Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 35
April 18, 2025
April 17, 2025
Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) posted a picture of himself with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the Trump administration says it sent to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador through “administrative error” but can’t get back, and wrote: “I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.”
While the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, apparently tried to stage a photo that would make it look as if the two men were enjoying a cocktail together, it seems clear that backing down and giving Senator Van Hollen access to Abrego Garcia is a significant shift from Bukele’s previous scorn for those trying to address the crisis of a man legally in the U.S. having been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process.
Bukele might be reassessing the distribution of power in the U.S.
According to Robert Jimison of the New York Times, who traveled to El Salvador with Senator Van Hollen, when a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he would move to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, Trump answered: “Well, I’m not involved. You’ll have to speak to the lawyers, the [Department of Justice].”
Today a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to stop Judge Paula Xinis’s order that it “take all available steps” to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “as soon as possible.” Conservative Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote the order. Notably, it began with a compliment to Judge Xinis. “[W]e shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” he wrote.
Then Wilkinson turned his focus on the Trump administration. “It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter,” he wrote. “But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.” The court noted that if the government is so sure of its position, then it should be confident in presenting its facts to a court of law.
Echoing the liberal justices on the Supreme Court, Wilkinson wrote: “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” He noted the reports that the administration is talking about doing just that.
“And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present,” he wrote, “and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”
After Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell’s warning yesterday that Trump’s tariffs will have “significantly larger than anticipated…economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth,” and his statement that the Fed would not cut interest rates immediately as it assesses the situation, Trump today began attacking Powell. Trump wrote on his social media site that Powell is “always TOO LATE AND WRONG.” His missive concluded: “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”
Firing Powell would inject yet more chaos into the economy, and the White House told reporters that Trump’s post “should not be seen as a threat to fire Powell.” Hedge fund founder Spencer Hakimian posted: “Cleanup of orange vomit on Aisle 3.”
There seems to be a change in the air.
Three days ago, on April 14, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote that the vibe is shifting against the right. Yesterday, former neocon and now fervent Trump critic and editor of The Bulwark Bill Kristol posted a photo of plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers kidnapping Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, and commented: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology.”
Today, in the New York Times, conservative David Brooks called for all those resisting what he called “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men” to work together. He called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” that would first stop Trump and then create “a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism—one that offers a positive vision.”
Brooks is hardly the first to suggest that “this is what America needs right now.” But a conservative like Brooks not only arguing that “Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life,” but then quoting Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to call for resistance to those shackles—“We have nothing to lose but our chains”—signals that a shift is underway.
That shift has apparently swept in New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who is generally a good barometer of the way today’s non-MAGA Republicans are thinking. In an interview today, he said: “[M]y feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Mariana Trench. So the memory of things that this administration has done, of which I approve, is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad—not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement.”
Stephens identified Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s bullying of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as the event that turned him away from Trump. “America should never treat an ally that way, certainly not one who is bravely fighting a common enemy,” he said. Stephens also noted the meeting had “delighted” Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who is now “emboldened…to press the war harder.”
We have been in a similar moment of shifting coalitions before.
In the 1850s, elite southern enslavers organized to take over the government and create an oligarchy that would make enslavement national. Northerners hadn’t been paying a great deal of attention to southern leaders’ slow accumulation of power and were shocked when Congress bowed to them and in 1854 passed a law that overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept slavery out of the West. The establishment of slavery in the West would mean new slave states there would work with the southern slave states to outvote the North in Congress, and it would only be a question of time until they made slavery national. Soon, the Slave Power would own the country.
Northerners of all parties who disagreed with each other over issues of immigration, finance, and internal improvements—and even over the institution of slavery—came together to stand against the end of American democracy.
Four years later, in 1858, Democrat Stephen Douglas complained that those coming together to oppose the Democrats were a ragtag coalition whose members didn’t agree on much at all. Abraham Lincoln, who by then was speaking for the new party coalescing around that coalition, replied that Douglas “should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/us/politics/senator-chris-van-hollen-el-salvador-prison.html
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca4.178400/gov.uscourts.ca4.178400.8.0.pdf
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/17/abrego-garcia-appeal-wilkinson-00298063
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20250416a.htm
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, April 17, 2025, 6:12 a.m.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/dissident-right-trump.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/trump-harvard-law-firms.html
https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/trump-critic-conservatism.html
Bluesky:
vanhollen.senate.gov/post/3ln2gcpf6js2m
revkin.bsky.social/post/3ln2jmqelmk2d
gtconway.bsky.social/post/3lmzj4ibvl224
April 17, 2025
April 16, 2025
In El Salvador today, authorities denied Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) a meeting or a phone call with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man the Trump regime sent by “administrative error” to the terrorist prison CECOT. Abrego Garcia is Van Hollen’s constituent, and the senator promised his family to try to get him released. That Salvadoran officials cannot or will not produce him raises concerns about his well-being.
