Emmanuel Macron has arrived in the UK for a three-day state visit, during which Keir Starmer hopes to secure a “one in, one out” migrant returns deal. The arrangement would allow Britain to return small boat migrants to France in exchange for accepting asylum seekers with a family connection in Britain. A Russian politician has died from suspected suicide on the same day he was fired as transport minister by Vladimir Putin. Roman Starovoyt’s death came amid a corruption probe into the construction of defensive fortifications in the region of Kursk, where he was governor until May 2024 – three months before it was invaded by Ukrainian forces. Former Conservative party chairman Norman Tebbit has died at the age of 94. One of Margaret Thatcher’s most loyal supporters and the most high-profile victim of the IRA’s Brighton bombing in 1984, Tebbit was widely remembered for his unsympathetic response to the 1981 Brixton riots over unemployment. “I grew up in the ‘30s with an unemployed father,” he said. “He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work.”

Trump’s “private army”

Donald Trump is “ushering in America’s ICE age”, says Edward Luce in the FT. The president has raised the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget to some $37.5bn a year, making it the country’s best-funded law enforcement agency. Agent numbers will double, and a nationwide apparatus of camps is being set up to incarcerate 116,000 deportees at a time and process a million people a year. Last month, the Supreme Court removed lower courts’ ability to limit Trump’s actions, which means ICE can snatch “pretty much whomever they like” off the streets. The agency’s internal watchdog has been scrapped; agents are not required to remove face masks or show any ID. Trump’s sweeping immunity from “official” presidential acts means ICE is now his de facto private army. “Welcome – or rather, not welcome – to America 2025.”

The deportation push is smarter politics than people think, says Mary Harrington in UnHerd. One of the big questions about Trump’s second term was how he would balance the two sides of his winning coalition on the “most salient” issue of the election: immigration. On the one side are the Silicon Valley tech bros desperate to bring in more high-skilled immigrants; on the other are the MAGA base who don’t want foreigners taking their jobs. Trump has already expressed enough support for H1B, the visa for high-skilled workers, to keep the deep-pocketed tech guys onside. His enormous boost to ICE is an attempt to fulfil his promise to the MAGA faithful. In other words, he is trying to deliver the “some immigration, but the high-skilled kind only” programme that pretty much every political party promises but never delivers. If he gets this right – retaining the trust of MAGA without bankrupting the country – he could be “unstoppable”.