Protesters gather outside of the Federal Building in Milwaukee to denounce the arrest of Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

After the arrest of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan by federal agents Friday morning, the city’s political and activist communities responded forcefully, protesting against the arrest across the city. 

Dugan was charged with obstruction of justice and harboring an individual after a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents showed up outside of her courtroom last week to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery. 

The criminal complaint against Durgan alleges she broke the law by allowing Flores-Ruiz to use a side door in her courtroom to exit without going past the agents. The agents saw him leave and later apprehended him on foot. 

While a larger protest took place outside of the federal courthouse in downtown Milwaukee, local resident Jeneca Wolski stood alone outside of the county courthouse where Dugan was arrested.

“[I’m] just a local citizen who is horrified that we are finding ourselves in this position right now,” Wolski told the Wisconsin Examiner. “We’re sliding downhill so fast. I don’t want to be looked back on by history as part of it. We have to do everything we can to kick and fight and scream to save our democracy right now.” 

At a press conference, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley accused the administration of President Donald Trump of acting to intimidate “anyone who opposes these policies.” Crowley added that Dugan was arrested by a “large, performative showing” of federal agents in the county courthouse. 

 “We have an obligation to administer our courts in a safe, efficient manner that delivers due process for anyone,” Crowley said. “The Trump administration’s actions are clearly preventing us from doing so by intimidating judges and eroding public faith in our judicial system.” 

People gathered outside the federal courthouse in Milwaukee Friday afternoon to protest Dugan’s arrest. At the rally, Christine Neumann Ortiz, executive director of immigrant rights group Voces De La Frontera, told the Wisconsin Examiner the Trump administration was trying to undermine efforts to oppose its immigration policies.

“They basically want to be unleashed to do whatever they want to commit these raids in courtrooms across the country,” she said. “They don’t want any resistance from judges or from the community standing up for people’s due process rights or limiting their policies of mass deportation and racism.”

Seven of the city of Milwaukee’s legislative representatives said in a joint statement that Dugan’s arrest and ICE operating inside the courthouse will “lead to a breakdown of civil society.”

“The County Courthouse is a sanctuary for justice and peace where the accused come forward willingly in a fair and unbiased process,” said the lawmakers, Sens. Chris Larson and Tim Carpenter and Reps. Christine Sinicki, Darrin Madison, Supreme Moore Omokunde, Angelito Tenorio and Sequanna Taylor. “Arresting people out of a courtroom will lead to a breakdown of civil society. We do not support the presence of ICE in places where it will lead to intimidation against witnesses and victims of crimes, denying everyone involved the justice they deserve.”

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, questioned how Dugan’s arrest makes the country safer. 

“The Trump Administration continues to test the limits of our Constitution — this time by arresting a sitting judge for allegedly obstructing an immigration operation at the courthouse,” Durbin said. “When immigration enforcement officials interfere with our criminal justice system, it undermines public safety, prevents victims and witnesses from coming forward, and often prevents those who committed crimes from facing justice in the United States. How does this make America any safer? How does arresting a sitting judge make America any safer? It is imperative that Judge Dugan is afforded due process and the presumption of innocence, as required by our Constitution and her fundamental rights as an American.”

State Senate Minority Leader Diane Hesselbein (D-Middleton) and Sen. Dora Drake (D-Milwaukee), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety, criticized the arrest in a joint statement. 

“Today’s arrest of a sitting judge, at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, is a frightening escalation of the Trump Administration’s attacks on America’s judicial system,” they said. “This is part of a pattern by this Administration – defying court orders, flouting the democratic system of checks and balances, ignoring the right to due process, and threatening judicial independence – that alarms us as legislators and as residents of this great state and this great country. We will follow this case closely. We will continue to stand up to lawless and unconstitutional actions. And, we will always fight for a bedrock principle of American democracy: equal justice under the law.”

The Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, an activist group, was planning protests Friday afternoon outside the federal courthouse and Saturday outside the FBI’s Milwaukee field office. In a statement, the group said the arrest was a “heinous attack.” 

“They are seeking to send a clear message: either you play along with Trump’s agenda, or pay the consequences,” the group said. “During this period of racist and political repression, we must stand together to denounce today’s actions by the FBI. What happened to Dugan is not new. The FBI and other agencies have been emboldened in recent months, snatching people off the streets, separating families, terrorizing communities, breaking doors down of pro-Palestine activists, and contributing to the unjust deportation of immigrants who don’t have criminal records. What is new is that they have gone after a judge.”

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Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez and state Sens. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi) and Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) listen to community members at an April 24 roundtable in Richland Center. (Hery Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

RICHLAND CENTER — In a 90-minute roundtable meeting at the Richland Center community center Thursday, President Donald Trump’s name was mentioned just twice. But community leaders highlighted how his administration’s policies are already wreaking havoc on the county with the sixth highest poverty rate in the state. 

About 15 area leaders representing small business owners, farmers, schools, hospitals and community advocacy groups met Thursday with state Sens. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi) and Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) and Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez. Throughout the event, the attendees discussed how the policies and plans of Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to cut or diminish Medicaid, Social Security and education funding while instituting widespread tariffs on imported goods from countries around the world and making it harder for migrant workers to obtain visas could decimate their region. 

“None of this is right. Where I’m at that age in my life where I don’t get more thoughtful, I get more pissed,” Brett White, executive director of the Southwestern Wisconsin Community Action Program, said. “And because this is all not necessary, this is completely unnecessary, which means that it’s intentional.” 

The group noted repeatedly that a cut to programs in one area had a ripple effect across every other community institution. 

White, and Chris Frakes, the organization’s senior director, said that the cuts to Head Start early childhood education programming that have already come and are set to deepen under Trump are their biggest worry. 

There are currently about 70 kids in Richland County enrolled in Southwest CAP’s Head Start program, according to Frakes. If those programs are lost, poor kids in Richland County will never catch up, she said. 

“Because we know if you enter kindergarten already behind, there’s virtually no chance to catch up by third grade,” Frakes said. “If you’re not on grade level reading in third grade, we know your life prospects go down dramatically, right? So Head Start fills this critical, vital need to get those kiddos onto par with their middle class peers when they hit kindergarten, so that they are ready to learn, and their families have the sort of surrounding supports, whether that’s food, whether that’s access to transportation, for medical care.” 

If Head Start gets cut, the children who are affected will eventually reach Aaron Mithum, the middle and high school principal for the Kickapoo Area School District. Mithum says the district is “waiting for the other shoe to drop” on the future of the approximately $800,000 it gets annually from the federal government as Trump seeks to shut down the U.S. Department of Education. 

If Head Start leaves poor kids behind before they turn five, by the time they reach Mithum at a middle school that’s also struggling financially, there won’t be many options. 

“We’re getting them when they get into pre K or kindergarten, and now we’re trying to go from there, and now, all of a sudden, they don’t have any of that foundational aspect,” Mithum said. “It’s a building block, trickle effect, and not in a positive way. So now it’s that much harder for us to do what [Head Start wasn’t] able to do, and it continues to go up. And it’s just really hard to think about, what does that look like? What does that look like to be a parent with a special ed kid who needs speech services or reading services, or whatever. And the answer is, sorry, not our problem.” 

While the child care and education system of a community that’s already seen the closure of its local University of Wisconsin campus faces the prospect of being unable to keep poor kids from falling behind, the area’s food system is also being hit. 

Retaliatory tariffs on the area’s wheat, corn and soybean farmers are hurting their ability to find international markets for their products while tariffs imposed by Trump have made fertilizer and machinery more expensive, said Sally Leong, Wisconsin Farmers Union member and former professor of plant pathology at UW-Madison. 

Those struggles are continuing to push up the price of food, causing local families to rely on food pantries more than used to, according to Jackie Anderson, executive director of Feeding Wisconsin. 

