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Secret Service Told Trump It Needs to Bolster Security if He Keeps Golfing
The acting director of the Secret Service told former President Donald J. Trump that significant additional security arrangements and planning would be needed if he wanted to continue safely playing golf, according to three people with knowledge of their conversation.
The agency’s acting director, Ronald L. Rowe Jr., made the recommendation at a meeting with Mr. Trump on Monday afternoon in the former president’s office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla.
The meeting came just 24 hours after a second apparent assassination attempt on the former president in the span of just two months. And it also comes at a time when, behind the scenes, tensions between the Trump campaign and the Secret Service have been escalating.
Mr. Trump asked Mr. Rowe whether it was safe for him to keep playing golf, one of the people said. Mr. Rowe discussed the difficulties of securing sprawling golf courses near public roads and said that some of Mr. Trump’s courses were easier to protect than others, one of the people said.
It is unclear what changes Mr. Trump will make to his golf schedule after the meeting, and some people in Mr. Trump’s orbit are frustrated at any notion he might have to cut back on his weekly activity. They questioned why President Biden was able to visit open beaches but Mr. Trump should have to restrict his golf, especially given that other former presidents regularly play the sport.
However, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden do not receive the same level of security. One of them is a sitting president and one is a former president. Mr. Trump’s level of Secret Service protection reduced after he left the White House. But since the first attempt on Mr. Trump’s life in July in Butler, Pa., both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have raised concerns about the former president’s protection, given the current intensity of threats. Mr. Biden has called on the Secret Service to provide whatever additional resources are required to keep Mr. Trump safe.
Golf remains more than a pastime for Mr. Trump — it’s a major part of his identity as well as a way of socializing and a release valve as he faces a presidential campaign and ongoing legal woes.
The authorities said the suspect in the latest case, Ryan W. Routh, hid for 12 hours on Sunday near the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. After a Secret Service agent spotted Mr. Routh poking the barrel of a gun through bushes on the course’s perimeter, that agent opened fire, leading Mr. Routh to run to his car, officials have said.
Mr. Routh left behind a semiautomatic rifle, a scope, two backpacks and a Go-Pro camera, which suggested he planned to film an intended shooting, officials said. The police pulled him over on the side of Interstate 95 about 45 minutes after a witness, who saw him fleeing, photographed his license plate.
In their meeting on Monday, Mr. Rowe told Mr. Trump that it was difficult to secure his sprawling golf courses because they have so much open space, one of the people briefed on the meeting said.
The courses are close to public roads and the fact that photographers, using long-range lenses, can often capture Mr. Trump on his greens and fairways suggest that a skilled gunman might be able to get a clear line of sight on him. Mr. Trump raised some of these concerns himself in the meeting with Mr. Rowe, one of the people with knowledge of the meeting said.
Mr. Rowe told Mr. Trump that the Secret Service views the golf course at Joint Base Andrews as easier to secure than some of his courses, because it’s a military course, two of the people said. Barack Obama frequently played there during his presidency.
Given Mr. Trump’s campaign schedule, which is expected to be busier as the November election draws near, it is unclear how much golf he will be able to play in the final 49 days, an adviser said.
A campaign spokeswoman, Danielle Alvarez, declined to comment on Monday’s private briefing. She noted Mr. Trump’s Sunday post on social media, in which he praised the Secret Service and law enforcement.
“It was certainly an interesting day!” Mr. Trump wrote on his social-media platform Truth Social, adding in all-caps, “The job done was absolutely outstanding.”
In a private conversation shortly after the assailant disrupted his game, Mr. Trump told Senator Lindsey Graham that his Secret Service team had been “awesome,” Mr. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, later recalled.
But while Mr. Trump has repeatedly praised the agents on his personal detail since the first assassination attempt in July, his team has complained that the agency has not provided the former president with the level of resources the campaign has requested.
A spokesman for the Secret Service said that Mr. Rowe declined to comment on private conversations involving someone the agency protects.
Mr. Trump owns or leases a number of courses, including three in Florida, as well as one in New Jersey, one in Westchester County in New York, one in Sterling, Va., two courses in Scotland and one in Ireland, and a new one in the Middle East. He plays every week and takes great pride in it, describing it as his main form of exercise.
