There are two ways to lie about President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, and JD Vance has mastered both of them.

The first: muddy the waters, refuse to acknowledge reality and dismiss facts as inaccurate.

The second: dehumanize people targeted by the US government, and describe them as inherently criminal and un-American to justify a policy of mass detention and deportation.

Now on his third week of promotion for “Communion,” his memoir about converting to Catholicism, Vance is using his faith to sanitize the worst aspects of Trump’s second term — and possibly previewing how he’ll campaign on immigration during a likely presidential run of his own.

Trump’s agenda relies on cruelty. The administration set a new record for people in immigration detention earlier this year, though the vast majority of detained people have no criminal convictions at all. Only a tiny percentage of immigration detainees have convictions for violent crimes. Many people in detention don’t even have a final deportation order, but rather are in the middle of applying for asylum. The administration has asserted the authority to jail millions of people indefinitely, and recently asked the Supreme Court to bless that unprecedented “mandatory detention” policy. Trump officials have admitted to using the misery of detention to pressure people to give up their legal cases and “self-deport.”

Vance can’t run from that record. Instead, he’s doing what he’s done for years — talking his way beyond the pale.

“Communion” lays out the debate over immigration policy in the most general terms possible — presumably because anything else would be damning for Vance.

“Law enforcement is an inherently difficult business,” Vance writes. “If you arrest a person illegally in the United States, that person will sometimes resist arrest. Even if they don’t, and even if everyone agrees their deportation is lawful and moral, there will still be some measure of separation and heartache.”

These lines are all about the art of the straw man: The issue at hand isn’t the “heartache” of a lawful, moral deportation — it is the question of whether the vast majority of this administration’s immigration arrests and deportations are lawful or moral in the first place.

And despite the book being about why he aligned with Catholicism as an adult, Vance is evasive about the fact that two popes in a row have criticized Trump’s immigration agenda at length. He doesn’t engage on the substance of the policies that have been criticized and instead somewhat ironically wishes for “an institutional faith less focused on platitudes and more focused on reality.”

The comment about how “inherently difficult” law enforcement is, for example, comes just after Vance describes how, in late 2025, the U.S. Conference on Catholic Bishops approved a “special pastoral message on immigration” that critiqued the administration. Vance writes that the document was “almost too measured,” then moves on without actually addressing the letter’s contents.

But the conference’s statement was detailed, expressing concern about mass deportation, racial profiling, “the vilification of immigrants,” horrific conditions inside detention centers, “the lack of access to pastoral care” in the facilities, the fact that “some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status,” and the administration’s efforts to arrest immigrants in sensitive zones including churches. Vance did not address any of the specifics.

Vance has now taken the sleight-of-hand strategy on tour. Rather than defending the worst parts of Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda when faced with legitimate criticisms, he creates a new reality: disputing straightforward facts and cherry-picking hypotheticals.

On “The View” a couple of weeks ago, Vance faced questions about in-custody Immigration and Customs Enforcement deaths, children being held in “sub-human” detention centers, and the administration’s racist language.

“Law enforcement is always inherently not a very pretty process,” he deflected, especially with “violent people” and those who are “resisting arrest.”

He went on to essentially accuse Joe Biden’s administration of running, or at least tolerating, a child trafficking ring, saying there were “tens of thousands of children that were sex-trafficked by the cartels” in the last administration — a number that no one else in the Trump administration has used and for which HuffPost found no evidence. (The administration has repeatedly made broad-brush false claims about the prevalence of child sex trafficking, all while it arrests parents, threatens youth with “prolonged detention,” and targets migrant kids’ legal service providers.)

“You think that our immigration policies are inhumane based on the reporting of one person with a political bias,” Vance said, not indicating which “one person” he was calling out, despite there being millions of words written about the specifics of the administration’s policies. “What I’m telling you is that it’s inhumane to allow cartels to sex-traffic people across our borders.”