Under Trump, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) paused funding for The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which Anderson said has amounted to about a 30% cut to what food banks are able to buy. USDA has also ended a program that connected local farms with food pantries to supply fresh produce. 

“Food banks are really looking at the bottom line and saying, like, ‘How are we going to be able to get that amount of food here?’” Anderson said. 

The tariffs are also affecting the companies providing jobs in the area. Marty Richards, the county tourism director, said that Rockwell Automation has delayed and cancelled orders because of Trump’s tariffs. Meanwhile it’s getting harder to find local workers and Trump’s restrictive immigration policies have made it nearly impossible to hire migrant workers. Richards said the company has had a hard time getting workers from its plant in Mexico to come to the U.S. even temporarily for technical training

Teri Richards, board member of the Greater Richland Area Chamber of Commerce, said the county desperately needs more people and she doesn’t know where to find them. 

“We’re obviously not having enough babies. We’re struggling to get that immigrant population and we can’t keep stealing from each other,” she said. “So it’s time to go into Chicago or Milwaukee, to even get a few of those folks moved out here? I don’t know.” 

With fewer people moving in and federal policies discouraging investment from the business community and cutting funds from schools and child care, the community is also facing the management of an aging population. About 30% of the population is older than 60 and 14% is disabled, according to Roxanne Klubertanz, manager of Richland County’s Aging and Disability Resource Center (ADRC). 

That aging population means the community is only going to become more reliant on federal programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Currently, the ADRC helps people in the community apply for Medicaid to pay for the services that will help them stay in their homes for as long as possible or move to an assisted living facility — currently a cost of about $3,800 per month, she said. 

Republicans in Congress are currently weighing a budget proposal that would slash Medicaid funding. Klubertanz said without the program people won’t be able to access those services and will ultimately get sicker and require a placement in a nursing home — a cost of about $10,000 per month. 

“So if that funding, that Medicaid funding, goes away, what’s going to happen?” she said. “Maybe right away, you’re going to see some decreases, but people are going to get sicker and need more services, and then they have to pay for that nursing home placement, which is almost three times the cost. So if you’re trying to fix something today, you have to think about what it’s gonna be like in five years. You’ve gotta have that long range thinking.” 

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Former Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley came to Wisconsin this week as he travels the country warning about the danger of cuts to the administration. | Photo courtesy Maryland's Executive Office of the Governor.

Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor and Social Security commissioner under President Joe Biden, was rushing around Wisconsin Thursday, conducting a flurry of local media interviews before speaking at an evening town hall in Racine.

“I’ve found myself doing a lot of town halls,” O’Malley said, speaking on his phone from the passenger seat of a car as he hurried to a local TV station.

On Wednesday, he was in Kansas City, Missouri, talking to constituents of Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. Before that he traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the invitation of a grassroots group to speak to a big crowd of people worried about threatened cuts to benefits for seniors.

In Racine on Thursday night he joined a town hall hosted by the progressive coalition group Opportunity Wisconsin. U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a Republican who represents the 1st District, was invited, but did not attend.

“Having served in the agency so recently, as its last confirmed commissioner, I just feel a responsibility to speak up,” O’Malley said of his detour from private life to travel the country criticizing President Donald Trump and Elon Musk for cutting Social Security staff and closing offices.

“The only thing that’s going to stop the driving of Social Security into system collapse is the American people rising up,” he added.

When he came into the Social Security Administration in 2023, O’Malley said, a decade of staff reductions had reduced the agency’s workforce to a 50-year low, just as the Baby Boom generation was causing a spike in the number of retirees it was serving. As a result, “every line of service was headed in the wrong direction.”

“The agency needed to turn things around, and to their credit they did it,” he said. O’Malley is full of praise for the federal workers he supervised, who reduced call wait times from 42 and a half minutes on average to 12.8 minutes, along with other improvements. “It’s one of the most highly skilled executive services I’ve ever worked with,” he said, including when he served as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland. The “obsessive compulsive” culture of the agency, as O’Malley affectionately terms it, has meant that over the last 90 years, no one missed a check.

Then came Trump and Musk, who “unleashed a reign of terror on those employees” — “the same people who got us through COVID without ever missing a payment.”

Mass firings, a hostile work environment, and the huge waste of taxpayer money as employees were paid to walk out the door appalled O’Malley.

Instead of rooting out “waste fraud and abuse,” Musk’s DOGE cut the IT department in half, undoing the work O’Malley and his colleagues had done to improve service at the agency. 

As Trump and Musk drive out the people who know how the system works, intermittent IT outages have become a problem. The website for Social Security accounts has gone down. Wait times are skyrocketing. And as the problems get worse, O’Malley said, “ultimately, it will interrupt benefits.”

“I don’t know when it will happen,” he said, “but when it breaks, it will break.”

What is the point of this wanton destruction? 

“I don’t know what the end game is,” O’Malley said.  

Members of Congress in both political parties have told him they think Trump and Musk have set their sights on the $2.6 trillion in the Social Security trust fund in order to make tax cuts for the superwealthy permanent.

Then there’s Musk’s nihilistic ideology, captured in his assertion that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” 

“There’s no more empathetic program than Social Security,” says O’Malley. “It guarantees widows and orphans and people who are disabled don’t live in poverty. Maybe Musk thinks those are useless members of society who don’t help build his immense wealth. I don’t know.”

Whatever their motives, O’Malley is certain that Musk and Trump must be stopped from a campaign that will end in enormous damage to Americans. 

O’Malley’s message is the opposite of Musk’s — far from being riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, the Social Security administration is a model. Fraud affects less than one-half of 1% of Social Security funds. And far from being wasteful, the program spends 1.2% of its budget on overhead, meaning it could be seen as the most efficient insurance company in the world. Private health insurance companies have notoriously high administrative costs.

Other “Big Lies” O’Malley is out to bust include the whopper that immigrants without legal status are draining resources from the system. In fact, they pay about $26 billion in Social Security tax withholdings to fund benefits they themselves can never access, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Nor are dead people drawing Social Security benefits. “There is no zombie apocalypse,” says O’Malley. Facts and figures supporting the efficiency of Social Security are laid out in plain language on his website, winbackourcountry.com.

The good news is that people are beginning to push back on the idea that Social Security is riddled with abuse and should be made more “efficient.” 

“Congress people are getting a heck of a lot more calls now than they did two months ago,” O’Malley said, “whether it’s from people experiencing long wait times, or having trouble accessing the benefits they’ve worked their whole lives to earn, or who are just seeing what’s happening on the news.”

That pressure is absolutely necessary if we are going to prevent the raiding and destruction of a New Deal program that has served so many people so well for generations. 

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Fort McCoy | Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner

The commander of Fort McCoy, a military base near Sparta, Wisconsin, has been suspended after a controversy over the base not displaying portraits of President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. In a statement, the U.S. Army said that Col. Sheyla Baez Ramirez had been suspended as garrison commander at Fort McCoy. 

The statement said that the suspension “is not related to any misconduct,” though the base drew recent criticism for not displaying pictures of Trump and Hegseth, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. On X, formerly known as Twitter, the Department of Defense posted a picture showing Trump’s portrait missing from  a leadership wall and Hegseth’s turned so only the back of the picture was visible. The post declared: “Regarding the Ft. McCoy Chain of Command wall controversy…. WE FIXED IT! Also, an investigation has begun to figure out exactly what happened.”

Spokespeople from the Department of Defense and Fort McCoy’s 88th Readiness Division declined to comment, but told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Ramirez has “not been relieved of command.” A subsequent statement on the U.S. Army’s website said that neither Ramirez nor anyone else on the fort’s leadership team had directed the removal of the portraits. After Ramirez was suspended, Hegseth shared a post on X mentioning the commander’s suspension. 

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Fort McCoy | Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner

The commander of Fort McCoy, a military base near Sparta, Wisconsin, has been suspended after a controversy over the base not displaying portraits of President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. In a statement, the U.S. Army said that Col. Sheyla Baez Ramirez had been suspended as garrison commander at Fort McCoy. 

