Trump signs orders stepping up immigration crackdown and ‘unleashing America’s law enforcement’ – as it happened

The president signed orders ramping up the administration’s crackdown on immigration:

• “Protecting American communities from criminal aliens”, which targets sanctuary cities that the administration believes aren’t cooperating enough with immigration crackdowns.

• “Strengthening and unleashing America’s law enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent citizens”, which provides legal defense for police accused of misconduct.

• “Enforcing commonsense rules of the road for America’s truck drivers”, which requires professional truck drivers to speak English.

Prosecutors filed charges against Mario Bustamante Leiva on Monday. He was charged with federal robbery and wire fraud for stealing US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s purse while she was dining at a restaurant on Easter Sunday, according to the 34-page charging document.

Bustamante Leiva, a 49-year-old Chilean national, was arrested and taken into custody in Washington DC on Saturday after an investigation by the US Secret Service and the Metropolitan police department.

The charging documents say that cameras recorded Bustamante Leiva sitting at a table near Noem (Noem is not directly named, she’s identified as “Victim-3”). He then allegedly edged his chair back toward her and discreetly nabbed her purse, which was by her feet.

Noem’s purse reportedly had $3,000 in cash and her keys, driver’s license, passport and homeland security badge. Noem posted on Twitter/X yesterday that a suspect had been arrested and he “is a career criminal who has been in our country illegally for years”. Bustamante Leiva’s immigration status is unclear.

Donald Trump is putting together a council to review the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). In a Truth Social post, the president said that this council will “work hard to fix a terribly broken System”. Fema’s mission is to help Americans struck by disasters, such as floods, hurricanes and fires.

Trump said the council will be made up of “Top Experts in their fields” and who are “Highly Respected by their peers”. The people he’s appointed include secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem, Texas governor Greg Abbott and Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin. He said they will “return power to State Emergency Managers” and “MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN”.

Trump denied federal aid to Arkansas after the state was ravaged by tornadoes in March. The storms killed more than 40 people. Governor Sarah Huckabee, a Republican, and other Arkansas lawmakers have since publicly asked Trump to reconsider his decision and Huckabee sent an appeal of the decision on 18 April.

The Peace Corps is offering various staff a second “fork in the road” buyout, according to a source familiar with the matter. Allison Greene, the CEO of Peace Corps, sent an email to staff on Monday with an update about the Department of Government Efficiency’s (Doge) assessment of the agency.

Greene said to expect “significant restructuring efforts” at Peace Corps headquarters, according to the email seen by the Guardian. Starting on April 28 and going through May 6, direct hire and expert staff are being offered a second Deferred Resignation Program, what Doge has referred to as a “fork in the road” buyout. Those staff will receive an email from the Chief Human Capital Officer and “are strongly encouraged to consider this option”. Some “mission-critical” positions may not be eligible for the Deferred Resignation Program.

A Peace Corps spokesperson confirmed on Monday that Doge began an assessment of the agency’s operations earlier this month and the new Deferred Resignation buyout has begun.

Doge started its work at Peace Corps headquarters at the beginning of April. Bridget Youngs, a Doge representative, requested access to the agency’s financial records and Doge has continued work at the agency throughout the month.

Greene wrote in her email to staff that the Peace Corps will “continue to recruit, place, and train Volunteers”. The Peace Corps has had more than 240,000 volunteers since its inception in 1961, when it was created by John F Kennedy. The agency’s mandate has been to send volunteers to other countries to work on public health, economic development and education projects.

House Republicans have proposed allocating tens of billions of dollars to pay for border wall construction, in an effort to make good on a contentious campaign promise that dates back to Donald Trump’s first term in office.

The moves come as Republicans set to work this week on writing a massive bill expected to pay for many of the president’s priorities, including mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, extending tax cuts enacted during his first term, and potentially ending the taxation of tips, overtime and Social Security payments. To pay for it, the GOP is mulling major cuts to federal safety net programs including Medicaid and the food assistance program known as SNAP.

House committees are now beginning to write sections of the bill that deal with programs under their jurisdictions, and the homeland security committee has proposed allocating $46.5bn to border wall construction, including more than 700 miles of new wall, 900 miles of river barriers, and the replacement of 141 miles of vehicle and pedestrian barriers. While it did not say where the barriers would be built, most would likely go to the southern border with Mexico, which Trump has long wanted to seal with a full-length wall. Many Democrats oppose the barrier as ineffective and draconian, and a previous standoff over funding for the wall in late 2018 led to the longest government shutdown in US history.

