Live Updates: Vance Appears on ‘Face the Nation’ as Trump’s Cabinet Takes Shape

The Trump administration has enlisted various law enforcement agencies within the Justice Department — the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals — to assist operations in Chicago and elsewhere.

Mr. Bove said in a written statement that he had watched agents from the departments of Justice and Homeland Security deploy in lock step “to address a national emergency arising from four years of failed immigration policy.” The Justice Department, he added, was working to “secure the border, stop this invasion and make America safe again.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement that federal agencies have started “enhanced targeted operations” in Chicago “to enforce U.S. immigration law and preserve public safety and national security by keeping potentially dangerous criminal aliens out of our communities.”

Mr. Bove urged local officials to aid in the effort, and warned there could be consequences for those who do not.

“We will support everyone at the federal, state and local levels who joins this critical mission to take back our communities,” he said. “We will use all available tools to address obstruction and other unlawful impediments to our efforts to protect the homeland.”

Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that his state would cooperate with federal authorities in deporting undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes or with pending deportation orders. But he emphasized that state law enforcement would not take part in targeted raids or profile people in the state who might be without documents.

Mr. Pritzker also said there was no new legal basis for the memo Mr. Bove issued last week indicating the department may investigate and prosecute officials in any jurisdictions that refuse to assist with the deportation crackdown. “They’re just putting that out because they want to threaten everybody,” he said.

Immigration enforcement is an everyday feature of the Homeland Security Department, which oversees agencies including ICE. But the Trump administration has vowed to devote more Justice Department personnel to those efforts as it takes more aggressive action.

Mr. Bove, who was part of Mr. Trump’s defense team in his Manhattan criminal case, is now overseeing much of the department’s day-to-day activity while the Senate works toward a confirmation vote on Pam Bondi, Mr. Trump’s nominee for attorney general. A vote on her nomination is expected this week.

Hamed Aleaziz and Minho Kim contributed reporting.

Regardless the steps are all but certain to hobble the agency’s efforts to recruit, retain and train employees.

The bureau’s human resources division, in an internal memo issued on Friday, detailed the moves it was taking as a result of the order, including supplying the White House with a list of probationary employees.

Employees’ concerns have only been compounded by the deep suspicion and relentless attacks President Trump and his pick to be the agency’s director, Kash Patel, have leveled at the bureau over its previous criminal investigations that ensnared Mr. Trump. Mr. Patel has promised to turn F.B.I. headquarters into a museum of the “deep state,” dismantle the bureau intelligence cadre and slash the general counsel’s office, which provides the director with key legal advice.

Already on edge, current F.B.I. employees wonder whether the directive signals the administration’s intent to gut parts of the country’s premier law enforcement agency, even as Mr. Trump has pushed to rapidly overhaul the federal bureaucracy.

The F.B.I. declined to comment and referred questions to the Justice Department, which, like other government agencies, has been subject to the hiring freeze. A spokesman for the department did not immediately comment.

Among the moves that have stoked concern at the F.B.I. is a request by the White House for the names of probationary employees, or employees who joined the bureau in the last two years — some of whom are military veterans. The list encompasses nearly 1,000 agents in field offices around the country.

The memo said the bureau had to justify which employees on the list the agency wanted to retain.

“To be clear, our employees on that list are on that list because we hired them to do mission critical jobs,” the memo said. “We will do everything that we can to ensure that they stay here at the F.B.I.”

Firing new agents would be a considerable blow to the F.B.I., which spends tens of thousands of dollars recruiting, hiring and putting them through 20 weeks of extensive training.

The F.B.I. said that new agent and analyst classes would begin their training at the bureau’s facility in Quantico, Va., as planned on Sunday. But future classes, the backbone of the agency’s ability to protect the country, appear to be on hold as job offers made to agents and analysts are put on pause.

The field offices, which struggle to keep their squads filled, will have to scramble to make sure investigations and other operations continue to run smoothly if the agents are let go and more cannot be hired to keep pace with retirements.

All recruitment events and activities were also paused. The bureau said that job postings had been removed but that it was trying to seek an exemption for special agents.

The F.B.I., which has about 38,000 employees, was already facing budget cuts before Mr. Trump’s hiring freeze.

In June, Christopher A. Wray, who fell out of favor with Mr. Trump and resigned before the inauguration, told a Senate appropriations subcommittee that the agency was already stretched thin from previous budget reductions.

He warned that the threats to the country had never been greater.

