Closing summary
We are wrapping up our live coverage of the day in US politics now, but will return on Wednesday to continue out chronicle of the second Trump administration.
Here are some of the day’s developments:
A federal judge has ordered Elon Musk and his unofficial “department of government efficiency” to stop their dismantling of USAid, saying their move to rapidly shut down the agency tasked with managing foreign assistance was likely illegal.
A federal judge has granted an injunction that temporarily blocks the US military from enforcing Donald Trump’s executive order barring transgender people from military service while a lawsuit by 20 current and would-be service members challenging the measure goes forward.
Federal judge James Boasberg gave the Trump administration until noon on Wednesday to provide answers to specific questions about three flights carrying suspected Venezuelan gang members that left the United States despite his order preventing their departure.
Trump escalated his rhetoric against the judicial branch, saying that a federal judge who attempted to block his deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members should be impeached. The comment prompted a rare public statement from John Roberts, the chief justice of the supreme court, who said impeachment “is not an appropriate response”.
The Trump administration fired most of the board of the US Institute of Peace (USIP) and sent its new leader into the Washington DC headquarters of the independent organization on Monday in its latest effort targeting agencies tied to foreign assistance work.
Trump and Putin “spoke about the need for peace and a ceasefire in the Ukraine war”, the White House said. But Russia has not accepted the 30-day ceasefire Ukraine agreed to, casting doubt on Trump’s ability to bring the fighting to a halt.
The two Democratic commissioners at the US Federal Trade Commission, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, both said on Tuesday that they were “illegally fired” by Trump on Tuesday.
In his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.
On a rare day when Trump was not on live television, the president appeared in a new social media ad recorded in the Oval Office, pitching a new phone app from the Department of Homeland Security intended to make it easy for undocumented immigrants to “self-deport”.
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Trump pitches 'self-deportation' app to undocumented immigrants
On a rare day when Donald Trump was not on live television, the president appeared in a new social media ad recorded in the Oval Office, pitching a new phone app from the Department of Homeland Security intended to make it easy for undocumented immigrants to “self-deport”.
In the ad, “Illegal Aliens: Self-Deport with the CBP Home App”, Trump makes it plain that “people in our country illegally can self-deport the easy way or they can get deported the hard way, and that’s not pleasant.”
He goes on to incorrectly state that the Biden administration’s CBP One app, which allowed asylum seekers to schedule appointments at the border, allowed “more than one million aliens to illegally enter the United States”.
The Trump administration turned off the CBP One app on his first day in office, and has now reworked it into what it calls “CBP Home”, an app to register their self-deportation.
As the Fox pundit Jesse Watters said in a segment on the new app shared on social media by DHS, the administration hopes that highly-produced video images of accused Venezuelan gang members being sent to a prison in El Salvador “will be enough to scare off” new migrants and convince people already in the US to leave before they are subjected to similar brutality.
What’s remarkable about the concept of self-deportation as a cornerstone of White House policy is that the idea was, originally, a joke, dreamed up by a pair of Mexican-American satirists in the 1990s.
In 2012, when Mitt Romney was asked in a Republican primary debate how he planned to repatriate millions of undocumented immigrants without the use of force, and he suggested that the ideal solution was to encourage them to “self-deport”, or return voluntarily to their countries of origin, he was widely mocked.
There is nothing funny about the concept of making life in the United States so uncomfortable for those who came here without legal status that they might leave willingly, and it has prompted states such as Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina to enact a series of brutal laws to discourage migrants from trying to stay.
But as I reported at the time, there is an argument to be made that the term self-deportation was invented in 1994 by the Mexican-American satirists Lalo Alcaraz and Esteban Zul. That year, “sickened” by a ballot initiative known as Proposition 187, which aimed to prohibit illegal immigrants from using state-run hospitals and schools in California, the comedians began posing as conservative activists who backed the measure.
The two men started a satirical media campaign to support the initiative, faxing radio and television stations a fake news release that touted the benefits of “self-deportation centers” and invited reporters seeking more information to call a Latino Republican and “militant self-deportationist” named Daniel D Portado. Eventually the men founded “Hispanics Against Liberal Takeover,” or Halto, and produced a mock radio ad, in which Portado claimed to support “California Gov Pete Wilson’s self-deportation message”.
After Romney drew attention to the term self-deportation in 2012, Alcaraz resurrected the character, on Twitter and YouTube.
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Donald Trump took another highly undiplomatic swipe at Canada on Tuesday as the neighbours remain locked in a trade war.
The president has imposed tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum and repeatedly suggested that Canada should surrender its sovereignty and join the US.
Fox News interviewer Laura Ingraham put it to Trump that he is tougher on Canada than America’s adversaries. “Because it’s meant to be our 51st state,” he replied.
Brushing off an interruption, the president continued: “Look, I deal with every country indirectly or directly. One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.