In addition, the homeland security committee will propose billions more in spending to increase surveillance and inspections at US borders, and to hire 3,000 more Border Patrol officers and 5,000 customs officers.

The bill faces what is expected to be a long road to enactment, with some Republicans uneasy over cutting safety net programs or tax credits first implemented under Joe Biden.

• Donald Trump is expected to sign two new executive orders this afternoon related to immigration, according to the White House, including one targeting so-called “sanctuary cities” and another the administration says will strengthen law enforcement. Speaking to reporters on Monday morning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that one of the orders will aim to “strengthen and unleash America’s law enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent citizens”. The second order will target so-called “sanctuary cities”, she said, and will direct the attorney general and secretary of homeland security to publish a list of state and local jurisdictions that Leavitt said “obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration laws”. Story here.

• Trump this morning threatened a veto of the bipartisan Senate resolution intended to cancel out the emergency powers underpinning his sweeping global “Liberation Day” tariffs. The OMB sent a statement of administration policy to congressional offices this morning, vowing a veto and saying the resolution “would undermine the administration’s efforts to address the unusual and extraordinary threats to national security and economic stability, posed by the conditions reflected in the large and persistent annual US goods trade deficit”. The Senate is set to vote on the measure this week, led by Democratic senator Ron Wyden and Republican Rand Paul.

• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials are seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide with a view to deporting them or pursuing criminal cases against them or adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US, according to sources and an Ice document. The moves are sparking fears of a crackdown on such children and prompting alarm about what one critic called “backdoor family separation”. Story here.

• Trump issued a statement overnight on the eve of Canada’s election, again threatening the country’s independent sovereignty, and describing the border between the two nations as an “artificially drawn line from many years ago”. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said “Good luck to the great people of Canada” on the eve of the election, and then urged them to become the 51st state of the US, claiming it would bring tax cuts, and increased military power. You can follow all our coverage of Canada’s election day here.

• Treasury secretary Scott Bessent and top GOP negotiators, including House speaker Mike Johnson and Senate majority leader John Thune, are due to meet at 4pm ET today at the Capitol, likely to discuss the next steps for the GOP’s party-line budget megabill to kickstart Trump’s domestic agenda. Now that Congress has returned, just how riven the party is over spending will become clear in the weeks to come, my colleague Chris Stein reports.

• Gerry Connolly, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives’ key oversight committee, announced he will not run for re-election and resign his committee post, citing a return of the cancer for which he previously been successfully treated. His retirement from the top leadership position paves the way for generational change on the influential panel, after he beat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the seat last autumn. Story here.

Trump this morning threatened a veto of the bipartisan Senate resolution intended to cancel out the emergency powers underpinning his sweeping global “Liberation Day” tariffs, the Daily Caller reports.

The Office of Management and Budget sent a statement of administration policy to congressional offices this morning, vowing a veto and saying the resolution “would undermine the administration’s efforts to address the unusual and extraordinary threats to national security and economic stability, posed by the conditions reflected in the large and persistent annual US goods trade deficit”.

Trump declared a national emergency on 2 April in order to impose tariffs in response to various trade practices including “the large and persistent annual US goods trade deficit”. Congress has the power to force a vote on terminating these emergency powers, subject to a simple majority vote in both chambers.

The Senate is set to vote on the measure as early as this week, led by Democratic senator Ron Wyden and Republican Rand Paul.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials are seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide with a view to deporting them or pursuing criminal cases against them or adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US, according to sources and an Ice document.

The moves are sparking fears of a crackdown on such children and prompting alarm about what one critic called “backdoor family separation”.

In recent months, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Ice have begun engaging in “welfare checks” on children who arrived in the US alone, usually via the US-Mexico border, to “ensure that they are safe and not being exploited”, according to a DHS spokesperson.

Although DHS is characterizing the welfare visits as benevolent, an internal Ice document accessed by the National Immigration Project advocacy group and then shared shows Ice is also seeking out children who came into the US alone as immigrants – and their US-based sponsors – for immigration enforcement purposes and/or to pursue criminal prosecutions. The recent operations and document confirm a February report from Reuters, that the Trump administration has directed Ice to track down and deport this group.

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent and top GOP negotiators, including House speaker Mike Johnson and Senate majority leader John Thune, are due to meet at 4pm ET today at the Capitol, likely to discuss the next steps for the GOP’s party-line budget megabill to kickstart Trump’s domestic agenda, Politico reports.

Now that Congress has returned, just how riven the party is over spending will become clear in the weeks to come, my colleague Chris Stein reports. In particular, he highlights, Republicans must set to work crafting the bill amid an economy made newly precarious by Trump’s on-again, off-again approach to tariff policy.

