Mark Morgan, a veteran FBI agent who was in charge of the US Border Patrol during the final days of the Obama administration, has been chosen by President Donald Trump to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“Mark is a true believer and American patriot,” Trump tweeted on Sunday. “He will do a great job!”

Morgan will lead ICE, a federal agency under the Department of Homeland Security umbrella responsible for, as Vox’s Dara Lind has explained, “identifying, detaining, and deporting people in the US who have violated immigration law.”

Trump had nominated his former acting ICE chief, Ron Vitiello, to lead the agency, but withdrew that nomination last month, saying Vitiello was no longer a good fit because “we’re going in a tougher direction.”

As the leader of Border Patrol, Morgan was criticized by the union representing patrol officers for being unsuited to executing Trump’s vision for the US-Mexico border.

In November 2016, the executive board of that union wrote an op-ed for the far-right website Breitbart calling Morgan a “disgrace,” citing, in particular, congressional testimony during which he said supported immigration reform. In 2017, Morgan said he was asked by his superiors to leave his post as Border Patrol chief, and he ultimately resigned.

More recently, Morgan has made it clear he is onboard with Trump’s immigration policies.

In mid-April, Morgan appeared on Fox News, and was vocal in his support for Trump’s plan to send detained immigrants to “sanctuary cities,” or cities that have said they will not cooperate with federal immigration officials.

“I’ve been there,” Morgan said. “The border patrol, ICE, their facilities are overwhelmed, the faith-based organizations and other non-governmental organizations are overwhelmed. They have no choice. They’re going to have to start pushing these individuals out. Shouldn’t we kind of share the burden throughout the country?”

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in early April, Morgan explained what he thought the president meant by “a tougher direction.”

“Here’s phase one of what ‘tougher’ looks like, in my opinion,” Morgan said. “They have to stop expecting that Congress is going to do their job. In the immediate, we have to do something — even if we lose in the courts, we still gotta do something to stop the incentive [to immigrate].”

Trump has recently purged a number of Homeland Security officials, including Vitello and former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen.

Vox’s Matt Yglesias wrote last month about the purge:

All of this adds up, in theory, to an even harder line from the White House on immigration. But what it amounts to in practice is not clear.

Trump is upset that his administration is not halting the flow of asylum seekers. But his only alternative to his own failed tough policies is to say that we need tough policies. So officials are being fired for no clear reason. (Trump’s only idea for negotiating with either congressional Democrats or other regional governments is more bluster.)

The president is frustrated about how little progress he’s making on a signature issue, but also apparently unwilling to try to resolve that frustration by actually doing anything different.

Whether Morgan will be able to execute on Trump’s vision remains to be seen, although his recent rhetoric suggests he is more than willing to give doing so his best effort. Before he can take command of ICE, however, he must be formally nominated to the post, and be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate.

The cold open began with a nod to Attorney General William Barr deciding to skip his scheduled appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, with an announcer saying the SNL cast decided to depart the “depressing” world of politics in favor of “the two things all Americans can get behind.”

Bringing back the tried-and-true Celebrity Family Feud format, Kenan Thompson returned as Steve Harvey “of House Mustache” to host teams made up of Avengers and Game of Thrones characters.

First, Thompson introduced the Avengers team: Thor (Alex Moffat), the “sexiest man at a Renaissance Fair;” Thanos (Beck Bennett) or “swole Grimace;” Okoye (Ego Nwodim) from Wakana or “Okie-dokie;” and Groot (Leslie Jones).

When it came time for the Westeros characters, Thompson had to take a swipe at the last episode, which many noted was difficult to see because it was so dark.

“I gotta be honest, I didn’t see the last episode,” Thompson said. “I watched it, but I couldn’t see it. You know it’s dark when you can’t even see the white people,” he said.

Representing George R. R. Martin’s world were: Brienne (Kate McKinnon), Tormund (Mikey Day), Melisandre (Cecily Strong), and Bran (Kyle Mooney).

