Trump Administration Live Updates: Lawyers Demand Return of a Wrongly Deported Maryland Father
Where Things Stand
Wrongly deported: Lawyers for a Maryland man who was deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador despite an order protecting him from removal want to force the Trump administration to bring him back. Government lawyers have called the man’s deportation an “administrative error” but said there was little that could be done to force his return. Read more ›
Utility assistance: The Trump administration abruptly laid off the entire staff running the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps roughly 6.2 million people from Maine to Texas pay their heating and cooling bills. The layoffs were part of the purge of roughly 10,000 employees from the Health and Human Services Department. Read more ›
Law firm fight: Most of the country’s biggest law firms are said to have declined to join a so-called friend of the court brief in support of Perkins Coie, as it mounts a legal fight against President Trump. Milbank became the latest law firm to strike a deal with the president, who has targeted major firms as part of his retribution campaign against perceived enemies.
Tariff announcement: Follow live coverage on Mr. Trump’s tariff plans. Read more ›
Another big law firm has reached an agreement with the Trump administration over the kind of free legal services its lawyers can provide to head off an executive order that could impair its business.
President Donald J. Trump announced on Truth Social that Milbank had agreed to provide $100 million in pro bono legal services to causes supported by his administration and the law firm, including helping veterans, active members of the military and people who are victims of inequities in the criminal justice system.
The law firm also agreed to use a merit-based system and to not engage in “illegal D.E.I. discrimination.” It also promised not to deny representation to a client because of his or her political views.
The Trump administration has focused on firms that employed lawyers involved in investigations of Mr. Trump and his prior administration, or who have hired lawyers who have been critical of the president.
Milbank recently hired Neal Katyal, a frequent critic of Mr. Trump who was an acting solicitor general during the Obama administration, as an attorney in its Washington office.
The settlement comes on the heals of similar deals Mr. Trump announced with two other big law firms: Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Willkie Farr & Gallagher. A number of big law firms have rushed to strike deals with the administration after Mr. Trump signed executive orders against three firms that crippled their ability to represent clients with government contracts or other government business.
Three firms are fighting the administration in court and federal judges have temporarily blocked the orders against them. But a big one, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, chose to settle after being hit with an executive order on March 14. The firm’s settlement has been roundly criticized by law professors and others in the legal industry. Critics said the firm’s decision would only embolden Mr. Trump to go after more firms he views as having helped his political enemies or causes he rejects.
In the statement posted on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said Milbank supported his initiative to end the “weaponization” of the legal system and to avoid partisan litigation. The president’s post included a statement from Scott Edelman, Milbank’s chairman, in which he said the firm was glad to be able to “find common ground” with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Edelman did not immediately return a request for comment.
Earlier on Wednesday, the New York City Bar issued a strong statement of support for the suits against the Trump administration. The country’s oldest attorney bar association said it supported the lawsuits filed by WilmerHale and Jenner & Block and it affirmed the rights of lawyers to represent whomever they wanted.
Perkins Coie was the first law firm to sue the Trump administration over an executive order limiting its access to the federal government.
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Lawyers for a Maryland man who was inadvertently deported last month to a notorious Salvadoran prison despite an order that he could remain in the United States angrily urged the judge overseeing his case on Wednesday to force the Trump administration to bring him back as soon as possible.
In a court filing, the lawyers for the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, furiously took issue with almost every aspect of the case. To start, they said, Trump officials had acknowledged on Monday night that they had made an “administrative error” by flying Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador on March 15 even though a U.S. immigration judge had already determined that he might face torture there.
The lawyers also expressed shock that the administration was maintaining that it had little power to get Mr. Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national whose wife and child are both American citizens, out of custody. The prison where he is being held, known as CECOT, has long had a reputation of having brutal conditions.
“Defendants have already washed their hands of plaintiff, of his U.S.-citizen wife, of his autistic nonverbal five-year-old U.S.-citizen child,” the lawyers wrote. “Defendants’ proposed resolution of this state of affairs, which they caused either intentionally or at best recklessly, is nothing at all. This is an outrageous set of facts.”
The case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, 29, is the latest flashpoint in a multifront and increasingly bitter battle between immigration lawyers and the White House, which in recent weeks has been escalating its efforts to deport hundreds of migrants using both traditional and highly unorthodox methods.
The case has raised questions not only about how a man whom a judge had granted permission to remain in the United States could have ended up on a plane to El Salvador, but also about why the Trump administration has apparently done nothing to correct its mistake.
Moreover, the matter, which is unfolding in Federal District Court in Maryland, has put a spotlight on the administration's description of Mr. Abrego Garcia as a member of MS-13, the violent Salvadoran street gang, an accusation for which there is limited evidence and that he himself denies.
Not long after Mr. Abrego Garcia was detained by the local police in March 2019 while looking for employment at a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Md., officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement tried to have him deported.
