Trump Administration Live Updates: Judges Challenge White House Over Disregard for Court Orders
Where Things Stand
Deportation fight: A federal judge threatened to open a contempt inquiry into the Trump administration over what he called its “willful disregard” for his order temporarily halting deportations under an obscure wartime law. The judge said there was “probable cause” to find the administration in contempt, a day after another federal judge moved to open a similar inquiry in a different deportation case. Read more ›
Deported Marylander: Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, traveled to El Salvador in hopes of meeting with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who is being held in a notorious prison after being mistakenly deported by the Trump administration. Mr. Van Hollen said El Salvador’s vice president, Félix Ulloa, had told him that Mr. Abrego Garcia remained in custody only because the Trump administration was paying to keep him there. Read more ›
Transgender athletes: The Trump administration sued Maine over policies that allowed some transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports, claiming the state was violating a federal law intended to prevent discrimination based on sex. Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested similar action was being considered against Minnesota and California. Read more ›
“He will never live in the United States again,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, adding a new accusation about him: that he was accused of spousal abuse.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has just started a news briefing that appears aimed at defending the Trump administration’s defiant stance of several federal court orders in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who is being held in a notorious Salvadoran prison after being mistakenly deported by the Trump administration.
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In his remarks in El Salvador, Senator Chris Van Hollen accused the Trump administration of “lying” to justify their mistakes in deporting Abrego Garcia, and singled out President Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Vice President JD Vance by name. Van Hollen said that when top Trump officials made claims that Abrego Garcia had been charged with a crime or was part of the Salvadoran gang MS-13, “That is a lie.”
Van Hollen said El Salvador has not yet allowed him to see or speak with Abrego Garcia, or even tour the prison where he is being held — despite granting such access to visiting Republicans like the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, and Representative Riley Moore of West Virginia, who posted photographs of his trip to CECOT on social media on Tuesday night.
Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, who traveled to El Salvador to advocate for the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, told reporters that El Salvador’s vice president, Félix Ulloa, said that the country was keeping Abrego Garcia in detention because the Trump administration was paying for them to hold him.
“I asked the vice president if Abrego Garcia has not committed a crime, and the U.S. courts have found that he was illegally taken from the United States, and the government of El Salvador has no evidence that he was part of MS-13, why is El Salvador continuing to hold him in CECOT?” Van Hollen said.
“And his answer was that the Trump administration is paying the government of El Salvador to keep him in CECOT,” he added, referring to the notorious maximum security prison where dozens of deported migrants have been sent.
The Trump administration indicated that it would appeal Judge Boasberg’s ruling, according to the White House communications director, Steven Cheung. “We plan to seek immediate appellate relief. The president is 100% committed to ensuring that terrorists and criminal illegal migrants are no longer a threat to Americans and their communities across the country,” Cheung said on social media.
A federal judge in Washington threatened on Wednesday to open a high-stakes contempt investigation into whether the Trump administration violated an order he issued last month directing officials to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador.
In a 46-page ruling, the judge, James E. Boasberg, said he would begin contempt proceedings against the administration unless the White House did what it has failed to do for more than a month: give scores of Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador under the expansive authority of a wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act a chance to challenge their removal.
“The court does not reach such conclusions lightly or hastily,” wrote Judge Boasberg, who sits as the chief judge in Federal District Court in Washington. “Indeed, it has given defendants ample opportunity to explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”
Judge Boasberg’s threat of contempt proceedings, coupled with another federal judge’s move on Tuesday to open a similar inquiry in a separate deportation case, represented a remarkable attempt by jurists to hold the White House accountable for its apparent willingness to flout court orders.
The twin decisions also showed that judges remain willing to push back against the administration’s broader inclination to probe the traditional, but increasingly fragile, balance of power between the executive and judicial branches. Should administration officials slow-walk his efforts, Judge Boasberg warned that he could make a criminal referral to the Justice Department or even appoint an outside prosecutor.
Judge Boasberg’s move came one day after Judge Paula Xinis said at a hearing in Federal District Court in Maryland that she would begin her own accelerated investigation into whether the White House had violated a ruling by the Supreme Court.
In that case, Judge Xinis ordered the administration within the next two weeks to answer questions — both in writing and in depositions — about why it had so far apparently failed to comply with directions from the Supreme Court to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from the same Salvadoran prison to which the Venezuelan migrants had been sent.
