May 15, 2025
ICE arrests Russian national smuggling biological material into Boston ICE
One day after a federal judge scheduled a bail hearing for a Russian scientist arrested for a customs violation in Boston, ICE charged her with criminal smuggling. The charge was filed nearly three months after she was arrested on February 16.
May 14, 2025
U.S. Tells Court It Plans to Deport Scientist to Russia New York Times
The first few times the Trump administration announced its intent to deport foreign scholars, the justification was that the Secretary of State had concluded they supported anti-Israel terrorists and therefore threatened the success of United States foreign policy.
Now the government has expanded its claims of valid reasons for revoking visas and also who could make the decision.
In a case involving a Russian biologist working at Harvard, the Justice Department said Secretary of State Marco Rubio has delegated the authority to revoke visas to all customs agents, and said nothing about damage to US foreign policy objectives.
Russian scientist Kseniia Petrova was stopped at Boston’s Logan Airport February 16 because she did not declare on her customs form that she was carrying frog embryos to Harvard from a laboratory in Paris. She has been detained in Louisiana ever since.
Petrova fled Russia in 2022 because she was in danger of being arrested for protesting the war in Ukraine. The Justice Department said they intend to deport her back to Russia.
Christina Reiss, chief judge of the federal district court in Vermont, said she couldn’t find anywhere in the law that a customs agent has the authority to revoke a visa, or that a customs violation can be sufficient grounds. The Justice Department lawyer said the secretary of state has that authority and delegated it to customs officials.
Reiss scheduled a bail hearing for May 28.
So far, two scholars, Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University and Mohsen Mahdawi of Columbia University, have been freed on bail by Vermont district court judges. But the government’s efforts to deport them are continuing. Another Columbia scholar, Mahmoud Khalil, remains in Louisiana. All three have been vocal in criticizing Israel’s actions in Palestine. The government says they support Hamas but has offered no evidence to support that claim.
Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff to President Trump, has said that if judges don’t “do the right thing,” the administration may revoke the right of prisoners to seek a writ of habeas corpus. A writ of habeas corpus forces the government to argue in court that it has the right to keep someone locked up.
May 9, 2025
Top White House adviser Stephen Miller says 'we're actively looking at' suspending due process for migrants NBC News
After federal courts freed two students imprisoned by the Trump administration because of their pro-Palestinian views, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said the administration is “actively looking at” trying to eliminate court review of such cases.
Miller said the administration may suspend “habeas corpus,” a nearly 900-year-old legal principle that gives prisoners the right to try to persuade a court that the government had no right to jail them.
Both Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk were freed under habeas corpus.
In both cases, the government can still try to deport them, but can’t keep them locked up in the meantime.
Miller said the Constitution allows for suspending habeas corpus if there is an invasion. “A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not,” he said. Miller did not say whether the Khalil and Ozturk cases were the reason the administration was interested in suspending habeas corpus.
The Constitution provides that habeas corpus can not be suspended unless there is an invasion or a rebellion and keeping habeas corpus endangers public safety. This clause is in Article I of the Constitution in the section that lists restrictions on the powers of Congress. The only time a President has suspended habeas corpus without asking Congress to do it was at the start of the Civil War, when Congress was not in session, and President Abraham Lincoln didn’t wait for them to come back. He later got Congress to approve.
May 7, 2025
A Trump admin effort to deport immigrants to Libya would ‘clearly violate’ court order, judge says Politico
The Trump administration was reportedly set to deport East Asian immigrants to Libya on Wednesday, but a federal judge warned that such a move would clearly violate his earlier ban on expelling people from the country without due process.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy had already issued an injunction forbidding ICE from deporting people without due process, but the government sent two groups to El Salvador anyway. Government lawyers claimed they didn’t violate the injunction because the Defense Department handled the deportations, not ICE. Murphy then expanded his order to forbid ICE from turning over immigrants to other branches of the government in order to get them deported.
Meanwhile, the two governments that control the eastern and western parts of Libya both said they wouldn’t accept deportation flights from the United States.
May 5, 2025
Spy Agencies Do Not Think Venezuela Directs Gang, Declassified Memo Shows New York Times
A memo released under the Freedom of Information Act says the U.S. intelligence community does not believe the Tren de Aragua gang is controlled or directed by the Venezuelan government.
President Trump claimed in an executive order that the Venezuelan government does control the gang. He had to make that claim to be able to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelans to an El Salvador prison without trials or any presentation of evidence against them.
