On April 4, Trump fired head of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) and director of the National Security Agency (NSA) General Timothy Haugh, apparently on the recommendation of right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who is pitching her new opposition research firm to “vet” candidates for jobs in Trump’s administration.
Former secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall wrote in Newsweek yesterday that the position Haugh held is “one of the most sensitive and powerful jobs in America.” Kendall writes that NSA and CYBERCOM oversee the world’s most sophisticated tools and techniques to penetrate computer systems, monitor communications around the globe, and, if national security requires it, attack those systems. U.S. law drastically curtails how those tools can be used in the U.S. and against American citizens and businesses. Will a Trump loyalist follow those laws? Kendall writes: “Every American should view this development with alarm.”
Just after 2:00 a.m. eastern time this morning, the Senate confirmed Retired Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who goes by the nickname “Razin,” for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by a vote of 60–25. U.S. law requires the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to have served as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of staff of the Army, the chief of naval operations, the chief of staff of the Air Force, the commandant of the Marine Corps, or the commander of a unified or specified combatant command.
Although Caine has 34 years of military experience, he did not serve in any of the required positions. The law provides that the president can waive the requirement if “the President determines such action is necessary in the national interest,” and he has apparently done so for Caine. The politicization of the U.S. military by filling it with Trump loyalists is now, as Kendall writes, “indisputable.”
The politicization of data is also indisputable. Billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) claims to be saving Americans money, but the Wall Street Journal reported today that effort has been largely a failure (despite today’s announcement of devastating cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that monitors our weather). But what DOGE is really doing is burrowing into Americans’ data.
The first people to be targeted by that data collection appear to be undocumented immigrants. Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported on Wednesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been using a database that enables officials to search for people by filtering for “hundreds of different, highly specific categories,” including scars or tattoos, bankruptcy filings, Social Security number, hair color, and race. The system, called Investigative Case Management (ICM), was created by billionaire Peter Thiel’s software company Palantir, which in 2022 signed a $95.9 million contract with the government to develop ICM.
Three Trump officials told Sophia Cai of Politico that DOGE staffers embedded in agencies across the government are expanding government cooperation with immigration officials, using the information they’re gleaning from government databases to facilitate deportation. On Tuesday, DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi sent the first 6,300 names of individuals whose temporary legal status had just been canceled. On the list, which Moghaddassi said covered those on “the terror watch list” or with “F.B.I. criminal records,” were eight minors, including one 13-year-old.
The Social Security Administration worked with the administration to get those people to “self-deport” by adding them to the agency's “death master file.” That file is supposed to track people whose death means they should no longer receive benefits. Adding to it people the administration wants to erase is “financial murder,” former SSA commissioner Martin O’Malley told Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz, Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac, and Tara Siegel Bernard of the New York Times. Those people will not be able to use credit cards or banks.
On Tuesday, Acting Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Melanie Krause resigned after the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security agreed to share sensitive taxpayer data with immigration authorities. Undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes, in part to demonstrate their commitment to citizenship, and the government has promised immigrants that it would not use that information for immigration enforcement. Until now, the IRS has protected sensitive taxpayer information.
Rene Marsh and Marshall Cohen of CNN note that “[m]ultiple senior career IRS officials refused to sign the data-sharing agreement with DHS,” which will enable HHS officials to ask the IRS for names and addresses of people they suspect are undocumented, “because of grave concerns about its legality.” Ultimately, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed the agreement with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
Krause was only one of several senior career officials leaving the IRS, raising concerns among those staying that there is no longer a “defense against the potential unlawful use of taxpayer data by the Trump administration.”
Makena Kelly of Wired reported today that for the past three days, DOGE staffers have been working with representatives from Palantir and career engineers from the IRS in a giant “hackathon.” Their goal is to build a system that will be able to access all IRS records, including names, addresses, job data, and Social Security numbers, that can then be compared with data from other agencies.