“The people that – now, this was Trudeau – the people that - good old Justin, I call him ‘Governor Trudeau’. His people were nasty and they weren’t telling the truth. They never told the truth.”
Trudeau’s tenure as Canadian prime minister ended earlier this week after nearly a decade. He was succeeded by Mark Carney, who has said he has no current plans to visit Washington but hopes to have a phone call with Trump soon.
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Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, called the release of 1,123 documents related to the 1963 assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on Tuesday proof that the administration “is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency”.
While many of the documents appear to have been previously released, including by the Biden administration, some previously redacted passages have now been made public.
On Fox, Laura Ingraham coaxes Trump into saying he can't defy court orders
In an interview with Laura Ingraham broadcast on Tuesday evening, the Fox host coaxed Donald Trump into saying that he would not defy court orders and agreeing with her that attacks on Tesla dealerships are domestic terrorism.
On both subjects, the pattern of the conversation was similar, with Ingraham, a die-hard Trump supporter, struggling to contain the president’s rambling answers to her questions and pushing him to agree with what seemed to be the positions she wanted him to take.
When Ingraham asked, “Are there circumstances where you would defy a court order?” Trump used it as an opportunity to rehearse his grievances about having been prosecuted. “I think that number one, nobody’s been through more courts than I have,” Trump began. After the president began to talk about the judge who oversaw his conviction for scheming illegally influence the 2016 election through secret payments to a porn actor, Ingraham dragged him back to the point. “But going forward, would you – would you defy a court order?”
“No, I never did defy a court order,” Trump said, although he had raged earlier on Tuesday against a federal judge who suggested that his administration had defied his order by deporting accused members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador last week.
“And you wouldn’t in the future,” Ingraham, a trained lawyer who once clerked for supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, urged Trump to agree.
“No, you can’t do that,” Trump said, before immediately launching into an attack on what he called the “rogue judge” who is pressing the administration to explain why it seemingly disregarded his order to not continue with a deportation flight to El Salvador.
“We have very bad judges and these are judges that shouldn’t be allowed,” Trump said. “I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge? The judge that we’re talking about. Look at his other rulings, I mean rulings unrelated, but having to do with me: he’s a lunatic.”
His response to her line of questioning about the vandalism of Tesla dealerships was similar.
“Do you consider what’s happening an act of domestic political terrorism?” Ingraham asked.
“I do,” Trump responded, before launching into an extended monologue about how he “hardly knew Elon” until the 2024 campaign, but it turned out “that he liked me … better than Kamala, better than Joe”.
Ingraham interrupted to repeat her question: “But do you consider this an act of domestic terrorism?”
“Sure, sure, I think – I think so,” Trump answered. He then went on to echo the baseless charge made by the attorney general, Pamela Jo Bondi, in a statement on Tuesday that unknown figures were “operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes” which are “nothing short of domestic terrorism”.
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Federal judge blocks Trump's ban on transgender people serving in military
A federal judge has granted an injunction that temporarily blocks the US military from enforcing Donald Trump’s executive order barring transgender people from military service while a lawsuit by 20 current and would-be service members challenging the measure goes forward.
Judge Ana Reyes stayed her order from going into effect until Friday morning to give the government to seek an emergency appeal.
Senator Warren condemns FTC firings
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, has condemned the firing of two Democratic commissioners at the US Federal Trade Commission, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter.
“Donald Trump just illegally fired two independent commissioners at the FTC who fight big corporations that abuse consumers and workers,” Warren said in a statement. “Why? Trump’s billionaire donors expect a return on their investment. He works for them, not you. The courts must reinstate the commissioners”.
“The FTC was created by Congress to stop greedy corporations from ripping off consumers,” Emma Lydon, the managing director of the Warren-aligned Progressive Change Institute, said in a statement. “By attempting to illegally fire the Democratic commissioners, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are revealing their true aim: ensuring that megacorporations can steal, cheat, and lie with no consequences. This is an abuse of power and reeks of corruption. We look forward to watching this Administration lose in court.”
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Four years' worth of consumer protection information deleted from FTC website
As Wired magazine first reported on Tuesday, more than 300 blog posts have been deleted from the FTC website, “including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency’s landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft”.
A look at the FTC’s Business Blog reveals that the four most recent posts there now are three that were posted this month and one from December 2020. Current and former FTC employees, who spoke under anonymity for fear of retaliation, told Wired that the agency’s site “no longer includes any information published during former president Joe Biden’s administration”.
Among the deleted items, Wired explains, are several that documented violations of consumer protection laws by tech giants including Amazon.
One now deleted blog, titled “Hey, Alexa! What are you doing with my data?” explains how, according to two FTC complaints, Amazon and its Ring security camera products allegedly leveraged sensitive consumer data to train the ecommerce giant’s algorithms. (Amazon disagreed with the FTC’s claims.) It also provided guidance for companies operating similar products and services.