“Our adversaries are not scaling back their efforts because of the constrained budget environment,” he said. “In fact, threat actors may try to take advantage of federal budget reductions to conduct nefarious activities.”

Similar to the Justice Department, the F.B.I. also put the its coveted honors interns program on pause for the 2026 fiscal year, the memo said.

Pressed about comments before the inauguration that people who committed acts of violence on Jan. 6 should not be considered for pardons by President Trump, the vice president said that “grey areas” and “double standards” in sentencing of rioters justified the mass pardons issued by Trump.

Concerning specific rioters who turned on police officers on Jan. 6, causing serious injuries, Vance denounced violence against police but again dismissed the broader prosecution of rioters by the Justice Department as illegitimate. “We’re not saying everybody did everything perfectly,” he said.

On the ruling this week by a federal judge to block Trump’s order to end automatic citizenship for babies born on American soil, Vice President Vance that children born to anyone in the United States — legally or illegally — who “don’t plan to stay,” should not be granted citizenship. “Just because we were founded by immigrants doesn’t mean that 240 years later that we have to have the dumbest immigration policy in the world,” he said.

Vance reiterated the administration’s argument that those not in the country permanently are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. He added: “Why would we make those people’s children American citizens permanently?” The judge who temporarily blocked the order called it “blatantly unconstitutional.”

Weighing in on a topic that Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, discussed earlier Sunday, Vice President Vance said immigration raids in religious buildings and schools should not be ruled out. “If you have a person who is convicted of a violent crime, whether they are an illegal immigrant or not, you have to go and get that person to protect the public safety,” he said. “That’s not unique to immigration.”

Asked if the authorization to conduct raids in schools could have “knock-on effects,” stoking fear among parents about sending their children to school, Vance said he hoped tht would deter illegal immigration. “I desperately hope it has a chilling effect on illegal immigrants coming to our country,” he said.

Pushed for details about how the Trump administration would address inflation in areas like grocery prices, Vice President Vance argued that the quick push to expand oil and gas drilling that Trump announced on Monday would help ease prices more broadly. Economists and energy experts have disputed that further encouraging American oil production, which is already booming, would have much effect on the larger economy.

Vance suggested that energy prices had been one of the “main drivers” of higher prices during the Biden administration, and that increased grocery prices were related to elevated costs of shipping related to fuel prices.

Pressed on whether immigration enforcement agents would search for people in churches or schools, Homan replied that ICE would act on a “case-by-case basis.” But he seemed to suggest that high-school-aged children could be affiliated with gangs and represented legitimate targets.

“The message needs to be clear: There’s consequences for entering our country illegally,” he said. “If we don’t show there’s consequences, you’re never going to fix the border problem.”

Tom Homan, President Trump’s newly appointed “border czar,” said on ABC that deportations would “steadily increase” as the administration moved to “open up the aperture” to target anyone in the country illegally — not just those with a criminal record.

“If you’re in the country illegally, you’ve got a problem,” he said. “And that’s why I’m hoping those who are in the country illegally who have not been ordered removed by the federal judge should leave.”

JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, suggested on CNN that President Trump’s Justice Department has no new legal basis in trying to coerce state and local law enforcement into cooperation on deportation raids by issuing a memo threatening prosecution. “They’re just putting that out because they want to threaten everybody,” he said.

Pritzker said Illinois would cooperate with federal authorities in deporting undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes or with pending deportation orders. But he emphasized that state law enforcement would not take part in targeted raids or profile people in the state who might be without documents.

Graham also said that Trump made a mistake in revoking security details for some of his former aides, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the former national security adviser John Bolton. Graham said he spoke with his colleague and chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who told him, “The threats seem to be real against these individuals, and I don’t want to leave them hanging.”

“Everybody doesn’t deserve a detail all your life,” Graham told CNN’s Dana Bash. But he added, “If the intel was what Senator Cotton said, I think we should keep the details.”

“You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Mr. Trump said of Gaza on Saturday. “I don’t know. Something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now.”

Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he had spoken to King Abdullah II of Jordan, saying, “I said to him, ‘I’d love for you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess.’” He said he would also like Egypt to take in more Palestinians and that he would speak to the country’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

He said Palestinians could be in Jordan and Egypt “temporarily, or could be long-term.”

It was unclear from Mr. Trump’s comments if he was suggesting that all of the people in Gaza leave. The enclave has a population of about two million.

The suggestion by Mr. Trump was rejected Sunday by Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza.

