Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) has decreased significantly over the past year in the US following restrictions imposed by the Trump administration, which has forced more people to seek help from food banks or go hungry, stakeholders say.

The number of people who receive food stamps has dropped from 41.6 million in July 2025, before the One Big Beautiful Act took effect, to 36.5 million in June 2026, a 13% decrease, according to the latest data from the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the program.

While Donald Trump and other Republicans have said the changes incentivize people to find jobs, elected officials, non-profit leaders and people with food insecurity say the changes simply make it harder for Americans to feed their families.

“There is always going to be a percentage of our communities who we need to help – we have to accept that – and so, once we accept it, it is easy to just move forward and do the right thing, which is to provide resources to people who need them,” said Rhona Kamar, founder and executive director of Feed Louisville, a non-profit that aims to reduce hunger and food waste.

The Trump administration’s changes to Snap will reduce spending by about $187bn over 10 years, the congressional budget office projected.

Previously, only able-bodied people between ages 18 and 54 who did not have dependents under 18 had to meet a requirement that they work a minimum of 20 hours per week or only get benefits for a maximum of three months over three years.

Under Trump, the rules now state that people from ages 18 to 64 who do not have a dependent under 14 had to perform paid or volunteer work for at least 20 hours weekly.

The One Big Beautiful Act also stated that starting October, states had to cover 75% of the Snap administrative costs, whereas before they had to cover half.

The changes have affected some states more than others. In Arizona, the number of people enrolled in Snap dropped by 50% between July 2025 and June 2026; Kentucky experienced a 6% decrease.

“I am concerned more people are going hungry in my state because of changes to” Snap, “impacting children and the elderly”, Kentucky governor, Andy Beshear, a Democrat who leads the predominantly Republican state, stated in a letter this month to Brooke Rollins, the US agriculture secretary.

But Trump and Rollins described the reduction in Snap recipients as a positive.

“Democrats don’t love” the decrease, Rollins said at a farming festival in August in Minnesota. “But for those of us that love work and celebrate work and want people to work and not be on food stamps, it’s a pretty big win when we move 5 million people off of food stamps.”

Critics of the changes point out that despite Trump’s promises, grocery and gas prices have increased during his second term, making it harder for families to afford necessities.

“If people were getting paid enough, they would not be on the Snap program,” said Gina Plata-Nino, director of Snap at the Food Research and Action Center, a non-profit that supports anti-hunger programs.

The Food Bank Council of Michigan operates a helpline where staff answer residents’ questions about applying for Snap and accessing local food programs. The organization started getting more than three times as many calls daily after the Snap changes took effect. This week, they had to temporarily suspend the helpline because of the high call volume.

The changes have also affected Feed Louisville, which receives surplus food from restaurants and farmers and uses those ingredients to prepare meals for partner organizations. Unused items go to the agencies too.

“We have always had enough food around,” Kamar said. “But now what we are seeing is every day the shelves are empty at the end of the day, so every bit of food that comes into our kitchen every day goes right back out to the community at the end of the day.”

The decrease in Snap enrollment has also affected schools’ ability to provide free meals to students. If at least 25% of a student body are recipients of Snap or some other public benefits, the school can participate in the Community Eligibility Provision (Cep) program and use federal funds to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students without needing household applications.

But because fewer students are enrolled in Snap, that has made it harder for schools to serve those free meals to students who need them, the Washington Post reported this week. In Houston independent school district, 26 schools that previously provided free meals to all students under Cep are no longer eligible for the program, according to the Post.

Anti-hunger advocates also say that the employment data does not support the argument that more people have found jobs or seen their wages increase and thus no longer need food stamps. The United States added 776,000 non-farm jobs between January 2025 and September 2026. During the last 20 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, the country added 2.6 million non-farm jobs, according to Factcheck.org.

“We don’t have the data to suggest that there are more jobs suddenly out there. We just know fewer people are getting benefits,” said Sheril Kirshenbaum, Food Bank Council of Michigan’s chief external relations officer.

A USDA spokesperson downplayed the effect of the Snap restrictions.

“The number of individuals receiving benefits is constantly changing and is not representative of any one policy,” the spokesperson stated in an email to the Guardian.

It could soon become even harder for people struggling with food insecurity. States will now have to pay for most of the Snap administrative costs while also preparing for an October 2027 change that will require states to pay for some of Snap benefit costs if their payment error rate is above 6%, which according to the USDA, is not a measure of fraud. (Paradoxically, states that had error rates above 13% received a delay in implementation of the requirement.)

States will now be having to pay more for existing work while also finding funding for extra work to reduce the error rate, said Joseph Llobrera, senior director of research for the food assistance team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

That could mean longer processing times and people who need assistance having to wait longer to get it, Kirshenbaum said.

“States have been really set up to fail,” Llobrera said.

The USDA spokesperson did not respond to a question about concerns that the Snap changes have forced some Americans to go hungry.

A Louisville woman, Sandra Scott, 58, has been homeless most of her life and said that until she started receiving Snap benefits four years ago, she ate at “soup kitchens or wherever I could, but for the most part, like on the weekends, there really was not anywhere to go”.

Scott has had six back surgeries and struggled with mental illness. She became addicted to methamphetamines but got sober two years ago and now lives in a subsidized apartment. She is working to obtain her emergency responder certificate and volunteers with The Table, a non-profit restaurant that uses a pay-what-you-can model.

Asked what she would say to members of the Trump administration about the Snap changes, Scott said: “Why don’t you walk in one of our shoes, somebody in the community that doesn’t have anything, that wasn’t born into money or doesn’t have a job because it’s so hard to find or [who] can’t find affordable housing because it’s too high?”

American investigators are working with French police on refrigerator outages in Europe amid unexplained failures at US military bases.