Senator Van Hollen had hoped to meet with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, but met instead with Vice President Félix Ulloa. Ulloa at first told Van Hollen there had not been enough time to arrange a meeting with Abrego Garcia, but when the senator offered to come back next week, Ulloa allowed as how a meeting might not be possible at all.
Van Hollen reported that when he asked Ulloa why El Salvador was continuing to imprison Abrego Garcia when it had no evidence that he was a gang member, Ulloa answered that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador to hold him.
Evidently, President Donald Trump thinks what he is doing to Abrego Garcia and the optics of CECOT play well to his base. Jordain Carney and Nicholas Wu of Politico reported today that the White House has “heavily encouraged” Republican lawmakers to lean into the idea of Abrego Garcia—who has no criminal record—as an example of the dangerous criminals they insist Democrats want to bring to the U.S. Yesterday, out of the blue and with absolutely no evidence, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that Abrego Garcia engaged in human trafficking.
At least a dozen Republicans have followed the president’s lead. Congressional reporter Craig Caplan reported that yesterday, House Ways and Means committee chair Jason Smith (R-MO) led a delegation of Republican House members to tour CECOT. The delegation included representatives Ron Estes (KS), Kevin Hern (OK), Mike Kennedy (UT), Carol Miller (WV), Riley Moore (WV), and Claudia Tenney (NY). At least some of the representatives had photographs taken of them in CECOT, standing in front of the caged men.
The delegation also met with U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador William Duncan, who posted on social media that “[t]he delegation is visiting the country to strengthen bilateral ties and discuss initiatives that promote economic development and mutual cooperation.”
Two days ago, Bukele posted a picture of himself and Trump with their arms around each other with the comment: “Friends.” Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews wrote: “We traded Europe for a guy that builds concentration camps for profit.”
Trump is likely pushing his narrative about criminal undocumented immigrants—although Bloomberg has reported that 90% of the men he has sent to El Salvador have no criminal record—in part because that rendition is stirring up opposition. In addition to popular protests, judges are pushing back.
Today, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued an opinion saying that the administration’s “hurried removal” of the men to El Salvador after Boasberg had issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) prohibiting them from doing so, demonstrated “a wilful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt.”
“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” Boasberg wrote. Quoting Chief Justice John Marshall, who laid down the foundations of much of America law, Boasberg wrote: “To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.’”
If the government decides not to try to repair its contempt, Boasberg says the court will use declarations, hearings, or depositions to identify the individuals responsible for making the judgment to ignore the court. Then he will ask the government to prosecute the contempt, but if—as is likely—it refuses, Boasberg says he will appoint a private prosecutor to move the case along. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance puts it: “These cases are about making sure that, American citizen or not, criminal or not, peoples’ right to have the day in court that the Constitution guarantees them is honored. That’s all. But it’s everything.”
Trump is also likely playing to his base because Americans are terribly concerned about what’s happening to the economy on his watch.
Stocks fell again today after Trump’s administration said it would put limits on chip sales to China and after Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell told the Economic Club of Chicago that Trump’s tariffs will have “significantly larger than anticipated…economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth.” The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 700 points or 1.73%, the S&P 500 fell 2.24%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 3.07%.
Danielle Kaye of the New York Times reports on a recent Bank of America survey that shows global investors have dumped a record amount of U.S. stocks in the past two months. Trump insists that the U.S. has been bringing in $2 billion a day in tariffs, some of which he claims comes from his new levies, but, in fact, Lori Ann LaRocco of CNBC reported today that U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the U.S. is taking in only $250 million a day.
Leila Fadel of NPR reports that China used to buy more than half the U.S. crop of soybeans and now soybean farmers are gravely concerned they’re going to lose that market. At the same time, we are heading in the prime months for the U.S. tourism industry, and Bloomberg reports that a worst-case scenario by the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates that the U.S. could lose almost $90 billion as foreign tourists stay away from the U.S. and boycott American products.