Shortly after Judge Boasberg’s order was handed down, the White House said it planned to appeal.
“The President is 100% committed to ensuring that terrorists and criminal illegal migrants are no longer a threat to Americans and their communities across the country,” Steven Cheung, President Trump’s spokesman, said on social media.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed suit on behalf of the Venezuelan men, celebrated the decision.
“Judge Boasberg is correctly focused on the return of individuals sent to a brutal Salvadoran prison without any process whatsoever, and that also remains our concern,” said Lee Gelernt, the A.C.L.U.’s lead lawyer in the case.
In his opinion, Judge Boasberg enumerated several reasons he believed there was “probable cause” that the administration had in fact violated his order. But even more remarkably, he laid out a road map for what could happen next.
He said that if the White House did not come up with some way of giving the Venezuelans an opportunity to contest their deportations, he would order sworn declarations from Trump officials in an effort to determine who in the administration was responsible for disobeying his instructions.
If that failed to turn up the culprit, Judge Boasberg said he would then require depositions from officials or hold “hearings with live witness testimony under oath.”
If that technique was unsuccessful, too, Judge Boasberg said he would refer the case to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.
And given the unlikelihood that the department under Mr. Trump’s control would bring charges, Judge Boasberg said he would avail himself of one final gambit: using a special provision of criminal contempt law that permits him, as the judge overseeing the matter, to appoint a lawyer from outside the department to prosecute the contempt.
This detailed blueprint suggested that Judge Boasberg’s anger at the administration — and his desire to hold its feet to the fire — had been building for weeks.
All of it started with an emergency Zoom hearing on March 15 at which the judge told lawyers for the Justice Department to alert the administration that any deportation flights headed to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act needed to be halted at once and that any planes that were already in the air should turn around.
That, however, never happened, leaving nearly 140 Venezuelans, accused by the administration of being members of the violent street gang Tren de Aragua, in the custody of jailers at a notorious prison known as CECOT.
Over the next several days, the Justice Department, acting on the White House’s behalf, repeatedly stonewalled Judge Boasberg’s attempts to figure out if someone in the administration had willfully ignored his directives.
First, Justice Department lawyers tried at the last minute to cancel a follow-up hearing where they were told to be prepared to explain what had happened. That same day, department lawyers also took the highly unusual step of asking the federal appeals court that sits over Judge Boasberg to remove him from the case.
When Judge Boasberg remained on the case and refused to delay the hearing, Justice Department lawyers spent much of it dodging his questions and offering an array of excuses.
The lawyers claimed, among other things, that once the planes had left U.S. airspace the judge no longer had the authority to stop them. They also argued that the ruling they paid attention to was Judge Boasberg’s written order, which was filed on the docket almost an hour after his oral order in the courtroom — a position that he scoffed at.
“That’s a heckuva stretch,” he said of the government’s attempts to differentiate between the two.
In the days that followed, the administration tried more, declaring at one point that information about the deportation flights should be considered state secrets and that revealing any data about the planes would jeopardize national security.
Department lawyers made that claim despite the fact that the timing of the flights was readily available on public flight databases and administration officials amplified on social media videos of the planes — with their tail numbers visible — arriving in El Salvador.
In yet another unusual twist in the case, the Supreme Court, in a narrow ruling this month, struck down Judge Boasberg’s order, essentially on procedural grounds.
The justices ruled that while migrants deported by the White House under the Alien Enemies Act should have the opportunity to challenge their removal, those challenges had to be filed in the places where they were being detained. And the migrants covered by Judge Boasberg’s initial ruling were being held in Texas, not Washington.
In his opinion on Wednesday, Judge Boasberg said it was legally permissible to move forward with contempt proceedings even though the underlying order had been vacated.
The Supreme Court’s decision, he wrote, “does not excuse the government’s violation,” adding, “It is a foundational legal precept that every judicial order ‘must be obeyed’ — no matter how ‘erroneous’ it ‘may be’ — until a court reverses it.”
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his aides shut down a State Department office on Wednesday that tracks and counters global disinformation from foreign actors, including the governments of China, Russia and Iran, U.S. officials said.
