Politics - BlogFlock

April 18, 2025 - Letters from an American

2025-04-19T05:23:02.000Z

Tonight I had the extraordinary privilege of speaking at the anniversary of the lighting of the lanterns in Boston’s Old North Church, which happened 250 years ago tonight. Here’s what I said:

Two hundred and fifty years ago, in April 1775, Boston was on edge. Seven thousand residents of the town shared these streets with more than 13,000 British soldiers and their families. The two groups coexisted uneasily.

Two years before, the British government had closed the port of Boston and flooded the town with soldiers to try to put down what they saw as a rebellion amongst the townspeople. Ocean trade stopped, businesses failed, and work in the city got harder and harder to find. As soldiers stepped off ships from England onto the wharves, half of the civilian population moved away. Those who stayed resented the soldiers, some of whom quit the army and took badly needed jobs away from locals.

Boston became increasingly cut off from the surrounding towns, for it was almost an island, lying between the Charles River and Boston Harbor. And the townspeople were under occupation. Soldiers, dressed in the red coats that inspired locals to insult them by calling them “lobsterbacks,” monitored their movements and controlled traffic in and out of the town over Boston Neck, which was the only land bridge from Boston to the mainland and so narrow at high tide it could accommodate only four horses abreast.

Boston was a small town of wooden buildings crowded together under at least eight towering church steeples, for Boston was still a religious town. Most of the people who lived there knew each other at least by sight, and many had grown up together. And yet, in April 1775, tensions were high.

Boston was the heart of colonial resistance to the policies of the British government, but it was not united in that opposition. While the town had more of the people who called themselves Patriots than other colonies did—maybe 30 to 40 percent—at least 15% of the people in town were still fiercely loyal to the King and his government. Those who were neither Patriots nor Loyalists just kept their heads down, hoping the growing political crisis would go away and leave them unscathed.

It was hard for people to fathom that the country had come to such division. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War, Bostonians looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.

That euphoria faded fast.

Almost as soon as the French and Indian War was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.

In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.

But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury, and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.

Far more than money was at stake. The fight over the Stamp Act tapped into a struggle that had been going on in England for more than a century over a profound question of human governance: Could the king be checked by the people?

This was a question the colonists were perhaps uniquely qualified to answer. While the North American colonies were governed officially by the British crown, the distance between England and the colonies meant that colonial assemblies often had to make rules on the ground. Those assemblies controlled the power of the purse, which gave them the upper hand over royal officials, who had to await orders from England that often took months to arrive. This chaotic system enabled the colonists to carve out a new approach to politics even while they were living in the British empire.

Colonists naturally began to grasp that the exercise of power was not the province of a divinely ordained leader, but something temporary that depended on local residents’ willingness to support the men who were exercising that power.

The Stamp Act threatened to overturn that longstanding system, replacing it with tyranny.

When news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, a group of dock hands, sailors, and workers took to the streets, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They warned colonists that their rights as Englishmen were under attack. One of the Sons of Liberty was a talented silversmith named Paul Revere. He turned the story of the colonists’ loss of their liberty into engravings. Distributed as posters, Revere’s images would help spread the idea that colonists were losing their liberties.

The Sons of Liberty was generally a catch-all title for those causing trouble over the new taxes, so that protesters could remain anonymous, but prominent colonists joined them and at least partly directed their actions. Lawyer John Adams recognized that the Sons of Liberty were changing the political equation. He wrote that gatherings of the Sons of Liberty “tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty. They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”

John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, who was deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty, recognized that building a coalition in defense of liberty within the British system required conversation and cooperation. As clerk of the Massachusetts legislature, he was responsible for corresponding with other colonial legislatures. Across the colonies, the Sons of Liberty began writing to like-minded friends, informing them about local events, asking after their circumstances, organizing.

They spurred people to action. By 1766, the Stamp Act was costing more to enforce than it was producing in revenue, and Parliament agreed to end it. But it explicitly claimed “full power and authority to make laws and statutes...to bind the colonies and people of America...in all cases whatsoever.” It imposed new revenue measures.

News of new taxes reached Boston in late 1767. The Massachusetts legislature promptly circulated a letter to the other colonies opposing taxation without representation and standing firm on the colonists’ right to equality in the British empire. The Sons of Liberty and their associates called for boycotts on taxed goods and broke into the warehouses of those they suspected weren’t complying, while women demonstrated their sympathy for the rights of colonists by producing their own cloth and drinking coffee rather than relying on tea.

British officials worried that colonists in Boston were on the edge of revolt, and they sent troops to restore order. But the troops’ presence did not calm the town. Instead, fights erupted between locals and the British regulars.

Finally, in March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry men and boys harassing them. They wounded six and killed five, including Crispus Attucks, a Black man who became the first to die in the attack. Paul Revere turned the altercation into the “Boston Massacre.” His instantly famous engraving showed soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, “Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey; Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.”

Parliament promptly removed the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor and got rid of all but one of the new taxes. They left the one on tea, keeping the issue of taxation without representation on the table. Then, in May 1773, Parliament gave the East India Tea Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. By lowering the cost of tea in the colonies, it meant to convince people to buy the taxed tea, thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose a tax on the colonies.

In Boston, local leaders posted a citizen guard on Griffin’s Wharf at the harbor to make sure tea could not be unloaded. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded three merchant ships. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped the valuable leaves overboard.

Parliament closed the port of Boston, stripped the colony of its charter, flooded soldiers back into the town, and demanded payment for the tea. Colonists promptly organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and took control of the colony. The provincial congress met in Concord, where it stockpiled supplies and weapons, and called for towns to create “minute men” who could fight at a moment’s notice.

British officials were determined to end what they saw as a rebellion. In April, they ordered military governor General Thomas Gage to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had left Boston to take shelter with one of Hancock’s relatives in the nearby town of Lexington. From there, they could seize the military supplies at Concord. British officials hoped that seizing both the men and the munitions would end the crisis.

But about 30 of the Sons of Liberty, including Paul Revere, had been watching the soldiers and gathering intelligence. They met in secret at the Green Dragon Tavern to share what they knew, each of them swearing on the Bible that they would not give away the group’s secrets. They had been patrolling the streets at night and saw at midnight on Saturday night, April 15, the day before Easter Sunday, that the general was shifting his troops. They knew the soldiers were going to move. But they didn’t know if the soldiers would leave Boston by way of the narrow Boston Neck or row across the harbor to Charlestown. That mattered because if the townspeople in Lexington and Concord were going to be warned that the troops were on their way, messengers from Boston would have to be able to avoid the columns of soldiers.

The Sons of Liberty had a plan. Paul Revere knew Boston well—he had been born there. As a teenager, he had been among the first young men who had signed up to ring the bells in the steeple of the Old North Church. The team of bell-ringers operated from a small room in the tower, and from there, a person could climb sets of narrow stairs and then ladders into the steeple. Anyone who lived in Boston or the surrounding area knew well that the steeple towered over every other building in Boston.

On Easter Sunday, after the secret watchers had noticed the troop movement, Revere traveled to Lexington to visit Adams and Hancock. On the way home through Charlestown, he had told friends “that if the British went out by Water, we would shew two Lanthorns in the North Church Steeple; & if by Land, one, as a Signal.” Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.

The plan was dangerous. The Old North Church was Anglican, Church of England, and about a third of the people who worshipped there were Loyalists. General Thomas Gage himself worshiped there. But so did Revere’s childhood friend John Pulling Jr., who had become a wealthy sea captain and was a vestryman, responsible for the church’s finances. Like Revere, Pulling was a Son of Liberty. So was the church’s relatively poor caretaker, or sexton, Robert Newman. They would help.

Dr. Joseph Warren lived just up the hill from Revere. He was a Son of Liberty and a leader in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. On the night of April 18, he dashed off a quick note to Revere urging him to set off for Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock that the troops were on the way. By the time Revere got Warren’s house, the doctor had already sent another man, William Dawes, to Lexington by way of Boston Neck. Warren told Revere the troops were leaving Boston by water. Revere left Warren’s house, found his friend John Pulling, and gave him the information that would enable him to raise the signal for those waiting in Charlestown. Then Revere rowed across the harbor to Charleston to ride to Lexington himself. The night was clear with a rising moon, and Revere muffled his oars and swung out of his way to avoid the British ship standing guard.

Back in Boston, Pulling made his way past the soldiers on the streets to find Newman. Newman lived in his family home, where the tightening economy after the British occupation had forced his mother to board British officers. Newman was waiting for Pulling, and quietly slipped out of the house to meet him.

The two men walked past the soldiers to the church. As caretaker, Newman had a key.

The two men crept through the dark church, climbed the stairs and then the ladders to the steeple holding lanterns—a tricky business, but one that a caretaker and a mariner could manage—very briefly flashed the lanterns they carried to send the signal, and then climbed back down.

Messengers in Charlestown saw the signal, but so did British soldiers. Legend has it that Newman escaped from the church by climbing out a window. He made his way back home, but since he was one of the few people in town who had keys to the church, soldiers arrested him the next day for participating in rebellious activities. He told them that he had given his keys to Pulling, who as a vestryman could give him orders. When soldiers went to find Pulling, he had skipped town, likely heading to Nantucket.

While Newman and Pulling made their way through the streets back to their homes, the race to beat the soldiers to Lexington and Concord was on. Dawes crossed the Boston Neck just before soldiers closed the city. Revere rowed to Charlestown, borrowed a horse, and headed out. Eluding waiting officers, he headed on the road through Medford and what is now Arlington.

Dawes and Revere, as well as the men from Charleston making the same ride after seeing the signal lanterns, told the houses along their different routes that the Regulars were coming. They converged in Lexington, warned Adams and Hancock, and then set out for Concord. As they rode, young doctor Samuel Prescott came up behind them. Prescott was courting a girl from Lexington and was headed back to his home in Concord. Like Dawes and Revere, he was a Son of Liberty, and joined them to alert the town, pointing out that his neighbors would pay more attention to a local man.

About halfway to Concord, British soldiers caught the men. They ordered Revere to dismount and, after questioning him, took his horse and turned him loose to walk back to Lexington. Dawes escaped, but his horse bucked him off and he, too, headed back to Lexington on foot. But Prescott jumped his horse over a stone wall and got away to Concord.

The riders from Boston had done their work. As they brought word the Regulars were coming, scores of other men spread the news through a system of “alarm and muster” the colonists had developed months before for just such an occasion. Rather than using signal fires, the colonists used sound, ringing bells and banging drums to alert the next house that there was an emergency. By the time Revere made it back to the house where Adams and Hancock were hiding, just before dawn on that chilly, dark April morning, militiamen had heard the news and were converging on Lexington Green.

So were the British soldiers.

When they marched onto the Lexington town green in the darkness just before dawn, the soldiers found several dozen minute men waiting for them. An officer ordered the men to leave, and they began to mill around, some of them leaving, others staying. And then, just as the sun was coming up, a gun went off. The soldiers opened fire. When the locals realized the soldiers were firing not just powder, but also lead musket balls, most ran. Eight locals were killed, and another dozen wounded.

The outnumbered militiamen fell back to tend their wounded, and about 300 Regulars marched on Concord to destroy the guns and powder there. But news of the arriving soldiers and the shooting on Lexington town green had spread through the colonists’ communication network, and militiamen from as far away as Worcester were either in Concord or on their way. By midmorning the Regulars were outnumbered and in battle with about 400 militiamen. They pulled back to the main body of British troops still in Lexington.

