Trump to impose 25% tariff on countries that buy oil or gas from Venezuela
Donald Trump said on Monday that any country that buys oil or gas from Venezuela will pay a 25% tariff on trades made with the US.
This “secondary tariff” will take effect on 2 April, the president announced in a Truth Social post. He cited “numerous reasons” for the move, including his baseless repeated claim that “Venezuela has purposefully and deceitfully sent to the United States, undercover, tens of thousands of high level, and other, criminals, many of whom are murderers and people of a very violent nature”.
He adds: “Among the gangs they sent to the United States, is Tren de Aragua, which has been given the designation of ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization’.” Tren de Aragua has been the organisation cited by Trump when he controversially invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime, to deport more than 250 mainly Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador last week. It was formally designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by the US last month.
In his post, Trump goes on: “In addition, Venezuela has been very hostile to the United States and the freedoms which we espouse.”
Finally, he referred to 2 April as “LIBERATION DAY IN AMERICA”.
In February, Trump announced the US would scrap a license granted to Chevron since 2022 to operate in Venezuela and export its oil and gave the company until April to wind down its operations there, after he accused President Nicolás Maduro of not making progress on electoral reforms and migrant returns.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was considering a plan to extend Chevron’s license by 60 days and impose financial penalties on other countries that do business with the South American nation. It followed a meeting with Chevron’s CEO Mike Wirth and other top oil executives.
Key events
Sam Levine
After a little over an hour, oral arguments just ended in the supreme court challenging Louisiana’s congressional map. The justices seemed closely divided and it’s hard to know exactly how they’re going to rule.
Mark Carney says he is available for call with Trump, but on Canada’s terms
Canada’s new prime minister Mark Carney said on Monday he was available for a call with Donald Trump but would do so “on our terms as a sovereign country”.
Speaking to reporters in Newfoundland, Carney also said he assumed Trump was waiting to see who won the general election before calling the winner.
Carney, elected leader of the ruling Liberal Party on 9 April, on Sunday triggered an election for 28 April, a contest that is widely expected to focus on the strained relationship with the US amid threats to Canada’s economic and political future.
Trump has figured prominently into Canada’s political narrative, repeatedly threatening to wage economic war on the US’s closest ally and one of its largest trading partners, with the end goal of annexing the country’s northern neighbor.
Those threats, and the prospect of painful tariffs on Canadian goods, have electrified the country, with a groundswell of patriotism, calls to boycott American goods and an “elbows up” rallying cry.
You can read more on that from my colleague Leyland Cecco here:
Sam Levine
Back at Louisiana v. Callais, Edward Greim, a lawyer representing those challenging the map, is now making his arguments to the justices. A good portion of his argument has focused on whether or not the state had a good reason to redraw the state’s congressional map. There has been a lot of tussling over whether the court order the state was under was good enough of a reason.
Trump to impose 25% tariff on countries that buy oil or gas from Venezuela
Donald Trump said on Monday that any country that buys oil or gas from Venezuela will pay a 25% tariff on trades made with the US.
This “secondary tariff” will take effect on 2 April, the president announced in a Truth Social post. He cited “numerous reasons” for the move, including his baseless repeated claim that “Venezuela has purposefully and deceitfully sent to the United States, undercover, tens of thousands of high level, and other, criminals, many of whom are murderers and people of a very violent nature”.
He adds: “Among the gangs they sent to the United States, is Tren de Aragua, which has been given the designation of ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization’.” Tren de Aragua has been the organisation cited by Trump when he controversially invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime, to deport more than 250 mainly Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador last week. It was formally designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by the US last month.
In his post, Trump goes on: “In addition, Venezuela has been very hostile to the United States and the freedoms which we espouse.”
Finally, he referred to 2 April as “LIBERATION DAY IN AMERICA”.
In February, Trump announced the US would scrap a license granted to Chevron since 2022 to operate in Venezuela and export its oil and gave the company until April to wind down its operations there, after he accused President Nicolás Maduro of not making progress on electoral reforms and migrant returns.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was considering a plan to extend Chevron’s license by 60 days and impose financial penalties on other countries that do business with the South American nation. It followed a meeting with Chevron’s CEO Mike Wirth and other top oil executives.