During those proceedings, the officials accused him of being a member of MS-13, citing two pieces of evidence: an accusation from a confidential informant who told them Mr. Abrego Garcia belonged to the gang, and the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, which the officials said was further proof of his gang membership.
Mr. Abrego Garcia appealed the deportation effort and filed for asylum, claiming his life would be in danger if he were sent back to El Salvador. In October 2019, an immigration judge granted him a status known as “withholding from removal,” which protected him from deportation.
But last month Mr. Abrego Garcia was stopped again by immigration agents, who inaccurately told him that his protected status had changed. Within days, he had been placed on one of three flights to El Salvador that the Trump administration had hastily arranged as it was beginning to use a rarely invoked wartime statute, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport Venezuelans accused of being members of a different street gang, Tren de Aragua.
Two of the planes were sent to El Salvador under the authority of the wartime act, administration officials have said. But the third — the one on which Mr. Abrego Garcia was traveling — was supposed to have been transporting only migrants with formal removal orders signed by a judge.
The Trump administration now admits that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s removal was an “oversight” but has urged the judge overseeing the case, Paula Xinis, to reject his family’s petition to bring him home. Officials have claimed that the White House cannot force the Salvadoran government to release him and that U.S. federal courts have no jurisdiction to order his release.
Judge Xinis is scheduled to hold a hearing on Friday to discuss the deportation. In advance of the proceeding, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers told her that it was inconceivable that Trump officials had done nothing to get him back even though prior administrations, they maintain, had worked quickly to win the return of people who had been removed in error.
The lawyers have asked Judge Xinis to order the administration to win their client’s release by “financial pressure and diplomacy.” But the Justice Department, appearing to throw its hands up, responded this week that there is simply no evidence that the Salvadoran government would agree to releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia for any amount of money or would consider freeing him even if the administration asked.
In what appeared to be a preview of arguments they will raise in court this week, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers also claimed that the case touched on broader issues of the rule of law and trust in government authority.
“In the end, the public interest is best served by restoring the supremacy of laws over power,” they wrote. “The Department of Homeland Security must obey the orders of the immigration courts, or else such courts become meaningless. Noncitizens — and their U.S.-citizen spouses and children — must know that if this nation awards them a grant protection from persecution, it will honor that commitment even when the political winds shift.”
The Trump administration said on Wednesday that the president had chosen Stanley Woodward Jr., who has defended several key figures in his orbit, for the No. 3 position at the Justice Department.
Since January, Mr. Woodward has served as a lawyer at the White House, a reflection of the trust he developed in President Trump’s inner circle during a tumultuous period in 2022 and 2023 when Mr. Trump faced multiple criminal investigations and prosecutions. He rose to prominence representing Mr. Trump’s personal aide in the investigation into his handling of classified documents after he left office.
If the Senate confirms him as associate attorney general, Mr. Woodward will oversee a number of important parts of the department, including civil litigation, civil rights, antitrust, tax and environmental work. Historically, the associate attorney general also plays a major role in formulating department policy and coordinating with the White House. He would also become the department’s chief officer overseeing lawsuits involving the Freedom of Information Act.
Mr. Woodward would join a department already dominated by senior officials who previously served as lawyers for Mr. Trump, including Attorney General Pam Bondi; the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche; and the principal associate deputy attorney general, Emil Bove III. D. John Sauer, who represented Mr. Trump before the Supreme Court, is poised to become the solicitor general if confirmed later Wednesday by the Senate.
Mr. Woodward has also represented senior aides to the president who came under investigation, as well as people charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on Congress.
But it was in the classified documents investigation that Mr. Woodward proved his value to the president. In representing Mr. Trump’s aide, Walt Nauta, Mr. Woodward often played a significant role in devising and executing defense strategy. Mr. Nauta first began working as a valet for Mr. Trump at the White House and stayed with him as a private employee when the president left office.
Prosecutors came to consider Mr. Nauta a critical figure in understanding how roughly 300 classified documents ended up stashed in dozens of boxes at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida estate.
At first, investigators tried to persuade Mr. Nauta to testify against his boss. That effort failed, and prosecutors charged Mr. Trump with violating a section of the Espionage Act. Mr. Nauta was charged alongside him with conspiring to obstruct the investigation.
As Mr. Nauta’s lawyer, Mr. Woodward proved a vexing adversary to prosecutors, who at one point suggested he had ethical conflicts by representing other witnesses in the case that might force him to stop representing Mr. Nauta.
Mr. Woodward remained and ultimately it was the charges that went away, thanks to a judge’s skepticism of the special counsel appointed to handle the case, and the presidential election that returned Mr. Trump to office.
In recent years, Mr. Woodward did a great deal of Trump-related legal work. He was often paid by the president’s political action committee to represent witnesses, including in the documents case and the other federal criminal case against Mr. Trump stemming from Jan. 6.