The Regulars headed back to Boston, but by then militiamen had converged on their route. The Regulars had been awake for almost two days with only a short rest, and they were tired. Militiamen fired at them not in organized lines, as soldiers were accustomed to, but in the style they had learned from Indigenous Americans, shooting from behind trees, houses, and the glacial boulders littered along the road. This way of war used the North American landscape to their advantage. They picked off British officers, dressed in distinct uniforms, first. By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.

By the next morning, more than 15,000 militiamen surrounded the town of Boston. The Revolutionary War had begun. Just over a year later, the fight that had started over the question of whether the king could be checked by the people would give the colonists an entirely new, radical answer to that question. On July 4, 1776, they declared the people had the right to be treated equally before the law, and they had the right to govern themselves.

Someone asked me once if the men who hung the lanterns in the tower knew what they were doing. She meant, did they know that by that act they would begin the steps to a war that would create a new nation and change the world.

The answer is no. None of us knows what the future will deliver.

Paul Revere and Robert Newman and John Pulling and William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, and all the other riders from Charlestown who set out for Lexington after they saw the signal lanterns in the steeple of Old North Church, were men from all walks of life who had families to support, businesses to manage. Some had been orphaned young, some lived with their parents. Some were wealthy, others would scrabble through life. Some, like Paul Revere, had recently buried one wife and married another. Samuel Prescott was looking to find just one.

But despite their differences and the hectic routine of their lives, they recognized the vital importance of the right to consent to the government under which they lived. They took time out of their daily lives to resist the new policies of the British government that would establish the right of a king to act without check by the people. They recognized that giving that sort of power to any man would open the way for a tyrant.

Paul Revere didn’t wake up on the morning of April 18, 1775, and decide to change the world. That morning began like many of the other tense days of the past year, and there was little reason to think the next two days would end as they did. Like his neighbors, Revere simply offered what he could to the cause: engraving skills, information, knowledge of a church steeple, longstanding friendships that helped to create a network. And on April 18, he and his friends set out to protect the men who were leading the fight to establish a representative government.

The work of Newman and Pulling to light the lanterns exactly 250 years ago tonight sounds even less heroic. They agreed to cross through town to light two lanterns in a church steeple. It sounds like such a very little thing to do, and yet by doing it, they risked imprisonment or even death. It was such a little thing…but it was everything. And what they did, as with so many of the little steps that lead to profound change, was largely forgotten until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used their story to inspire a later generation to work to stop tyranny in his own time.

What Newman and Pulling did was simply to honor their friendships and their principles and to do the next right thing, even if it risked their lives, even if no one ever knew. And that is all anyone can do as we work to preserve the concept of human self-determination. In that heroic struggle, most of us will be lost to history, but we will, nonetheless, move the story forward, even if just a little bit.

And once in a great while, someone will light a lantern—or even two—that will shine forth for democratic principles that are under siege, and set the world ablaze.

—

Notes:

https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2007/07/bostons-population-in-july-1775.html

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/british-army-boston

https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=98

https://www.masshist.org/database/99

April 17, 2025 - Letters from an American

2025-04-18T16:18:11.000Z

The Week in Musk: Musk's "legion" of kids - Musk Watch

2025-04-18T11:31:24.000Z

President Donald Trump trips while boarding Marine One with Æ A-Xii, the son of White House Senior Advisor Elon Musk, on March 14, 202,5 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

The Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-led entity within the White House, appears to have reached a transitional phase. Last week, Musk appeared to lower the project’s cost-cutting goal from $1 trillion to $150 billion in fiscal year 2026. DOGE claims to have cut $155 billion in federal spending thus far, but that is still a massive overstatement. Musk Watch’s DOGE Tracker identified just $12.6 billion in verifiable cuts.

Nevertheless, Musk has claimed victory on DOGE’s founding mission as its focus turns to other projects. Among its new responsibilities is the creation of revenue through a program that would allow wealthy foreigners to purchase a special immigration visa for $5 million. According to the New York Times, DOGE engineers Marko Elez and Edward Coristine are collaborating with the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to develop a website and application process for Trump’s “gold card” scheme.

DOGE is also playing a leading role in the administration’s campaign to hunt down undocumented immigrants, using databases from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Social Security Administration. From the Washington Post:

HUD knows which households include undocumented people because all applicants are required to report their status when seeking assistance. Undocumented immigrants are prorated out of the amount of assistance households receive but have been allowed to live in public housing for years. An undocumented grandparent or parent sometimes lives in public housing with other eligible family members.
The effort to locate and kick out mixed-status households is being led by Mike Mirski, a DOGE staffer at HUD who plans to target cities such as New York and Chicago first, according to one employee. The power to mine that information effectively lets Mirski “decide who is a citizen and who is not a citizen,” the employee said, adding that those decisions would be based on flawed analyses of datasets he doesn’t know how to use.
In most scenarios, HUD does not have the authority to knock on people’s doors and remove them from housing. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement and law enforcement do.

In another report, the Post found that DOGE has aided the Department of Homeland Security’s effort to list thousands of undocumented immigrants as deceased within the Social Security death database. Declaring immigrants deceased would make it nearly impossible for them to find legal work, access financial services, and obtain housing. DOGE is also using the Social Security database to determine the citizenship status of various individuals — a use of SSA data that its acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, reportedly considered illegal.

While DOGE’s purview expands, the initiative has continued to seek access to highly sensitive information housed by federal agencies. At the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, DOGE has requested read and write access to agency data, including “staff emails, personnel data, contracts, and payments systems,” Bloomberg reported this week.

Musk’s “legion” of children

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published a comprehensive investigation into Musk’s various partners and how he has gone about soliciting them to have his children. Ashley St. Clair, a 26-year-old conservative influencer, provided the results of a paternity test that confirmed Musk is the father of a son St. Clair had last year. (Musk had previously questioned whether the child was his.) St. Clair also told the paper that Musk, through his fixer, Jared Birchall, offered her a one-time payment of $15 million and a $100,000 monthly stipend in exchange for her silence. St. Clair rejected the offer, fearing it would make her son, Romulus, “feel like he’s a secret.” Her decision defied a warning from Birchall. Taking “the legal route… always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise,” the Musk deputy told St. Clair.

SpaceX in line for massive Golden Dome contract

SpaceX appears to be on track to win a significant portion of a contract to build Donald Trump’s Golden Dome program, according to Reuters. The staggeringly expensive missile defense system would involve a network of satellites designed to detect and neutralize incoming ballistic threats. Potential SpaceX partners for the Golden Dome include right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir and autonomous weapons maker Anduril, founded by Trump fundraiser Palmer Luckey. From Reuters:

The three companies met with top officials in the Trump administration and the Pentagon in recent weeks to pitch their plan, which would build and launch 400 to more than 1,000 satellites circling the globe to sense missiles and track their movement, sources said.
A separate fleet of 200 attack satellites armed with missiles or lasers would then bring enemy missiles down, three of the sources said. The SpaceX group is not expected to be involved in the weaponization of satellites, these sources said.
One of the sources familiar with the talks described them as "a departure from the usual acquisition process. There's an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government."

SpaceX has long been considered a shoo-in for at least a portion of the Golden Dome program, which could cost close to $1 trillion. But the Reuters report revealed a baffling way that Musk’s company hopes to capitalize on the project: A subscription model, wherein the government would pay recurring fees to access SpaceX’s share of the system instead of owning it.

Should SpaceX, Anduril, and Palantir secure the lion’s share of Golden Dome funding, it would mark Silicon Valley’s greatest triumph in its campaign to overtake the traditional Big Five defense contractors. Anduril already beat out Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin last year in securing a combat drone contract from the Air Force.

Musk questions Trump’s proposed NASA cuts

In a post on X last week, Musk called Trump’s proposed cuts to NASA’s funding “troubling.” News of the cuts were reported by Ars Technica, which cited a draft budget proposal from the White House Office of Management and Budget that included a 20% overall cut of NASA’s funding and a 50% cut of its science division. “I am very much in favor of science,” Musk remarked, “but unfortunately cannot participate in NASA budget discussions, due to SpaceX being a major contractor to NASA.”

FCC head lobbies for Starlink in Europe

European governments have been hesitant to adopt Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite communications provider, for their military and civil needs. Anti-Starlink sentiment on the continent arose after it was revealed that Musk had tampered with Ukraine’s Starlink access during a military operation, and was exacerbated after the Trump administration recently used access to the network as a bargaining chip against Ukraine.

In turn, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, a longstanding Musk ally, told the European Union to get over it. “If you’re concerned about Starlink, just wait for the CCP’s version, then you’ll be really worried,” Carr said in an interview with the Financial Times. “If Europe has its own satellite constellation then great, I think the more the better. But more broadly, I think Europe is caught a little bit between the US and China. And it’s sort of time for choosing,” he added.

Cybercab production arrested by Trump’s trade war; Tesla sales continue to slide in California; Cybertruck production scaled back

As we noted last week, Trump’s trade war with China will likely hinder Tesla’s battery storage division, its top growth sector last quarter. Fallout from the tit-for-tat tariffs between China and the U.S. has now spread to the company’s planned rollout of autonomous semi-trucks and “Cybercabs,” the latter being a primary driver of Tesla’s stock price. From Reuters:

Tesla's plans to ship components from China for Cybercab and Semi electric trucks in the United States were suspended after President Donald Trump raised tariffs on Chinese goods amid a trade war, said a person with direct knowledge. The move could disrupt Tesla's plan to start mass production of the much-anticipated models, which its CEO Elon Musk has been touting to investors as major innovations providing growth momentum of the U.S. automaker.
Tesla was ready to absorb the additional costs when Trump imposed the 34% tariff on Chinese goods but could not do so when the tariff went beyond that, leaving shipping plans suspended, said the person, who declined to be named as the matter is private…
The company was scheduled to start receiving component shipments in upcoming months with the goal of starting trial production of the two models in October and mass production in 2026, the person said, with Cybercab to be produced in Texas and Semi in Nevada.

Musk has claimed that the Cybercab, a self-driving vehicle, would open a huge profit stream for Tesla, passively generating revenue for the company and individual owners in its role as a robotaxi. Its most aggressive shareholders have bought into this vision. Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood, the preeminent Tesla bull, recently predicted that Cybercabs “will account for 90% of the value of the company in five years.”

A number of high-ranking Tesla employees appear to disagree with that assessment. The Information reported this week that Musk, in 2024, rejected internal data indicating the Cybercab would lose money. “We had lots of modeling that showed the payback around FSD [Full Self Driving] and Robotaxi was going to be slow,” Rohan Patel, a former Tesla executive, told the outlet. “It was going to be choppy. It was going to be very, very hard outside of the U.S., given the regulatory environment or lack of regulatory environment.”

As for the White House’s tariffs on China, they currently stand at 145%, with some imports facing fees of up to 245%. Though on Thursday, Trump told reporters, “We’re going to make a deal. I think we’re going to make a very good deal with China.” The president has also hinted at providing relief to automanufacturers that source their parts abroad without specifying whether that would extend to imports from China.

Amid this uncertainty, Tesla’s sales force in China stopped accepting orders for the Model S and Model X. Both of the lines are made in the U.S. and shipped to China, the world’s top EV market. In the U.S., Tesla continues to face lagging sales numbers. In California, the top EV market in North America, Experian Automotive reported registrations of new Teslas declined 15.1% year-over-year in Q1, the company’s sixth straight quarterly decline.