The closing of the office, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, had been in the works for weeks. Mr. Rubio put all 40 or so of its employees on paid leave on Wednesday morning, the first step in firing them this spring. The State Department fired about 80 contractors working for the office in March and cut almost all contracts related to its work.
The office had been tracking disinformation campaigns by rival powers of the United States, as well as terrorist groups, and publishing reports on them. Some Republican lawmakers in recent years have accused federal employees and nongovernment experts working on tracking disinformation of trying to stifle the views of right-wing political groups around the world and trying to coordinate with social media companies to do so. Russian disinformation often circulates in far-right online channels.
Mr. Rubio released a statement before noon on Wednesday announcing the closure, saying that the office and its precursor in the Biden administration had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.” Mr. Rubio did not present any evidence to support the claim.
James P. Rubin, a former State Department official who ran the precursor to the office in the Biden administration, pushed back on the move to shutter the operation.
“This amounts to a form of unilateral disarmament in the information warfare Russia and China are conducting all over the world,” he said on Wednesday.
He added that on his watch, “no efforts were made inside the United States — only international. All of our efforts were focused on Russian and Chinese operations in Latin America, Europe and Africa.”
The office now falls under the authority of Darren Beattie, a political appointee who is the senior official acting as the under secretary for public diplomacy. Mr. Beattie was organizing the firings, said two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss actions by senior aides to President Trump.
Mr. Beattie was himself fired from a job as a White House speechwriter during the first Trump administration after CNN published a report saying he had given a speech to a group of white nationalists. He has made controversial social media posts on issues of race, including one that said “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
After starting his job at the State Department, Mr. Beattie gained access to the email accounts of current and former employees who had worked on countering disinformation, the two U.S. officials said. He has looked through them to find evidence of censorship of conservative ideas, they said.
The State Department declined to comment on Mr. Beattie’s role.
Diplomats are bracing for a series of deep cuts at the State Department. A memo has circulated in Mr. Rubio’s office that proposes, in coordination with the White House, a cut to the agency’s budget of nearly 50 percent next fiscal year. Another memo proposes closing 10 embassies and 17 consulates.
The cuts are occurring as China has expanded its diplomatic footprint across the globe, and as that country and Russia have become much more aggressive in spreading disinformation in recent years. When Mr. Rubio was a senator from Florida, he continually spoke about the need to expend government resources to counter both superpowers in contested areas around the world and online.
The State Department’s office for countering foreign disinformation is a successor to the Global Engagement Center, which was set up in 2011 to counter the propaganda of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The center recently had 125 employees and a budget of $61 million. During the Biden administration, it put out reports on global disinformation campaigns by China and Russia.
But the center came under attack during the Biden administration from several House Republicans who called its work an effort to censor conservative ideas in the public sphere, including on social media sites. Conservative groups filed lawsuits against the group. In 2023, Elon Musk, the conservative billionaire who has become a close adviser to Mr. Trump, said the center was the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship.”
Mr. Rubin, the center’s coordinator, rebutted the accusations at the time, saying it had a “focus on how foreign adversaries, primarily China and Russia, use information operations and malign interference to manipulate world opinion.”
Late last year, some House Republicans successfully blocked congressional reauthorization of the center. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and his aides reorganized the efforts to counter foreign disinformation at the State Department by creating the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub.
The State Department under Mr. Blinken managed to move the most essential functions of the efforts into the new office, a U.S. official said. That included channels to inform allies and partners about disinformation spread by China among citizens of various nations in Asia, the official said.
The Trump administration has dismantled federal government efforts to monitor U.S. elections for foreign interference, reassigning dozens of officials across several agencies who had worked on the issue. Those employees had tried to combat false content online and worked on broader safeguards to protect elections from cyberattacks or other attempts to disrupt voting systems. U.S. intelligence officials say Russia is the most active foreign government involved in election interference, and intelligence agencies assessed that the Kremlin intervened in the 2016 U.S. elections in favor of Mr. Trump.
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Trump Administration Announces Lawsuit Against Maine
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the Trump administration’s plan to sue Maine over policies that allow some transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.
Today, The Department of Justice is announcing a civil lawsuit against the Maine Department of Education. The State of Maine is discriminating against women by failing to protect women in women’s sports. Pretty basic stuff. I don’t care if it’s one. I don’t care if it’s two, I don’t care if it’s 100. It’s going to stop and it’s going to stop in every single state.
