Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media, June 30, 2025

June 30, 2025 · The White House · 0:33:18

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt briefed members of the media on June 30, 2025, carried on the White House channel. She announced that the President would travel to Florida the next day for the opening of a new detention center at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport alongside Secretary Kristi Noem, Governor Ron DeSantis, and Rep. Byron Donalds. “The facility will have up to 5,000 beds to house, process, and deport criminal illegal aliens,” she said, describing it as isolated in the Everglades, with one road in and, as she put it, “the only way out is a one-way flight.”

Leavitt also presented what she described as original correspondence from the President to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell: a chart of world interest rates with the President’s note arguing American rates remained too high. “The American people want to borrow money cheaply and they should be able to do that. But unfortunately, we have interest rates that are still too high,” she said, in the administration’s stated case. She added that passing the One Big Beautiful Bill — which she called the largest tax cuts in American history, as she characterized it — remained the President’s top priority, with the White House in touch with lawmakers through the weekend.

Why it matters

This briefing pairs the two pressure campaigns of that week in the White House’s own presentation: the Florida detention opening as the deportation program’s showcase, and a physical, handwritten presidential note to the Fed chair as the public form of the rate-cut campaign.

Scoreboard watch

This briefing is a scoreboard reference point: the Press Secretary’s June 30, 2025 presentation of the President’s note to Chair Powell on interest rates, as she stated it, to be checked against the Federal Reserve’s subsequent rate decisions.

Sources: The White House, “Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media, June 30, 2025” (official upload, embedded above). All characterizations as stated by the Press Secretary.