Tesla also appears to be paring back its Cybertruck production after selling fewer than 50,000 units (as of last month) since its release in November 2023. A noticeable contingent of line workers behind the trapezoidal vehicle’s production have been reassigned to the Model Y, according to a report from Business Insider. (Perhaps to boost sales, Tesla launched a bare-bones, RWD version of the Cybertruck in the U.S. and Mexico last week. At $70,000, it is $10,000 less than the base model.)

Look for these problems to be addressed during Tesla’s Q1 earnings call, scheduled for Tuesday, April 22, at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. The call will be streamed live on X.

OpenAI countersues; ChatGPT’s X rival; Musk says no more IP laws

OpenAI, the research organization behind ChatGPT, has filed a countersuit against Musk, seeking a reprieve from what it describes as harassment and “unlawful and unfair action.”

“Through press attacks, malicious campaigns broadcast to Musk’s more than 200 million followers on the social media platform he controls, a pretextual demand for corporate records, harassing legal claims, and a sham bid for OpenAI’s assets,” reads the filing made in a California district court, “Musk has tried every tool available to harm OpenAI.”

Musk, who cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman in 2015 but left the board in 2018, is suing the AI developer for allegedly departing from its philanthropic “founding agreement.” OpenAI currently operates as a nonprofit-for-profit hybrid but plans to transition fully to a for-profit public benefit corporation.

In what might be construed as another shot at Musk, OpenAI is developing a social network, according to The Verge. The outlet described the prototype as being “focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed.”

Meanwhile, Musk, who is developing his own ChatGPT rival through xAI’s Grok, called for an end to all laws protecting intellectual property. “Delete all IP law,” wrote Twitter founder Jack Dorsey over the weekend. “I agree,” Musk replied. AI developers like Musk have had frequent battles over IP rights with companies and creatives that produce the copyrighted material that fills the internet and is then used to train AI models. OpenAI’s Altman has argued that using IP to train AI software should fall under “fair use,” but Musk's desire to do away with IP laws entirely is a unique escalation.

Musk Minutes

A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board has accused DOGE of exfiltrating data from the agency, which houses information on unions and labor organizers, corporate secrets, and complaints filed by employees against their employers. The whistleblower also said DOGE members went through great lengths to obscure what they were doing while accessing NLRB systems. SpaceX is currently suing the NLRB, arguing the agency is unconstitutional. (NPR)

To facilitate Musk’s long-held “self-driving” promise to customers, Tesla may have to replace computers in millions of its cars. (Electrek)

In a lawsuit, the owner of a Model Y in California has accused Tesla of manipulating the odometers in its cars to hasten “the expiration of Tesla vehicle warranties to reduce or avoid responsibility for contractually required repairs as well as increase the purchase of its extended warranty policy.” (The Street)

Trump reportedly stepped in to bar Musk from attending a Pentagon briefing on its operational plans should a war break out between China and the U.S. "What the f**k is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn't go," Trump reportedly said. (Axios)

The U.S. Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog, plans to probe DOGE’s actions at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (USA Today)

DOGE has taken control of grants.gov, the website the federal government uses to solicit applications for $500 billion in grants annually, and revoked access for some federal officials previously in charge of posting grant opportunities. (Washington Post)

Trump’s War on Measurement Means Losing Data on Drug Use, Maternal Mortality, Climate Change and More - ProPublica

2025-04-18T10:00:00.000Z

by Alec MacGillis

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More children ages 1 to 4 die of drowning than any other cause of death. Nearly a quarter of adults received mental health treatment in 2023, an increase of 3.4 million from the prior year. The number of migrants from Mexico and northern Central American countries stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol was surpassed in 2022 by the number of migrants from other nations.

We know these things because the federal government collects, organizes and shares the data behind them. Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.

The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.

Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.

The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear. Here are just a few examples:

The Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off the 17-person team in charge of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which for more than five decades has tracked trends in substance abuse and mental health disorders. The department’s Administration for Children and Families is weeks behind on the annual update of the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the nationwide database of child welfare cases, after layoffs effectively wiped out the team that compiles that information. And the department has placed on leave the team that oversees the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a collection of survey responses from women before and after giving birth that has become a crucial tool in trying to address the country’s disconcertingly high rate of maternal mortality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eviscerated divisions that oversee the WISQARS database on accidental deaths and injuries — everything from fatal shootings to poisonings to car accidents — and the team that maintains AtlasPlus, an interactive tool for tracking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities to measure and report their greenhouse-gas emissions, as they have done since 2010, making it difficult to know whether any of the policies meant to slow climate change and reduce disaster are effective. The EPA has also taken down EJScreen, a mapping tool on its website that allowed people to see how much industrial pollution occurs in their community and how that compares with other places or previous years.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics has yet to update its monthly tallies on deportations and other indices of immigration enforcement, making it difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s triumphant claims of a crackdown; the last available numbers are from November 2024, in the final months of President Joe Biden’s tenure. (“While we have submitted reports and data files for clearance, the reporting and data file posting are delayed while they are under the new administration’s review,” Jim Scheye, director of operations and reporting in the statistics unit, told ProPublica.)

And, in a particularly concrete example of ceasing to measure, deep cutbacks at the National Weather Service are forcing it to reduce weather balloon launches, which gather a vast repository of second-by-second data on everything from temperature to humidity to atmospheric pressure in order to improve forecasting.

Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy. In some cases, the data now being jettisoned is geared around concepts or presumptions that the administration fundamentally rejects: EJScreen, for instance, stands for “environmental justice” — the effort to ensure that communities don’t suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental harms. (An EPA spokesperson said the agency is “working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.’” The spokesperson added: “The EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment” in Trump’s second term.) The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Laura Lindberg, a Rutgers public health professor, lamented the threatened pregnancy-risk data at the annual conference of the Population Association of America in Washington last week. In an interview, she said the administration’s cancellation of data collection efforts reminded her of recent actions at the state level, such as Florida’s withdrawal in 2022 from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey after the state passed its law discouraging classroom discussion of sexual orientation. (The state’s education secretary said the survey was “inflammatory” and “sexualized.”) Discontinuing the survey made it harder to discern whether the law had adverse mental health effects among Florida teens. “States have taken on policies that would harm people and then are saying, ‘We don’t want to collect data about the impact of the policies,’” Lindbergsaid. “Burying your head in the sand is not going to be a way to keep the country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

Making the halt on data gathering more confounding, though, is the fact that, in some areas, the information at risk of being lost has been buttressing some of the administration’s own claims. For instance, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly cited, as an argument for tougher border enforcement, the past decade’s surge in fentanyl addiction — a trend that has been definitively captured by the national drug use survey that is now imperiled. That survey’s mental health components have also undergirded research on the threat being posed to the nation’s young people by smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have taken up as a cudgel against Big Tech.

Or take education. The administration and its conservative allies have been able to argue that Democratic-led states kept schools closed too long during the pandemic because there was nationwide data — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the Nation’s Report Card — that showed greater drops in student achievement in districts that stayed closed longer. But now NAEP is likely to be reduced in scope as part of crippling layoffs at the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which has been slashed from nearly 100 employees to only three, casting into doubt the future not only of NAEP but also of a wide array of long-running longitudinal evaluations and the department’s detailed tallies of nationwide K-12 and higher education enrollment. The department did not respond to a request for comment but released a statement on Thursday saying the next round of NAEP assessments would still be held next year.

Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, cast the self- defeating nature of the administration’s war on educational assessment in blunt terms: “The irony here is that if you look at some of the statements around the Department of Education, it’s, ‘We’ve invested X billion in the department and yet achievement has fallen off a cliff.’ But the only reason we know that is because of the NAEP data collection effort!”

Shelly Burns, a mathematical statistician who worked at NCES for about 35 years before her entire team was laid off in March, made a similar point about falling student achievement. “How does the country know that? They know it because we collected it. And we didn’t spin it. We didn’t say, ‘Biden is president, so let’s make it look good,’” she said. “Their new idea about how to make education great again — how will you know if it worked if you don’t have independent data collection?”

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert liked to quip, and there have been plenty of liberal commentators who have, over the years, taken that drollery at face value, suggesting that the numbers all point one way in the nation’s political debates. In fact, in plenty of areas, they don’t.

It’s worth noting that Project 2025’s lengthy blueprint for the Trump administration makes no explicit recommendation to undo the government’s data-collection efforts. The blueprint is chock full of references to data-based decision-making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, it urges the next administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors had.

But when an administration is making such a concerted effort to stifle assessments of government and society at large, it is hard not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the efficacy of its current national overhaul. As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results. Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.

Who knows if the country will be able to rebuild that measurement capacity in the future. For now, the loss is incalculable.

Jesse Coburn, Eli Hager, Abrahm Lustgarten, Mark Olalde, Jennifer Smith Richards and Lisa Song contributed reporting.

Idaho Gave Families $50M to Spend on Private Education. Then It Ended a $30M Program Used by Public School Families. - ProPublica

2025-04-18T09:00:00.000Z

by Audrey Dutton

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Just weeks after creating a $50 million tax credit to help families pay for private school tuition and homeschooling, Idaho has shut down a program that helped tens of thousands of public school students pay for laptops, school supplies, tutoring and other educational expenses.

The Republican leading the push to defund Idaho’s Empowering Parents grants said it had nothing to do with the party’s decision to fund private schools. But the state’s most prominent conservative group, a strong supporter of the private school tax credit, drew the connection directly.

The Idaho Freedom Foundation, on its website, proposed adding the $30 million that fueled Empowering Parents to the newly created tax credit, paying for an additional 6,000 private and homeschool students to join the 10,000 already expected to benefit from the program.

The new voucher-style tax credits have major differences from the grants lawmakers killed.

The tax credits are off-limits to public school students, while the grants went predominantly to this group. And there’s limited state oversight on how the private education tax credits will be used, while the grants to public school families were only allowed to be spent with state-approved educational vendors.

Rep. Soñia Galaviz, a Democrat who works in a low-income public elementary school in Boise, condemned the plan to kill the grants in a speech to legislative colleagues.

“I have to go back to the families that I serve, the parents that I love, the kids that I teach, and say, ‘You no longer can get that additional math tutoring that you need,’” she said, “that ‘the state is willing to support other programs for other groups of kids, but not you.’”

When states steer public funds to private schools, well-off families benefit more than those in lower income brackets, as ProPublica has reported in Arizona. The programs are pitched as enabling “school choice,” but in reality, research has found the money tends to benefit families that have already chosen private schools.

Idaho lawmakers passed such a program this year with the new tax credit, which some describe as a version of school “vouchers” that parents in other states spend on schools of their choosing.

The credit allows private and homeschool families to reduce their tax bills by $5,000 per child — $7,500 per student with disabilities — or get that much money from the state if they owe no taxes. Lower-income families have priority, and there’s no cap on how many credits each family can claim. The law says funds must go to traditional academic expenses like private school tuition or homeschool curricula and textbooks, plus a few other costs like transportation. But families don’t have to provide proof of how they spent the money unless they’re audited.

The Empowering Parents grant program that lawmakers repealed was open to students no matter where they learn, although state data shows at least 81% of the money went to public school students this academic year — more than 24,000 of them. It offered up to $1,000 per student, with lower-income families getting first dibs and a family limit of $3,000.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little created a similar program in 2020 called Strong Families, Strong Students with federal pandemic funds, to help families make the abrupt shift to remote learning. State lawmakers created the current program in 2022, also using one-time federal pandemic recovery money, and liked it so much they renewed it with ongoing state funding in 2023.