The statement said that the suspension “is not related to any misconduct,” though the base drew recent criticism for not displaying pictures of Trump and Hegseth, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. On X, formerly known as Twitter, the Department of Defense posted a picture showing Trump’s portrait missing from  a leadership wall and Hegseth’s turned so only the back of the picture was visible. The post declared: “Regarding the Ft. McCoy Chain of Command wall controversy…. WE FIXED IT! Also, an investigation has begun to figure out exactly what happened.”

Spokespeople from the Department of Defense and Fort McCoy’s 88th Readiness Division declined to comment, but told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Ramirez has “not been relieved of command.” A subsequent statement on the U.S. Army’s website said that neither Ramirez nor anyone else on the fort’s leadership team had directed the removal of the portraits. After Ramirez was suspended, Hegseth shared a post on X mentioning the commander’s suspension. 

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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 that makes school discipline policies centered on “objective behavior;”
• an order mandating “full and timely disclosure of foreign funding by higher education institutions;”
• 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. 

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.” 

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks during his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Jan. 14, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Monday he fully supports the secretary of Defense, despite The New York Times reporting over the weekend that Pete Hegseth shared details of a bombing campaign in Yemen in a second group chat, this time with his wife and brother.

“Ask the Houthis how much dysfunction there is?” Trump said, referring to the Iranian-backed terrorist organization that operates in Yemen. “There’s none. Pete’s doing a great job. Everybody’s happy with him.”

The New York Times published an article Sunday detailing a second group chat on the encrypted, commercial messaging app Signal, where Hegseth shared information about U.S. military plans.

Hegseth, asked during the White House Easter Egg roll on Monday about the latest New York Times report, didn’t deny that he sent messages in another group chat.

“What a big surprise that a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax, won’t give back their Pulitzers, they got Pulitzers for a bunch of lies,” Hegseth said. “As they peddle those lies no one ever calls them on it. See, this is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations.”

The New York Times report was the second time in less than a month that Hegseth’s discussion of military operations on the app came to light.

Someone on a chat meant to comprise only high-level administration officials accidentally included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, who published an article in late March on the experience.

That group chat included Vice President J.D. Vance, Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and others. In that chat, Hegseth shared a precise timeline of U.S. bombing of Houthi targets in Yemen.

The Defense Department’s Office of the Inspector General opened an investigation earlier this month “to determine the extent to which the Secretary of Defense and other DoD personnel complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging application for official business. Additionally, we will review compliance with classification and records retention requirements.”

The OIG investigation came after U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and ranking member Jack Reed, D-R.I., sent a letter to the acting inspector general asking the independent watchdog agency to look into the issue.

While Trump and most congressional Republicans continued to back Hegseth, Nebraska Republican Rep. Don Bacon raised concerns Monday about the operational security risk of communicating on “perceived secure applications” like Signal.

In a social media post that did not name Hegseth or specifically reference Signal, Bacon wrote that “admin officials must assume their phones are closely monitored by China & Russia.”

“They’re top priority targets. Our adversaries can put thousands of people in position just to monitor their phones & to penetrate perceived secure applications on non-secure phones,” Bacon wrote. “I’ve assumed my phones were monitored since I was a Colonel in Iraq & as Commander at Ramstein.”

The U.S. Supreme Court is pictured Oct. 9, 2024. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court announced Thursday it will hear oral arguments next month over President Donald Trump’s efforts to restructure birthright citizenship, though the justices won’t decide on the merits of the case just yet. 

Instead, they will choose whether to leave in place nationwide injunctions from lower courts that so far have blocked the Trump administration from implementing the executive order.

The oral arguments, scheduled for May 15, will likely provide the first indication of whether any of the nine justices are interested in revisiting the Court’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 following the Civil War.

The amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 1898 in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the 14th Amendment guarantees any child born in the United States is entitled to U.S. citizenship, even if their parents are not citizens.

Trump disagrees with that ruling and signed an executive order on his first day in office seeking to change which babies born in the United States become citizens. If that order were implemented, babies whose parents were “unlawfully present in the United States” or whose parents’ presence “was lawful but temporary” would not be eligible for citizenship.

Several organizations and Democratic attorneys general filed lawsuits seeking to block the executive order, leading to nationwide injunctions against its implementation.

Last month, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the lower court’s nationwide injunctions, limiting them to the organizations and states that filed suit.

The three cases are Trump v. State of Washington, Trump v. CASA, Inc. and Trump v. State of New Jersey.

Legislation

Nationwide injunctions by lower court judges have become an issue for Republicans in Congress as well as the Trump administration.

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley introduced a bill in Congress that would bar federal district court judges from being able to implement nationwide injunctions.

“We all have to agree to give up the universal injunction as a weapon against policies we disagree with,” Grassley said during a hearing earlier this month. “The damage it causes to the judicial system and to our democracy is too great.”

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. 

Van Hollen said he was also denied a phone or video call with Abrego Garcia to ask how he was doing and report that information to his family. 

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.

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)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday ruled the Trump administration must “facilitate” the return of a Maryland man to the United States after he was wrongly deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, but stopped short of requiring his return.

The high court said the Trump administration must try to bring back Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, of Beltsville, who was deported due to an “administrative error” admitted by the Trump administration.

The high court did not give the administration a date by which to return Abrego Garcia, saying the deadline in a District of Columbia court order has expired. The Supreme Court said the district court also needs to clarify what it meant by saying the administration must “effectuate” the return of Abrego Garcia and the scope of that term is “unclear” and may exceed the district court’s authority.

The Trump administration has repeatedly rejected retrieving Abrego Garcia from prison.  President Donald Trump and other high-ranking officials have alleged Abrego Garcia is a MS-13 gang member, but produced no evidence and have defended his deportation, despite admitting his removal was a mistake.  

“We don’t want them back,” Trump said April 8, referencing the case. “Can you imagine, you spend all of that time, energy and money on getting them out, and then you have a judge that sits there… (saying), he said, ‘No, bring him back.’”

It’s unclear how long Abrego Garcia will remain in the prison unless he is returned to the U.S., but El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele said based on the $6 million agreement between his country and the U.S., those men at the prison will remain there for at least a year.

Bukele is scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House Monday.

Effect on other prisoners

Thursday’s decision may have ramifications for the 238 Venezuelans who were deported to the same prison, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT.

They were sent there under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime law their attorneys say denied them due process because those subject to it were not able to challenge their removal in court.

The Supreme Court will allow, for now, the continued removal of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act, but those subject to a presidential proclamation issued by Trump citing the Alien Enemies Act must be given notice of their removal under the wartime law and a court hearing. The court action also must be in the locations where they are incarcerated.

Arrested while driving son

The Abrego Garcia case garnered national attention when he was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while driving his 5-year-old son home. Abrego Garcia was not charged with an offense, but was apprehended by ICE because his “status had changed.”

In 2019 Abrego Garcia was given a final order of removal, but an immigration judge granted him protection from removal to his home country because it was more “likely than not that he would be persecuted by gangs in El Salvador” if he was returned, according to court documents.

But on March 15 he was placed on one of three deportation flights to El Salvador.

The Trump administration has argued that Abrego Garcia is no longer in U.S. custody and therefore cannot be returned to the United States.

There is precedent from the U.S. government to return an immigrant accidentally deported, including U.S. citizens. Between fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2020, ICE accidentally deported 70 U.S. citizens who needed to be returned, according to a 2021 U.S. Government Accountability Office report.  

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building pictured on Nov. 25, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom) 

The U.S. Education Department has agreed to delay for nearly two weeks enforcement of a disputed directive seeking to ban diversity, equity and inclusion practices, according to a court filing Thursday in the case challenging the order.