Earlier on Tuesday, the two Democratic commissioners on the FTC revealed that they had been “illegally fired” by Donald Trump.
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‘I am a political prisoner,’ Mahmoud Khalil tells the Guardian in first public statement
In his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.
“I am a political prisoner,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to the Guardian. “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.”
Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last spring, was arrested and detained in New York on 8 March by federal immigration authorities who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.
“My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night,” Khalil added. “With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.”
Read the rest of Khalil’s statement:
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Both Democrats on Federal Trade Commission say Trump 'illegally fired' them
The two Democratic commissioners at the US Federal Trade Commission, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, both said on Tuesday that they were “illegally fired” by Donald Trump on Tuesday.
Trump is already being sued for firing members of other independent regulatory agencies including the National Labor Relations Board.
Bedoya posted a statement on X in which he said: “This is corruption plain and simple”.
“The FTC is an independent agency founded 111 years ago to fight fraudsters and monopolists”, Bedoya wrote. “Now the president wants the FTC to be a lapdog for his golfing buddies”.
Slaughter said in a statement to the American Prospect that Trump’s illegal action violated “the plain language of a statute and clear Supreme Court precedent”.
She added:
The law protects the independence of the Commission because the law serves the American people, not corporate power. The reason that the FTC can be so effective for the American people is because of its independence and because its commissioners serve across political parties and ideologies. Removing opposition voices may not change what the Trump majority can do, but it does change whether they will have accountability when they do it. The administration clearly fears the accountability that opposition voices would provide if the President orders Chairman Ferguson to treat the most powerful corporations and their executives—like those that flanked the President at his inauguration—with kid gloves.
I have served across administrations, including during the last Trump administration, and throughout my entire time as a commissioner I applied the same criteria in my work: that the law must be enforced without fear or favor. I have dedicated myself to executing the Commission’s statutory mandate to protect consumers and promote competition, fighting against illegal business practices that make groceries more expensive, healthcare inaccessible, and compromise people’s privacy and security; it has been my greatest honor to serve.
As Deepak Gupta, former senior counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, explained recently on Slate’s Amicus podcast, in the 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor v United States, the US supreme court upheld a law that permitted FTC commissioners to be fired only for good cause, such as neglecting their duties. That ruling shields a number of independent, bipartisan multi-member agencies from direct control by the White House.
As Gupta noted, the idea that government needed independent agencies and people with experts to solve complex problems was introduced during the New Deal era, to replace what was known as “the spoils system”, in which the incoming president rewarded friends, campaign staffers and other supporters with appointments to federal government positions for which they had no qualifications or expertise.
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Ed Martin, the combative interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, and a 2020 election denier who helped lead the Stop the Steal movement, plans to use his office to investigate possible election law violations, according to an email seen by Bloomberg Law.
Martin, who publicly called the 2020 “rigged” in 2021, said in the office-wide email that he had established a “Special Unit: Election Accountability,” or SUEA.
The unit “has already begun one investigation and will continue to make sure that all the election laws of our nation are obeyed”, Martin wrote. “We have a special role at this important time.”
David Becker, the director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told Talking Points Memo that Martin “seems to be misunderstanding his jurisdiction and the federal laws around elections and voting, and without more information, it’s unclear what is being done here other than furthering conspiracy theories that he’s embraced in the past”.
Martin is a veteran anti-abortion activist who has argued for a national ban without exceptions for rape or incest, falsely claimed that “no abortion is ever performed to save the life of the mother” and discussed the possibility of jailing doctors who perform abortions and women who get abortions.
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Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, has criticized the chief justice of the supreme court, John Roberts, for defending the federal judge who tried to block the government’s showy deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador.
After Donald Trump reacted to Judge James Boasberg’s ruling by calling for his impeachment, Roberts said in a statement: “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
Responding on X, the social network owned by Elon Musk, Lee wrote:
Impeachment is a non-justiciable political question assigned by the Constitution to Congress—one of the two political branches of the U.S. government—and not to the courts
Frankly, I’m surprised that Chief Justice Roberts is publicly opining on such matters
Musk himself had posted a similar comment hours earlier. Lee, a former critic of Trump who had called on him to drop out of the 2016 campaign before becoming a public convert, also shared Musk’s comment and added, of the arch-conservative Roberts, “This isn’t the first time he’s treaded on legislative power”.
Here is more from our colleagues Hugo Lowell and Joseph Gedeon on the Roberts intervention:
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Trump’s trade war has had an incredible impact on the popularity of Canada’s Liberal Party, as new polling suggests a stunning reversal of public opinion.
For the first time, projection shows the Liberals with a 55% chance of a majority government, according to the closely watched website 338Canada, which tracks and aggregates national polls, converting those figures into projected election results. In January, these odds stood at less than 1%.