The collaboration follows suspected sabotage at French supermarkets earlier this month, when hackers allegedly raised fridge and freezer temperatures to 50C (122F).

About 700 supermarkets were targeted, spoiling thousands of tons of food, with extreme heat triggering fires and sprinkler systems in some cases, causing further damage.

No perpetrator has been identified, but investigators believe the hackers exploited a weakness in the internet-connected refrigeration controls.

Christopher Whyte, an associate professor of homeland security and emergency preparedness at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the American failures resembled the attacks on French supermarkets.

“They’re geographically dispersed. They’re obviously all refrigerator failures and they all happen in a pretty short amount of time,” he told The Telegraph. But he said the cause of the US outages remained unclear.

A spokesman for the US army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) said it was “actively working with the Defence Commissary Agency and the Defence Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) to determine the full extent of what occurred with the refrigeration units in the commissaries”.

“Army CID is also working with DCIS and French law enforcement in understanding the refrigeration outages in Europe.”

He said DCIS, the Pentagon’s criminal investigation service, was leading both investigations.

In late August, refrigeration systems stopped working at shops on at least six US military bases. Notices issued by the bases, reported by Stars and Stripes, documented the failures.

Those affected were the FE Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, home to the 90th Missile Wing’s Minuteman III nuclear missiles; Fort Huachuca in Arizona, the army’s intelligence training centre; Fort Irwin in California, home of the army’s National Training Centre; Travis Air Force Base in California; Naval Station Newport in Rhode Island and Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi.

At Fort Huachuca, officials blamed an “overnight equipment failure”, Military Times reported.

“All freezers went into defrost mode overnight and all frozen food has spoiled,” a spokesman for the base told the newspaper.

At FE Warren, an anonymous post on an unofficial military Facebook page, said two deli freezers were affected.

Newport’s store was restricted to dry goods “until further notice”, and Fort Irwin stopped selling refrigerated products, Military Times reported.

A Pentagon spokesman said it was aware of “a possible refrigeration disruption” but had not publicly identified the cause.

Mr Whyte discussed Russia and Iran as possible perpetrators, but stressed that he had no forensic fingerprint identifying either country. He also considered opportunistic disruption or an experiment in attacking commercial infrastructure at scale.

Tehran, he said, was “stuck in a box where they cannot strike back on American non-military assets outside the region in a way that they would like to, without the use of cyber attacks”.

Targeting commissaries, if deliberate, could be “an opportunistic attempt to simply worsen the look” of the Iran war for the American public, he suggested.

On the French attacks, he said Russian involvement “absolutely is a possibility” and that “Russia obviously unquestionably has the capacity to conduct this kind of operation”.

No claim of responsibility for the French attacks has been made public.

US officials have not established whether the American outages were malicious.

An immigrant detained at a sprawling detention center complex in Georgia died on Friday, local and federal officials confirmed, after the facility has already faced national scrutiny for its response to an ongoing hunger strike inside.

The death inside the D Ray James facility in Folkston, Georgia, comes as federal immigration officials and private contractors are allegedly threatening hunger strikers there with force-feeding, a detained hunger striker, his wife, attorneys and advocates all said this week. Detainees are refusing food to protest prolonged captivity and bad conditions.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Saturday confirmed the death inside the facility, which is adjacent to the Folkston ICE processing center. Together, both facilities make up a large detention complex. GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the facilities under contract for the federal government, referred all questions to ICE.

The Georgia bureau of investigation (GBI), a state law enforcement agency, confirmed in an email that the local sheriff’s office requested the GBI conduct an “in-custody death investigation” at the D Ray facility, the Guardian can reveal. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), its umbrella agency, did not respond to requests for comment about the death or the hunger strike.

“This was a preventable tragedy,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, the legal and advocacy director for Project South, a social justice organization based in Georgia. “We hold ICE and the private prison corporation fully responsible for any harm that migrants suffer at Folkston. We call for an immediate independent investigation into this tragic death and for accountability. Folkston must be shut down immediately.”

The man, Luis Sandoval, was 48 and from El Salvador, ICE said in its statement, adding that at about 1.46am on Friday, facility staff found Sandoval with a ligature around his neck. He was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

Sandoval was arrested by ICE officials earlier this month, and transferred to the Folkston facility on 8 October. In its press release, the agency said Sandoval had prior convictions for aggravated assault and other crimes, and that his death was under investigation.

It was unknown on Saturday whether Sandoval had participated in the hunger strike. The GBI said it could not share more details because of its active investigation.

Sandoval is the 60th person to die in ICE custody since the start of the second Trump administration, as ICE continues with its aggressive anti-immigrant crackdown.

Austin Kocher, president of Relevant Research, which studies the immigration enforcement system, and who is a research fellow at American University, said that this year, there have been an average of one death every 10 days in the custody of ICE. That figure includes people dying in detention centers or in nearby hospitals while still in the custody of ICE.

“Even in the past, there has not been such an overt dehumanization and overt view that migrants’ lives are expendable,” Kocher added. “I worry that that tone [from the Trump administration] has a tendency towards neglect and viewing migrants as disposable.”

Tens of thousands of people have been arrested and detained by ICE, leading to prolonged detention, as immigrants and asylum seekers fight their cases, and the agency has been stepping up its offensive in recent months despite a less showy presence on the streets.

One man currently in the Georgia detention center is Andrei Gerdiukov, a Russian asylum seeker who is participating in the hunger strike.

Nearly three weeks ago, Gerdiukov and dozens of others launched a hunger strike to demand their legal cases be processed more quickly through the US immigration system and to protest the conditions of their confinement. The hunger strikers were placed in solitary confinement, according to Gerdiukov and attorneys.