The agreement between the department and the groups suing it over the order pauses enforcement until after April 24. According to the agreement, states and local education agencies until then cannot be investigated or asked to provide certification that they are not using DEI, a term for race- and gender-conscious practices, in admissions, programming, training, hiring or scholarships.

Education Department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said the department and the groups reached the agreement Monday.

An April 3 letter from the department demanded states and districts provide certifications they were complying with the order within 10 days or risk losing federal funding. That letter followed a February missive introducing the order.

The National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union sued in New Hampshire federal court last month to block enforcement of the directive.

“This pause in enforcement provides immediate relief to schools across the country while the broader legal challenge continues,” the NEA said in a Thursday statement.

In a written statement, Biedermann said the extension was due to what the department saw as states’ efforts to comply with the order.

“The Department extended the certification requirement on Monday in response to states’ good-faith inquiries to ensure compliance,” Biedermann wrote. “Having voluntarily extended the deadline, commonsense would dictate the Department would not take enforcement action until the deadline had passed.”

Court battle

The groups asked the court to issue an emergency ruling to block enforcement of the department’s order while the case is ongoing.

The agreement effectively grants that request without a court order.

“No school district, state agency, or higher education institution will face investigation or penalties for failure to return the challenged certification that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts do not exist within their curriculums,” the NEA said.

The underlying lawsuit remains ongoing.

The suit challenges the department’s authority to impose restrictions on state K-12 curriculum and says the order limits academic freedom and restricts educators’ ability to teach.

Trump and DEI

President Donald Trump campaigned against progressive cultural positions, including how race, gender and sexuality are handled in public schools.

In the early months of his second presidency, the entire executive branch has moved to restrict DEI initiatives and education policy, which has long been a battleground for such issues, has been a focal point.

The administration has used antidiscrimination requirements to pursue restrictions on DEI initiatives in education, arguing that DEI discriminates against white students.

DEI programs “discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another based on identity characteristics in clear violation of Title VI,” Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting head of civil rights, said in an April 3 statement.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., right, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., hold a press conference on the Republican budget resolution at the U.S. Capitol on April 10, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

This story was updated at 11:54 a.m. EDT.

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Republicans adopted a budget resolution Thursday, clearing the way for both chambers of Congress to write a bill extending 2017 tax cuts and bolstering funding for border security and defense, though the blueprint set vastly different targets for spending cuts.

The cliff-hanger 216-214 vote followed a tumultuous week on Capitol Hill. Far-right members of the GOP Conference said repeatedly they wouldn’t accept the outline, since it requires the House to write a bill that cuts spending by at least $1.5 trillion, while senators set themselves a floor of $4 billion in cuts.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was forced to postpone a floor vote on the budget resolution on Wednesday evening. But Johnson was able to secure the votes needed after he and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., announced Thursday morning that they were in agreement about meeting the higher threshold for spending cuts.

Johnson said both chambers of Congress “are committed to finding at least $1.5 trillion in savings for the American people, while also preserving our essential programs.”

“Many of us are going to aim much higher and find those savings because we believe they are there,” Johnson said. “We want to make the government more efficient, effective and leaner for the American people. And I think that will serve every American of every party. And we’re happy to do that.”

Despite the difference in reconciliation instructions, Thune said the Senate is “aligned with the House” when it comes to cutting spending over the next decade.

“The speaker has talked about $1.5 trillion,” Thune said. “We have a lot of United States senators who believe that is a minimum.”

Thune added he believes it’s time for Congress “to get the country on a more sustainable fiscal path and that entails us taking a hard scrub of our government and figuring out where we can find those savings.”

Democrats, and some centrist Republicans, have expressed deep concerns the House’s instructions require the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid, to cut at least $880 billion.

The panel, which also oversees Medicare and other programs, could not recoup that level of spending without pulling hundreds of billions from Medicaid, the state-federal program for lower-income Americans and some people with disabilities.

The budget resolution has been endorsed by President Donald Trump, who’s repeatedly urged the House to adopt the measure. “Great News! “The Big, Beautiful Bill” is coming along really well. Republicans are working together nicely. Biggest Tax Cuts in USA History!!! Getting close. DJT,” Trump posted on social media Thursday morning prior to the vote.

Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and Indiana Rep. Victoria Spartz were the only members of the Republican Party to vote against approval.

“If you were trying to hasten financial collapse of our country and bribe voters to go along with it, the strategy wouldn’t look much different than what Congress is doing today,” Massie wrote on social media. “The big beautiful bill cuts taxes while keeping spending on an increasingly unsustainable trajectory.”

Spartz wrote in a social media post of her own that the reconciliation instructions “we voted on today are still setting us up for the largest deficit increase in the history of our Republic, & opening up a ‘pandora’s box’ by changing accounting rules to hide it.

“In good conscience, I couldn’t vote YES.”

Only a beginning

The House adopting the 68-page budget resolution only marks the start of the months-long journey of writing and voting on the reconciliation package.

Republicans hope to use that bill to permanently extend the 2017 tax law, increase spending on border security and defense by hundreds of billions of dollars and rework energy policy.

The budget resolution includes different budget targets for many of those goals, and for raising the debt limit. It calls on the House to increase the country’s borrowing authority by $4 trillion, while the Senate’s instructions say that chamber would lift the debt ceiling by up to $5 trillion.

Writing the various elements of the reconciliation package will fall to 11 committee chairs in the House and 10 committee leaders in the Senate, as well as Johnson, Thune and a lot of staffers.

In the House, the Agriculture Committee needs to slice at least $230 billion; Education and Workforce must reduce spending by a minimum of $330 billion; Energy and Commerce needs to cut no less than $880 billion; Financial Services must find at least $1 billion in savings; Natural Resources has a minimum of $1 billion; Oversight and Government Reform has a floor of $50 billion; and the Transportation Committee needs to reduce deficits by $10 billion or more.

Four Senate committees — Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry; Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; Energy and Natural Resources; and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP — must each find at least $1 billion in spending cuts over the 10-year budget window.

House committees that can increase the federal deficit include the Armed Services Committee with a cap of $100 billion in new spending, Homeland Security with a $90 billion ceiling for new funding for programs it oversees, Judiciary with a maximum of $110 billion and Ways and Means, which can increase deficits up to $4.5 trillion for tax cuts.

Senate committees also got instructions for increasing the deficit, which will allow them to spend up to the dollar amount outlined in the budget resolution. Those committees include Armed Services at $150 billion; Commerce, Science and Transportation with $20 billion; Environment and Public Works at $1 billion; Finance with $1.5 trillion in new deficits, likely for tax cuts; Homeland Security at $175 billion and Judiciary with $175 billion.

The back story

If the process to reach agreement on a final reconciliation package is anything like the path to adopting the budget resolution, it will be long, winding and filled with drama.

The Senate voted for a completely different budget resolution in February that would have set up Congress to enact Republicans’ agenda in two reconciliation bills instead of one.

Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., referred to the reconciliation instructions in that budget proposal as “Plan B.”

That tax-and-spending blueprint would have had lawmakers first write a bill increasing funding for border security and defense, and rewriting energy policy, before debating another bill later in the year to extend the 2017 tax law and cut federal spending.

The House voted about a week later to approve its original budget resolution, but not without a bit of theatrics.

Johnson didn’t originally have the votes and opted to recess the chamber before calling lawmakers back about 15 minutes later to approve that version of the budget resolution.

The Senate made changes to its reconciliation instructions in the House-approved budget resolution, before voting to send it back across the Capitol for their colleagues to vote on final approval, which they did Thursday.

Politically difficult votes ahead

Each time the Senate voted on a budget resolution it undertook a marathon amendment voting session, known as a vote-a-rama, where lawmakers stay on the floor overnight to debate various aspects of the outline.

Senators will need to undertake one more of those when they debate the actual reconciliation package later this year, though the stakes will be much higher.

The budget resolution is a blueprint for how Congress wants to shape tax and spending policy during the 10-year budget window. It’s not a bill so it never becomes law. And it contains no actual money, it’s simply a plan for how lawmakers want to structure policy.