So Trump is hitting his MAGA themes hard.
Today he escalated his attacks on Maine governor Janet Mills. Trump has demanded that Mills prohibit transgender girls in the public schools from participating in girls’ sports. Mills, who was Maine’s attorney general before she became governor, maintains she is bound by the 2021 state law that explicitly protects against discrimination on the basis of gender identity. As Jeremy Roebuck and Joanna Slater of the Washington Post note, Mills has said that law is “worthy of debate” but that Trump cannot change it by decree.
On February 21, Trump threatened to withhold federal education funding for Maine unless Mills promised to comply with his ban. When she reiterated that “I’m complying with state and federal laws,” and that “We’re going to follow the law,” he warned: “You’d better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.” Mills answered: “See you in court.”
Since then, the administration has attacked the state, opening investigations, cutting and then restoring Social Security Administration contracts, and taunting Mills on social media. On Friday the Department of Education said it would pull all federal funding for education in Maine unless the state agreed to ban the state’s two transgender girls from playing on girls sports teams. Today the Justice Department sued Maine’s Department of Education, and Attorney General Pam Bondi threatened to pull past funding retroactively.
Mills said the administration is trying “to pressure the State of Maine to ignore the Constitution and abandon the rule of law.” “For nearly two months, Maine has endured recriminations from the Federal government that have targeted hungry school kids, hardworking fishermen, senior citizens, new parents, and countless Maine people,” Mills said. “We have been subject to politically motivated investigations that opened and closed without discussion, leaving little doubt that their outcomes were predetermined. Let today serve as warning to all states: Maine might be among the first to draw the ire of the Federal government in this way, but we will not be the last.”
Trump is also keeping his attack on Harvard in the news. Yesterday, after Harvard defied the regime’s attempt to take over the school, Trump posted “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”
Today, Evan Perez, Alayna Treene, and Marshall Cohen of CNN reported that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is planning to take away Harvard University’s tax-exempt status. Law professor Sam Brunson noted that this is illegal. “In 1998,” he wrote, “Congress explicitly provided that the President could not, directly or indirectly, request that the IRS start or end an audit or other investigation of a taxpayer.” Brunson also noted that the move was “dumb.” “Unless Trump has super-secret information, Harvard hasn't done anything to violate its tax-exempt status.” Brunson added: “there's not a single competent attorney left in the Administration.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board helpfully noted that the Supreme Court “has repeatedly held that the government may not use federal benefits or funds to coerce parties to surrender their constitutional rights. This is what the Administration is doing” with its demands on Harvard.
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark reposted a clip of then-senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) on the Fox News Channel when a right-wing group falsely alleged the IRS was targeting them. "This is about whether we have functional constitutional government in this country,” Vance told host Laura Ingraham. “If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we'd no longer live in a free country.“
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Notes:
https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/kilmar-abrego-garcia-el-salvador-maryland-man-deported/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/16/kilmar-abrego-garcia-congress-el-salvador-00295147
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20250416a.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/business/stocks-trump-tariffs.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/16/us-customs-tariffs-revenue-generated-since-april-5.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/11/maine-education-trump-janet-mills/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/16/politics/irs-harvard-tax-exempt-status/index.html
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-harvard-funding-conditions-constitution-congress-c26040f8
https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2025cv0766-81
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance Contemptible Today, James Boasberg, a federal judge in the District of Columbia, issued an order following a hearing he held in his courtroom almost two weeks ago. That case involved the two planeloads of people the Trump government spirited out of the country, Venezuelans who are allegedly members of the Tren de Aragua gang. We don’t know for sure whether they are…Read more10 hours ago · 1029 likes · 120 comments · Joyce Vancehttps://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5249835-abrego-garcia-deportation-el-salvador/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/16/investing/us-stock-market/index.html
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5249835-abrego-garcia-deportation-el-salvador/
Youtube:
watch?v=gu30vxluOe4&t=3362s Mills-Trump exchange at about 56:00.
X:
CraigCaplan/status/1912577886529147002
Bluesky:
marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3lmx3342lsc2u
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lmsliutwkk2u
sarahlongwell25.bsky.social/post/3lmxkthtxb22b
smbrnsn.bsky.social/post/3lmxlgx4pok2o
April 16, 2025
April 15, 2025
A large crowd of protesters calling for the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the Trump administration sent to a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador, milled around the courthouse this afternoon where U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis held a hearing on the case.
Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Ben Wittes of Lawfare watched the hearing and explained that Judge Xinis is now building the evidence to determine whether individuals in the administration have acted in contempt of court. The court ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., as well as to give updates on what they are doing to make that return happen. To date, Judge Xinis said, “what the record shows is nothing has been done.” She dismissed the administration lawyer’s argument that yesterday’s Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and president of El Salvador Nayib Bukele was part of the effort to “facilitate” the case.
As Bower said, we all know what’s going on, but it’s impossible right now to know which individual is responsible for the stonewalling. For that matter, Bower added, those speaking for the administration usually deny personal knowledge of the case, simply saying they have been made aware of the facts they are representing. Judge Xinis called for two weeks of fact finding to determine if the Trump regime is following her orders that it facilitate his return. The judge told Abrego Garcia’s lawyers that they may conduct four depositions and apply for two more, make up to 15 document requests, and up to 15 interrogatories (these are lists of written questions that must be answered under oath and in writing).
Xinis noted that “every day Mr. Garcia is detained in CECOT is a day of irreparable harm.”
Bower added that the Trump regime is likely drawing this out in part because it permits them to showcase the one part of their agenda that is still polling well. The staged meeting with Bukele enabled officials to get widespread media coverage for the straight-up lie that Abrego Garcia has been found to be a member of the MS-13 gang. As Greg Sargent reported today in the New Republic, this story came from a police officer who, just weeks later, was suspended for “providing information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts.”
The Oval Office event also enabled White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller both to lie that the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision against the administration was actually in favor of it, and to rerun the litany of heinous crimes he associates with immigrants. The attention to the case has also gotten Miller airtime on news shows, where he repeats those lies.
The administration needs the immigration issue to play to its base, but it’s actually not clear that Americans like Miller’s approach to immigrants. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers that while polls say Americans generally like Trump’s approach to immigration—a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll said 49% were in favor—they hate the specifics.
The same Reuters/Ipsos poll says that 82% of Americans, including 68% of Republicans, think “the president should obey federal court rulings even if he disagrees with them.” Only 40% think he “should keep deporting people despite a court order to stop,” although 76% of Republicans think he should violate a court order.
The questions specifically about immigration are even starker. Trump promised during the campaign that he would deport undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes, and people like that plan by an 81-point margin. But according to Morris’s crunching of polls on the subject, U.S. adults oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who have lived more than 10 years in the U.S. by a 37-point margin. They oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens by a 36-point margin. By an 18-point margin, they oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who have broken no laws in the U.S. other than immigration laws.
The more visible Abrego Garcia’s case becomes, coupled as it is with the idea that it is a precursor to sending U.S. citizens to CECOT, the less likely it is to be popular. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) got an earful from his constituents on the topic. “Are you going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?” one man asked, to applause and calls of “Yeah!” from around the room. When Grassley said no, because that wasn’t a power of Congress, the man replied: “The Supreme Court said to bring him back!” and others chimed in, “They’re defying the Constitution.” “Trump don’t care,” the first man said. “If I get an order to pay a ticket for $1,200 and I just say no, does that stand up? Because he’s got an order from the Supreme Court, and he just said no! He just said ‘Screw it!’” “It’s wrong,” someone in the crowd said. The first man concluded: “I’m pissed.”
This evening, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) noted that “[f]ollowing his abduction and unlawful deportation, U.S. federal courts have ordered the safe return of my constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. It should be a priority of the U.S. government to secure his safe release, which is why tomorrow I am traveling to El Salvador…to visit Kilmar and check on his wellbeing and to hold constructive conversations with government officials around his release. We must urgently continue working to return Kilmar safely home to Maryland.”
Trump’s losing ground on his other major selling point in the 2024 election: that he would improve the economy. He promised to bring prices down “on Day One,” but backed off on that almost immediately. Then an utterly chaotic trade war, tariffs on and off and on again, and a dramatic drop in the bond market as well as the stock market suggesting that the U.S. is losing its status as a safe haven made April an economic disaster. JPMorgan said this week that Trump’s tariffs mean that he is “on track to deliver one of the largest US tax hikes on record,” taxes that will fall on poorer Americans rather than the wealthy and corporations.