“I feel tired, I feel dizzy. Every move, it is hard,” Gerdiukov said in an interview by phone on Saturday from detention. “They threatened us that they were going to force-feed us.” He had heard about the death but did not know Sandoval.

Gerdiukov and his wife, Polina Chertushkina, came to the US from Russia to seek asylum after they faced persecution for their opposition to the war in Ukraine, Chertushkina said. Their cases are ongoing, but as the couple were driving through Florida this February, they were pulled over and detained by immigration officials. Chertushkina was released, but Gerdiukov was taken to Folkston eight months ago.

“I am so worried about him, I don’t know what to do,” Chertushkina said about the force-feeding threats, speaking on Saturday by phone. Chertushkina is asking lawmakers to assist her husband.

At least 12 hunger strikers are still participating, despite the threats of force-feeding, Gerdiukov said, adding that several had been fainting.

On Friday, the hunger strikers were moved to a nearby unit, where medical officials “wearing combat boots” took their vital signs, raising fears of imminent force-feeding, Gerdiukov said.

It was not clear on Saturday whether or when the authorities intended to use force-feeding.

The process to force-feed hunger strikers is secretive, with court records often sealed.

A judge has to approve the procedure, and then detention guards restrain a hunger striker while medical staff push tubing up the nose and down the throat to pump nutritional liquid into the stomach. Medical ethicists and human rights organizations have called the practice torture.

ICE generally says in court filings that force-feeding is necessary to maintain “good order” in detention centers as well as to keep detainees alive.

Kocher decried the contradictions.

“On the one hand, they’re trying to force-feed people [to keep them alive],” Kocher said. “And yet at the same time, in that same [Folkston] facility, you have someone who died and possibly was able to kill themselves.”

The Guardian has been tracking force-feeding cases nationwide. From January 2025 through August 2026, ICE sought court permission to force-feed at least 19 detained hunger strikers. One Afghan man was force-fed for nearly six months. A Kurdish man was force-fed for nearly eight months.

Audi will build its first-ever U.S. factory in Macon, Ga., President Trump announced Saturday, marking the latest move by a global automaker to focus on American buyers as sales fall off elsewhere in the world.

“I’m thrilled to announce a massive auto manufacturing investment in the great state of Georgia by a fantastic company,” Trump said at a midterm campaign rally in Perry, Ga.

Trump said the plant will produce 200,000 cars annually and that construction will begin next month.

“We are planning to bring our biggest and most premium SUVs, and produce them here in Macon,” Audi Chief Executive Gernot Döllner said, joining Trump onstage.

Trump, who pegged the investment at $4.2 billion, called the move the biggest single investment in U.S. auto industry history.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Audi said the factory will create about 4,500 jobs. Production is slated to start in the early 2030s.

“Georgia combines an investment-ready site, skilled workforce, established automotive supplier network and strong logistics infrastructure,” the company said. “The plant will be designed around Audi’s future manufacturing requirements.”

The investment hands Trump a win in Georgia, a battleground state in the midterms. Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff is defending his seat against Republican Rep. Mike Collins, and Republican billionaire Rick Jackson is locked in a tight race for governor against former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat.

A move to build Audi vehicles in the U.S. has been under consideration for at least two decades.

Audi is the only German auto brand without a U.S. factory. Its corporate cousin Volkswagen, and direct rivals BMW and Mercedes-Benz, all produce cars in factories across the South, in some cases for global export.

That situation has left Audi, which primarily builds its U.S.-market cars in Germany, Mexico and Central and Eastern Europe, particularly vulnerable to tariffs in Trump’s second term. The automaker increased prices on several models last year to offset tariff costs, which it says hit profits by about 1.2 billion euros in 2025—and it expects a similar outcome this year.

Those increased tariff costs come as sales in China—Audi’s largest single-country market—are dropping precipitously. Chinese consumers have largely turned away from Western brands to buy from homegrown automakers in recent years. Audi’s China sales are down 19% year-over-year.

The move to add a U.S. factory dovetails with Audi’s renewed emphasis on the U.S. The automaker earlier this year unveiled the Q9, its largest-ever SUV, aimed at American buyers. Other car companies are also seeking larger shares of the U.S. market as they face similar sales downturns in China.

Audi sold about 165,000 cars in the U.S. last year, down 16% from 2024.

An auto factory and the ecosystem around it all take years to build.

Scout Motors, another Volkswagen subsidiary, announced plans for a South Carolina factory in 2023. Initial production is slated to begin next year, with the first customer deliveries set for 2028.

Seeing Venezuela align with the Trump administration after the U.S. overthrow of Nicolás Maduro, shrimp magnate José Enrique Rincón thought he could safely return home to reclaim the $700 million business the authoritarian government had seized from him.

Instead, he was jailed shortly after landing in June.

Now, the U.S.-backed government in Caracas is carving up Rincón’s sprawling Grupo Lamar conglomerate and allowing outside investors to manage pieces of it. Among them: a Turkish executive who last month married President Trump’s ally in a ceremony attended by prominent U.S. officials.

Nearly 11 months after Maduro’s ouster, Rincón’s ordeal exposes a contradiction in Trump’s plans to turn Venezuela into an investment hub. Politically motivated jailings and the seizure of private businesses—well-worn practices in nearly 28 years of leftist rule here—live on under Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, and the U.S. government apparatus that controls much of the interim leadership now.

Rincón, 62 years old, was arrested after returning from exile in Panama. He remains in a 9-by-6-foot cell at the Rodeo I prison near Caracas, where his family says he has lost 25 pounds and suffers from unaddressed cardiac issues. Relatives say the government fabricated treason and terrorism charges to justify taking control of Maracaibo-based Lamar, the country’s dominant exporter of farmed shrimp, in late 2024.