The law allows for detention or deportation only when a foreign country is at war with or invading the United States. Trump claimed the gang is mounting an invasion, but he also had to claim that the invasion was directed by a foreign government.
However, the memo says the U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that “the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with [Tren De Aragua] and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”
May 4, 2025
Trump says judges he appoints won't demand deportation 'trials' ABC News
President Trump doubled down on his plans to deport “millions” of undocumented immigrants without due process in an exchange with reporters on Air Force One.
He said about appointing judges, "Well, we're putting them in rapidly. We're trying to get very good ones.
“We need judges that are not going to be demanding trials for every single illegal immigrant. We have millions of people that have come in here illegally, and we can't have a trial for every single person. That would be millions of trials."
He said he thinks the Supreme Court will back him up. "So, [immigrants] come into our country illegally, and then we're supposed to take weeks, I guess, and months to have a trial on every criminal that we have, murderers all over the country. I don't think the Supreme Court will stand for that. I can't believe it, because, you know what, if they do, we're not going to have a country,“ Trump said.
The fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution says “no person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Donald Trump tells Meet the Press that due process for all the people he wants to deport would take too long NBC News
Excerpt: PRES. DONALD TRUMP: [W]e have thousands of people that we want to take out, and we have some judges that want everybody to go to court —
KRISTEN WELKER of NBC: Some of them you appointed, sir, including three on the Supreme Court
TRUMP: [They] change. I mean, it’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable how that happens, but they do change. …
[I]f the courts don’t allow us to take people out, if we had to have a court case every single — think of it. …[W]e have millions of people. If you have millions of court cases, figure two weeks a court case, it would be 300 years.
… We have thousands of people that are some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth. … And I was elected to get them the hell out of here and the courts are holding me from doing it.
KRISTEN WELKER: But even given those numbers …, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?
PRES. DONALD TRUMP: I don’t know. … I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.
May 1, 2025
Judge bars deportations of Venezuelans from South Texas under the Alien Enemies Act Associated Press
A federal judge in Texas has issued the first permanent injunction against President Trump’s use of a 1798 law to deport Venezuelans without due process.
President Trump declared last March that the Tren de Aragua gang is connected to the Venezuelan government and is invading the United States, making its members deportable under the law, which was last used during World War II to intern Japanese residents.
Trump officials have already sent hundreds of Venezuelan men to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process. The Supreme Court later said said that people arrested under the law must be given a realistic opportunity to contest their deportation.
But Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr’s ruling is the first to say that Trump can not use the 1798 law to deport members of the gang. Invoking the law to deport gang members, he said, “exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”
His ruling applies only to Rodriguez’s district in South Texas. The Trump administration is expected to appeal.
Apr 28, 2025
A Mother and Father Were Deported. What Happened to Their Toddler? New York Times
Attorneys dispute Trump officials' claim that deported moms willingly took their U.S. citizen childrenNBC News
In the last few days, news has surfaced of child victims of the Trump administration’s drive to deport people without due process.
In one case, a two-year-old child born in the United States was flown to Honduras with his mother after an ICE agent cut off a phone call as the child’s father was trying to give the mother a lawyer’s phone number.
In another case, a mother wasn’t allowed to speak with attorneys or family members before she was deported with her two U.S.-born children, even though ICE knew one of them had Stage 4 cancer. A federal judge has scheduled a hearing May 17 in that case. The judge, appointed by Donald Trump in 2017, says he has a “strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
And the latest report: According to the New York Times, a two-year-old girl was put in foster care while her mother was first detained and then deported to Venezuela. Her father was sent to prison in El Salvador. The girl’s grandmother in Venezuela is calling on the United States to give her back to her mother.
The Department of Homeland Security says the girl is in foster care in the United States. They say she was removed from her parents for her own “safety and welfare.”
Her grandmother says the toddler has had four foster homes. The grandmother has spoken with some of the foster parents, who told her the girl is “sweet” and “independent” for a toddler. But they also noted that the girl cried when she moved among families and seemed confused about who she belonged to.
Apr 25, 2025
Trump administration reverses abrupt terminations of foreign students’ US visa registrations Politico
How a Trump administration crackdown on foreign students unraveled Politico
The Trump administration has restored the student visa registrations of thousands of foreign students studying in the United States who had minor — and often dismissed — legal infractions.
