Trump Administration Live Updates: China Rejects Trump’s Claim of Trade Talks With Xi
Where Things Stand
Trump and China: China’s foreign ministry on Friday rejected suggestions by President Trump that the countries were engaged in talks about his new tariffs, saying the United States “should stop creating confusion.” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Time magazine published Friday that President Xi Jinping of China had called him to discuss tariffs. He also said the U.S. was prepared to lead military action against Iran if talks to limit its nuclear program failed to produce an agreement.
Venezuelan deportees: The American Civil Liberties Union early Friday filed an updated version of its lawsuit against the Trump administration that seeks due process for about 140 Venezuelans who were deported to El Salvador last month under the Alien Enemies Act. This time, the A.C.L.U. is asking a federal judge to help return those men to U.S. soil. Read more ›
Hegseth and security: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s personal phone number, the one used in a recent Signal chat, was easily accessible on the internet and public apps as recently as March, potentially exposing national security secrets to foreign adversaries. Cybersecurity analysts said an American defense secretary’s communications device would usually be among the most protected national security assets. Read more ›
Devlin Barrett is a reporter covering the F.B.I. and the Justice Department.
F.B.I. Director Kash Patel said on Friday that agents had arrested a county judge in Milwaukee on charges of obstructing immigration enforcement.
The bureau arrested Judge Hannah Dugan on suspicion that she “intentionally misdirected federal agents away from” an immigrant being pursued by federal authorities, Mr. Patel wrote on social media.
The Trump administration has vowed to investigate and prosecute local officials who do not assist federal immigration enforcement efforts.
The case involves a frequent point of friction over immigration agents trying to arrest undocumented immigrants who are appearing in state court. Local authorities often chafe at such efforts, arguing they endanger public safety if people dealing with relatively minor legal issues feel it is unsafe to enter courthouses.
In the first Trump administration, a local Massachusetts judge was indicted by the Justice Department on charges of obstructing immigration authorities. The charges were dismissed after the judge agreed to refer herself to potential judicial discipline.
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President Trump, whose trade war with China has rattled financial markets and threatened to disrupt huge swaths of trade, suggested on Friday that he has been in touch with Xi Jinping, China’s president, even as officials in China insist that no negotiations are occurring.
In an interview with Time, Mr. Trump said Mr. Xi had called him and asserted that his team was in active talks with the Chinese on a trade deal. Speaking to reporters outside the White House on Friday morning, the president reiterated that he had spoken with the Chinese president “numerous times,” but he refused to answer when pressed on whether any call had happened after he imposed the tariffs earlier this month.
Mr. Trump’s comments appeared aimed at creating the impression of progress with China to soothe jittery financial markets, which have fallen amid signs that the world’s largest economies are not negotiating. The S&P 500 is down 10 percent since Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
But his claims of talks have been rejected by Chinese officials, who have repeatedly denied this week that they are actively negotiating with the United States.
“China and the U.S. have not held consultations or negotiations on the issue of tariffs,” Guo Jiakun, the spokesman for the foreign ministry, said in a news conference on Friday. “The United States should not confuse the public.”
On Thursday, He Yadong, a spokesman for China’s commerce ministry, had said that there were “no economic and trade negotiations between China and the United States.”
“Any claims about progress in China-U.S. economic and trade negotiations are baseless rumors without factual evidence,” he said.
Asked in the Time interview if he would call Mr. Xi if the Chinese leader did not call first, Mr. Trump said no.
“We’re meeting with China. We’re doing fine with everybody,” the president said.
Mr. Trump also said, without evidence, that he had “made 200 deals.” He added that he would finish and announce them in the next three to four weeks.
With the two governments at an impasse, businesses that rely on sourcing products from China — varying from hardware stores to toymakers — have been thrown into turmoil. The triple-digit tariff rates have forced many to halt shipments entirely.
Trump officials have argued that the status quo with China on trade is not sustainable. Mr. Trump has rapidly ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese products, from 54 percent on April 2 to 145 percent just one week later. The Chinese government has argued that the actions are unfair and closely matched his moves, raising its tariffs on American goods to 125 percent.
