Haverford College President Wendy Raymond testifies before the U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — A trio of college presidents from across the nation Wednesday took heat from U.S. House lawmakers, as Republicans expand their drive to penalize higher education institutions they say have failed to combat antisemitism.
The presidents of Pennsylvania’s Haverford College, DePaul University in Chicago and California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo appeared before the House Committee on Education and Workforce to detail the steps the schools have taken to address antisemitism at their schools.
But it was the Haverford president, Wendy Raymond, who drew the most outrage from Republicans, including a tense exchange with Rep. Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, when Raymond could not say how many students have been disciplined recently for antisemitic conduct.
Stefanik called Raymond’s responses “completely unacceptable.”
The hearing in the GOP-controlled House education panel — the first on antisemitism since President Donald Trump took office — came as his administration takes drastic steps to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from several elite institutions across the country over claims that the schools are harboring antisemitism on their campuses.
Harvard University has had grant funding yanked by the administration for permitting “intolerable” harassment of Jewish students.
Trump officials have also attempted to make elite institutions align more with the administration ideologically.
GOP lawmakers have focused on antisemitism in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and college protests that surfaced across the country last year over the war in Gaza. Now they are moving on beyond the Ivy League.
Chairman Tim Walberg said “the scourge of antisemitism has taken root far beyond the country’s best-known ivory towers, and it’s our responsibility as a committee to unearth and address antisemitism at these schools, too, and others, especially as antisemitism is at a historic high in the United States.”
“Antisemitism is proliferating at colleges across the country, both private and public, in rural, urban and suburban settings,” the Michigan Republican said.
Haverford president apologizes
Republicans on the panel expressed particular dissatisfaction with testimony offered from Haverford’s Raymond.
The small liberal arts college, founded in 1833, is located in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
Raymond acknowledged that in reaction to the war in Gaza, “events have occurred on our campus that are inconsistent with our values” and apologized to Haverford’s Jewish community. She did not elaborate on the incidents.
She said the college has taken “significant steps to address these issues and strengthen our policies.”
“That includes updating our policies, strengthening campus safety programs, deepening engagement with the Jewish community, launching programs to combat antisemitism and forming our ad hoc committee on free expression.”
Asked by Walberg how many students have been expelled or suspended for antisemitic conduct since Hamas’ 2023 attack, Raymond was the only one of the three presidents who could not provide concrete numbers.
Raymond said Haverford does not publicize that information but that suspension and expulsion are “normal parts” of their disciplinary process.
‘Straightforward questions’
Stefanik took aim at Raymond’s refusal to offer more details on any actions taken by the school regarding antisemitism.
During a heated exchange between Stefanik and Raymond, the Haverford president said: “Respectfully, representative, I will not be talking about individual cases here.”
Stefanik fired back, saying: “Respectfully, president of Haverford, many people have sat in this position who are no longer in the positions as president of universities for their failure to answer straightforward questions.”
Stefanik was pointing to multiple university presidents she grilled who appeared before the House education panel for hearings regarding campus antisemitism and later resigned, including leaders at Harvard, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Raymond had said that there “have been some” disciplinary actions taken by Haverford related to antisemitism but did not offer details.
“For the American people watching: You still don’t get it. Haverford still doesn’t get it. It’s a very different testimony than the other presidents who are here today, who are coming with specifics,” Stefanik said.
DePaul’s president, Robert Manuel, detailed a number of steps the university is taking, including implementing a new ID verification and mask policy, placing new limits on campus protests and suspending the operations of a student group that Walberg claimed is “at the very center” of the school’s “antisemitism problem.”
Cal Poly’s president, Jeffrey Armstrong, said “when alleged antisemitism or harassment occurs, we investigate and impose immediate university discipline.”
He also said the university is enhancing its mandatory student orientation and biannual employee training to provide greater education and awareness on antisemitism.
At the end of her heated exchange with Raymond, Stefanik said “this is completely unacceptable, and it’s why this committee has stepped in, because higher education has failed to address the scourge of antisemitism, putting Jewish students at risk at Haverford and other campuses across the country.”
Democrats criticize cuts at Education Department
Meanwhile, Democrats on the panel criticized Republicans on the committee for pursuing hearings on antisemitism when the Trump administration has made huge cuts to the U.S. Department of Education, including its Office for Civil Rights that’s tasked with investigating discrimination complaints.
Rep. Bobby Scott, ranking member of the panel, said “in its first three months, the Trump administration has closed down seven of 12 OCR regional offices, all of which conduct investigations into discrimination on campus, whether it be based on antisemitism or race, national origin, gender or disability.”
The Virginia Democrat also pointed to reports of nearly half of the OCR staff being laid off. “One is left to wonder: how can OCR carry out its important responsibilities with half the staff?” he said.
Scott added that the administration’s move to dismantle OCR “raises reasonable doubt about the plans for addressing antisemitism on campus as well as racism, homophobia, sexism, Islamophobia or the needs of students with disabilities.”
Angélica Infante-Green, Rhode Island’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education, speaks at a forum on Tuesday, May 6, 2025, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Screenshot via YouTube)
WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Democrats on Tuesday blasted the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, underscoring the impact of the dizzying array of cuts, overhauls and proposed changes to the agency on students, families and educators.
Sen. Patty Murray, who hosted the forum in a U.S. Senate hearing room alongside several Democratic colleagues, said Trump is “essentially bulldozing the Department of Education, regardless of who depends on it, regardless of who is still inside, and regardless of the very loud outcry from parents and educators and students about this.”
The Washington state Democrat brought in education advocates and leaders, who emphasized the importance of the department in delivering on federal resources for public education, investigating civil rights complaints and helping students cheated by predatory institutions.
Trump and his administration have sought to dramatically reshape the federal role in education, including an executive order calling on Education Secretary Linda McMahon to facilitate the closure of her own department, the gutting of more than 1,300 employees at the agency, threats to revoke funds for schools that use diversity, equity and inclusion practices and a crackdown on “woke” higher education.
‘Unnecessary confusion and chaos’
Angélica Infante-Green, Rhode Island’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said she and colleagues who lead state education across the country have spent a great deal of time trying to decipher the intent of Trump’s executive orders and the department’s directives and policy changes.
“They seem unclear and cause unnecessary confusion and chaos for all of us,” Infante-Green said. “While the impact of the confusion may be hard to quantify, what is clear is that students and families and educators are the losers in this new paradigm.”
Denise Forte, CEO of the nonprofit policy and advocacy group EdTrust, said “most urgently, we are alarmed by the mass firing of over half of the department staff.”
“This isn’t reform — it is sabotage,” Forte said, pointing to the layoffs hitting wide swaths of the department, particularly in the Office for Civil Rights, Office of Federal Student Aid and Institute of Education Sciences.
“With the Office for Civil Rights now severely understaffed, civil rights complaints will skyrocket while response capacity plummets,” she said.
Students with disabilities
The cuts at the agency and Trump’s proposal in March that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “will be handling special needs” have sparked worries among disability advocates over whether the department can carry out its responsibilities to serve students with disabilities.
Diane Willcutts, director of Education Advocacy, said she’s been getting “panicked phone calls from parents of children with disabilities who are wondering, ‘What does this all mean?’”
Willcutts has worked for over two decades in Connecticut and Massachusetts helping families of children with disabilities navigate the education process.
“I think everyone’s shell-shocked, and we’re looking for direction — how can we be helpful to you in order to protect the U.S. Department of Education?” she said. “I know there’s this assumption that ‘Oh, the states will take care of it.’ That is absolutely not the case, I can tell you in my state that is not what is happening right now, and so, as I said, there’s a level of panic but we’re looking for direction.”
Trump’s budget request
Meanwhile, Trump also released a budget request last week that calls for $12 billion in spending cuts at the department.
Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin said the budget includes “devastating cuts to many critical programs,” and that the proposal “comes at a time when too many students are chronically absent and achieving at levels that will not set them up for success.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Trump administration is “cutting so many things — don’t feel alone, Department of Education.”
“They don’t know what they’re doing about just about anything, and they want to cut everything, but to cut education, which has been sacrosanct in America, is just awful,” the New York Democrat said.
Schumer said Tuesday’s “spotlight hearing” is just one in a series Senate Democrats will be hosting in response to Trump’s cuts to the department.
Trump administration officials said the outrage was misplaced.
“If Senate Democrats were truly interested in fighting for parents, students, and teachers as they claim, where was their outrage over this year’s dismal math and reading scores? Don’t get it twisted,” Savannah Newhouse, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education, said in a statement shared with States Newsroom.
Senate Democrats “are fighting President Trump’s education agenda for one reason: to protect the bloated bureaucracy that has consistently failed our nation’s students,” Newhouse said.
“By returning education authority to the states, President Trump and Secretary McMahon will help every American child — including those in public schools — to have the best shot at a quality education.”
A U.S. Border Patrol official vehicle is shown parked near the border. (Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — U.S. House Judiciary Republicans Wednesday worked in committee on a portion of a major legislative package that would help fund President Donald Trump’s plans to conduct mass deportations of people living in the United States without permanent legal status.
The Judiciary panel’s $81 billion share of the “one, big beautiful” bill the president has requested of Congress would provide $45 billion for immigration detention centers, $8 billion to hire thousands of immigration enforcement officers and more than $14 billion for deportations, among other things.
The border security and immigration funds are part of a massive package that wraps together White House priorities including tax cuts and defense spending boosts. Republicans are pushing the deal through using a special procedure known as reconciliation that will allow the Senate GOP to skirt its usual 60-vote threshold when that chamber acts.
On Wednesday, lawmakers continued work on the various sections of the reconciliation bill with markups — which means a bill is debated and potentially amended or rewritten — in the Financial Services, Judiciary, Transportation and Infrastructure and Oversight and Government Reform committees.
House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana said Republicans will spend the rest of this week and next debating the 11 separate bills in committees. Committees when they finish their measures will send them to the House Budget Committee, which is expected to bundle them together prior to a floor vote.
The Judiciary panel’s 116-page bill vastly overhauls U.S. asylum laws. It would, for example, create a fee structure for asylum seekers that would set a minimum cost for an application at no less than $1,000. Applications now are free.
“These and other resources and fees in this reconciliation bill will ensure the Trump administration has the adequate resources to enforce the immigration laws in a fiscally responsible way,” GOP Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio said.
The bill would establish a $1,000 fee for immigrants granted temporary protected status, which would mean they would have work authorizations and deportation protections.
It would also require sponsors to pay $3,500 to take in an unaccompanied minor who crosses the border without a legal status. Typically, unaccompanied minors are released to sponsors who are family members living in the United States.
The bill would also require immigrants without permanent legal status to pay a $550 fee for work permits every six months.
The top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, slammed the bill as targeting immigrants.
“Every day, this administration uses immigration enforcement as a template to erode constitutional rights and liberties,” he said.
A final committee vote was expected Wednesday night.
‘A giveaway to ICE’
The Judiciary bill directs half of the fees collected from asylum seekers to go toward the agency that handles U.S. immigration courts, but Democrats criticized the provisions as creating a barrier for asylum seekers.
“The so-called immigration fees that are in this bill are really fines and nothing but a cruel attempt to make immigrating to this country impossible,” Washington Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal said.
Democratic Rep. Chuy Garcia of Illinois, said the bill would not only “gut asylum” but would significantly increase funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.
Funding for ICE detention this fiscal year is roughly $3.4 billion, but the Judiciary bill would sharply increase that to $45 billion.
Garcia called the increase a “a giveaway to ICE, a rogue agency that’s terrorizing communities and clamping (down) on civil liberties and the Constitution itself, because they’ve been directed to do so by this president.”
House Republicans have also included language that would move the Federal Trade Commission into the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, a move Democrats argued would kneecap the FTC’s regulatory authority.
“You’re trying to shutter the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, making it harder for us to enforce our antitrust laws,” Democratic Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont said.
Consumer protections to take a hit
Lawmakers on the House Committee on Financial Services met in a lengthy, and at times tense, session to finalize legislation to cut “no less than” $1 billion from government programs and services under the panel’s jurisdiction, according to the budget resolution Congress approved in April.