The shifting polls reflect the outsized role played by a teetering and unpredictable US president, and it underscores the incentives for newly minted prime minister Mark Carney to call a snap election in the coming days.
Read more about it here:
Of all that Donald Trump has done since being sworn in on 20 January, there’s a good argument to be made that dismantling USAid was the most impactful, though not necessarily within the United States. The Guardian’s Katy Lay has a look at how the global fight against HIV has suffered from USAid’s stripping:
This year the world should have been “talking about the virtual elimination of HIV” in the near future. “Within five years,” says Prof Sharon Lewin, a leading researcher in the field. “Now that’s all very uncertain.”
Scientific advances had allowed doctors and campaigners to feel optimistic that the end of HIV as a public health threat was just around the corner.
Then came the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to US aid funding. Now the picture is one of a return to the drugs rationing of decades ago, and of rising infections and deaths.
But experts are also talking about building a new approach that would make health services, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, less vulnerable to the whims of a foreign power.
The US has cancelled 83% of its foreign aid contracts and dismantled USAid, the agency responsible for coordinating most of them.
Many fell under the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) programme, which has been the backbone of global efforts to tackle HIV and Aids, investing more than $110bn (£85bn) since it was founded in 2003 and credited with saving 26 million lives and preventing millions more new infections. In some African countries it covered almost all HIV spending.
Judge Theodore D Chuang’s ruling that the dismantling of USAid was likely unconstitutional landed just as top officials at the agency were planning for it to be completely shut down by the end of September, the Bulwark reports.
Employees at USAid were informed that their jobs will likely be wrapped into other federal departments, while workers overseas will be sent back to the United States. Chuang’s ruling could disrupt these plans, though the Trump administration could also appeal it.
Here’s more from the Bulwark of what was planned for USAid’s final months:
Tim Meisburger, the head of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, recently briefed staff about plans and pegged a final day for the agency’s existence at September 30, 2025 (notably, when the just-struck government funding deal runs out). According to notes of the briefing, which were obtained by The Bulwark, Meisburger expected that the agency would have a new structure, new names for subsections, and that there would be a “minimal overseas footprint,” with the possibility to expand in the future. They’d be incorporated into the State Department and officials had to “mentally prepare” to go from being agency leaders to senior staffers.
“Most of the madness is behind us,” Meisburger said, according to the notes. It was time to “make lemonade out of lemons.”
But what if you can’t get the lemons home? That’s one of the problems USAID is currently confronting.
Last week, Jason Gray, who was serving as acting administrator for USAID, sent an email to staffers outlining the process for overseas officials to use the agency portal to come back to the United States. According to one person familiar with those concerns, the American Foreign Service Association is seeking information about the use of the portal. As of now, some USAID employees stationed abroad face a Catch-22. Some fear that if they relocate voluntarily, they may not be eligible for all the reimbursements associated with relocation costs (such as the shipment of personal effects). Other overseas employees worry that if they don’t voluntarily return to the United States, they could be fired. But at least that would potentially make the government liable to cover more of the end-of-contract relocation costs (assuming the current administration doesn’t just choose to leave fired employees abroad).
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Judge rules against Musk and Doge, finding USAid shutdown 'likely violated' constitution
A federal judge has ordered Elon Musk and his “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to stop their dismantling of USAid, saying their move to rapidly shut down the agency tasked with managing foreign assistance was likely illegal.
“The court finds that defendants actions taken to shut down USAid on an accelerated basis, including its apparent decision to permanently close USAid headquarters without the approval of a duly appointed USAid Officer, likely violated the United States constitution in multiple ways, and that these actions harmed not only Plaintiffs, but also the public interest, because they deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress,” wrote Maryland-based judge Theodore D. Chuang.
He ordered Musk and Doge officials to halt any work meant to shut down USAid, reinstate email access for all USAid employees and contractors and not disclose any employees’ personal information publicly.
He also said Musk and Doge have two weeks to either certify that USAid’s Washington DC headquarters has been reopened or have a top USAid official agree to close it down.
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Judge sets new deadline for Trump administration to provide details of deportation flights
Federal judge James Boasberg has given the Trump administration until noon tomorrow to provide answers to specific questions about three flights carrying suspected Venezuelan gang members that left the United States despite his order preventing their departure.
Boasberg informed the justice department they have until 12pm ET tomorrow to answer the following questions:
1) What time did the plane take off from U.S. soil and from where? 2) What time did it leave U.S. airspace? 3) What time did it land in which foreign country (including if it made more than one stop)? 4) What time were individuals subject solely to the Proclamation transferred out of U.S. custody? and 5) How many people were aboard solely on the basis of the Proclamation?
The government, which has cited national security concerns in refusing to answer Boasberg’s questions, is allowed to reply under seal.
The Pentagon said that fewer than 21,000 employees have accepted voluntary resignations after they announced plans to cut up to 60,000 civilian jobs, the Associated Press reports.