“The Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have endured death and destruction over 15 months in one of humanity’s greatest crimes of the 21st century, simply to stay on their land and homeland,” said Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, referring to the war that started with the Hamas-led attack on Israel in 2023. “Therefore, they will not accept any proposals or solutions, even if seemingly well-intentioned under the guise of reconstruction, as proposed by U.S. President Trump.”

But the idea appeared to be welcomed by hard-line Israeli politicians.

Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted a statement on X on Sunday that seemed to refer to Mr. Trump’s comments, although he did not mention the U.S. president.

“After 76 years in which most of the population of Gaza was held by force under harsh conditions to maintain the ambition to destroy the State of Israel, the idea of ​​helping them find other places to start a new, good life is a great idea,” he said.

Mr. Smotrich has long advocated for helping Gazans who want to leave to depart, and for the Israeli military to remain in the enclave to help pave the way for eventual Jewish settlement there.

Millions of Palestinian refugees are already living in camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, while others now live in other Arab countries — including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates — and around the world. But Palestinians and their Arab allies have long rejected any further resettlement outside Palestinian territories, saying that forcing Palestinians to leave would mean erasing any hope of a future Palestinian state. Without land, they say, there is no country.

Virtually all Egyptians and Jordanians fervently support Palestinian aspirations for statehood, making it unlikely that either government would consent to such arrangement.

The Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said in a news conference on Sunday that Jordan’s “rejection of displacement is fixed and unchangeable,” according to Sky News Arabia, in what appeared to be a reference to Mr. Trump’s remarks. He added, “Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”

There was no public response to Mr. Trump’s suggestion from Egypt on Sunday.

“This would be going against its base completely,” Maged Mandour, an Egyptian political analyst, said of the prospects of Egypt taking in large numbers of Palestinians. “It’s just a non-starter.”

Egypt also fears that the arrival of large numbers of Palestinians could threaten the country’s security. In particular, Cairo has long been concerned that embittered, impoverished Palestinian refugees, if allowed into Egypt, could launch attacks on Israel from Egyptian soil, drawing Israeli retaliation.

Early in the war, Egypt became so concerned about the prospect of any move that would send Gazans spilling into its territory that it warned Israel that it was jeopardizing the decades-old Israel-Egypt peace treaty, an anchor of Middle East stability since 1979.

Jordan is already home to many Palestinians and many Jordanians of Palestinian descent. Accepting refugees from Gaza would risk destabilizing a population that has never resolved tensions stemming from the original influx of Palestinians, analysts say.

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump’s comment signals a change in U.S. policy toward Palestinians.

Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other recent presidents other than Mr. Trump, the United States officially supported establishing a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one, criticized Israeli extremist attempts at seizing more Palestinian land by building settlements on it and assured Egypt and Jordan that they would not be forced to take in more Palestinians.

But with Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, all of the assumptions that had undergirded American relationships in the Middle East may now be upended.

Egypt and Jordan are both major U.S. partners in the region, and successive U.S. administrations have regarded their stability as crucial to that of the wider Middle East. They both receive significant U.S. funding, with Egypt the second-largest recipient of foreign aid after Israel.

The Trump administration issued a memo on Friday suddenly freezing all foreign aid for a 90-day reassessment period, but laid out two major exceptions: weapons support to Israel and Egypt. The same day, in a further sign of Mr. Trump’s support for Israel, the White House told the Pentagon to proceed with a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that Mr. Biden abruptly stopped last summer to discourage the Israeli military from destroying much of the Gazan city of Rafah. Israeli forces bombed the city anyway.

It is unclear if Mr. Trump would try to use the $1.3 billion that Egypt is supposed to receive in annual aid as leverage to try to force it to accept more Palestinian refugees.

The fear of being driven from Gaza runs deep among Palestinians, who reject it as a replay of what they call the Nakba — or “catastrophe” in Arabic — the mass displacement of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 during the war surrounding Israel’s creation as a state.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are trying to return to their homes as the cease-fire between Hamas and Israel enters a second week. It is only the second pause in fighting between the two since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas led an attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 Israelis. Since then, Israel’s military has killed at least 46,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. It has also destroyed thousands of homes and buildings in Gaza and killed many of Hamas’s leaders.

Most of the two million Palestinians in Gaza have had to flee their homes at least once. And though aid in recent days has increased, the humanitarian situation remains dire, with water, food and medicine running low and few working hospitals left.

Noura al-Awad, 29, and her family were some of those who stayed put in their homes in Gaza City for the last 15 months, persisting through airstrikes, a ground invasion and near-famine conditions because they were determined not to cede their land to Israel, she said in a phone interview on Sunday.