Funds in the crosshairs include those previously authorized for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and grants provided under the Biden administration-era Inflation Reduction Act for homeowners to improve energy efficiency.
Chair French Hill said the committee “will do its part to reduce the deficit and decrease direct spending, so that Congress can enact pro-growth tax policies.”
“And remember, today, we are here with one purpose, to do our part to put our nation back on a responsible fiscal trajectory,” the Arkansas Republican said.
Democrats introduced dozens of amendments during the hourslong session to block cuts to community block grants and programs protecting consumers, including veterans, from illegal credit and lending practices.
Ranking member Maxine Waters said committee Republicans’ plans to cut the CFPB by 70% “is ridiculous.”
“The bureau has saved American consumers $21 billion by returning to them funds that big banks and predatory lenders swindled out of them,” said Waters, a California Democrat.
Congress created the CFPB in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when subprime mortgage lending cascaded into bank failures and home and job losses.
Republicans opposed amendment after amendment.
Rep. María Salazar of Florida tossed a copy of one of Waters’ lengthy amendments straight into a trash can after a staffer handed it to her. Michigan’s Rep. Bill Huizenga held up proceedings for several minutes when he accused Waters of breaking the rules by not distributing enough paper copies of her amendment.
“We cannot allow our government to continue spending money like there are no consequences,” GOP Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska said in response to several Democratic amendments.
A final committee vote was expected Wednesday night.
Transportation section adds fees on electric vehicles
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee also approved, by a party line 36-30 vote, reconciliation instructions that would cut $10 billion from the federal deficit while boosting spending for the U.S. Coast Guard and the air traffic control system.
Like other portions of the larger reconciliation package, the transportation committee’s instructions would add funding for national security and border enforcement, through the Coast Guard funding, while cutting money from programs favored by Democrats, including climate programs and any spending that could be construed as race-conscious.
The bill would provide $21.2 billion for the Coast Guard and $12.5 billion for air traffic control systems. It would raise money through a $250 annual fee on electric vehicles and a $100 annual fee on hybrids, while also cutting $4.6 billion from climate programs created in Democrats’ 2022 reconciliation package.
Chairman Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, said the measure included priorities for members of both parties, as well as business and labor interests.
“We all want to invest in our Coast Guard,” he said. “We all want to rebuild our air traffic control system and finally address the broken Highway Trust Fund. We have held countless hearings on all of these topics, both recently and, frankly, for years. And now members have the opportunity to actually act.”
Democrats on the panel complained that the reconciliation package was a partisan exercise and a departure from the panel’s normally congenial approach to business. They introduced dozens of amendments over the daylong committee meeting seeking to add funding for various programs. None were adopted.
“The larger Republican reconciliation package will add more than $15 trillion in new debt, gives away $7 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts to the wealthy and slashes access to health care and food assistance for families,” ranking Democrat Rick Larsen of Washington said. “Given that, I think we’re going to have to vote no on the bill before us.”
The vehicle fees, which would be deposited into the Highway Trust Fund that sends highway and transit money to states, created a partisan divide Wednesday.
Federal gas taxes provide the lion’s share of deposits to the fund and Republicans argued that, because drivers of electric vehicles pay no gas taxes and hybrid drivers pay less than those who drive gas-powered cars, the provision would make the contributions fairer.
Republicans scrapped a proposed $20 annual fee on gas-powered cars, which Graves said was meant to “start a conversation” on the solvency of the Highway Trust Fund. But the provision “became a political distraction that no longer centered around seriously addressing the problem,” he said.
Pennsylvania Democrat Chris Deluzio criticized the vehicle fees, noting Republicans were pursuing additional revenue opportunities to offset losses from tax cuts.
“I don’t know when you guys became the tax-and-spend liberals,” Deluzio told his Republican colleagues. “But I guess the taxing of car owners so you can pay for tax giveaways to billionaires is your new strategy. Good luck with that.”
Federal employee benefits targeted
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform voted nearly along party lines, 22-21, to send its portion of the reconciliation package to the Budget Committee, with Ohio Republican Rep. Mike Turner joining Democrats in opposition.
Turner was the first GOP lawmaker to cast a committee vote against reconciliation instructions this year.
The legislation hits at federal employee benefits and comes as the Trump administration continues to overhaul the federal workforce.
Part of the bill would raise federal employees’ required retirement contribution to a rate of 4.4% of their salary and eliminate an additional retirement annuity payment for federal employees who retire before the age of 62, while cutting more than $50 billion from the federal deficit.
At his committee’s markup, Chairman James Comer said the legislation “advances important budgetary reforms that will save taxpayers money.”
The Kentucky Republican acknowledged that the chief investigative committee in the U.S. House has “very limited jurisdiction to help reduce the federal budget deficit,” noting that the panel is “empowered to pursue civil service reforms, including federal employee benefits and reining in the influence of partisan and unaccountable government employee unions.”
But Democrats on the panel blasted the committee’s portion of the reconciliation package, saying the bill chips away at federal employees’ protections.
Rep. Stephen Lynch, the top Democrat on the panel, said congressional Republicans instructed the panel to target the federal workforce with roughly $50 billion in funding cuts “regardless of the impact on hard-working, loyal federal employees and their critical services that they provide to the American people.”
The Massachusetts Democrat said the bill “threatens to further undermine the federal workforce by reducing the take-home pay, the benefits and workforce protections of 2.4 million federal employees, most of whom are middle-class Americans and a third of whom are military veterans.”
Ohio’s Turner, who voted against the legislation because of the provision reducing pension benefits, said he supported the overall reconciliation package and hoped the pension measure would be stripped before a floor vote.
Turner said “making changes to pension retirement benefits in the middle of someone’s employment is wrong.”
Demonstrators holds signs as a motorist passes with flags supporting President Donald Trump during an April 5, 2025, protest in Columbia, South Carolina. Protestors organized nationwide demonstrations against Trump administration policies and Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Tuesday marked the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term, a period filled almost daily with executive orders seeking to expand presidential power, court challenges to block those orders and economic anxiety that undermines his promised prosperity.
Trump has taken decisive actions that have polarized the electorate. He’s used obscure authorities to increase deportations, upended longstanding trade policy with record-high tariffs, made drastic cuts to the federal workforce and ordered the closure of the Education Department.
Those moves have garnered mixed results and led to legal challenges.
The approach to immigration enforcement has yielded lower numbers of unauthorized border crossings compared to last year. But the immigration crackdown has barreled the country toward a constitutional crisis through various clashes with the judiciary branch.
Those nearing retirement have watched their savings shrink as Trump’s blunt application of tariffs, which he promises will replace income taxes, roils markets. Administration officials have promised the short-term tariff pain will benefit the country in the long term.
And White House advisor and top campaign donor Elon Musk’s efforts at government efficiency have resulted in eliminations of wide swaths of government jobs. That includes about half of the Education Department workforce so far, though Trump has signed an executive order to eliminate the department.
The controversial moves appear unpopular, as Americans delivered record low approval ratings for a president so early in his term. Polls spearheaded by Fox News, NPR, Gallup and numerous others yield overall disapproval of Trump’s job performance.
Trump speaks to reporters after signing executive orders in the Oval Office on April 23, 2025. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon look on. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Deportation push tests legal boundaries
Immigration was Trump’s signature issue on the campaign trail and his first 100 days were marked by a crackdown carried out against people with a range of immigration statuses and at least three U.S. citizen children. The aggressive push has led to clashes with the judiciary branch.
A burst of Inauguration Day executive orders Trump signed upon his return to office included some hardline immigration policies he’d promised.
On day one, he declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border that enabled his deployment two days later of 1,500 troops to help border enforcement.
District courts blocked the birthright citizenship and refugee resettlement measures and an appeals court has upheld those interpretations. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in May on birthright citizenship.
Trump’s record on immigration is a clear example of his desire to expand executive power, said Ahilan Arulanantham, a co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law.
“It’s an attempt to expand the government’s powers far beyond anything that we have seen before in this realm,” he said.
Unprecedented authorities
The administration has taken a series of actions considered nearly unprecedented to conduct mass deportations.
Authorities never accused Khalil of committing a crime, but sought to revoke his green card under a Cold War-era provision that allows the secretary of State to remove lawful permanent residents if the secretary deems their presence has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
Similar arrests followed at universities across the country.
In mid-March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport two planeloads of people his administration said belonged to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
It was only the fourth time the law was invoked and the first outside of wartime. The first flights left U.S. soil en route to a mega-prison in El Salvador on Saturday, March 15, amid a hearing on the legality of using the law in peacetime.
Prison officers stand guard over a cell block at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, on April 4, 2025 in El Salvador. (Photo by Alex Peña/Getty Images)
When a federal judge entered an oral order to turn the flights around, the administration refused, arguing the oral order was not valid. The administration also ignored a subsequent written order demanding the return of the flights, later arguing the flights were outside U.S. airspace at that time and impossible to order returned.
Administration officials mocked the court order on social media.
The Supreme Court on April 7 allowed for the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport suspected gang members of Tren de Aragua. However, the justices unanimously agreed that those removed under the wartime law needed to have due process and have a hearing to challenge their removal.
Abrego Garcia
A third March 15 flight carried a man who was mistakenly deported in an episode that has gained a national spotlight.
Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a native of El Salvador, had a final order of removal, but was granted deportation protections by an immigration judge because of the threat he would be harmed by gangs if he were returned to his home country. Despite the protective order, he was deported to the notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT prison.
After his family sued over his deportation, the administration admitted he’d been removed through an “administrative error,” but stood by its decision.
The administration argued it had no power to compel the El Salvador government to release Abrego Garcia, despite a possibly illegal $6 million agreement with the country to detain the roughly 300 men.
A Maryland federal court and an appeals court ruled the administration must repatriate Abrego Garcia, whose wife and 5-year-old son are U.S. citizens, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Trump administration must “facilitate” his return, but stopped short of requiring it.
The administration has done little to indicate it is complying with that order, earning a rebuke from a conservative judge on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“The Supreme Court’s decision does not … allow the government to do essentially nothing,” Circuit Court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote. “‘Facilitate’ is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear.”
The administration’s relationship with the courts — delaying compliance with orders and showing a clear distaste for doing so — has led to the brink of a constitutional crisis, Arulanantham said.
“They’re playing footsy with disregarding court orders,” he said. “On the one hand, they’re not just complying. If they were complying, Abrego Garcia would be here now.”
But the administration has also not flagrantly refused to comply, Arulanantham added. “They’re sort of testing the bounds.”
Tariffs prompted market drop
Trump’s first 100 days spiraled into economic uncertainty as he ramped up tariffs on allies and trading partners. In early April, the president declared foreign trade a national emergency and shocked economies around the world with costly import taxes.
Following a week of market upheaval, Trump paused for 90 days what he had billed as “reciprocal” tariffs and left a universal 10% levy on nearly all countries, except China, which received a bruising 125%.
Some products, including pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, lumber and copper, remain exempt for now, though the administration is eyeing the possibilities of tariffs on those goods.
A billboard in Miramar, Florida, displays an anti-tariff message on March 28, 2025. The Canadian government has placed the anti-tariff billboards in numerous American cities in what they have described as an “educational campaign” to inform Americans of the economic impacts of tariffs. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The administration now contends it will strike trade deals with some 90 foreign governments over the pause, set to expire in July.
Meanwhile, an all-out trade war rages with China after Trump hiked tariffs on the world’s no. 2 economy even further to 145%. China responded with 125% tariffs on U.S. goods. The two economies share a massive trading relationship, both in the top three for each other’s imports and exports.
‘Chaotic’ strategy
Inu Manak, fellow for trade policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, summed up Trump’s first 100 days as “chaotic.”
“We haven’t seen anything like this in our U.S. history in terms of how trade policy is being handled. It’s very ad hoc,” Manak said.
“U.S. businesses can’t figure out what to do. And even for the large companies, it’s hard for them to know some of the long-term trajectories of where this was going to go,” Manak said.
Shortly after his second term began, Trump declared a national emergency over illicit fentanyl entering the U.S. — an unprecedented move to trigger import taxes — and began escalating tariffs on Chinese goods, as well as up to 25% on certain products crossing the borders from Canada and Mexico.