The reconciliation package, once written, will have the chance of becoming law, so any amendments offered during the Senate’s vote-a-rama will carry greater weight than the proposals voted on when the chamber took up the two budget resolutions.

Democrats will have an opportunity to challenge centrist GOP senators on whether they support or want to remove every single policy that Republicans put in their reconciliation package.

That could create real issues for GOP leadership if they include tax policy or spending cuts that cannot garner the backing of senators like Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, Maine’s Susan Collins and others.

The final reconciliation package will need support from nearly every Republican in Congress. GOP leaders will not be able to lose more than three House lawmakers or three Republican senators, under their very slender majorities. 

Four or more Republicans opposing the reconciliation package in one chamber, either because it cuts too much spending or doesn’t cut enough, would likely prevent it from becoming law. 

Wisconsin State Flag | Getty Images

The co-founder of Wisconsin’s progressive, pro-democracy law firm is not ignoring the tsunami of bad news out of Washington. He’s just not letting it drown his optimism. 

“I don’t think any of us fully anticipated how heavy, broad, fast and extreme the onslaught was going to be,” Jeff Mandell concedes, referring to President Donald Trump’s moves to seize unprecedented power, weaponize the federal government against his political enemies, defy court orders, deport people without due process and throw the entire global economy into chaos.

“Some of what we are seeing and hearing is so contrary to our most fundamental understanding of what we believe about our government, I have to believe this is temporary and that people won’t stand for it,” Mandell says.

Since its founding in October 2020, Law Forward has pursued high-profile lawsuits that have helped claw back democracy in Wisconsin. The firm challenged the state’s now-defunct gerrymandered voting maps and uncovered the details of the fake electors scheme that originated here — forcing the Republican officials who posed as members of the Electoral College and cast fraudulent votes for Trump in 2020 to admit they were trying to subvert the will of the voters. On the public website it created to display the details of the scheme, which it obtained as a condition of a settlement, Law Forward stated that it wanted to show “how close our democracy came to toppling and how the freedom to vote must continue to be protected, not taken for granted.”

This week, Law Forward’s grievance against former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman for misconduct in his ill-conceived “investigation” of voter fraud in the 2020 election led to the suspension of Gableman’s law license.

As a Wisconsin-based organization, Mandell says Law Forward looks for opportunities to pursue cases that are of particular importance to the state and that shine a light on threats to democracy.

“The rest of the time we don’t sit in paralysis because of the news,” he adds. Whatever fresh hell is erupting across the country, “we continue to work here so people see an alternative.” 

“I think building a stronger, more resilient democracy in Wisconsin is its own form of resistance,” he adds.

“When things feel most shocking and unstable at the federal level,” at the state and local level, Mandell says, “we can show our institutions still work and provide some reassurance.” 

Even before Susan Crawford defeated Brad Schimel last week in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race — despite the heavy-handed intervention of Trump and Elon Musk — Mandell was feeling hopeful. He felt Wisconsin showed a “silver lining” after the November 2024 election, despite Trump’s narrow win in the state.

Among his reasons for optimism: New, fair voting maps that replaced the old Republican gerrymander, creating a more balanced Legislature; a governor who supports voting rights and democratic institutions; extraordinarily high voter engagement, with Wisconsinites turning out in bigger numbers than in other states in 2024 and overwhelmingly rejecting the MAGA-backed Supreme Court candidate in 2025. 

With Crawford’s win, “Wisconsin will continue to be a place where we can rely on the courts to protect our fundamental freedoms,” Mandell says.

The 10-point margin in last week’s election also “reinforces my conviction that the majority of Wisconsinites really do believe in democracy,” Mandell says.

All of those things position Wisconsin to be a leader in the struggle to protect democracy from the Trump onslaught.

Wisconsin’s long march to recovery from misrule by Gov. Scott Walker and the rightwing billionaires who backed him has been taking us in the opposite direction from the rest of the country.

Along with his union-busting Act 10 — challenged by Law Forward and soon to be taken up by the Wisconsin Supreme Court — Walker took a sledgehammer to funding for public education, long before Trump and Musk arrived with their chainsaws. Voters here have been pushing back against the billionaire-financed destruction of civil society for more than a decade. Recently, they’ve been gaining traction. Law Forward has played an important role in that fight.

It’s not just that Democrats will pick up more seats in the state Legislature as the un-gerrymandered maps go into full effect next year, Mandell has hope that our closely divided state will maintain its longstanding independence and commitment to bipartisan institutions. He draws encouragement from the fact that Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee are holding budget hearings around the state, even as Republicans in Washington ram through a budget based on Trump’s demands, ignoring the public and ceding their power as members of Congress.

Wisconsin’s long tradition of good government includes a host of bipartisan commissions, a decentralized elections system that is hard to hack and a great university that has managed to survive waves of attacks by McCarthyites and budget cutters for 176 years.

That tradition extends to a bipartisan nominating commission for federal judges, which ought to choose a replacement for 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Diane Sykes, who announced in March that she is taking semi-retirement. Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s office reports it has been in contact with Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s office to reconstitute the charter for the bipartisan nominating commission, as they have done in every Congress under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump could still ignore the process and nominate someone on his own. But three weeks after Sykes’ announcement, he hasn’t done it yet.

If Trump wrecks the economy and steers the whole country into a recession, Wisconsin won’t be spared. Nor can we avoid all the shocks of a national authoritarian regime. But our state’s independent democratic institutions leave us well situated to recover, and to help the rest of the country remember what civil society looks like.

“There is no one silver bullet,” says Mandell. “But the goal is to continue to tend the lamp here in Wisconsin, to shine a light that illuminates the path to balance, order and democracy.”

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The U.S. Capitol, as seen on Oct. 9, 2024. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson postponed a vote on the budget resolution that was supposed to take place Wednesday, as he tried to get the support of far-right members of the party who object because it won’t go far enough to achieve their goals of slashing government spending.

Johnson, R-La., said he hoped the House would be able to vote on the tax and spending blueprint Thursday, before leaving town for a two-week recess, though he didn’t rule out setting up a conference process with the Senate, or changing the budget resolution and sending it back across the Capitol.

“We are working through some good ideas and solutions to get everybody there,” Johnson said. “It may not happen tonight, but probably by tomorrow morning.”

Johnson’s comments came after he huddled behind closed doors for about an hour with more than a dozen far-right House Republicans who believe the budget resolution doesn’t require the Senate to cut enough spending.

“We want everybody to have a high degree of comfort about what is happening here,” Johnson said. “And we have a small subset of members who weren’t totally satisfied with the product as it stands. So we’re going to talk about maybe going to conference with the Senate, or adding an amendment. But we’re going to make that decision. We are going to continue to move forward. This is all positive.”

The House and Senate are far from agreement on how much to reduce federal spending later this year when they write the reconciliation bill.

The House instructions call on numerous committees to cut spending by at least $1.5 trillion, with more than half of that deficit savings coming from the committee that oversees Medicaid. Those instructions would likely lead to hundreds of billions in federal funding being pulled from the program, though Republicans insisted during floor debate they were only looking to address waste, fraud and abuse.

The Senate has given itself a floor of $4 billion in spending cuts, which could lead to substantial deficit increases. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released analysis last week, showing the reconciliation package could bolster deficits by up to $5.8 trillion during the next decade.

Trump lobbying, last-minute drama

House debate, which took place before the vote was delayed, followed days of lobbying by House GOP leaders and President Donald Trump, who urged holdouts to adopt the budget resolution during a campaign fundraising dinner Tuesday evening.

“I think we are there,” Trump said. “But just in case there are a couple of Republicans out there, you just got to get there, close your eyes and get there. It’s a phenomenal bill. Stop grandstanding, just stop grandstanding.”