Charlene Bradley used the grant this school year to buy a laptop for her daughter, a fifth grader in Nampa School District. Before the purchase, Bradley’s daughter could use computers at school, but there was no way to do schoolwork at home, “besides my cell phone which we did have to use sometimes,” Bradley said in a Facebook message.

Debra Whiteley used it for home internet and a printer for her 12-year-old daughter, who attends public school in north-central Idaho. Whiteley’s daughter resisted doing projects that needed pictures or graphs. “Now when she has a project she can make a tri fold display that’s not all hand written and self drawn, which looking back on, I didn’t have a clue she may have been embarrassed about,” Whiteley said in a Facebook message.

Annie Coltrin used it to get “much needed” tutoring for her daughter, a sophomore in an agricultural community in southern Idaho. The grant paid for Coltrin’s daughter to receive math tutoring in person twice a week, which took her grade from a low D to a B+.

Such families were on the minds of education leaders like Jason Sevy when they advocated for preserving the Empowering Parents program this year.

Sevy, who chairs a rural public school district board in southwestern Idaho and is the Idaho School Boards Association’s president-elect, said families in his district used the Empowering Parents grants for backpacks and school supplies, or laptops they couldn’t afford otherwise.

“You’re looking at families with five kids that were only making $55,000 a year. Having that little extra money made a big difference,” Sevy said. “But it also closed that gap for these kids to feel like they were going to be able to keep up with everybody else.”

Few families in Sevy’s district will be able to use the state’s new tuition tax credits for private education, he said. A tiny residential school is the only private school operating in Sevy’s remote county. The next-closest options require a drive to the neighboring county, and Sevy worries those schools wouldn’t take English-language learners or children who need special education. (Unlike public schools, private schools can accept or reject students based on their own criteria.)

“This is the program that was able to help those groups of people, and they’re just letting it go away” to free up money for private schools, Sevy said.

The freshman legislator who sponsored the bill to end Empowering Parents is Sen. Camille Blaylock, a Republican from a small city west of Boise.

Blaylock’s stance is that the grants aren’t the proper role of government.

Speaking on the Senate floor in March, Blaylock highlighted the fact that the vast majority of the Empowering Parents money went to electronics — mostly computers, laptops and tablets.

“This program has drifted far from its original intent,” Blaylock said. “It’s turning into a technology slush fund, and if we choose to continue funding it, we are no longer empowering parents. We are creating entitlements.”

In an interview, Blaylock denied any desire to divert public school money to private education and said she was unaware the Idaho Freedom Foundation took that “unfortunate” position.

“The last thing I want is for this to be a ‘taking away from public schools to give to school choice,’ because that is not my intent at all,” Blaylock said.

She told the Senate’s education committee this year that her hope in ending the grants was to cut government spending by $30 million. But if the savings had to go somewhere, she’d want it to benefit other public school programs, especially in a year when lawmakers created the $50 million tax credit for private and homeschooling.

Regardless of how the $30 million in savings will be spent in the future, Blaylock’s assertion that the grants weren’t supposed to help families buy computers goes against what’s in the legislative record.

Lawmakers pitched Empowering Parents three years ago as a way to help lower-income students be on equal footing with their peers, with one legislator arguing that tablets and computers are such a part of education now that “without the ability of families to afford those devices, a student’s learning is substantially jeopardized.”

Republican Sen. Lori Den Hartog, opening debate on her bill to create Empowering Parents in 2022, said it was partly to address pandemic learning loss. “But,” she said, “it’s also a recognition of the ongoing needs that students in our state have, and that there is a potential different avenue to provide resources to those students.”

First in the list of eligible expenses Den Hartog spelled out: computer hardware, internet access, other technology. Then came textbooks, school materials, tutoring and everything else. (Den Hartog, who voted to repeal the program this year, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Killing the grants also went against the praise that Little, the state’s Republican governor, has showered on it. He has described the program as itself a form of “school choice,” touting how it helped low-income parents afford better education.

“The grants help families take charge of tools for their children’s education — things like computers and software, instructional materials and tutoring,” Little said in January 2023 when announcing his intent to make Empowering Parents permanent.

He called the grants “effective, popular and worthy of continued investment” because they “keep parents in the driver’s seat of their children’s education, as it should be.”

In the months before Idaho lawmakers voted to kill the program, Little again cited Empowering Parents as a success story, a way “to ensure Idaho families have the freedom and access to choose the best fit for their child’s unique education and learning needs.” He pointed out that the grants mainly went to public school students. He again touted it in his State of the State address in January, not as a temporary pandemic-era program but as “our popular” grant program “to support students’ education outside of the classroom.”

Nonetheless, the Idaho House and Senate both voted to kill the grant program by wide margins, and Little signed the bill on April 14.

Blaylock disagreed that the grant’s creators foresaw it would be used mostly for laptops and electronics. And, despite acknowledging state lawmakers decided to make it permanent, she disagrees that it was intended to be an ongoing program. She said public schools already get $36 million a year from the state to spend on technology, which they use to furnish computers students can take home, so families don’t need state money to buy more.

Little, in a letter explaining his decision to join lawmakers in killing the grants, said he was “proud of the positive outcomes” from the program. But, he wrote: “Now that the pandemic is squarely in the rearview mirror and students have long been back in school, I agree with the Legislature that this program served its purpose.”

When looking back at how Empowering Parents was created, Sevy, the local school board chair, suspects it was a soft attempt “to get the foot in the door” toward vouchers, not purely an effort to meet the needs of all students.

He remembers telling Den Hartog that the program was helping low-income families in his district. “She was super-excited to hear that,” Sevy said. “It’s like, OK! And here we are two years later, just getting rid of it.”

April 17, 2025 - Letters from an American

2025-04-18T07:25:03.000Z

Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) posted a picture of himself with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the Trump administration says it sent to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador through “administrative error” but can’t get back, and wrote: “I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.”

While the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, apparently tried to stage a photo that would make it look as if the two men were enjoying a cocktail together, it seems clear that backing down and giving Senator Van Hollen access to Abrego Garcia is a significant shift from Bukele’s previous scorn for those trying to address the crisis of a man legally in the U.S. having been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process.

Bukele might be reassessing the distribution of power in the U.S.

According to Robert Jimison of the New York Times, who traveled to El Salvador with Senator Van Hollen, when a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he would move to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, Trump answered: “Well, I’m not involved. You’ll have to speak to the lawyers, the [Department of Justice].”

Today a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to stop Judge Paula Xinis’s order that it “take all available steps” to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “as soon as possible.” Conservative Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote the order. Notably, it began with a compliment to Judge Xinis. “[W]e shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” he wrote.

Then Wilkinson turned his focus on the Trump administration. “It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter,” he wrote. “But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.” The court noted that if the government is so sure of its position, then it should be confident in presenting its facts to a court of law.

Echoing the liberal justices on the Supreme Court, Wilkinson wrote: “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” He noted the reports that the administration is talking about doing just that.

“And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present,” he wrote, “and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”

After Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell’s warning yesterday that Trump’s tariffs will have “significantly larger than anticipated…economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth,” and his statement that the Fed would not cut interest rates immediately as it assesses the situation, Trump today began attacking Powell. Trump wrote on his social media site that Powell is “always TOO LATE AND WRONG.” His missive concluded: “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”

Firing Powell would inject yet more chaos into the economy, and the White House told reporters that Trump’s post “should not be seen as a threat to fire Powell.” Hedge fund founder Spencer Hakimian posted: “Cleanup of orange vomit on Aisle 3.”

There seems to be a change in the air.

Three days ago, on April 14, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote that the vibe is shifting against the right. Yesterday, former neocon and now fervent Trump critic and editor of The Bulwark Bill Kristol posted a photo of plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers kidnapping Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, and commented: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology.”

Today, in the New York Times, conservative David Brooks called for all those resisting what he called “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men” to work together. He called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” that would first stop Trump and then create “a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism—one that offers a positive vision.”

Brooks is hardly the first to suggest that “this is what America needs right now.” But a conservative like Brooks not only arguing that “Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life,” but then quoting Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to call for resistance to those shackles—“We have nothing to lose but our chains”—signals that a shift is underway.

That shift has apparently swept in New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who is generally a good barometer of the way today’s non-MAGA Republicans are thinking. In an interview today, he said: “[M]y feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Mariana Trench. So the memory of things that this administration has done, of which I approve, is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad—not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement.”

Stephens identified Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s bullying of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as the event that turned him away from Trump. “America should never treat an ally that way, certainly not one who is bravely fighting a common enemy,” he said. Stephens also noted the meeting had “delighted” Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who is now “emboldened…to press the war harder.”

We have been in a similar moment of shifting coalitions before.

In the 1850s, elite southern enslavers organized to take over the government and create an oligarchy that would make enslavement national. Northerners hadn’t been paying a great deal of attention to southern leaders’ slow accumulation of power and were shocked when Congress bowed to them and in 1854 passed a law that overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept slavery out of the West. The establishment of slavery in the West would mean new slave states there would work with the southern slave states to outvote the North in Congress, and it would only be a question of time until they made slavery national. Soon, the Slave Power would own the country.

Northerners of all parties who disagreed with each other over issues of immigration, finance, and internal improvements—and even over the institution of slavery—came together to stand against the end of American democracy.

Four years later, in 1858, Democrat Stephen Douglas complained that those coming together to oppose the Democrats were a ragtag coalition whose members didn’t agree on much at all. Abraham Lincoln, who by then was speaking for the new party coalescing around that coalition, replied that Douglas “should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/us/politics/senator-chris-van-hollen-el-salvador-prison.html

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca4.178400/gov.uscourts.ca4.178400.8.0.pdf

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/17/abrego-garcia-appeal-wilkinson-00298063

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20250416a.htm

Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, April 17, 2025, 6:12 a.m.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/dissident-right-trump.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/trump-harvard-law-firms.html

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/trump-critic-conservatism.html

Bluesky:

vanhollen.senate.gov/post/3ln2gcpf6js2m

revkin.bsky.social/post/3ln2jmqelmk2d

gtconway.bsky.social/post/3lmzj4ibvl224

billkristolbulwark.bsky.social/post/3lmx4skidgc25

April 16, 2025 - Letters from an American

2025-04-17T19:15:03.000Z

Wisconsin’s Name-Change Law Raises Safety Risks for Transgender People - ProPublica

2025-04-17T09:00:00.000Z

by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Wisconsin Watch. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In 2022, after living as a boy and going by a new name for several years, a 15-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin, wanted to make it official. Like most teenagers, he dreamed of getting his driver’s license, and his family wanted his government identification to reflect who he really was.

But Wisconsin law has a caveat: He would have to publish his old, feminine name and new name in the local newspaper for three weeks — essentially announcing to the world that he is transgender.

In many instances, if he had committed a crime, the law would afford him privacy as a minor. But not as a transgender teenager changing his name.

His parents worry the public notice now poses a risk as President Donald Trump has attacked transgender rights, asserted that U.S. policy recognizes only two sexes and described efforts to support transgender people as “child abuse.” The publication requirements endanger the community, lawyers working with trans people say, by creating a de facto dataset of likely transgender people that vigilantes and even the government could use for firing, harassment or violence.

Transgender people are over four times more likely to be victims of violence, research shows. Most transgender people and their families agreed to be interviewed for this story only if they weren’t named, citing safety concerns.