The Justice Department announced the wholesale reversal in federal court after 20 days, more than 100 lawsuits and 50 restraining orders from dozens of federal judges.
The government said it is now developing a procedure for making decisions on visa revocations in the future. A government official said that until that policy is issued, no students will have their visas terminated “solely based on” criminal history checks that had flagged misdemeanor charges and dismissed cases.
The new policy does not seem to affect students whose visas were canceled for pro-Palestinian activities.
What appears to have happened is that the ICE linked a list of all foreign students with an FBI database that records all encounters with law enforcement, no matter how trivial. If a student was found on the FBI database, the student was removed from the list of foreign students authorized to be in the United States. One student was apparently removed because he had once been cited by police for driving too slowly.
Universities told students they could no longer go to classes or do research work that had been authorized as long as they were in good standing.
In courtroom after courtroom, Justice Department lawyers said they didn’t know whether that meant the student was now in the country illegally, because ICE wouldn’t tell them.
One judge called the situation Kafkaesque. Another resorted to quantum physics. “There is a yes or no answer here. … This is not Schrodinger’s visa,” said U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes. “Either he’s here legally or he’s not here legally.”
Apr 24, 2025
Trump Education Department efforts to get DEI out of schools hit roadblock Chalkbeat
The administration’s efforts to make all states adopt Trump’s policies are on hold, but only temporarily, and some states have already agreed.
The federal Department of Education told all state education departments they must certify that they were carrying out the federal policies, which include stopping virtually all affirmative action efforts. States that refuse to go along would lose their federal education funding.
Three different federal district courts today ordered the administration not to hold up the funds. The three court orders are slightly different, but in sum, they cover the entire country and essentially freeze any effort by the Education Department to carry out its threat.
At least 16 states had announced they would refuse to certify their agreement with the Trump interpretation of racial discrimination law. But another 16 states and Puerto Rico have already signed.
Apr 23, 2025
Trump Says Undocumented Immigrants Shouldn’t Get Trials Before Deportation New York Times
“I hope we get cooperation from the courts, because we have thousands of people that are ready to go out and you can’t have a trial for all of these people,” Mr. Trump said.
He claimed that the “very bad people” he was removing from the country included killers, drug dealers and the mentally ill.
“We’re getting them out, and a judge can’t say, ‘No, you have to have a trial,’” Mr. Trump said. “The trial is going to take two years. We’re going to have a very dangerous country if we’re not allowed to do what we’re entitled to do.”
In a social media post, he wrote, “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”
“We cannot give everyone a trial.”
– President Trump
“If you want to shred the Constitution, just say so.”
– Rep. Jonathan L. Jackson, D-Illinois
Apr 19, 2025
Supreme Court blocks, for now, new deportations under 18th century wartime lawAssociated Press
The Supreme Court temporarily banned the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelans from a detention center in Texas after a Trump-appointed district court judge refused to do it and the Court of Appeals for that area did not act fast enough – ACLU lawyers said some of the Venezuelans had already been loaded onto buses, presumably to take them to an airport.
Two justices dissented from the decision, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.
Trump officials claim the detainees belong to a Venezuelan criminal gang, and that the gang is a “hybrid state” which is invading the United States in collaboration with the government of Venezuela. They say that allows the U.S. government to detain and deport them under a 1798 law, which applies to “Alien Enemies” belonging to nations that are invading the United States.
The Supreme Court had earlier ruled that people accused under this law have the right to judicial review, but that they have to go to a district court in the part of the country where they are being confined. Since then, several district courts have forbidden the government from deporting people without due process. The government has been moving prisoners to districts where there is no ban.
Trump Officials Blame Mistake for Setting Off Confrontation With Harvard New York Times
It was all a mistake! Or was it?
Trump administration officials say the administration didn’t intend to send last Friday’s hostile letter to Harvard University, which prompted university leaders to embark on a court battle against government control.
But it’s not clear whether the mistake was in the content of the letter or just the timing.
Before the letter was sent, Trump officials and Harvard lawyers had been working on a deal.
Apr 18, 2025
U.S. intelligence contradicts Trump’s justification for mass deportationsWashington Post
The National Intelligence Council, representing the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determined in a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United States by the prison gang Tren de Aragua.
President Trump’s claim that the gang is invading at the behest of the Venezuelan government is central to his administration’s claim that they can deport members of the gang without due process. The 1798 “Alien Enemies Act” allows the president to detain or remove “alien enemies” of nations that are at war with the United States or mounting or threatening an invasion.
