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Nearly 4,000 people have lodged objections to the project being approved, with this pushback leading to contentious public meetings that Lee Perry, the Box Elder county commissioner, said have left him feeling “physically sick” amid alleged death threats and false accusations.

O’Leary has claimed in social media posts that most of the protesters don’t live locally and have been paid to object to the project. “There are professional protesters that are paid by somebody, I don’t know who,” O’Leary said in a video posted to X last week. “They’re being bused in.”

Opponents of the project have rejected this accusation. On Monday, a group calling itself the Box Elder Accountability Referendum filed an application for a referendum to reverse the commissioners’ approval of Stratos. If the group is able to collect 5,422 signatures from registered voters in the county in the next 45 days, the project approval will go to a vote in November.

“Instead of speaking with us, Kevin O’Leary went on social media saying we were out-of-state, paid protesters, and we don’t want people from out-of-state making decisions for us,” said Brenna Williams, lead sponsor of the referendum push.

“The only thing he’s right about is that we don’t want him, an out-of-state billionaire, making decisions for us.”

The US Senate will not pass the $70bn legislation ahead of a 1 June deadline set by the US president, Republican senators told reporters on Thursday, as lawmakers leave Washington for the Memorial Day recess.

It comes amid backlash from members of Trump’s own party against an attempt to latch funding for his ballroom project on to the immigration bill.

The plan prompted intense anxiety among congressional Republicans, who feared diverting taxpayer dollars toward Trump’s “East Wing modernization project” amid mounting cost of living concerns across the US would risk alienating voters ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Some Senate Republicans have also expressed concerns about a plan, announced on Monday, to create a secretive $1.776bn fund – which critics have argued is essentially a slush fund – to compensate Trump allies as part of an agreement in which the president and his sons dropped a $10bn long-shot lawsuit against the US Internal Revenue Service.

Democratic state representatives in Minnesota staged an overnight sit-in in their house chamber on Thursday after the Republican speaker failed to put a gun violence prevention bill up for a vote.

Samantha Sencer-Mura, a Democratic representative from Minneapolis, first announced the plan on Wednesday from the floor of the state’s house of representatives, giving the speaker, Lisa Demuth, a candidate for governor, 24 hours to give the bill a vote before the sit-in would start.

The sit-in began around 9pm local time. Lawmakers intend to stay until the house comes back in session, which is set for Saturday at noon.

The Minnesota senate, controlled by Democrats, narrowly passed the gun violence prevention omnibus earlier this month. The house, where there is a 67-67 vote tie and a Republican speaker in charge, has so far not taken up the bill.

The push for new gun laws came after a school shooting at Annunciation Catholic church last August, where two students were killed and others injured during a school-wide mass. Minnesota also saw the killings of state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the shootings of state lawmaker John Hoffman and his wife, last summer.

Democrats tore into government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein abuse scandal on Tuesday – revealing new details of the scale of his international sex-trafficking ring, and warning Donald Trump not to grant a presidential pardon to the late sex offender’s sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell.

Several survivors of Epstein’s abuse also gave tearful testimony at a congressional field hearing in Florida of their experiences as teenagers in his orbit. Some spoke of being retraumatized after they were “outed” by the justice department’s failure to redact their names from the so-called Epstein files.

Democratic members of the US House oversight committee said they held Tuesday’s event in Palm Beach, where the president lives, and where Epstein had a residence, because it was “the scene of the crime”.

“We’re here because so much of this investigation brings us back to this location,” the California Democrat Robert Garcia, ranking member of the oversight committee, told a press conference after the hearing.

“We know that the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, the horrible things that happened to so many women and girls, totaling 1,200 could have been stopped and halted.”

Garcia began the hearing by unveiling a new report called The Price of Non-Prosecution that he said revealed how Epstein was able to build a substantial and lucrative international sex-trafficking ring following his infamous “sweetheart deal” with Florida prosecutors in 2008.

By the time “Operation Metro Surge” hit Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota, residents were primed to fight back. From houses and stores, in cars and on bicycles, people of every age, race and political stripe dogged ICE wherever it went. The protesters wore inflatable animal costumes, flak jackets and parkas heavy enough to brave weather so cold it froze the ink in reporters’ pens. They withstood teargas, police batons and arrests. And when agents fatally shot two US citizens in January, cellphone videographers were there to record the killings – and disseminate the images around the world on social media.

Public opinion swung decisively against Trump, the then homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, and “commander at large” Greg Bovino. The government was forced to retreat.

André is part of a group of “data rescuers” who have banded together during Trump’s second term. They have been quietly racing to save hundreds of critical government datasets before they are no longer available. Now known as the Data Rescue Project, it’s a grassroots network of more than 800 people around the world who spend up to 40 hours a week painstakingly archiving the US government’s digital footprint in their spare time.

Anyone can join, but the majority of volunteers are librarians and academics, said Lynda Kellam, a university data librarian and a founding member of the Data Rescue Project. Programmers from the open-source software community and retirees also work on the project. Some, like André, contribute anonymously. What brings everyone together is the belief that “public data should be a public good”, said Kellam.

Attorney Paul Schwiep, who represents the groups, said the legal fight would continue even if the camp closed.

“While it is welcome news that people will no longer be inhumanely confined at this facility, the damage caused by this reckless and ill-conceived endeavor cannot simply be abandoned and forgotten,” he said.

“This project was recklessly advanced without any meaningful regard for the remote, environmentally sensitive and ecologically fragile landscape in which it was imposed. The fencing, lighting, paving and other infrastructure – all constructed without environmental permits, review, or analysis – must be removed, and any lingering harm remediated.”

As of 1 April, the Department of Justice has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for failing to turn over full copies of their voter registration lists. The push has hit repeated roadblocks, including legal defeats in California, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, Arizona and Michigan. But the justice department is also running into obstacles in some of America’s reddest states, with Trump strongholds Utah, West Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky and Idaho all refusing to hand over the requested data.

In their objections, the Republican-controlled states cite their constitutionally guaranteed authority over election administration, as well as concerns over data security, privacy laws and the questionable legal grounds of the department’s request.

DeepMind’s UK workers voted to unionize in April. One of the workers said they were particularly driven by reports that Google was close to reaching a deal with the defense department and pointed to the US’s “capricious Iran war” and the Trump administration’s feud with Anthropic as indications that the department is “not a responsible partner”. The deal was ultimately announced on Friday.

Ocasio-Cortez said that instead of aiming for higher office, “I get to wake up every day and say, ‘How am I going to meet the moment?’

“And conditions change radically all the time. So I make my response less to an attachment to some positional title or position and working backwards from there.”

She added: “I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window and observing the conditions of this country. And saying what move or what decision can I make today that is going to get us closer to that future, stronger, faster, better than yesterday.”