more than a year before he would lose his reelection bid, that he would establish his presidential library at Texas A&M University after he left office. Trump taps legal settlements for his Trump was mostly quiet about plans for a presidential library after losing to Biden in 2020 and has remained so since his return to the White House this year. But the Republican has won millions of dollars in lawsuits against Paramount Global, ABC News, Meta and X in which parts of those settlements are directed for a future Trump library. Trump has also accepted a free Air Force One replacement from the Qatar government. He says the $400 million plane would be donated to his future presidential library, similar to how the Boeing 707 used by President Ronald Reagan was decommissioned and put on display as a museum piece, once he leaves office. Others named to Biden's library board are former senior White House aides Elizabeth Alexander, Julissa Reynoso Pantaleón and Cedric Richmond; David Cohen, a former ambassador to Canada and telecom executive; Tatiana Brandt Copeland, a Delaware philanthropist; Jeff Peck, Biden Foundation treasurer and former Senate aide; Fred C. Sears II, Biden's longtime friend; former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh; former Office of Management and Budget director Shalanda Young; and former Delaware Gov. Jack Markell. Biden has deep ties to Pennsylvania but ultimately settled on Delaware, the state that was the launching pad for his political career. He was first elected to the New Castle County Council in 1970 and spent 36 years representing Delaware in the Senate before serving as Obama's vice president. The president was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he lived until age 10. He left when his father, struggling to make ends meet, moved the family to Delaware after landing a job there selling cars. Working-class Scranton became a touchstone in Biden's political narrative during his long political career. He also served as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania after his vice presidency, leading a center on diplomacy and global engagement at the school named after him. Gifford said ultimately the Bidens felt that Delaware was where the library should be because the state has “propelled his entire political career." Elected officials in Delaware are cheering Biden's move. “To Delaware, he will always be our favorite son,” Gov. Matt Meyer said. “The new presidential library here in Delaware will give future generations the chance to see his story of resilience, family, and never forgetting your roots.” Copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.     

It comes after the Trump administration deployed National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., to target crime, immigration and homelessness. WASHINGTON D.C., DC — Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday said that the Trump administration will soon expand immigration operations in Chicago, confirming plans for a stepped up presence of federal agents in the nation's third-largest city as President Donald Trump continues to lash out at Illinois' Democratic leadership. Noem's comments come after the DHS last week requested limited logistical support from officials at the Naval Station Great Lakes to support the agency's anticipated operations. The military installation is about 35 miles north of Chicago. “We’ve already had ongoing operations with ICE in Chicago... but we do intend to add more resources to those operations,” Noem said during an appearance CBS News' ”Face the Nation." Noem declined to provide further details about the planned surge of federal officers. It comes after the Trump administration deployed National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., to target crime, immigration and homelessness, and two months after it sent troops to Los Angeles. Trump lashed out against Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker in a social media posting Saturday, warning him that he must straighten out Chicago's crime problems quickly “or we're coming.” The Republican president has also been critical of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. Johnson and Pritzker have pushed back against the expected federal mobilization, saying crime has fallen in Chicago. They are planning to sue if Trump moves forward with the plan. Johnson has already signed an order barring the Chicago Police Department from helping federal authorities with civil immigration enforcement or any related patrols, traffic stops and checkpoints during the surge. Chicago is home to a large immigrant population, and both the city and the state of Illinois have some of the country’s strongest rules against cooperating with federal government immigration enforcement efforts. That has often put the city and the state at odds with Trump’s administration as it tries to carry out his mass deportation agenda. Pritzker in an interview aired Sunday on “Face the Nation” charged that Trump's expected plans to mobilize federal forces in the city may be part of a plan to “stop the elections in 2026 or, frankly, take control of those elections.” Noem said it was a Trump “prerogative” whether to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago as he did in Los Angeles in June in the midst of immigration protests in the California city. “I do know that LA wouldn’t be standing today if President Trump hadn’t taken action," Noem said. “That city would have burned if left to devices of the mayor and governor of that state.” Copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.     