The first match-up featured Thor versus Brienne, who were tasked with naming things that would appear on a bucket list.

McKinnon’s Brienne buzzed in first, saying she has “Jamie Lannister, one night, three hands, no rules” on her bucket list. Thor’s bucket list included reforming Asgard’s Rainbow Bridge and rebuilding Valhalla, which Thompson abbreviated to “some kind of white nonsense” and the Feud judges further shortened to “travel,” something that appeared on the board. So the game swung over to Thanos and the Avengers.

Thanos’ bucket list included getting off HGH, while Okoye wanted to just put on sweat pants and watch eight hours of Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club. Groot just said, “Bitch, I’m Groot.”

None of those things appeared on the board, so the game was tossed over to team Westeros to win, with Arya Stark (Melissa Villaseñor) showing up at the last minute.

“Well, Steve, as a battle approaches, and I stare into an endless night, there is but one thing a girl must do,” Arya said.

“Oh, say no more. I saw what you did in that episode,” Steve said. “Show me … getting that booty!”

With that, the Game of Thrones team took the top answer on the board, setting themselves up for a win.

Thompson cut things off there, promising a Jocedi-themed duet with the Black Panther.

Unfortunately, the cast ended the cold open there, leaving all of us to imagine Steve Harvey and T’Challa harmonizing their way through “Come and Talk to Me.”

President Donald Trump seemed to spend a lot of time Saturday morning on Twitter, retweeting Islamophobic content, as well as sharing tweets defending far-right activists recently banned from Facebook.

The president retweeted a video from Deep State Exposed, an alt-right account that contains numerous Islamophobic tweets and conspiracy theories, including some linked to QAnon. The account’s author, Jeremy Stone, mentions in his Twitter bio that the president has retweeted him nine times.

As Vox’s Jane Coaston explained, QAnon is a tangled group of conspiracy theories that include claims prominent Democrats are secretly being monitored, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is a CIA asset, and that President Trump is leading a hidden war against a pernicious, powerful, and hidden “deep state” working to abuse children and enslave the American people.

In the tweet retweeted by the president Saturday, Stone falsely claimed, “The ‘elite’ proclaim America must submit to Islam or else.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has shared Islamophobic content. In 2017, he retweeted three anti-Muslim propaganda videos that had been originally posted by Jayda Fransen, a leader of a far-right British political party called Britain First. More recently, the president posted an edited video to Twitter that tried to link Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to the 9/11 attacks. Omar reportedly received death threats as the video went viral.

Trump’s other retweets defended members of the far-right who have either seen their social media accounts suspended or who have been outright banned in recent days.

Paul Joseph Watson, an editor of the alt-right website Infowars, was banned from Facebook on Thursday along with the site’s leader, Alex Jones. Watson is perhaps best known outside of alt-right circles for tweeting a video White House press secretary Sarah Sanders used in trying to ban CNN’s Jim Acosta from press briefings in November 2018.

Infowars has been banned from Twitter, YouTube, Apple, Facebook, and Instagram for spreading false information; the personal accounts of some of the site’s contributors remain active on certain social media networks, however.

Friday, Watson complained about being banned from Facebook and Instagram, which Facebook owns, and included a link to a YouTube video in which the editor lambasts the tech giant while claiming citizens’ First Amendment rights are being eroded. Trump retweeted this jeremiad Saturday.

The president once again attacked news organizations he has been critical of in the past, calling out the Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, and CNN by name. Just before doing so, however, he retweeted an analyst for the pro-Trump conservative media group Sinclair Broadcasting, Sharyl Attkisson, who echoed Watson’s concerns about censorship.

Picking up on the theme of a “slippery slope,” as Attkisson put it, alt-right Canadian blogger Lauren Southern’s presidential retweet argued the bans of alt-right figures are just the beginning.

