The Trump administration placed a statue of Christopher Columbus on White House grounds over the weekend, doubling down on its efforts to commemorate the 15th-century explorer.

“As we celebrate our Nation’s 250th anniversary of independence, the White House is proud to honor Christopher Columbus’s legendary life and legacy with a well-deserved statue on the White House grounds,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero, and President Trump will ensure he’s honored as such for generations to come.”

The statue is a replica of the one that used to sit in Baltimore’s Little Italy, according to John Pica, a Maryland lobbyist and president of the Italian American Organizations United. In 2020, after the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer and a reckoning on racial justice issues in the U.S., protesters pulled the statue down and hurled it into the city’s Inner Harbor.

The marble statue depicted Columbus facing east towards the sun, and was dedicated by former Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer and President Ronald Reagan in October 1984.

Soon after, Pica, who also has served as a Maryland state senator, said his group hired divers to fish pieces of the statue out of the harbor. They raised money through grants and private contributions to hire a Maryland sculptor to rebuild it, Pica said.

The replica had been finished for a few years and sat in storage until Pica got a call last week that the White House wanted the statue. The statue was installed around 2 a.m. Sunday morning, he said, and it is on loan to the White House until the end of Trump’s term.

“It’s a place where it can peacefully shine and be protected,” he added.

“It’s a source of pride for Italian Americans,” Pica said. “Christopher Columbus, notwithstanding the controversy around him, is a symbol of pride and adventure for Italian Americans.”

Pica said he understands the hesitancy around Columbus’ legacy. In a way, he said, Italian Americans are “stuck” with Columbus.

“We don’t raise a glass of wine to Christopher Columbus on Columbus Day,” Pica said. “We celebrate our heritage. We don’t have Columbus celebrations. We have Italian American celebrations and Italian heritage celebrations. It’s just Columbus happens to be the symbol.”

The statue is not the administration’s first attempt to shine a favorable light on the controversial figure.

Last year, the Trump administration issued a proclamation commemorating Columbus Day, and took a jab at people who have criticized the explorer.

“Outrageously, in recent years, Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage,” the proclamation read. “Before our very eyes, left-wing radicals toppled his statues, vandalized his monuments, tarnished his character, and sought to exile him from our public spaces.”

Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which is not an official federal holiday but is celebrated by cities and states across the country, previously had been recognized by the Biden administration.

Members of the public offer mixed reactions to the statue

On Monday morning, groups of schoolchildren, tourists and locals passed by the White House and offered differing opinions of the statue.

The statue wasn’t visible to the public because of construction and fences walling off the area. But when Ivone Sagastume, a first-generation Guatemalan American, heard about the new statue, she was brought to tears. To her, she said, the statue is another way the Trump administration is dividing the country.

“We as a nation have fought for unity and for respect of other cultures,” Sagastume, 35, said. “That symbol is just going to destroy that even more, it’s just destroying what this country was built on.”

Gerald Horne, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Houston, said that reaction to the statue makes sense.

“Statues are political statements and those who have objected to the statue of Christopher Columbus are objecting to his role in helping to ignite genocide against the Indigenous population, of being an enslaver himself,” Horne said.

Middle school history teacher Scott Silk, 57, looked out at the White House with a group of students from San Diego behind him.

“For so many people in the United States, Christopher Columbus is a symbol of racism and the oppression of native peoples,” he said.

He said if he and his students could see the statue, he would ask them to reflect on what it means.

But others, like Martha Castillo, a tourist from San Diego, Calif., said it’s important to remember American history.

“I think it’s a good idea to have it here,” Castillo, 55, said. “This is a historic place and I think it should be here in the White House.”

Peter Diaz, 47, traveled from Miami, Fla. to explore the city’s capital. Diaz said the country has “bigger problems” than a statue.

“How many statues do we have in every city? In every state?” he said. “Are those really the issues that we care about? Don’t you think we have to think about our kids?”

Travelers are facing long waits at airport security checkpoints as the partial government shutdown continues to strain staffing for Transportation Security Administration workers. About 50,000 T.S.A. personnel have been working without pay for over a month, and hundreds have quit or called out of work.

On Monday, President Trump deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to some U.S. airports, saying that they would help ease long security lines. By Monday afternoon, the lines at the Atlanta, LaGuardia and Newark airports had become so long that those airports removed wait time estimates from their websites. Atlanta’s airport advised passengers to allow for at least four hours for security screenings.

Here are the latest available wait times at select major airports across the country.

A Chicago man arrested for allegedly gunning down a Loyola University student was in the country illegally and captured in part because of his “distinct” limp, officials said Monday.

Sheridan Gorman, 18, was killed shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday near Tobey Prinz Beach Park, less than a mile from campus, police said.

Jose Medina, 25, was arrested Friday night and booked on suspicion of murder, attempted murder and other gun-related charges in connection with the fatal shooting of Gorman, who was from the New York City suburb of Yorktown Heights.

Medina’s scheduled court appearance on Monday was delayed after the defendant was taken to the hospital, prosecutors said. The nature of Medina’s injury or illness was not immediately disclosed.

The suspect wore black clothes and a black mask when he allegedly shot Gorman in the back in the early morning hours of Thursday, according to a Chicago police arrest report released on Monday.

Witnesses described and nearby security cameras showed the suspect “walking with a distinct limp and slow gait,” according to the report.

Cameras then caught Medina entering his apartment house on N. Sheridan Road, and a building engineer identified the suspect as a resident, the police report said.

Medina had been previously “apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol and released into the country,” according to a Department of Homeland Security statement.

The suspect was released again on June 19, 2023, following a shoplifting arrest in Chicago, federal officials said.

Gorman was “failed by open border policies and sanctuary politicians,” DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement.

The report didn’t make clear what, if any, motive the suspect might have had for the attack.

“We are gravely disappointed by the policies and failures that allowed this individual to remain in a position to commit this crime,” a statement from Gorman’s family said.

“When systems fail — whether through release decisions, lack of coordination, or unwillingness to act — the consequences are not abstract. They are real. And in our case, they are permanent,” the family said.

It wasn’t immediately clear on Monday if Medina had hired or been appointed a lawyer to speak on his behalf.

Gorman’s slaying could take center stage in the nation’s ongoing debate on immigration in the same manner as Georgia nursing student Laken Riley’s murder in 2024.

The suspect in her slaying, Venezuelan citizen Jose Antonio Ibarra, illegally entered America in 2022 near El Paso, authorities have said.

The Trump administration frequently invokes Riley’s name in its justification of mass deportations and other anti-immigration actions.

Riley’s family has asked that their loved one’s name not be used in this public debate.

“I’d rather her not be such a political, how you say — it started a storm in our country,” father Jason Riley told NBC’s “TODAY” show a month after his daughter’s death, “and it’s incited a lot of people.”