The Trump administration sued Maine on Wednesday over policies that allow some transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports, claiming the state is violating a federal law intended to prevent discrimination based on sex.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, announcing the move at a news conference while flanked by young female athletes from the state, acknowledged that Maine’s policies permitted very few transgender students to compete — perhaps only two, according to state officials.
“I don’t care if it’s one, I don’t care if it’s two, I don’t care if it’s 100 — it’s going to stop, and it’s going to stop in every single state,” said Ms. Bondi, who suggested that the Justice Department was considering similar action against Minnesota and California for failing to comply with demands by President Trump that the states immediately reverse course.
The lawsuit came just days after the administration threatened to cut off funding to Maine’s public schools and lunch programs through grants from the Education and Agriculture Departments. A federal judge temporarily blocked the move from going into effect.
The Justice Department has also pulled $1.5 million in grants from Maine’s Corrections Department for housing a transgender woman in a women’s prison, according to a fact sheet distributed by officials.
The lawsuit was not unexpected. Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, has said she expected the department to take such action, defiantly telling Mr. Trump, “See you in court,” after he began ramping up attacks on her.
“This matter has never been about school sports or the protection of women and girls, as has been claimed,” Ms. Mills said in a statement. “It is about states’ rights and defending the rule of law against a federal government bent on imposing its will, instead of upholding the law.”
The government accused officials in Maine of “defiantly flouting federal anti-discrimination law,” or Title IX, according to a 31-page complaint filed in Maine federal court.
The complaint cited a handful of events in which transgender athletes competed, including pole-vaulting, cross-country and ski competitions.
Ms. Bondi, who was joined by Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the activist Riley Gaines, said the Justice Department did not act lightly. “We don’t want to be suing people,” she added. “We want them to comply with the law, and that’s what we’re doing.”
During a question-and-answer period afterward, Ms. Bondi said she had spoken with Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania after an arson attack on his residence while his family was at home.
“It is absolutely horrific what happened to him,” she said. “I firmly believe that they wanted to kill him.”
The man charged with setting the fire staged the attack because he believed Mr. Shapiro’s stance on the war in Gaza was leading to the deaths of Palestinians, according to a police search warrant made public after Ms. Bondi’s appearance.
Ms. Bondi added that federal law enforcement officials were assisting local authorities in the investigation.
But she would not call the fire domestic terrorism — after repeatedly using that label for attacks on Tesla property, which did not entail attacks on people.
Jenna Russell contributed reporting.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTAn important nuance in today’s ruling: Judge Boasberg’s order says there is a likelihood that Trump officials could be found in criminal contempt, not merely civil contempt. Civil contempt is a provision generally used as leverage to compel compliance with a judge’s order moving forward whereas as criminal contempt is often used to punish actions that have already come and gone.
By choosing the path of criminal contempt, Judge Boasberg has left open the possibility that he may seek to refer the matter to the Justice Department for an actual prosecution, regardless of how likely the department, under President Trump’s control, may be to follow his recommendation.
Judge Boasberg’s finding in the case of the deportation flights came despite the fact that the Supreme Court has vacated the order he claims was likely violated. It ruled that the deportation case he was considering should not have been filed in Washington but rather in Texas, where the Venezuelan men were being held at the time they were flown out of the country.
Still, Judge Boasberg wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision “does not excuse the government’s violation,” adding, “It is a foundational legal precept that every judicial order ‘must be obeyed’ — no matter how ‘erroneous’ it ‘may be’ — until a court reverses it.”
A federal judge in Washington threatened to open a high-stakes contempt inquiry after finding that there is “probable cause” to hold that the Trump administration violated an order he issued last month directing officials to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador. The judge, James E. Boasberg, wrote in an 46-page opinion that the administration had shown a “willful disregard” for his instructions barring officials from sending the planes under the authority of a wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.
“The court does not reach such conclusions lightly or hastily,” Judge Boasberg wrote. “Indeed, it has given defendants ample opportunity to explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”
The American Civil Liberties Union brought a new lawsuit on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Abilene, Texas, as part of its continuing effort to stop the Trump administration from using a powerful wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador.