As Vox’s Emily Stewart explained, figures on the right have long argued Facebook and other social media companies are unfairly targeting them:

Conservatives have for quite some time complained that they’re being censored by social media, and Facebook has struggled to respond. Part of that stems from a 2016 Gizmodo story citing a former Facebook journalist who said workers at the company routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers. Since then, Republicans and Silicon Valley have engaged in a back-and-forth where conservatives accuse platforms of bias and companies bend over backward to show that’s not the case. After the Gizmodo story broke, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with conservative leaders to discuss how the social network handles conservative content.

Before pivoting to discussions of the economy, Trump had one final retweet: missives sent by Mindy Robinson, host of the right-wing show Red, White, and F You: Unapologetically Patriotic.

Robinson complained about the suspension of conservative actor James Woods from Twitter. Woods’ partner tweeted in April that the actor’s account had been suspended for sending a tweet reading: “If you try to kill the king, you better not miss. #HangThemAll.”

As Robinson notes, Woods paraphrased Emerson; however, as she neglected to note, the second part of the actor’s tweet could be seen as a violation of Twitter’s rules on violent speech.

Many Twitter accounts feature the disclaimer: “Retweets do not equal endorsements.” The president’s account does not feature any such language, and while a tweet he sent Saturday afternoon avoided the sort of bigoted content seen in some of the accounts he retweeted in the morning, it was clear the president was building to a larger point in sharing the tweets of these alt-right and conservative figures:

In tying together social media companies, the media, and Democrats, the president was able to attack three of his habitual targets, and worked to reinforce the idea that all three are against him and his supporters, lending even more presidential credibility to the messages he tweeted in the morning.

A Boeing 737 with 143 people aboard slid off a runway into a shallow river in Jacksonville, Florida on Friday night as pilots attempted a landing in the middle of a thunderstorm.

All 136 passengers and seven flight crew members on board are alive and accounted for, although 21 adults were transported to local hospitals with minor injuries, officials said.

Officials did not immediately say what caused the plane to leave the runway and go into the St. Johns River.

The plane, a chartered Boeing 737-800, was arriving from Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to Naval Air Station Jacksonville at about 9:40 p.m. Eastern Standard Time when the incident occurred, a spokesman for the Florida air base said.

Capt. Michael P. Connor, the commanding officer at Naval Air Station Jacksonville, said at a news conference that “the cause of the mishap has yet to be determined” and praised the skill of the first responders on the scene.

“We could be talking about a different story this evening. So there’s a lot to say about the professionalism of the folks that helped the passengers off the airplane,” Conor said early Saturday. “Some of them were coming back to see their families, some of them were continuing on travel to their homes outside of Florida.”

The mayor of Jacksonville, Lenny Curry, said on Twitter that President Donald Trump called him to offer help as the situation was “developing.”

“No fatalities reported. We are all in this together,” Curry said in a separate tweet.

Passenger Cheryl Bormann told CNN’s Don Lemon the plane flew through lightning and thunderstorms on the way to Jacksonville.

“As we went down, we had a really hard landing,” Bormann said. “And then the plane bounced and screeched and bounced some more … then it came to a complete like crash stop.”

Bormann said passengers had no idea where they were at first.

“We were in water. We couldn’t tell where we were, whether it was a river or an ocean. There was rain coming down. There was lightning and thunder. And we stood on that wing for a significant period of time. Rescue folks came and eventually someone inflated a life raft that had been on the plane and we began climbing into it. Everybody was helping everybody,” she said.

The flight was operated by Miami Air International, a charter airline with a fleet of Boeing 737-800s, that is contracted by the military for its twice-weekly “rotator” roundtrip service between the US mainland and Guantanamo Bay, said Bill Dougherty, a spokesperson for the base in Jacksonville.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the cause of the crash.

While the plane involved in the Jacksonville incident is a Boeing 737, it is not a 737 Max, the plane involved in two deadly crashes less than six months apart. Those crashes are currently under investigation by the Department of Justice as the airplane manufacture retools the plane.

In a statement released on Twitter, Boeing said it is cooperating with the NTSB’s investigation into the Jacksonville crash.