Rachel Reeves, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, is set to meet Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury secretary, today in Washington in their first one-on-one, in-person meeting. Last night at a reception at the British Embassy, Reeves said she planned to discuss building stronger trade and investment ties between the U.S. and Britain. Reeves also took a sharper tone in criticizing China, saying that while its economic rise had brought huge benefits, it was a problem that some countries had large, persistent trade surpluses.
“The challenges that Donald Trump’s administration has spoken about — about global trade imbalances — are very real and we should address them,” she said.
As he left the White House for his trip to Rome for the pope’s funeral, President Trump was pressed on his claim to Time magazine that President Xi Jinping of China had called him to talk about tariffs. According to a pool report, when asked if he had talked with Xi, Trump said he had spoken to him “numerous times,” but would not say whether they had talked since he imposed the new tariffs. Chinese officials said today that the two countries are not negotiating on tariffs, indicating that Trump is trying to create the impression that more is going on behind the scenes to resolve the trade war than actually is.
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Reporting from Jerusalem
If an agreement with Iran to limit its nuclear program proves elusive, the United States could spearhead military action against it, President Trump said in an interview published on Friday.
Mr. Trump’s comments, in an interview with Time magazine marking his first three months in office, came as American and Iranian officials were set to meet for the third consecutive Saturday in an effort to reach an agreement that would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
After being asked if he was worried that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel might drag him into a war with Iran, Mr. Trump said: “I may go in very willingly if we can’t get a deal. If we don’t make a deal, I’ll be leading the pack.”
Mr. Trump has said he thought the talks between the United States and Iran were going well, but officials on both sides have not achieved a breakthrough.
Mr. Netanyahu has expressed openness to diplomacy if it leads to the full dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program — a demand that Iranian officials have rejected. Some Israeli officials have expressed concerns that the United States could agree to a deal that leaves some of Iran’s nuclear program in place.
Mr. Netanyahu has avoided a public confrontation with Mr. Trump, but has issued a number of public statements saying Israel will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon.
Last week, The New York Times reported that Israel had planned an attack on Iranian nuclear sites, but was held back by Mr. Trump, who expressed support for attempting to negotiate an agreement with Iran first. Israeli officials have suggested that U.S. support for such strikes was crucial, both to ensure successful execution and to protect Israel against an Iranian response.
Mr. Trump said he did not stop Israel from attacking Iran, but “didn’t make it comfortable for them.”
“Ultimately I was going to leave that choice to them, but I said I would much prefer a deal than bombs being dropped,” he said.
Mr. Trump also said he was open to meeting with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or its president, Masoud Pezeshkian.
Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, who is known as an outspoken defender of Ukraine on Capitol Hill, says he is “very resistant” to a deal that would reward Russia “by giving it any Ukrainian land.” The Trump administration is seeking to pressure Ukraine to accept a U.S. proposed peace plan that would cede territory to Russia along the current front lines of the conflict. The deal would also permanently restrict Ukraine’s ability to join NATO, though Bacon says if Ukraine forfeits the land, it should be “allowed into NATO to gain much needed security guarantees.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s personal phone number, the one used in a recent Signal chat, was easily accessible on the internet and public apps as recently as March, potentially exposing national security secrets to foreign adversaries.
The phone number could be found in a variety of places, including WhatsApp, Facebook and a fantasy sports site. It was the same number through which the defense secretary, using the Signal commercial messaging app, disclosed flight data for American strikes on the Houthi militia in Yemen.
Cybersecurity analysts said an American defense secretary’s communications device would usually be among the most protected national security assets.
“There’s zero percent chance that someone hasn’t tried to install Pegasus or some other spyware on his phone,” Mike Casey, the former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said in an interview. “He is one of the top five, probably, most targeted people in the world for espionage.”
Emily Harding, a defense and security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, added: “You just don’t want the secretary of defense’s phone number to be out there and available to anyone.”
The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, did not respond to request for comment.
Mr. Hegseth’s use of Signal to convey details of military strikes in Yemen first surfaced last month when the editor of The Atlantic wrote an article that said he had been added, apparently accidentally, to an encrypted chat among senior U.S. government officials. The New York Times reported this week that Mr. Hegseth included sensitive information about the strikes in a Signal group chat he set up that included his wife and brother, among others.