But the administration’s attempt to automate deportation is riddled with errors. Last night the government sent threatening emails to U.S. citizens, green card holders, and even a Canadian (in Canada) terminating “your parole” and giving them seven days to leave the U.S. One Massachusetts-born immigration lawyer asked on social media: “Does anyone know if you can get Italian citizenship through great-grandparents?”
The government is not keen to correct its errors. On March 15 the government rendered to prison in El Salvador a legal U.S. resident, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the courts had ordered the U.S. not to send to El Salvador, where his life was in danger. The government has admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but now claims—without evidence—that he is a member of the MS-13 gang and that his return to the U.S. would threaten the public. Abrego Garcia says he is not a gang member and notes that he has never been charged with a crime.
On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7. The administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision yesterday, saying the government must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release, but asked the district court to clarify what it meant by “effectuate,” noting that it must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
The Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”
Legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained what happened next. Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by 9:30 a.m. today explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.
The administration made clear it did not intend to comply. It answered that the judge had not given them enough time to answer and suggested that it would delay over the Supreme Court’s instruction that Xinis must show deference to the president’s ability to conduct foreign affairs. Xinis gave the government until 11:30 and said she would still hold the hearing. The government submitted its filing at about 12:15, saying that Abrego Garcia is “in the custody of a foreign sovereign,” but at the 1:00 hearing, as Anna Bower of Lawfare reported, the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not have information about where Abrego Garcia is and that the government had done nothing to get him back. Ensign said he might have answers by next Tuesday. Xinis says they will have to give an update tomorrow.
As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens. Indeed, both President Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have proposed that very thing.
Tonight, Trump signed a memorandum to the secretaries of defense, interior, agriculture, and homeland security calling for a “Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions.” The memorandum creates a military buffer zone along the border so that any migrant crossing would be trespassing on a U.S. military base. This would allow active-duty soldiers to hold migrants until ICE agents take them.
By April 20, the secretaries of defense and homeland security are supposed to report to the president whether they think he should invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to enable him to use the military to aid in mass deportations.
That, for me, is the most depressing Heather letter yet that I've read.
It was just 20 days ago—on March 24—that editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg reported that the most senior members of the Trump administration discussed a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecure commercial messaging app and that they included him on the chat.
Their Signal chat, which Goldberg published later in response to the administration’s insistence that there was nothing classified in the chat, showed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had posted precise details of the munitions and planes involved in the strikes. It showed that neither President Donald Trump nor the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—a Biden appointee—was on the chat, and that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller apparently made the decision to strike based on his interpretation of what President Donald Trump wanted. In violation of the Presidential Records Act, the app was set to delete the messages. There was apparently no larger strategy or diplomatic plan other than to strike, and participants greeted news of the collapse of an apartment building into which a Houthi leader had allegedly walked with emojis of fists, fire, and a U.S. flag.
This extraordinary lapse in national security protections would normally have defined an administration and caused a number of resignations, but the White House called the case “closed” on March 31. And there was more: On April 2, Dasha Burns of Politico reported that the team working with national security advisor Mike Waltz regularly used the unsecure Signal app to communicate about issues involving Ukraine, China, Gaza, the Middle East, the U.S., and Europe. The officials to whom Burns spoke said they had personal knowledge of at least 20 such chats.
That story has been almost completely driven out of the news by President Donald Trump’s tariff machinations since April 2. On that day, after teasing the idea of what he called “Liberation Day,” Trump announced that at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, April 9, he would be imposing a 10% tariff on all imports to the United States, with significantly higher rates on countries he claims engage in unfair trade practices. By the next day it had been established that his team, led by trade advisor Peter Navarro, arrived at the tariff rates with a nonsensical formula that simply took the U.S. trade deficit with a country, divided it by the value of that country’s exports to the U.S., and cut the resulting number in half.
For the next week, the stock market plummeted, jumping only with rumors that Trump would back off on the tariffs, while economists and financial analysts revised the chances of inflation and recession upward, and economic growth downward. News coming out of the White House was contradictory: one advisor would say that Trump would not negotiate over tariffs and they were here to stay, while another would say he intended to negotiate and they were just starting points.