Trump will gather his cabinet secretaries for a third known meeting on Monday morning with Elon Musk expected to attend, a senior administration official has told NBC News.
The official described the 11 am ET gathering as a “follow up on the last Doge meeting”, in reference to a meeting on 6 March where Trump placed limits on the billionaire tycoon’s authority amid backlash to new cuts by the so-called “department of government efficiency”. He wrote on his Truth Social platform after that meeting:
We just had a meeting with most of the secretaries, Elon, and others, and it was a very positive one. It’s very important that we cut levels down to where they should be, but it’s also important to keep the best and most productive people. We’re going to have these meetings every two weeks until that aspect of this very necessary job is done.
Sam Levine
Back at the hearing, Stuart Naifeh, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund representing Black voters, is now beginning his oral argument.
This court has been clear that states have breathing room to take reasonable efforts to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and they may also balance the many other interests that enter the redistricting calculus.
It was perfectly appropriate after two federal courts had found that Louisiana had likely violated section two, that the state sought to comply with those rulings and that it exercised its authority to protect favored incumbents and unite preferred communities of interest and accounting for those types of political considerations is squarely the legislature’s prerogative.
Sam Levine
Here’s some useful background to the case regarding Louisiana’s majority-Black districts that Sam Levine is covering for us which, he writes, could be vehicle for court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act.
The case, Louisiana v Callais, arrives at the supreme court after years of legal wrangling over Louisiana’s congressional map.
After the 2020 census, Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature only drew one majority-Black congressional district when it redrew the boundaries for the state’s six seats in Congress. A group of Black voters, who make up about a third of the state’s population, sued the state in 2022, arguing that section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, required lawmakers to add a second majority-Black congressional district.
A federal judge agreed with that argument, blocked the state from using the map, and told the state to add a second majority-Black district, which it did.
A group of non-African American voters then sued in a different court, saying the new map unconstitutionally sorted voters based on their race. They pointed out that the new district was unusually shaped and that race had predominated in drawing it. A court struck down Louisiana’s new map in 2024, but the US supreme court allowed it to be used for elections last year. Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, won the seat last fall.
A ruling in favor of the non-African American voters who challenged the districts could further chip away at the Voting Rights Act by making it nearly impossible for lawmakers to draw districts that comply with the landmark civil rights law.
Sara Rohani, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represents the voters who challenged the original map in Louisiana and is arguing in defense of the current one, said:
It would basically lead to just endless collateral attacks on maps that were drawn to remedy Voting Rights Act violations and even potentially existing districts that are compliant with section 2.
You can read more here:
Sam Levine
At the hearing J. Benjamin Aguiñaga, Louisiana’s solicitor general, is doing a delicate dance in his arguments to the justices. In response to a question from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Louisiana has argued in other litigation that Section 2 is unconstitutional as applied to the state. But he acknowledges courts have not embraced the state’s interpretation of the law so far.
“At least as things stand now, we’re duty bound to comply with the Voting Rights Act,” Aguiñaga said.
Sam Levine
Oral arguments are just getting started in Louisiana v. Callais are just getting here.
“Louisiana would rather not be here,” J. Benjamin Aguiñaga, the state’s solicitor general, opened his arguments. “Our fundamental question today is how do we get out of this predicament.”
Venezuela receives hundreds of deported migrants from US after flights restart
This report is from Reuters.
A group of 199 Venezuelan migrants deported from the US arrived on Monday after the two countries reached an agreement to restart flights, Venezuela’s interior minister Diosdado Cabello said.
A diplomatic spat last week inflamed already tense relations as the US accused Venezuela of refusing to accept deportations flights, while Caracas accused Washington of blocking them. As that unfolded, a plane-load of deported Venezuelans had arrived from Mexico, a country that has agreed to accept migrants from other countries sent by the US.
Cabello said flights have been inconsistent “not because of Venezuela,” adding that they will “depend on the United States.” The US sent the deportees first to Honduras, where they were picked up by Venezuelan state airline Conviasa and arrived in Caracas at 1am local time. The US does not deport migrants directly to Venezuela due to the strained diplomatic relationship between the two countries.
“We expect to see a consistent flow of deportation flights to Venezuela going forward,” the US state department’s bureau of western hemisphere affairs said in a post on X confirming the flight.
