While the Democrat-induced shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security enters its sixth week, Americans and even some airlines are looking for new ways to apply pressure on Congress to end it.

Most recently, Delta Air Lines announced that it would be revoking key perks afforded to members of Congress until DHS is reopened and Transportation Security Administration employees can get paid. These services include express lanes and dedicated congressional phone numbers to afford members and their staff extra flexibility.

‘I wait in line like everyone else.’

But with no clear end in sight to the DHS shutdown, Republican Rep. Mark Alford of Missouri offered his own defense of the congressional perks.

“The reason these are put into place is because of our irregular schedule in Congress,” Alford told Blaze News during a Republican Study Committee press conference Tuesday. “We don’t know what time of the day we’re going to leave after votes to get back to our district, to work in our district, to see our families.”

RELATED: Delta revokes major travel perk for Congress amid ongoing DHS shutdown

“It’s not like a special favor necessarily that we’re getting. It’s to accommodate a chaotic schedule in Congress so that we can represent the three quarters of a million people that we represent,” Alford added.

Alford went on to offer a financial justification for these congressional benefits, arguing they ultimately save taxpayers money.

“There’s also a discount for congressional travel,” Alford said, “because this is taxpayer money that we’re talking about. It comes out of our members’ representational account, and going through this special office, there is a government fare for these tickets, and I would submit to you that that is in the best interest of the American taxpayer.”

“These offices exist to help facilitate so that we can do our job, not for our pleasure, not to get through security any faster, but to do our job for the American people, and some use these services more than not,” Alford added.

RELATED: Trump adds new condition to ICE airport plan in DHS shutdown fight

Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP via Getty Images

Although Alford defended some of these members-only services, he said it was “disconcerting” to see members of Congress cutting TSA lines and going around security, particularly during the DHS shutdown.

“I personally do not do that,” Alford said. “I wait in line like everyone else, and I think the more the American people see that we are — look, we’re a voice and a vote for three quarters of a million people.”

“We are not better because we have this pin,” Alford added. “We’re not better than anyone else, but we do have a job to do, and to get here and to get back home is part of that job.”

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Los Angeles residents appear to be souring on the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles after various scandals and controversies, according to a new poll.

The Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies/Los Angeles Times poll found that a majority of L.A. residents disapprove of Mayor Karen Bass just two months before she hopes to capture the Democratic nomination for her re-election.

‘That she’s having this much trouble against such a little-known field bodes very, very poorly for her.’

The poll found that Bass is still the front-runner for the nomination, with 25% support of Angelenos, but another 25% were undecided.

Far-left City Councilwoman Nithya Raman came in second place with 17%, and reality TV star Spencer Pratt has taken the third place spot with 14%.

Fifty-six percent of likely voters said they view Bass negatively, and 13% said they had no opinion. Only 31% said they had a favorable opinion of Bass.

“These are very discouraging, if not downright devastating, poll numbers for Karen Bass. She’s running ahead of her opponents only because her opponents are not very well known,” said USC and UC Berkeley political communications lecturer Dan Schnur to KABC-TV.

“That she’s having this much trouble against such a little-known field bodes very, very poorly for her,” he added.

Among the more damaging controversies hurting Bass is her apparent lack of leadership during the 2025 Palisades fires and her attempts to pass the blame onto others afterward. Pratt, whose house burned down in the fires, has been hammering away at Bass and other Democratic leaders over their incompetence.

RELATED: Video: LA Mayor Karen Bass has deranged meltdown over ICE operation near Newsom’s anti-Trump presser

Schnur added that Bass would be doing far worse if other candidates had run for mayor.

“The only thing saving her at this point is that top-tier candidates who were considering running decided to stay out of the race,” he said.

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A man who had been arrested and sentenced for threatening to kill President Donald Trump and others was sentenced to prison and released before allegedly making more threats.

Diedrich Holgate, 47, was sentenced to a year and a half of prison time for the original threats made when Trump was a 2024 candidate.

‘I have the right to kill the president. I want to kill you.’

In 2024, Holgate threatened to kill the president nearly three dozen times in posts on social media and calls and voicemails sent to U.S. Secret Service.

“I will kill everyone,” he said, according to Fox News, citing a federal indictment. “The president is going to die. I don’t care if it is Trump or Biden. I will hang everyone for treason.”

In one call, when he was asked directly who he was targeting, he responded, “POTUS, FLOTUS, and SCOTUS. … I have the right to kill the president. I want to kill you.”

Holgate was also sentenced to supervised release, which he began to serve on Jan. 21 at the Northwest Regional Re-Entry Center in Portland, Oregon. Holgate was released to a halfway house, where he allegedly continued to make threats and was subsequently arrested again.

He was kicked out of the halfway house after being found vaping in a bathroom, according to testimony from Diana Leiseth, his federal probation officer.