Soon after the first Signal chat about Yemen became public in March, Der Spiegel, the German news publication, found the phone numbers of Mr. Hegseth and other senior Trump officials on the internet.
That Mr. Hegseth’s private cellphone number was easily available through commercial providers of contact information is not surprising, security experts said. After all, Mr. Hegseth was a private citizen until Donald J. Trump, who was then the president-elect, announced that he wanted the former National Guardsman and Fox News weekend anchor to run the Pentagon, an $849 billion-a-year enterprise with close to three million employees.
It has now become routine for government officials to keep their personal cellphones when they enter office, several defense and security officials said in interviews. But they are not supposed to use them for official business, as Mr. Hegseth did.
Even low-level government workers are instructed not to use their personal cellphones and laptops for work-related matters, according to current and former government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
For senior national security officials, the directive is even more crucial, one former senior Pentagon official said.
Mr. Hegseth had a significant social media presence, a WhatsApp profile and a Facebook page, which he still has.
On Aug. 15, 2024, he used his personal phone number to join Sleeper.com, a fantasy football and sports betting site, using the username “PeteHegseth.” Less than two weeks later, a phone number associated with his wife, Jennifer, also joined the site. She was included in one of the two Signal chats about the strikes.
Mr. Hegseth also left other digital breadcrumbs, using his phone to register for Airbnb and Microsoft Teams, a video and communications program.
Mr. Hegseth’s number is also linked to an email address that is in turn linked to a Google Maps profile. Mr. Hegseth’s reviews on Google Maps include endorsements of a dentist (“The staff is amazing”), a plumber (“Fast, honest, and quality work”), a mural painter (“Painted 2 beautiful flags for us — spot on”) and other businesses. (Google Maps street view blurs out Mr. Hegseth’s former home.)
“If you use your phone for just ordinary daily activities, you are leaving a highly, highly visible digital pathway that even a moderately sophisticated person, let alone a nefarious actor, can follow,” said Glenn S. Gerstell, a former general counsel for the National Security Agency.
Government cellphones, by contrast, are far more secure because they are fitted with rigorous government controls meant to protect official communications.
In using that same phone number on Signal to discuss the exact times that American fighter pilots would take off for strikes in Yemen and other sensitive matters, Mr. Hegseth opened himself — and, potentially the pilots — to foreign adversaries who have demonstrated their abilities to hack into accounts of American officials, encrypted or not, security experts said.
“Phone numbers are like the street address that tell you what house to break into,” said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert. “Once you get the street address, you get to the house, and there might be locks on the doors, and you ask yourself, ‘Do I have the tools to bypass or break the locks?’”
China and Russia do, and Iran may as well, several cybersecurity experts said.
Last year a series of revelations showed how a sophisticated Chinese intelligence group, called Salt Typhoon, penetrated deep into at least nine U.S. telecommunications firms. Investigators said that among the targets were the commercial, unencrypted phone lines used by Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance and top national security officials.
Mr. Gerstell said he had no knowledge of Mr. Hegseth’s phone or if it was subject to attack. But personal phones are typically far more vulnerable than government-issued phones.
“It would be possible, with moderate difficulty for someone to take over a phone in a surreptitious way once they had the number assuming you clicked on something malicious,” Mr. Gerstell said. “And when really sophisticated bad guys are involved, like Russia or China, phones can be infected even if you don’t click on anything.”
Cybersecurity experts said that more than 75 countries had acquired commercial spyware within the past decade. The most sophisticated spyware tools — like Pegasus — have “zero-click” technology, meaning they can stealthily and remotely extract everything from a target’s mobile phone, without the user having to click on a malicious link to give Pegasus remote access. They can turn the mobile phone into a tracking and secret recording device, allowing the phone to spy on its owner.
Signal is an encrypted app, and its security for a commercial messaging service is considered very good. But malware that installed a key logger or keystroke capture code on a phone would allow the hacker, or nation state, to read what someone types into a phone, even in an encrypted app, former officials said.