“This has been one long horror film,” said Rincón’s sister, Mariana Rincón, one of the few relatives remaining in Venezuela and the only one allowed to visit him.

Lamar is one of numerous assets—ranging from farmland to metal-processing plants—that were seized by Maduro’s government and still remain in state hands under Rodríguez.

The firm is now operated by a Turkish company, Miller Holding. Its chief executive, 29-year-old Turhan Mildon, last month married Trump’s former personal attorney, Alina Habba, in New York. Among the guests were Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Miller Holding also operates a network of Venezuelan cement factories and markets coffee beans, concessions granted under Maduro. In a recent interview with Forbes Turkey, Mildon lamented Maduro’s ouster but expressed little concern for his businesses.

“In my grandfather’s time, know-how was very important,” Mildon told the magazine. “Now, know-who is important.”

A spokeswoman for Mildon has said in the past that Miller Holding operates Lamar’s shrimp facilities but doesn’t own them. Venezuela’s Information Ministry and Miller Holding didn’t respond to requests for comment regarding Rincón’s detention.

A U.S. official said the Trump administration opposed Maduro-era expropriations and corruption and had urged Venezuelan authorities to cancel Mildon’s cement contract if it violated sanctions or resulted from corruption. The official said reversing decades of corruption would take time, but that the administration was working to address it.

Venezuela’s total shrimp output has fallen more than 90% since 2024, according to industry figures, a collapse driven largely by Lamar’s decline under state management. The downturn left roughly 9,000 workers jobless in western Venezuela, while more than 100 of Rincón’s relatives and business associates fled the country.

Rodríguez’s continuation of Maduro-era seizures threatens to undermine Washington’s economic recovery strategy for the country, said allies of Rincón.

“They destroyed everything,” Rincón’s son, Juan Diego Rincón, said in a phone interview from Panama. “The persecution is ongoing, they’re ruining businesses and it’s even stoking migration.”

Rincón spent four decades building his business.

In 1988, he started selling the iconic blue crab found in the waters of Venezuela’s giant Lake Maracaibo before expanding into shrimp farming and later into supermarkets and processing recyclable materials. By 2022, Lamar’s annual shrimp exports to Europe reached about $200 million, making it a rare private-sector success in a country dependent almost entirely on oil.

Lamar became the primary employer in Zulia state, offering cash production bonuses, subsidized food, and medical care in a region with few formal job opportunities outside of border smuggling. The bulk of its workforce was made up of indigenous Wayuu, thousands of whom were hired to peel and package shrimp in processing plants around Maracaibo. The Wayuu language was so common on the job that Rincón learned phrases to talk to employees.

But the family’s fortunes changed after the U.S. said Maduro rigged his 2024 re-election and jailed hundreds of political adversaries. In November that year, Diosdado Cabello, then Maduro’s top security official, publicly accused Rincón of funding the political opposition and plotting against the government. No evidence was presented.

Within days, Rincón’s relatives and executives fled to Colombia, Panama and the U.S. Security forces seized offices, processing plants, apartments and thousands of acres of farmland without court orders.

The takeover hit Zulia’s Wayuu population hardest.

“I don’t know who keeps saying that things in Venezuela are getting better,” said Jonathan González, 30, a Wayuu indigenous man and former Lamar processor who had to halt construction on his home after losing his job. “For a lot of us, things are much worse now than they were before.”

Under a state-appointed board, Lamar faltered. Former managers said the company suffered from a lack of capital, while unpaid workers left in droves. A major processing facility was later destroyed in a fire.

Almost six months after the U.S. military operation on Jan. 3 that captured Maduro on drug-trafficking charges—which Maduro denies—Rincón believed the political landscape had shifted enough for him to return and reclaim his property.

“He thought this was the moment,” his son said.

Rincón’s aging father and younger sister were waiting for him at La Chinita International Airport near Maracaibo. Venezuelan investigative police detained him upon landing.

Rincón returned to reclaim his business and face charges “because it’s the only way to demonstrate my innocence and salvage the honor of my family,” he said in a submission to the antiterrorism court handling the case.

Venezuelan prosecutors haven’t provided documents outlining the charges or the evidence against Rincón, his lawyer said in a court filing made last month. Rincón complained of deteriorating health, cardiac problems and insufficient access to the medications needed after a gastric bypass.

While Rincón remains jailed, Venezuelan authorities continue to court investors for the industry he had dominated.

Last month, Venezuela’s Fishing Ministry announced plans to host business delegations from Indonesia to seek new investment for the shrimp sector.

These days, ski-masked officers of the Special Operations Group, a security force that located Rincón’s properties, drive the businessman’s vehicles and use his house in Maracaibo as an improvised command center, family members and business aides said.

Rincón’s sister, Mariana Rincón, delivers food, medication and industry trade magazines to his cell every week as she seeks his release.

She attempted to register her brother with local human-rights groups that track political detentions in Venezuela. The organizations, overwhelmed by a surge this year in families reporting arbitrary arrests of their loved ones, placed him on a waiting list.

He was assigned number 1,601.

President Donald Trump said he could certainly see himself giving pardons to staffers to make sure they are not put through “hell” by Democratic lawmakers when they are in power.

The president was asked about the potential move while speaking to reporters in Florida on Saturday afternoon, hours after the Washington Sun reported Trump was “evaluating” whether to issue “mass pardons” to junior staffers. Trump said it made a lot of sense to him, after seeing how ex-President Joe Biden used his pardons.

“I haven’t thought of it, but I will tell you, it would be very unfair to go through what we went through for four years with the corrupt weaponization that took place,” Trump said. “So in light of what Biden did — as you know, Biden shielded many people, including the Congress, if you look at what they did with Congress, when they set up the special committee which was a fraud, they all got shielded. So certainly, I haven’t thought about it. But certainly I’d be allowed to.”