Under Biden, Vietnam and the U.S. had strengthened economic ties, but yesterday, China and Vietnam signed dozens of cooperation agreements to combat disruptions caused by Trump's trade war. Today, Chinese officials stopped accepting Boeing jets or U.S. airline parts. China has also stopped accepting U.S. beef, turning instead to Australia. U.S. beef exports to China have been worth $2.5 billion annually. Last Thursday, Gustaf Kilander of The Independent reported that “fund managers quietly fear Trump doesn’t have a tariff plan and that he ‘might be insane.’”
Meetings in Washington this week did little to calm the situation. Jordan Erb of Bloomberg reported that Maros Sefcovic, the trade chief for the European Union, left yesterday’s trade meeting in Washington unclear about what the U.S. even wants. Erb notes: “The uncertainty around Trump’s chaotic tactics, replete with delays, retreats, new threats and sudden exceptions and trial balloons, hasn’t helped.”
Trump also promised he would end Russia’s war on Ukraine immediately. But it has become obvious that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is using Trump’s desperation to deliver a peace deal to strike harder at Ukraine. Just after a visit to Moscow by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff last week, the Russians struck the Ukrainian city of Sumy during Palm Sunday celebrations, killing at least 35 people and injuring another 119, including children. European leaders called the attack a war crime, Trump said it was likely a “mistake.”
After Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said in a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night that U.S. officials are echoing Russian disinformation, Trump called for CBS, the channel on which 60 Minutes appears, to lose its license.
Bloomberg reports that the U.S. refused to support a statement by the Group of Seven (G7), an informal group of seven of the countries with the world’s most advanced economies, condemning the Sumy attack. The U.S. said it wouldn’t condemn the mass killing of civilians because it is “working to preserve the space to negotiate peace.”
One of Trump’s key attacks on the Biden administration before the election was his lie that it had shortchanged the North Carolina victims of the devastating Hurricane Helene by sending money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to undocumented immigrants, likely to buy their votes (it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections). In fact, the Biden administration and FEMA had been in the state since the start and approved FEMA’s reimbursement for 100% of disaster relief, particularly emergency protective services and the removal of debris, renewable after six months.
Trump won North Carolina by more than 3 points, but on Saturday the Trump administration denied North Carolina’s application for that extension. “The need in western North Carolina remains immense—people need debris removed, homes rebuilt, and roads restored,” North Carolina governor Josh Stein said. “I am extremely disappointed and urge the President to reconsider FEMA’s bad decision, even for 90 days. Six months later, the people of western North Carolina are working hard to get back on their feet; they need FEMA to help them get the job done.”
Trump’s approval ratings are dropping steadily, with even Republican pollsters showing him “underwater,” meaning that more people disapprove of his presidency than approve of it.
Part of Trump’s fight with the Supreme Court is an attempt to demonstrate dominance as his numbers drop, but institutions, as well as the courts, are standing up to him. With Trump having won concessions from Columbia University and then announced those concessions were only the beginning of his demands, other universities are banding together to defend education, academic freedom, and freedom of speech.
On Monday, Harvard University took a stand against the administration’s demand to regulate the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” at Harvard, including its governance, admissions, programs, and extracurricular activities, in exchange for the continuation of $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and a $60 million contract. Harvard is the country’s oldest university, founded in 1636, and in 2024 had an endowment of more than $53 billion.
In a letter noting that the administration’s demands undercut the First Amendment and the university’s legal rights, Harvard’s lawyers wrote: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle…. Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
But Harvard didn’t stop there. It turned its website into a defense of the medical research funded by the federal grants Trump is threatening to withhold. It explains the advances Harvard researchers have made in cancer research, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, obesity and diabetes, infectious diseases, and organs and transplantation. It highlights the researchers, shows labs, and presents readable essays on different scientific breakthroughs.
As the administration slashes through the government with charges of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” Harvard’s president Alan Garber has made a stand on what he calls “the promise of higher education.”
“Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere,” he wrote. “All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom. We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity—and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/15/politics/abrego-garcia-case-hearing-xinis-discovery/index.html
Strength In NumbersTrump's immigration agenda is not popularTo start this post, I am going to ask you a key question about immigration policy. But first, I need to establish a few facts based on recent news…Read morea day ago · 77 likes · 16 comments · G. Elliott Morrishttps://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/lawfare-live--court-hearing-on-the-removal-of-abrego-garcia
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.79.0.pdf
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/politics/fact-check-trump-fema-hurricane-response/index.html
https://newrepublic.com/article/194010/kilmar-abrego-garcia-case-trump-deported-error-another-hit
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-boeing-orders-halt-to-jet-deliveries-bloomberg-trump-tariffs/
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-sumy-b034da8f4d83d08e5ea24c6033dbe3cf
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5249294-steve-witkoff-russia-ukraine-peace-talks/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-blocking-g7-statement-denouncing-130116848.html
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/trump-ukraine-war-russia-disinformation/
https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2025/the-promise-of-american-higher-education/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/15/us/universities-responses-investigations-funding-freeze/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/harvard-trump.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/27/trump-putin-ukraine-war-witkoff/
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-republican-pollster-2059924
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April 15, 2025
April 14, 2025
April 14, 2025
Today, U.S. president Donald J. Trump met in the Oval Office with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, along with a number of Cabinet members and White House staff, who answered questions for the press. The meeting appeared to be as staged as Trump’s February meeting with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, designed to send a message. At the meeting, Trump and Bukele, who is clearly doing Trump’s bidding, announced they would not bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home, defying the U.S. Supreme Court.
Bukele was livestreaming the event on his official X account and wearing a lapel microphone as he and Trump walked into the Oval Office, so Trump’s pre-meeting private comments were audible in the video Bukele posted. “We want to do homegrown criminals next…. The homegrowns.” Trump told Bukele. “You gotta build about five more places.” Bukele appeared to answer, “Yeah, we’ve got space.” “All right,” Trump replied.
Rather than being appalled, the people in the room—including Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Attorney General Pam Bondi—erupted in laughter.
At the meeting, it was clear that Trump’s team has cooked up a plan to leave Abrego Garcia without legal recourse to his freedom, a plan that looks much like Trump’s past abuses of the legal system. The White House says the U.S. has no jurisdiction over El Salvador, while Bukele says he has no authority to release a “terrorist” into the U.S. (Abrego Garcia maintains a full-time job, is married to a U.S. citizen, has three children, and has never been charged or convicted of anything.) No one can make Trump arrange for Abrego Garcia’s release, the administration says, because the Constitution gives the president control over foreign affairs.
Marcy Wheeler of Empty Wheel noted that “all the people who should be submitting sworn declarations before [U.S. District Court] Judge Paula Xinis made comments not burdened by oaths or the risk of contempt, rehearsed comments for the cameras.” They falsely claimed that a court had ruled Abrego Garcia was a terrorist, and insisted the whole case was about the president’s power to control foreign affairs.
As NPR’s Steven Inskeep put it: “If I understand this correctly, the US president has launched a trade war against the world, believes he can force the EU and China to meet his terms, is determined to annex Canada and Greenland, but is powerless before the sovereign might of El Salvador. Is that it?”
On April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “there were no legal grounds whatsoever for [Abrego Garcia’s] arrest, detention, or removal.… Rather, his detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” The Supreme Court agreed with Xinis that Abrego Garcia had been illegally removed from the U.S. and must be returned, but warned the judge to be careful of the president’s power over foreign affairs.
At the Oval Office meeting, when Trump asked what the Supreme Court ruled, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller said it had ruled “9–0…in our favor,” claiming “the Supreme Court said that the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9–0 unanimously.” Legal analyst Chris Geidner of Law Dork called Miller’s statement “disgusting, lying propaganda.”
He also noted that when the administration filed its required declaration about Abrego Garcia’s case today, it included a link to the Oval Office meeting, thus submitting Miller’s lies about its decision directly to the Supreme Court. Geidner wished the administration's lawyers: “Good luck there…!”
Legal analyst Harry Litman of Talking Feds wrote: “What we all just witnessed had all the earmarks of a criminal conspiracy to deprive Abrego-Garcia of his constitutional rights, as well as an impeachable offense. The fraud scheme was a phony agreement engineered by the US to have Bukele say he lacks power to return Abrego Garcia and he won't do it.”
As Adam Serwer wrote today in The Atlantic, The “rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law.”
Serwer notes that if the administration actually thought there was enough evidence to convict these men, it could have let the U.S. legal process play out. But Geidner of Law Dork noted that Trump’s declaration this morning that he wanted to deport “homegrown criminals” suggests that the plan all along has been to be able to get rid of U.S. citizens by creating a “Schroedinger’s box” where anyone can be sent but where once they are there the U.S. cannot get them back because they are “in the custody of a foreign sovereign.”
“If they can get Abrego Garcia out of the box,” Geidner writes, “the plan does not work.”
