• In a staggering post on social media, Donald Trump wrote that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”, ahead of his 8pm ET deadline for Iran to reopen the strait of Hormuz. The president maintains that if a deal isn’t reached, the US will escalate its bombing campaign to target civilian and energy infrastructure, that would amount to a violation of international law.

• Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, has called Donald Trump an “extremely sick person” in response to the president’s recent post on Truth Social. “Each Republican who refuses to join us in voting against this wanton war of choice owns every consequence of whatever the hell this is,” Schumer added. House Democrats echoed his calls and issued a statement calling for lawmakers to return from recess in order to hold a vote to end the war on Iran. A move that is unlikely to yield any results given the GOP majority in both chambers of Congress.

• But some of the most forceful backlash is also coming from inside Trump’s own coalition. A number of far‑right commentators who once formed the bedrock of his base have broken with him over Operation Epic Fury and his threats to strike bridges and power plants. Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – previously one of Trump’s most reliable allies on Capitol Hill – has joined Democrats in calling for his removal under the 25th amendment. While conspiracy theorist and rightwing broadcaster Alex Jones also urged Trump’s ouster. “You can have a good leader, and they just go crazy,” he said on social media.

• Brent crude has risen above $110 a barrel again, after Donald Trump warned Iran “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not make an agreement. Brent, the global oil benchmark, has see-sawed in volatile markets today, and is now up 0.8% at $110.67 a barrel.

As lawmakers condemn Trump’s comments, saying they are tantamount to the president telegraphing war crimes, my colleagues Joseph Gedeon and Lauren Gambino have more on the implications for international law.

Neither the US nor Iran is a member of the international criminal court, they write, meaning no formal ICC jurisdiction applies.

The more immediate legal framework is the Geneva conventions of 1949 onwards, which both countries have ratified. Article 33 of the Fourth Convention explicitly prohibits collective punishment of a civilian population.

Article 54 of Additional Protocol I – whose core principles are binding as customary international law even on states, like the US and Iran, that never ratified it – prohibits attacks on infrastructure indispensable to civilian survival, with only a narrow exception for objects used exclusively to sustain enemy armed forces.

The US has itself acknowledged this customary obligation, though the adoption of this position came under the Biden administration in 2024. In one formal UN submission, Washington said it treated the fundamental protections of Additional Protocol I as legally binding even without ratification.

House Democratic leadership has issued a statement calling for lawmakers to return from recess to vote to block “this reckless war of choice in the Middle East before Donald Trump plunges our country into World War III”.

Their comments come as Trump’s deadline for Iran to reopen the strait of Hormuz draws nearer. The president has vowed devastating military action that threatens to wipe out a “whole civilization” if the regime fails to reach an agreement by 8pm ET.

“Republicans have enabled and excused Donald Trump’s deeply dangerous and extreme behavior. Enough is enough,” top Democratic lawmakers in the lower chamber said. “It’s time for House Republicans to put patriotic duty over party loyalty and join Democrats in stopping this madness.”

Last month, the House – which has a razor-thin GOP majority – failed to pass a war powers resolution to limit further action in Iran. A similar measure failed in the Senate.

Donald Trump’s threat to eradicate a “whole civilization” if Iran refuses a deal that includes reopening the strait of Hormuz has thrown the country’s political split‑screen into even starker relief.

Republicans and several former officials have praised the administration’s stance in the stalled negotiations with Tehran as overdue decisiveness. Democrats, by contrast, described the president’s latest remarks – startling even by the standards of a leader who routinely escalates his own rhetoric – as grounds for removal.

But some of the most forceful backlash is coming from inside Trump’s own coalition. A number of far‑right commentators who once formed the bedrock of his base have broken with him over Operation Epic Fury and his threats to strike civilian and energy infrastructure. Many accuse him of abandoning his campaign promise to keep the US out of foreign conflicts in the weeks since the US‑Israel war on Iran began.

Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson called the strategy “vile on every level” on Monday’s episode of his online show, saying that “not even a month and a half into the conflict … we’re going to use our military to kill the civilians of this country”.