That didn’t sway everyone, however, leading Speaker Johnson to pull about a dozen of the far-right members off the floor Wednesday evening just as the House was supposed to move on to the budget vote.

The rest of the chamber’s lawmakers waited on the floor for more than an hour as the group huddled nearby.

Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry, South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett and Texas Rep. Chip Roy were among the members to get summoned off the floor by Johnson.

Scalise pleads to ‘get America back on track’

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., called on Republicans to adopt the budget resolution earlier in the day during floor debate, saying it “just opens the door to” using the complex budget reconciliation process to enact their agenda.

“The process where 11 of our committees here in the House will go to work to start making improvements in so many areas to get America back on track,” Scalise said. “And ultimately, that’s why we all come here. We come here to solve big problems. We deal with small issues too. But every now and then — and it’s not often — you deal with a big issue that can actually improve the lives of families all across this country.”

Budget Committee ranking member Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., said members of his party wouldn’t allow the parts of the 2017 tax law that benefit the middle class to expire at the end of the year, rejecting claims from GOP lawmakers.

“If you’re a middle-class American, if you are in the 99%, you will not see your taxes go up next year,” Boyle said. “There is no question about that. What is at issue is the tax cuts for multimillionaires, billionaires and big corporations.”

Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Lloyd Smucker said he couldn’t vote to approve the budget resolution since the Senate’s instructions for spending cuts were “not acceptable.”

“To me, it’s important we have the guardrails in the initial resolution,” Smucker said, before encouraging House leaders to amend the budget resolution to increase the amount of spending cuts the Senate must implement.

“I can’t vote on this bill as it is, but there’s a path forward here and that is very, very important,” Smucker said.

Roy of Texas also spoke out against the budget resolution, saying the Senate’s instructions didn’t go far enough to reduce deficits.

“The Senate sent over a joke. And we’re going to capitulate to the Senate, knowing full well that the Senate instructions carry the day,” Roy said. “And we’re going to be sitting there in a reconciliation debate, where we’re going to end up on the short end of the stick. But worse, the American people are going to end up on the short end of the stick because it absolutely increases deficits. No one can deny it.”

Roy added that members of Congress should “pass a math test” because the numbers in the budget resolution didn’t add up.

Lengthy struggle

Republican leaders have struggled for months to get the vast majority of their members on board with the outline.

Even if the House finally approves the resolution, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., have months of work ahead of them as committees begin writing and debating their sections of the reconciliation package.

The budget resolution tasks 11 House committees and 10 Senate panels with meeting vague budget targets. Committees either have a minimum amount of spending to cut or a maximum amount of deficits they can create.

The House and Senate are relatively aligned on some of those targets, though they are far apart on spending cuts and potentially tax policy.

In the House, the Agriculture Committee needs to slice at least $230 billion; Education and Workforce must reduce spending by a minimum of $330 billion; Energy and Commerce needs to cut no less than $880 billion; Financial Services must find at least $1 billion in savings; Natural Resources has a minimum of $1 billion; Oversight and Government Reform has a floor of $50 billion; and the Transportation Committee needs to reduce deficits by $10 billion or more.

The Energy and Commerce Committee’s instructions have been a central issue for Democrats, and many centrist Republicans, who are concerned that Medicaid, the state-federal health program for lower-income people, will be a target for hundreds of billions in cuts.

Four Senate committees — Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry; Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; Energy and Natural Resources; and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP — must each find at least $1 billion in spending cuts over the 10-year budget window.

House committees that can increase the federal deficit include the Armed Services Committee with a cap of $100 billion in new spending, Homeland Security with a $90 billion ceiling for new funding for programs it oversees, Judiciary with a maximum of $110 billion and Ways and Means, which can increase deficits up to $4.5 trillion for tax cuts.

Senate committees also got instructions for increasing the deficit, which will allow them to spend up to the dollar amount outlined in the budget resolution. Those committees include Armed Services at $150 billion; Commerce, Science and Transportation with $20 billion; Environment and Public Works at $1 billion; Finance with $1.5 trillion in new deficits, likely for tax cuts; Homeland Security at $175 billion and Judiciary with $175 billion.

House instructions call for the reconciliation package to raise the debt limit by $4 trillion while the Senate’s plans say lawmakers can raise it by up to $5 trillion.

Slim majority

Assuming the House adopts the budget resolution, GOP leaders will need to keep nearly all of their members supportive during the next couple months as those numbers turn into tangible policy proposals.

House Republican leaders can only lose three members on party-line votes, given their paper-thin 220-lawmaker majority.

The same number of GOP senators can vote against the final reconciliation package as long as Vice President J.D. Vance casts the tie-breaking vote.

Any more Republicans opposing the package would prevent it from becoming law. 

Minister of Justice and Public Security Héctor Villatoro, right, accompanies U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, center, during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center, or CECOT, on March 26, 2025 in Tecoluca, El Salvador. (Photo by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Federal judges in Texas and New York Wednesday temporarily halted the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in parts of those two states where Venezuelans set for deportation are incarcerated.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed cases in the Southern District of New York and the Southern District of Texas, after the U.S. Supreme Court this week deemed challenges to the wartime law must be brought in the location of those subject to President Donald Trump’s proclamation on use of the act. The cases earlier were argued in the District of Columbia.

That Monday decision from the high court lifted a lower court’s order that barred the Trump administration from invoking the wartime law to deport any Venezuelan nationals 14 or older who are suspected gang members — but the justices also said unanimously that the Venezuelans must be allowed court hearings.

Texas Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. issued a temporary restraining order to prevent the deportation of Venezuelans in the entire state of Texas under the Alien Enemies Act, as well as the facility where the three men who brought the case are currently detained, the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville.

The restraining order from Rodriguez Jr. is in place until April 23. The order also states that the three Venezuelan men cannot be removed from the El Valle Detention Center, which is the same center from which the Trump administration on March 15 transferred those subject to the wartime law and placed them on a plane to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador.

New York order

The temporary restraining order from New York Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein that he plans to sign Wednesday would cover Venezuelans in the Southern District of New York, according to The Associated Press. That would include New York City, the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx and Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan and Westchester counties.  

Two Venezuelans brought the suit in the Southern District of New York.

Hellerstein, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, will hold an April 22 hearing to determine if the temporary restraining order should become a preliminary injunction. The ACLU is also pushing for a class certification.

The Supreme Court said this week it will allow, for now, the Trump administration to use the Alien Enemies Act, but those subject to the proclamation must be allowed to bring a challenge in court.

The original suit against the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act came from five men detained in Texas. The justices argued that the proper court venue should be where they were being detained in Texas rather than before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. 

More than 238 Venezuelans have been deported to the brutal prison, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, known as CECOT.

Marylander’s case cited

Judge Rodriguez Jr., whom President Donald Trump appointed in 2017, in placing the temporary restraining order noted that anyone who is erroneously deported under the Alien Enemies Act potentially cannot be returned to the United States.

In his reasoning, he cited the Trump administration’s stance in a high-profile case that led to a Maryland man being sent to a prison in El Salvador by mistake.

The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to strike down a lower court’s order that officials return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia of Beltsville, Maryland, who had a 2019 court order barring his removal to El Salvador. On Monday the Supreme Court temporarily paused the deadline until the high court could make a full decision.

“Furthermore, if the United States erroneously removed an individual to another country based on the Proclamation, a substantial likelihood exists that the individual could not be returned to the United States,” Rodriguez Jr. wrote.

A hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in the Brownsville division, is set for Friday 1:30 p.m. Central. 

Rodriguez said of the upcoming Friday hearing, “the Court will consider whether to extend the temporary restraining order or issue other forms of emergency relief.”

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an executive order signing in the Oval Office at the White House on Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington, D.C.  (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Suddenly veering from his declaration a week ago, President Donald Trump on Wednesday paused his sweeping “liberation day” tariffs for 90 days on countries he’s said are willing to negotiate new trade deals.

