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The House Committee on Oversight and Reform convened Thursday to question acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin K. McAleenan about children held in migrant detention facilities and border security.

The Senate took another small step to improve election security Wednesday evening, even as there is no plan for a broader debate on the floor.

As the chamber was closing for the evening, senators passed by unanimous consent a bipartisan bill out of the Senate Judiciary Committee designed to make sure that hacking election systems is actually a federal crime.

ANALYSIS — First, it was the lights. Next, it was the price of — perceived — bad advice. And Wednesday night, it was the months-old end to his canned campaign stump speech.

President Donald Trump, the New York-based real estate executive whose penchant for delegating has faded since taking office, isn’t exactly hiding his annoyance with his reelection campaign advisers.

President Donald Trump on Thursday, in a rare move, broke with his supporters one day removed from a Greenville, N.C., crowd chanted “Send her back!” after he criticized Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar.

Trump had whipped the Pitt County crowd into a frenzy by calling Democrats “socialists” and accusing Omar of “vicious, anti-Semitic screeds.”

The National Republican Congressional Committee chairman said it was not acceptable that the crowd at President Donald Trump’s rally Wednesday chanted “send her back” about a Muslim congresswoman who was born in Somalia.

But Rep. Tom Emmer declined on Thursday to say whether Trump’s rhetoric could damage GOP efforts to win back the House next year. He also said Republicans were unprepared for health care attacks last year, but next year will be focus on the impact of Democrats’ calls to expand Medicare to cover more people.

Seventy demonstrators from a Catholic coalition were arrested Thursday in the Russell Senate Office Building as they protested the conditions migrants are being held in at detention facilities abutting the U.S. southern border.

The protest was organized by several faith-based organizations, including Faith in Public Life, Faith in Action and Sisters of Mercy of the Americas. Catholic priests, nuns, and lay members converged on Capitol Hill to put pressure on Trump administration and lawmakers in Congress to end “the immoral and inhumane practice of detaining immigrant children.” 

Updated 12:46 p.m. | The House voted 231-199 Thursday to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour incrementally over six years, but the Democratic effort was almost derailed by divisions between progressives and moderates.

Progressives on Wednesday had issued a last-minute warning to their moderate colleagues not to help Republicans make any last-minute changes to the bill through the procedural maneuver known as a motion to recommit, or MTR. If moderate Democrats helped the GOP add what the progressives considered poison pill language to the measure, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus were prepared to vote against it, the group’s co-chairs, Reps. Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal, said. 

House members suggested Wednesday that Facebook Inc.‘s proposed cryptocurrency could be deemed an exchange-traded fund, a currency or a commodity, all of which could require some degree of regulatory oversight.

“What we’re struggling with is: What are you?” said Democratic Colorado Rep. Ed Perlmutter summing up a four-hour House Financial Services Committee grilling of a company executive about the proposed cryptocurrency known as Libra.

Three senior Senate Democrats are pressing the U.S. Secret Service on whether security has been beefed up at President Donald Trump’s Florida and New Jersey resorts after a 33-year-old Chinese woman talked her way into his Mar-a-Lago property while he was there.

Yujing Zhang, 33, pleaded not guilty on charges of trespassing and lying to U.S. Secret Service agents after being arrested March 30 at the president’s Florida resort. When searched, she was found carrying a pair of passports, four mobile devices, a laptop computer, a thumb drive allegedly containing malware and one external hard drive.