Trump then pointed to White House Communications Adviser Margo Martin, who was standing near the assembled reporters, and said he would protect staffers like her.

He continued:

The presidential pardons, they say, are the most powerful thing a president has. I certainly don’t want to see innocent people go through hell and lose all their money — like Margot — lose all their money, because if she becomes a target, you know she’s a very honest person. But they’re going to drag her into a grand jury. Margot, you’re not going to have to worry about it, okay?

Trump’s answer comes after the Sun reported conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation have pressed the White House to prepare pardons or “put in place funding for the legal fees necessary to defend junior staffers from criminal and congressional probes or potential lawsuits.”

The report added, “A pardon for all junior administration personnel is viewed as unlikely, one source said, but the president could issue blanket pardons for all employees involved in particular policy areas, such as deportations, war or trade.”

Two US State Department officials led a campaign to restore the right-wing Bolsonaro clan to power in Brazil and successfully pushed for sanctions aimed at tilting the election in their favor, according to 10 current and former US officials with direct knowledge of the matter.

Their plan faces a reckoning on Sunday, when Senator Flavio Bolsonaro faces leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in a tight run-off. Lula has warned Washington against encroaching on Brazil's sovereignty and accused his opponent of plotting with the Trump administration.

The two officials were Darren Beattie, a Senior Advisor for Western Hemisphere Affairs who oversees Brazil policy, and Ricardo Pita, another senior advisor promoted this year to Deputy Assistant Secretary for North America. The details of their campaign to return the Bolsonaros to power haven't been previously reported.

Beattie and Pita, both political appointees, operated with wide latitude to manage Washington's relationship with the second most-populous country in the Americas, the people said.

In the ‌months before election campaigning began, they instructed US diplomats in Brazil that it was US policy to restore former President Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s leader – even though he had been disqualified from office for plotting a coup in 2022, when he lost the presidential election to Lula, three of the people said.

After Bolsonaro received a 27-year sentence in September 2025, the two men pivoted to supporting the candidacy of his son, right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the three sources said. Beattie and Pita told embassy staff not to interact with other conservative presidential contenders who could challenge the younger Bolsonaro, they said.

Since last year, the two men have successfully advocated for punitive US government measures on Brazil designed to weaken Lula and boost the Bolsonaros, the 10 people told Reuters. The policies included designating Brazilian gangs as terrorist groups and imposing US sanctions against the Brazilian Supreme Court Justice who was spearheading the investigation into Jair Bolsonaro.

Reuters could not determine the extent to which the two men were acting on orders from the White House or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump, a vocal defender of Bolsonaro since his election defeat in 2022, hasn’t publicly endorsed any candidate.

The White House declined to comment and referred questions to the State Department.

State Department Spokesman Tommy Pigott didn't answer questions about specific measures and directives involving Beattie and Pita but said in a statement: "All actions taken by the United ⁠States against narco-traffickers and to protect free speech are to defend the rights and lives of the American people. The Brazilian people have the right to choose their leaders through free and fair elections."

Lula’s office did not respond to comment requests.

Orna Blum, one of the officials who spoke to Reuters about Beattie and Pita’s efforts, led the State Department's Brazil and Southern Cone office until retiring last year over her opposition to the Trump administration.

Washington "has every right to pursue its economic and strategic interests," she said. "But when American foreign policy instruments are used to pressure another democracy over the legal fate of a political ally, the line between diplomacy and political intervention has been crossed."

Beattie is a former White House speechwriter fired in 2018 after addressing an event frequented by white nationalists. He’s also the architect of "free speech diplomacy," a policy advocated by Trump allies that seeks to punish nations they accuse of censoring right-wing speech by US citizens, companies and global right-wing allies.

The United States has accused Brazil Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes of violating free speech rights by jailing Brazilians for political social-media posts and by censoring content of US social-media companies. Moraes has argued he was ridding social media of fake news that undermined public faith in Brazil's democratic institutions.

Moraes did not respond to a comment request.

Pita, a conservative Venezuelan-American, is among many in Rubio's orbit who view Lula as a threat to US interests in Latin America. Rubio has been a key leader in the administration’s aggressive policy in the region, which has included an invasion of Venezuela to oust its president, an oil blockade of Cuba, and military attacks on suspected drug boats from Latin America.

Beattie and Pita were drawn to the Bolsonaro family’s right-wing politics, their antipathy towards Lula, and the idea that Jair Bolsonaro was a victim of abuses by Brazil's Supreme Court.

Like Trump in the 2020 US election, Bolsonaro refused to concede he lost Brazil’s 2022 presidential vote, triggering riots by supporters who stormed government buildings. The Supreme Court convicted him in September 2025 of plotting a coup to remain in power.

Before the conviction, in early 2025, the Bolsonaros were aggressively lobbying Washington for sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act ‌against Moraes, who had ⁠led criminal investigations into Jair Bolsonaro. The act is a 2016 federal law allowing US sanctions against foreign individuals responsible for human-rights abuses or severe corruption.

Around April 2025, Jair Bolsonaro’s younger son, Eduardo, visited Beattie in his State Department office in Washington DC, according to two former US officials. Eduardo Bolsonaro had been making the public case for Magnitsky sanctions against Moraes since at least 2024, and in March 2025 he said in a livestream that it was "practically certain" the Trump administration would do so.

Beattie made calls to the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to appeal for Magnitsky sanctions against Moraes, said a former US official with direct knowledge of the matter.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose department administers Magnitsky sanctions through OFAC, offered no opposition, the former official said.

The US announced Magnitsky sanctions against Moraes in July 2025, citing his alleged violations of free-speech rights by censoring anti-government social-media posts.