Those clients included Kash Patel, who is now Mr. Trump’s F.B.I. director.
Separately on Wednesday, the Senate is poised to vote on the nomination of Harmeet Dhillon to serve as the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTPresident Trump announced on Truth Social that the law firm Milbank had agreed to provide $100 million in pro bono services for causes the administration supports and not engage in “illegal DEI discrimination” in hiring lawyers. For the past month, the administration has been threatening big law firms with executive orders that would make it impossible for the firms to represent clients with deals or contracts with the federal government.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has joined a closed-door luncheon with Senate Republicans, where they’re expected to discuss the president’s upcoming plan for sweeping tariffs.
Several Senate Republicans who left the meeting with Bessent said that he did not offer any details about the president’s tariff plan but instead wanted to focus on the need for Congress to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which will expire in 2025.
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Adams Endorses F.B.I. Director’s Book After Charges Are Dropped
Mayor Eric Adams held a news conference after his federal corruption case was dismissed and encouraged New Yorkers to read “Government Gangsters” by the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel.
This case, the judge has dismissed it with prejudice, making it clear that it never can be brought back. Let me be clear: As I’ve said all along, this case should have never, should have never been brought. And I did nothing wrong. When all that came at me, Jesus stepped in. And he uses who he uses. And New Yorkers stop me all the time in trying to find the rationale behind this. And I found it in this book. I’m going to encourage every New Yorker to read it. Read it, and understand how we can never allow this to happen to another innocent American. God bless you.
Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York City who, after his federal corruption indictment, forged a mutually beneficial relationship with President Trump, on Wednesday made clear where his loyalties lie.
Hours after a federal judge granted the Trump administration’s request to dismiss the corruption charges against him, Mr. Adams suggested at a news conference in front of Gracie Mansion that Mr. Trump’s Justice Department was doing God’s will.
“Jesus stepped in and he uses who he uses,” Mr. Adams said at the news conference, seemingly referring to the Justice Department officials who moved to drop his case.
“New Yorkers stop me all the time trying to find the rationale behind this,” Mr. Adams said. “And I found it in this book.”
Then he held up a copy of “Government Gangsters” by the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist who has spread misinformation about the agency he now runs, arguing that Americans are the victims of an unbridled cabal of federal officials referred to by Mr. Patel and others as the “deep state.”
Mr. Adams turned Mr. Patel’s book so that the audience could read the title and waved it for emphasis. “I’m going to encourage every New Yorker to read it,” he said. “Read it and understand how we can never allow this to happen to another innocent American.”
The extraordinary moment occurred during Mr. Adams’s first public comments after the charges were dropped.
And his brandishing of the book at the news conference seemed to underscore the bargain he has been accused of striking with the Trump administration — one that the judge who dismissed the charges on Wednesday referred to explicitly, saying it appeared that federal prosecutors had sought to dismiss the indictment in exchange for “immigration policy concessions.”
Mr. Adams was indicted in September and charged with bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. But after Mr. Trump took office, officials at the Justice Department moved to drop his case, saying that it was hindering the mayor from cooperating fully with Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda.
The judge overseeing the case, Dale E. Ho, dismissed it on Wednesday. But he noted that “the record does not show that this case has impaired Mayor Adams in his immigration enforcement efforts.”
Mr. Patel’s book, published in 2023, is a broadside against federal law enforcement officials, including Justice Department prosecutors and F.B.I. agents. Mr. Patel wrote in the book that the “Deep State isn’t some crazy conspiracy but a real force — and the most dangerous threat to our democracy.”
Mr. Patel said that the term, often used by Mr. Trump’s allies to refer to unelected civil servants, described officials who worked at the highest levels of almost every federal agency, including the F.B.I., and who were hopelessly politicized.
“Government Gangsters” is not Mr. Patel’s only published work. In 2022, he wrote a children’s book called “The Plot Against the King,” a retelling of the investigation into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and its potential ties to Russia.
In the book, Mr. Patel cast himself as a wizard who saves “King Donald” from the machinations of law enforcement and Democratic villains.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTPresident Trump plans to nominate a White House lawyer to be the No. 3 official at the Justice Department. The lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., also represented Trump aides as well as defendants in cases arising out of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump wants Woodward to be the associate attorney general, a critical job in which he would oversee a great deal of Justice Department policy and civil litigation and interact often with White House officials. Woodward is the latest of several lawyers involved in Trump’s criminal defense who could be working at the Justice Department.
Reporting from Washington
The Trump administration has abruptly laid off the entire staff running a $4.1 billion program to help low-income households across the United States pay their heating and cooling bills.
The firings threaten to paralyze the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which was created by Congress in 1981 and helps to offset high utility bills for roughly 6.2 million people from Maine to Texas during frigid winters and hot summers.