Stocks surged upon his announcement after days of wrecked markets erased trillions of dollars from investor portfolios. The Nasdaq index saw the biggest single-day hike in five years as of Wednesday afternoon, according to financial media.

The pause will not extend to China, which he announced will see a further hike to 125% on imports to the U.S. “effective immediately,” he said.

“At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable,” Trump posted on Truth Social just after 1 p.m. Eastern.

The president said more than 75 countries have reached out to negotiate, and that because “these Countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States” he is dropping their tariff rates to a universal 10%.

Several rounds of tariffs the president enacted in March will remain in place, including 25% import taxes on foreign steel, aluminum and cars — charges which sparked the European Union to approve retaliatory tariffs Wednesday.

Canada and Mexico, which both face up to 25% tariffs on a sizable chunk of products, will continue to see the levies but will not face an additional 10% stacked on top.

Trump’s 25% tax on imports from any country that buys oil from Venezuela also remains unchanged.

Americans ‘yippy’

The president told the press outside the White House Wednesday afternoon that he saw people getting “queasy” and “yippy” about the market turmoil.

“You have to have flexibility,” Trump said about his decision to pause the levies.

The tariffs, which the administration maintains are “reciprocal,” though under a formula disputed by economists, went into effect just after midnight Wednesday.

When asked by reporters if he’ll consider exempting any large companies that lost big in the market crash from paying the baseline 10% import tax, Trump said he’ll rely on his “instinct” to make the decision.

The announcement came just hours after the president posted on social media “BE COOL!” and “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.”

Trump’s sudden pause also came just after U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer defended the steep tariffs to nervous lawmakers for the second day in a row.

Administration officials quickly claimed the sudden pause was part of Trump’s strategy all along — despite several saying over the last few days that the tariffs were here to stay and that Americans needed to have patience as the market crashed. More than half of Americans are invested in the stock market.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller characterized Trump’s about-face on tariffs as “the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history,” in a post on X Wednesday afternoon.

A rollercoaster few days

Trump’s tariff plan sent shock waves through the economy after he unveiled import taxes on trading partners and allies, including 46% for Vietnam, a major tech exporter to the U.S.

The administration calculated the steep tariff rates based on each country’s trade deficit with the U.S.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters outside the White House Wednesday that the tariffs were “a successful negotiating strategy.”

“As I told everyone a week ago in this very spot: Do not retaliate, and you will be rewarded,” Bessent said.

The administration met with Vietnamese officials Wednesday, according to Bessent, and meetings with Japan, South Korea and India are expected shortly, though he didn’t provide details.

When asked by reporters if Trump’s tariff policy was mainly now focused on China, Bessent said “it’s about bad actors” but added that China “is the biggest source of the U.S. trade problems.”

The trade war — a term Bessent rejected — between the U.S. and China expanded rapidly overnight Wednesday when Chinese officials raised levies on U.S. goods to 84%.

“The US’s practice of escalating tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake, which seriously infringes on China’s legitimate rights and interests and seriously damages the rules-based multilateral trading system,” according to a translation of a statement Wednesday from the country’s State Council Tariff Commission.

Pressure from lawmakers

A Trump campaign account posted on X a screenshot of the president’s morning message urging people to buy stocks and asked “Did the Panicans listen to @POTUS’s advice this morning?”

“Panicans” is a term Trump used recently to mock lawmakers who openly criticized losses to retirement funds and questioned how the tariffs would affect small businesses in their districts.

Republican Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and James Lankford of Oklahoma grilled Greer Tuesday during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance.

“Whose throat do I get to choke if this proves wrong?” Tillis asked.

Greer faced questions Wednesday morning from the House Committee on Ways and Means, where Chair Jason Smith of Missouri cheered on Trump’s choice to unleash tariffs on almost every country at once.

Rep. Richard Neal, the panel’s top Democrat, told Greer that his office has been “inundated” with calls from constituents worried about their 401k funds.

“They don’t know what to expect, trillions of dollars of market value being lost even as we meet,” the Massachusetts Democrat said at the morning hearing before Trump called off the tariffs.   

Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff said Wednesday that he’s asking the White House if any insider trading occurred while Trump was “creating giant market fluctuations with his on-again, off-again tariffs.”

“Who in the administration knew about Trump’s latest tariff flip flop ahead of time? Did anyone buy or sell  stocks, and profit at the public’s expense?” Schiff wrote on X.

Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington and Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa introduced a bipartisan bill to claw back Congressional power over trade decisions from the president, who currently has near-unilateral authority.

GOP Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska introduced companion legislation in the House.

While Trump imposed some of his tariffs — including those on foreign steel and aluminum — under a national security provision, he levied the charges on Canadian and Mexican imports as well as his recent worldwide tariffs by declaring a national emergency. 

The Milwaukee County Courthouse. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office of Milwaukee released new information Tuesday regarding the arrests of two undocumented immigrants at the county courthouse. 

A spokesperson wrote in an email statement that Edwin Bustamante-Sierre, 27, and Marco Cruz-Garcia, 24, were arrested by ICE at the courthouse. The statement said that Bustamante-Sierre, a citizen of Nicaragua, was arrested on April 3, and convicted in Fond du Lac County for reckless driving on Dec. 5, 2024. He is currently charged with endangering safety, reckless use of a firearm, use of a dangerous weapon and cocaine possession in Milwaukee County, the email statement read. 

Mexican citizen Cruz-Garcia, the spokesperson wrote, was detained by ICE on March 20. The agency’s statement accuses Cruz-Garcia of being a known member of the “Sureños transnational criminal street gang” and states that he’d been arrested for “multiple criminal charges including breaking and entering, car theft, and assault.” The spokesperson wrote that an immigration judge ordered Cruz-Garcia to be deported to Mexico on Feb. 5, 2020.

Wisconsin Examiner was unable to locate an online court record related to Bustamante-Sierre. For Cruz-Garcia, online court records show a case filed on Jan. 18 involving one count of misdemeanor battery with a domestic abuse modifier. The court record shows that on March 9, Cruz-Garcia was in custody and appeared in court via video, where it was noted that he was indigent. Cruz-Garcia’s case was assigned to another judge and he was turned over for supervison to Justice Point, a non-profit organization which provides a variety of evidence-based criminal justice programs.

All Cruz-Garcia’s prior court orders, including a no-contact order and no possession of firearms, remained in place, as he was required to attend all future court proceedings. On March 20, the day he was detained by ICE, Cruz-Garcia appeared in family court where a domestic violence restraining order was dismissed. 

Days later in early April, there was a courtroom discussion about Cruz-Garcia having been deported to Mexico. Rather than dismissing the case, as defense attorneys asked, Circuit Court Judge Marshall Murray (serving as a reserve for Judge Rebecca Kiefer) granted a prosecutor’s request for a warrant to be issued, according to online court records. An order to review the dismissal of the case against Cruz-Garcia 60 days from April 2 was also issued. 

Courthouses are not immune from the Trump administration’s deportation efforts. On Jan. 21, ICE was directed to conduct “civil immigration enforcement actions in or near courthouses when they have credible information that leads them to believe the targeted alien(s) is or will be present at a specific location, and where such action is not precluded by laws imposed by the jurisdiction in which the civil immigration enforcement action will take place.” 

Agents are instructed to conduct enforcement actions “in non-public areas of the courthouse” in collaboration with court security staff, and to use “non-public entrances and exits.” Wherever possible, ICE agents should operate “discreetly to minimize their impact on court proceedings,” the directive states. The order also says ICE agents and officers should avoid actions in or near non-criminal courthouses, such as family or small claims court. 

Last week, the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) said in a press statement that it did not participate in the arrests. Although MCSO was aware of the first arrest, the office was not given advance notice of the second arrest. The press release did not name the people who were arrested, and noted that it’s “not uncommon” for law enforcement agencies to search available databases for upcoming court hearings to find targeted individuals. 

