US supreme court maintains block on Trump deportations under Alien Enemies Act
Reuters is reporting that the US supreme court is keeping in place its order blocking the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act.
On 7 April, the supreme court ruled that those being removed under the law needed to be provided adequate notice that they were being removed under the Act so that they might be able to file a legal challenge.
Less than two weeks later, on 19 April, the supreme court ordered a halt to a deportation of migrants in Texas after being presented with evidence they weren’t being given adequate chance to file their removals.
Key events
It looks like Axios obtained some of the audio of the interviews between former president Joe Biden and special counsel Robert Hur in October 2023.
Biden is heard struggling to recall the year his son died, when he left the vice-presidency, when Donald Trump was elected, and why he had classified documents.
The recordings include long pauses, occasional slurred speech and mumbled responses, Axios reports.
The newly released audio offers a better look into why the White House resisted calls to release the recordings last year, as concerns about Biden’s memory and cognitive sharpness mounted.
The recordings come less than a week until a new book on that topic – Original Sin, by Axios’ Alex Thompson and CNN’s Jake Tapper – will be released.
The New York Times is reporting that the Trump administration is planning to release audio of former president Joe Biden’s 2023 interview with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents.
The audio recording could be released as early as next week.
Biden was interviewed at the White House in October 2023 by Robert K Hur, who had been appointed to investigate whether crimes had been committed related to classified documents found at Biden’s former office and home after he left the Obama administration.
José Olivares
Ice used ‘false pretenses’ for warrant to hunt for Columbia students, lawyers say
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) effectively misled a judge in order to gain access to the homes of students it sought to arrest for their pro-Palestinian activism, attorneys say.
A recently unsealed search warrant application shows that Ice told a judge it needed a warrant because the agency was investigating Columbia University for “harboring aliens”. In reality, attorneys say, Ice used the warrant application as a “pretext” to try to arrest two students, including one green card holder, in order to deport them.
What the unsealed document shows is that the agency “was manufacturing an allegation of ‘harboring’, just so agents can get in the door,” Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said. “What Ice was actually trying to do is get into these rooms to arrest them.”
The “harboring aliens” statute is applied to those who “conceal, harbor, or shield from detection” any immigrant who is not authorized to be in the US.
The search warrant, which was first reported by the Intercept, relates to two Columbia University students, Yunseo Chung and Ranjani Srinivasan, whom Ice sought to deport over their purported pro-Palestinian activism.
Read the full story here:
Moody’s Ratings downgraded the United States’ credit rating today, lowering it one notch from the top-tier AAA to Aa1, citing mounting fiscal pressures and high interest rates.
A credit rating signals how likely a country (or company) is to repay its debt.
“This one-notch downgrade on our 21-notch rating scale reflects the increase over more than a decade in government debt and interest payment ratios to levels that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns,” the agency said in a statement.
With this move, it now joins Standard & Poor’s, which downgraded the US in 2011, and Fitch Ratings, which followed suit in 2023, both assigning an AA+ rating.
The US continues to run a large budget deficit, with interest costs on Treasury debt climbing amid both rising rates and increased borrowing.
So far this fiscal year, the deficit has reached $1.05 trillion, a 13% jump from the same period last year. An uptick in tariffs helped slightly narrow the gap last month.
Trump slams Supreme Court over decision to block attempts to deport Venezuelans to prison in El Salvador
President Donald Trump criticized the Supreme Court’s decision blocking his administration’s attempt to send Venezuelans whom he says are gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
He wrote on social media: “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!”
His remarks come after the Supreme Court kept in place its order blocking the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act.
“Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster,” the ruling said.
The United States has issued emergency orders to address “critical grid security issues and improve grid resiliency” in Puerto Rico, the Energy Department said in a statement on Friday.
The DOE also said it would review $365 million in funding from the Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund to make sure all assistance “is used to support practical fixes to the grid and benefits all residents of Puerto Rico.”