The new suit, filed on behalf of two Venezuelan men, is the fourth legal challenge the A.C.L.U. has brought in recent days against the administration’s use of the act in its deportation policy. The other cases are in Manhattan, Denver and Brownsville, Texas.
Much like the plaintiffs in the previous cases, those in the new case deny being members of a Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua. Their lawyers claim that the government’s accusations that they belong to the gang are based solely on their tattoos or social media posts.
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A day after the Interior Department announced that it had transferred jurisdiction over more than 100,000 acres along the U.S.-Mexico border to the Army, expanding the presence of U.S. military forces in the region, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said her government had sent a diplomatic note to the White House to request the troops not cross into Mexico. The transfer was part of the Trump administration’s plans to put the land under military control — effectively turning a long strip of land in California, Arizona and New Mexico into a military installation.
“We don’t know if it is to continue building the wall or what their objective would be,” Sheinbaum told reporters on Wednesday, calling the move an “autonomous decision” of the U.S. government. “But in any case, we always ask for respect and coordination.”
The Associated Press said in a court filing that the Trump administration had defied a court order requiring that the news service’s access to the White House press pool and events involving President Trump be restored. Lawyers for the The A.P., which had its access to Trump sharply reduced over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, wrote that a White House deputy press secretary told A.P. reporters on Monday that they would “continue to be excluded from press pool events because this case is ‘ongoing.’”
Last week, a federal judge instructed the White House to restore access “immediately,” writing that the ban violated the First Amendment.
The Justice Department is suing Maine to challenge the state’s policies allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has used her position to pursue a culture war issue Republicans see as a political liability for Democrats, conceded that Maine’s policies affected very few athletes — perhaps only two. But she said during a news conference on Wednesday that allowing “even one” transgender athlete to compete was too many.
Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, traveled to El Salvador on Wednesday to press for the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant and Maryland resident who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration and remains imprisoned in his native country.
The trip was the latest chapter in an intensifying political battle over the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, who was removed from the United States last month in what immigration officials have acknowledged was an error. Although the Supreme Court has instructed the U.S. government to facilitate his return, both American and Salvadoran authorities have so far refused to do so.
Mr. Van Hollen met with El Salvador’s vice president, Félix Ulloa, as well as officials at the U.S. embassy there, but he came away with no assurances that he would be able to see or even speak to Mr. Abrego Garcia, who is being held in a notorious maximum security prison known for human rights violations.
And his visit did little to change the minds of the Trump administration or Salvadoran officials who have refused to release Mr. Abrego Garcia. After his meeting with Mr. Ulloa, Mr. Van Hollen told reporters that the explanation Mr. Ulloa provided for continuing to keep Mr. Abrego Garcia in detention in the absence of a criminal charge against him was that the Trump administration was paying El Salvador to do so.
“I’m asking President Bukele under his authority as president of El Salvador to do the right thing and allow Mr. Abrego Garcia to walk out of a prison — a man who’s charged with no crime, convicted of no crime and who was illegally abducted from the United States,” Mr. Van Hollen told reporters in San Salvador, the capital.
The Trump administration has accused Mr. Abrego Garcia of being a member of the dangerous transnational gang MS-13. Mr. Van Hollen portrayed him instead as an innocent family man who was illegally “abducted” from the streets of Maryland in a miscarriage of justice, and bluntly accused the Trump administration of “lying” to justify its mistakes in deporting him.
“We have an unjust situation here, the Trump administration is lying about Abrego Garcia,” Mr. Van Hollen said.
He called out President Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Vice President JD Vance by name, saying that claims from top administration officials that Mr. Abrego Garcia had been charged with a crime or was part of MS-13 were inaccurate.
The senator said he hoped to visit Mr. Abrego Garcia at the prison, known as CECOT, about an hour outside San Salvador, but that Mr. Ulloa had cast doubt on his chances of doing so.
“I said I’m not interested at this moment in taking a tour of CECOT, I just want to meet with Mr. Abrego Garcia,” Mr. Van Hollen said he told the Salvadoran vice president. “He said he was not able to make that happen. He said he needed a little more time.”
He was similarly noncommittal about the chance of allowing Mr. Abrego Garcia’s family to speak with him, saying that such requests would have to come at the behest of officials from the U.S. embassy there, which is run by the Trump administration.