Meanwhile, as predicted, other countries began to put tariffs on goods from the United States or pause exports, and global markets fell. Americans from business leaders to small business owners to consumers and wage workers called out the “stupidity” of Trump’s trade war. Others noted that the tariffs appeared to be intended as a shakedown as countries or businesses who offered Trump the right price could get exemptions.
As trillions of dollars in stock values evaporated, Trump insisted the tariffs were here to stay. “I know what the hell I’m doing,” Trump told Republicans on Tuesday, April 8. He boasted that global leaders were “kissing my ass.” On Wednesday, April 9, at 9:33 a.m, he posted: “BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!” At 9:37, he posted “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT”
But, as Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Ana Swanson, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported, Trump’s team, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, was worried about setting off a financial panic that could not be stopped. Driving their concern was a broad sell-off of U.S. government bonds, which in the past investors had seen as a safe haven during times of market turmoil, and the rise in popularity of the government bonds of other countries.
Former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers noted that global financial markets were backing away from U.S. assets. Fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management George Cipolloni told Bernard Condon and Stan Choe of the Associated Press: “The fear is the U.S. is losing its standing as the safe haven. Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen.”
On April 8, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer defended Trump’s tariffs to the Senate Finance Committee. He was offering similar testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee at 1:18 p.m. when a social media post from Trump pulled the rug out from under him. Trump paused most of the highest tariffs for 90 days and instituted an across-the-board tariff of 10% in their place. But, perhaps unwilling to look weak, he announced that he was raising tariffs on goods from China to 125% effective immediately, “[b]ased on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets.”
With Trump’s tariff pause, stocks jumped upward in one of the biggest single-day gains since World War II. Hedge fund manager Spencer Hakimian posted a graph showing that Nasdaq call volume—bets that stock values would rise—spiked minutes before Trump’s announcement. He commented: “Not a good look at all.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reposted Hakimian’s post and added: “Any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now. I’ve been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor. Disclosure deadline is May 15th. We’re about to learn a few things. It’s time to ban insider trading in Congress.”
David Smith of The Guardian noted that the juxtaposition of Trump golfing, dining with donors, and meeting with race car drivers even as economic chaos tanked people’s retirement accounts prompted accusations that he has lost touch with reality. A widely circulated video that appears to be Trump bragging to NASCAR drivers visiting the White House that investor Charles Schwab made $2.5 billion on Wednesday and that another investor made $900 million has fed anger at Trump’s economic chaos. On Friday the University of Michigan released its well-respected consumer-sentiment index, showing that consumer sentiment about the economy and personal finances fell for the fourth straight month, dropping 11% from March. Consumers from all political affiliations fear recession, inflation, and unemployment.
This level of consumer sentiment is the second lowest since the index began in 1952. Chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics Samuel Tombs told the Wall Street Journal’s Harriet Torry: “Consumers have spiraled from anxious to petrified.” James Knightley, the chief international economist at the multinational banking and financial services company ING, noted that consumers appear to blame Trump for their concerns. While in January 44% of respondents told researchers that the government was doing a poor job of managing inflation and unemployment, now 67% say so.
The change happened so quickly that White House officials could not tell reporters what the actual tariff rates were for different countries. When more information was available, Kevin Schaul of the Washington Post noted that Trump’s new tariff levies had actually increased tariffs rather than lowered them because he had dropped rates only on goods from countries that don’t export much to the U.S. He had raised them significantly—not just to 125% but to 145%—on China, a major trading partner.
On Friday, China imposed 125% tariffs on goods from the U.S. A spokesperson for the Chinese Finance Ministry said that Trump’s tariff machinations “will become a joke in the history of the world economy.” At 9:20 a.m. President Trump posted: “We are doing really well on our TARIFF POLICY. Very exciting for America, and the World!!! It is moving along quickly. DJT.” The new tariffs had badly threatened Apple Inc., and at 10:36 p.m. the U.S. Customs and Border Protection posted a notice that various electronics, including smartphone and computer monitors, are exempt from the tariffs.