Trump hiked existing tariffs on steel and aluminum in mid-March under trade provisions meant to protect domestic production and national security, followed by 25% levies on foreign cars and auto parts — though Trump signed two executive orders Tuesday to grant some tariff relief to carmakers.
The import taxes have alarmed investors, small businesses and American consumers following the 2024 presidential campaign when Trump made lowering prices a major tenet of his platform.
The latest University of Michigan survey of consumers — a staple indicator for economists — reported consumer outlook on personal finances and business conditions took a nosedive in April. Expectations dropped 32% since January, the largest three-month percentage decline since the 1990 recession, according to the analysis.
Manak said Trump’s tariffs are “really at odds with” with the administration’s objectives of helping U.S. manufacturers and cutting costs for Americans.
“The U.S. now has the highest tariff rates in the world,” she said. “That’s going to hurt both consuming industries that import products to make things, and then consumers as well. We’re starting to see notifications coming out on layoffs, and some small businesses considering closing up shop already. And the tariffs haven’t been in place for that long.”
Rhett Buttle, of Small Business for America’s Future, said the policies are “causing real damage in terms of not just planning, but in terms of day-to-day operations.”
Buttle, a senior advisor for the advocacy group that claims 85,000 small business members, said even if Trump begins to strike deals with other countries, entrepreneurs will likely be on edge for months to come.
“It’s that uncertainty that makes business owners not want to hire or not want to grow,” Buttle said. “So it’s like, ‘Okay, we got through this mess, but why would I hire a person if I don’t know if I’m gonna wake up in two weeks and there’s gonna be another announcement?’”
Support dropping
Trillions were erased from the U.S. stock market after “Liberation Day” — the White House’s term for the start of its global tariff policy. The S&P 500 index, which tracks the performance of the 500 largest U.S. companies, is overall down 8.5% since Trump’s inauguration, according to The Wall Street Journal’s analysis.
Numerous recent polls showed flagging support for Trump’s economic policies.
In a poll released Monday, Gallup found 89% of Americans believe tariffs will result in increasing prices. And a majority of Americans are concerned about an economic recession and increasing costs of groceries and other goods, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey between April 17 and April 22.
The Pew Research Center similarly found a growing gloomy outlook among U.S. adults from April 7 to April 13. Results showed a majority of Americans — 59% across race, age and income levels — disapproved of Trump’s approach to tariffs. But when broken down by party, the survey showed a majority of Democrats disapprove while the majority of Republicans approve of the tariff policy.
American households are poised to lose up to $2,600 annually if tariffs remain in place and U.S. fiscal policy doesn’t change, according to the Yale Budget Lab. Analyses show low-income households will be disproportionately affected.
“If these tariffs stay in place, some folks are going to benefit, but a lot of people are going to get hurt,” Manak said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Government spending
Elon Musk, accompanied by his son X Musk and Trump, speaks during an executive order signing in the Oval Office on February 11, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Trump began his second term with a flurry of action on government spending, challenging the balance of power between the president and Congress.
Efforts to unilaterally cancel funding already approved by lawmakers, who hold the authority to spend federal dollars under the Constitution, led to confusion and frustration from both Democrats and Republicans, especially after the U.S. DOGE Service froze allocations on programs that have long elicited bipartisan support.
Many of the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back appropriations are subject to injunctions from federal courts, blocking the cuts from moving forward while the lawsuits advance through the judicial system.
Kevin Kosar, senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Trump’s actions on spending so far have sought to expand the bounds of presidential authority.
“We’ve never seen a president in modern times who’s been this aggressive in trying to seize control of the power of the purse,” he said. “To just say, ‘I’m not going to fund this agency, like USAID, despite money being appropriated for it. And we’re going to walk over and take their plaque off their wall and lock their doors.’ This is new.”
Many of Trump’s actions so far indicate to Kosar that the administration expects a change to the balance of power following next year’s midterm elections, when the president’s party historically loses control of at least one chamber of Congress.
“It feels to me that the first 100 days are in large part predicated on an assumption that they may only have two years of unified Republican control of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency,” he said. “We know the margins in the House are quite narrow, and the heavy use of executive actions and the simple defunding of various government contracts and agencies all through executive action, just tell me that the administration feels like they have to get everything done as fast as they possibly can, because the time is short.”
Kosar said he’s watching to see if Trump works with Republicans in Congress, while they still have unified control, to codify his executive orders into law — something he didn’t do with many of the unilateral actions he took during his first term.
“He just did executive actions, which, of course, (President Joe) Biden just undid,” he said. “And I’m just wondering: Are we going to see this movie all over again? Or is he going to actually partner with Congress on these various policy matters and pass statutes so that they stick?”
Zachary Peskowitz, associate professor of political science at Emory University, said Trump has been much more “assertive” during the last 100 days than during the first few months of 2017.
DOGE ‘winding down’
U.S. DOGE Service and Musk hit the ground running, though their actions have fallen short of the goals he set, and appear to be sunsetting with the billionaire turning his attention back toward his businesses.
“I think the big bang is winding down. They did a lot of things early on. It’s not clear how many of them are going to stick, what the consequences are,” Peskowitz said. “And I think, big picture, in terms of federal spending, the amounts of money that may have been saved or not are pretty small.”
Democrats in Congress released a tracker Tuesday listing which accounts the Trump administration has frozen or canceled to the tune of more than $430 billion.
But Trump has just gotten started.
The administration plans to submit its first budget request to Congress in the coming days, a step that’s typically taken in early February, though it happens a couple months behind schedule during a president’s first year.
That massive tax-and-spending proposal will begin the classic tug-of-war between Congress, which will draft the dozen annual appropriations bills, and Trump, who has shown a willingness to act unilaterally when he doesn’t get his way.
Trump and lawmakers must agree to some sort of government funding bill before the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, otherwise a partial government shutdown would begin. And unlike the reconciliation package that Republicans can enact all on their own, funding bills require some Democratic support to move past the Senate’s 60-vote cloture threshold.
Trump stands with McMahon after signing an executive order to reduce the size and scope of the Education Department during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on March 20, 2025. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Eliminating the Education Department
Researchers and advocates predicted even more changes to the federal role in education, underscoring anti-diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and a continued ideological battle with higher education that have marked Trump’s approach to education policy in his first 100 days.
In a torrent of education-related decisions, Trump and his administration have tried to dismantle the Education Department via an executive order, slashed more than 1,300 employees at the department, threatened to revoke funds for schools that use DEI practices and cracked down on “woke” higher education.
The Trump administration has taken drastic steps to revoke federal funding for a number of elite universities in an attempt to make the institutions align more with them ideologically.
Rachel Perera, a governance studies fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, cited “brazen lawlessness” when reflecting on Trump’s approach to higher education in his second term.
“The ways that they’re trying to withhold funding from universities are very clearly in violation of federal law and the processes mandated by civil rights law in terms of ensuring that institutions are offered due process in assessing whether violations have taken place,” Perera said. “There’s not even a pretense of pretending to investigate some of these institutions before taking really dramatic action.”
Whether the administration’s approach continues or not depends on court action, she added.
“I think what the next three years might look like is really going to depend on how some of these lawsuits play out,” Perera said, referencing some of the major legal battles involving the Trump administration.
Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at the nonprofit policy and advocacy group EdTrust, said “much of what this administration has done has been overreach.” He pointed to the Education Department’s letter threatening to yank federal funds for schools that use race-conscious practices across aspects of student life as one example.
Del Pilar, who was previously deputy secretary of postsecondary and higher education for the state of Pennsylvania, said the administration is “going to take any opportunity to grab at power that advances their ideology.”
Meanwhile, Perera said the consequences of the department implementing a reduction in force plan in March “have yet to be felt.”
“I think we will start to see really the material consequences of the reduced staffing capacity in the coming years, in terms of how programs are administered, in terms of how funding is moving out the building, in terms of auditing, making sure funding is going to the right groups of students that Congress intended for the money to go to, whether big data collection efforts that are congressionally mandated are being carried out in timely and effective ways,” she said.
A U.S. Border Patrol official vehicle is shown parked near the border. (Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — U.S. House Judiciary Republicans Wednesday worked in committee on a portion of a major legislative package that would help fund President Donald Trump’s plans to conduct mass deportations of people living in the United States without permanent legal status.
The Judiciary panel’s $81 billion share of the “one, big beautiful” bill the president has requested of Congress would provide $45 billion for immigration detention centers, $8 billion to hire thousands of immigration enforcement officers and more than $14 billion for deportations, among other things.
The border security and immigration funds are part of a massive package that wraps together White House priorities including tax cuts and defense spending boosts. Republicans are pushing the deal through using a special procedure known as reconciliation that will allow the Senate GOP to skirt its usual 60-vote threshold when that chamber acts.
On Wednesday, lawmakers continued work on the various sections of the reconciliation bill with markups — which means a bill is debated and potentially amended or rewritten — in the Financial Services, Judiciary, Transportation and Infrastructure and Oversight and Government Reform committees.
House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana said Republicans will spend the rest of this week and next debating the 11 separate bills in committees. Committees when they finish their measures will send them to the House Budget Committee, which is expected to bundle them together prior to a floor vote.
The Judiciary panel’s 116-page bill vastly overhauls U.S. asylum laws. It would, for example, create a fee structure for asylum seekers that would set a minimum cost for an application at no less than $1,000. Applications now are free.
“These and other resources and fees in this reconciliation bill will ensure the Trump administration has the adequate resources to enforce the immigration laws in a fiscally responsible way,” GOP Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio said.
The bill would establish a $1,000 fee for immigrants granted temporary protected status, which would mean they would have work authorizations and deportation protections.
It would also require sponsors to pay $3,500 to take in an unaccompanied minor who crosses the border without a legal status. Typically, unaccompanied minors are released to sponsors who are family members living in the United States.
The bill would also require immigrants without permanent legal status to pay a $550 fee for work permits every six months.
The top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, slammed the bill as targeting immigrants.
“Every day, this administration uses immigration enforcement as a template to erode constitutional rights and liberties,” he said.
A final committee vote was expected Wednesday night.
‘A giveaway to ICE’
The Judiciary bill directs half of the fees collected from asylum seekers to go toward the agency that handles U.S. immigration courts, but Democrats criticized the provisions as creating a barrier for asylum seekers.
“The so-called immigration fees that are in this bill are really fines and nothing but a cruel attempt to make immigrating to this country impossible,” Washington Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal said.
Democratic Rep. Chuy Garcia of Illinois, said the bill would not only “gut asylum” but would significantly increase funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.
Funding for ICE detention this fiscal year is roughly $3.4 billion, but the Judiciary bill would sharply increase that to $45 billion.
Garcia called the increase a “a giveaway to ICE, a rogue agency that’s terrorizing communities and clamping (down) on civil liberties and the Constitution itself, because they’ve been directed to do so by this president.”
House Republicans have also included language that would move the Federal Trade Commission into the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, a move Democrats argued would kneecap the FTC’s regulatory authority.
“You’re trying to shutter the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, making it harder for us to enforce our antitrust laws,” Democratic Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont said.
Consumer protections to take a hit
Lawmakers on the House Committee on Financial Services met in a lengthy, and at times tense, session to finalize legislation to cut “no less than” $1 billion from government programs and services under the panel’s jurisdiction, according to the budget resolution Congress approved in April.
Funds in the crosshairs include those previously authorized for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and grants provided under the Biden administration-era Inflation Reduction Act for homeowners to improve energy efficiency.
Chair French Hill said the committee “will do its part to reduce the deficit and decrease direct spending, so that Congress can enact pro-growth tax policies.”
“And remember, today, we are here with one purpose, to do our part to put our nation back on a responsible fiscal trajectory,” the Arkansas Republican said.
Democrats introduced dozens of amendments during the hourslong session to block cuts to community block grants and programs protecting consumers, including veterans, from illegal credit and lending practices.
Ranking member Maxine Waters said committee Republicans’ plans to cut the CFPB by 70% “is ridiculous.”
“The bureau has saved American consumers $21 billion by returning to them funds that big banks and predatory lenders swindled out of them,” said Waters, a California Democrat.