The Alien Enemies act, however, does not give the government authority to detain or deport people without due process. The fifth amendment to the Constitution reads, “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Judge says detained Tufts student must be transferred from Louisiana to VermontPolitico
US senator returns from El Salvador trip, says Abrego Garcia case is about far more than one manAssociated Press
Deportation updates:
Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University graduate student and Fulbright Scholar abducted from the street near her home on March 25 and sent to Louisiana:
A federal district court judge in Vermont ordered the government to bring her to Vermont by May 1 for a bail hearing May 9 and a hearing on her case May 22. By the time Ozturk’s lawyer found out she had been arrested, ICE had taken her to Vermont, but not yet to Louisiana, so a Boston district court judge decided the Vermont court should have jurisdiction.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran refugee and Maryland resident sent to a Salvadoran prison by an “administrative error”:
Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen went to El Salvador, and was finally allowed to talk with Garcia, who has been moved from the prison where alleged members of a Venezuelan gang are being held and moved to a prison with better conditions. The Trump administration insists Garcia is a member of another gang but has produced very little evidence of that. Trump officials say he will never come back to America, despite a unanimous Supreme Court order to the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return.
Apr 17, 2025
Supreme Court keeps hold on Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship but sets May arguments Associated Press
The Supreme Court has set May 15 as the date for oral arguments on whether the Trump administration can overturn the long-established principle that, with few exceptions, any child born in the United States is a citizen.
The Fourteenth Amendment says everyone born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a citizen. It was adopted after the Civil War and was intended mostly to ensure equal rights for freed slaves. The Trump administration claims that undocumented immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. In the past, that clause was taken to mean foreign diplomats.
Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship was blocked by three federal district court judges who extended their rulings to the whole country. The Trump administration didn’t ask the court to rule on the constitutionality of the executive order, but just whether the district court orders should cover the whole country.
Conservative judge blasts Trump administration’s ‘shocking’ conduct in Abrego Garcia case Politico
The case of a Salvadoran immigrant deported by “error” seems headed back to the Supreme Court after a three-judge Appeals Court panel rebuffed the Trump administration’s latest effort to dodge a district court order.
District Court Judge Paula Xinis has demanded that federal officials testify under oath so she can find out whether they obeyed her order that they try to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a notorious Salvadoran prison, an order that was backed by the Supreme Court.
The government asked the Appeals Court to overrule Judge Xinis.
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III delivered a blistering rejection. The administration is “asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” he wrote. Wilkinson is a prominent conservative appointed by President Ronald Reagan.
The Trump administration insists Garcia is a member of a criminal Salvadoran gang, but they have presented almost no evidence of that and they do not claim they sent him to the prison because he was a gang member. They say he was deported due to an “administrative error.”
Apr 15, 2025
IRS making plans to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status CNN
The Trump administration is stepping up its attacks on Harvard University. CNN reports that the Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind the university’s tax-exempt non-profit status, which allows wealthy donors to avoid taxes on their contributions. There’s been no official announcement yet.
According to Politico, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threatened to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students, who now make up 27 percent of the student body. “Harvard bending the knee to antisemitism — driven by its spineless leadership — fuels a cesspool of extremist riots and threatens our national security,” she said.
Trump Just Blew up Own Deportation Excuse With Columbia Student Arrest The New Republic
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student arrested April 14 because Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he is a danger to United States foreign policy, has a record of active opposition to anti-Semitism.
Mahdawi, born in a West Bank refugee camp, is a green card holder and co-founder of the Palestinian Student Union at Columbia University.
The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Mahdawi worked to create dialogue and understanding between Israeli and Palestinian students at Columbia.
In 2023, the CBS News program Sixty Minutes asked him about an incident in which someone outside a pro-Palestine walkout at Columbia yelled, “Death to the Jews!”
His response: “I told him, ‘You don’t represent us. … To be antisemitic is unjust, is unjust. And the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’”
Apr 14, 2025
El Salvador won’t return wrongly deported Maryland man Politico
The president of El Salvador says he won’t return a Salvadoran immigrant whom the United States government sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison because of an “administrative error.”
“The question is preposterous,” President Nayib Bukele told a reporter, sitting next to President Trump in the White House. He said he doesn’t have the power to send Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia back.