“They fired everybody, there’s nobody left to do anything,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which works with states to secure funding from the program. “Either this was incredibly sloppy, or they intend to kill the program altogether.”
The layoffs were part of a broader purge on Monday of approximately 10,000 employees from the Department of Health and Human Services, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. moved to drastically reorganize the agency. Roughly 25 employees had been overseeing the energy assistance program, which is also known as LIHEAP. All had been laid off, Mr. Wolfe said.
Congress had approved $4.1 billion for the program for fiscal year 2025, and about 90 percent of that money had already been sent to states in October to help households struggling with high heating costs. There is still about $378 million left to assist with summer cooling as households crank up their air-conditioners. Heat waves in the United States are growing more intense and lasting longer as a result of climate change.
Normally, the federal government sends the money to state agencies after allocating the funds using a complicated formula and performing various reviews and audits. Some states, like Maine, use the money to help low-income families to offset the cost of buying fuel oil to heat their homes in the winter. States also use the money to weatherize homes and provide emergency assistance to households at risk of being disconnected from their utility.
Now, it’s not clear how the remaining funds could be disbursed to the states, even though Congress has explicitly ordered the federal government to spend the money.
“If there’s no staff, how do you allocate the rest of this money?” Mr. Wolfe said. “My fear is that they’ll say we’ve got this funding, but there’s nobody left to administer it, so we can’t send it out.”
In an emailed statement, Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the agency “will continue to comply” with federal law “and as a result of the reorganization, will be better positioned to execute on Congress’s statutory intent.”
Over the past two months, the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to freeze or withhold spending authorized by Congress. Those moves have triggered a growing number of legal challenges and judicial rulings that say doing so is unconstitutional.
The firings at the energy assistance office triggered a furious response from several Democratic lawmakers.
“What ‘efficiency’ is achieved by firing everyone in Maine whose job is to help Mainers afford heating oil when it’s cold?,” Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat who represents a largely rural district in Maine that voted for President Trump, wrote in a social media post.
Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, said he would work to try to unlock the program’s funding. “Eliminating the entire federal staff responsible for LIHEAP — a program that millions of households depend on to stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer — isn’t reform,” he said in a statement. “It’s sabotage.”
The office of Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, issued a statement saying: “Senator Collins has been a longtime advocate for LIHEAP and the critical financial assistance it provides to lower income families to help ensure that they can stay warm during the winter months. It is unclear how, and if, the administration of this program will be affected by the HHS staffing changes.”
A study published in The Economic Journal last year found that roughly 17 percent of U.S. households spend more than one-tenth of their income on energy, a threshold that researchers often define as a “severe” energy burden. The study also found a strong relationship between energy affordability and winter mortality.
“When home heating is less affordable, more people die each winter,” Seema Jayachandran, an economist at Princeton and one of the authors of the study, wrote on Monday. “That’s what our analysis found for a period when LIHEAP was in place. Without LIHEAP, the effect would presumably much larger.”
Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said in remarks on the Senate floor that President Trump’s tariffs on Canada would be “detrimental” and that she was supporting a measure to stop Trump’s emergency order to levy tariffs on Canadian goods. She commended Trump’s efforts to “halt this dangerous and deadly flow” of fentanyl into the United States, but noted that most fentanyl was coming from Mexico and China, not Canada.
Her comments came after Trump attacked a number of Republicans for signaling they would provide enough votes to help the measure pass the chamber. “They are playing with the lives of the American people, and right into the hands of the Radical Left Democrats and Drug Cartels,” Trump said on social media, referring to Collins; Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska; and Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, both of Kentucky.
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They are among the nation’s richest law firms, and they employ some of the most loquacious litigators. But with their industry under attack from President Trump, most of these leaders of Big Law are not speaking up to defend one of their own.
For nearly three weeks, there has been a broad effort in the legal community to collect signatures from law firms for a so-called friend of the court brief supporting Perkins Coie, the first firm Mr. Trump targeted with an executive order in his retribution campaign against perceived enemies. Perkins Coie has sued, and a judge has temporarily blocked the president’s order, which jeopardized its ability to represent government contractors and limited its access to federal buildings.
Most of the nation’s top firms by revenue were asked to sign the brief supporting Perkins Coie, according to people with knowledge of the matter, and all of them were made aware of the signature campaign.
But so far, none of the top 10 firms has committed to signing, even after a soft deadline came and went on Tuesday, the people with knowledge of the matter said. Only a few firms in the top 50, as ranked by American Lawyer, have committed their signatures.
The brief — drafted by Donald B. Verrilli Jr., a solicitor general during President Barack Obama’s administration — is meant to be a show of strength against Mr. Trump. And ahead of the deadline, more than 200 firms in total have signed, mostly midsize and boutique firms.
Mr. Verrilli, a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a prominent firm but not among the nation’s top revenue generators, is expected to submit the brief in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., as soon as Friday, the people with knowledge of the matter said. Firms can still sign before then, and if the signature gathering gains momentum some larger names might ultimately appear.