Congress created the CFPB in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when subprime mortgage lending cascaded into bank failures and home and job losses.
Republicans opposed amendment after amendment.
Rep. María Salazar of Florida tossed a copy of one of Waters’ lengthy amendments straight into a trash can after a staffer handed it to her. Michigan’s Rep. Bill Huizenga held up proceedings for several minutes when he accused Waters of breaking the rules by not distributing enough paper copies of her amendment.
“We cannot allow our government to continue spending money like there are no consequences,” GOP Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska said in response to several Democratic amendments.
A final committee vote was expected Wednesday night.
Transportation section adds fees on electric vehicles
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee also approved, by a party line 36-30 vote, reconciliation instructions that would cut $10 billion from the federal deficit while boosting spending for the U.S. Coast Guard and the air traffic control system.
Like other portions of the larger reconciliation package, the transportation committee’s instructions would add funding for national security and border enforcement, through the Coast Guard funding, while cutting money from programs favored by Democrats, including climate programs and any spending that could be construed as race-conscious.
The bill would provide $21.2 billion for the Coast Guard and $12.5 billion for air traffic control systems. It would raise money through a $250 annual fee on electric vehicles and a $100 annual fee on hybrids, while also cutting $4.6 billion from climate programs created in Democrats’ 2022 reconciliation package.
Chairman Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, said the measure included priorities for members of both parties, as well as business and labor interests.
“We all want to invest in our Coast Guard,” he said. “We all want to rebuild our air traffic control system and finally address the broken Highway Trust Fund. We have held countless hearings on all of these topics, both recently and, frankly, for years. And now members have the opportunity to actually act.”
Democrats on the panel complained that the reconciliation package was a partisan exercise and a departure from the panel’s normally congenial approach to business. They introduced dozens of amendments over the daylong committee meeting seeking to add funding for various programs. None were adopted.
“The larger Republican reconciliation package will add more than $15 trillion in new debt, gives away $7 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts to the wealthy and slashes access to health care and food assistance for families,” ranking Democrat Rick Larsen of Washington said. “Given that, I think we’re going to have to vote no on the bill before us.”
The vehicle fees, which would be deposited into the Highway Trust Fund that sends highway and transit money to states, created a partisan divide Wednesday.
Federal gas taxes provide the lion’s share of deposits to the fund and Republicans argued that, because drivers of electric vehicles pay no gas taxes and hybrid drivers pay less than those who drive gas-powered cars, the provision would make the contributions fairer.
Republicans scrapped a proposed $20 annual fee on gas-powered cars, which Graves said was meant to “start a conversation” on the solvency of the Highway Trust Fund. But the provision “became a political distraction that no longer centered around seriously addressing the problem,” he said.
Pennsylvania Democrat Chris Deluzio criticized the vehicle fees, noting Republicans were pursuing additional revenue opportunities to offset losses from tax cuts.
“I don’t know when you guys became the tax-and-spend liberals,” Deluzio told his Republican colleagues. “But I guess the taxing of car owners so you can pay for tax giveaways to billionaires is your new strategy. Good luck with that.”
Federal employee benefits targeted
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform voted nearly along party lines, 22-21, to send its portion of the reconciliation package to the Budget Committee, with Ohio Republican Rep. Mike Turner joining Democrats in opposition.
Turner was the first GOP lawmaker to cast a committee vote against reconciliation instructions this year.
The legislation hits at federal employee benefits and comes as the Trump administration continues to overhaul the federal workforce.
Part of the bill would raise federal employees’ required retirement contribution to a rate of 4.4% of their salary and eliminate an additional retirement annuity payment for federal employees who retire before the age of 62, while cutting more than $50 billion from the federal deficit.
At his committee’s markup, Chairman James Comer said the legislation “advances important budgetary reforms that will save taxpayers money.”
The Kentucky Republican acknowledged that the chief investigative committee in the U.S. House has “very limited jurisdiction to help reduce the federal budget deficit,” noting that the panel is “empowered to pursue civil service reforms, including federal employee benefits and reining in the influence of partisan and unaccountable government employee unions.”
But Democrats on the panel blasted the committee’s portion of the reconciliation package, saying the bill chips away at federal employees’ protections.
Rep. Stephen Lynch, the top Democrat on the panel, said congressional Republicans instructed the panel to target the federal workforce with roughly $50 billion in funding cuts “regardless of the impact on hard-working, loyal federal employees and their critical services that they provide to the American people.”
The Massachusetts Democrat said the bill “threatens to further undermine the federal workforce by reducing the take-home pay, the benefits and workforce protections of 2.4 million federal employees, most of whom are middle-class Americans and a third of whom are military veterans.”
Ohio’s Turner, who voted against the legislation because of the provision reducing pension benefits, said he supported the overall reconciliation package and hoped the pension measure would be stripped before a floor vote.
Turner said “making changes to pension retirement benefits in the middle of someone’s employment is wrong.”
Demonstrators holds signs as a motorist passes with flags supporting President Donald Trump during an April 5, 2025, protest in Columbia, South Carolina. Protestors organized nationwide demonstrations against Trump administration policies and Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Tuesday marked the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term, a period filled almost daily with executive orders seeking to expand presidential power, court challenges to block those orders and economic anxiety that undermines his promised prosperity.
Trump has taken decisive actions that have polarized the electorate. He’s used obscure authorities to increase deportations, upended longstanding trade policy with record-high tariffs, made drastic cuts to the federal workforce and ordered the closure of the Education Department.
Those moves have garnered mixed results and led to legal challenges.
The approach to immigration enforcement has yielded lower numbers of unauthorized border crossings compared to last year. But the immigration crackdown has barreled the country toward a constitutional crisis through various clashes with the judiciary branch.
Those nearing retirement have watched their savings shrink as Trump’s blunt application of tariffs, which he promises will replace income taxes, roils markets. Administration officials have promised the short-term tariff pain will benefit the country in the long term.
And White House advisor and top campaign donor Elon Musk’s efforts at government efficiency have resulted in eliminations of wide swaths of government jobs. That includes about half of the Education Department workforce so far, though Trump has signed an executive order to eliminate the department.
The controversial moves appear unpopular, as Americans delivered record low approval ratings for a president so early in his term. Polls spearheaded by Fox News, NPR, Gallup and numerous others yield overall disapproval of Trump’s job performance.
Trump speaks to reporters after signing executive orders in the Oval Office on April 23, 2025. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon look on. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Deportation push tests legal boundaries
Immigration was Trump’s signature issue on the campaign trail and his first 100 days were marked by a crackdown carried out against people with a range of immigration statuses and at least three U.S. citizen children. The aggressive push has led to clashes with the judiciary branch.
A burst of Inauguration Day executive orders Trump signed upon his return to office included some hardline immigration policies he’d promised.
On day one, he declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border that enabled his deployment two days later of 1,500 troops to help border enforcement.
District courts blocked the birthright citizenship and refugee resettlement measures and an appeals court has upheld those interpretations. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in May on birthright citizenship.
Trump’s record on immigration is a clear example of his desire to expand executive power, said Ahilan Arulanantham, a co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law.
“It’s an attempt to expand the government’s powers far beyond anything that we have seen before in this realm,” he said.
Unprecedented authorities
The administration has taken a series of actions considered nearly unprecedented to conduct mass deportations.
Authorities never accused Khalil of committing a crime, but sought to revoke his green card under a Cold War-era provision that allows the secretary of State to remove lawful permanent residents if the secretary deems their presence has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
Similar arrests followed at universities across the country.
In mid-March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport two planeloads of people his administration said belonged to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
It was only the fourth time the law was invoked and the first outside of wartime. The first flights left U.S. soil en route to a mega-prison in El Salvador on Saturday, March 15, amid a hearing on the legality of using the law in peacetime.
Prison officers stand guard over a cell block at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, on April 4, 2025 in El Salvador. (Photo by Alex Peña/Getty Images)
When a federal judge entered an oral order to turn the flights around, the administration refused, arguing the oral order was not valid. The administration also ignored a subsequent written order demanding the return of the flights, later arguing the flights were outside U.S. airspace at that time and impossible to order returned.
Administration officials mocked the court order on social media.
The Supreme Court on April 7 allowed for the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport suspected gang members of Tren de Aragua. However, the justices unanimously agreed that those removed under the wartime law needed to have due process and have a hearing to challenge their removal.
Abrego Garcia
A third March 15 flight carried a man who was mistakenly deported in an episode that has gained a national spotlight.
Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a native of El Salvador, had a final order of removal, but was granted deportation protections by an immigration judge because of the threat he would be harmed by gangs if he were returned to his home country. Despite the protective order, he was deported to the notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT prison.
After his family sued over his deportation, the administration admitted he’d been removed through an “administrative error,” but stood by its decision.
The administration argued it had no power to compel the El Salvador government to release Abrego Garcia, despite a possibly illegal $6 million agreement with the country to detain the roughly 300 men.
A Maryland federal court and an appeals court ruled the administration must repatriate Abrego Garcia, whose wife and 5-year-old son are U.S. citizens, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Trump administration must “facilitate” his return, but stopped short of requiring it.
The administration has done little to indicate it is complying with that order, earning a rebuke from a conservative judge on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“The Supreme Court’s decision does not … allow the government to do essentially nothing,” Circuit Court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote. “‘Facilitate’ is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear.”
The administration’s relationship with the courts — delaying compliance with orders and showing a clear distaste for doing so — has led to the brink of a constitutional crisis, Arulanantham said.
“They’re playing footsy with disregarding court orders,” he said. “On the one hand, they’re not just complying. If they were complying, Abrego Garcia would be here now.”
But the administration has also not flagrantly refused to comply, Arulanantham added. “They’re sort of testing the bounds.”
Tariffs prompted market drop
Trump’s first 100 days spiraled into economic uncertainty as he ramped up tariffs on allies and trading partners. In early April, the president declared foreign trade a national emergency and shocked economies around the world with costly import taxes.
Following a week of market upheaval, Trump paused for 90 days what he had billed as “reciprocal” tariffs and left a universal 10% levy on nearly all countries, except China, which received a bruising 125%.
Some products, including pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, lumber and copper, remain exempt for now, though the administration is eyeing the possibilities of tariffs on those goods.
A billboard in Miramar, Florida, displays an anti-tariff message on March 28, 2025. The Canadian government has placed the anti-tariff billboards in numerous American cities in what they have described as an “educational campaign” to inform Americans of the economic impacts of tariffs. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The administration now contends it will strike trade deals with some 90 foreign governments over the pause, set to expire in July.
Meanwhile, an all-out trade war rages with China after Trump hiked tariffs on the world’s no. 2 economy even further to 145%. China responded with 125% tariffs on U.S. goods. The two economies share a massive trading relationship, both in the top three for each other’s imports and exports.
‘Chaotic’ strategy
Inu Manak, fellow for trade policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, summed up Trump’s first 100 days as “chaotic.”
“We haven’t seen anything like this in our U.S. history in terms of how trade policy is being handled. It’s very ad hoc,” Manak said.
“U.S. businesses can’t figure out what to do. And even for the large companies, it’s hard for them to know some of the long-term trajectories of where this was going to go,” Manak said.
Shortly after his second term began, Trump declared a national emergency over illicit fentanyl entering the U.S. — an unprecedented move to trigger import taxes — and began escalating tariffs on Chinese goods, as well as up to 25% on certain products crossing the borders from Canada and Mexico.
Trump hiked existing tariffs on steel and aluminum in mid-March under trade provisions meant to protect domestic production and national security, followed by 25% levies on foreign cars and auto parts — though Trump signed two executive orders Tuesday to grant some tariff relief to carmakers.
The import taxes have alarmed investors, small businesses and American consumers following the 2024 presidential campaign when Trump made lowering prices a major tenet of his platform.
The latest University of Michigan survey of consumers — a staple indicator for economists — reported consumer outlook on personal finances and business conditions took a nosedive in April. Expectations dropped 32% since January, the largest three-month percentage decline since the 1990 recession, according to the analysis.
Manak said Trump’s tariffs are “really at odds with” with the administration’s objectives of helping U.S. manufacturers and cutting costs for Americans.
