Oklahoma and Arkansas to send 260 Guardsmen to DC
The governors of Oklahoma and Arkansas will send a combined 260 National Guardsmen to Washington, D.C., after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week vowed to bring 500 more to the District after the shooting of two Guard members.
A U.S. Army spokesperson said the number of Guardsmen in the city will begin to tick up over the next several weeks as they arrive, but there’s no target date or deadline to reach 500 new troops.
Oklahoma will send approximately 160 Guardsmen and Arkansas will send roughly 100, joining the 2,200 Guardsmen from eight other states and the District of Columbia.
Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said Tuesday that all 2,200 Guard members in D.C. are now armed and that the additional 500 will also be armed. She confirmed that the Guard in D.C. is now conducting joint patrols with D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department.
-ABC News’ Chris Boccia
Family of fisherman killed in US boat strike files human rights complaint
The family of the Colombian fisherman who was killed in the Sept. 15 U.S. military strike in the Caribbean Sea filed a formal complaint Tuesday with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights alleging the U.S. government illegally killed him.
“From numerous news reports, we know that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was responsible for ordering the bombing of boats like those of Alejandro Carranza and the murder of all those on such boats,” they wrote in their petition.
“Secretary Hegseth has admitted that he gave such orders despite the fact that he did not know the identity of those being targeted for these bombings and extra-judicial killings,” they added.
Carranza’s lawyer Dan Kovalik said the fisherman’s family “has no recourse to adequate and effective remedies in Colombia to obtain redress for the injuries they have suffered due to the actions of the United States.”
Hegseth has maintained that the strikes are all legal and claims that the military has evidence that the boats were carrying drugs.
-ABC News’ Laura Romero
Rand Paul slams White House response to second strike
Republican Sen. Rand Paul characteristically broke with the majority of his GOP colleagues in his reaction to growing accusations of war crimes facing the Pentagon following the reveal of the second boat strike in September, which, according to reports, targeted survivors of an initial strike.
Paul said he had concerns about reports that Hegseth gave an order “that would say, ‘kill them all,’” words the White House denied Hegseth said.
He also said he had concerns about the conflicting explanations about who knew about the details and when.
Most Republican senators responded to repeated questions about the Sept. 2 strikes by sidestepping and saying they support the overall mission in the Caribbean.
Sen. Eric Schmidt told reporters there was “100% legal justification for taking out the narco-terrorist boats.”
-ABC News’ Jay O’Brien, Emily Chang and Allison Pecorin
Trump touts $6.25B donation, says ‘Trump accounts’ are ‘trust funds for every American child’
From the Oval Office on Tuesday, President Donald Trump touted the sweeping $6.25 billion contribution from philanthropic billionaires Michael and Susan Dell that builds on his “Trump account” initiative.
The donations from the Dells will deposit $250 into savings accounts for 25 million children ages 10 and under. They apply to children living in ZIP codes where the median income is below $150,000.
“Trump accounts will be the first, I guess you could say, real trust funds for every American child, allowing family members, employers, corporations, generous donors to contribute money that will be invested and grow over the course of a child’s life, to be used for their benefit after they turn 18,” Trump said on Tuesday.
Flanked by the Dell couple and a few key members of Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump highlighted the fact that the “Trump account” came out of his major policy framework — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that passed this summer.
“Michael and Susan, I want to thank you for this extraordinary act of kindness and patriotism and charity. This is truly one of the most generous acts in the history of our country,” Trump said on Tuesday. “As I mentioned, this gift is being made possible by the largest tax cuts in American history, which our Republican majorities passed earlier this year.”
Trump said that in addition to the Dells’ contribution, he expects “hundreds of major companies to announce plans to contribute to these accounts in the coming months.”
Trump also said that contributions from employers to these Trump accounts will be tax free.
-ABC News’ Elizabeth Schulze and Isabella Murray
Schumer calls on Hegseth to publicly release video of Sept 2 boat strikes
In remarks on the Senate floor Tuesday morning, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to publicly release the full video of the attack on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea on Sept. 2, which killed survivors of a military strike against a suspected drug boat.
“Pete Hegseth should release the full tapes of the Sept. 2 attack. Both the first and second strike. Not a clip. Not some edited or redacted snippet. The full unedited tapes of each strike must be released so the American people can see what happened with their own eyes,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “Now Pete Hegseth said he did nothing wrong. So prove it.”
Schumer called the “failure of leadership” at the Pentagon a “national embarrassment.”
Schumer called for Department of Defense briefings on the strikes and said that Hegseth should be present for those briefings.