It comes after Donald Trump invoked an obscure wartime law to rapidly deport people who were, according to the White House, members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which Washington has declared a terrorist group and alien enemy.
Despite a judge quickly blocking the measure, the Trump administration deported more than 200 Venezuelans – 137 under the wartime act – to El Salvador where they are being detained in the country’s massive anti-terrorism prison.
Venezuela denies the migrants’ involvement in the criminal group, which the government claims was eradicated. Lawyers and family members of the migrants also deny their gang ties and say some may have been deported because of their tattoos, which they said US immigration authorities claimed imply gang ties.
Cabello said on Monday that the Venezuelans in El Salvador were being “held hostage” and demanded that their rights be respected.
Supreme Court hears Louisiana racial gerrymandering claim
Sam Levine
The US supreme court is hearing a case this morning that could upend Louisiana’s congressional map and have significant implications for the makeup of the US Congress and voting rights.
At the center of the case is Louisiana’s 6th congressional district. State lawmakers drew the oddly shaped district in 2022 after they were ordered to add a second majority-Black district in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act. A group of non-Black voters challenged that district, saying lawmakers had unlawfully sorted voters based on their race. The supreme court allowed the map to be used for elections last year and Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, won the seat.
The supreme court has long said that lawmakers can consider race if it serves a “compelling interest” and its use is “narrowly tailored” to that interest. Those challenging the map say the state did not meet that standard.
The case is being closely watched both because of the close partisan balance of the US House and to see whether the court will further weaken protections for minority voters when it comes to redistricting.
We’ll bring you more on this as we get it.
Mia Love, first Black Republican woman elected to Congress, dies aged 49
Mia Love, a daughter of Haitian immigrants who became the first Black Republican woman elected to Congress, died on Sunday at the age of 49.
The former US House member of Utah had undergone recent treatment for brain cancer and received immunotherapy as part of a clinical trial at Duke University’s brain tumor center. Her daughter said earlier this month that the former lawmaker was no longer responding to treatment. Love died at her home in Saratoga Springs, Utah, according to a statement posted by the family.
Love didn’t emphasize her race during her campaigns, but she acknowledged the significance of her election after her 2014 victory. She said her win defied naysayers who had suggested that a Black, Republican, Mormon woman couldn’t win a congressional seat in overwhelmingly white Utah.
She was briefly considered a rising star within the GOP and she kept her distance from Donald Trump, who was unpopular with many Utah voters during his successful run for his first presidency in 2016.
In an op-ed published earlier this month in the Deseret News, Love described the version of America she grew up loving and shared her enduring wish for the nation to become less divisive. She thanked her medical team and every person who had prayed for her.
Andrew Sparrow
British prime minister Keir Starmer and Donald Trump held a brief call on Sunday to discuss progress on a new economic deal between the two countries, Downing Street said this morning.
At the lobby briefing, asked about reports that the government may cut the digital services tax, to help US tech firms and to persuade the White House to reduce the impact of tariffs on the UK in return, the PM’s spokesperson replied:
Firstly, just taking a step back, the UK is working with the United States on an economic prosperity deal, building on our shared strength of that commitment to economic security. As part of those discussions, the prime minister and President Trump discussed progress made in those discussions last night. The UK will only do a deal in the national interest, which reflects this government’s mandate to deliver economic stability for British people.
The spokesperson did not say whether or not the digital services tax came up in the call. But he said the government remained in favour of the tax in principle.
On the prospects of a trade deal, the spokesperson said that “good progress” was being made. But he confirmed that what was being envisaged was less a full-blown free trade agreement, and more a deal just covering certain sectors.
Downing Street also refused to respond directly to the claim from Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff that Starmer’s stance on Ukraine amounts to “posturing”.
Asked if Starmer was happy for one of Trump’s closest advisers to be talking in these terms, the PM’s spokesperson said that Starmer himself has explained in detail why he is working on plans for a “coalition of the willing” to support Ukraine, and why a peace deal would need military underpinning.
The prime minister is focused on delivering the right outcome in Ukraine. There’s frequent engagement with President Trump to that end, with shared vision with President Trump in terms of bringing a durable peace in Ukraine.
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