US news

The attorney general of New Jersey on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the private company operating the Delaney Hall Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center, demanding access for health officials amid allegations of “inhumane and unsanitary conditions”.

Immigrants locked up at the federal detention center in Newark began a hunger and labor strike more than 10 days ago to protest against conditions, while demonstrations built up outside that veered into violent scenes after dark.

Tuesday’s lawsuit, filed by Jennifer Davenport, the state’s attorney general, asks the state superior court in Newark to order the private operator, the Geo Group, to grant the New Jersey department of health full access to the facility to conduct inspections.

Standing in front of the most powerful and well-known people in the television news business on Wednesday night, in a glitzy New York City ballroom, 18-year-old high school student Santiago Campos shocked – but also delighted – many in attendance when he called out the network that funded the scholarship he received: CBS News.

Campos, a graduating senior at the District of Columbia international school who had traveled to New York for the 47th annual news and documentary Emmy awards with his mother and teacher, was awarded the Mike Wallace memorial scholarship, honoring the legendary television interviewer. Campos was given the award by veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, who said: “Mike would see something of himself in this year’s recipient.”

While Campos thanked CBS News for funding the $10,000 grant, he launched into a critique of the network’s direction under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and owner David Ellison. “I want to also acknowledge how the recent direction of the outlet stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship,” he told the crowd.

“As corporate elites take hold over the very pipes through which our information flows, journalism that serves the people becomes increasingly harder to come by, yet ever more crucial. And what the people want is the truth. So if at any time you hesitate to utter the word ‘genocide’, or remain silent in the face of blatant lies, remember to ask yourself: ‘Who is this for?’ I hope you choose us.”

Seven states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its decision to cancel a major offshore wind lease off the coast of New York.

In March, federal officials announced they would pay nearly $1bn in taxpayer dollars to French energy firm TotalEnergies in exchange for the company killing plans to erect two offshore windfarms off New York and North Carolina. TotalEnergies agreed to terminate the projects and pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States, while investing hundreds of millions of dollars in oil and gas projects.

The deal was unlawful, says the lawsuit, led by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.

“The Trump administration is once again trying to kill clean energy projects and destroy good-paying jobs for New Yorkers,” she said in a statement to the Guardian.

The administration’s agreement with TotalEnergies came after federal judges repeatedly struck down the president’s executive orders and stop-work directives which aimed to halt offshore wind development, ruling them unlawful and arbitrary.

Legal challenges to the fund and its addendum have been growing. A bipartisan group of 35 ex-federal judges on 27 May filed a motion appealing to a federal judge in Miami who oversaw Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS to reopen the case, and launch an inquiry to determine if Trump and DoJ’s unorthodox deal to settle the lawsuit involved fraud. The jurists’ charge that the settlement fund’s creation was a “fraud on the court”.

In an extraordinary turnaround on 29 May, the Miami judge reopened Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS to explore whether the court had been deceived by the parties involved including DoJ, and the deal was “premised on deception”.

Separately, responding to a lawsuit filed by a former January 6 prosecutor who the DoJ fired, plus other individuals and entities who say they have faced Trump administration attacks, a Virginia federal judge ruled on 29 May temporarily blocking further moves to set up the fund and fund dispersals until at least a hearing on 12 June.

Kim, a senator from New Jersey, had joined the state’s governor, Mikie Sherrill, also a Democrat, at the protest to speak with relatives of some of those detained. He told USA Today that the incident in which he was sprayed by a chemical substance came shortly after he had been inside Delaney Hall to see conditions for himself.

He said he emerged to a “standoff” between protesters and agents from ICE, who he said had deployed an armored vehicle as a barricade, and that he “kind of lined up in front of them” to try to de-escalate the situation.

“ICE officials told me that they were going to push through the crowd with their vehicle and they wanted to get some vehicles out of there,” Kim said.

“I tried to arrange a situation where people would not get hurt, where there wouldn’t be a confrontation. Unfortunately, ICE just continued on.”

People were “getting tackled and brought to the ground” and ICE “started pushing through with their vehicles” and “started shooting at us with pepper balls and using pepper spray”, he said.

“I tried to do whatever I could standing in the middle to keep people safe.”

Congressional Democrats are strongly opposing a US Department of Labor proposal that would allow 401(k) investments to include cryptocurrency, private credit and private equity assets, arguing the change will expose workers to riskier and more complex investments.

In a letter shared exclusively with the Guardian, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and House education and workforce committee ranking member Bobby Scott of Virginia, argued the rule would expose an estimated $14.2tn of 401(k) retirement savings to volatile assets and would probably not withstand a challenge in court.

“This would strip long-held investor protections from retirement savers and encourage the use of more risky, complex, and expensive investments,” said the letter. “The proposed rule is harmful to American workers.”

Residents in Monterey Park, California, became the first in the US to vote on a permanent ban on datacenters on Tuesday, and early results indicate a resounding victory for the prohibition.

While many cities and counties have already passed temporary or indefinite moratoriums via their local governments, Monterey Park would be the first to do so through a ballot initiative.

The ballot measure needs a majority vote – at least 51% – to win. As of 2am Pacific Time, 86.3% of the more than 7,000 votes counted so far were in favor of banning datacenters. While it can take days to finalize election results, the stark gap was enough evidence for Jose Sanchez, a city councilmember, to claim a “landslide victory” for residents who don’t want to live near datacenters.

“[This] shows unequivocally that residents in Monterey Park do not want datacenters in their community,” Sanchez said. “We hope that other communities will use the model set by residents here in Monterey Park as inspiration to stop data centers from encroaching in their backyard.”

While the Trump administration has argued that new restrictions on the size of federal student loans will lower tuition costs, public health officials and Democrats say the measures will exacerbate the country’s serious nursing shortage.

As such, a group of 24 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia recently sued the federal government seeking to block the new rule, which is set to take effect on 1 July.

Members of the scientific community have been raising concerns about the paper since immediately after it was published. Top and other scientists wrote about some of its methodological issues within days of publication. In an email, Top said in the six years since then, the paper had been cited in other studies and used to justify changes to vaccine policy and undermine confidence in vaccines, “likely contributing to decreased vaccination rates and outbreaks of serious preventable infections, like measles and whooping cough”.

Top called for the publisher and editors to conduct a thorough review of the peer review process and their response to the previous complaints, and to commit to improving the timeliness of their response in future.

The hunger and work strike and protests come as the Trump administration continues its controversial, aggressive and increasingly unpopular mass deportation campaign, targeting immigrants nationwide to detain and deport them.

A letter from detainees was published by advocates on Tuesday morning. Two men recently released from Delaney confirmed in interviews with the Guardian their participation in the strike, despite denials by the Trump administration that any such strike was happening.

“We are detained, we are on hunger strike, demanding due process rights and the improvement of conditions,” one of the men said in an interview with the Guardian. “We are not criminals. We are people who enter [the facility] with a clean record. We pay our taxes. [We are] Fathers. Mothers. Spouses of citizens with existing petitions.”