The U. S. government sent Garcia to El Salvador and is paying Bukele to keep him imprisoned.
The Supreme Court has ordered the administration to “facilitate” Garcia’s return. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the U.S. government would send a plane to “facilitate” his trip – if El Salvador wanted to give him up. Neither El Salvador nor the United States has charged Garcia with any crime although U. S. officials claim he is a member of a criminal gang. He denies that and they have not presented any evidence beyond the claim by an informant that Garcia was a member of a gang branch in New York. Garcia has never lived in New York.
Trump thanks Bukele for prisons and tells Americans: You’re nextThe [London] Times
President Trump says he would like to ship U.S. citizens who are criminals to prisons in El Salvador, although he said the administration would first have to see whether that would be legal.
“They’re great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games,” Trump said. “I’d like to go a step further [than sending non-citizens there]. I said it to Pam [Bondi, the attorney-general], I don’t know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws.
“But we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters. I’d like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country.”
Harvard University rejects Trump administration demands to change policiesPolitico
Trump administration freezes more than $2 billion in grants to HarvardThe Hill
Harvard University has rejected Trump administration demands that would give the federal government control over large areas of university policy.
Within hours, the administration announced it would freeze about $2.2 billion in multi-year grants.
Harvard President Garber announced the decision to resist in an open letter to the university community. The Trump ultimatum, Garber said, “violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority.”
The Trump administration accuses Harvard of racial and religious discrimination by maintaining diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and by not protecting Jewish students from intimidation by students who are pro-Palestine.
In recent weeks, Harvard seemed to be trying to forestall intervention by the Trump administration by preemptively firing the two leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, who were accused of being too pro-Palestinian, and by adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism, according to which some kinds of criticism of Israel are inherently antisemitic.
But the Trump administration pushed ahead anyway, saying nearly $9 billion in research and other federal funds would be withheld unless Harvard agreed to a wide range of steps including:
Eliminating diversity as a consideration in admissions,
Instituting new disciplinary measures for student protesters, and
Decertifying pro-Palestinian student groups.
Harvard’s lawyers sent federal officials a formal rejection of the demands. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” they said.
Apr 13, 2025
No evidence linking Tufts student to antisemitism or terrorism, State Dept. office found Washington Post
A few days before masked ICE agents abducted Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, a State Department memo stated that no evidence had been found that she had engaged in antisemitic activity or made public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization. The memo recommended that the government switch its legal justification for arresting her from a law that required evidence to a different law that seemed to rely entirely on the discretion of the Secretary of State.
The memo said Ozturk should not be notified that her visa had been revoked “[d]ue to ongoing ICE operations security.”
Ozturk remains in a Louisiana detention center while a federal district court judge in Vermont decides whether that district has jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the Tufts Democrats and Republicans wrote a joint op-ed in the university newspaper, calling on the government to present any evidence they have to justify revoking her student visa. They said the article that Ozturk co-authored about divestment from Israel was no threat to the national security of the United States.
Apr 11, 2025
27 US Jewish groups file support for detained anti-Israel Tufts student Times of Israel
The groups, which include the liberal Zionist lobbying organization J Street, filed a legal brief in support of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student who was seized on the street near her home by masked ICE agents and quickly taken to a Louisiana detention facility.
So far, the only reason given for deporting Ozturk was an op-ed piece in which she called Israeli actions in Gaza “genocide” and supported divestment from Israel.
The Jewish groups wrote that they don’t necessarily agree with what Ozturk said but they support her right to say it.
“Arresting, detaining, and potentially deporting Ozturk does not assist in eradicating antisemitism. Nor was that the government’s apparent purpose,” the brief said. “The government instead appears to be exploiting Jewish Americans’ legitimate concerns about antisemitism as a pretext for undermining core pillars of American democracy, the rule of law, and the fundamental rights of free speech and academic debate on which this nation was built.”
Trump moves to strip Maine of federal education funding in unprecedented tacticChalkbeat
The Department of Education announced it is starting an administrative process to stop federal education funding that is allocated to Maine through a formula adopted by Congress. The department said Maine is discriminating against girls by allowing transgender girls to compete in school sports against girls who were assigned female at birth.
Five Major Law Firms Cut $600 Million Deals With TrumpBloomberg Law
Five more of the world’s biggest law firms have settled with President Trump, agreeing to make available a total of $600 million in pro bono legal representation to be used as Trump directs. That brings the total to nine big law firms and $940 million. Each of the firms has some connection to a past legal case against Trump.