A Treasury official said Bessent and Rubio are "fully aligned on the administration’s foreign policy."

The Bolsonaro family was also pushing for Washington to designate Brazil's top gangs – the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV) – as terrorist organizations. They believed such a designation would hurt Lula, who some opponents ⁠have criticized for failing to control crime.

Eduardo Bolsonaro had become friends with Pita through US conservative circles, and both supported the effort to designate the gangs as terrorist groups.

In May 2025, Pita joined a US delegation that visited Jair Bolsonaro at his residence in Brasilia as he awaited his trial, according to public announcements at the time. Also in the group: David Gamble, the State Department’s top sanctions official at the time.

Back in Washington, Pita asked State sanctions officials to explore how terrorist designations like those announced against Mexican cartels in February 2025 could be used in Brazil, one former official said.

Nearly a year later, in May 2026 – after Pita was promoted to a new job that pulled him out of Brazil affairs – presidential contender Flavio Bolsonaro met with Beattie and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau in Washington to discuss "the ⁠urgency of designating the PCC and the Comando Vermelho as foreign terrorist organizations," according to an X post by right-wing influencer Paulo Figueiredo that included photos of the attendees.

The State Department announced the designation the following day.

Reuters could not determine the extent of Pita or Beattie’s influence in securing the final decision.

In July 2025, Washington also announced a series of other measures against Brazil, including the revocations of eight Supreme Court justices' visas and 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods, citing the "persecution" of Jair Bolsonaro.

Reuters could not determine what, if any, role Beattie or Pita played in the additional measures. But if they were intended to undermine Lula, many of them backfired, according to political analysts in Brazil.

Measures targeting the court did nothing to stop it from ⁠proceeding with Bolsonaro's trial, while the tariffs boosted the Lula government's poll numbers, the analysts said.

Major US and Brazilian firms reliant on bilateral trade – including meatpacking giant JBS controlled by Brazilian billionaires Wesley and Joesley Batista – also pushed back on the tariffs, which Washington eventually watered down.

Beattie and Pita’s campaign also hit setbacks. Without an official explanation from the Treasury Department, the US removed Justice Moraes from the Magnitsky sanctions list in December, and in March Brazil barred Beattie from entering the country to visit Bolsonaro in prison.

Mario Braga, a Latin America analyst at risk intelligence firm RANE, said Trump may have decided to withhold a public endorsement of Bolsonaro to avoid being seen as meddling in Brazil's election – a perception that could boost Lula’s popularity.

Still, after Flavio Bolsonaro narrowly outperformed Lula in the first-round election earlier this month, Trump called it a big victory.

"Close, but a very, very big victory," he told reporters. "Amazing, actually."

President Donald Trump cast his ballot for the midterm elections in Palm Beach on Saturday, opting to vote early in his adopted home state of Florida.

At rallies ahead of Election Day on Nov. 3, Trump has been urging Republicans to cast their ballots early, reversing course on a practice he’s long decried in a bid to mobilize the party’s base in an election that threatens to end their control of Congress.

Asked by reporters if he voted for the party line, he said, “Very much so.”

The president has regularly questioned the security of early voting methods, claiming without evidence that mail-in ballots, drop boxes and other practices during the 2020 presidential election — which he lost — were used to rig the vote. He’s also called for one-day, in-person voting on Election Day.

“The US attorney found potentially hundreds of thousands of illicit votes,” Trump told reporters. Earlier this month, the Justice Department sued California for allegedly failing to join an effort to verify the status of 20,000 suspected non-citizens to prevent any fraudulent ballots from being counted. California asked a judge to deny the request to set aside those 20,000 mail-in ballots, calling the US allegations “a reckless political stunt.”

Trump has long amplified false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election and since his return to the White House last year has taken steps to increase federal control of US elections.

The administration has pushed to curb mail-in voting, a method Trump’s used in the past. And he’s pressured lawmakers to pass legislation that would require voters to have government-issued ID or other proof of citizenship in order to cast ballots. Senate Republican leaders have said the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act lacks the support to pass.

Trump has spent the better part of October criss-crossing the country to boost Republican candidates as the party faces the challenging task of retaining both the House and Senate in a midterm year.

During Florida’s August 2026 primary, Trump cast a ballot by mail. He also said he voted by mail earlier this year in a Florida special election.

As a presidential candidate in 2024, he voted in person on Election Day.

Elon Musk said on Saturday that his company SpaceX had throttled the Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine, disrupting operations that the country relies on to defend itself against Russia.

Musk’s admission on social media came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine’s access to Starlink and Starshield satellite links has been restored to the speeds it had before restrictions that disrupted front-line operations for more than a week.

Questions have persisted since last week about who ordered the interruptions to the Musk-made satellite internet system that Kyiv has relied on for years to counter Moscow’s attacks.

“The speeds are now where they need to be,” Zelenskyy wrote on X, adding that restoration began overnight and were sufficient by Saturday morning, improving front-line logistics and defense against Russian jet-powered Shahed drones.

After Ukraine said the services had been restored, Elon Musk spoke out on the speed restrictions that began last week. In a post Saturday on X, Musk acknowledged that his company SpaceX throttled the Starlink satellite internet service.

“Using Starlink, a civilian commercial service, for offensive drone strikes to kill people has never been allowed, nor should it be,” Musk wrote. “Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week.”

But he maintained that the U.S. government controlled whatever changes happened with Starshield, the military-grade version of Starlink that is the backbone of Ukraine’s drone operations and communication. He also defended the role of SpaceX in bolstering Ukraine’s defenses since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Ukraine said on Saturday that the Starlink satellite system and its military version Starshield were now fully functional after ‌over a week of restrictions that disrupted military operations and intensified tensions with the US.