Later, Vance dismissed an accurate criticism about the administration’s agenda. “Since October of last year, there’s been something like 6,668 refugees let into the country. All but three were white South Africans,” co-host Ana Navarro said.

Vance suggested the statistic was wrong, though it’s actually a well-known, damning testament to the white supremacist attitudes that pervade the Trump administration.

“I’m very skeptical of that number because we have a lot of different immigration pathways in the United States of America,” he said.

In his book, Vance writes that it’s possible to support “strict migration policy without dehumanizing anyone” — but his career in the Trump administration is predicated on dehumanizing immigrants.

There’s no clearer example of the impact of that strategy than what Vance did to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

In 2024, Vance was the first major elected official to push the lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating pets in the area. Local officials told Vance’s staff the claims weren’t true, and no evidence ever supported them.

Vance was unapologetic. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said at the time. Vance acknowledged that the rumors he was spreading could be lies, and he kept spreading them anyway, saying he was merely amplifying (unverified and politically convenient) reports his office received. He also falsely claimed that, as a result of Haitian migrants, communicable diseases like tuberculosis and HIV had “skyrocketed” in Springfield.

Within days, Trump had pledged to revoke temporary protected status — or TPS, a deportation protection for people whose birth countries are in severe turmoil — for Haitians, saying Springfield had been “overrun.”

The Supreme Court just signed off on that move, meaning that, with the help of Vance’s propaganda, Trump has a list of more than 300,000 people who are now newly deportable and at risk of being sent to their extremely dangerous home country. As the historian Timothy Snyder observed Monday, “If there is a Springfield pogrom, JD Vance will have his first namesake policy.”

Just this week, Vance warned against allowing “low-wage third-world immigrants” and said European countries risked “committing civilizational suicide” through immigration.

He dresses up his casual racism in his book, referring to “the social instability inherent in assimilating one population into another.”

“Too much immigration,” he writes, “actually destroys the social cohesion necessary to form labor unions.”

That’s pretty rich coming from Vance, who as a U.S. senator opposed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act — the U.S. labor movement’s top legislative priority — because, as he told Politico in 2024, “I think it’s dumb to hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican.”

Vance also takes pains to suggest that immigrants make America less Christian — even though the facts are more complicated.

“Churchgoing kept declining just as Biden-era immigration policy caused a skyrocketing increase in the foreign-born share of the population,” he writes. “That makes assimilating newcomers even harder.”

Toward the end of the book, in a discussion of racism, Vance again suggests that migration is associated with decreasing religiosity.

“From the intermarriage of the Spanish and native populations in Mexico to the American melting pot of the nineteenth century to the Civil Rights Movement, Christianity has long brought people together,” he writes. “And yet, as our leaders have ushered in an unprecedented increase in demographic diversity through immigration, they have simultaneously discarded the most powerful force for cultural cohesion: Christianity. It is hardly any surprise that the fruits of their labor are rising racial conflict and gender division. Secularism has produced social strife despite its promises of enlightenment.”

The data tell a different story.

Pew Research Center’s 2025 Religious Landscape Study shows that immigrants to the United States said the Bible is extremely or very important to them at rates higher than people born in the United States to U.S.-born parents. The same group also attended religious services more frequently and were more likely to say religion was very or somewhat important to them. While, overall, the study found that immigrants were a few percentage points less Christian than people born in the United States, a separate 2024 Pew report using different data found that 70% of migrants to the United States were Christian, compared with 64% of the U.S. population that was Christian as of 2020.

It’s true that religiosity in America has trended downward in recent years, but that’s regardless of immigration status. It’s also true that most undocumented migrants are from the Americas, and that Trump administration policies — including turning away asylum-seekers at the southern border and ending certain deportation protections — disproportionately affect migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, which are far more Christian than the United States.

“Catholic immigrants are being differentially impacted by these policies,” Stephanie Kramer, a senior researcher on religion and public life at Pew, told HuffPost.