In the case of Mr. Hegseth’s use of Signal to discuss the Yemen strike plans, spyware on his phone could potentially see what he was typing or reading before he hit “send,” because Signal is encrypted during the moments of sending and receiving, cybersecurity experts said.
One person familiar with the Signal conversation said that Mr. Hegseth’s aides warned him a day or two before the Yemen strikes on March 15 not to discuss such sensitive operational details in his group chat. That chat, while encrypted, was not considered as secure as government channels.
It was unclear how Mr. Hegseth responded to those warnings.
Mr. Hegseth also had Signal set up on a computer in his office at the Pentagon so that he could send and receive instant messages in a space where personal cellphones are not permitted, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. He has two computers in his office, one for personal use and one that is government-issued, one of the people with knowledge of the matter said.
“I guarantee you Russia and China are all over the secretary of defense’s cellphone,” Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, who has suggested that Mr. Hegseth should be fired, told CNN this week.
Christiaan Triebert reported from New York. Greg Jaffe in Washington contributed reporting and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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Over the past two weeks, immigration lawyers, scrambling from courthouse to courthouse, have secured provisional orders in five states stopping the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law, to deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a terrorism prison in El Salvador.
Judges have been harsh in appraising how the White House has used the powerful statute. “Cows have better treatment now under the law,” a federal judge in Manhattan said on Tuesday.
But at least so far, the one thing the lawyers have not managed to do is protect another — and harder to reach — group of Venezuelan migrants: about 140 men who are already in El Salvador, having been deported there under the act more than a month ago.
Early Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union took another shot at seeking due process for those men. Lawyers for the group filed an updated version of a lawsuit they brought against President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act on March 15, the first that challenged his invocation of the law.
This time, the A.C.L.U. is asking a federal judge in Washington not to stop the men from being sent to El Salvador, but rather to help them return to U.S. soil.
When the A.C.L.U. filed its initial version of the suit, in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge James E. Boasberg issued an immediate order telling the administration to hold off sending any planes of Venezuelans to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act and to turn around any flights that were already in the air.
But that never happened. The administration’s inaction ultimately resulted in a threat by Judge Boasberg to begin a contempt investigation into whether Trump officials violated his original instructions — and now the updated lawsuit.
Altogether, the A.C.L.U. has filed at least seven lawsuits in seven federal courts across the country, challenging Mr. Trump’s proclamation on March 14 invoking the Alien Enemies Act as one of the central tools of his aggressive deportation agenda.
The suits have homed in on two different but related legal issues.
One is a significant procedural question: whether the Trump administration has provided migrants whom officials have asserted are subject to removal under the law with sufficient time and opportunity to challenge their deportations in court.
In a court filing unsealed on Thursday in an A.C.L.U. case in Texas, a top federal immigration official said that the administration had decided that “a reasonable amount of time” for migrants to express their desire to challenge deportations could be as little as 12 hours. The official said that migrants could have at least another day to file their challenges in court.
The other issue the A.C.L.U. has been exploring is more substantive: whether the White House should be allowed to use the act at all against the Venezuelan migrants. The act, which was passed in 1798, is supposed to be invoked only in times of declared war or military invasion against members of a hostile foreign nation.
Trump officials have repeatedly argued that the Venezuelans they are trying to deport are members of a criminal gang called Tren de Aragua and that their presence in the United States amounts to an invasion supported by the Venezuelan government. But that view has been rejected not only by some U.S. intelligence officials, but also by an increasing number of judges considering the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuits.
On Tuesday, for example, during a hearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein blasted Mr. Trump’s use of the statute, saying it was “contrary to law.”
Several times, Judge Hellerstein, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, said he believed that Mr. Trump was using the law in inappropriate ways. He noted in particular that the law did not authorize the government “to hire a jail in a foreign country where people could be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment not allowable in the United States jails.”
When Tiberius Davis, a lawyer for the Justice Department took issue with that view, Judge Hellerstein shot him down.
“Your Honor, respectfully, once they’ve already been removed, they’re not in United States custody,” Mr. Davis said. “That’s El Salvador. They’re a separate foreign sovereign.”
“That’s exactly the point,” Judge Hellerstein said.