The courthouse arrests were widely condemned by community members. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said “an attack on this safe, community-serving space undermines public trust, breeds fear among citizens and staff and disrupts the due process essential to our courts.” Senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin Tim Muth echoed concerns that the arrests would create an atmosphere of fear around the courthouse. “Research by the ACLU has shown that when ICE is known to be active in courthouses, members of the immigrant community are less likely to report crimes, less likely to cooperate with police and prosecutors and less likely to make their court appearances,” said Muth. “Our communities become less safe as a consequence.” 

Activists from the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression also expressed concerns about database sharing between local and federal law enforcement, and called for the courthouse to be a safe space for people to come for legal support, services and to seek justice. Over the weekend, at a rally  protesting policies by the Trump administration and Elon Musk, local immigration activists raised those same concerns. “People will be afraid to come to the courthouse if that is not a protected zone,” said Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera during the protest. “And we know that these local fights are our frontline battles.”

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A group of coal miners watch as President Donald Trump speaks at the White House shortly before signing executive orders on the coal industry on April 8, 2025. (White House livestream)

President Donald Trump signed four executive orders Tuesday aiming to invigorate the U.S. coal industry.

In wide-ranging comments in front of a phalanx of coal miners at the White House, Trump said the orders would revitalize an industry pushed to the brink by Democratic policies that encourage renewable energy.

“This is a very important day to me, because we’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned, despite the fact that it was just about the best, certainly the best in terms of power, real power,” Trump said.

The orders:

• End a moratorium on leasing federal lands for coal mining;
• Remove Biden administration environmental regulations that Trump said slow approvals of new mining projects;
• Prioritize grid security and reliability; and
• Direct the U.S. Justice Department to block states from enforcing their own regulations on coal.

Two of the orders cite increased energy demand for the power-intensive task of artificial intelligence data processing as the rationale for increasing coal production.

Reopening plans for mines in Montana, Wyoming

A press release from the Interior Department, which oversees resource management on public lands, added that one of the orders reopens plans to build mines in Montana and Wyoming, removes regulatory burdens on coal production and lowers royalty rates coal companies owe for production on federal lands.

Environmental groups cautioned against a renewed federal investment in coal and took particular exception to the provision allowing the federal government to undermine state efforts to move away from the sector.

“Reviving or extending coal to power data centers would force working families to subsidize polluting coal on behalf of Big Tech billionaires and despoil our nation’s public lands,” Tyson Slocum, the energy policy director for the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement. “States planning to move to cleaner, cheaper energy sources could be forced to keep old coal plants up and running for years, forcing nearby residents to breathe dirty air and harming the climate.”

In a line that appeared ad-libbed, Trump also promised the orders could not be reversed by a future president.

“We’re going to give a guarantee that the business will not be terminated by the ups and downs of the world of politics,” he said. “We’re going to give a guarantee that it’s not going to happen, so that if somebody comes in, they cannot change it at a whim.”

Trump said he’d thought of the idea “about 15 minutes before” getting on stage at the White House.

‘Beautiful, clean coal’

Trump cast the move as a direct rebuke to his Democratic predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and said it was in service of restoring working-class jobs in states like West Virginia.

“We’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all. And it wasn’t just Biden, it was Obama and others, but we’re doing the exact opposite… We’re going to put the miners back to work.”

A 2024 Biden rule to raise emissions standards on coal plants was unworkable, one of the orders, which reversed the Biden rule, said.

“The Rule requires compliance with standards premised on the application of emissions-control technologies that do not yet exist in a commercially viable form,” the order said. “The Rule therefore raises the unacceptable risk of the shutdown of many coal-fired power plants, eliminating thousands of jobs, placing our electrical grid at risk, and threatening broader, harmful economic and energy security effects.”

With both U.S. senators from West Virginia, Republicans Shelley Moore Capito and Jim Justice, on hand, Trump said the state’s workers rejected Democrats’ vision of transitioning away from their mining identity.

“One thing I learned about the coal miners is that’s what they want to do,” he said. “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue in a different kind of a job, but they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal. That’s what they love to do.”

Environmental groups slam orders

Even before the orders were signed, environmental advocacy groups panned them as a giveaway to the industry and a reckless move away from attention to the climate crisis.

“Trump’s coal orders take his worship of dirty fossil fuels to a gross and disturbingly reckless new level,” Jason Rylander, the legal director of the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said in a written statement. “This is yet another assault on efforts to preserve a livable climate.”

Lena Moffitt, the executive director of environmental group Evergreen Action, said true energy reliability would come from renewable sources.

“Coal is toxic and outdated,” Mofitt said in a statement. “It poisons our air and water, jacks up household energy bills, and is deadly for communities living under the shadow of its smokestacks. If Trump actually cared about meeting rising energy demand, he’d invest in affordable, clean power—not drag us backward to prop up a dying industry.”

Immigration and tariffs

Trump spoke for about 45 minutes and touched on issues beyond energy policy, including his recently enacted tariffs that have rocked world financial markets and the case of a Maryland man erroneously swept up in a deportation operation.

Trump promoted his aggressive immigration policy and referenced the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man who the administration has admitted was mistakenly deported from Maryland to his native El Salvador despite being granted legal protection to remain in the United States.

The administration sent planeloads of Venezuelan nationals to an El Salvador mega-prison last month, accusing them of being members of the gang Tren de Aragua.

Without naming Abrego Garcia, Trump referenced a man sent to El Salvador who was not a member of the Venezuelan gang, but said he was a member of a different Latin American gang. The government has produced no evidence to suggest Abrego Garcia is a gang member.

On tariffs, Trump said the taxes on imported goods were already bringing in billions of dollars daily in new federal revenue and were critical to protect U.S. industries.

“We’ve been ripped off and abused by countries for many years with the tariff situation,” he said. “They’ve used tariffs against us. We didn’t use tariffs against them in any way, but we just didn’t use them of any monumental proportion. And so we are doing it now.”

He did not respond to a shouted question about Republican unease with the worldwide tariffs at the close of the White House event.

President Donald Trump‘s import tariffs that went into effect on April 2 have worldwide implications as they have disrupted most countries’ (including America’s) economies and almost all brands’ plans. The latest to be affected is Renault-owned Alpine, which was set to launch in the US market in 2027 – but now this plan has been put on hold.

Renault will most likely delay its sports car sub-brand introduction in the States as it awaits for the dust from Trump’s tariffs to settle. This is part of the French brand’s decision to put certain projects on ice to reduce costs so as to minimize an economic impact if the trade war between the US and the rest of the world slows down growth, CFO Duncan Minto explained.

More: Alpine’s New 911 Rival Is Hiding Under This Little Known French Racecar 

As Minto told Auto News, the delay is “perfectly normal” under the current circumstances. That’s despite the fact that expanding to the second-largest auto market in the world was key in CEO Luca de Meo’s intention to boost the sports car maker’s revenue to more than €8 billion ($9.1 billion) by 2030. This was, in itself, quite an ambitious goal since, last year, Alpine sold a mere 4,585 vehicles.

While the market for two-door sports cars like the Alpine 110 is shrinking, that of electric cars is expanding – and it so just happened that the brand last June introduced its first-ever EV, the A290 GT, at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It is a Renault 5 E-Tech-based hot hatch with more aggressive styling cues and, in Performance trim, a single electric motor with 217 HP driving the front wheels that’s good enough for a 0-62 mph (0-100 km/h) sprint in 6.4 seconds and a 236-mile range. A less powerful version, simply badged the A290 GT, gets a lower 178 hp output and is one second slower to 62 mph.

This will be followed up by the A390 electric sports crossover that will be unveiled this year and should prove more popular with US buyers. By 2030, Alpine intends to launch five more EVs, so de Meo’s plan for the brand’s rapid increase does make sense. Or rather did, before Trump made good on his promise of an “America First” economic policy and implemented harsh tariffs on imports.