“Access to energy is essential for all modern life, yet the current energy emergency jeopardizes Puerto Ricans’ access to basic necessities,” said US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “This system is unsustainable, and our fellow citizens should not be forced to suffer the constant instability and dangerous consequences of an unreliable power grid.”
The orders will unlock emergency protocols to address immediate programs, according to the statement.
The news comes about two weeks away from the start of hurricane season. In 2017, Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm and the strongest to hit the island in nearly a century. A Harvard study later estimated the death toll at 4,645 people.
Chronic power disruptions continue to affect the island amid a faulty power grid.
Lauren Gambino
Donald Trump won the presidency with the help of a key constituency: Latino voters. But there are early signs of “discontent”.
A new poll by Equis Research, a Democratic-leaning group, found that fewer Latino voters approve of Trump’s second-term performance – 38% – than say they voted for him in the 2024 presidential election – 44%. In total, the poll found that 15% of Latinos who voted for Trump last year disapprove of his job to date.
“It is cracks, not a collapse,” Carlos Odio, the cofounder of Equis, said in an interview on Friday.
The Equis survey found “discontent” among Latino voters over Trump’s actions on the economy and his immigration policies, Odio said. While Latino voters are generally supportive of security measures, two-thirds of respondents said Trump’s actions were “going too far and targeting the types of immigrants who strengthen our nation”.
Among the Latinos who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, a similar share – 64% – said the president had gone “too far” on immigration.
“Latinos, like all Americans, are still safety/security conscious, even while they don’t like what they’re seeing right now,” Odio said.
The polling memo notes that Trump’s slippage in approval ratings has not yet pushed Latino voters into the arms of Democrats – at least not yet. Among the respondents who disapprove of Trump’s immigration policies, 1 in 4 say they don’t prefer either party on the issue.
Emphasizing that many voters feel Trump has only just taken office and remain in a “wait-and-see posture,” Odio said, “there is damage that undoubtedly has been done in this early go.”
Former vice president Mike Pence said today that President Donald Trump shouldn’t accept a luxury jet from Qatar to use as the next Air Force One.
In an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” Kristen Welker, Pence said:
“The very idea that we would accept an Air Force One from Qatar, I think is inconsistent with our security, with our intelligence needs. And my hope is the president reconsiders it. I think if Qatar wants to make a gift to the United States, they ought to. They ought to take that $400 million and plow it into infrastructure on their military base.”
Context: Trump has so far brushed off fierce criticism over his plan to accept a $400m luxury jet from the Qatari government. Trump has said Qatar’s offer for a Boeing 747-8 jetliner to use as Air Force One was too good to refuse, complaining the current presidential aircraft is underwhelming.
Trump administration working on plan to move 1 million Palestinians to Libya, reports
NBC News is reporting that the Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya.
Two people familiar with the move said that the plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya’s leadership.
In exchange for the resettling of Palestinians, the administration would potentially release to Libya billions of dollars of funds that the US froze more than a decade ago.
No final agreement has been reached, according to the news outlet, and Israel has been kept informed of the administration’s discussions.
The Department of Government Efficiency is planning to assign a team to review the congressional watchdog known as the Government Accountability Office, NOTUS reports.
“GAO was contacted by representatives of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who sought to assign a team to GAO,” said an internal email sent to GAO employees at 12:42 p.m. on Friday. “Today, we sent a letter to the acting administrator of DOGE stating that GAO is a legislative branch agency that conducts work for the Congress. As such, we are not subject to DOGE or executive orders.”
Currently, GAO is the only federal body auditing DOGE’s operations. Many of the audit requests from Congress have been consolidated into a few major ongoing investigations, with final reports not expected for several months.
One of those reviews involves potential violations of the Impoundment Control Act, which could set GAO on a collision course with DOGE.
The 1974 law requires the president to notify Congress of any withheld budget authority and to follow a formal review process set by lawmakers.
US supreme court maintains block on Trump deportations under Alien Enemies Act
Reuters is reporting that the US supreme court is keeping in place its order blocking the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act.