Another judge, Charlotte N. Sweeney, issued a ruling this week in Federal District Court in Denver determining that Mr. Trump’s proclamation had improperly stretched the meaning of terms like “war” and “invasion” in a way that ran counter to the actual text of the Alien Enemies Act.
“Because the act’s ‘text and history’ use these terms ‘to refer to military actions indicative of an actual or impending war’ — not ‘mass illegal migration’ or ‘criminal activities’ — the act cannot sustain the proclamation,” she wrote.
While the Supreme Court has not weighed in yet on the broad issue of whether the White House is using the statute properly, the court has made a decision on the procedural question of whether Trump officials have given migrants subject to the law due process.
Deciding they had not, the justices ruled in an order on April 7 that the Venezuelan migrants must be warned in advance if the government intends to deport them under the Alien Enemies Act so they can challenge them in court, but only in the places where they were being detained. The justices have not yet laid out their vision of how much — or what type of — warning the migrants should receive.
Still, the A.C.L.U. is using that ruling in its updated lawsuit filed in Washington in tandem with a second Supreme Court decision handed down in a different deportation case. In that decision, the justices determined that the White House had to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from Salvadoran custody after officials wrongfully deported him last month in violation of an earlier court order that expressly barred him from being sent to the country.
Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. have sought in essence to merge both of these rulings into a single tool to demand not only that the Trump administration provide the nearly 140 Venezuelans in Salvadoran custody with some way of challenging their circumstances, but also that officials take active steps toward securing their release, since they were not previously given the opportunity to do so.
The lawyers have argued, moreover, that it is appropriate to challenge the deportations in front of Judge Boasberg in Washington even though that is not where the men are currently being held. They say that Washington is the proper venue for legal actions when prisoners are in custody overseas.
But even if this strategy is successful, it could be difficult to force the administration to actually take steps to get the men released from Salvadoran custody.
Mr. Abrego Garcia, for example, remains in El Salvador two weeks after the Supreme Court ordered the White House to help secure his freedom.
Jonah E. Bromwich and Mattathias Schwartz contributed reporting.
Kenneth P. Vogel and David Yaffe-Bellany
Kenneth P. Vogel reported from Washington, and David Yaffe-Bellany from New York.
Roger J. Stone Jr., the longtime associate of President Trump’s, has been lobbying for a pioneering cryptocurrency investor known as “Bitcoin Jesus” who is facing federal fraud and criminal tax charges, according to congressional filings.
Mr. Stone filed paperwork last month indicating that he had been retained by Roger Ver, an early Bitcoin investor who was charged last year and accused of shielding his cryptocurrency holdings from $48 million in taxes.
Mr. Stone noted in a filing last week that he had been paid $600,000 by Mr. Ver since early February to help his client’s case, partly by trying to abolish the tax provisions at the heart of the charges.
Mr. Ver, a former California resident who renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014, was arrested last year in Spain, according to the Justice Department, which announced plans at the time to extradite him.
Mr. Ver disputed the charges, claiming in a video posted on social media in January that he was being threatened with a possible sentence of more than 100 years in prison because of his political views and his role in promoting cryptocurrency.
In the video, which was framed as an appeal to Mr. Trump, Mr. Ver linked his case to the president’s grievances about the weaponization of the justice system.
As footage of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on the screen, Mr. Ver said that “if there’s anybody that knows what it’s like to be the victim of lawfare for spreading American ideals, it’s Donald Trump.”
“They’re doing the exact same thing to me that they’ve done to you,” he added.
Mr. Ver did not respond to a request for comment.
His lobbying, public relations and legal campaign comes as Mr. Trump has embraced cryptocurrency and dialed back efforts to crack down on the industry, which donated millions of dollars to committees raising money for Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and inauguration.
Mr. Trump’s family is involved in several cryptocurrency-related ventures.
His administration has announced initiatives to stimulate the industry, and has backed away from enforcement against crypto companies. Mr. Trump pardoned a different Bitcoin pioneer who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for creating Silk Road, the world’s largest online drug marketplace.
Last month, he also granted pardons to three founders of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX who had pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating guidelines in the Bank Secrecy Act, a law that protects against money laundering.