On August 12, 2024, in a discussion on billionaire Elon Musk’s X of what Trump insisted were caravans coming across the southern border of the U.S., Trump told Musk that other countries were doing something “brilliant” by sending streams of people out of their country. “You know the caravans are coming in and…who’s doing this are the heads of the countries. And you would be doing it and so would I, and everyone would say ‘oh what a terrible thing to say.’”
He continued: “The fact is, it’s brilliant for them because they're taking all of their bad people, really bad people and—I hate to say this—the reason the numbers are much bigger than you would think is they’re also taking their nonproductive people. Now these aren’t people that will kill you…but these are people that are nonproductive. They are just not productive, I mean, for whatever reason. They’re not workers or they don’t want to work, or whatever, and these countries are getting rid of nonproductive people in the caravans…and they’re also getting rid of their murderers and their drug dealers and the people that are really brutal people….”
Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained the larger picture: “On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.” He compared it to the Nazis’ practice of pushing Jews into statelessness because “[i]t is easier to move people away from law than it is to move law away from people. Almost all of the killing took place in artificially created stateless zones.”
Yesterday, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) requested a meeting with Bukele today “to discuss the illegal detention of my constituent, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.” He said that he would travel to El Salvador this week if Abrego Garcia “is not home by midweek.”
Judge Xinis has set the next hearing in Abrego Garcia’s case for tomorrow, April 15, at 4:00 p.m.
Today, Dauphin County Magisterial District Judge Dale Klein denied bail for Cody Balmer, the 38-year-old man charged in connection with the arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro on April 13, saying he is a danger to the community. Balmer allegedly set alight beer bottles full of gasoline in the same room in the governor's mansion where, just hours before, the family had held a Passover meal. Shapiro and his wife Lori, their four children, and another family were asleep in the house. Emergency personnel rescued the people and pets, but the historic mansion sustained significant damage.
Balmer said he has a high-school education. He is currently unemployed, does not have any income or savings, and has been living with his parents. Balmer was charged with assault in 2023, allegedly punching both his wife (from whom he is now separated) and their 13-year-old son in the face during an argument. He was due in court this week. His mother says he has mental health issues.
Balmer said he “harbor[ed] hatred” for Governor Shapiro and would have beaten him with a hammer if he had found him.
Governor Shapiro called it “an attack not just on our family, but on the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania…. This type of violence is not okay. This kind of violence is becoming far too common in our society. And I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another, or one particular person or another. It is not okay and it has to stop. We have to be better than this. We have a responsibility to all be better.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-presidency-tarrifs-bukele-visit-04-14-25/index.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/bukele-trump-court-order/682432/
Law DorkTrump told us the horrifying reason why Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not back in the U.S.We are approaching one month since the United States illegally sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the CECOT “terrorism” prison in El Salvador on the third March 15 flight that took people to the prison…Read more16 hours ago · 307 likes · 42 comments · Chris Geidner
Talking Feds SubstackMonsters, Inc.Passover began this past weekend with the traditional meal and discussion known as the “seder.” “Seder” means order, and the meal requires a precise liturgy unchanged for thousands of years. (The English translation has undergone a few rewrites to soften up the edges of what is a fairly martial story.) I was struck, as I hadn't been previously, by the f…Read more21 hours ago · 568 likes · 137 comments · Harry Litmanhttps://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.31.0.pdf
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/us/pennsylvania-governor-arson-what-we-know-hnk/index.html
https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/04/14/what-trump-wants-from-the-nayib-bukele-presser/
CNN video:
2025/04/13/us/video/governor-josh-shapiro-pennsylvania-residence-fire-arson-speech-digvid
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X:
realDonaldTrump/status/1823144316014911820?lang=en comments begin at 1:24.
April 13, 2025
April 13, 2025
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!”
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Notes:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.31.0.pdf
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.65.0.pdf
https://apnews.com/article/who-is-abrego-garcia-e1b2af6528f915a1f0ec60f9a1c73cdd
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance The Supreme Court Finally RulesLate this afternoon, the Supreme Court issued a 9-0 response to the government’s application to vacate federal District Judge Paula Xinis’ order that the Trump administration return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from prison in El Salvador to the United States. Xinis had ordered him returned by the end of the day on Monday. The Supreme Court let him sit for an ad…Read more3 days ago · 3264 likes · 348 comments · Joyce Vancehttps://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.64.0.pdf
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/10/nx-s1-5358421/supreme-court-abrego-garcia-deportation-decision
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
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