When economist Justin Wolfers commented: “I just want to tip my hat to the crack team of White House economists who were able to discover—in just a few short days—that the U.S. is dependent on China for smartphones, computers and semiconductors.” Dr. Soumya Rangarajan noted that “a basic medicine we use 1000x per day in the hospital, heparin, is also dependent on China, and people will die without it.” As Sabrina Malhi of the Washington Post explained, about 12 million people hospitalized in the U.S. need heparin every year, and it is only one of the many medications that will be affected by Trump’s tariffs on goods from China.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted that a “[g]ood way to see the current tariffs, as of literally today, is no tariffs on high value add manufactured goods marketed to middle and upper middle classes. Massive tariffs for cheap consumer items” that benefit those lower on the economic ladder.
While the damage from the tariffs both to the domestic and global economy, as well as the USA’s standing in the world, is not yet clear—all the chaos has been about the prospect of Trump’s high tariff rates, not their actual effect—Trump appears to be trying to downplay that story in favor of demonstrating his power.
As the tariff saga played out on Wednesday, Trump signed a memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies informing them that they no longer need to let the public know when they get rid of regulations that they determine are obviously unlawful. Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo notes that “unlawful” appears to mean anything Trump doesn’t like.
In a breathtaking violation of the Constitution, on Wednesday Trump also went after two individuals: Christopher Krebs and Miles Taylor. Trump appointed Krebs to head the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where in 2020 Krebs assured the American people that the presidential election had not been stolen. Trump now claims Krebs thus censored the speech of Trump loyalists.
As a Department of Homeland Security staffer, Taylor wrote an op-ed under the pseudonym “Anonymous” saying that members of the first Trump administration were pushing back against the president’s policies. Taylor later wrote a book about his time in the White House that Trump claims was “designed to sow chaos and distrust in Government” and thus “could properly be characterized as treasonous and as possibly violating the Espionage Act.” A grand jury believed Trump himself violated the Espionage Act by retaining classified documents.
Trump stripped security clearances from Krebs and Taylor and also from their employers. He ordered government officials to investigate the two men and to recommend “appropriate remedial or preventative actions to be taken to protect America’s interests.” Employees at CISA told Kevin Collier of NBC News they were disheartened by the attack on Krebs and noted that staffing cuts at CISA had “already severely degraded our capacity to defend critical infrastructure.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
This evening, lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal court that the administration does not believe it has a legal obligation to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States, despite a court order to do so.
The 29-year-old Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. about 2011 when he was 16 to escape threats from a gang that was terrorizing his family. He settled in Maryland with his older brother, a U.S. citizen, and lived there until in 2019 he was picked up by police as he waited at a Home Depot to be picked up for work as a day laborer. Police transferred him to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After a hearing, an immigration judge rejected his claim for asylum but said he could not be sent back to El Salvador, finding it credible that the Barrio 18 gang had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”
Ever since, Abrego Garcia has checked in annually with ICE as directed. He lives with his wife and their three children, and has never been charged with any crime. The Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, and he joined a union, working full time as a sheet metal apprentice.
On March 12, ICE agents pulled his car over, told his wife to come pick up their disabled son, and incarcerated Abrego Garcia, pressing him to say he was a member of MS-13. On March 15 the government rendered Abrego Garcia to the infamous CECOT prison for terrorists in El Salvador, alleged to be the site of human rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial killings. The U.S. government is paying El Salvador $6 million a year to incarcerate the individuals it sends there.
On March 24, Abrego Garcia’s family sued the administration over his removal.
On March 31 the government admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but said he couldn’t be brought back because, in El Salvador, he is outside the jurisdiction of the United States. It also accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang and said that bringing him back to the U.S. would threaten the public.
On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7.
In her opinion, filed April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “[a]lthough the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal.…. [H]is detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the 'custodian,' and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction.”