Marjorie Taylor Greene – previously one of Trump’s most reliable allies on Capitol Hill – has joined Democrats in calling for his removal under the 25th amendment. Conspiracy theorist and rightwing broadcaster Alex Jones also urged Trump’s ouster. “You can have a good leader, and they just go crazy,” he said on social media. “That’s the madness of a king.”

Meanwhile Candace Owens, once a darling of the Maga movement, reiterated her condemnation of the bombing campaign, calling Trump “a genocidal lunatic” and urging Congress and the military to intervene.

2h ago18.29 BST

Andrew Sparrow

Even Nigel Farage now believes that Donald Trump has gone too far. In the past the Reform UK leader has been one of the president’s biggest supporters in the UK. More recently he has started to stress that he does not agree with the president on everything.

But Trump’s latest Truth Social post has pushed Farage over the edge.

During a post-press conference walkabout in Bedworth, a Press Association reporter told Farage what Trump had said in his post and asked for a response. Farage said:

I am quite shocked just to hear that. That is over the top in every single way.

Yes of course he wants to threaten – to get them to the negotiating table. But those words are … they’re way too far.

Donald Trump says the US will bomb Iran’s power plants and bridges if Tehran fails to meet his latest deadline to reopen the strait of Hormuz. The US president says he is “not at all” concerned that such attacks on civilian infrastructure could amount to war crimes and a “whole civilisation will die tonight” if Iran doesn’t agree to a deal.

But will he follow through on the threat? And what could it mean for the war? In today’s edition of The Latest podcast, Lucy Hough is joined by senior international correspondent Julian Borger.

10:08

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested more than 800 people following tips shared by federal airport security officials from the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency through February 2026, according to internal agency data reviewed by Reuters – a figure far above what was previously publicly known.

The leads came from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which supplied ICE with records on more than 31,000 travelers for possible immigration enforcement, the data showed.

Reuters could not determine how many arrests took place inside airports, although the TSA tips would mainly be useful in determining when a person would be traveling.

ICE and the TSA are part of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The agencies have historically shared information related to national security threats, but they began focusing on routine immigration arrests after the start of Trump’s second presidency as part of his mass deportation effort.

The 31,000 traveler records were gathered by TSA’s Secure Flight Program, which was created in 2007 to allow the agency to review passenger information for people who may be on US government watchlists. The program was intended as a counter-terrorism measure, not to track down immigration offenders, according to the regulation outlining its purpose.

The DHS did not respond to Reuters’ questions about the TSA providing passenger information to ICE. But the TSA said that under Trump it “is pursuing solutions that improve resiliency, security and efficiency across our entire system”.

The city of Minneapolis released a video yesterday that undermined the initial ICE account of a shooting involving an agency officer and two Venezuelan men in January.

The video, from a city-owned security camera, captured federal officers chasing one of the men to his residence. Another Venezuelan man who lives there was shot during the confrontation, which eventually led to the suspensions of two federal officers involved in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, the so-called Operation Metro Surge.

Meanwhile, federal authorities in February dropped all charges against the two immigrants and opened a criminal investigation into whether the officers lied under oath about what had happened.

The city released the video after the New York Times, which obtained a copy earlier, reported that the footage raised questions about why it took weeks for the federal government’s case against the two men, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, to collapse. Among other things, though the ICE officer at the center of the case claimed at first that he tussled with both men for about three minutes before firing, the video released on Monday depicted a confrontation lasting about 12 seconds.

The Times reported that federal investigators had access to the video within hours of the 14 January shooting – but did not watch it until nearly three weeks after they had charged the two men.

“The video makes it crystal clear that, just like in other situations during Operation Metro Surge, the federal government’s account of what happened simply does not match the facts,” Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, said in a statement.

More on this story here:

A group of 36 lawmakers says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has created “disappearances” on US soil, due to the “increasingly unreliable” online system used to track people detained by immigration authorities, according to a letter shared with the Guardian.

The lawmakers, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, are urging that the DHS inspector general’s office open an investigation into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “online detainee locator system” (ODLS), which has been used for years by family members, attorneys and journalists to track people in the federal immigration detention system.

“Since January 2025, that system has grown increasingly unreliable,” the lawmakers, including Senator Ben Ray Luján and House representatives Veronica Escobar and Lauren Underwood, say in the letter. “Without a functional locator system, DHS is effectively creating ‘disappearances’ on US soil, and we urge the DHS office of inspector general (OIG) to investigate this matter.”