The defense department announced last month that it would fire 5-8% of its civilian workforce, with layoffs of 5,400 probationary workers. The defense department is the largest government agency, with the Government Accountability Office finding in 2023 that it had more than 700,000 full-time civilian workers.
A man accused of battling police with a baseball bat and shield during the January 6 riot at the US Capitol has announced a run for the US Senate in Florida.
Jake Lang, a prominent January 6 defendant, has announced on social media that he is seeking the seat recently vacated by the current secretary of state Marco Rubio in 2026.
“WE ARE TAKING OVER THE CAPITOL AGAIN,” Lang wrote in a post on X.
Lang continued to be politically active during his time in the DC jail, reportedly attempting to organize a militia and creating fundraisers for the January 6 defendants.
Lang did not stand trial for charges related to his role in the insurrection due to continuous delays. He was pardoned alongside about 1,600 others who participated in the Capitol attack when Donald Trump took office.
Read more about it here:
The Trump administration has moved to reinstate at least 24,500 recently fired probationary workers following a pair of orders from federal judges last week.
The reinstatements were outlined in a filing by the Justice Department in federal court in Maryland on Monday.
US District Judge James Bredar, an appointee of former President Obama, previously ordered the mass reinstatement of fired probationary workers at 18 federal agencies. He determined that the government’s claims that the terminations were because of performance issues “isn’t true”.
The majority of the reinstated employees were placed on paid administrative leave, according to the Washington Post. According to the filings, some workers were fully reinstated with pay, and some were reinstated without pay if they had been on unpaid leave before their termination.
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Voters in Wisconsin are casting the first ballots in a pivotal state supreme court race that will decide whether liberal or conservative justices control the highest court in the state.
The first day of early voting comes two weeks before the April 1 election between the Republican-supported Brad Schimel and Democratic-supported Susan Crawford.
The race, which is in an important presidential battleground state, can be seen as a barometer of public opinion early in Trump’s presidency. The outcome will have far-reaching implications for a court that faces cases over abortion and reproductive rights, the strength of public sector unions, voting rules and congressional district boundaries.
Trump and Putin spoke about “the need for peace and a ceasefire” in the Russia-Ukraine war
The White House said in a statement that Trump and Putin “spoke about the need for peace and a ceasefire in the Ukraine war” in a phone call that lasted over an hour.
“Both leaders agreed this conflict needs to end with a lasting peace,” reads the statement. “The leaders agreed that the movement to peace will begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire, as well as technical negotiations on implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace.”
Putin and Trump also discussed the Middle East, the “need to stop” the proliferation of strategic weapons, and Iran, according to the statement.
Trump administration declines to offer details of deportation flights, argues it did not violate court order
The justice department told the judge considering the legality of deporting suspected Venezuelan gang members that they did not violate his order to stop the planes from departing, but refused to immediately offer more details of their itinerary.
The filings came after judge James Boasberg yesterday gave the administration a deadline of today at noon to share details of how the three planes were allowed to fly to El Salvador even though he ordered that they not depart, and turn back if they were in the air.
In response, Robert L. Cerna, an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) official based in Texas, said that two of the planes had already left US airspace by the time that Boasberg issued his order, while the third carried migrants who had been ordered deported through the typical legal process – not the Alien Enemies Act, which is at issue in the case Boasberg is considering.
From Cerna’s filing:
On March 15, 2025, after the Proclamation was publicly posted and took effect, three planes carrying aliens departed the United States for El Salvador International Airport (SAL). Two of those planes departed U.S. territory and airspace before 7:25 PM EDT. The third plane departed after that time, but all individuals on that third plane had Title 8 final removal orders and thus were not removed solely on the basis of the Proclamation at issue. To avoid any doubt, no one on any flight departing the United States after 7:25 PM EDT on March 15, 2025, was removed solely on the basis of the Proclamation at issue.
Separately, attorney general Pam Bondi and other top justice department officials signed a notice to Boasberg in response to his demand for details about the planes and their departure time, essentially refusing to provide him with what he wanted:
The Court also ordered the Government to address the form in which it can provide further details about flights that left the United States before 7:25 PM. The Government maintains that there is no justification to order the provision of additional information, and that doing so would be inappropriate, because even accepting Plaintiffs’ account of the facts, there was no violation of the Court’s written order (since the relevant flights left U.S. airspace, and so their occupants were “removed,” before the order issued), and the Court’s earlier oral statements were not independently enforceable as injunctions. The Government stands on those arguments.