“Publication requirements really leave folks open and vulnerable to discrimination and to harassment more than they already are,” said Arli Christian, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “It can put people at risk of violence and blatant discrimination simply because of who they are.”

Wisconsin’s legal process stems from a 167-year-old law, one of many statutes across the country that Christian said were intended to keep people from escaping debts or criminal records. Changing one’s name through marriage is a separate process that does not require publication in a paper.

Although the right to change one’s legal name exists in every state, the effort and risk required to exercise it vary. Less than half of states require people to publicize their name changes in some or all cases, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that tracks voting and LGBTQ+ rights.

Wisconsin law grants confidentiality only if a person can prove it’s more likely than not that publication “could endanger” them. But the statute does not define what that means. For years, some judges interpreted that to include psychological abuse or bullying, or they accepted statistics documenting discrimination and violence against transgender people nationwide.

In 2023, however, a state appeals court set a stricter standard after a trans teenager was denied a confidential name change in Brown County, home to Green Bay. The teen said he had endured years of bullying, in which peers called him slurs and beat him up. Court records show the Brown County judge asserted that publishing the teen’s name wouldn’t expose him to further harm because his harassers already knew he was transgender.

The teen argued that a public process would create a record available to people he met in the future. While the appeals court conceded a “reasonable judge” could agree, it found the Brown County judge had not improperly exercised her discretion in denying the request. Crucially, the appeals court determined that “endanger” meant only physical harm. The case wasn’t appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Both of these trans girls living in Wisconsin requested the confidential name-change process after the 2024 presidential election. First image: A 14-year-old likes cuddling her cat, playing video games and practicing piano. Second image: A 12-year-old shares her artwork. (Illustrations by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images obtained by ProPublica.)

The combination of Wisconsin’s public requirement, the restrictive ruling and the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies has dissuaded at least one person from going through with a name change.

J.J Koechell, a 20-year-old LGBTQ+ advocate from suburban Milwaukee, tried to change his name in November but decided against it after a judge denied his request for confidentiality, ordering him to publish his change in the local paper and create a public court record if he wanted to proceed.

“That’s already dangerous,” Koechell said of a public process, “given our political atmosphere, with an administration that’s trying to erase trans people from existence completely, or saying that they don’t exist, or that there’s something wrong with them.”

At the end of March, Wisconsin Democrats announced plans to introduce a bill that would eliminate the publication requirement for transgender people, so long as they can prove they’re not avoiding debt or a criminal record. Republicans, who control the Legislature, will decide whether it will receive a hearing or vote.

There has been a push in some states to make it easier and safer for transgender people to update their legal documents. Michigan and Illinois laws removing publication requirements took effect earlier this year. And a California lawmaker introduced a bill that would retroactively seal all transition-related court records.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, did not respond to emails and a phone call to his office seeking comment. Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica sought comment from four other Republican leaders in the Assembly and Senate. Of the two whose offices responded, a staffer for Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, R-Walworth, said, “It doesn’t look like something we’d consider a priority,” and a staffer for Senate Assistant Majority Leader Dan Feyen, R-Fond du Lac, said he was not available for comment.

Asked about the safety concerns people raised, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump has vowed to defend women from gender ideology extremism and restore biological truth to the Federal government.”

No Exceptions for Minors

Wisconsin’s law requires a transgender person to publish the details of their identity to change their name whether they are an adult or a child. The notice requirement makes no distinction based on age.

This is less privacy than the legal system typically affords young people, confirmed Cary Bloodworth, who directs a family law clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Bloodworth said both child welfare and juvenile courts tend to keep records confidential for a number of reasons, including that what happens in a person’s youth will follow them for a lifetime.

“I certainly think having a higher level of privacy for kids is a good thing,” Bloodworth said, adding that she thinks the publication requirement is unnecessary for people of any age.

An 11-year old trans girl recently went through the name-change process. She enjoys playing with her dog and swimming, and her mom describes her as a “major science geek.” (Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch)

A mom living near the Wisconsin-Illinois border whose 11-year-old daughter recently went through the name-change process said these proceedings should automatically be private for children.

“The fact that we still have to fight to get something as simple as a confidential name change for a minor who is obviously not running away from criminal or debt charges is just so frustrating and overwhelming,” she said.

The judge deciding their case seemed reluctant to grant confidentiality at first, questioning whether her daughter was being threatened physically, she said. The judge granted the confidential change. But the family remains shaken.

“We live just in constant terror of the wrong person finding out that we have an 11-year-old trans child,” she said. “All it takes is one wrong person getting that information, and what we could end up going through, becoming a target, is horrifying.”

Right before the pandemic, a teenager told her parents she was transgender. She spent much of that first year of her transition at home, attending virtual school like the rest of her peers in the Madison school district. She came out to only a few friends and wanted to keep her gender identity private, so she kept her camera off and skipped her high school graduation.

When she decided to legally change her name, the prospect of publicizing her transition terrified her, according to her mom.

“I explained to her that it’s in tiny, tiny print, and it’s in some page of the paper that no one is going to read,” her mom said. “But it felt to her like she was just standing out there in public with a ‘TRANS’ sign on her.”

A trans teenager was terrified of the public name-change requirement. She loves playing board games, reading and spending time with friends and her partner. (Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images obtained by ProPublica.)

While fewer people read physical newspapers these days, much of their content gets published online and is easily searchable. The court case, too, becomes a public record that is stored online and sometimes aggregated by other websites that show up at the top of search results.

The parents of the then-15-year-old boy who changed his name before getting his driver’s license discovered that happened to their son. When anyone — say, a prospective employer — searches the young man’s name, one of the first results shows his old name and outs him as trans.

“This is what somebody would use as their first judgment of him,” his mom said. “We certainly don’t want that to be something that people would use to rule him out for a job, or whatever it is he might be doing.”

Like many other states, Wisconsin does not have laws that ban discrimination against transgender people in credit and lending practices or in public spaces like stores, restaurants, parks, doctor’s offices and hotels. However, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, issued an executive order in 2019 banning transgender discrimination in state employment, contracting and public services.

After Trump took office again and began issuing executive orders attacking trans rights, the boy’s family started to investigate how they could retroactively seal the court records related to the name change. It wouldn’t change what was in the newspaper, but it could help them remove the online records. The court records also contain sensitive information like their home address that someone could use to harass them.

A friend who was a retired attorney helped their son craft an affidavit describing his experiences. His mom read from it during an interview. “‘Because of recent political events, I fear violence —’” she said before breaking off. “Oh God, I hate even reading this. ‘I fear violence, harassment, retribution because of my status as a transgender person.’”

Her son, who is now 18, shared a statement over email.

“At this moment in time I’m probably more scared about being a trans person than I ever have been before, with the public record if you have my first and last name you can easily find my deadname and therefore find out I’m trans,” he said. “I would love to say that I feel safe and valued in our society but unfortunately I can’t, at times I feel that my personhood is being stripped away under this government.”

A trans teenager officially changed his name and now fears violence because that information is public. He enjoys doing puzzles with his family and creating metal artwork. (Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch)

Anne Daugherty-Leiter, who has guided transgender clients and their families through the name-change process as board president of Trans Law Help Wisconsin, said where a person lives in Wisconsin, and therefore what court they must petition, affects their likelihood of getting a confidential change.

Confidentiality is important, she said, because of how the state handles changes to birth certificates. Wisconsin birth certificates that are issued through a confidential name change show only the new name. But if a person has to announce their name change publicly, birth certificates are amended to list both the person’s old and new names. Any time the person has to use that document, at the DMV or while getting a loan, it outs them, she said.

“This Is Not Who I Am”

Koechell, a trans man and LGBTQ+ activist, was unwilling to go through with the name-change process after being denied confidentiality by a judge late last year.

Koechell lives in Waukesha County, a Republican stronghold where multiple schools have enacted policies critics have called anti-LGBTQ+.

A judge denied J.J Koechell’s confidential name change with an order that referred to the trans man as “she” and “her.” (Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images courtesy of J.J Koechell, obtained by ProPublica.)

In a letter to the judge, Koechell wrote that people had sent him multiple threats and posted his family members’ addresses online, all for “being an advocate and being transgender openly in my community.”

“I do not want to publish my deadname for people to use against me,” he said in an interview, using a term common among transgender people to refer to their birth names. “I don’t see a reason why people who are not particularly fond of me wouldn’t show up at a hearing like that and try and cause trouble.”

Court records show the judge denied Koechell’s confidentiality request and his request to reconsider. The judge’s order referred to Koechell, a trans man with a masculine voice and beard, as “she” and “her.”

Koechell decided the public process wasn’t worth the risk. But it’s hard, he said, to move through life with his old identification.

“When I go to a new doctor or new appointment or something, then that’s the name on my chart, and then I get called that in a waiting room full of people, and it’s super uncomfortable. I just want to disappear,” Koechell said. “Then eventually, I have to correct the doctors, and I’m like, ‘Hey, just to let you know, I don’t go by that name. This is not who I am.’”

Data from the latest U.S. Transgender Survey found that 22% of people who had to show an ID that did not match their identity experienced some form of negative consequence, including verbal harassment, discrimination or physical violence.

If the U.S. Senate passes the SAVE Act, which would require voters to prove citizenship with a passport or birth certificate, those consequences could include disenfranchisement. Transgender people who can’t change the name on their birth certificate or passport would be ineligible to vote, according to the liberal think tank Center for American Progress.

U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican and chief sponsor of the bill, has said the legislation directs states to create a process for citizens with a “name discrepancy” to register. “No one will be unable to vote because of a name change,” he said.

Trace Schlax, a trans man in Wisconsin, has tried to change his gender marker and name on official documents. (Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch)

After Trump won in November, Trace Schlax, a 40-year-old IT project manager, decided to expedite changing his gender marker on his passport, figuring he could update his name later in state court.

“It matters,” Schlax said. He loves to travel but has encountered extra scrutiny from airport security with outdated documents. “I get comments from TSA when I go through to travel domestically, about my hair, about how I look. I get extra pat-downs."

He sent his application in early December and crossed his fingers. He received it back in February, rejected. By that time, Trump had issued an executive order banning trans people from changing the gender markers on their passports.

Schlax decided to continue updating what records he could, like his birth certificate and driver’s license. He worries about having conflicting documents. Will he get accused of fraud? Will he have trouble flying?

But in the end, he decided it was still important to change his name and update his license to improve his day-to-day experience.

And he decided to go about it publicly. It felt less painful, he said, to accept the risks rather than detail his personal, traumatic experiences to a judge only to have them decide he hadn’t endured sufficient danger.

“Me changing my name and my gender marker affects absolutely no one but me,” said Schlax, who has a court date to change his name in late April. “Why does this have to be so hard? Why do I have to prove myself so hard?”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

April 16, 2025 - Letters from an American

2025-04-17T07:43:07.000Z

In El Salvador today, authorities denied Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) a meeting or a phone call with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man the Trump regime sent by “administrative error” to the terrorist prison CECOT. Abrego Garcia is Van Hollen’s constituent, and the senator promised his family to try to get him released. That Salvadoran officials cannot or will not produce him raises concerns about his well-being.

Senator Van Hollen had hoped to meet with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, but met instead with Vice President Félix Ulloa. Ulloa at first told Van Hollen there had not been enough time to arrange a meeting with Abrego Garcia, but when the senator offered to come back next week, Ulloa allowed as how a meeting might not be possible at all.