The scathing letter, submitted to the DHS inspector general office on Monday evening, comes as the Trump administration continues with its aggressive anti-immigrant arrest, detention and deportation practices.

The ICE detention system is made up of a network of large and small facilities, jails, military bases and federal prisons, many of which are privately owned and operated. Often the agency will quickly and quietly shuffle detained immigrants from one facility to another.

ICE created the ODLS in 2010 so family members and attorneys could quickly and accurately track people detained by ICE in its detention network. Before the Trump administration, ICE added people to its locator system within eight hours of their arrival to an ICE facility. But since the Trump administration took office last year, there has been a radical increase of complaints that the ODLS is not working properly.

Read the full report here:

Fox News anchor Brett Baier said on air that he just got off the phone with Donald Trump.

While Baier said the president refused to put odds on whether the US will reach an agreement with Iran, which includes reopening the strait of Hormuz, by this evening’s deadline, Trump said that the 8pm cutoff still stands, reiterating that “if we get to that point, there is going to be an attack like they have not seen”.

Republican senator Ron Johnson said that he hopes Donald Trump’s threats to target energy and civilian infrastructure in Iran is “bluster”.

In an interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday, the Wisconsin lawmaker noted that the president’s vow to launch strikes that could amount to war crimes if the regime doesn’t fails to reopen the strait of Hormuz was concerning. “I do not want to see us start blowing up civilian infrastructure. I do not want to see that. We are not at war with the Iranian people. We are trying to liberate them,” Johnson said.

His comments came before Trump said on Truth Social that a “whole civilization would die tonight”, and an outpour of condemnation from Democratic lawmakers and former officials.

5h ago15.51 BST

Julia Kollewe

Brent crude has risen above $110 a barrel again, after Donald Trump warned Iran “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not make an agreement by 8pm ET.

Brent, the global oil benchmark, has see-sawed in volatile markets today, and is now up 0.8% at $110.67 a barrel.

Democrat Martin Heinrich has joined the chorus of lawmakers decrying the president’s latest social media post – where he writes that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran doesn’t reopen the strait of Hormuz by 8pm ET.

“This man is unhinged,” the New Mexico senator said plainly. Also calling into question Donald Trump’s mental acuity is former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – once a loyal ally of the president who has since soured on the administration and left Capitol Hill.

“25TH AMENDMENT!!!” Greene wrote on social media, in reference to the constitutional provision which includes a section that allows for the replacement of the president in the event of incapacitation. This, however, must be invoked by the vice-president and a majority of the cabinet.

“Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness,” Greene added.

Joe Kent, the former top counter-terrorism official who resigned last month in opposition to the war on Iran, said that Trump’s threats to eradicate Iranian civilization ultimately endanger America.

“The United States will no longer be viewed as a stabilizing force in the world, but as an agent of chaos – effectively ending our status as the world’s greatest superpower,” he wrote on social media. “This would upend our economy and shatter the global order.”

Kent added that the US still has time to “avert catastrophe if Trump finds the courage to pursue serious negotiations rather than reckless rage and destruction”.

A reminder that Kent is the administration’s first major defection over the ongoing war. He resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in March, said that Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation” and blamed Israel for pressuring the US to launch a military operation in his resignation letter. Trump, and several White House officials rebuked Kents claims, and undermined his overall performance.

Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, has called Donald Trump an “extremely sick person” in response to the president’s recent post on Truth Social – in which he said “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran fails to meet his 8pm ET deadline to reopen the strait of Hormuz.

“Each Republican who refuses to join us in voting against this wanton war of choice owns every consequence of whatever the hell this is,” Schumer added.

Other Democrats have slammed Trump’s most recent comments, hours before he promises to follow through on his threat to target civilian infrastructure and power plants in Iran.

Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator who sits on the foreign relations committee, said that Trump’s plan is to “murder thousands of innocent Iranians and hope for a civil war that somehow ends up with the strait of Hormuz reopening”. Murphy also highlightedd the global energy crisis that has spiralled since the war began and oil prices spiked.