Here’s more on the legal wrangling over the deportations, and Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act:
The day so far
Donald Trump escalated his rhetoric against the judicial branch, saying that a federal judge who attempted to block his deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members should be impeached. The comment prompted a rare public statement from John Roberts, the chief justice of the supreme court, who said impeachment “is not an appropriate response” and that appeals in the case should be allowed to play out. We expect to find out more today about the deportations of the undocumented immigrants to El Salvador, where the government released jarring video of them being manhandled off planes and having their heads shaved. The government continues to argue that the group belonged to Tren de Aragua, whose members Trump has designated for rapid deportation, but family members of some of the men told the Washington Post they had no association with the gang.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Despite the rhetoric, impeaching and removing federal judges is exceedingly rare, and Republicans don’t appear to have the votes in the Senate.
Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, asked the Trump administration not to deport their citizens to a third country, or detain them in Guantánamo Bay.
More documents related to the assassination of John F Kennedy Jr should be released today, Trump told reporters on Monday.
Impeachments of federal judges are rare, removals are even rarer, and political considerations make it unlikely that Congress would ever remove a federal judge during Donald Trump’s term.
Impeaching and removing a federal judge follows largely the same procedure as it would for a president. In order to remove a judge, the House of Representatives would have to vote to impeach them by a simple majority. The Senate would then hold a trial, after which they would need a two-thirds majority of members to vote to convict the judge and remove them from the federal bench.
While the GOP controls the Senate, they hold only 53 seats, and would need significant Democratic support to reach the 67-vote threshold for convictions – something that is unlikely to happen at Trump’s bidding.
Impeachments and convictions are exceedingly rare, in general. According to federal court data, only 15 judges have ever been impeached, and eight convicted.
Supreme court chief justice Roberts says impeachment 'not an appropriate response' after Trump comment
Chief justice of the supreme court John Roberts has issued a rare public statement after Donald Trump this morning suggested a federal judge who attempted to block his administration’s deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members should be impeached.
Without referencing the president, Roberts said:
For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.
Roberts is considered part of the court’s conservative bloc and has repeatedly joined rulings that Trump supports, perhaps most notably last year’s decision granting presidents immunity for official acts. However, Roberts also has a record of defending the judiciary from Trump’s attacks, such as this episode from his first term:
Mexico’s government has asked the Trump administration not to send any of its deported citizens to Guantánamo Bay, or any other country besides their own, Reuters reports.
President Claudia Sheinbaum made the request after the US government deported more than 200 suspected Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador, which agreed to take them in exchange for $6m.
Donald Trump has said he wants to detain tens of thousands of migrants at Guantánamo Bay, which is best known as the site where foreigners arrested in the US “war on terror” were imprisoned:
Trump says to expect release of more JFK assassination records today
Donald Trump said that his administration will release tens of thousands of records today related to the assassination of John F Kennedy Jr, which he does not expect to be redacted.
“You got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything,” the president told reporters as he visited the Kennedy Center performing arts venue in Washington DC.
He added that he expected about 80,000 pages to be released. “They’ve been waiting for that for decades, and I said during the campaign I’d release them and I’m a man of my word, so, tomorrow you have the JFK files.”
Trump is indeed a man of his word in this respect, as was Joe Biden:
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Donald Trump has been on the phone with Russian president Vladimir Putin for the past hour, a senior White House official said.
“President Trump is currently in the Oval Office speaking with President Vladimir Putin of Russia since 10:00amEDT. The call is going well, and still in progress,” deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino wrote on X.
The call between the two leaders is seen as crucial to the peace agreement Trump is hoping to forge in Ukraine. Here’s more about it:
Fans of one-hit wonders and 90s music will no doubt recognize Semisonic’s 1998 hit, “Closing Time”.
You can still hear it on the radio, at baseball games and, most recently, in a video the White House released to advertise their zeal for deporting people.
The Minnesota-based band is not a fan, writing on X:
We did not authorize or condone the White House’s use of our song “Closing Time” in any way. And no, they didn’t ask. The song is about joy and possibilities and hope, and they have missed the point entirely.
In a court filing submitted yesterday, an official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) acknowledged that not all the alleged Venezuelan gang members are suspected of committing crimes in the United States.
“While it is true that many of the [Tren de Aragua] members removed under the [Alien Enemies Act] do not have criminal records in the United States, that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time,” wrote Robert L Cerna, the acting field office director for Ice’s enforcement and removal operations in part of Texas.
“The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”
Despite family members of some of the deported Venezuelans insisting their relatives were not in any gang, Cerna argued all of the deportees had specifically been identified as part of Tren de Aragua, members of which Donald Trump has said should be removed under the Alien Enemies Act.
“ICE did not simply rely on social media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures, or tattoos alone,” Cerna wrote.
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The Trump administration says the more than 200 undocumented immigrants flown to El Salvador are “terrorists” who belong to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang.
But the Washington Post spoke to relatives of four of those arrested, who said they are Venezuelans who escaped their country’s economic collapse and were living in Dallas, before being arrested just days ago. The relatives deny that they belong to the gang or any other violent group.
From the Post’s story:
The four friends grew up within blocks of each other in Venezuela, playing soccer and bouncing between one another’s homes. As the nation deteriorated, they journeyed to the United States and were eking out a new life in Dallas, where they worked long hours and shared a townhouse.