“The U.S. now has the highest tariff rates in the world,” she said. “That’s going to hurt both consuming industries that import products to make things, and then consumers as well. We’re starting to see notifications coming out on layoffs, and some small businesses considering closing up shop already. And the tariffs haven’t been in place for that long.”
Rhett Buttle, of Small Business for America’s Future, said the policies are “causing real damage in terms of not just planning, but in terms of day-to-day operations.”
Buttle, a senior advisor for the advocacy group that claims 85,000 small business members, said even if Trump begins to strike deals with other countries, entrepreneurs will likely be on edge for months to come.
“It’s that uncertainty that makes business owners not want to hire or not want to grow,” Buttle said. “So it’s like, ‘Okay, we got through this mess, but why would I hire a person if I don’t know if I’m gonna wake up in two weeks and there’s gonna be another announcement?’”
Support dropping
Trillions were erased from the U.S. stock market after “Liberation Day” — the White House’s term for the start of its global tariff policy. The S&P 500 index, which tracks the performance of the 500 largest U.S. companies, is overall down 8.5% since Trump’s inauguration, according to The Wall Street Journal’s analysis.
Numerous recent polls showed flagging support for Trump’s economic policies.
In a poll released Monday, Gallup found 89% of Americans believe tariffs will result in increasing prices. And a majority of Americans are concerned about an economic recession and increasing costs of groceries and other goods, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey between April 17 and April 22.
The Pew Research Center similarly found a growing gloomy outlook among U.S. adults from April 7 to April 13. Results showed a majority of Americans — 59% across race, age and income levels — disapproved of Trump’s approach to tariffs. But when broken down by party, the survey showed a majority of Democrats disapprove while the majority of Republicans approve of the tariff policy.
American households are poised to lose up to $2,600 annually if tariffs remain in place and U.S. fiscal policy doesn’t change, according to the Yale Budget Lab. Analyses show low-income households will be disproportionately affected.
“If these tariffs stay in place, some folks are going to benefit, but a lot of people are going to get hurt,” Manak said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Government spending
Elon Musk, accompanied by his son X Musk and Trump, speaks during an executive order signing in the Oval Office on February 11, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Trump began his second term with a flurry of action on government spending, challenging the balance of power between the president and Congress.
Efforts to unilaterally cancel funding already approved by lawmakers, who hold the authority to spend federal dollars under the Constitution, led to confusion and frustration from both Democrats and Republicans, especially after the U.S. DOGE Service froze allocations on programs that have long elicited bipartisan support.
Many of the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back appropriations are subject to injunctions from federal courts, blocking the cuts from moving forward while the lawsuits advance through the judicial system.
Kevin Kosar, senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Trump’s actions on spending so far have sought to expand the bounds of presidential authority.
“We’ve never seen a president in modern times who’s been this aggressive in trying to seize control of the power of the purse,” he said. “To just say, ‘I’m not going to fund this agency, like USAID, despite money being appropriated for it. And we’re going to walk over and take their plaque off their wall and lock their doors.’ This is new.”
Many of Trump’s actions so far indicate to Kosar that the administration expects a change to the balance of power following next year’s midterm elections, when the president’s party historically loses control of at least one chamber of Congress.
“It feels to me that the first 100 days are in large part predicated on an assumption that they may only have two years of unified Republican control of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency,” he said. “We know the margins in the House are quite narrow, and the heavy use of executive actions and the simple defunding of various government contracts and agencies all through executive action, just tell me that the administration feels like they have to get everything done as fast as they possibly can, because the time is short.”
Kosar said he’s watching to see if Trump works with Republicans in Congress, while they still have unified control, to codify his executive orders into law — something he didn’t do with many of the unilateral actions he took during his first term.
“He just did executive actions, which, of course, (President Joe) Biden just undid,” he said. “And I’m just wondering: Are we going to see this movie all over again? Or is he going to actually partner with Congress on these various policy matters and pass statutes so that they stick?”
Zachary Peskowitz, associate professor of political science at Emory University, said Trump has been much more “assertive” during the last 100 days than during the first few months of 2017.
DOGE ‘winding down’
U.S. DOGE Service and Musk hit the ground running, though their actions have fallen short of the goals he set, and appear to be sunsetting with the billionaire turning his attention back toward his businesses.
“I think the big bang is winding down. They did a lot of things early on. It’s not clear how many of them are going to stick, what the consequences are,” Peskowitz said. “And I think, big picture, in terms of federal spending, the amounts of money that may have been saved or not are pretty small.”
Democrats in Congress released a tracker Tuesday listing which accounts the Trump administration has frozen or canceled to the tune of more than $430 billion.
But Trump has just gotten started.
The administration plans to submit its first budget request to Congress in the coming days, a step that’s typically taken in early February, though it happens a couple months behind schedule during a president’s first year.
That massive tax-and-spending proposal will begin the classic tug-of-war between Congress, which will draft the dozen annual appropriations bills, and Trump, who has shown a willingness to act unilaterally when he doesn’t get his way.
Trump and lawmakers must agree to some sort of government funding bill before the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, otherwise a partial government shutdown would begin. And unlike the reconciliation package that Republicans can enact all on their own, funding bills require some Democratic support to move past the Senate’s 60-vote cloture threshold.
Trump stands with McMahon after signing an executive order to reduce the size and scope of the Education Department during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on March 20, 2025. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Eliminating the Education Department
Researchers and advocates predicted even more changes to the federal role in education, underscoring anti-diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and a continued ideological battle with higher education that have marked Trump’s approach to education policy in his first 100 days.
In a torrent of education-related decisions, Trump and his administration have tried to dismantle the Education Department via an executive order, slashed more than 1,300 employees at the department, threatened to revoke funds for schools that use DEI practices and cracked down on “woke” higher education.
The Trump administration has taken drastic steps to revoke federal funding for a number of elite universities in an attempt to make the institutions align more with them ideologically.
Rachel Perera, a governance studies fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, cited “brazen lawlessness” when reflecting on Trump’s approach to higher education in his second term.
“The ways that they’re trying to withhold funding from universities are very clearly in violation of federal law and the processes mandated by civil rights law in terms of ensuring that institutions are offered due process in assessing whether violations have taken place,” Perera said. “There’s not even a pretense of pretending to investigate some of these institutions before taking really dramatic action.”
Whether the administration’s approach continues or not depends on court action, she added.
“I think what the next three years might look like is really going to depend on how some of these lawsuits play out,” Perera said, referencing some of the major legal battles involving the Trump administration.
Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at the nonprofit policy and advocacy group EdTrust, said “much of what this administration has done has been overreach.” He pointed to the Education Department’s letter threatening to yank federal funds for schools that use race-conscious practices across aspects of student life as one example.
Del Pilar, who was previously deputy secretary of postsecondary and higher education for the state of Pennsylvania, said the administration is “going to take any opportunity to grab at power that advances their ideology.”
Meanwhile, Perera said the consequences of the department implementing a reduction in force plan in March “have yet to be felt.”
“I think we will start to see really the material consequences of the reduced staffing capacity in the coming years, in terms of how programs are administered, in terms of how funding is moving out the building, in terms of auditing, making sure funding is going to the right groups of students that Congress intended for the money to go to, whether big data collection efforts that are congressionally mandated are being carried out in timely and effective ways,” she said.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon testifies during her Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee confirmation hearing on Feb. 13, 2025. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
A federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration Thursday to pause enforcement of a new U.S. Education Department ban on diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
The order came as another federal judge in New Hampshire issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the Trump administration from yanking federal funding from many schools.
The New Hampshire order, though, only applied to schools that employ members of the National Education Association — the country’s largest labor union, which brought the case challenging the ban — or the Center for Black Educator Development.
The rulings used different legal logic but arrived at the same conclusion: The administration’s ban on race-conscious practices is not valid.
In Maryland, U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher said she ruled not on the merits of the policy, but the way the Trump administration developed it.
“This Court takes no view as to whether the policies at issue here are good or bad, prudent or foolish, fair or unfair. But this Court is constitutionally required to closely scrutinize whether the government went about creating and implementing them in the manner the law requires,” she wrote. “The government did not.”
Gallagher’s order pauses the enforcement of a Feb. 14 letter to school districts from Craig Trainor, the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, that threatened to rescind federal funds for schools that use race-conscious practices in programming, admissions, scholarships and other aspects of student life.
In New Hampshire, U.S. District Judge Landya McCafferty wrote that “the loss of federal funding would cripple the operations of many educational institutions.”
McCafferty’s order has a nationwide effect, but McCafferty limited it to schools that employ NEA members, rejecting the union’s attempt to completely halt the policies outlined in the letter.
Teachers unions sued
The Feb. 14 letter drew swift legal action, and the National Education Association brought the suit in New Hampshire against the administration alongside the Center for Black Educator Development.
The American Federation of Teachers — one of the largest teachers unions in the country — filed a complaint in February alongside its affiliate, AFT-Maryland. The American Sociological Association and a public school district in Oregon also sued over the letter.
“Today the court confirmed the importance of our job as educators to foster opportunity, dignity, and engagement,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement after the Maryland ruling.
“The court agreed that this vague and clearly unconstitutional requirement is a grave attack on students, our profession, honest history, and knowledge itself,” she added. “It would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenet of the United States since its founding.”
NEA also celebrated the preliminary injunction granted in its case Thursday, and the union’s president, Becky Pringle, said in a statement “today’s ruling allows educators and schools to continue to be guided by what’s best for students, not by the threat of illegal restrictions and punishment.”
The statement said President Donald Trump, billionaire head of the U.S. DOGE Service Elon Musk and Education Secretary Linda McMahon were responsible for an “attack” on public education.
“The fact is that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Linda McMahon are using politically motivated attacks and harmful and vague directives to stifle speech and erase critical lessons to attack public education, as they work to dismantle public schools,” Pringle said. “This is why educators, parents, and community leaders are organizing, mobilizing, and using every tool available to protect our students and their futures.”
The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Letter raised questions
In the February letter, Trainor offered a wide-ranging interpretation of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023 involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, which struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions.
Trainor wrote that though the ruling “addressed admissions decisions, the Supreme Court’s holding applies more broadly.”
The four-page letter raised a slew of questions for schools across pre-K through college over what fell within the requirements, and the department later released a Frequently Asked Questions document on the letter in an attempt to provide more guidance.
Earlier this month, the Education Department gave state education leaders just days to certify all K-12 schools in their states were complying with the letter in order to keep receiving federal financial assistance. The department and the groups suing in the New Hampshire case later reached an agreement that paused enforcement.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon testifies during her Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee confirmation hearing on Feb. 13, 2025. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
A federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration Thursday to pause enforcement of a new U.S. Education Department ban on diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
The order came as another federal judge in New Hampshire issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the Trump administration from yanking federal funding from many schools.
The New Hampshire order, though, only applied to schools that employ members of the National Education Association — the country’s largest labor union, which brought the case challenging the ban — or the Center for Black Educator Development.
The rulings used different legal logic but arrived at the same conclusion: The administration’s ban on race-conscious practices is not valid.
In Maryland, U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher said she ruled not on the merits of the policy, but the way the Trump administration developed it.
“This Court takes no view as to whether the policies at issue here are good or bad, prudent or foolish, fair or unfair. But this Court is constitutionally required to closely scrutinize whether the government went about creating and implementing them in the manner the law requires,” she wrote. “The government did not.”
Gallagher’s order pauses the enforcement of a Feb. 14 letter to school districts from Craig Trainor, the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, that threatened to rescind federal funds for schools that use race-conscious practices in programming, admissions, scholarships and other aspects of student life.
In New Hampshire, U.S. District Judge Landya McCafferty wrote that “the loss of federal funding would cripple the operations of many educational institutions.”
McCafferty’s order has a nationwide effect, but McCafferty limited it to schools that employ NEA members, rejecting the union’s attempt to completely halt the policies outlined in the letter.
Teachers unions sued
The Feb. 14 letter drew swift legal action, and the National Education Association brought the suit in New Hampshire against the administration alongside the Center for Black Educator Development.