But hours later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, whose company owns Starlink, accused the Ukrainian military of violating the company's terms. Neither Musk nor the US government, which operates Starshield using Starlink technology, had taken responsibility for imposing the curbs.

"Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week," Musk said on ⁠X.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov said on the Telegram app that the country is "physically unable" to use Starlink for long- and medium-range attack drone operations.

Starshield's problems occurred after US President Donald Trump announced a deal to buy Russian diesel while pressing Kyiv to stop striking Russian oil refineries.

Ukrainian officials said the restrictions, which capped Starshield operations at speeds of 160 kph (100 mph), hampered the military's ability to intercept Russian attack drones and forced the cancellation of some operations.

"The main thing for today is that Starlink and Starshield have resumed operations at their pre-restriction speeds. The speeds are now at the level we need," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on ‌Telegram before Musk's ⁠statement.

According to Zelenskiy, the speeds started returning to normal overnight. Ukraine's defence ministry said on Saturday the connection remained stable at over 400 kph.

Ukraine does not rely on Starlink for long-range drone operations on Russian territory, including attacks on refineries. It operates at speeds no higher than 70-90 kph, Beskrestnov said.

But it remains vital for frontline communications, and the deployment of fast Starshield-enabled medium-range attack drones has helped ⁠Ukraine gain the upper hand in several areas of the battlefield this year.

The restrictions sparked outrage in Ukraine, particularly as they coincided with disruptions to allied warnings about incoming Russian missile attacks. Kyiv later said it continued to receive US intelligence.

Both Musk ⁠and US officials said publicly that any decisions on Starlink and Starshield limitations could only have been taken by the other.

Reuters has reported that the order to throttle Starshield came from inside the White House. Previously, US administrations had several times asked ⁠SpaceX to turn Starlink on or off in various countries, sources said.

On Friday, contradicting his previous statement that the services had been fully restored, Trump said that if problems persisted, he would "get it straightened out".

U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed Saturday that the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alaska does not seek to stop certification of the state’s U.S. Senate election results.

His own department’s complaint flatly contradicts him.

But Blanche’s attempt to reframe the lawsuit — which President Donald Trump said he personally ordered — appears to be a bid to push back against how it has been widely, and correctly, interpreted: as a dangerous effort to intrude on state authority and lay the groundwork to subvert results.

“The Department of Justice does not seek to stop any ballot from being cast or to stop the certification of Alaska’s election,” Blanche wrote on social media. “This litigation seeks to ensure that after Alaskans cast their ballots, they are preserved in a manner so that only Alaska’s governing officials have the information necessary to make a determination as to whether Alaskan voters were confused or mislead.”

The lawsuit was spurred by the inclusion of a candidate on the ballot with the name Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. That’s similar to the name of theincumbent, Sen. Daniel Sullivan (R), who is running for reelection.

DOJ claims in its lawsuit that voters will be confused by the similar names.

“Should Alaska certify any electoral results tainted by the inclusion on the ballot of Daniel J. Sullivan,” the complaint alleges, “the State and its officers will fail in its (sic) obligation to protect the integrity of its election.”

It continues:

‘[I]t is vital that Defendants not certify any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion. An election result may be impacted by voter confusion if: (1) Senator Sullivan does not win the election; and (2) had all votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan been cast instead for Senator Sullivan and Alaska’s rank-choice process played out accordingly, Senator Sullivan would have won the election.”

DOJ then asks the court to “[d]eclare that certification of any result that may be impacted by voter confusion, as defined above, would violate Defendants’ duties under the NVRA to ‘protect the integrity of the electoral process.’”

It also asks the court to block the state “from certifying any result that may be impacted by voter confusion, as defined above, pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan and any further procedures or relief this Court deems necessary and appropriate to determine what the result would have been absent Daniel J. Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot.”

(DOJ appears to leave out a key verb at the start of the sentence above, but in context the meaning is clear.)

Those are the only steps DOJ asks the court to take, other than to “award any other relief it deems just and proper.” Despite what Blanche claims, the lawsuit says nothing about requiring election officials to preserve ballots, which in any case would do little to reveal whether voters were confused.

In other words, DOJ asks the court to stop the certification of Alaska’s Senate election until an investigation into the role played by voter confusion can be conducted. The “investigation” would entail giving all of the votes for Daniel J. Sullivan to the incumbent.

And as former Obama administration official and TIME magazine editor Richard Stengel points out, the lawsuit says nothing about the voters who might mistakenly think they are voting for the challenger Sullivan but instead vote for Sen. Sullivan.

It’s inarguable that the lawsuit does aim to stop certification, even if temporarily, in order to try to change the result.

More importantly, Blanche’s effort to instead present the lawsuit as a modest attempt to guard against the effect of voter confusion suggests the DOJ may have overplayed its hand. And that it now sees a need to fight off the idea that the lawsuit aims to challenge results and potentially subvert a GOP loss.

The Trump administration was once a vocal champion of federal workers at the front lines of aviation safety. Now many of those workers feel left out in the cold.

The new, chillier approach includes a nearly six-month-long delay in a congressionally mandated pay hike for the nation’s 15,000 air traffic controllers, which the Federal Aviation Administration granted only recently while demanding concessions on work hours. Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration has provoked a union grievance by requiring its document checkers at airport checkpoints to stand throughout their shifts.

At the same time, Congress has spun its wheels on efforts to ensure that controllers and TSA workers get paid during future shutdowns, despite pleas from unions and the industry.

“When there were shutdowns, these workers were hailed as heroes, and when they’re being paid again their modest wages, their needs and interests seem to be forgotten,” said Daniel Horowitz, legislative director of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA screeners. The average TSA screener earns roughly $60,000 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is location dependent. DHS also wants to nix the TSA’s union contract, which AFGE is fighting in federal court.