Then, on Thursday, armed officers showed up at their home, arrested them and took them to a Texas detention center, Mervin Yamarte, 29, told his mother by phone. The family members do not know their charges, and the men’s names do not appear in federal, state or local criminal court records.
What happened next horrified their families. Yamarte said they were asked to sign deportation papers and agreed, thinking that they would soon be back with their children and loved ones in Venezuela. But a day later, his mother saw a jarring video released by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele showing alleged gang members being violently pulled off planes from the United States and dragged to a mega-prison notorious for allegations of human rights abuses.
Mercedes Yamarte spotted her son.
He appears for only a second, but she has no doubt it is him. He is kneeling and wearing a ripped black shirt. His head has been shaved. An officer stands behind him. He appears to be wincing.
“I didn’t have words,” Mercedes Yamarte said Monday, her voice strained. “I couldn’t speak.”
…
“If there are people with criminal records, then look for them,” Mercedes Yamarte said. “But the innocent shouldn’t have to pay for the rest.”
With the help of the Senate, Donald Trump has the opportunity to appoint judges he approves to the federal judiciary, potentially tilting it towards the right, the Guardian’s David Smith reports:
Donald Trump is poised to reshape the US judiciary over the next four years through hundreds of potential appointments of rightwing judges, a progressive advocacy group has warned.
The analysis by Demand Justice comes with the courts already facing extraordinary pressure. The Trump administration has suffered several legal setbacks and was accused of violating a judge’s order by deporting about 250 Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador.
Trump, a Republican, appointed 226 judges to the federal courts during his first term as president. The total was narrowly eclipsed by his successor, Joe Biden, with 228 including record numbers of women and people of colour.
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Trump calls for impeachment of judge weighing Alien Enemies Act deportation case
Donald Trump has called for the impeachment of the judge handling lawsuits over his administration’s deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members, a significant escalation of rightwing attacks on the judiciary.
While allies of the president such as Elon Musk have repeatedly said judges who rule against him should be impeached, this appears to be the first time the president has backed such calls publicly. Trump’s post on Truth Social does not name the judge, but seems to reference James Boasberg, the Washington DC-based justice who was appointed by Barack Obama and attempted to prevent the government from deporting the alleged gang members under the Alien Enemies Act. Here’s what Trump wrote:
This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President - He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!! WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
The attacks on the judiciary have prompted US Marshals to up their protection of judges, amid fears they may prompt violence:
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The Trump administration turned the deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members into a spectacle by sending around video of them arriving in El Salvador and being manhandled off the plane and into a detention facility.
It appears to be part of a plan to encourage undocumented immigrants in the United States to leave voluntarily. Another aspect of the plan is the CBP Home app, which was formerly used under a different name by the Biden administration to manage arrivals of asylum seekers. Under Donald Trump, it has been rebranded and is now intended to facilitate departures of immigrants without visas, and the White House just released video of the president encouraging them to make use of it:
People in our country illegally can self-deport the easy way, or they can get deported the hard way, and that’s not pleasant.
Here’s more about the app:
Attorney general says deportation flights will 'absolutely' continue as noon deadline nears
The Trump administration faces a deadline of 12pm ET to provide federal judge James Boasberg with more information about the three flights carrying suspected Venezuelan gang members that were allowed to depart the United States over the weekend.
The case is the latest instance of the Trump administration apparently defying a court order – something top administration officials are making no apologies for.
In an interview with Fox News on Monday, attorney general Pam Bondi said that the White House was “absolutely” hoping to continue similar deportation flights. The suspected gang members were deported to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, which cuts through much of the usual due process required by immigration law.
“These are foreign terrorists. The president has identified them and designated them as such, and we will continue to follow the Alien Enemies Act,” Bondi said.
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Donald Trump plans to sign more executive orders at 3.30pm today.
It’s the only event on his White House schedule and currently listed as closed to the press, but Trump is known to use the signing as an opportunity to invite reporters into the Oval Office and take their questions.
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The US defense department webpage celebrating a Black Medal of Honor recipient that was removed and had the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address has been restored – and the letters scrubbed – after an outcry.
But defense department officials have continued to argue publicly that it is wrong to say that diversity is a strength and that it’s essential to dismantle all “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts.
On Saturday, the Guardian reported that US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers’s Medal of Honor webpage led to a “404” error message – and that the URL had been changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal”.
Rogers, who died in 1990, served in the Vietnam war, where he was wounded three times while leading the defense of a base. Then president Richard Nixon awarded him the Medal of Honor, the country’s highest military honor, in 1970, making him the highest-ranking African American to receive it, according to the West Virginia military hall of fame.
On Saturday, the webpage honoring him was no longer functional, with a “404 – Page Not Found” message appearing along with the note: “The page you are looking for might have been moved, renamed, or may be temporarily unavailable.”