Judge permits Trump administration to deport Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil NBC News
An immigration judge in Louisiana said the Trump administration could deport Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil based on a statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that his presence in the United States is contrary to the foreign policy interests of the United States. The judge said the law does not require Rubio to back up his statement. According to the New York Times, immigration Judge Jamee Comans said he did not have the authority to make a judgement about the constitutionality of the law.
Khalil’s lawyers have until April 23 to appeal. He also has a separate case pending in a New Jersey federal district court where they can raise the constitutionality issue.
Khalil is a permanent resident of the United States with a Green Card.
The Department of Homeland Security announced a new task force on Wednesday to monitor the social media activity of immigrants, including 1.5 million foreign students, for antisemitism, looking for potential reasons to deport them.
Judge Orders Daily Updates on Trump Administration’s Efforts to Retrieve Wrongly Deported ManTime
A federal district court judge ordered the Trump administration to provide sworn updates every day on what it is doing to return a man the government says it deported to a notorious Salvadoran prison due to an “administrative error.”
Judge Paula Xinis has repeatedly clashed with government lawyers who insist that the court can’t order them to return Kilmar Abrego García, a refugee from El Salvador, because that involves foreign policy. The Supreme Court ordered the government to “facilitate” the man’s return and to tell the court what it is doing about that. But the Supreme Court said the court can’t make the government “effectuate” the return – that is, make it happen – because that infringes on the president’s right to conduct foreign policy.
The government claims Garcia is a member of a Salvadoran gang, MS-13, but an immigration judge ruled in 2019 that there was no credible evidence supporting that claim. The judge said Garcia does have credible reasons to fear gang violence if he returned to El Salvador.
Apr 10, 2025
Supreme Court upholds order directing Trump officials to return wrongly deported man Washington Post
In its first significant challenge to the Trump administration, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration must “facilitate” the return of a Salvadoran immigrant, Kilmar Abrego García, whom the government admitted they sent to a Salvadoran prison through an “administrative error.”
Although the government admitted he shouldn’t have been deported, they said they were under no obligation to bring him back because he was now in the custody of a foreign government. They said the district court judge who ordered them to return the prisoner to the United States was interfering with American foreign policy.
The Supreme Court order was unsigned. No dissent was noted.
The three liberal justices wrote that the Trump administration’s position “implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
Although the ruling was favorable to Garcia, it does not necessarily mean he will come home. The count only ordered the government to try. They left open the possibility that the government would ask for his release, El Salvador would refuse, and then the Trump administration would claim that further efforts would interfere with foreign policy.
Trump border czar’s town stood up for 3 kids detained by ICE — and wonWashington Post
ICE arrested a mother and her three children from Trump border czar Tom Homan’s hometown, even though they were in the middle of a court process to get legal status. ICE quickly took them to Texas, but the town rallied to their defense. Faced with a PR fiasco, ICE backed down.
Pressed for evidence against Mahmoud Khalil, government cites its power to deport people for beliefsAssociated Press
The Trump administration told a federal judge in Louisiana that a non-citizen can be deported “if the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that the alien’s presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences…” and the “reasonable ground” can be “the alien’s past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful.”
This may be the first time the government has claimed they can deport you for what they expect you will believe in the future.
The judge had demanded that the government lay out its evidence for deporting Mahmoud Khalil, the green card holder who served as a negotiator and spokesperson for pro-Palestine demonstrators at Columbia University.
In response, the government filed this document.
Apr 9, 2025
Judges bar US use of Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans held in parts of Texas and New York Associated Press
The Supreme Court has ruled that Venezuelans who want to keep the Trump administration from shipping them to a notorious prison in El Salvador have to file their appeal in the federal court that covers the area where ICE is holding them. So the ACLA went to courts in Texas and New York State, and judges temporarily blocked deportation for five individuals. According to their lawyers, the men were identified as gang members by physical attributes using the “Alien Enemy Validation Guide,” in which an ICE agent tallies points by relying on tattoos, hand gestures, symbols, logos, graffiti, and manner of dress.
President Trump claims the gang is a “hybrid state” invading the United States. He has invoked a 1798 law that allows the president to detain or expel “alien enemies” if a foreign country is at war with the United States or is invading.
An earlier article about these deportations is summarized below under April 7.