If Vance has any regrets about backing up Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade, he hasn’t said so. In his book, he walks back a snide remark about “childless cat ladies,” calling it “boneheaded.”

As far as the Haitian community he slandered as disease-spreading pet-eaters — or anyone else he’s allowed Trump to set his sights on — Vance lets the administration’s actions do the talking.

President Donald Trump is playing the blame game yet again for the ongoing issues with his exorbitant renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — this time for its algae outbreak.

“They put in algae! Who the hell put in algae?” Trump asked while delivering remarks in Medora, North Dakota, on Wednesday.

The president went on to accuse former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden of not fixing the pool despite spending millions of dollars “trying” to do so.

Trump, who potentially has spent more than $1 billion on a slew of Washington, DC renovations, alleged he only spent “a very small amount of money” on the Reflecting Pool in comparison.

“What they don’t say is Barack Hussein Obama ― Have you heard of him? ― Barack Hussein Obama spent tens of millions of dollars trying to fix it, and it was a disaster,” he continued. “Sleepy Joe Biden spent millions of dollars trying to fix it, and he was unable to do it.”

“But we did it, and it works beautifully,” he added.

“We got rid of the algae, which they put in,” Trump claimed. “They had a couple of people with signs [that said] ‘Protect the algae.’ Can you believe this? This world has gone crazy.”

Trump was referring to the protesters who have celebrated the algae that has bloomed in the Reflecting Pool following the president’s ongoing controversial renovations. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt slammed the same protesters late last month, calling them “deranged leftist[s].”

It is unclear if Trump was accusing the protesters or Obama and Biden of adding the algae.

Trump first announced his plans to spruce up Washington in April ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary, claiming the Reflecting Pool revamp would only cost $1.5 million. The pool renovations have since exceeded $16 million.

Obama oversaw a multimillion-dollar renovation of the pool, but the final bill didn’t come anywhere close to Trump’s renovations price tag. FactCheck.Org also debunked Trump’s claims that the Biden administration conducted major work on the pool.

Biden called Trump a “loser” last week over Reflecting Pool drama.

Elsewhere in his remarks Wednesday, Trump also repeated unproven and likely false claims that the pool was vandalized with a knife.

Watch Trump’s remarks below. Skip to the 49:37 mark to hear his comments about the Reflecting Pool.

Andy Burnham has vowed not to make “crude cuts” to Britain’s welfare bill when he becomes prime minister later this month.

The former mayor of Greater Manchester said he would take a “different approach” to help get young people not in employment, education or training (NEETS) into work.

Keir Starmer was thwarted by a Labour backbench rebellion when he tried to cut the benefits bill by £5 billion a year ago.

But speaking to LBC, Burnham – who is on course to take over from Starmer on July 20 – said: “I’m not going to go with the crude cuts to benefit levels that then just put people who are struggling in even worse poverty, and that often creates the backlash, and understandably so.

“There’s a different approach, which is looking at two things that can be done differently to get the overall benefits bill down.

“One of those is how we support young people. I will not defend an education system that is overly focused on the university route and does not lay out paths to technical qualifications for our young people.”

He added: “What I’ve done in Greater Manchester is something that might be looked at more broadly, free bus travel for 16 to 18-year-olds, so that they can access those opportunities.

“In my view, if we did that, and we changed the way we provide mental health support to young people – I believe we can substantially reduce the number of NEETS.

“If you build more council homes, you can bring down the housing benefit bill. You do it over a longer term, in a more sustainable way.”

Burnham also hinted at increasing business rates on firms like Amazon, which build huge warehouses outside towns and cities, and using that money to help struggling high streets.

He said he stuck by Labour’s election manifesto pledge not to increase income tax, VAT or national insurance.

But he said “there is some room within that manifesto for movement on tax”.