Leiseth said Holgate would send her 20 to 40 messages a day and renewed his threat to kill the president and others. One message allegedly said: “Trump’s gonna fkn pardon me or I’ll kill him!!!!”

“I’m done playing — everyone is dead, dead, dead,” the man said to Leiseth, according to her testimony.

Leiseth added that Holgate refused to stay at approved residential housing and didn’t show up to a probation request.

RELATED: ‘Pew pew MAGA’: Florida TikToker threatened to shoot Trump supporters — and faces years behind bars

Photo by Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A man by the same name in Austin, Texas, was arrested in 2017 and allegedly threatened to kill an Austin police officer and his family for violating his constitutional rights.

Holgate was ordered to be held in custody pending a new hearing in the trial.

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Six technically unrelated news stories are all pointing in the same direction, but nobody is noticing the common thread, says Glenn Beck.

Those stories are as follows, Glenn says:

1. Recently declassified documents revealed that the Biden administration had evidence that China was accessing American voter registration data in 2020, but it “was hidden from members of Congress” and “from the people.”

2. “There is so much fraud in this country” that recovering even “half of it” could “balance the budget,” with a new task force now being launched to go after it.

3. The national debt has now surpassed $39 trillion.

4.The Supreme Court is “quietly, patiently reconsidering” the doctrine of qualified immunity — a legal rule that protects government officials from being sued for violating rights unless the violation matches an exactly identical situation already ruled unconstitutional in a previous case.

5. In Las Vegas, the Metropolitan Police Department recently defied a judge’s order to release a suspect with 35 prior arrests and a conviction for involuntary manslaughter onto pretrial GPS monitoring, citing public safety risks.

6. Key allies, like Germany, France, the U.K., and others, are refusing to commit military support to reopen or secure the Strait of Hormuz — a vital global oil shipping route that Iran has heavily disrupted or de facto closed amid the ongoing U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict.

“Every story by itself is dismissible, until one day you realize they were never separate stories at all,” says Glenn

When you zoom out and see the big picture, it becomes clear that these aren’t really news stories at all, he says. “They’re signals; they’re sirens; they’re warnings.”

There are two possibilities when it comes to these six stories, Glenn argues: Either “the government is actually starting to do its job … confronting fraud, confronting corruption, restoring accountability, having our allies take a stand one way or another,” or “the system [is beginning] to lose control of itself.”

“If this is a correction and we lean into it, we fix it, we demand the truth, we rebuild. But if this is collapse, then the most dangerous thing we can do is pretend it’s normal,” he says.

“What is the solution?” he asks.

To those who aren’t connecting the dots between these six stories, Glenn’s advice is blunt: “Wake up and recognize where we are in history.”

To those who do recognize the imminent peril, he gives a choice: “There is a movement to correct [America’s deep-rooted corruption] right now. Are you part of that movement, or are you part of the movement that says, ‘I just can’t do anything about it’?”

“I know which side I’ve chosen,” he says. “I demand … we tear down the corruption; I demand we believe that this country is worth saving and taking the steps every day to preserve our principles in our own families, in our own neighborhood, in our own town, in our own state.”

To hear more of Glenn’s compelling analysis, watch the video above.

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In a last-ditch effort to stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Democrats have been attempting to defund the Department of Homeland Security — and their plan is backfiring miserably.

“Guess what, guys?” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says. “You played yourselves, because now you’ve unleashed ICE agents at airports across the country.”

“The Radical Left Democrats have hurt so many people with their vicious and uncaring ways. What they have done to the Department of Homeland Security, our fantastic TSA Officers, and, most importantly, the great people of our Country, is an absolute disgrace,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“If the Democrats do not allow for Just and Proper Security at our Airports, and elsewhere throughout our Country, ICE will do the job far better than ever done before! The Fascist Democrats will never protect America, but the Republicans will,” he added.

And, as expected, the Democrats are not happy with Trump’s move to place ICE agents at airports around the country.

“The last thing that the American people need are untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports all across the country, potentially to brutalize or in some instances kill them,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told Dana Bash in a segment on CNN.

“He is trying to do what they always do, and any time that they want to make this country less safe and any time that they don’t want to go along with what the majority of Americans decided when President Trump was elected on his agenda of deporting the criminals, the illegals,” Gonzales says, before showing a clip of what TSA lines have looked like across the country.

“You’re affecting a whole hell of a lot of Americans, Democrats. You are restricting their ability to just travel freely and be able to just show up at an airport and go through all the motions and go get to their flight and go wherever they need to go,” she continues.

However, while Jeffries and other Democrats claim it’s the fault of the Republicans, even ABC News is reporting that the blame can be placed squarely on the Democrats.

“Democrats have once again blocked a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security as they continue to insist on reforms to ICE and Customs and Border Protection in exchange for funding the agency,” a post on X from the network reads.