On 7 April, the supreme court ruled that those being removed under the law needed to be provided adequate notice that they were being removed under the Act so that they might be able to file a legal challenge.
Less than two weeks later, on 19 April, the supreme court ordered a halt to a deportation of migrants in Texas after being presented with evidence they weren’t being given adequate chance to file their removals.
From a trip to the Middle East to talks between Russia and Ukraine, it’s a busy week for Donald Trump and US foreign policy. In this week’s episode of our Politics Weekly America podcast Jonathan Freedland speaks to the Guardian’s global affairs correspondent, Andrew Roth, about the big players behind the US president’s deals and decisions on the world stage.
You can listen here:
The day so far
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Rightwing lawmakers derailed Donald Trump’s signature legislation in the House of Representatives, preventing its passage through a key committee and throwing into question whether Republicans can coalesce around the massive bill. The major and embarrassing setback raises the stakes for the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who had set a goal of Memorial Day to get the legislation passed through the House and on to the Senate. The budget committee will reconvene on Sunday night to consider the bill, giving Johnson another couple of days to find agreement with the fiscal hardliners in his party who want deeper spending cuts.
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Trump said the US will send letters to some of its trading partners to unilaterally impose new tariff rates, suggesting that Washington lacks the capacity to reach individual trade deals.
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Trump accused the former FBI director James Comey of calling for his assassination in a coded social media post written in seashells. Comey’s Instagram post – a photograph of seashells on a beach arranged to spell the numbers 8647, which he captioned: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk” – was used by rightwing supporters of Trump to claim it was a call to assassinate the US president. The Secret Service said it has launched an investigation. Comey has said it “never occurred to me” that the numbers represented a coded threat. Here’s our explainer of what “8647” really means (hint: it’s not what Trump’s supporters are saying).
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Trump acknowledged that people are starving in Gaza and the US would have the situation in the territory “taken care of” as it suffered a further wave of intense Israeli airstrikes overnight. On the final day of his Gulf tour, the US president told reporters in Abu Dhabi: “We’re looking at Gaza. And we’re going to get that taken care of. A lot of people are starving.”
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US military commanders will be told to identify troops in their units who are transgender or have gender dysphoria, then send them to get medical checks in order to force them out of the service. Story here.
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The Trump administration has terminated nearly 600 contractors at Voice of America, the US-funded international news network known for delivering independent journalism to countries with restricted press freedom. Among those dismissed are journalists from authoritarian countries who now face deportation, as their visas are linked to their jobs at VOA. Story here.
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Ice effectively misled a judge in order to gain access to the homes of students it sought to arrest for their pro-Palestinian activism, attorneys say. A recently unsealed search warrant application shows that Ice told a judge it needed a warrant because the agency was investigating Columbia University for “harboring aliens”. In reality, attorneys say, Ice used the warrant application as a “pretext” to try to arrest two students, including one green card holder, in order to deport them.
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The former US ambassador to Ukraine, who resigned from the role in April, has said that she quit the post because she disagreed with Donald Trump’s foreign policy. Ambassador Bridget Brink, who served as ambassador to Ukraine from May 2022 until her departure last month, outlined the reasons for her departure for the first time in an op-ed published today by the Detroit Free Press. In the piece, Brink hit out at Trump for pressuring Ukraine rather than Russia and said she felt it was her duty to step down. “Peace at any price is not peace at all ― it is appeasement,” she wrote. More here.
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US government records reveal Latin American leaders have spent millions hiring Washington’s top lobbyists to push for a laundry list of requests – from free-trade deals, security assistance and energy investments – to be heard by the Trump administration, according to an analysis by the Guardian and The Quincy Institute. Story here.
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Lawyers for 252 Venezuelans deported by the Trump administration and imprisoned in El Salvador for two months have alleged that the migrants are victims of physical and emotional “torture”. Story here.
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US district judge Paula Xinis expressed frustration on Friday that the Trump administration once again failed to provide sufficient details about its efforts bring back Kilmar Ábrego García, who was deported in error from the United States in March and sent to a prison in El Salvador. More here.