She vowed to outlast Mr. Trump’s plans, too.

“For one year and three months, we were attacked from all sides, we got starved and humiliated, we experienced killing, death and destruction, but we didn’t move south,” she said. “No way” would she leave, she said.

Reporting was contributed by Andrés R. Martínez, Iyad Abuheweila, Isabel Kershner and Rania Khaled.

“I have to be honest with you, I’m really here for a different reason,” Mr. Trump told the crowd in a Las Vegas casino. “I’m here to say thank you.”

Rather than focus on his economic plan, Mr. Trump took a victory lap of sorts in front of hundreds of supporters.

He celebrated a series of executive orders that would curtail immigration and others shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the government. “We got rid of the woke crap,” he said of the D.E.I. moves.

The president also criticized the World Health Organization and talked about his decision to pardon those who rioted on Jan. 6, with a founder of a militia group in attendance. He continued to attack former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., one day after sparring with Democrats during a briefing on recovering from the wildfires in California.

Despite winning the election and nearing the end of his first week in office, Mr. Trump appeared to still be in campaign mode.

“They put America last, they put you last,” Mr. Trump said, adding that he did not know if Mr. Biden knew “he was alive” while in office. “Bad things were happening, and now there is light.”

The final day of his first trip of his second term signaled the collision of lofty campaign promises with the realities of governing. Mr. Trump told the crowd gathered in the Circa Resort & Casino that he would work with Congress in the coming weeks on legislation that “keeps my promise” on not taxing tips.

Mr. Trump said the pledge that became a key plank of his campaign originated in a suggestion from a waitress he met at a hotel. After she proposed the idea, he recounted, “I said, ‘Thank you very much, you just won the election.’”

But he had little to say on how to smooth a path for the proposal through Congress. Republicans have introduced legislation interpreting Mr. Trump’s pledge in different ways, with some leery of the cost of fulfilling it.

Among the details under debate is which kind of taxes people should be allowed to be exempt from. Many workers pay both income taxes and payroll taxes, which fund Social Security and Medicare, though low-wage workers often owe very little or no income tax.

One proposal floated in Congress would exempt tips from income tax, but keep it for payroll taxes, in a proposal estimated to cost $106 billion over a decade.

Creating a tax-free form of income could also motivate many Americans, including highly paid professionals, to change how they are paid, making the tax break even more expensive. To address that, Republicans could set an income cap, barring wealthier Americans from the tax break, or they could allow taxpayers to exclude only a certain amount of tips from their taxable income.

Mr. Trump’s audience at the casino on Saturday appeared fully content with Mr. Trump’s performance, even if it came without details on delivery.

The crowd roared when he proclaimed that Pete Hegseth had been confirmed as defense secretary the night before. They cheered when Mr. Trump said he was “very proud to pardon the J6 hostages” to a crowd that included Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia who had been serving 18 years in prison on seditious conspiracy convictions until his sentence was commuted by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump got laughs when he appeared to joke about serving a third term, an idea that has prompted a long-shot proposal in Congress from a House Republican to change the 22nd Amendment’s term limits.

“It will be the greatest honor of my life to serve not once but twice or three times or four times,” Trump said, as he began laughing. He added, “No, it will be to serve twice.”

After his speech, Mr. Trump went downstairs to the casino floor, where he was greeted with cheers from patrons as he watched a game of craps.

“Throw the dice,” Mr. Trump said as he ignored a reporter’s shouted question over his firing of at least a dozen inspectors general in the federal government. “Not bad,” Mr. Trump said after the gamble.

Ms. Noem, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump who was once seen as a contender to be his running mate, issued a statement on Saturday thanking him and vowing to “work to make America SAFE again!”

She takes charge of a sprawling agency that runs the nation’s immigration system — including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and that leads counterterrorism efforts. The Homeland Security Department also oversees the Secret Service, the Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. (In recent days, Mr. Trump has suggested disbanding FEMA.)

Ms. Noem, a former congresswoman and two-term South Dakota governor, has been closely aligned with Mr. Trump on immigration, the issue he says won him the White House.

She has described high levels of immigration to the United States in recent years as an “invasion,” and she has supported restoring a policy that requires asylum seekers to stay in Mexico for the duration of their U.S. cases. The policy, in place during Mr. Trump’s first term, was heavily criticized by Democrats and immigration-rights activists.