Aides to Mr. Trump have described golf as an important form of relaxation for him. When he was cooped up in a Manhattan courtroom for his hush-money trial earlier this year, his advisers were eager for him to spend as much time as possible outdoors on his golf courses.
As president, Mr. Trump often used his Virginia club, and sometimes took lawmakers out on the golf course with him. Since leaving the presidency, Mr. Trump has played his courses with sports figures, donors and supporters, and mingles openly with people in the club dining rooms. The golf courses have been one of Mr. Trump’s steadiest streams of income.
After the first assassination attempt in July, when a 20-year-old man, Thomas Crooks, came within inches of killing Mr. Trump at a rally in Butler, Mr. Trump told allies that the Secret Service had concerns about him playing golf. But Mr. Trump continued to play.
The Secret Service has come under harsh scrutiny over security lapses that allowed Mr. Crooks to crawl onto a warehouse rooftop at the July 13 rally in Butler and fire off eight rounds at Mr. Trump, wounding his ear and killing a spectator in the crowd behind him. The agency appears to have narrowly averted another shooting at Mr. Trump on Sunday by posting agents ahead of the former president to scout out his next holes on the golf course. Agents were able to spot and shoot at the would-be assailant before he could fire his own weapon through the shrubbery.
The alleged assailant, Mr. Routh, has been known to U.S. authorities in recent years. A contractor and occasional social activist, Mr. Routh has a significant criminal record, including a 2002 conviction in North Carolina for possessing a weapon of mass destruction, which court records describe as explosives with a blasting cap and detonation cord.
Mr. Trump has also been the target of foreign assassination plots, particularly from Iran. U.S. officials obtained information about an Iranian plot to assassinate Mr. Trump in the weeks ahead of the Butler rally, although the plot did not appear connected to the shooting that took place.
The former head of the Secret Service, Kimberly A. Cheatle, resigned her post amid widespread criticism of the agency over the Butler attack.
The acting director of the Secret Service, Mr. Rowe, said in a Monday news conference that “the protective methodologies of the Secret Service were effective yesterday,” but he also made it clear that the agency did not search the golf course’s perimeter before Mr. Trump began his round.
“The president wasn’t even really supposed to go there,” Mr. Rowe said. “It was not on his official schedule.”
But it is well-known that Mr. Trump frequently plays golf at his course in West Palm Beach when he’s staying at Mar-a-Lago. It remains unclear why no perimeter search was conducted.
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What to know about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release from immigration custody
BALTIMORE — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose mistaken deportation helped galvanize opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, was released from immigration detention on Thursday, and a judge has temporarily blocked any further efforts to detain him.
Abrego Garcia currently can’t be deported to his home country of El Salvador thanks to a 2019 immigration court order that found he had a “well founded fear” of danger there. However, the Trump administration has said he cannot stay in the U.S. Over the past few months, government officials have said they would deport him to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana and, most recently, Liberia.
Abrego Garcia is fighting his deportation in federal court in Maryland, where his attorneys claim the administration is manipulating the immigration system to punish him for successfully challenging his earlier deportation.
Here’s what to know about the latest developments in the case:
Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran citizen with an American wife and child who has lived in Maryland for years. He immigrated to the U.S. illegally as a teenager to join his brother, who had become a U.S. citizen. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from being deported back to his home country.
While he was allowed to live and work in the U.S. under Immigration and Customs Enforcement supervision, he was not given residency status. Earlier this year, he was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, despite the earlier court ruling.
When Abrego Garcia was deported in March, he was held in a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison despite having no criminal record.
The Trump administration initially fought efforts to bring him back to the U.S. but eventually complied after the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in. He returned to the U.S. in June, only to face an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. Abrego Garcia was held in a Tennessee jail for more than two months before he was released on Friday, Aug. 22, to await trial in Maryland under home detention.
His freedom lasted a weekend. On the following Monday, he reported to the Baltimore immigration office for a check-in and was immediately taken into immigration custody. Officials announced plans to deport him to a series of African countries, but they were blocked by an order from U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland.