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An Indian PhD graduate who was studying at a university in South Dakota, whom the Trump administration has been attempting to deport, was granted an injunction by a federal judge, allowing her to stay in the country after having received her degree. The Trump administration terminated Priya Saxena’s student visa in April, which would have prevented her from completing her doctoral program and graduating on 10 May.
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And finally, the Department of Homeland Security is reportedly mulling a pitch for a new reality tv show that would pit immigrants against each other to win fast-tracked US citizenship. The Daily Mail has the story.
US judge questions justice department over efforts to return wrongly deported Kilmar Ábrego García
US judge Paula Xinis expressed frustration on Friday that the Trump administration once again failed to provide sufficient details about its efforts bring back Kilmar Ábrego García, who was deported in error from the United States in March and sent to a prison in El Salvador.
Xinis said at a hearing in Greenbelt, Maryland, that the government had not produced information from high-level officials that adequately explained how it was complying with her order to “facilitate” the return of Maryland resident Ábrego García.
The Trump administration has argued that details sought by Ábrego García’s attorneys are confidential state secrets, but Xinis said the justice department had not shown how the doctrine would apply. She said:
You have not given me anything that I can really say: ‘Ok, I understand what of the plaintiffs’ requests or the court’s order, in the government’s view, poses a reasonable danger to diplomatic relations.’
Xinis said information provided by government officials in Ábrego García’s case so far had been “an exercise in utter frustration”.
Ábrego García’s lawyer Andrew Rossman told Xinis it was “deeply disturbing” that the administration indicated it was in compliance with the judge’s orders while “at the same time the highest officials in the government are saying the opposite”.
The hearing marks the latest court clash over Ábrego García’s deportation, amid concerns that the administration failed to comply with Xinis’ orders even after the US supreme court said it “should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken” to facilitate his return.
Ábrego García was deported to El Salvador on 15 March despite an order protecting him from removal there. His case has sparked concerns that Trump’s administration is willing to disregard the judiciary, an independent and equal branch of government.
Xinis last month ordered the administration to provide more information about what it was doing to secure Ábrego García’s return. She previously said that the administration had not given her any information of value about its efforts.
Administration officials have accused courts of interfering with the executive branch’s ability to conduct foreign policy. They have invoked the state secrets privilege, a legal doctrine that allows the government to block the disclosure of information that could harm national security interests, to conceal details about its efforts to return Ábrego García.
The US Department of Justice said in a court filing this week that Ábrego García’s lawyers have “all the information they need” to confirm that it has complied with the court’s order on his return.
Earlier we reported that five Republicans revolted during a key House budget committee vote, sinking Trump’s signature legislation.
My colleague Chris Stein notes that one of the no votes – Pennsylvania’s Lloyd Smucker – initially voted to advance the bill, then changed his vote to no at the last minute, which he said was a procedural manoeuvre to allow the bill to be reconsidered in the future.
The other four no’s came from members of the far-right Freedom Caucus joined with the Democratic minority to block the bill from proceeding, arguing the legislation does not make deep enough cuts to federal spending and to programs they dislike.
Rightwing lawmakers want to see big reductions in government spending, which has climbed in recent years as Trump and Joe Biden responded to the Covid pandemic and pursued their own economic policies.
“We’re … committed to ensuring the final package is fiscally responsible, rightsizing government and putting our fiscal future back on track. Unfortunately, the current version falls short of these goals and fails to deliver the transformative change that Americans were promise,” one of the no’s Andrew Clyde, of Georgia, said at the budget committee.
He called for deeper cuts to Medicaid, but many Republicans in both the House and Senate have signaled nervousness with dramatic funding reductions to the program that provides healthcare to lower-income and disabled Americans. Others in the GOP dislike parts of the bill that would cut green tax credits created by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
And a small group of Republicans representing districts in blue states such as New York and New Jersey are demanding an increase in the deduction for state and local taxes, saying it will provide needed relief to their constituents. But including that would drive the cost of the bill even higher, risking the ire of fiscal conservatives.
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