The administration had already appealed her April 4 order to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision on Thursday, April 10, requiring the Trump administration “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,” but asking the district court to clarify what it meant by “effectuate,” that release, noting that it must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
The Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by 9:30 a.m. on April 11 explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.
But the administration evidently does not intend to comply. On April 11, the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not have information about where Abrego Garcia is and ignored her order to provide information about what the government was doing to bring him back. Saturday, it said Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in CECOT. Today, it said it had no new information about him, but said that Abrego Garcia is no longer eligible for the immigration judge’s order not to send him to El Salvador “because of his membership in MS-13 which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.”
There is still no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.
Today, administration lawyers used the Supreme Court’s warning that the court must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs” to lay out a chilling argument. They ignored the Supreme Court’s agreement that the government must get Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador, as well as the court’s requirement that the administration explain what it’s doing to make that happen.
Instead, the lawyers argued that because Abrego Garcia is now outside the country, any attempt to get him back would intrude on the president’s power to conduct foreign affairs. Similarly, they argue that the president cannot be ordered to do anything but remove domestic obstacles from Abrego Garcia’s return. Because Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, is currently in the U.S. for a visit with Trump, they suggest they will not share any more updates about Abrego Garcia and the court should not ask for them because it would intrude on “sensitive” foreign policy issues.
Let’s be very clear about exactly what’s happening here: President Donald J. Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal, kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country, and then claim that there is no way to get that person back.
All people in the United States are entitled to due process, but Trump and his officers have tried to convince Americans that noncitizens are not. They have also pushed the idea that those they are offshoring are criminals, but a Bloomberg investigation showed that of the 238 men sent to CECOT in the first group, only five of them had been charged with or convicted of felony assault or gun violations. Three had been charged with misdemeanors like petty theft. Two were charged with human smuggling. In any case, in the U.S., criminals are entitled to due process.
Make no mistake: as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error either because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens.
Trump has said he would “love” to do exactly that, and would even be “honored” to, and Bukele has been offering to hold U.S. citizens. Dasha Burns and Myah Ward of Politico reported Friday that former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is pitching a plan to expand renditions to El Salvador to at least 100,000 criminal offenders from U.S. prisons and to avoid legal challenges by making part of CECOT American territory, then leasing it back to El Salvador to run.
When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says, “The president's idea for American citizens to potentially be deported, these would be heinous violent criminals who have broken our nation's laws repeatedly," remember that just days ago, Trump suggested that a former government employee was guilty of treason for writing a book about his time in the first Trump administration that Trump claimed was “designed to sow chaos and distrust” in the government.
Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.
At least some people understand this. The president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey, received a standing ovation when he said to a room full of his fellow union workers: “We need to make our voices heard. We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re the building trades, the backbone of America. You want to build a $5 billion data center? Want more six-figure careers with health care, retirement, and no college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk, you call us!... And yeah, that means all of us. All of us. Including our brother [International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers] apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now! Bring him home!”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Comments
That, for me, is the most depressing Heather letter yet that I've read.
It was just 20 days ago—on March 24—that editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg reported that the most senior members of the Trump administration discussed a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecure commercial messaging app and that they included him on the chat.
Their Signal chat, which Goldberg published later in response to the administration’s insistence that there was nothing classified in the chat, showed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had posted precise details of the munitions and planes involved in the strikes. It showed that neither President Donald Trump nor the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—a Biden appointee—was on the chat, and that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller apparently made the decision to strike based on his interpretation of what President Donald Trump wanted. In violation of the Presidential Records Act, the app was set to delete the messages. There was apparently no larger strategy or diplomatic plan other than to strike, and participants greeted news of the collapse of an apartment building into which a Houthi leader had allegedly walked with emojis of fists, fire, and a U.S. flag.