On Thursday, after months of legal filings and hearings, Xinis ruled that Abrego Garcia should be released immediately. Her ruling hinged on what was likely a procedural error by the immigration judge who heard his case in 2019.
Normally, in a case like this, an immigration judge will first issue an order of removal. Then the judge will essentially freeze that order by issuing a “withholding of removal” order, according to Memphis immigration attorney Andrew Rankin.
In Abrego Garcia’s case, the judge granted withholding of removal to El Salvador because he found Abrego Garcia’s life could be in danger there. However, the judge never took the first step of issuing the order of removal. The government argued in Xinis’ court that the order of removal could be inferred, but the judge disagreed.
Without a final order of removal, Abrego Garcia can’t be deported, Xinis ruled.
The only way to get an order of removal is to go back to immigration court and ask for one, Rankin said. But reopening the immigration case is a gamble because Abrego Garcia’s attorneys would likely seek protection from deportation in the form of asylum or some other type of relief.
One wrinkle is that immigration courts are officially part of the executive branch, and the judges there are not generally viewed as being as independent as federal judges.
“There might be independence in some areas, but if the administration wants a certain result, by all accounts it seems they’re going to exert the pressure on the individuals to get that result,” Rankin said. “I hope he gets a fair shake, and two lawyers make arguments — somebody wins, somebody loses — instead of giving it to an immigration judge with a 95% denial rate, where everybody in the world knows how it’s gonna go down.”
Alternatively, the government could appeal Xinis’ order to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and try to get her ruling overturned, Rankin said. If the appeals court agreed with the government that the final order of removal was implied, there could be no need to reopen the immigration case.
In compliance with Xinis’ order, Abrego Garcia was released from immigration detention in Pennsylvania on Thursday evening and allowed to return home for the first time in months. However, he was also told to report to an immigration officer in Baltimore early the next morning.
Fearing that he would be detained again, his attorneys asked Xinis for a temporary restraining order. Xinis filed that order early Friday morning. It prohibits immigration officials from taking Abrego Garcia back into custody, at least for the time being. A hearing on the issue could happen as early as next week.
Meanwhile, in Tennessee, Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty in the criminal case where he is charged with human smuggling and conspiracy to commit human smuggling.
Prosecutors claim he accepted money to transport, within the United States, people who were in the country illegally. The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee for speeding. Body camera footage from a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer shows a calm exchange with Abrego Garcia. There were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling. However, Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving with only a warning.
Abrego Garcia has asked U.S. District Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw to dismiss the smuggling charges on the grounds of “selective or vindictive prosecution.”
Crenshaw earlier found “some evidence that the prosecution against him may be vindictive” and said many statements by Trump administration officials “raise cause for concern.” Crenshaw specifically cited a statement by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on a Fox News Channel program that seemed to suggest the Justice Department charged Abrego Garcia because he won his wrongful-deportation case.
The two sides have been sparring over whether senior Justice Department officials, including Blanche, can be required to testify in the case.
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Afghan CIA fighters face stark reality in the U.S. : Consider This from NPR
A makeshift memorial stands outside the Farragut West Metro station on December 01, 2025 in Washington, DC. Two West Virginia National Guard troops were shot blocks from the White House on November 26.
Heather Diehl/Getty Images
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Heather Diehl/Getty Images
They survived some of the Afghanistan War’s most grueling and treacherous missions.
But once they evacuated to the U.S., many Afghan fighters who served in “Zero Units” found themselves spiraling.
Among their ranks was Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the man charged with killing one National Guard member and seriously injuring a second after opening fire on them in Washington, D.C. on Thanksgiving Eve.
NPR’s Brian Mann spoke to people involved in Zero Units and learned some have struggled with mental health since coming to the U.S. At least four soldiers have died by suicide.
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.
This episode was produced by Erika Ryan and Karen Zamora. It was edited by Alina Hartounian and Courtney Dorning.
Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
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Video: Behind the Supreme Court’s Push to Expand Presidential Power
new video loaded: Behind the Supreme Court’s Push to Expand Presidential Power
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