The “big, beautiful bill” envisioned by Trump will extend tax cuts enacted during his first term, fund more border defenses and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and potentially include his vow to end the taxation of tips, overtime and social security payments. To pay for it, the GOP is eyeing dramatic reductions in government spending, and has targeted social safety net programs relied on by tens of millions of Americans.

But even with the cuts, experts say this could be one of the steepest increases to the federal deficit in recent US history – a prospect which has tested the resolve the Republican party’s relatively small congressional majorities. While many lawmakers insist that government spending must be reined in to manage the country’s budget deficit at a time of high borrowing costs, small groups of lawmakers have already registered their opposition to dismantling programs they say help their constituents.

Bill Hoagland, a former top budget adviser to Republican senators who is now a senior vice-president at the Bipartisan Policy Center thinktank, told Chris:

The budget resolution that they adopted is unique, I would say, somewhat unprecedented. What they’ve done here is keep the ball moving by kicking the can further down the road and leaving unsettled a number of differences, particularly on the spending side.

Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia has announced he is stepping down from the ranking member Democratic seat on the powerful oversight and government reform committee, owing to ill health.

In a statement shared on X, Connolly said his oesophageal cancer had returned and that he would also be leaving Congress at the end of the term.

As Politico notes, Connolly’s retirement from the top leadership position paves the way for generational change on the influential panel, after he beat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the seat last autumn.

Donald Trump’s appointees at the Department of Justice have removed all of the senior civil servants working as managers in the department’s voting section and directed attorneys to dismiss all active cases, according to people familiar with the matter, part of a broader attack on the department’s civil rights division.

The moves come less than a month after Trump ally Harmeet Dhillon was confirmed to lead the civil rights division, created in 1958 and referred to as the “crown jewel” of the justice department. In an unusual move, Dhillon sent out new “mission statements” to the department’s sections that made it clear the civil rights division was shifting its focus from protecting the civil rights of marginalized people to supporting Trump’s priorities.

Tamar Hagler, the chief of the voting section, which is responsible for enforcing federal laws designed to prevent voter discrimination, and five top career managers were all reassigned last week to the complaint adjudication office, a little-known part of the department that handles employee complaints, according to people familiar with the matter. A career line attorney in the section has also been reassigned to the complaint adjudication office.

The voting section had seven managers in January overseeing around 30 attorneys. Of the two other managers, one retired and another was detailed to work on an antisemitism task force.

Political appointees have also instructed career employees to dismiss all of their active cases without meeting with them and offering a rationale – a significant break with the department’s practices and norms.

The justice department did not return a request for comment.

Taken together, the changes have raised significant alarm about what the future of voting rights enforcement will look like for the federal government at a moment when states continue to pass restrictive voting measures.

It also raises concern about future political interference. The justice department’s civil rights division has long had resources and a credibility that private plaintiffs can’t match. And much of that reputation is driven by the fact that the day-to-day work is carried out by non-political, career staff, whose work is supposed to be apolitical.

Asked by The Atlantic (paywall), if his second presidential term feels different to his first, Trump said it did.

The first time, I had two things to do — run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world.

The piece goes on:

For weeks, we’d been hearing from both inside and outside the White House that the president was having more fun than he’d had in his first term. “The first time, the first weeks, it was just ‘Let’s blow this place up,’ ” Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and an ally of the president’s, had told us. “This time, he’s blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye.”

When we put this observation to Trump over the phone, he agreed. “I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,” he said. “You know, what I do is such serious stuff.”

Texas military base Fort Bliss could be ready “in the very near future” to hold migrant detainees, Tom Homan says.

“Fort Bliss is being ramped up,” Homan says, adding that he did not have an exact timetable for when it might be ready to hold migrants.

Fort Bliss is a US army base headquartered in El Paso, Texas, but extends into New Mexico.

Asked about Trump’s meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the weekend, Leavitt says Trump is “frustrated with both leaders of both countries” (Zelenskyy and Putin), but remains optimistic he can strike a deal.

Both leaders need to come to the negotiating table to end the war, Leavitt says. She notes that Putin had offered a temporary ceasefire on Monday, but reiterates that Trump has made it clear that he is seeking a permanent ceasefire.

Trump will sign executive orders law and order, and another on sanctuary cities, Leavitt announces.

The first will “strengthen and unleash America’s law enforcement to pursue criminals and protect citizens”, she says.