“So, if you take business rates, for instance, I believe there is a case for higher business rates on warehouses and the major developments we see on the outskirts of our cities so that we can cut business rates for pubs,” he said.

“And I proposed a 20% cut and lift some high street businesses out of business rates altogether.”

Shadow chancellor Mel Stride said: “Instead of raising taxes Labour should be getting a grip of spending, but Andy Burnham won’t touch the ballooning benefits bill. He will double down on all the mistakes Labour have already made.”

Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.

A cabinet minister and her department have dramatically quit X over the “abuse and misinformation” now widespread on the platform.

Culture secretary Lisa Nandy said “it isn’t healthy for our democracy or our communities and I don’t want to support it”.

Nandy said X – formerly Twitter – was originally “a platform originally designed for free speech and expression” but had changed over time.

Her comments were a clear swipe at tech billionaire Elon Musk, who introduced a raft of changes after he bought the platform in 2022.

Nandy announced her shock decision just seconds after Keir Starmer posted a video on X announcing that pubs can stay open until 5am on Monday to show England’s World Cup clash with Mexico.

A No.10 source said they had no plans to follow Nandy by leaving X.

Announcing her decision on Thursday, Nandy said: “I’ve decided to leave this platform and my department will too.

“A platform originally designed for free speech and expression now favours abuse and misinformation over meaningful debate. It isn’t healthy for our democracy or our communities and I don’t want to support it.”

She said she would still post content on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.

However, her decision drew criticism from some X users, with some people saying she should use her powers to crack down on abuse rather than leave the site altogether.

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A Reform UK MP broke down in tears in the Commons on Thursday while sharing her personal story of forced adoption.

Sarah Pochin revealed her own mother was pressured into giving up a child.

The Runcorn and Helsby MP said she only discovered she had a sibling after her mother’s death.

It came as the prime minister offered an official apology for the role the state played in forcing mothers to give up babies born out of wedlock between 1949 and 1976.

Pochin said: “My own mother was pressurised into giving up a baby for adoption and this was handled by the church.

“I only found out after her death. She carried her secret to her grave. When I found out, I tried to find my sibling, but drew a blank.

“I had to pay privately to find him and we’ve now been united.”

Struggling to carry on, she said: “Can the prime minister assure those affected that the new systems and resources will be given the funding they need to reunite families?”

MPs around her extended a sympathetic hand when she sat down.

Keir Starmer replied: “Can I thank her for sharing that personal story? And we can all see how difficult that must have been.

“She’s shown huge courage in saying that in the chamber today. The way she described her mother taking her secret to the grave is very powerful.”

As he looks to cement his legacy just three weeks before leaving office, Starmer told the Commons on Thursday: “We are deeply and profoundly sorry to the mothers who were told they were unfit, who were prevented from caring for the children they desperately wanted to help and to keep, and who have carried this loss for decades.

“To those who were not given the information they needed to provide informed consent, who faced pressure or coercion, and who experienced practices that were unethical.

“To the sons and daughters, the children who are now adults, who, through pressure and coercion within these systems, were taken from their families, denied their identity, their history, and sometimes their safety. To those who grew up believing that they were unwanted.”

The government has also created a peer-led support group for mothers and adopted adults and make it easier for them to access records.

Pochin was not the only MP who grew emotional during the Commons discussion on Starmer’s apology.

Labour MP Tracy Gilbert welled up as she told her colleagues: “As an adopted person born in 1972, I welcome today’s statement from the prime minister.

“I have no idea if my birth mother felt forced to have me adopted.

“I do know that prior to the birth she was in a Church of Scotland mother and baby home.

“My adopted parents have since died, but I am sure they would not want to have adopted any child who had been forcibly removed from their mother.”

The PM said he saluted “her courage and resilience”.

He added: “To have to speak out about something which is so intensely difficult, over and over again, is incredibly, incredibly demanding, but the comfort I hope is not only that because of that you have been seen and heard, but that others will have the courage to speak out about what happened to them, and I thank her in that regard as well.”

Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.

Rumours that Taylor Swift and fiancé Travis Kelce are going to marry this weekend have been hitting headlines all week.

Some think they’re going to get hitched on either Friday 3 July or Saturday 4 July, at New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden arena.

In fact, it’s even been speculated that the celebrations are already underway.

But if you clock all those uncertain terms – “rumour”, “speculation” – you might get an idea of how secretive the whole affair has been so far.

As of the time of writing, there has been no official confirmation as to when and where the highly anticipated knot will be tied.

Which means Swifties have resorted to some, er, unorthodox techniques in order to find out more details.

Their most recent source? BBC Radio 1 presenter Greg James sure has been getting a lot of prying questions recently.

In a reposted clip of a months-old interview, Greg asked Taylor: “Where’s [the wedding] gonna be? Do we know?”

In response, Taylor, who confirmed she was getting married in 2025, said: “I will let you kn– I’m gonna let you know at a different time”.

The singer then appeared to reference Greg’s appearance at the wedding. The radio host said he’d love to “play catch” with professional athlete Travis Kelce, to which Taylor responded: “The way that [Travis] is going to do that as soon as he sees you at our wedding”.

“Woah – am I coming?” Greg responded.

“Obviously,” Taylor smiled.

Though the moment uploaded onto BBC Radio 1′s Instagram yesterday – just as speculation about the stars’ nuptials hit fever pitch – was actually filmed on October 3, 2025, its resurfacing has led some fans to what they see as a potential source of precious info.

″@greg_james are you in Sheffield or NY?” one commenter asked.

The presenter’s most recent Instagram stories included pictures taken in the South Yorkshire town.

Another comment showed just how closely some Swifties are watching the presenter’s every move this week: “Greg being off so many breakfast shows this week has really messed with my head. Tuesday I was convinced it was a sign, but [it] turned out he was at Wimbledon… can’t handle this suspense”.

On Tuesday, Greg was seen in the iconic tennis championships’ Royal Box.

However, other fans pointed out that the presenter’s father has been unwell recently.

Greg’s dad, who suffered a stroke before the presenter’s Comic Relief challenge earlier this year, has since undergone surgery.

In June, Greg shared: “Real talk, surgery went ok but he’s far from out of the woods so I’m gonna take it easy tomorrow and hopefully back on Friday. Plus, I’m in no fit state to be on the radio. I mean, look at me, I’m posting photos from intensive care ffs. Thanks for your lovely messages” in his Instagram story.

Donald Trump has repeated his false claim that Nato was “not there” for America in a new attack on the country’s allies.

In a social media post shared less than one week before a highly-anticipated Nato summit in Ankara, the US president claimed it was “ridiculous” for America to continue with its “one-sided” relationship with the western military alliance.

“Ridiculous for the U.S.A. to continue along this one sided path when the relationship is not reciprocal. They were not there for us!!! President DJT,” he wrote on Truth Social.

He attached a graphic which suggested the US spent $999 billion on Nato, while the UK spent $90.5bn, France £66.5bn, Italy $48.8bn and Poland $44.3bn.

He did not say where the graphic came from or explain how those numbers matched up to the Nato target of spending at least 3.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence by 2035.

Trump has repeatedly criticised Nato allies for not supporting the US, particularly with his offensive in Iran earlier this year.

Multiple countries refused to let American troops use their military bases to launch strikes on Tehran.

He also overlooks how the defence alliance’s mutual defence clause has only ever been invoked once – in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the US.

Trump claimed back in January that Nato ought to give him Greenland having “never” been there fore the US.

When Nato chief Mark Rutte pointed out that member states flocked to support the US in Afghanistan after 9/11, Trump falsely claimed the coalition troops “stayed a little back, little off the frontlines” in the war.

Keir Starmer’s spokesperson then slapped the president down, telling reporters: “The president was wrong to diminish the role of Nato troops, including British forces, in Afghanistan.