The American Federation of Teachers — one of the largest teachers unions in the country — filed a complaint in February alongside its affiliate, AFT-Maryland. The American Sociological Association and a public school district in Oregon also sued over the letter.
“Today the court confirmed the importance of our job as educators to foster opportunity, dignity, and engagement,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement after the Maryland ruling.
“The court agreed that this vague and clearly unconstitutional requirement is a grave attack on students, our profession, honest history, and knowledge itself,” she added. “It would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenet of the United States since its founding.”
NEA also celebrated the preliminary injunction granted in its case Thursday, and the union’s president, Becky Pringle, said in a statement “today’s ruling allows educators and schools to continue to be guided by what’s best for students, not by the threat of illegal restrictions and punishment.”
The statement said President Donald Trump, billionaire head of the U.S. DOGE Service Elon Musk and Education Secretary Linda McMahon were responsible for an “attack” on public education.
“The fact is that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Linda McMahon are using politically motivated attacks and harmful and vague directives to stifle speech and erase critical lessons to attack public education, as they work to dismantle public schools,” Pringle said. “This is why educators, parents, and community leaders are organizing, mobilizing, and using every tool available to protect our students and their futures.”
The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Letter raised questions
In the February letter, Trainor offered a wide-ranging interpretation of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023 involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, which struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions.
Trainor wrote that though the ruling “addressed admissions decisions, the Supreme Court’s holding applies more broadly.”
The four-page letter raised a slew of questions for schools across pre-K through college over what fell within the requirements, and the department later released a Frequently Asked Questions document on the letter in an attempt to provide more guidance.
Earlier this month, the Education Department gave state education leaders just days to certify all K-12 schools in their states were complying with the letter in order to keep receiving federal financial assistance. The department and the groups suing in the New Hampshire case later reached an agreement that paused enforcement.
People move about the Guilford County Democratic Party headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Nov. 7, 2022. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
The Democratic National Committee will transfer more than $1 million per month to its state and territorial parties over the next four years in an effort to build state-level infrastructure and operations, the DNC announced Thursday.
The agreement marks the DNC’s largest total investment in Democratic state parties to date and comes as Democrats try to rebound from significant losses in the 2024 election cycle.
Each state party is set to receive a minimum of $17,500 per month, a $5,000 increase from the current baseline, the DNC said in materials provided to States Newsroom ahead of the wider announcement.
Republican-controlled states will get an additional $5,000 a month, bringing their monthly total to $22,500. The GOP-controlled states will get that additional investment through the DNC’s Red State Fund.
The DNC’s definition for a GOP-controlled state is one that meets at least two of the three criteria: no Democratic governor or Democratic U.S. Senator; one-quarter or less of the congressional delegation is made up of Democrats; and Republicans hold supermajorities in both state legislative chambers.
As part of the agreement, the DNC said it will host six regional training “bootcamps” for state parties per two-year cycle and will also hire new staff to the Association of State Democratic Committees.
The DNC said the initiative also aims to help Democratic state parties with their infrastructure, staffing, data and tech operations as well as with organizing programs and preparation for future election cycles.
DNC Chair Ken Martin, the former Minnesota party chair who was elected to lead the national party in February, called the initiative “a historic political investment unlike anything Democrats have done in modern times” and said in a statement it is part of a long-term strategy.
“We’re putting our money where our mouth is to equip state parties with what they need to reach working families who deserve better, build long-term success all across the ballot, and gain electoral ground for years to come,” Martin said in the statement.
“Elections are won in states — and that’s exactly where we will be investing our resources,” said Martin.
Last week, Martin laid out the leadership board’s organizing principles, which centered on “organizing early, organizing always, organizing everywhere, and winning everywhere.”
“You’re going to continue to witness a level of aggressive investment and organizing from this DNC that’s unlike anything we’ve done before,” Martin wrote in that memo.
In a Thursday statement, Jane Kleeb, president of the Association of State Democratic Committees and chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, said “state parties are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and through this investment, our state parties will receive the support they need to show voters that, no matter where they live, there is a strong Democratic Party in their corner, protecting their rights and economic opportunity against Republican attacks.”
20 years later
The strategy bears some resemblance to the 50-state strategy pioneered by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who led the DNC from 2005 to 2009 and appeared on a DNC press call Thursday.
“This is a really critical move that’s being made here,” Dean said. “We have not been anything but a Washington, D.C.-centric party since 2008, and the reason that the Democrats have had a tough time is because if you’re not out there doing the grassroots politics, you don’t win. Period.”
Critics during Dean’s tenure argued that spending in deep-red areas pulled resources away from winnable races in more moderate states and congressional districts.
Asked on the press call whether the push to spread money to more states could lead to a decline in financial support to swing states, Martin said, “No, not at all.”
“I mean, as I said, there’s no such thing as a perpetual blue state or a perpetual red state, and over the years, because there’s been a lack of investment in blue states, as an example, by other partners in the ecosystem, not necessarily the DNC, it’s meant we’ve seen actually our vote share in some of the bluest parts of the country actually starting to decrease,” he said.
“I believe you have to invest everywhere and organize everywhere if you want to win everywhere, and so, that’s what this will do.”
People move about the Guilford County Democratic Party headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Nov. 7, 2022. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
The Democratic National Committee will transfer more than $1 million per month to its state and territorial parties over the next four years in an effort to build state-level infrastructure and operations, the DNC announced Thursday.
The agreement marks the DNC’s largest total investment in Democratic state parties to date and comes as Democrats try to rebound from significant losses in the 2024 election cycle.
Each state party is set to receive a minimum of $17,500 per month, a $5,000 increase from the current baseline, the DNC said in materials provided to States Newsroom ahead of the wider announcement.
Republican-controlled states will get an additional $5,000 a month, bringing their monthly total to $22,500. The GOP-controlled states will get that additional investment through the DNC’s Red State Fund.
The DNC’s definition for a GOP-controlled state is one that meets at least two of the three criteria: no Democratic governor or Democratic U.S. Senator; one-quarter or less of the congressional delegation is made up of Democrats; and Republicans hold supermajorities in both state legislative chambers.
As part of the agreement, the DNC said it will host six regional training “bootcamps” for state parties per two-year cycle and will also hire new staff to the Association of State Democratic Committees.
The DNC said the initiative also aims to help Democratic state parties with their infrastructure, staffing, data and tech operations as well as with organizing programs and preparation for future election cycles.
DNC Chair Ken Martin, the former Minnesota party chair who was elected to lead the national party in February, called the initiative “a historic political investment unlike anything Democrats have done in modern times” and said in a statement it is part of a long-term strategy.
“We’re putting our money where our mouth is to equip state parties with what they need to reach working families who deserve better, build long-term success all across the ballot, and gain electoral ground for years to come,” Martin said in the statement.
“Elections are won in states — and that’s exactly where we will be investing our resources,” said Martin.
Last week, Martin laid out the leadership board’s organizing principles, which centered on “organizing early, organizing always, organizing everywhere, and winning everywhere.”
“You’re going to continue to witness a level of aggressive investment and organizing from this DNC that’s unlike anything we’ve done before,” Martin wrote in that memo.
In a Thursday statement, Jane Kleeb, president of the Association of State Democratic Committees and chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, said “state parties are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and through this investment, our state parties will receive the support they need to show voters that, no matter where they live, there is a strong Democratic Party in their corner, protecting their rights and economic opportunity against Republican attacks.”
20 years later
The strategy bears some resemblance to the 50-state strategy pioneered by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who led the DNC from 2005 to 2009 and appeared on a DNC press call Thursday.
“This is a really critical move that’s being made here,” Dean said. “We have not been anything but a Washington, D.C.-centric party since 2008, and the reason that the Democrats have had a tough time is because if you’re not out there doing the grassroots politics, you don’t win. Period.”
Critics during Dean’s tenure argued that spending in deep-red areas pulled resources away from winnable races in more moderate states and congressional districts.
Asked on the press call whether the push to spread money to more states could lead to a decline in financial support to swing states, Martin said, “No, not at all.”
“I mean, as I said, there’s no such thing as a perpetual blue state or a perpetual red state, and over the years, because there’s been a lack of investment in blue states, as an example, by other partners in the ecosystem, not necessarily the DNC, it’s meant we’ve seen actually our vote share in some of the bluest parts of the country actually starting to decrease,” he said.
“I believe you have to invest everywhere and organize everywhere if you want to win everywhere, and so, that’s what this will do.”
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after signing executive orders in the Oval Office on April 23, 2025. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon look on. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed a series of education-focused orders Wednesday related to accreditation in higher education, school discipline policies, historically Black colleges and universities, artificial intelligence in education and workforce development.
The executive orders are the latest in a slew of efforts from Trump to dramatically reshape the federal role in education. Last month, Trump called on U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of her own agency.
In one executive order, Trump aims to “overhaul” college accreditation, setting up more of a clash between his administration and higher education as they look to reform the system responsible for ensuring institutions meet quality standards.
The order directs McMahon to hold accreditors accountable by “denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination of accreditation recognition, for accreditors’ poor performance or violations of federal civil rights law,” according to a White House fact sheet.
The order also directs McMahon and Attorney General Pam Bondi to “investigate and take action to terminate unlawful discrimination by American higher education institutions, including law schools and medical schools.”
During his presidential campaign, Trump pledged to fire “radical Left accreditors,” claiming they “have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.”
AI in education
Trump also signed an executive order aimed at advancing artificial intelligence in education. The order calls for a White House task force on AI education that will help agencies implement a “Presidential AI Challenge” and establish public-private partnerships to provide resources for AI education in K-12 schools.
The order also directs McMahon to “prioritize the use of AI in discretionary grant programs for teacher training and directs the Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to prioritize research on the use of AI in education,” according to a White House fact sheet.
The order also calls for Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, by collaborating with the director of the National Science Foundation, to “work with State and local workforce organizations and training providers to identify and promote high-quality AI skills education coursework and certifications across the country.”
Job training
Another order directs McMahon, Chavez-DeRemer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to “modernize American workforce programs to prepare citizens for the high-paying skilled trade jobs of the future,” according to a White House fact sheet.
The order asks the Cabinet members to review federal workforce programs and refocus programs to train workers in industrial manufacturing.
Trump and Lutnick framed the order as part of the administration’s moves this month to place tariffs on every trading partner, with particularly high levies on goods from China.
“All those factories that you’re bringing in because of your trade policy, we’re going to train people” to work in them, Lutnick said.
Following the signings, Trump took several questions on his tariffs policy, acknowledging the rate on China was “high” but saying that was by design to hurt Chinese manufacturers.
“It basically means China is not doing any business with us, essentially, because it’s a very high number,” he said. “So when you add that to the price of a product, you know, a lot of those products aren’t going to sell, but China is not doing any business.”
Other orders
Other education-related executive orders signed Wednesday include:
an order establishing a White House initiative on historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, and a “President’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs” within the Education Department.
A three-judge panel wrote that its earlier order only pertains to people whom immigration officials had conditionally approved as refugees before Jan. 20 and had arranged travel to the United States.
The March order from the Ninth Circuit panel upheld part of a Washington state federal judge’s order blocking President Donald Trump’s day-one executive order suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.
On Monday, the appeals court panel said the government and the refugee advocacy groups challenging Trump’s executive order had overstated what the panel’s March order required.
Rather than admit all of the roughly 130,000 conditionally approved refugees, as the government claimed, or “tens of thousands” of refugees the groups said the order applied to, the court only required the government to allow those who “needed only to complete their arranged travel to the United States.”
“Under these definitions, the parties have construed our carveout broadly enough to swallow the entire stay order,” the judges wrote Monday.
The judges used the example of a refugee family in Kenya that was forced to shelter in the parking lot of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi after their travel was abruptly canceled as the type of people who would still be allowed to settle in the United States under the March order.
Inauguration Day order
Consistent with the Jan. 20 executive order, the administration withheld funds appropriated by Congress for those services — drawing swift legal action.
The International Refugee Assistance Project filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Church World Service, Lutheran Community Services Northwest and several refugees and others impacted by the order in February.