Van Hollen reported that when he asked Ulloa why El Salvador was continuing to imprison Abrego Garcia when it had no evidence that he was a gang member, Ulloa answered that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador to hold him.

Evidently, President Donald Trump thinks what he is doing to Abrego Garcia and the optics of CECOT play well to his base. Jordain Carney and Nicholas Wu of Politico reported today that the White House has “heavily encouraged” Republican lawmakers to lean into the idea of Abrego Garcia—who has no criminal record—as an example of the dangerous criminals they insist Democrats want to bring to the U.S. Yesterday, out of the blue and with absolutely no evidence, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that Abrego Garcia engaged in human trafficking.

At least a dozen Republicans have followed the president’s lead. Congressional reporter Craig Caplan reported that yesterday, House Ways and Means committee chair Jason Smith (R-MO) led a delegation of Republican House members to tour CECOT. The delegation included representatives Ron Estes (KS), Kevin Hern (OK), Mike Kennedy (UT), Carol Miller (WV), Riley Moore (WV), and Claudia Tenney (NY). At least some of the representatives had photographs taken of them in CECOT, standing in front of the caged men.

The delegation also met with U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador William Duncan, who posted on social media that “[t]he delegation is visiting the country to strengthen bilateral ties and discuss initiatives that promote economic development and mutual cooperation.”

Two days ago, Bukele posted a picture of himself and Trump with their arms around each other with the comment: “Friends.” Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews wrote: “We traded Europe for a guy that builds concentration camps for profit.”

Trump is likely pushing his narrative about criminal undocumented immigrants—although Bloomberg has reported that 90% of the men he has sent to El Salvador have no criminal record—in part because that rendition is stirring up opposition. In addition to popular protests, judges are pushing back.

Today, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued an opinion saying that the administration’s “hurried removal” of the men to El Salvador after Boasberg had issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) prohibiting them from doing so, demonstrated “a wilful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt.”

“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” Boasberg wrote. Quoting Chief Justice John Marshall, who laid down the foundations of much of America law, Boasberg wrote: “To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.’”

If the government decides not to try to repair its contempt, Boasberg says the court will use declarations, hearings, or depositions to identify the individuals responsible for making the judgment to ignore the court. Then he will ask the government to prosecute the contempt, but if—as is likely—it refuses, Boasberg says he will appoint a private prosecutor to move the case along. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance puts it: “These cases are about making sure that, American citizen or not, criminal or not, peoples’ right to have the day in court that the Constitution guarantees them is honored. That’s all. But it’s everything.”

Trump is also likely playing to his base because Americans are terribly concerned about what’s happening to the economy on his watch.

Stocks fell again today after Trump’s administration said it would put limits on chip sales to China and after Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell told the Economic Club of Chicago that Trump’s tariffs will have “significantly larger than anticipated…economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth.” The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 700 points or 1.73%, the S&P 500 fell 2.24%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 3.07%.

Danielle Kaye of the New York Times reports on a recent Bank of America survey that shows global investors have dumped a record amount of U.S. stocks in the past two months. Trump insists that the U.S. has been bringing in $2 billion a day in tariffs, some of which he claims comes from his new levies, but, in fact, Lori Ann LaRocco of CNBC reported today that U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the U.S. is taking in only $250 million a day.

Leila Fadel of NPR reports that China used to buy more than half the U.S. crop of soybeans and now soybean farmers are gravely concerned they’re going to lose that market. At the same time, we are heading in the prime months for the U.S. tourism industry, and Bloomberg reports that a worst-case scenario by the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates that the U.S. could lose almost $90 billion as foreign tourists stay away from the U.S. and boycott American products.

So Trump is hitting his MAGA themes hard.

Today he escalated his attacks on Maine governor Janet Mills. Trump has demanded that Mills prohibit transgender girls in the public schools from participating in girls’ sports. Mills, who was Maine’s attorney general before she became governor, maintains she is bound by the 2021 state law that explicitly protects against discrimination on the basis of gender identity. As Jeremy Roebuck and Joanna Slater of the Washington Post note, Mills has said that law is “worthy of debate” but that Trump cannot change it by decree.

On February 21, Trump threatened to withhold federal education funding for Maine unless Mills promised to comply with his ban. When she reiterated that “I’m complying with state and federal laws,” and that “We’re going to follow the law,” he warned: “You’d better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.” Mills answered: “See you in court.”

Since then, the administration has attacked the state, opening investigations, cutting and then restoring Social Security Administration contracts, and taunting Mills on social media. On Friday the Department of Education said it would pull all federal funding for education in Maine unless the state agreed to ban the state’s two transgender girls from playing on girls sports teams. Today the Justice Department sued Maine’s Department of Education, and Attorney General Pam Bondi threatened to pull past funding retroactively.

Mills said the administration is trying “to pressure the State of Maine to ignore the Constitution and abandon the rule of law.” “For nearly two months, Maine has endured recriminations from the Federal government that have targeted hungry school kids, hardworking fishermen, senior citizens, new parents, and countless Maine people,” Mills said. “We have been subject to politically motivated investigations that opened and closed without discussion, leaving little doubt that their outcomes were predetermined. Let today serve as warning to all states: Maine might be among the first to draw the ire of the Federal government in this way, but we will not be the last.”

Trump is also keeping his attack on Harvard in the news. Yesterday, after Harvard defied the regime’s attempt to take over the school, Trump posted “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”

Today, Evan Perez, Alayna Treene, and Marshall Cohen of CNN reported that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is planning to take away Harvard University’s tax-exempt status. Law professor Sam Brunson noted that this is illegal. “In 1998,” he wrote, “Congress explicitly provided that the President could not, directly or indirectly, request that the IRS start or end an audit or other investigation of a taxpayer.” Brunson also noted that the move was “dumb.” “Unless Trump has super-secret information, Harvard hasn't done anything to violate its tax-exempt status.” Brunson added: “there's not a single competent attorney left in the Administration.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board helpfully noted that the Supreme Court “has repeatedly held that the government may not use federal benefits or funds to coerce parties to surrender their constitutional rights. This is what the Administration is doing” with its demands on Harvard.

Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark reposted a clip of then-senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) on the Fox News Channel when a right-wing group falsely alleged the IRS was targeting them. "This is about whether we have functional constitutional government in this country,” Vance told host Laura Ingraham. “If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we'd no longer live in a free country.“

—

Notes:

https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/kilmar-abrego-garcia-el-salvador-maryland-man-deported/

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/16/kilmar-abrego-garcia-congress-el-salvador-00295147

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20250416a.htm

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-15/us-economy-is-set-to-lose-billions-as-foreign-tourists-stay-away

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/business/stocks-trump-tariffs.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/16/us-customs-tariffs-revenue-generated-since-april-5.html

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/nx-s1-5361357/u-s-soybean-farmers-urge-trump-to-ease-tariffs-on-china-to-protect-their-industry

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/11/maine-education-trump-janet-mills/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/16/justice-department-maine-transgender-athletes/

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/16/politics/irs-harvard-tax-exempt-status/index.html

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-harvard-funding-conditions-constitution-congress-c26040f8

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-09/about-90-of-migrants-sent-to-salvador-lacked-us-criminal-record

https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2025cv0766-81

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

Contemptible

Today, James Boasberg, a federal judge in the District of Columbia, issued an order following a hearing he held in his courtroom almost two weeks ago. That case involved the two planeloads of people the Trump government spirited out of the country, Venezuelans who are allegedly members of the Tren de Aragua gang. We don’t know for sure whether they are…

5 hours ago · 1029 likes · 120 comments · Joyce Vance

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5249835-abrego-garcia-deportation-el-salvador/

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/16/investing/us-stock-market/index.html

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5249835-abrego-garcia-deportation-el-salvador/

Youtube:

watch?v=gu30vxluOe4&t=3362s Mills-Trump exchange at about 56:00.

CraigCaplan/status/1912577886529147002

Bluesky:

marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3lmx3342lsc2u

ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lmsliutwkk2u

sarahlongwell25.bsky.social/post/3lmxkthtxb22b

smbrnsn.bsky.social/post/3lmxlgx4pok2o

macfarlanenews.bsky.social/post/3lmx6wnmea22a

April 15, 2025 - Letters from an American

2025-04-16T20:51:58.000Z

Judge grants CREW discovery in DOGE FOIA suit - News - CREW | Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

2025-04-16T17:14:07.000Z

The post Judge grants CREW discovery in DOGE <span class="dewidow">FOIA suit</span> appeared first on CREW | Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Trump Is Spending Billions on Border Security. Some Residents Living There Lack Basic Resources. - ProPublica

2025-04-16T10:00:00.000Z

by Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica, and Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and photography by Cengiz Yar, ProPublica

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Within hours of taking office, President Donald Trump declared an emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, giving him authority to unilaterally spend billions on immigration enforcement and wall construction. He has since reportedly urged Congress to authorize an additional $175 billion for border security, far exceeding what was spent during his first term.

In the coming months, border towns in Texas and Arizona will receive more grants to fund and equip police patrols. New wall construction projects will fill border communities with workers who eat at restaurants, shop in stores and rent space in RV parks. And National Guard deployments will add to local economies.

But if the president asked Sandra Fuentes what the biggest need in her community on the Texas-Mexico border is, the answer would be safe drinking water, not more border security. And if Trump put the same question to Jose Grijalva, the Arizona mayor would say a hospital for his border city, which has struggled without one for a decade.

Although billions of state and federal dollars flow into the majority-Latino communities along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, many remain among the poorest places in the nation. In many towns, unemployment is significantly higher and income much lower than their interior counterparts, with limited access to health care, underfunded infrastructure and lagging educational attainment. Security walls are erected next to neighborhoods without running water, and National Guard units deploy to towns without paved roads and hospitals.

By some estimates, about 30,000 border residents in Texas lack access to reliable drinking water, among more than a million statewide. For 205,000 people living along Arizona’s border with Mexico, the nearest full-service hospital is hours away.

Such struggles aren’t confined to the border. But the region offers perhaps the most striking disparity between the size of federal and state governments’ investment there and how little it’s reflected in the quality of life of residents.

“The border security issue takes up all the oxygen and a lot of the resources in the room,” said state Rep. Mary González, a Democrat from El Paso County who has sponsored bills to address water needs. “It leaves very little space for all the other priorities, specifically water and wastewater infrastructure, because most people don’t understand what it’s like turning your faucet and there’ll be no water.”

Here’s how residents in two border towns, Del Rio, Texas, and Douglas, Arizona, experience living in places where the government always seems ready to spend on border security while stubborn obstacles to their communities’ well-being remain.

Nearly a fifth of the nearly 50,000 residents in Val Verde County, Texas, live in poverty, compared with the state’s 14% average.

When Cierra Flores gives her daughter a bath at their home in Del Rio, she has to keep a close eye on the water level of the outdoor tank that supplies her house. Like any 6-year-old, her daughter likes to play in the running water. But Flores doesn’t have the luxury of leaving the tap open. When the tank runs dry, the household is out of water. That means not washing dishes, doing laundry or flushing the toilet until the trip can be made to get more water.

Flores lives on a ranch in Escondido Estates, a neighborhood where many residents have gone decades without running water. Flores’ family has a well on their property. But during the summer and prolonged droughts, as the region is now experiencing, their well runs dry.

At those times, the family relies on a neighbor who has a more dependable well and is willing to sell water. Flores’ husband makes hourlong trips twice on weekends to fill the family’s water tank. Their situation has felt even more tenuous lately, as her neighbor’s property was listed for sale, prompting worries about whether they’ll continue to have access to his well.