A spokeswoman for the Salvadoran presidency, Wendy Ramos, did not immediately respond to a request for the government’s comment on Mr. Van Hollen’s remarks. White House officials said in March that the U.S. government was paying the Salvadoran government $6 million to hold deported members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Officials have not said whether that also covers the detention of Salvadorans removed as part of the same operation, like Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Mr. Van Hollen made his visit shortly after President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador traveled to Washington this week for a meeting with Mr. Trump. The leaders appeared side-by-side in the Oval Office, with Mr. Bukele saying he had no intention of releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia and Mr. Trump saying he was powerless to seek his return.
Mr. Van Hollen said he had been unable to meet with Mr. Bukele on Wednesday because he was traveling.
The case has supercharged a partisan battle over immigration. Democrats argue that the Trump administration defied the law in deporting and then refusing to return Mr. Abrego Garcia, who entered the United States illegally but was later granted “withholding of removal” status, in 2019. Mr. Trump and other Republicans accuse Democrats of catering to a dangerous criminal who has no right to be in the United States.
In a statement on Wednesday, the National Republican Congressional Committee said Democrats were acting as “travel agents for illegal immigrants.”
On Wednesday, the Trump administration stuck to its position, continuing to defy the Supreme Court’s order. Asked about the case, Ms. Bondi declared that Mr. Abrego Garcia would not be repatriated unless the Salvadoran president decided to return him. Even if that happened, she said, the United States would immediately deport him again.
“President Bukele said he was not sending him back,” Ms. Bondi said. “That’s the end of the story.” She added that Mr. Abrego Garcia is “from El Salvador, he’s in El Salvador and that’s where the president plans on keeping him.”
With Congress in a two-week recess and Mr. Abrego Garcia’s fate becoming increasingly politicized, more members of Congress were making trips to El Salvador to weigh in on his case. At least two House Republicans, Riley Moore of West Virginia and Jason Smith of Missouri, toured the prison where Mr. Abrego Garcia was being held, although it was unclear whether they met with or saw him during their visit.
Both lawmakers posted photos on social media from inside the facility and argued in favor of its continued use as a destination for imprisoning deportees, as well as criminals from the United States.
“I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Mr. Moore wrote, alongside photos of him posing with thumbs up in front of a jail cell where several inmates were being held in multitiered metal bunks.
Mr. Smith praised Mr. Trump’s use of the facility and wrote that it was “unconscionable that Democrats in Congress are urging the release of more foreign criminals back into our country.”
Representatives Maxwell Alejandro Frost of Florida and Robert Garcia of California, both Democrats, also planned to visit El Salvador, according to two people familiar with their plans who discussed them on the condition of anonymity because they were not yet final.
The two wrote on Tuesday to Representative James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee, requesting an official congressional delegation be sent to the nation to conduct a “welfare check” on Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Mr. Frost and Mr. Garcia also said more oversight was needed given Mr. Trump’s remarks this week that he wanted to send “homegrown criminals,” including American citizens, to the Salvadoran prison.
“I may be the first United States senator to visit El Salvador on this issue, but there will be more and there will more members of Congress coming,” Mr. Van Hollen said on Wednesday.
Annie Correal contributed reporting from Panama City.
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Stocks fell in early trading this morning, on renewed signs that the global trade war could dent the financial results of some of the world’s largest technology companies. The S&P 500 opened 1 percent lower, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index dropped about 2 percent. American chip giant Nvidia said it would take a $5.5 billion hit from the U.S. government’s restrictions on sales of some of its chips to China; its stock sank about 6 percent this morning.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, said she had offered her sympathy to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in the wake of an arson attack on his residence that led to attempted murder and terrorism charges. But Bondi flatly refused to label the attack domestic terrorism — even though she has repeatedly described attacks on Tesla property, which did not entail attacks on people, as “domestic terrorism.”
transcript
So I spoke to Governor Shapiro. I think you’re referring to his governor’s mansion. I spoke to him. It is absolutely horrific what happened to him. Kash Patel also spoke to him. We have been praying for Josh, for his family, those photos — it was horrible. I firmly believe they wanted to kill him. The defendant allegedly said he was going to use a hammer if he could have gotten to the governor. I’ve known the governor many, many years. It is horrible. And yes, we are working with state authorities to do — it’s now a pending investigation. Anything we can to help convict the person that did this and keep them behind bars as long as possible.