This extraordinary lapse in national security protections would normally have defined an administration and caused a number of resignations, but the White House called the case “closed” on March 31. And there was more: On April 2, Dasha Burns of Politico reported that the team working with national security advisor Mike Waltz regularly used the unsecure Signal app to communicate about issues involving Ukraine, China, Gaza, the Middle East, the U.S., and Europe. The officials to whom Burns spoke said they had personal knowledge of at least 20 such chats.
That story has been almost completely driven out of the news by President Donald Trump’s tariff machinations since April 2. On that day, after teasing the idea of what he called “Liberation Day,” Trump announced that at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, April 9, he would be imposing a 10% tariff on all imports to the United States, with significantly higher rates on countries he claims engage in unfair trade practices. By the next day it had been established that his team, led by trade advisor Peter Navarro, arrived at the tariff rates with a nonsensical formula that simply took the U.S. trade deficit with a country, divided it by the value of that country’s exports to the U.S., and cut the resulting number in half.
For the next week, the stock market plummeted, jumping only with rumors that Trump would back off on the tariffs, while economists and financial analysts revised the chances of inflation and recession upward, and economic growth downward. News coming out of the White House was contradictory: one advisor would say that Trump would not negotiate over tariffs and they were here to stay, while another would say he intended to negotiate and they were just starting points.
Meanwhile, as predicted, other countries began to put tariffs on goods from the United States or pause exports, and global markets fell. Americans from business leaders to small business owners to consumers and wage workers called out the “stupidity” of Trump’s trade war. Others noted that the tariffs appeared to be intended as a shakedown as countries or businesses who offered Trump the right price could get exemptions.
As trillions of dollars in stock values evaporated, Trump insisted the tariffs were here to stay. “I know what the hell I’m doing,” Trump told Republicans on Tuesday, April 8. He boasted that global leaders were “kissing my ass.” On Wednesday, April 9, at 9:33 a.m, he posted: “BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!” At 9:37, he posted “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT”
But, as Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Ana Swanson, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported, Trump’s team, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, was worried about setting off a financial panic that could not be stopped. Driving their concern was a broad sell-off of U.S. government bonds, which in the past investors had seen as a safe haven during times of market turmoil, and the rise in popularity of the government bonds of other countries.
Former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers noted that global financial markets were backing away from U.S. assets. Fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management George Cipolloni told Bernard Condon and Stan Choe of the Associated Press: “The fear is the U.S. is losing its standing as the safe haven. Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen.”
On April 8, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer defended Trump’s tariffs to the Senate Finance Committee. He was offering similar testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee at 1:18 p.m. when a social media post from Trump pulled the rug out from under him. Trump paused most of the highest tariffs for 90 days and instituted an across-the-board tariff of 10% in their place. But, perhaps unwilling to look weak, he announced that he was raising tariffs on goods from China to 125% effective immediately, “[b]ased on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets.”
With Trump’s tariff pause, stocks jumped upward in one of the biggest single-day gains since World War II. Hedge fund manager Spencer Hakimian posted a graph showing that Nasdaq call volume—bets that stock values would rise—spiked minutes before Trump’s announcement. He commented: “Not a good look at all.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reposted Hakimian’s post and added: “Any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now. I’ve been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor. Disclosure deadline is May 15th. We’re about to learn a few things. It’s time to ban insider trading in Congress.”
David Smith of The Guardian noted that the juxtaposition of Trump golfing, dining with donors, and meeting with race car drivers even as economic chaos tanked people’s retirement accounts prompted accusations that he has lost touch with reality. A widely circulated video that appears to be Trump bragging to NASCAR drivers visiting the White House that investor Charles Schwab made $2.5 billion on Wednesday and that another investor made $900 million has fed anger at Trump’s economic chaos. On Friday the University of Michigan released its well-respected consumer-sentiment index, showing that consumer sentiment about the economy and personal finances fell for the fourth straight month, dropping 11% from March. Consumers from all political affiliations fear recession, inflation, and unemployment.