Some of those larger firms have offered their signatures only if enough of their peers signed on as well, and several top-20 firms are still considering whether to sign, the people with knowledge of the matter said.
The brief presents a gut check moment for the law firm industry, testing its resolve in the face of an attack on the core tenets of the profession. And the difficulty in getting signatures from the biggest firms like Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins, the industry’s top revenue generators, reflects a broader split among law firms since Mr. Trump began issuing executive orders against firms that he claimed were hostile to his administration.
Kirkland and Latham declined to comment.
For most of the big firms, the hesitation stems not from ideological opposition to the brief, the people with knowledge of the matter said. They quietly support it, but are concerned that signing the document would draw Mr. Trump’s ire and cost them clients, or that signing would not meaningfully help Perkins Coie.
Some also note that signing the brief is not the only way the legal world is backing firms ensnared in Mr. Trump’s executive orders. Two large and prestigious firms, Williams & Connolly and Cooley, are representing other firms in lawsuits challenging the orders.
And the New York City Bar Association on Wednesday issued a statement of support for the lawsuits.
“The City Bar believes that it is important for legal organizations throughout the country to affirm the rights of lawyers and law firms to association, freedom of expression, due process and freedom in their contractual relationships,” the statement said.
Perkins Coie was the first law firm to oppose an executive order in court. Two other firms, WilmerHale and Jenner & Block, have recently done the same. All three are top 100 firms by revenue, and all three had ties to the investigation into Russia’s support for Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
WilmerHale was once home to Robert Mueller III, the former F.B.I. director who served as the special counsel leading that investigation. Jenner & Block had employed a top prosecutor who worked with Mr. Mueller. And Perkins Coie was involved in a dossier compiled during the 2016 campaign about Mr. Trump’s potential ties to Russia.
While federal judges have blocked the most onerous aspects of the orders for now — and the firms are expected to continue to prevail in the courts — they could sustain some financial pain. Perkins Coie disclosed in a court filing that it “already lost significant revenue due to the loss of clients.”
Unwilling to stomach losses like that, other firms in Mr. Trump’s cross hairs have chosen to strike a deal.
Paul Weiss, a large firm with deep ties to Democrats and their causes that helped sue the first Trump administration, initially considered taking legal action after it was hit with an executive order. But as many of its corporate partners feared a financial fallout, it opted for a deal with Mr. Trump that required the firm to do $40 million in pro bono work for causes supported by the White House.
Last month, the firm’s chairman lamented that other firms did not come to Paul Weiss’s defense.
“We waited for firms to support us in the wake of the president’s executive order,” Paul Weiss’s chairman, Brad Karp, wrote in an email to the firm at the time. “Disappointingly, far from support, we learned that certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.”
Last week, to head off an executive order, the giant firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom agreed to provide $100 million in pro bono work on issues that Mr. Trump supports.
The deals with Mr. Trump were seen by many in the legal world as a capitulation and a way to embolden the White House.
On Tuesday, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, a law firm that employs Doug Emhoff, the husband of former Vice President Kamala Harris, agreed to a deal with Mr. Trump to avoid an executive order.
A list of the names of the firms signing Mr. Verrilli’s brief in support of Perkins Coie has not been disclosed. But at least one firm has publicly declared its support: Keker, Van Nest & Peters, a prominent San Francisco litigation boutique.
In a recent New York Times guest essay, the named partners at that firm called on more to join, arguing, “If lawyers and law firms won’t stand up for the rule of law, who will?”
But Mr. Trump has suggested that many firms are more interested in signing deals.
“They’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much,’” he said last week, adding that law firms are saying: “‘Where do I sign? Where do I sign?’”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
More than 4,000 legal professionals have signed an open letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi that raises concerns about the administration’s attacks on law firms. The letter urges the Justice Department’s leadership “to preserve and protect the independence and integrity of the legal profession” by “opposing the use of the federal government to attack lawyers, law firms and legal organizations for engaging in good faith representation of their clients.”
Among the signatories to the letter, dated March 23 and sent Wednesday morning by mail and email, are prominent conservatives including J. Michael Luttig, a retired appellate judge, and Peter Keisler, a founder of the Federalist Society.
Reporting from Paris
The U.S. State Department is seeking to quell a diplomatic tempest roiling Europe this week after American Embassies in several countries sent letters to foreign contractors instructing them to certify their compliance with President Trump’s policies aimed at unraveling diversity programs.
The letters, directed at companies in France, Spain, Denmark, Belgium and elsewhere that have contracts with the U.S. government, rankled European companies and officials, who are pushing back at what they described as a pressure campaign by the Trump administration to impose anti-diversity policies abroad.