President Trump said in a post on social media on Wednesday that Harvard “should no longer receive federal funds,” as part of a longer diatribe against the university. This week, federal officials said they would freeze over $2 billion in multiyear grants to Harvard because it had refused to comply with government demands for changes to the school’s operations, admissions, hiring, faculty and student life.
The nation’s largest federation of unions has put together a pro bono legal network that aims to help federal employees whose jobs have been lost or threatened under the Trump administration.
More than 1,000 lawyers in 42 states have completed training in order to offer their services, organizers said. The new pro bono group — Rise Up: Federal Workers Legal Defense Network, which was formally introduced on Wednesday — was formed by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. along with several other unions and civil rights groups, including We The Action, a network that connects lawyers with nonprofits, Democracy Forward, which has been leading legal action against the Trump administration, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Unions that represent federal workers — such as the American Federation of Government Employees, which is also involved in the legal network — have been at the forefront of efforts to push back against President Trump’s efforts to significantly downsize the civil service. But lawsuits challenging mass firings and other moves by Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, have had mixed success. And litigation takes time.
With dismissals expected to accelerate in the coming months, the unions decided to add a new dimension to their legal efforts. The new group aims to provide guidance and legal support to individual workers — regardless of whether they are union members — to challenge their employment status through the agencies that they work for, as well as various administrative boards.
“We knew there would be a lot of quick and valiant legal work in the federal courts, but we knew there was a chance you’d have to go to the employee agencies to protect the workers’ rights,” Deborah Greenfield, the network’s executive director, said in an interview.
One challenge for the network and their potential clients is that some of these bodies, like the National Labor Relations Board, are themselves in a state of limbo as courts weigh whether Mr. Trump has the power to fire appointed board members.
“We are still operating as though there is a rule of law,” Liz Shuler, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said of the network’s intent to bring individual cases through the administrative board process. “We are suing when things go awry, but we are watching closely to see that the rule of law holds.”
Since January, the Trump administration has worked to profoundly reshape the civil service through executive orders, sweeping layoffs and budget cuts. Tens of thousands of workers have been fired — though some have been reinstated, at least temporarily — and others have been warned that their jobs will be gone within months. A number of agencies are soon expected to conduct “reductions in force,” a bureaucratic term for a large-scale shrinking of an organization.
The administration has also sought to cancel collective bargaining agreements and remove union protections for at least a million federal employees.
Lawyers who sign up for the pro bono network are trained on the nuances of challenging federal employment cases. The training covers guidelines for how reduction in force actions are supposed to work, and a step-by-step guide to representing an employee before the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears appeals from federal employees over actions taken by their employers.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSenator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, said he was traveling to El Salvador on Wednesday to pressure the Trump administration to secure the return of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, after he was wrongly deported to a Salvadoran prison last month. “We are going to keep fighting to bring Abrego Garcia home,” Van Hollen said in a post on social media, adding that he was hoping to meet with officials in El Salvador as well as Abrego Garcia to check on his welfare.
Shoppers ramped up their spending on big-ticket items in March, according to Census Bureau data released this morning, ahead of Trump’s April 2 tariffs and resulting potential price increases. Retail sales, which are not adjusted for inflation, rose 1.4 percent from the previous month — the biggest monthly jump in more than two years. That’s far above the 0.2 percent increase in February. Sales of cars and car parts, in particular, jumped 5.3 percent in March. Electronics and appliance purchases rose 0.8 percent. Consumer spending is a key engine of economic growth, and this data, while robust, comes against a backdrop of falling consumer sentiment and concerns about the potential inflationary effects of the Trump administration’s trade war.
President Trump said on Wednesday that he would attend trade talks with Japan in Washington, indicating that he is paying particular attention to that country as it seeks to gain a reprieve from the administration’s sweeping tariffs.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had been set to lead the talks with a negotiator handpicked by Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba of Japan. Mr. Trump’s plan to join offers further evidence that Japan holds a special place in the president’s thinking about global trade.
“Japan is coming in today to negotiate tariffs, the cost of military support, and ‘trade fairness.’ I will attend the meeting,” Mr. Trump said in a post on Truth Social early on Wednesday. “Hopefully something can be worked out which is good (great!) for Japan and the USA!”