This level of consumer sentiment is the second lowest since the index began in 1952. Chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics Samuel Tombs told the Wall Street Journal’s Harriet Torry: “Consumers have spiraled from anxious to petrified.” James Knightley, the chief international economist at the multinational banking and financial services company ING, noted that consumers appear to blame Trump for their concerns. While in January 44% of respondents told researchers that the government was doing a poor job of managing inflation and unemployment, now 67% say so.
The change happened so quickly that White House officials could not tell reporters what the actual tariff rates were for different countries. When more information was available, Kevin Schaul of the Washington Post noted that Trump’s new tariff levies had actually increased tariffs rather than lowered them because he had dropped rates only on goods from countries that don’t export much to the U.S. He had raised them significantly—not just to 125% but to 145%—on China, a major trading partner.
On Friday, China imposed 125% tariffs on goods from the U.S. A spokesperson for the Chinese Finance Ministry said that Trump’s tariff machinations “will become a joke in the history of the world economy.” At 9:20 a.m. President Trump posted: “We are doing really well on our TARIFF POLICY. Very exciting for America, and the World!!! It is moving along quickly. DJT.” The new tariffs had badly threatened Apple Inc., and at 10:36 p.m. the U.S. Customs and Border Protection posted a notice that various electronics, including smartphone and computer monitors, are exempt from the tariffs.
When economist Justin Wolfers commented: “I just want to tip my hat to the crack team of White House economists who were able to discover—in just a few short days—that the U.S. is dependent on China for smartphones, computers and semiconductors.” Dr. Soumya Rangarajan noted that “a basic medicine we use 1000x per day in the hospital, heparin, is also dependent on China, and people will die without it.” As Sabrina Malhi of the Washington Post explained, about 12 million people hospitalized in the U.S. need heparin every year, and it is only one of the many medications that will be affected by Trump’s tariffs on goods from China.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted that a “[g]ood way to see the current tariffs, as of literally today, is no tariffs on high value add manufactured goods marketed to middle and upper middle classes. Massive tariffs for cheap consumer items” that benefit those lower on the economic ladder.
While the damage from the tariffs both to the domestic and global economy, as well as the USA’s standing in the world, is not yet clear—all the chaos has been about the prospect of Trump’s high tariff rates, not their actual effect—Trump appears to be trying to downplay that story in favor of demonstrating his power.
As the tariff saga played out on Wednesday, Trump signed a memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies informing them that they no longer need to let the public know when they get rid of regulations that they determine are obviously unlawful. Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo notes that “unlawful” appears to mean anything Trump doesn’t like.
In a breathtaking violation of the Constitution, on Wednesday Trump also went after two individuals: Christopher Krebs and Miles Taylor. Trump appointed Krebs to head the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where in 2020 Krebs assured the American people that the presidential election had not been stolen. Trump now claims Krebs thus censored the speech of Trump loyalists.
As a Department of Homeland Security staffer, Taylor wrote an op-ed under the pseudonym “Anonymous” saying that members of the first Trump administration were pushing back against the president’s policies. Taylor later wrote a book about his time in the White House that Trump claims was “designed to sow chaos and distrust in Government” and thus “could properly be characterized as treasonous and as possibly violating the Espionage Act.” A grand jury believed Trump himself violated the Espionage Act by retaining classified documents.
Trump stripped security clearances from Krebs and Taylor and also from their employers. He ordered government officials to investigate the two men and to recommend “appropriate remedial or preventative actions to be taken to protect America’s interests.” Employees at CISA told Kevin Collier of NBC News they were disheartened by the attack on Krebs and noted that staffing cuts at CISA had “already severely degraded our capacity to defend critical infrastructure.”
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This evening, lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal court that the administration does not believe it has a legal obligation to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States, despite a court order to do so.
The 29-year-old Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. about 2011 when he was 16 to escape threats from a gang that was terrorizing his family. He settled in Maryland with his older brother, a U.S. citizen, and lived there until in 2019 he was picked up by police as he waited at a Home Depot to be picked up for work as a day laborer. Police transferred him to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After a hearing, an immigration judge rejected his claim for asylum but said he could not be sent back to El Salvador, finding it credible that the Barrio 18 gang had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”
Ever since, Abrego Garcia has checked in annually with ICE as directed. He lives with his wife and their three children, and has never been charged with any crime. The Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, and he joined a union, working full time as a sheet metal apprentice.