In its March order, the appeals court denied the administration’s motion “to the extent the district court’s preliminary injunction order applies to individuals who were conditionally approved for refugee status by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services before January 20, 2025.”
“The preliminary injunction remains in effect for these individuals only, and the government must resume their processing, facilitation of travel to the United States, admission, and provision of resettlement benefits after admission,” the judges wrote Monday.
The panel noted that when it issued the order in March, it “did not define conditional approval.”
Melissa Keaney, senior supervising attorney in the litigation department at the International Refugee Assistance Project, said “the Ninth Circuit reiterated that the U.S. government must end the state of limbo for refugees like our client Pacito who were ready to travel and had their lives turned upside down by President Trump’s suspension of the refugee program,’’ in a statement shared with States Newsroom.
“We will hold the government accountable to actually process those refugees immediately, and we will continue to defend the refugee program as a whole in court,” Keaney said.
Opponents of President Donald Trump’s executive order indefinitely halting refugee resettlement in the U.S. rally on the steps of the federal courthouse in Seattle on Feb. 25, 2025, after a judge issued a ruling blocking the president’s order. (Photo by Jake Goldstein-Street/Washington State Standard)
WASHINGTON — State and local leaders and advocates from across the country called on the Trump administration Monday to immediately restart the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, saying the program’s suspension has harmed communities.
President Donald Trump signed an order suspending the program on his first day back in office and the administration withheld funds appropriated by Congress for those services. Federal courts have partially rejected that order, but the Trump administration has still not resumed the program, the advocates said.
By indefinitely halting the program and subsequently defunding its infrastructure, Trump “stranded” more than 100,000 refugees “who had already been interviewed by Homeland Security and received written notices from the U.S. government that they were eligible for resettlement,” Mark Hetfield, president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or HIAS, said at a press conference hosted by several refugee advocacy groups Monday.
‘More than a program’
Aisha Koroma, a Refugee Congress delegate for Washington, D.C., said the Refugee Admissions Program “is more than a program.” Refugee Congress is a national organization advocating for people who are forcibly displaced.
“It represents lives, dreams, resilience, hope — it is a gateway for future change-makers, doctors, engineers, artists, tradespeople — people who are ready and eager to become assets to America’s workforce and to contribute meaningfully to its economy and communities,” Koroma said.
“Pausing this program doesn’t just delay paperwork, it delays possibilities, it ensures tragedies, it tears families apart, and it leaves people vulnerable, but most importantly, it sends a painful message that America is closing its doors, not only to those who need it most, but also those who fill jobs, those who open stores and people who sat on our school boards,” Koroma added.
Rev. Noel Andersen, national field director at Church World Service and faith leader with the United Church of Christ, said the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program “has signified a space of refuge and hope for the world as a beacon of light for democracy.”
“Now, because of the increased discriminatory attacks on all immigrants, including refugees, we’re in a dire place for this program, even as it is clearly represented in our laws written by Congress and with a recent court order to resume the refugee program, yet it has not happened, and now our own democracy is in danger,” he said.
Legal challenge ongoing
The International Refugee Assistance Project filed a lawsuit on behalf of HIAS, Church World Service, Lutheran Community Services Northwest and refugees impacted by the order in February.
A federal judge in Washington state granted a nationwide injunction in February requested by the groups who challenged Trump’s executive order suspending the program and the withholding of funds for those services.
The administration quickly appealed the judge’s subsequent order requiring the State Department to restore contracts to nonprofits that help with resettling refugees. An appeals court denied part of the administration’s request to halt the lower court’s earlier preliminary injunction.
The federal judge on April 11 granted the groups’ motion to enforce the first preliminary injunction issued.
Hetfield said the administration defied the February injunction effectively ordering the administration to restart the program and the federal appeals court upholding the part of that order focused on admitting more than 100,000 conditionally approved refugees.
“Yet two months later, the administration has continued to defy the court order, noting in its filings last week that it intends to admit only a fraction of a fraction of conditionally approved refugees, and, in fact, has taken no visible steps yet to even do that,” he said.
Trump’s January executive order also instructed officials at the State and Homeland Security departments to submit a report to Trump 90 days from the order — April 20 — “regarding whether resumption of entry of refugees into the United States under the (U.S. Refugee Admissions Program) would be in the interests of the United States.”
Trump also instructed the departments to submit further reports every 90 days thereafter until he determines that resumption of the program “is in the interests of the United States.”
Advocates said Monday they have yet to hear whether the administration’s first 90-day report regarding the potential resumption of the program was delivered to the White House.
Asked for a comment on the issue, a White House spokesperson acknowledged receiving the inquiry but did not immediately provide a substantive response.
U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon speaks at a press conference organized by House Democrats outside the U.S. Department of Education headquarters in Washington, D.C., on April 2, 2025. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Education said Monday that it will resume collections May 5 for defaulted federal student loans.
After pausing during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the agency has not collected on defaulted loans in over five years. More than 5 million borrowers sit in default on their federal student loans, and just 38% of borrowers are current on their payments, the department said.
“American taxpayers will no longer be forced to serve as collateral for irresponsible student loan policies,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement Monday.
During last year’s presidential campaign, President Donald Trump criticized his predecessor and successor, President Joe Biden, for his efforts to erase student debt. McMahon resumed that line of attack Monday, blaming Biden’s administration for unreasonably raising borrowers’ expectations of forgiveness.
“The Biden Administration misled borrowers: the executive branch does not have the constitutional authority to wipe debt away, nor do the loan balances simply disappear. Hundreds of billions have already been transferred to taxpayers,” McMahon said.
She added that “going forward, the Department of Education, in conjunction with the Department of Treasury, will shepherd the student loan program responsibly and according to the law, which means helping borrowers return to repayment — both for the sake of their own financial health and our nation’s economic outlook.”
The department said the Office of Federal Student Aid will restart the Treasury Offset Program, which the U.S. Treasury Department administers, on May 5.
The Education Department statement said all borrowers who are in default will get emails over the next two weeks “making them aware of these developments and urging them to contact the Default Resolution Group to make a monthly payment, enroll in an income-driven repayment plan, or sign up for loan rehabilitation.”
The department said the Office of Federal Student Aid will “send required notices beginning administrative wage garnishment” later this summer.
More than 42.7 million borrowers owe more than $1.6 trillion in student debt, according to the department.
The administration claims that “instead of protecting responsible taxpayers, the Biden-Harris Administration put them on the hook for irresponsible lending, pushing the federal student loan portfolio toward a fiscal cliff.”
U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, right, meets with Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador on April 17, 2025. Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, had been seeking a meeting with Abrego Garcia after the administration said it mistakenly deported him to a mega-prison in his home country. (Photo via Van Hollen on X.)
This story was updated at 6:01 p.m. Eastern.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident the Trump administration erroneously deported to his native El Salvador, appeared to be in good health and had been moved from a notorious mega-prison to another detention center, as his case tests the limits of executive power to override due process rights in the United States, Sen. Chris Van Hollen told reporters Friday.
Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, met Thursday with Abrego Garcia and briefed reporters on the visit after landing Friday afternoon at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C.
The meeting with Van Hollen was Abrego Garcia’s first contact outside of the U.S. and El Salvador immigration and legal systems since he was deported in March, the senator said.
“His conversation with me was the first communication he’d had with anybody outside a prison since he was abducted,” Van Hollen said Friday.
U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen speaks at a press conference at Dulles International Airport on Friday, April 18, 2025. (Image via Van Hollen YouTube channel livestream)
Accompanied by Abrego Garcia’s wife, mother and brother at Dulles, Van Hollen said he’d been preparing to catch his plane out of El Salvador Thursday evening when he got word from the U.S. embassy that he would be able to meet with Abrego Garcia.
The meeting came at the end of Van Hollen’s second day in the country, where he faced difficulties securing an in-person meeting or phone call with the Salvadoran citizen. The second-term senator traveled to the Central American country this week to urge the Salvadoran government to release Abrego Garcia and to meet with him.
Abrego Garcia told Van Hollen he’d been taken to a detention center in Baltimore, Van Hollen said Friday. From there, he was transported to Texas and then flown to El Salvador, where he was detained at the notorious mega-prison Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT.
Abrego Garcia was moved on April 9 from CECOT to another El Salvador detention center, Van Hollen reported. The conditions at the new prison were better, but Abrego Garcia was still denied access to the outside world, including communication with his family or lawyers, which is a violation of international law, Van Hollen said.
The meeting occurred under close supervision from Salvadoran officials, Van Hollen said, but Abrego Garcia appeared in adequate health.
“On a very cursory examination, he appeared OK,” Van Hollen said.
Van Hollen on Thursday shared a picture on social media of his meeting with Abrego Garcia, who appeared in civilian clothes.
Constitutional conflict
While he said Abrego Garcia’s individual case was tragic, Van Hollen said it had even larger implications for the strength of constitutional rights to due process.
“This should not be an issue for Republicans or Democrats,” he said. “This is an issue for every American who cares about our Constitution, who cares about personal liberty, who cares about due process and who cares about what makes America so different, which is adherence to all of those things. This is an American issue.”
Noting that the administration has ignored federal courts at every level — including a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week that President Donald Trump’s administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States — Van Hollen said officials at the U.S. embassy in El Salvador told him they had not received any instruction from the administration to seek his release.
“It’s very clear that the president, the Trump administration, are blatantly, flagrantly disagreeing with, defying, the order from the Supreme Court,” he said.
White House says ‘he’s NOT coming back’
The Trump administration, which has admitted in court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation stemmed from an “administrative error,” continued Friday to be steadfast in refusing to return him.
The Trump administration has criticized Van Hollen’s advocacy for Abrego Garcia, and the White House targeted the senator on social media Friday.
“Oh, and by the way, @ChrisVanHollen — he’s NOT coming back,” a post on X from the official White House account read. The post included an illustration of a New York Times headline on the meeting, with two sections crossed out and replaced with administration claims about Abrego Garcia.
The administration has claimed there are logistical reasons it cannot repatriate Abrego Garcia, but some — including a Reagan-appointed federal appeals court judge on Thursday — have said the executive branch is defying the Supreme Court order.
Payments to El Salvador
Van Hollen said the Trump administration has promised to pay El Salvador up to $15 million to detain the prisoners, but noted that Democrats in the U.S. Senate are not “totally powerless” to stop those payments.
“Appropriations need to go through the Congress, and that $15 million, you can be sure we’re going to be looking for where it is because that wasn’t authorized in previous appropriations,” he said.
He said that while Democrats are in the minority in both houses of Congress, they could block any Senate funding bill that included payments for detention in El Salvador.
“You can be sure that I won’t support the use of one penny of taxpayer dollars to keep Abrego Garcia illegally detained in El Salvador,” he said.
Prisoners look out of their cell as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem tours the Terrorist Confinement Center, or CECOT, on March 26, 2025 in Tecoluca, El Salvador. (Photo by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images)
U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Thursday that soldiers blocked him from entering a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador where the erroneously deported Maryland resident Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia has been held for more than a month.
The Maryland Democrat arrived in the Central American country Wednesday in an effort to help bring Abrego Garcia, whom the Justice Department admitted in court was deported in error, back to the United States, or at least check on his wellness. He met with El Salvador Vice President Félix Ulloa that day, who denied his requests to either visit or speak on the phone with Abrego Garcia.
Van Hollen told reporters Thursday afternoon that he again tried to make contact with Abrego Garcia that morning.
A U.S. immigration judge issued a protective order in 2019 finding that sending Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen, back to his home country would put him in grave danger.
Accompanied by Chris Newman — the lawyer for Abrego Garcia’s wife and his mother — Van Hollen said they tried to enter Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, but soldiers stopped them at a checkpoint about three kilometers from the prison.
“We were told by the soldiers that they’d been ordered not to allow us to proceed any further than that point,” Van Hollen said.
Van Hollen said that since Abrego Garcia was sent to CECOT, he has not spoken with anyone outside of the prison walls, and “this inability to communicate with his lawyers is a violation of international law.”
“That covenant says, and I quote, ‘A detained or imprisoned person shall be entitled to communicate and consult with his legal counsel,’” he said.