News media in Japan said that the country’s chief tariff negotiator, Ryosei Akazawa, who is the minister for economic revitalization, flew to Washington on Wednesday for the talks. The exact timing of the meeting was unclear.
The White House initially imposed “reciprocal” tariffs of 24 percent on Japan on April 3 before Mr. Trump, facing turmoil in financial markets, reversed course last week and said that the levies would be paused for 90 days. Japan still faces the 10 percent “baseline” tariff that Mr. Trump imposed on most imports to America, as well as 25 percent tariffs on steel, aluminum and cars.
On Friday, the White House amended its terms again by sparing smartphones, computers, semiconductors and other electronics from the tariffs, for now. Levies on chips and pharmaceuticals appear to be in the works.
These tariffs could hit Japan’s economy hard, and they also came as a political shock to a diplomatic relationship that has endured for decades. Mr. Ishiba has described them as a “national crisis.”
Japan is one of the first countries to hold direct talks with the administration over the duties, and as such the run-up to the negotiations has been closely watched by other nations that seek exemptions or more favorable terms.
In one sign of Japan’s favored status, Mr. Trump, while criticizing what he has called the country’s unfair trade policies and unequal security relationship, has also praised the country as an ally and for its negotiating skills. “I love Japan,” he said last month.
Martin Fackler contributed reporting from Tokyo.
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California’s governor and attorney general sued President Trump on Wednesday to try to stop his flurry of tariffs, accusing the president of taking unlawful action to escalate a global trade war that has caused “immediate and irreparable harm” to the state’s economy.
The lawsuit is the largest legal challenge yet to Mr. Trump’s trade policies. It was filed Wednesday in federal court in California by Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Attorney General Rob Bonta, both Democrats.
Mr. Newsom said that California had a responsibility to fight the tariffs as the largest importer and second-largest exporter among the states, behind only oil-rich Texas. California’s economy would rank as the world’s fifth largest if the state were a nation and it represents 14 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
“Where the hell is Congress? Where the hell is Speaker Johnson? Do your job,” Mr. Newsom said Wednesday during a news conference at an almond farm in the Central Valley, the state’s agricultural center. He accused them of “sitting there passively” as Mr. Trump “wrecks the economy of the United States of America.”
Mr. Trump’s tariffs are upending global trade. He imposed a 10 percent tariff on nearly all imports from most of the world, and his escalating tariffs with China have reached 145 percent.
Mr. Newsom said that the tariffs had already cost the state billions of dollars in inflated costs and supply-chain disruptions, and that he was particularly concerned about the vulnerability of California farmers to the retaliatory trade policies of other countries.
“No other state is poised to lose more than the state of California,” Mr. Newsom said. “That’s why we’re asserting ourselves on behalf of 40 million Americans. I imagine if you caucus those 40 million Americans, you’d find few — I don’t care where they were in the last election — that are celebrating this uncertainty, that are celebrating the largest tax increase in modern U.S. history.”
The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, asks that the tariffs be declared unlawful and that federal agents be stopped from enforcing them. It focuses on Mr. Trump’s use of a 1977 law to impose the tariffs. The law, known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, generally grants the president sweeping powers during an economic emergency.
Mr. Trump has claimed that an influx of illegal drugs from China constitutes a “national emergency” that requires “immediate action.” But California officials argue that the Constitution expressly gives the authority to impose tariffs to Congress, not to the president. State officials also say that while the economic powers law specifies many actions a president can take in an emergency, “tariffs aren’t one of them.”
Mr. Bonta, whose office has filed 14 lawsuits against the Trump administration in as many weeks, said that Mr. Trump had invented “bogus national emergencies,” such as a flood of drugs entering the country over the Canadian border, to illegally enact tariffs under the 1977 law.
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The White House did not immediately respond Wednesday to requests for comment.
Mexico, Canada and China are the state’s top three trading partners, accounting for 44 percent of imports into the state, Mr. Newsom said. Those three countries buy $67 billion in goods from California, he said.
On Monday, a nonpartisan legal advocacy group, the Liberty Justice Center, asked the U.S. Court of International Trade to block the tariffs on behalf of five small U.S. businesses that say they will be hurt by them. Earlier this month, a conservative legal group, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, sued in federal court in Florida, arguing that Mr. Trump had overstepped his legal authority.
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