The second is “centered around protecting American communities from criminal aliens, and it will direct the attorney general and secretary of homeland security to publish a list of state and local jurisdictions that have shucked the enforcement of federal immigration laws”.

These executive orders will bring the number signed by Trump so far this presidency to more than 140 in 100 days, approaching the number signed by Joe Biden’s entire term, Leavitt notes.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is to hold a press conference shortly with Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, expected to focus on a key administration talking point – the dramatic fall in illegal border crossings in the last three months. I’ll bring you all the key lines here.

Ahead of the briefing, the White House has lined the driveway with posters of illegal aliens that have been arrested for violent crimes.

Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Monday directing the attorney general and the secretary of homeland security to identify within a month the cities and states that are not complying with federal immigration laws, a White House official said Monday.

Last week, a federal judge blocked Trump’s administration from withholding federal funding from more than a dozen so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that have declined to cooperate with Trump’s hardline immigration crackdown.

“President Trump plans to sign an executive order on Monday escalating his battle against Democratic-led states and cities that don’t fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities,” a White House official said.

The order was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Trump’s schedule calls for him to sign executive orders at 5pm ET.

President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Monday directing the attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security to identify within a month the cities and states that are not complying with federal immigration laws, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

Last week, a federal judge blocked Trump’s administration from withholding federal funding from more than a dozen so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that have declined to cooperate with Trump’s hardline immigration crackdown.

Good morning and welcome to our US politics coverage as China insisted that “no phone call” took place recently between President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart, after Donald Trump said he had spoken with the Chinese leader.

The world’s two biggest economies are locked in an escalating tit-for-tat trade battle triggered by Trump’s levies on Chinese goods, which have reached 145 percent on many products.

In an interview conducted on 22 April with Time magazine and published Friday, Trump insisted Chinese leader Xi called him despite Beijing denying there had been any contact between the two countries over their bitter trade dispute.

The US president did not say when the call took place or specify what was discussed.

Asked about the comments Monday, foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said: “As far as I know, there has been no phone call between the two heads of state recently.”

“China and the United States are not conducting consultations or negotiations on tariff issues,” he added.

The trade dispute continues to rumble as the US prepares to mark Trump’s 100 first days in power with tumultuous changes at home and abroad. In other news:

• Canadians prepared to go the polls in an election overshadowed by fury at Trump’s threats to the country’s sovereignty and fears over his escalating trade war.

• Donald Trump appears to have warmed to Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the two presidents met at the Vatican, with the US leader emerging from talks with a plea for Vladimir Putin: “stop shooting”. Trump on Sunday said Zelenskyy “wants to do something good” for Ukraine and is “working hard”, adding he was also “surprised and disappointed” that Russia continued to strike Ukraine after discussions between his peace envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Putin.

• While speaking to reporters, Trump hinted at a two-week deadline to strike or at least make progress on a peace deal. Trump has previously threatened to walk away from negotiations if a swift agreement is not reached.

• More than 300 law enforcement officers from at least 10 federal agencies raided an illegal after-hours nightclub in Colorado Springs early on Sunday, arresting more than 100 people authorities said were undocumented immigrants and seizing guns, cocaine, meth and pink cocaine. More than a dozen active-duty military members were detained as well, authorities said.

• The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said “there is a path” to an agreement with China over tariffs after he had interactions with his Chinese counterparts last week in Washington, but he continued to defend Trump’s trade plan as “strategic uncertainty” amid accusations the White House was sending mixed signals over its policy.

• Trump’s private golf resort in South Florida will next week host one of the world’s leading purveyors of chlorine dioxide, a potentially life-threatening form of industrial bleach that is claimed without evidence to be a cure for cancer, Covid and autism.

• House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and New Jersey senator Cory Booker were holding a sit-in protest and discussion on Sunday on the steps of the US Capitol in opposition to the Republicans’ proposed budget plan. Billed as an “Urgent Conversation with the American People”, the livestreamed discussion comes before Congress’s return to session on Monday, where Democrats hope to stall Republicans’ economic legislative agenda.

• Two suspects have been arrested in connection with the theft last week of the US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s purse as she ate at a Washington DC restaurant, officials said on Sunday. Noem’s purse was nabbed on Easter Sunday and reportedly contained about $3,000 in cash and her keys, driver’s license, passport and homeland security badge. The homeland security department said Noem had cash in her purse to pay for gifts, dinner and other activities for her family on Easter.

• Trump said he would restore Columbus Day in full and shirk Joe Biden’s practice of celebrating an Indigenous People’s Day in parallel to the public holiday. “I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes,” he wrote on social media, accusing Democrats of trying to “destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much.”