“I have no idea where we would go here if that well wasn’t there,” Flores said. “It’s frustrating that we don’t have basic resources, especially in a place where they know when the summer comes it doesn’t rain. It doesn’t rain, we don’t have water.”

Val Verde County, where Del Rio is located, is three times the size of Rhode Island and hours from a major city. About a fifth of its nearly 50,000 residents live in poverty, a rate nearly twice the national average. Some live in colonias — rural communities along the U.S.-Mexico border, including illegal subdivisions that lack access to water, sewers or adequate housing.

The county has worked for years to bring water to residents, piecing together state and federal grants. Yet about 2,000 people — more than 4% of the county’s population — still lack running water, according to a database kept by the Texas Office of the Attorney General. For those residents, it means showering at fitness centers and doing the dishes once a week with water from plastic jugs.

Some neighborhoods along the Mexican border on the outskirts of Del Rio, such as the area where Cierra Flores and her 6-year-old daughter, Olivia, live, still lack infrastructure like paved roads and access to safe drinking water.

In the early 1990s, then-Gov. Ann Richards, a Democrat, toured some of the state’s colonias along the border to assess the living conditions. After stepping into the mud on an unpaved street, she’s said to have been so moved by the scene that she told a staffer, “Whatever they want, give it to them.”

Fuentes, a community organizer, likes to tell that story because it drives home how long residents have fought for water and other improvements but been stymied by state and local politics and limited funds.

“It’s going to be an uphill battle, but we are going to keep on battling,” she said. “What else is there to do?”

Over the past 30 years, the state has provided more than $1 billion in grants and loans to bring drinking water and wastewater treatment to colonias and other economically distressed areas. Texas 2036, a nonpartisan public policy think tank, estimates Texas needs nearly $154 billion by 2050 to meet water demands across the state amid population growth, the ongoing drought and aging infrastructure.

Texas state leaders said they are committed to investing in water projects and infrastructure. Gov. Greg Abbott’s office said he is calling on the Legislature to dedicate $1 billion a year for 10 years and is looking forward to working with lawmakers “to ensure Texans have a safe, reliable water supply for the next 50 years.”

Kim Carmichael, a spokesperson for Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows, a Republican from Lubbock, said, “Texas is at a critical juncture with its water supply, and every lawmaker recognizes the need to act decisively and meaningfully invest to further secure our water future.” The Texas House’s base budget proposes $2.5 billion for water infrastructure.

One of the challenges — at the federal and state level — is that infrastructure needs often exceed available funds, said Olga Morales-Pate, chief executive officer of Rural Community Assistance Partnership, a national network of nonprofits that works with rural communities on access to safe drinking water and wastewater issues. “So it becomes a competitive process: Who gets there faster, who has a better application, who is shovel ready to get those funding opportunities out?” she said.

Community organizer Karen Gonzalez is frustrated that residents of the Del Rio area still lack water access while state leaders focus on border security.

The plight of people without water often gets overlooked, said Karen Gonzalez, an organizer who used to work with Fuentes. Even though she grew up in Del Rio, it wasn’t until she started to work with the community that she learned some county residents didn’t have water.

“Every person that I come across that I tell that we’re working this issue is like, ‘There’s people that don’t have water?’” she said. “It’s not something that is known.”

Unlike border security, which is constantly in the spotlight.

During his inauguration, Trump praised Abbott as a “leader of the pack” on border security. In 2021, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar effort aimed at curbing illegal immigration and drug trafficking. As part of the operation, the state has awarded Val Verde County and the city of Del Rio more than $10 million in grants, state data obtained by The Texas Tribune shows.

A state-funded border wall that has gone up in the county a short distance from the Rio Grande stretches in fits and starts, including next to a neighborhood without running water. As of November, about 5 miles of it had cost at least $162 million, according to the Tribune. The state Legislature’s proposed budget includes $6.5 billion to maintain “current border security operations.”

Meanwhile, organizers, elected officials and residents say state and federal programs to fund water infrastructure will continue to fall short of the need. Last year, the state fund created by lawmakers in 1989 to help underserved areas access drinking water had $200 million in applications for assistance and only $100 million in available funding.

When grants are awarded, water projects can take years to complete because of increasing costs and unforeseen construction difficulties — like hitting unexpected bedrock while laying pipe, said Val Verde County Judge Lewis Owens. Project delays — some of them, Owens acknowledged, the county’s fault — impede the ability to get future grants.

Organizers like Fuentes and Karen Gonzalez said their frustration with the slow progress on water has grown as they’ve watched the border wall go up and billions more dollars spent to deploy state troopers and the National Guard to aid federal border security officers.

“It’s just infuriating,” Karen Gonzalez said. She said she hopes elected officials “focus on what our actual border community needs are. And for us, I feel like it’s not border security.”

Sections of the border wall are being built as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star on the outskirts of Del Rio, near neighborhoods without access to safe drinking water.

Watch video ➜

As paramedics loaded her 8-year-old son into a helicopter in the Arizona border town of Douglas, Nina Nelson did her best to reassure him. Days earlier, Jacob and his father had been riding ATVs on their ranch in far southeastern Arizona, along the U.S.-Mexico border. Dust irritated Jacob’s lungs, and over the next few days his breathing deteriorated until Nelson could see him fight for every breath.

He needed care that isn’t available in Douglas, a town of about 15,000. And he would have to make the trip without her.

“Buddy, you’re gonna be OK,” she recalled telling him. She knew it would take more than twice as long to drive the 120 miles to Tucson and the nearest hospital that could provide the care he needed. “I’m gonna be racing up there. I’ll be there. I’m gonna find you,” she said.

Douglas lost its hospital nearly a decade ago. Southeast Arizona Medical Center had struggled financially for years and by 2015 was staffed by out-of-state doctors. When it ran afoul of federal rules too many times, jeopardizing patient safety, the government pulled its ability to bill Medicare and Medicaid and it closed within a week.

As her son’s breathing took a turn for the worse, Nelson considered the variables everyone in Douglas confronts in a medical emergency. Should she go to the town’s stand-alone emergency room, which treats only the most basic maladies? Drive the half hour to Bisbee or an hour to Sierra Vista for slightly higher levels of care? Or could Jacob endure the two hours it takes to drive to Tucson?

“That is the kind of game you play: ‘How much time do I think I have?’” Nelson said.

Nina Nelson’s son Jacob has been transported twice by helicopter to get medical care because Douglas lacks a full-service hospital.

Arizona hasn’t been as aggressive as Texas in funding border security. But when concerns about the border surge, money often follows.

In 2021, the state created the Border Security Fund and allocated $55 million to it. A year later, then-Gov. Doug Ducey asked state lawmakers for $50 million for border security. They gave him more than 10 times that amount, including $335 million for a border wall. The measure was proposed by Sen. David Gowan, a Republican who represents Douglas. In October 2022, crews began stacking shipping containers along the border in Cochise County, where Douglas is located. Gowan’s spokesperson said he wasn’t available for comment.

The container wall wasn’t effective. Migrants slipped through gaps between containers, and a section toppled over. When the federal government sued, claiming the construction was trespassing on federal land, Ducey had the container wall removed.

The cost of erecting, then disassembling the wall: $197 million. (The state recouped about $1.4 million by selling the containers.)

Daniel Scarpinato, Ducey’s former chief of staff, said border security is a significant issue for nearby communities and requires resources, “especially given the failures of the federal government.” He noted that the Ducey administration didn’t ignore other needs in the area, including spending to attract doctors to rural Arizona. “But we will make no apologies for prioritizing public safety and security at our border,” he said.

Southeast Arizona Medical Center closed in 2015, leaving the Douglas area without a full-service hospital.

Grijalva, a Douglas native, was sworn in as mayor in December with a list of needs he is determined to make progress on: a community center, more food assistance for the growing number of hungry residents and a hospital. Money the state spent on the container wall would’ve been better used on those projects, he said. “I appreciate Doug Ducey trying that, but those resources could have gone into the community,” he said.

The median income in Douglas is $39,000, about half the state’s median income, and almost a third of the town’s residents live in poverty. A shrinking tax base makes it difficult for Douglas to provide basic services. The town doesn’t have enough money for street repairs, let alone to reopen a hospital. The backlog of repaving projects has climbed to $67 million, while Douglas nets only $400,000 a year for street improvements.

Money for wall construction or National Guard units gives a short-term boost to the economy, but those efforts can also interfere with the economic lifeblood of towns like Douglas: cross-border traffic.

Both Trump and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, have deployed hundreds of guard members and active military personnel to the border. None have shown up in Douglas yet, Grijalva said. When they do, they’ll spend money. But a couple dozen troops don’t compare to the 3.6 million people who cross the border each year. The Walmart in Douglas, a stone’s throw from the port of entry, is packed daily with shoppers from Agua Prieta, Sonora, Grijalva said. More troops on both sides of the port bottleneck traffic and raise people’s fears of being detained, which may discourage them from crossing, even when they are doing so legally, he said.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Grijalva declared a state of emergency, which could make the city eligible for federal aid if its economy takes a hit. “I know the executive orders didn’t do anything to stop the legal immigration, but it’s the perception,” Grijalva said. “If our economy dips in any way, they could give us some funding.”

Douglas’ new mayor, Jose Grijalva, declared a state of emergency in January over concerns that Trump’s executive orders on border security and immigration will harm the border town’s fragile economy.

Attracting a new hospital is a longer-term effort. Construction alone could cost upwards of $75 million. But then it would have to be staffed. In its final years, the hospital in Douglas suffered from the shortage of health care professionals plaguing much of rural America. The year it closed, it had no onsite physicians, said Dr. Dan Derksen, director of the Arizona Center for Rural Health. The state has programs to address that problem, including helping doctors in rural areas repay school loans. But the shortage has persisted. If a hospital were to open again in Douglas, it could cost as much as $775,000 to launch a residency program there, according to Derksen and Dr. Conrad Clemens, who heads graduate medical education for the University of Arizona.

“There’s policy strategies that you can do at the state level that help, but there’s no single strategy that is a cure-all,” Derksen said. “You have to do a variety of strategies.”

Border security funding, on the other hand, is easier to get.

Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels is known for his aggressive border enforcement activities. His office soaks up state and federal grants to help with drug interdiction, human trafficking and surveillance equipment on the border. The state also awarded him $20 million for a new jail and $5 million to open a border security operations center, a base for various agencies enforcing the border, in Sierra Vista, about an hour from Douglas.

At its grand opening in November, Dannels said all he had to do was ask for the money.

“I was speaking with Gov. Ducey and the governor asked me, ‘What do you guys need?’” Dannels said. “I said, ‘We need a collective center that drives actions.’” Shortly after, the plan came together, he said.

However, if Cochise Regional Hospital were still open, Dannels’ office would have one less security concern. The abandoned building, which is deteriorating in an isolated pocket of desert on the outskirts of Douglas, is a common waypoint for smugglers.

Lexi Churchill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune and Dan Keemahill of The Texas Tribune contributed research.

An Indian Drugmaker, Investigated by ProPublica Last Year, Has Recalled Two Dozen Medications Sold to U.S. Patients - ProPublica

2025-04-16T09:00:00.000Z

by Patricia Callahan

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Glenmark Pharmaceuticals has recalled two dozen generic medicines sold to American patients because the Indian factory that made them failed to comply with U.S. manufacturing standards and the Food and Drug Administration determined that the faulty drugs could harm people, federal records show.