On March 12, ICE agents pulled his car over, told his wife to come pick up their disabled son, and incarcerated Abrego Garcia, pressing him to say he was a member of MS-13. On March 15 the government rendered Abrego Garcia to the infamous CECOT prison for terrorists in El Salvador, alleged to be the site of human rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial killings. The U.S. government is paying El Salvador $6 million a year to incarcerate the individuals it sends there.
On March 24, Abrego Garcia’s family sued the administration over his removal.
On March 31 the government admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but said he couldn’t be brought back because, in El Salvador, he is outside the jurisdiction of the United States. It also accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang and said that bringing him back to the U.S. would threaten the public.
On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7.
In her opinion, filed April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “[a]lthough the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal.…. [H]is detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the 'custodian,' and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction.”
The administration had already appealed her April 4 order to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision on Thursday, April 10, requiring the Trump administration “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,” but asking the district court to clarify what it meant by “effectuate,” that release, noting that it must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
The Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by 9:30 a.m. on April 11 explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.
But the administration evidently does not intend to comply. On April 11, the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not have information about where Abrego Garcia is and ignored her order to provide information about what the government was doing to bring him back. Saturday, it said Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in CECOT. Today, it said it had no new information about him, but said that Abrego Garcia is no longer eligible for the immigration judge’s order not to send him to El Salvador “because of his membership in MS-13 which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.”
There is still no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.
Today, administration lawyers used the Supreme Court’s warning that the court must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs” to lay out a chilling argument. They ignored the Supreme Court’s agreement that the government must get Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador, as well as the court’s requirement that the administration explain what it’s doing to make that happen.
Instead, the lawyers argued that because Abrego Garcia is now outside the country, any attempt to get him back would intrude on the president’s power to conduct foreign affairs. Similarly, they argue that the president cannot be ordered to do anything but remove domestic obstacles from Abrego Garcia’s return. Because Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, is currently in the U.S. for a visit with Trump, they suggest they will not share any more updates about Abrego Garcia and the court should not ask for them because it would intrude on “sensitive” foreign policy issues.
Let’s be very clear about exactly what’s happening here: President Donald J. Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal, kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country, and then claim that there is no way to get that person back.
All people in the United States are entitled to due process, but Trump and his officers have tried to convince Americans that noncitizens are not. They have also pushed the idea that those they are offshoring are criminals, but a Bloomberg investigation showed that of the 238 men sent to CECOT in the first group, only five of them had been charged with or convicted of felony assault or gun violations. Three had been charged with misdemeanors like petty theft. Two were charged with human smuggling. In any case, in the U.S., criminals are entitled to due process.
Make no mistake: as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error either because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens.
Trump has said he would “love” to do exactly that, and would even be “honored” to, and Bukele has been offering to hold U.S. citizens. Dasha Burns and Myah Ward of Politico reported Friday that former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is pitching a plan to expand renditions to El Salvador to at least 100,000 criminal offenders from U.S. prisons and to avoid legal challenges by making part of CECOT American territory, then leasing it back to El Salvador to run.
When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says, “The president's idea for American citizens to potentially be deported, these would be heinous violent criminals who have broken our nation's laws repeatedly," remember that just days ago, Trump suggested that a former government employee was guilty of treason for writing a book about his time in the first Trump administration that Trump claimed was “designed to sow chaos and distrust” in the government.
Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.
At least some people understand this. The president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey, received a standing ovation when he said to a room full of his fellow union workers: “We need to make our voices heard. We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re the building trades, the backbone of America. You want to build a $5 billion data center? Want more six-figure careers with health care, retirement, and no college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk, you call us!... And yeah, that means all of us. All of us. Including our brother [International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers] apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now! Bring him home!”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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