President Donald Trump and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry have discussed U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow challenging U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy in next year’s Republican primary, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

The Republican governor’s promotion of a new challenger to Cassidy reflects unease within Trump’s base about the two-term senator. Cassidy voted to convict Trump in Trump’s 2021 impeachment trial over the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And Cassidy, who is a medical doctor, expressed doubts about Trump’s pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the nation’s health secretary before voting to confirm Kennedy.

Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate and have a favorable electoral map in the 2026 midterms to help them keep control. But Cassidy is among several GOP senators up for reelection next year who are facing challenging primaries over past moves to distance themselves from Trump.

For the senator, “the biggest hurdle is going to be the impeachment vote. That’s what he has to overcome. And I don’t think he has the mindset to say, ‘I made a mistake,’” said Eddie Rispone, the Republican nominee for Louisiana governor in 2019 and a Cassidy supporter. “And Louisiana is a big Trump state.”

Landry, a close Trump ally, spoke last month with the president about Letlow as a potential Senate candidate, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation. They were granted anonymity to share contents of a conversation they were not authorized to discuss publicly.

A spokesperson for Letlow declined to comment on a potential campaign for Senate or the discussion between Landry and Trump. Landry’s office declined to comment.

Landry, elected in 2023, has been advocating for Letlow to consider a run, according to the people who confirmed their April conversation about Letlow. A Senate seat would be a safe bet for a Republican given that Trump received 60% of the vote in carrying Louisiana last year.

Republican insiders describe Landry and Cassidy not as close, but as having a cordial working relationship despite a difference in their feelings of loyalty to Trump, which creates some distance between Cassidy and segments of the party base in the state.

“Senator Cassidy delivers conservative results for the people of Louisiana,” Cassidy spokesperson Ashley Bosch said in a statement. “He’s worked hard to support the President’s agenda and we’re confident voters will re-elect him next year.”

Letlow is a three-term Republican representative from northeast Louisiana. She won the seat in a special election in March 2021 after her husband, Luke, had been elected but died of complications from COVID-19.

Letlow sits on the influential House Appropriations Committee. Her district was a mostly rural swath of northeast Louisiana when she arrived in Congress. It has shifted as a result of a redistricting map ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2024 and now also include parts of metropolitan Baton Rouge, where Cassidy lives.

Cassidy already faces one major challenger, Louisiana State Treasurer John Fleming, a former congressman.

Some Republican activists in the state condemned Cassidy for his 2021 vote to convict Trump, a vote Cassidy said afterward he was “at peace” casting.

The state Republican executive committee voted unanimously to censure Cassidy. The Republican committee in Bossier Parish, which includes the city of Shreveport in northwest Louisiana, adopted a censure measure describing Cassidy as “an object of extreme shame” and called for his resignation.

Trump revived his public contempt for Cassidy a year ago after the senator spoke out when the then-former president promised to pardon those convicted in connection with the Capitol riot; Trump did that after taking office in January.

In an April 2024 post on Truth Social, Trump called Cassidy “one of the worst Senators in the United States Senate” and a “disloyal lightweight.”

Louisiana’s new congressional primary election system also could be a wrinkle for Cassidy.

Until the new system was adopted this year, congressional candidates from all parties seeking the same office ran on the same ballot regardless of party affiliation. In these so-called jungle primaries, only a candidate who received 50% of the vote would win the office outright. If no one reached the threshold, the top two finishers would face each other in a runoff.

Next year, only voters who note Republican affiliation on their voter registration — and those who affiliate with no party — will be able to participate in the GOP Senate primary. The effect is seen as a potential challenge for Cassidy, who had benefited from the less-partisan nature of the old system.

“It does tighten it a little bit for him, because you do have the far-right Republicans — for them, it’s going to be hard to forgive him for that impeachment vote,” Rispone said.

Still, Cassidy has a clear fundraising advantage, with more than $7.4 million in his campaign account at the end of the first quarter. Cassidy has also begun laying the campaign groundwork in Louisiana and is expected to announce his candidacy formally in the coming weeks.

And in a sign things might not be as bad with Trump as they were, Cassidy received different sort of recognition from the president at an economic event at the White House this month.

“We have some great people, great senators, here,” Trump said. “Bill Cassidy, thank you, Bill.”

Copyright
© 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.

A Tufts University student from Turkey was released from a Louisiana immigration detention center Friday, more than six weeks after she was arrested walking on the street of a Boston suburb.

U.S. District Judge William Sessions in Burlington ordered the release of Rumeysa Ozturk pending a final decision on her claim that she’s been illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year that criticized the school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza. A photo provided by her legal team showed her outside, smiling with her attorneys in Louisiana, where the immigration proceedings will continue.

“Despite an 11th hour attempt to delay her freedom by trying to force her to wear an ankle monitor, Rumeysa is now free and is excited to return home, free of monitoring or restriction,” attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said.

Even before her release, Ozturk’s supporters cheered the decision, punctuating an earlier news conference held by her attorneys with chants of “She is free!”

“What we heard from the court today is what we have been saying for weeks, and what courts have continued to repeat up and down through the litigation of this case thus far,” Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, told reporters. “There’s absolutely no evidence that justifies detaining Ozturk for a single day, let alone the six and a half weeks that she has been detained, because she wrote a single op-ed in her student newspaper exercising her First Amendment right to express an opinion.”

Appearing by video for her bail hearing, Ozturk, 30, detailed her growing asthma attacks in detention and her desire to finish her doctorate degree focusing on children and social media while appearing remotely at her bail hearing from the Louisiana center. She and her lawyer hugged after hearing the judge’s decision.

“Completing my Ph.D. is very important to me,” she testified. She had been on track to finish her work in December when she was arrested.

Ozturk was to be released on her own recognizance with no travel restrictions, Sessions said. He said she is not a danger to the community or a flight risk, but that he might amend his release order to consider any specific conditions by ICE in consultation with her lawyers.

Sessions said the government had offered no evidence about why Ozturk was arrested other than the op-ed.

“This is a woman who is just totally committed to her academic career,” Sessions said. “This is someone who probably doesn’t have a whole lot of other things going on other than reaching out to other members of the community in a caring and compassionate way.”

A message seeking comment was emailed Friday afternoon to the U.S. Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review.

Sessions told Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Drescher he wants to know immediately when she is released.

Sessions said Ozturk raised serious concerns about her First Amendment and due process rights, as well as her health. She testified Friday that she has had 12 asthma attacks since her detention, starting with a severe one at the Atlanta airport.

“I was afraid, and I was crying,” she said.

Immigration officials surrounded Ozturk in Massachusetts on March 25 and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before putting her on a plane to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana. Her student visa had been revoked several days earlier, but she was not informed of that, her lawyers said.

Ozturk’s lawyers first filed a petition on her behalf in Massachusetts, but they did not know where she was and were unable to speak to her until more than 24 hours after she was detained. A Massachusetts judge later transferred the case to Vermont.

Ozturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.

Ozturk said Friday that if she is released, Tufts would offer her housing and her lawyers and friends would drive her to future court hearings. She is expected to return to New England on Saturday at the earliest.