Van Hollen also said he met with the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador and they discussed “the full range of important bilateral relations between the United States and El Salvador.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and other Republicans have criticized Van Hollen for making the trip, repeating the accusation that Abrego Garcia is a gang member.
Representatives for the White House and DHS did not respond to messages seeking comment Thursday.
Appeals court slams administration’s inaction
Meanwhile, Abrego Garcia’s case continues to work its way through U.S. courts as a flashpoint conflict between two branches of government that has led to the precipice of a constitutional crisis.
On Thursday, a federal appeals court panel dismantled the administration’s latest appeal, saying the government had done “essentially nothing” to attempt to return Abrego Garcia in compliance with last week’s Supreme Court order.
A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said the executive branch was due deference in conducting foreign policy, but that the administration’s inaction in seeking Abrego Garcia’s return amounted to defiance of a judicial order.
The unanimous ruling was written by Fourth Circuit Chief Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was nominated by Republican President Ronald Reagan. The other two judges, Robert Bruce King and Stephanie Thacker, were nominated by Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
“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,” the panel wrote. “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 appeals ruling responded to the government’s appeal of U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’ order this week for the Trump administration to offer evidence on how it has sought to help with Abrego Garcia’s release from CECOT.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that the Trump administration must “facilitate” — but stopped short of requiring — his return to the United States.
In unusually frank language, the Fourth Circuit panel warned Thursday the conflict between the executive and judicial branches threatened the foundation of U.S. government.
“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?” the court asked. “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.”
Near the end of the order, the panel urged the administration to obey the judicial branch.
“We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos,” the judges wrote. “This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.”
Neither country taking action
The Fourth Circuit panel pointed out that the leaders of both the United States and El Salvador claimed they had no power to return Abrego Garcia.
“We are told that neither government has the power to act,” they wrote. “The result will be to leave matters generally and Abrego Garcia specifically in an interminable limbo without recourse to law of any sort.”
During a White House visit this week, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said he would not bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States.
The Trump administration has admitted in court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation stemmed from an “administrative error.” The administration continues to accuse him of being part of the gang MS-13, despite no charges or convictions of any criminal offenses against him, including gang-related crimes.
Solar panels in Damariscotta, Maine. (Photo by Evan Houk/ Maine Morning Star)
WASHINGTON — The legal battle over a Biden-era climate program ramped up late Wednesday when an appeals court halted a federal judge’s ruling requiring the disbursement of those funds.
The ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will keep funds frozen in Citibank accounts while a federal suit over the program is ongoing.
The appeals court order reversed a preliminary injunction that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan of the District of Columbia issued Tuesday that temporarily barred the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from “unlawfully suspending or terminating” grant awards.
The appeals panel said it had not had access to Chutkan’s opinion explaining her order granting an injunction — which came a day after the order itself — and the trial judge had therefore not met the high bar needed to issue a preliminary injunction. The panel’s order “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits,” the judges said.
“The purpose of this order is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the district court’s forthcoming opinion in support of its order granting a preliminary injunction together with” the government’s appeal, the judges wrote.
Chutkan issued her opinion the day after granting the preliminary injunction, pointing out that “for weeks, despite repeated inquiries to Citibank and EPA, Plaintiffs received little to no communication from EPA or Citibank regarding their inability to access their funds.”
“Overnight, billions of dollars appropriated by Congress were frozen. As a result, nationwide projects were halted, workplans were disrupted, and millions of dollars in approved transactions with committed partners could not be disbursed,” she wrote.
On Thursday, the D.C. Circuit panel asked the government to refile its argument responding to Chutkan’s opinion by 5 p.m. Eastern on Saturday.
Fight over funding
Climate United Fund and other organizations sued President Donald Trump’s administration and Citibank in March over money frozen in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
The $27 billion initiative, which provides funding to organizations building for energy-efficient projects and other measures to tackle climate change, was authorized by Congress as part of the Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats passed along party lines and President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022.
Chutkan’s order blocked the administration from “directly or indirectly impeding” Citibank or causing the bank to “deny, obstruct, delay, or otherwise limit access to funds in accounts established in connection with” the organizations’ grants.
The Trump administration quickly challenged that ruling Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The higher court temporarily blocked Chutkan’s decision “pending further order.”
The appeals court’s ruling halts Chutkan’s preliminary injunction to the extent that it “enables or requires Citibank to release, disburse, transfer, otherwise move, or allow access to funds.”
The higher court also prevented the Trump administration from having to file a status report with the district court within 24 hours of the preliminary injunction’s entry that confirmed their compliance, as outlined in Chutkan’s ruling.
The appeals court also ordered that “no party take any action, directly or indirectly, with regard to the disputed contracts, grants, awards or funds.”
The EPA said in March it would be terminating $20 billion in grants under the program, and the agency’s administrator Lee Zeldin described the climate initiative as a “gold bar” scheme.
Climate United Fund did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday, and the EPA declined to comment.
Protesters outside the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in Greenbelt rally on April 4, 2025, in support of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father who was deported to El Salvador in an “administrative error,” calling for him to be returned to the U.S. (Photo by Ariana Figueroa/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Wednesday he was denied a meeting with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an El Salvador-born Maryland resident who was mistakenly deported to a mega-prison in his home country notorious for human rights abuses.
The Maryland Democrat met with El Salvador Vice President Félix Ulloa in the Central American country in an effort to help bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States. Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador, but a U.S. immigration judge issued a protective order in 2019 finding that sending him back to his home country would put him in grave danger.
After meeting with Ulloa, Van Hollen briefed reporters on the visit and said the Salvadoran vice president rebuffed his requests for contact with Abrego Garcia.
“I asked the vice president if I could meet with Mr. Abrego Garcia and he said, ‘Well, you need to make earlier provisions to go visit CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo),’” Van Hollen told reporters in El Salvador, referring to the mega-prison.
“I said, ‘I’m not interested, at this moment, in taking a tour of CECOT, I just want to meet with Mr. Abrego Garcia,’” Van Hollen said.
“He said he was not able to make that happen. He said he’d need a little more time. I asked him if I came back next week, whether I’d be able to see Mr. Abrego Garcia. He said he couldn’t promise that either,” the senator added.
The senator said he would contact the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador and request they ask the government of El Salvador to connect the two of them via phone, following a suggestion from Ulloa.
Van Hollen’s visit came a day after a federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration to offer evidence on how it has sought to help with Abrego Garcia’s release from CECOT.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that the Trump administration must “facilitate” — but did not require — his return to the United States. El Salvador President Nayib Bukele also said Monday that he would not bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States.
The Trump administration has acknowledged in court that Abrego Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error.”
The administration accused him of being a member of the gang MS-13. He has not been charged or convicted of any criminal offenses, including gang-related crimes.
Van Hollen, noting that the Trump administration “illegally abducted” Abrego Garcia, said he “won’t stop trying” to get the wrongly deported man out of the prison and back to Maryland and predicted others would follow.
“I can assure the president, the vice president, that I may be the first United States senator to visit El Salvador on this issue, but there will be more, and there will be more members of Congress coming,” he said.
Administration responds
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media Wednesday a copy of a restraining order Abrego Garcia’s wife sought against him in 2021 “claiming he punched, scratched, and ripped off her shirt, among other harm.”
In response, Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, told Newsweek she had a disagreement with him, but that things did not escalate and she did not continue with the civil court process.
Late Wednesday afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt made a statement on the case, displaying the restraining order, repeating the accusation Abrego Garcia is a gang member and objecting to media references to him as a “Maryland father.”
“There is no Maryland father,” she said.
Patty Morin, the mother of a Maryland woman slain by a Salvadoran immigrant in the country without legal status, also appeared at the briefing and spoke in favor of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation actions.
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after signing executive orders in the Oval Office on April 23, 2025. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon look on. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed a series of education-focused orders Wednesday related to accreditation in higher education, school discipline policies, historically Black colleges and universities, artificial intelligence in education and workforce development.
The executive orders are the latest in a slew of efforts from Trump to dramatically reshape the federal role in education. Last month, Trump called on U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of her own agency.
In one executive order, Trump aims to “overhaul” college accreditation, setting up more of a clash between his administration and higher education as they look to reform the system responsible for ensuring institutions meet quality standards.
The order directs McMahon to hold accreditors accountable by “denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination of accreditation recognition, for accreditors’ poor performance or violations of federal civil rights law,” according to a White House fact sheet.
The order also directs McMahon and Attorney General Pam Bondi to “investigate and take action to terminate unlawful discrimination by American higher education institutions, including law schools and medical schools.”
During his presidential campaign, Trump pledged to fire “radical Left accreditors,” claiming they “have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.”
AI in education
Trump also signed an executive order aimed at advancing artificial intelligence in education. The order calls for a White House task force on AI education that will help agencies implement a “Presidential AI Challenge” and establish public-private partnerships to provide resources for AI education in K-12 schools.
The order also directs McMahon to “prioritize the use of AI in discretionary grant programs for teacher training and directs the Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to prioritize research on the use of AI in education,” according to a White House fact sheet.
The order also calls for Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, by collaborating with the director of the National Science Foundation, to “work with State and local workforce organizations and training providers to identify and promote high-quality AI skills education coursework and certifications across the country.”
Job training
Another order directs McMahon, Chavez-DeRemer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to “modernize American workforce programs to prepare citizens for the high-paying skilled trade jobs of the future,” according to a White House fact sheet.
The order asks the Cabinet members to review federal workforce programs and refocus programs to train workers in industrial manufacturing.
Trump and Lutnick framed the order as part of the administration’s moves this month to place tariffs on every trading partner, with particularly high levies on goods from China.
“All those factories that you’re bringing in because of your trade policy, we’re going to train people” to work in them, Lutnick said.
Following the signings, Trump took several questions on his tariffs policy, acknowledging the rate on China was “high” but saying that was by design to hurt Chinese manufacturers.
“It basically means China is not doing any business with us, essentially, because it’s a very high number,” he said. “So when you add that to the price of a product, you know, a lot of those products aren’t going to sell, but China is not doing any business.”
Other orders
Other education-related executive orders signed Wednesday include:
an order establishing a White House initiative on historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, and a “President’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs” within the Education Department.
A three-judge panel wrote that its earlier order only pertains to people whom immigration officials had conditionally approved as refugees before Jan. 20 and had arranged travel to the United States.
The March order from the Ninth Circuit panel upheld part of a Washington state federal judge’s order blocking President Donald Trump’s day-one executive order suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.
On Monday, the appeals court panel said the government and the refugee advocacy groups challenging Trump’s executive order had overstated what the panel’s March order required.
Rather than admit all of the roughly 130,000 conditionally approved refugees, as the government claimed, or “tens of thousands” of refugees the groups said the order applied to, the court only required the government to allow those who “needed only to complete their arranged travel to the United States.”
“Under these definitions, the parties have construed our carveout broadly enough to swallow the entire stay order,” the judges wrote Monday.
The judges used the example of a refugee family in Kenya that was forced to shelter in the parking lot of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi after their travel was abruptly canceled as the type of people who would still be allowed to settle in the United States under the March order.
Inauguration Day order
Consistent with the Jan. 20 executive order, the administration withheld funds appropriated by Congress for those services — drawing swift legal action.
The International Refugee Assistance Project filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Church World Service, Lutheran Community Services Northwest and several refugees and others impacted by the order in February.
In its March order, the appeals court denied the administration’s motion “to the extent the district court’s preliminary injunction order applies to individuals who were conditionally approved for refugee status by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services before January 20, 2025.”
“The preliminary injunction remains in effect for these individuals only, and the government must resume their processing, facilitation of travel to the United States, admission, and provision of resettlement benefits after admission,” the judges wrote Monday.
The panel noted that when it issued the order in March, it “did not define conditional approval.”
Melissa Keaney, senior supervising attorney in the litigation department at the International Refugee Assistance Project, said “the Ninth Circuit reiterated that the U.S. government must end the state of limbo for refugees like our client Pacito who were ready to travel and had their lives turned upside down by President Trump’s suspension of the refugee program,’’ in a statement shared with States Newsroom.
“We will hold the government accountable to actually process those refugees immediately, and we will continue to defend the refugee program as a whole in court,” Keaney said.
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