Late Tuesday, the State Department tried to walk back the letters, saying the compliance requirement applies to companies only if they are “controlled by a U.S. employer” and employ U.S. citizens. That contradicted the details in the embassy letters, which said Mr. Trump’s D.E.I.-quashing orders applied to all suppliers and contractors of the U.S. government, regardless of their nationality and the country in which they operate.
The State Department’s statement repeated much of the letters’ content. It said American Embassies and missions worldwide were reviewing their contracts and grants to ensure that they were consistent with an executive order Mr. Trump signed the day after taking office. The order instructs federal contractors not to engage in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it described as “illegal discrimination.”
The State Department said the embassy letter “only asks contractors and grantees around the world to certify their compliance with applicable U.S. federal anti-discrimination laws.”
“There is no ‘verification’ required beyond asking contractors and grantees to self-certify their compliance,” its statement said. “In other words, we are just asking them to complete one additional piece of paperwork.”
The embassy letters are the latest action by the Trump administration to unnerve European officials, who are already on edge over a trade war as Mr. Trump prepares on Wednesday to unveil potentially punishing levies on countries around the globe, including America’s largest trading partners.
It was not immediately clear how many companies in Europe received a letter or whether it was enforceable. But in Belgium, the government said it had lodged a protest with the U.S. Embassy and was “concerned that the United States is pressuring European companies” to abandon their diversity, equality and inclusion programs.
“The U.S. Embassy must comply with Belgian law in its actions,” Maxime Prévot, Belgium’s deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, said in a statement on Tuesday. “If contracts were to be terminated solely because a company is committed to diversity and inclusion, this could constitute a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.”
Mr. Trump’s D.E.I. orders have sown fear and confusion among corporate leaders in the United States. But the Trump administration’s efforts to impose its policies on European-based work forces have been met with resistance in places, like Italy, that have long had strong labor laws favoring workers’ rights.
Companies across Europe have worked for years to increase the presence of women, members of minority groups and employees with disabilities, generally broadening their work forces to reflect the makeup of their society.
In Denmark, where companies also received the letter, Morten Bødskov, the industry minister, said on Wednesday that Danish and other European companies took “great responsibility for diversity,” and that European rules were designed to “enhance companies’ responsibility for the society they are part of.”
Companies must comply with local laws where they operate, but “there is no reason to hide the fact that this can only be seen as yet another attempt at an American trade barrier,” Mr. Bødskov said in a statement, adding that a response would be “discussed with our European colleagues.”
In France, companies that received the letter expressed their dismay during a meeting with French government officials last week. The missive had the effect of whipping up a rare united front of government, corporate and French labor union leaders.
France’s foreign trade minister, Laurent Saint-Martin, vowed to shield companies from the U.S. policy, which he said was tantamount to asking them to renounce diversity policies that complied with French or European law.
Patrick Martin, the president of France’s biggest employers association, Medef, said that French companies “cannot give in,” and that Mr. Trump was seeking “a grip on the global economy and European values.”
And the C.F.D.T., the leading trade union in France, called on French companies “to resist this intimidation and not to fill out the form,” which the group said would be “synonymous with submission to the Trump administration.”
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A judge on Wednesday dismissed corruption charges against Eric Adams, ending the first criminal case against a New York City mayor in modern history and underscoring how President Trump’s Justice Department is using prosecutorial power to advance his agenda.
The judge, Dale E. Ho of Federal District Court in Manhattan, refused to let the government retain the option of reinstating the case, as Mr. Trump’s Justice Department had sought.
The department had argued that the bribery and fraud charges should be dropped for three reasons: They were brought too close to the mayoral election; the U.S. attorney who brought the case had created “appearances of impropriety”; and, most importantly, the prosecution was hindering the mayor’s cooperation with Mr. Trump’s immigration plans.
Judge Ho roundly rejected all three arguments.
“Everything here smacks of a bargain: Dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” the judge wrote in his 78-page decision. He suggested that the arguments about impropriety and timing were misleading and insincere.
Even so, his decision to let the Justice Department abruptly end the case, which had originally been set for trial this month, underscored the remarkable power that Mr. Trump’s administration has to terminate prosecutions, regardless of rationale.
In his second term, President Trump has taken tight control over the department, eviscerating its public corruption efforts and turning its focus toward the administration’s signature issue: the immigration crackdown. The dismissal of the case against Mayor Adams — who had curried favor with Mr. Trump for months — epitomized the department’s new ethos, where politics and access take precedence over all else.
Judge Ho wrote that the law had left him with little recourse in the face of the Trump administration’s abandonment of the case. Still, he criticized the Department of Justice’s reasoning, calling it “unprecedented and breathtaking in its sweep.”
He noted that the department had failed to offer any examples of charges being dismissed against an elected official in order to fulfill federal policy goals.
Mayor Adams, in midday remarks at Gracie Mansion, reiterated his longstanding position that the case “should have never been brought, and I did nothing wrong.”