As governor of South Dakota, she opposed accepting Afghan refugees after the chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and she sent members of her state’s National Guard to Texas to address the immigration crisis — a contentious move that Mr. Trump cited in picking her for homeland security secretary.

While most Senate Democrats opposed Ms. Noem’s nomination, she received scattered support from Democratic lawmakers. Her confirmation went smoothly compared with the bruising battle to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who faced allegations of sexual abuse and excessive drinking, which he denied. Mr. Hegseth was approved by a 51-to-50 vote on Friday after Vice President JD Vance stepped in to cast a tiebreaking vote.

One Democrat who voted for Ms. Noem, Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, said he believed he would be able to work with her and maintain an open line of communication.

Still, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, said on the Senate floor that he believed Ms. Noem was “headed in the wrong direction” on immigration. And Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, said he was not confident Ms. Noem would respect the rule of law. Neither voted to confirm her.

Ms. Noem was grilled by lawmakers on whether she would administer disaster relief to Democratic-led states even if Mr. Trump ordered her not to. During his first term, Mr. Trump initially opposed unlocking federal funding for California after severe wildfires in 2018, his former aides have said.

“Under my leadership of the Department of Homeland Security, there will be no political bias to how disaster relief is delivered to the American people,” Ms. Noem told lawmakers, adding, “I will deliver the programs according to the law.”

She has also pledged to overhaul the Secret Service, which has struggled with attrition and has been the focus of several investigations over breakdowns that allowed a gunman to shoot at Mr. Trump, injuring him slightly, during a rally in Butler, Pa., in July.

Mr. Trump has appointed Sean Curran, who led Mr. Trump’s personal security detail during the presidential campaign, as director of the Secret Service, a position that does not require Senate confirmation.

Ms. Noem has been a champion of conservative positions on a number of cultural issues. She signed a law in South Dakota that bars transgender women and girls from competing in school sports consistent with their gender identity, and she battled critical race theory, a framework that argues racism is baked into the law and other modern institutions.

Many speculated that her chances of being selected as Mr. Trump’s running mate were dimmed by the publication of her memoir, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward.”

Its rollout did not go well. In the book, Ms. Noem described fatally shooting her family dog, drawing bipartisan outrage. A pre-publication version of the book also included a false story about her meeting with Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, during her tenure in Congress. The section was removed.

With Ms. Noem’s confirmation on Saturday, Larry Rhoden, who had served as her lieutenant governor, was elevated to governor of South Dakota. Mr. Rhoden is a conservative Republican and former state lawmaker.

A senior administration official said Ms. Dixon, who became acting director after Ms. Haines’s departure, was asked to step aside so President Trump could choose an acting official “who aligns with his priorities.”

Allies of Mr. Trump, chiefly Ezra Cohen, who served in the first Trump administration, had criticized Ms. Dixon on social media, saying she had been too involved in the Biden administration’s diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives.

Mr. Cohen said his criticism of Ms. Dixon was aimed at how diversity initiatives had hurt the spy agency’s “analytical integrity.” “Stacy Dixon advanced an aggressive social agenda within the intelligence community that undermined fact-based analysis and created significant distraction from the I.C.’s core mission,” he said.

The Trump administration ordered all diversity initiatives in the federal government halted, and officials working on such projects put on leave. The White House also issued orders to federal workers to help identify officials who were working on efforts to diversify government ranks.

The Biden administration put a priority on diversifying the intelligence agencies, saying language skills and wide knowledge of various cultures was needed to improve collection and analysis.

People briefed on the Trump administration’s decision pointed to Ms. Dixon’s speeches and interviews in which she talked about the importance of leading efforts to diversify the ranks. Ms. Dixon, who was the highest ranking Black intelligence official, had argued that intelligence agencies needed to recruit people from diverse perspectives to add better context to analytic work.

First, he said he intends to “revive the warrior ethos and restore trust in our military.” Many military specialists question the need, arguing that the armed forces have been focused on waging war for years.

Second, Mr. Hegseth emphasized the strengthening of the nation’s industrial base — which ramped up after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago — and streamlining the military’s cumbersome processes for buying new weapons.

Finally, he said the Pentagon would “re-establish deterrence by defending our homeland” and working with allies in the Indo-Pacific region to confront a rising military threat from China. He said the military will also support President Trump’s priority “to end wars responsibly,” presumably a reference to the war in Ukraine as well as the conflicts in the Middle East.

“All of this will be done with a focus on lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards and readiness,” Mr. Hegseth said.