“Following the 9/11 attacks on the US, Article 5 of the Nato treaty was invoked for the first time and British forces served alongside American and other allied troops in sustained combat operations – 457 British service personnel lost their lives in Afghanistan and many more were wounded.

“Many hundreds suffered life-changing injuries from their service, alongside the US and our allies in Afghanistan.

“Their sacrifice and that of other Nato forces was made in the service of collective security and in response to an attack on our ally.

“We are incredibly proud of our armed forces and their service and sacrifice will never be forgotten.”

Trump has also been pressuring Nato to increase its defence spending so that it is less reliant on the US.

Member states agreed to boost defence-related spending last year – including civil preparedness and resilience – to 5% of GDP by 2035.

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In a recent episode of The A24 Podcast, Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde discussed the 2007 comedy Knocked Up, in which Seth co-starred. Olivia said she auditioned to take the female lead role that Katherine Heigl landed in the movie, but was rejected.

They also discussed Anne Hathaway, who Seth claimed was going to co-star alongside him but “quit”.

“It was Anne Hathaway who quit the movie,” he said, to which Olivia replied: “Because of the crowning right? Is that real?”.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin star replied, “Yeah, I mean… it could have been a hundred million things. That was what I remember being told.

He added that he understood the graphic birthing scene in the movie to have been a dealbreaker because it wasn’t Anne’s “brand”.

“Crowning is a tough one. She didn’t want the crowning of the baby to be visually representative. Even though it wasn’t going to be hers… It’s obviously not real,” he stated.

“But… she felt that it was not her brand. Part of me also… we had started rehearsing the movie… maybe she was just like, ‘I don’t know if this is for me.’ I don’t know. I will take what she said at face value, which was the crowning.”

He continued, “She had a sense, and she knew it was not for her… and history will tell….

“She has been right about a lot more things than I have over the years. So I think she was probably right. [Katherine Heigl] knew what was right for her, yes. And then Heigl was great. Katie Heigl was great.”

HuffPost UK has reached out to Anne Hathaway’s representatives for a response. You can watch the entire The A24 Podcast here.

Andy Burnham has been tipped to bring back another senior figure from the New Labour era in his new-look government.

The former mayor of Manchester – who served as a minister under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – will officially take over as prime minister from Keir Starmer on July 20.

It has already emerged that his close friend James Purnell, who also served in cabinet during Labour’s last time in power, will be the new No.10 chief of staff.

David Miliband, another New Labour figure, could also be given a seat in the House of Lords in order to become foreign secretary.

Meanwhile, the i newspaper reported that Ed Balls could also be handed a peerage and given a role in Burnham’s government.

HuffPost UK has learned that another New Labour big beast who could make a dramatic comeback is Alan Milburn.

The former health secretary has held talks with Burnham about his review into record levels of unemployment among 18 to 24-year-olds.

In a speech last week, the PM-in-waiting said he wanted to introduce major education reforms which would place greater emphasis on technical qualifications rather than forcing pupils to study at university.

One minister said: “I can see Alan being brought into Andy’s government. He seems to like what Milburn has been saying about getting young people into work.”

Another source said: “Andy keeps referencing Milburn in his speeches, and Alan is clearly up for it.

“It would make sense to allow Alan to drive through his own reforms on youth unemployment as a minister.”

Asked whether Milburn could be handed a role once Burnham becomes prime minister, a source close to the new Makerfield MP insisted he had offered “no jobs and no deals”.

Milburn, who was the MP for Darlington from 1992 until 2010, was seen as an arch-Blairite during his time in government.

As well as being health secretary, he also serves as chief secretary to the Treasury and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster under the former prime minister.

After leaving Westminster, he was chair of the Social Mobility Commission between 2012 and 2017.

Like David MIliband, he would need to be made a peer in order to re-enter government.

Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.