Other figures in the crypto world have been angling for clemency, including Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the failed FTX crypto exchange who is serving a 25-year sentence for fraud.
Mr. Ver’s case has become something of a cause célèbre among cryptocurrency enthusiasts, who have called for a pardon.
In December, Mr. Stone’s website posted an essay by an activist titled “Why Roger Ver deserves a presidential pardon.”
In the final month of his first term, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Stone’s conviction for obstructing a congressional investigation into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and its possible ties to Russia.
But Mr. Stone told The New York Times that he was not relying on his decades-long relationship with Mr. Trump to help Mr. Ver.
“I have not lobbied any official in the executive branch of government including the president regarding his case or a pardon,” Mr. Stone wrote in a text message. Instead, he indicated that he was hired primarily to advise Mr. Ver’s lawyer.
In court filings, Mr. Ver’s legal team has called the tax laws in question “inscrutably vague as to their application to digital assets of the kind that underlie the charges.” His lawyers have challenged the constitutionality of the so-called “exit tax” requiring Americans to settle tax obligations before renouncing their citizenship.
Prosecutors accused Mr. Ver of concealing the value of his Bitcoin holdings while preparing his expatriation tax filings.
Mr. Stone indicated in his lobbying filings that he had lobbied the House about “ending the exit tax and reform of cryptocurrency tax policy.”
Mr. Stone said in a text message that he had discussed Mr. Ver’s case with lawmakers, and had “at all times advocated reform of the current laws regarding taxes upon expatriation.”
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Mattathias Schwartz reported from the federal courthouse in Brownsville, Texas.
On April 7, the Supreme Court ruled that the government must give Venezuelan migrants notice “within a reasonable time” and the chance to legally challenge their removal before being deported to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
Exactly how much notice the Trump administration considered appropriate in response to the Supreme Court’s edict was revealed in a document unsealed during a hearing on Thursday in Federal District Court in Brownsville, Texas.
Before Saturday, when the Supreme Court issued a second order, which blocked the deportation of a group of Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, detainees slated for deportation were given a one-page form that stated “if you desire to make a phone call, you will be permitted to do so,” according to the unsealed document, a four-page declaration by an official from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
They then had “no less than 12 hours” to “express an intent” to challenge their detention, and another 24 hours to file a habeas corpus petition asking for a hearing before a judge, the declaration said. The form itself is written in English, but “it is read and explained to each alien in a language that alien understands.”
The hearing was part of a case whose plaintiffs are three Venezuelan men being held at El Valle Detention Facility, roughly 50 miles from Brownsville.
Lawyers for detainees held elsewhere, who have sued in the Northern District of Texas, have disputed the government’s claims about being given notice. They also have said that the form was not explained to detainees and that they were simply told to sign the document, which the ICE declaration identified as Form AEA-21B.
The details about notice came during a two-hour hearing before Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., who unsealed the ICE declaration after rejecting the government’s stance that it should remain sealed because it contained sensitive law-enforcement details.
Judge Rodriguez also expressed some skepticism about President Trump’s assertion in an executive order that the men could be deported under the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law, because of claims by the government that they are members of a gang. The government tried to defend Mr. Trump’s wording that activity by Tren de Aragua amounted to “an invasion” and “predatory incursion,” but it was unable to provide what the judge requested: documentation from the time the act was passed that supported that argument.
“You’re giving me your view of what the words mean,” he said. “What I’m looking for is what the words meant at the time.”
Immediately after the hearing, Lee Gelernt of the A.C.L.U., one of the lawyers for the three plaintiffs, said the notice given to his clients was insufficient.
“Twelve hours is obviously too short to find out who to contact, and 24 hours to file a habeas corpus petition is obviously inconsistent with any notion of due process, or the Supreme Court’s ruling,” he said.
Judge Rodriguez is one of at least five district court judges who have issued temporary restraining orders barring the administration from deporting individuals from their districts under the Alien Enemies Act. He and another of those five judges were appointed by Mr. Trump.
At the end of the hearing on Thursday, Judge Rodriguez extended his restraining order by one week, to May 2.
Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
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