“The same ABC News that likes to call terrorists activists,” Gonzales adds.

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All of the top Democratic candidates running for governor of California accused the University of Southern California and KABC-TV of being racist against the minority candidates after none of them met the criteria to join a debate.

Two Republicans and four Democrats met the standard to appear in a debate scheduled for Tuesday, but some of the lower-tier candidates complained that those who qualified were all white. The criteria is a mix of polling performance and campaign donations.

‘Democrats in this state cannot organize anything.’

The Democrats who qualified for the debate are former Rep. Katie Porter, Rep. Eric Swalwell, billionaire Tom Steyer, and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.

According to the New York Times, the candidates left out pointed to Mahan, a white candidate who would not have qualified but for the millions of dollars he has raised in Silicon Valley, as evidence of racial bias.

“This biased and bigoted action by USC to manipulate the data to exclude every qualified Black, Latino, and API candidate in favor of a less qualified white candidate is shameful,” former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa railed.

“We are a minority-majority state, and the idea that the four candidates of color are not going to be on the stage to bring those perspectives, to really speak to those communities, is really not doing right by the voters,” said former California Controller Betty Yee.

“Criteria used to determine which candidates qualify to participate in a debate must be transparent, fair, and objective,” Porter responded. “I’m disappointed by how USC handled the process for Tuesday’s debate. Candidates and Californians deserve answers.”

“It is a shame that USC has decided to elevate one candidate at the expense of others,” Swalwell replied. “USC, and every host of a gubernatorial debate, should employ fair, objective, and honest criteria for all candidates. I remain hopeful they will do so Tuesday night.”

Steyer also accused USC of coming up with “retroactive standards that elevate some candidates that didn’t meet the initial criteria” in order to exclude other candidates.

Mahan called on the organizers to include four candidates who were excluded and are persons of color: Villaraigosa, Yee, Biden HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.

“The organizers of the USC debate must include these qualified candidates, and I ask all my fellow candidates to support this request,” he wrote.

USC defended the “independence, objectivity, and integrity” of the researcher who created the criteria for the debate and then canceled the debate.

Republican candidate Steve Hilton mocked Democrats after the cancellation.

RELATED: Swalwell surges in California governor’s race — but Republican candidate still leads, says new poll

“It’s another example that Democrats in this state cannot organize anything. … This is a really important debate about the future of our state,” Hilton said. People want to hear from the candidates, especially in such a crowded field, but yet again, the needs of the insiders, the Democrats, come before the needs of the people.”

One recent poll shows Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco taking the lead at 17% and 16% respectively, while Swalwell and Porter tie at 13%. Steyer comes in fifth place with 10% support.

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A sanctuary state governor is refusing to confirm whether he will honor an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer request against an illegal alien accused of fatally shooting a college student.

Sheridan Gorman, an 18-year-old college student at Illinois’ Loyola University Chicago, was attacked at around 1 a.m. on Thursday when she was out on a walk with friends to view the northern lights.

‘We are calling on Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago’s sanctuary politicians to commit to not releasing this criminal illegal alien from jail back into American neighborhoods.’

Jose Medina-Medina, an illegal alien from Venezuela, approached Gorman while wearing a mask and armed with a gun, according to the Department of Homeland Security. When Gorman attempted to flee, Medina-Medina allegedly fired his gun, shooting Gorman. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

The DHS reported that Medina-Medina was apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol agents in May 2023 but was released into the country under the Biden administration. He was again released from custody the following month after he was arrested in Chicago for allegedly shoplifting.

On March 22, the DHS asked Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) not to release Medina-Medina from custody a third time and instead honor ICE’s arrest detainer.

RELATED: College student went to Chicago park to see northern lights — and was lethally shot by illegal alien suspect, DHS says

JB Pritzker. Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

The Federalist reported Monday that Pritzker’s office refused to say whether his administration would honor ICE’s request.

“Our thoughts are with the family, friends, and Loyola University community grieving the senseless murder of Sheridan Gorman,” a spokesperson for Pritzker’s office told the Federalist.

“Violent crime has no place in our streets, and we expect the alleged perpetrator to be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” the spokesperson continued. “The Trump administration needs to stop politicizing heinous tragedies and instead focus on real solutions, like reinstating federal funds to prevent violence that support our public safety efforts.”

RELATED: Parents enraged over adult illegal alien allegedly molesting Virginia high school girls

Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images

Medina-Medina is facing several charges, including first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, aggravated assault, and unlawful possession of a firearm.

“Sheridan Gorman had her whole life ahead of her before this cold-blooded killer decided to end her life. She was failed by open border policies and sanctuary politicians who RELEASED this illegal alien TWICE before he went on to commit this heinous murder,” DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis stated. “We are calling on Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago’s sanctuary politicians to commit to not releasing this criminal illegal alien from jail back into American neighborhoods.”

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