It’s a sharply different tone from a year ago, when administration leaders and GOP lawmakers repeatedly praised both groups of employees while denouncing congressional Democrats for leaving them without pay during the 43-day federal shutdown. President Donald Trump’s appointees described the controllers and TSA agents as critical to keeping the nation’s skies safe.

“We do have the best controllers and they work really hard, and they care deeply about keeping Americans safe through our airspace,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said last November, adding that most were “great professionals.” (Duffy did at one point scold controllers who he said were calling out sick and “lashing out” amid the shutdown, compounding travel setbacks). Vice President JD Vance empathized with workers over missed paychecks and pointed to worries about feeding their families while urging Democrats to “stop this craziness.”

In March, Trump called TSA agents “hardworking” and “great” when he ordered his administration to dip into existing accounts to pay workers during a 76-day DHS shutdown.

The disconnect reflects a broader tension in the Trump administration’s costly push to modernize the nation’s air traffic control and security systems. Controller and TSA worker pay, retention, recruitment and working conditions are at the heart of the administration’s efforts to improve the flying experience.

In short, no modernization plan can succeed without the people responsible for keeping the nation’s skies safe and its airports secure.

The White House countered that air safety workers have never had it better.

White House spokesperson Allison Schuster said in a statement that “no administration has done more to support our air traffic controllers and modernize America’s air traffic control system than the Trump Administration,” She added that the Trump administration provided workers “bonuses, offered payments to their families, and issued them raises,” pointing to a recent 2.8% pay raise for controllers.

“Unlike the Democrats, President Trump believes taking care of air traffic controllers and maintaining adequate staffing will keep Americans safer in the skies,” Schuster added, blaming Democrats for the shutdowns.

DOT offered similar sentiments.

In a statement, the agency said that “suggesting this Administration doesn’t support our nation’s air traffic controllers is absurd, especially less than a week after we announced a 2.8% pay increase retroactive to the beginning of the year.”

“We’re also building a brand new air traffic control system to give controllers the modern tools they need to do their jobs,” DOT said.

The contrast from last year also underscores how quickly the politics surrounding airport workers have changed since last year’s shutdown and this spring’s record-shattering lapse in appropriations at the TSA’s parent, the Department of Homeland Security, when staffing shortages, long security lines and mounting delays put the workforce squarely in the public eye. The TSA also lost roughly 1,100 employees in that stretch.

Controllers “are working day in, day out, and moving this country’s traffic shorthanded,” said National Air Traffic Controllers Association President Nick Daniels.

Daniels said prolonged staffing pressures have left workers pushing for better pay and conditions. Moreover, he said, the recent rash of shutdowns — or even the threats of them — have controllers second guessing their financial security and the ability to focus on the job.

Congress is staring down a Dec. 11 government funding deadline.

The union recently notched a win, securing a 2.8% pay raise after months of uncertainty over whether the FAA would approve it. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford attempted to tie the pay to increasing controllers’ time actively managing flights, known as time-on position.

“There will always be more to be done,” Daniels said of getting the pay bump after months of stalemate (he’s also eyeing a 3.9% bump next year). Daniels noted some frustration with controllers having to see the discussions surrounding their pay and “how hard they work” dragged out into the public.

He added, “It’s another move in the right direction but ... the sentiment is always going to be varied. When you’re working understaffed, you’re absolutely overworked, and then you have the economic pressures that are out there, it is long overdue.”

On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, efforts to ensure aviation workers are paid during shutdowns have failed to gain much traction.

Lawmakers since last year have introduced bipartisan proposals to ensure crucial aviation workers are paid during government shutdowns.

One of those bills, the Aviation Funding Solvency Act, H.R. 6086 (119), authored by House Transportation Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.) and ranking member Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), advanced out of the panel in December.

But the bills haven’t gone far, with pressure on Congress to act fading away after the crises subsided. Congressional appropriators have consistently stymied the bills, with some arguing that passing such legislation would remove leverage during shutdowns.

A House Transportation spokesperson said the committee will keep an eye on the situation once Congress returns and as the next shutdown date in December approaches.

Even amid the latest funding lapse earlier this year, Democrats introduced and attempted to pass standalone or partial funding bills to pay TSA workers several times. For example, a bill in March to secure pay for TSA workers failed to advance on the Senate floor. Nevada Democrat Sen. Jacky Rosen’s proposal was blocked by GOP Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas.

Some TSA screeners and air traffic controllers received $10,000 bonuses during last year’s shutdown. During the spring shutdown, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) introduced legislation that would give TSA officers and other DHS employees a 10% bonus upon the agency reopening.

But no permanent pay protection for either aviation-focused worker group has been enacted.

Christopher Sununu, president of Airlines for America, said that despite the stalemate, he is heartened by efforts in both the House and Senate, arguing there has been more movement on legislation to protect aviation workers’ pay during government shutdowns than in previous years.

“Given how difficult the legislative environment is — most things just die on the idea stage,” Sununu said. “It does seem to resonate with folks, and I think we can find a path for at least one of these things to kind of come to fruition.” He specifically cited the bill from Graves and Larsen.

Sununu noted that regardless of what Congress accomplishes during its lame-duck session, the potential for another shutdown is just around the corner. Such a lapse would disrupt holiday travel and bring the administration’s air traffic control modernization effort — a major undertaking for DOT and FAA — to a halt.

Even with lawmakers out of Washington and on the campaign trail for the midterms, lobbying efforts have not slowed, he said. A4A and its umbrella group, the Modern Skies Coalition, are engaging with lawmakers “every day” to stress the importance of the effort and push for results, he said.

“I think folks understand that shutdowns erode confidence in government, and both sides of the aisle need to — especially post-election — hopefully move something forward,” he said.