“I’m running for re-election, and you know what, I’m going to win,” Mr. Adams said as he concluded his first public comments on the dismissal. He also brandished a book by Mr. Trump’s F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, “Government Gangsters,” and encouraged every New Yorker to read it.
One of his lawyers, Alex Spiro, said in a statement that “justice for Eric Adams and New Yorkers has prevailed.”
The Justice Department said in a statement that “this case was an example of political weaponization and a waste of resources. We are focused on arresting and prosecuting terrorists while returning the Department of Justice to its core mission of keeping Americans safe.”
Judge Ho’s ruling marked the finale of an extraordinary and bitter clash between the federal prosecutors in Manhattan who indicted Mr. Adams and the Justice Department officials who worked to kill the case. That fight, in which both sides accused each other of ethical misconduct, left Mr. Adams deeply damaged as he faces a steep uphill climb for re-election this year.
Judge Ho in his opinion discounted the Justice Department’s claims that the case had been brought for political reasons by the Manhattan federal prosecutors. “There is no evidence — zero — that they had any improper motives,” he wrote.
Read the ruling dismissing corruption charges against Eric Adams
Read Judge Dale Ho’s decision dismissing the charges against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, with prejudice.
Read DocumentThe judge made clear that his ruling did not address the merits of the case or whether a trial should have occurred. He said that Mr. Adams was, as ever, presumed innocent until proven guilty.
But while Mr. Adams no longer faces the prospect of a heavily publicized trial weeks before the Democratic primary, his political fortunes remain deeply uncertain.
If he runs as a Democrat, he could face as many as nine competitors vying for voters who disdain the Trump administration. If he runs as an independent, he would compete with the candidate who emerges triumphant from the Democratic primary, in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one.
The Justice Department had moved to dismiss the charges against the mayor after the prosecutors who brought the indictment refused. One of the department’s highest-ranking officials, Emil Bove III, offered the justification that the case was compromising Mr. Adams’s cooperation with the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Judge Ho wrote that “the record does not show that this case has impaired Mayor Adams in his immigration enforcement efforts.” Instead, he said, after Justice Department officials sought dismissal of the case, the mayor took at least one new immigration action in line with the administration’s polices.
The judge said that granting the government’s request to dismiss the charges without prejudice, which would have allowed it to bring them again, “would create the unavoidable perception that the mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration, and that he might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents.”
Judge Ho’s ruling was in line with a recommendation by a court-appointed legal expert, Paul D. Clement, a conservative lawyer who had argued that the mayor’s case should be ended with prejudice, meaning it could not be revived.
“A dismissal without prejudice creates a palpable sense that the prosecution outlined in the indictment and approved by a grand jury could be renewed, a prospect that hangs like the proverbial sword of Damocles over the accused,” Mr. Clement wrote in a March 7 court filing.
Judge Ho had also considered legal briefs urging him to deny the motion to dismiss the charges because of evidence of a corrupt quid pro quo. Judge Ho said doing so would be impractical because he could not force the government to prosecute, nor would a denial fulfill his obligation to protect the defendant, Mr. Adams.
The mayor was indicted last year on five counts, including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Prosecutors accused him of soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations and accepting thousands of dollars in travel benefits in exchange for helping Turkish officials open a new consulate building.
He had pleaded not guilty and consistently has denied wrongdoing.
Once the indictment was returned in September, the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan pursued the prosecution aggressively. But after the change in presidential administrations, the Trump Justice Department reversed course, ordering prosecutors to seek the charges’ dismissal.
Danielle R. Sassoon, the interim U.S. attorney, refused to obey the order and resigned, and a spate of resignations in New York and Washington followed. Justice Department officials, including Mr. Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, ended up filing the motion themselves and opened an investigation into the Manhattan prosecutors.
But Judge Ho said in his ruling that the record in the case indicated that the former Manhattan prosecutors had “followed all appropriate Justice Department guidelines.”
Throughout the opinion, the judge made it clear that he was personally unconvinced by arguments of Trump administration officials. He repeatedly asserted that while he had little power to defy them, his view was less important than that of American voters.
“Because the decision to discontinue a prosecution belongs primarily to a political branch of government,” he wrote, “it is the public’s judgment, and not this court’s, that truly matters.”
In a February hearing in Judge Ho’s courtroom, Mr. Bove had argued that Justice Department officials had “virtually unreviewable” discretion to end cases.
The judge seized on that phrase in his opinion, calling it “disturbing in its breadth.”
Mr. Bove’s argument, Judge Ho wrote, suggested that public officials “may receive special dispensation if they are compliant with the incumbent administration’s policy priorities. That suggestion is fundamentally incompatible with the basic promise of equal justice under law.”
Devlin Barrett and Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting.