He alleged more than 300 million Americans' data was put at risk by DOGE officials who uploaded sensitive information to a cloud account not subject to oversight. WASHINGTON D.C., DC — A Social Security whistleblower whose complaint alleged that Department of Government Efficiency officials mishandled Americans' sensitive information says he's resigning because of actions taken against him since making the claim. Charles Borges, the agency's chief data officer, alleged that more than 300 million Americans’ Social Security data was put at risk by DOGE officials who uploaded sensitive information to a cloud account not subject to oversight. His disclosure was submitted to the special counsel’s office on Tuesday. In a letter to SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano, Borges claimed that since filing the complaint, the agency's actions make his duties “impossible to perform legally and ethically” and have caused him “physical, mental and emotional distress.” “After reporting internally to management and externally to regulators, serious data and security and integrity concerns impacting our citizens’ most sensitive personal data, I have suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable,” Borges added. The Government Accountability Project, which is representing him in his whistleblower case, posted Borges' resignation letter on its website Friday evening. Borges declined to comment. “He no longer felt that he could continue to work for the Social Security Administration in good conscience, given what he had witnessed,” his attorney Andrea Meza said in a statement. She added that Borges would continue to work with the proper oversight bodies on the matter. In his whistleblower's complaint, Borges said the potentially sensitive information put at risk by DOGE's actions includes health diagnoses, income, banking information, familial relationships and personal biographic data. “Should bad actors gain access to this cloud environment, Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, may lose vital healthcare and food benefits, and the government may be responsible for re-issuing every American a new Social Security Number at great cost,” said the complaint. Borges had served as the Social Security Administration's chief data officer since January. The SSA declined to comment on Borges’ resignation or allegations against the agency in his letter to colleagues. President Donald Trump’s DOGE has faced scrutiny as it received unprecedented access from the Republican administration to troves of personal data across the government under the mandate of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. Labor and retiree groups sued SSA earlier this year for allowing DOGE to access Americans’ sensitive agency data, though a divided appeals panel decided this month that DOGE could access the information. Copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.     

It's a setback for the Republican administration’s efforts to remove migrants from the country without appearing before a judge first. WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from carrying out speedy deportations of undocumented migrants detained in the interior of the United States. The move is a setback for the Republican administration's efforts to expand the use of the federal expedited removal statute to quickly remove some migrants in the country illegally without appearing before a judge first. President Donald Trump promised to engineer a massive deportation operation during his 2024 campaign if voters returned him to the White House. And he set a goal of carrying out 1 million deportations a year in his second term. But U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb in Washington, D.C., suggested the Trump administration's expanded use of the expedited removal of migrants is trampling on individuals' due process rights. “In defending this skimpy process, the Government makes a truly startling argument: that those who entered the country illegally are entitled to no process under the Fifth Amendment, but instead must accept whatever grace Congress affords them,” Cobb wrote in a 48-page opinion issued Friday night. “Were that right, not only noncitizens, but everyone would be at risk.” The Department of Homeland Security announced shortly after Trump came to office in January that it was expanding the use of expedited removal, the fast-track deportation of undocumented migrants who have been in the U.S. less than two years. The effort has triggered lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant rights groups. Before the Trump administration's push to expand such speedy deportations, expedited removal was only used for migrants who were stopped within 100 miles of the border and who had been in the U.S. for less than 14 days. Cobb, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, didn't question the constitutionality of the expedited removal statute, or its application at the border. “It merely holds that in applying the statute to a huge group of people living in the interior of the country who have not previously been subject to expedited removal, the Government must afford them due process,” she wrote. She added that “prioritizing speed over all else will inevitably lead the Government to erroneously remove people via this truncated process.” Cobb earlier this month agreed to temporarily block the Trump administration’s efforts to expand fast-track deportations of immigrants who legally entered the U.S. under a process known as humanitarian parole — a ruling that could benefit hundreds of thousands of people. In that case the judge said Homeland Security exceeded its statutory authority in its effort to expand expedited removal for many immigrants. The judge said those immigrants are facing perils that outweigh any harm from “pressing pause” on the administration’s plans. Since May, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have positioned themselves in hallways to arrest people after judges accept government requests to dismiss deportation cases. After the arrests, the government renews deportation proceedings but under fast-track authority. Although fast-track deportations can be put on hold by filing an asylum claim, people may be unaware of that right and, even if they are, can be swiftly removed if they fail an initial screening. Copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.