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Doge breaks into US Institute of Peace building after White House guts board
The Trump administration fired most of the board of the US Institute of Peace (USIP) and sent its new leader into the Washington DC headquarters of the independent organization on Monday in its latest effort targeting agencies tied to foreign assistance work.
The remaining three members of the group’s board – defense secretary Pete Hegseth, secretary of state Marco Rubio and national defense university president Peter Garvin – fired president and CEO, George Moose, on Friday, according to a document obtained by the Associated Press.
An executive order that Donald Trump signed last month targeted the organization, which was created by Congress more than 40 years ago, and others for reductions.
Current USIP employees said staffers from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” entered the building despite protests that the institute is not part of the executive branch. USIP called the police, whose vehicles were outside the building on Monday evening.
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Kremlin says Putin and Trump to speak later today
Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will hold a phone call between 9am and 11am EDT on Tuesday to talk about settling the Ukraine conflict and normalising relations between Russia and the United States, the Kremlin said.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said there was already a “certain understanding” between the two leaders, based on a phone call they held on 12 February and on subsequent high-level contacts between the two countries.
“But there are also a large number of questions regarding the further normalisation of our bilateral relations, and a settlement on Ukraine. All of this will have to be discussed by the two presidents,” Peskov told reporters.
“The leaders will speak for as long as they deem necessary,” he said.
The Trump administration has removed former surgeon general Vivek Murthy’s advisory on gun violence as a public health issue from the US Department of Health and Human Services’ website.
This move was made to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order to protect second amendment rights, a White House official told the Guardian.
The “firearm violence in America” page, where the advisory had been posted, was filled with data and information about the ripple effects of shootings, the prevalence of firearm suicides and the number of American children and adolescents who have been shot and killed. Now, when someone reaches the site they will be met with a “page not found” message.
When it was originally released last summer, Murthy’s advisory was met with praise from violence prevention and research groups and was lambasted by second amendment law centers and advocacy groups that argued the Biden administration was using public health as a cloak to push forward more gun control.
“This is an extension of the Biden Administration’s war on law-abiding gun owners. America has a crime problem caused by criminals,” the National Rifle Association (NRA) said in a statement posted to X on 25 July 2024.
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Trump pledges overhaul of Kennedy Center in first visit as board chair
Donald Trump visited the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Monday for the first time since making himself its new chair, threatening to shutter an expensive new addition and describing the marble Washington landmark as being in “tremendous disrepair”.
Trump presided over the center’s board meeting in a demonstration of his takeover of an institution that has long enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington, Reuters reported.
Trump, a former real estate executive, criticised an expansive addition built on the Kennedy Center complex for lacking windows and suggested closing it.
He said the center would improve physically over time, however, and he encouraged people to attend shows there.
“This represents a very important part of DC, and actually our country,” he said when asked why he was making time to come to the Kennedy Center with so many other things on his plate. “I think it’s important to make sure that our country is in good shape and is represented well.”
Last month, Trump became chair of the Kennedy Center after pushing out billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein. He fired its longtime president, Deborah Rutter, and installed his former ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, as interim president.
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Judge issues fresh deadline to White House over Venezuelan deportations row
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news over the next couple of hours.
We start with news that a federal judge has given the Trump administration a deadline of today to provide details about plane loads of Venezuelans it deported despite orders not to, in a brewing showdown over presidential power.
Donald Trump claims the deported Venezuelans are members of the prison gang Tren de Aragua, which he designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
The White House on Saturday published a Trump proclamation that invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to declare the gang was conducting irregular warfare against the US, Reuters reported.
Later on Saturday, US district judge James Boasberg issued an order blocking the deportations but the flights continued anyway and 261 people were flown to El Salvador.
A Trump administration lawyer argued both that the judge’s initial oral ruling to block the flights was superseded by a more sparsely written order issued later and that the government had the legal right to continue with flights once they had left US airspace.
Since taking office in January, Trump has sought to push the boundaries of executive power, challenging the historic checks and balances between the US branches of government.
Read our latest story here:
In other news:
Trump announced on Truth Social that he was ending secret service protection for Joe Biden’s adult children, Ashley Biden and Hunter Biden.
Trump also said the government would release all of the remaining classified documents related to the assassination of President John F Kennedy on Tuesday, something he had pledged to do during his campaign.
Trump also said Joe Biden’s pardon of January 6 committee lawmakers was “void”, and his press secretary later said, without evidence, that the former president may not have been of sound mind when he gave it.
Meanwhile, the CEO of the non-profit US Institute of Peace said Monday that employees of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” had “broken into our building” as part of an escalating standoff over the legal status of the institute and whether Musk has authority over it.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, has reportedly cancelled a book tour as he faces protests from members of his own party for providing votes crucial to the passage of a Republican spending bill.
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