Anticipation of Trump’s new tariffs, set to be unveiled today, is dragging down major U.S. stock indexes this morning. The S&P 500 opened 1 percent lower, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was down nearly 1.5 percent. The retreat follows several days of choppy trading, during which the S&P 500 registered its worst month and quarter since 2022, as uncertainty about tariff policies and their effects on the economy continues to dampen Wall Street sentiment.
The oldest attorney bar association in the U.S. issued a statement today in support of two big law firms that are fighting the Trump administration in court over executive orders that effectively treat the firms as national security risks. The New York City Bar said it supports the lawsuits filed in federal court by WilmerHale and Jenner & Block.
The bar association said it “believes that it is important for legal organizations throughout the country to affirm the rights of lawyers and law firms to association, freedom of expression, due process and freedom in their contractual relationships.” The law firms are challenging executive orders that would bar them from doing government work for clients and even entering government buildings. Some rival law firms have drawn criticism for cutting deals with the president to avoid the bans, which legal experts say are unconstitutional.
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Several countries have said they will cut tariffs on American products ahead of Trump’s announcement of global levies today. Effective Monday, Vietnam cut tariffs on a range of products, including liquefied natural gas, ethanol, chicken legs, cherries, wood and cars.
The move is intended to “improve the trade balance with trade partners,” said Nguyen Quoc Hung, a senior official at Vietnam’s Ministry of Finance. The ministry said that the United States had been concerned about its trade deficit with Vietnam for many years.
Judge Susan Crawford won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday, defeating Judge Brad Schimel, who was backed by President Trump, and overcoming $25 million in spending from Elon Musk in a race that became somewhat of a referendum on the billionaire and his slashing of the federal government. Her election could affect decisions on abortion and labor rights.
While Judge Crawford, 60, may not have been a nationally recognizable name before Tuesday, this was not her first election. In 2018, she was elected as a circuit judge in Dane County, and she won re-election in 2022.
transcript
Susan Crawford Beats Musk-Backed Candidate in Wisconsin
Susan Crawford, a liberal judge, won a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, beating the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel, who received $25 million in campaign support from Elon Musk.
Susan! Susan! Susan! Susan! As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world – for justice in Wisconsin, and we won. My promise to Wisconsin is clear. I will be a fair, impartial and commonsense justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.
Before becoming a judge, she spent years working for the Wisconsin Department of Justice, including as assistant attorney general.
In 2009, Gov. Jim Doyle appointed her as his chief legal counsel, a job that she held until 2010. In that job, she also led the Governor’s Pardon Advisory Board, which reviews pardon applications and makes recommendations to the governor.
In 2011, she joined the private law firm Cullen Weston Pines & Bach. Among the cases she worked on were a constitutional challenge to the state’s voter ID law and a contractual dispute between a passenger train manufacturer and the State of Wisconsin, according to the firm, which is now named Pines Bach. In 2013, she became a partner at the firm.
Judge Crawford has spoken out in favor of abortion rights and has been a public proponent of collective bargaining rights and voting rights.
Her campaign website promotes her time as a private practice attorney, when she “protected voting and workers’ rights, and represented Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin to defend access to reproductive health care.”
Judge Crawford lives in Madison, the state’s capital. She is married to Shawn Peters, an academic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and they have two children.
A federal judge in Northern California ordered the restoration of legal funds for migrant children who enter the United States alone, temporarily reversing a Trump administration decision last month that had left children at risk of deportation.
Nonprofit groups had been fighting the decision since they received notice from the federal government on March 21 that it would terminate funding for legal services for unaccompanied children in immigration court.
The halt in funding, according to a complaint filed by the groups, had put some 26,000 children at risk of being cut off from their lawyers and disadvantaged them in adversarial immigration proceedings. The government had argued that the funding was discretionary and that it was not obligated to provide legal representation for the children.
But Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of San Francisco disagreed, saying on Tuesday that by terminating the funding, the government had potentially violated its obligations to protect children from human trafficking.
Under a law combating human trafficking, which the nonprofit groups argued the government had violated, the government must, to the “greatest extent practicable,” provide legal representation to minors.
Children represented by the nonprofits, according to the groups’ complaint, arrived in the United States to flee violence, poverty and other dangers. Many of them are from Central America. Most do not speak English or have the means to hire a lawyer.
Nearly two-thirds of unaccompanied children had representation when they appeared in U.S. courts during the 2024 fiscal year, according to official data. Children who have lawyers attend their hearings 95 percent of the time, while those without representation attend only 33 percent of the time. Thousands of children in recent years who have missed their court dates have been ordered to be deported.
Since the federal funding was cut off, the groups said that they had been forced to consider cutting staff to stay financially viable or to stop providing legal services to existing and future clients. The groups, the judge said on Tuesday, would likely suffer “irreparable harm” without the funding.
Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care of migrant children, said in an email on Wednesday that the department did not comment on ongoing litigation.
The order, which came into effect on Wednesday, will expire on April 16, with both parties able to file more briefs ahead of a final decision by the court.
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