In February, the FDA found problems with cleaning and testing at the plant in Madhya Pradesh, India, which was the subject of a ProPublica investigation last year. The current recalls, listed in an FDA enforcement report last week, cover a wide range of commonly prescribed medicines, including ones that treat epilepsy, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, heart disease and high blood pressure, among other ailments. A full list of the recalled medications is available here.

The agency determined that the drugs could cause temporary or reversible harm and that the chance of more serious problems was remote. However, the FDA didn’t say what symptoms the flawed drugs could cause. ProPublica asked the FDA and Glenmark for more specifics, but neither responded.

Records show that Glenmark first alerted wholesalers about the recalls in a March 13 letter. That letter suggests that Glenmark pulled the drugs because of potential cross-contamination. Thomas Callaghan, Glenmark’s executive director of regulatory affairs for North America, wrote that 148 batches of the recalled medicines were made “in a shared facility” with two cholesterol-lowering drugs, ezetimibe and a combination of that drug and simvastatin.

That’s a concern because the chemical structure of ezetimibe contains what’s known as a beta-lactam ring. FDA safety experts pay attention to this because many beta-lactam drugs, particularly penicillin, can cause life-threatening allergies and hypersensitivity reactions. It’s the most commonly reported drug allergy in the U.S. Because of that danger, the FDA requires manufacturers to follow special precautions to prevent cross-contamination with drugs that contain a beta-lactam ring, even if they aren’t antibiotics.

The chemical structure of ezetimibe, Callaghan wrote to Glenmark’s wholesalers, shows it is unlikely to cause such hypersensitivity reactions. Nevertheless, Glenmark was recalling the drugs “based on risk assessment and out of an abundance of caution,” Callaghan wrote. He added, “This recall is being made with knowledge of the Food and Drug Administration.”

According to Callaghan’s letter, the potential problem dates back years. The executive wrote that Glenmark began shipping the drugs on Oct. 4, 2022.

In December, ProPublica revealed that the Glenmark factory was responsible for an outsized share of U.S. recalls for pills that didn’t dissolve properly and could harm people. At the time, the FDA hadn’t inspected the plant since before the COVID-19 pandemic, even though one of those recalls had been linked to deaths of American patients.

About two months after that investigation was published, FDA officials returned to the factory — the agency’s first inspection in five years. Inspectors discovered that Glenmark hadn’t properly cleaned equipment to prevent contamination of medicines with residues from other drugs. The federal investigators also noted that Glenmark routinely released some drugs to the U.S. market using test methods that hadn’t been adequately validated, according to the inspection report.

What’s more, when some Glenmark tests found problems with a drug, the company at times declared those results invalid and “retested with new samples to obtain passing results,” the inspection report said. “The batches were ultimately released to the US market.”

In their detailed report, the inspectors listed drugs shipped to U.S. customers who had been affected by the potential contamination and testing problems, but FDA censors redacted page after page, making it impossible to know which medicines may not be safe. An FDA attorney said the information was being withheld because it contained trade secrets or commercial information that was considered privileged or confidential.

ProPublica first asked Glenmark about that inspection on March 7 after obtaining the FDA report through the Freedom of Information Act. Glenmark alerted wholesalers about the recalls less than a week later, but the company and the FDA didn’t tell ProPublica.

Instead, a Glenmark spokesperson sent a statement saying the company was “committed to working diligently with the FDA to ensure compliance with manufacturing operations and quality systems.” And the FDA said it could discuss potential compliance matters only with the company involved.

The FDA first mentioned the recalls publicly in its April 8 enforcement report, which is like an electronic filing cabinet for recalls. The recalls do not appear on the FDA’s recalls website, which compiles press releases written by pharmaceutical companies.

ProPublica asked the FDA and Glenmark why they didn’t alert the public last month that these medicines had been recalled, but neither responded.

Glenmark is embroiled in a federal lawsuit that alleges recalled potassium chloride capsules made at its Madhya Pradesh factory caused the death of a 91-year-old Maine woman in June. The FDA had determined last year that more than 50 million of those recalled Glenmark extended-release capsules had the potential to kill U.S. patients because they didn’t dissolve correctly and could lead to a perilous spike in potassium. In court filings, Glenmark has denied responsibility for the woman’s death.

Since that potassium chloride recall, Glenmark has told federal regulators it has received reports of eight deaths in the U.S. of people who took the recalled capsules, FDA records show. Companies are required to file such reports so the agency can monitor drug safety. The FDA shares few details, though, so ProPublica was unable to independently verify what happened in each case. In general, the FDA says these adverse event reports reflect the opinions of the people who reported the harm and don’t prove that the drug caused it.

April 15, 2025 - Letters from an American

2025-04-16T07:30:51.000Z

A large crowd of protesters calling for the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the Trump administration sent to a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador, milled around the courthouse this afternoon where U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis held a hearing on the case.

Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Ben Wittes of Lawfare watched the hearing and explained that Judge Xinis is now building the evidence to determine whether individuals in the administration have acted in contempt of court. The court ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., as well as to give updates on what they are doing to make that return happen. To date, Judge Xinis said, “what the record shows is nothing has been done.” She dismissed the administration lawyer’s argument that yesterday’s Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and president of El Salvador Nayib Bukele was part of the effort to “facilitate” the case.

As Bower said, we all know what’s going on, but it’s impossible right now to know which individual is responsible for the stonewalling. For that matter, Bower added, those speaking for the administration usually deny personal knowledge of the case, simply saying they have been made aware of the facts they are representing. Judge Xinis called for two weeks of fact finding to determine if the Trump regime is following her orders that it facilitate his return. The judge told Abrego Garcia’s lawyers that they may conduct four depositions and apply for two more, make up to 15 document requests, and up to 15 interrogatories (these are lists of written questions that must be answered under oath and in writing).

Xinis noted that “every day Mr. Garcia is detained in CECOT is a day of irreparable harm.”

Bower added that the Trump regime is likely drawing this out in part because it permits them to showcase the one part of their agenda that is still polling well. The staged meeting with Bukele enabled officials to get widespread media coverage for the straight-up lie that Abrego Garcia has been found to be a member of the MS-13 gang. As Greg Sargent reported today in the New Republic, this story came from a police officer who, just weeks later, was suspended for “providing information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts.”

The Oval Office event also enabled White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller both to lie that the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision against the administration was actually in favor of it, and to rerun the litany of heinous crimes he associates with immigrants. The attention to the case has also gotten Miller airtime on news shows, where he repeats those lies.

The administration needs the immigration issue to play to its base, but it’s actually not clear that Americans like Miller’s approach to immigrants. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers that while polls say Americans generally like Trump’s approach to immigration—a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll said 49% were in favor—they hate the specifics.

The same Reuters/Ipsos poll says that 82% of Americans, including 68% of Republicans, think “the president should obey federal court rulings even if he disagrees with them.” Only 40% think he “should keep deporting people despite a court order to stop,” although 76% of Republicans think he should violate a court order.

The questions specifically about immigration are even starker. Trump promised during the campaign that he would deport undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes, and people like that plan by an 81-point margin. But according to Morris’s crunching of polls on the subject, U.S. adults oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who have lived more than 10 years in the U.S. by a 37-point margin. They oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens by a 36-point margin. By an 18-point margin, they oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who have broken no laws in the U.S. other than immigration laws.

The more visible Abrego Garcia’s case becomes, coupled as it is with the idea that it is a precursor to sending U.S. citizens to CECOT, the less likely it is to be popular. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) got an earful from his constituents on the topic. “Are you going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?” one man asked, to applause and calls of “Yeah!” from around the room. When Grassley said no, because that wasn’t a power of Congress, the man replied: “The Supreme Court said to bring him back!” and others chimed in, “They’re defying the Constitution.” “Trump don’t care,” the first man said. “If I get an order to pay a ticket for $1,200 and I just say no, does that stand up? Because he’s got an order from the Supreme Court, and he just said no! He just said ‘Screw it!’” “It’s wrong,” someone in the crowd said. The first man concluded: “I’m pissed.”

This evening, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) noted that “[f]ollowing his abduction and unlawful deportation, U.S. federal courts have ordered the safe return of my constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. It should be a priority of the U.S. government to secure his safe release, which is why tomorrow I am traveling to El Salvador…to visit Kilmar and check on his wellbeing and to hold constructive conversations with government officials around his release. We must urgently continue working to return Kilmar safely home to Maryland.”

Trump’s losing ground on his other major selling point in the 2024 election: that he would improve the economy. He promised to bring prices down “on Day One,” but backed off on that almost immediately. Then an utterly chaotic trade war, tariffs on and off and on again, and a dramatic drop in the bond market as well as the stock market suggesting that the U.S. is losing its status as a safe haven made April an economic disaster. JPMorgan said this week that Trump’s tariffs mean that he is “on track to deliver one of the largest US tax hikes on record,” taxes that will fall on poorer Americans rather than the wealthy and corporations.

Under Biden, Vietnam and the U.S. had strengthened economic ties, but yesterday, China and Vietnam signed dozens of cooperation agreements to combat disruptions caused by Trump's trade war. Today, Chinese officials stopped accepting Boeing jets or U.S. airline parts. China has also stopped accepting U.S. beef, turning instead to Australia. U.S. beef exports to China have been worth $2.5 billion annually. Last Thursday, Gustaf Kilander of The Independent reported that “fund managers quietly fear Trump doesn’t have a tariff plan and that he ‘might be insane.’”

Meetings in Washington this week did little to calm the situation. Jordan Erb of Bloomberg reported that Maros Sefcovic, the trade chief for the European Union, left yesterday’s trade meeting in Washington unclear about what the U.S. even wants. Erb notes: “The uncertainty around Trump’s chaotic tactics, replete with delays, retreats, new threats and sudden exceptions and trial balloons, hasn’t helped.”

Trump also promised he would end Russia’s war on Ukraine immediately. But it has become obvious that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is using Trump’s desperation to deliver a peace deal to strike harder at Ukraine. Just after a visit to Moscow by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff last week, the Russians struck the Ukrainian city of Sumy during Palm Sunday celebrations, killing at least 35 people and injuring another 119, including children. European leaders called the attack a war crime, Trump said it was likely a “mistake.”

After Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said in a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night that U.S. officials are echoing Russian disinformation, Trump called for CBS, the channel on which 60 Minutes appears, to lose its license.

Bloomberg reports that the U.S. refused to support a statement by the Group of Seven (G7), an informal group of seven of the countries with the world’s most advanced economies, condemning the Sumy attack. The U.S. said it wouldn’t condemn the mass killing of civilians because it is “working to preserve the space to negotiate peace.”

One of Trump’s key attacks on the Biden administration before the election was his lie that it had shortchanged the North Carolina victims of the devastating Hurricane Helene by sending money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to undocumented immigrants, likely to buy their votes (it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections). In fact, the Biden administration and FEMA had been in the state since the start and approved FEMA’s reimbursement for 100% of disaster relief, particularly emergency protective services and the removal of debris, renewable after six months.

Trump won North Carolina by more than 3 points, but on Saturday the Trump administration denied North Carolina’s application for that extension. “The need in western North Carolina remains immense—people need debris removed, homes rebuilt, and roads restored,” North Carolina governor Josh Stein said. “I am extremely disappointed and urge the President to reconsider FEMA’s bad decision, even for 90 days. Six months later, the people of western North Carolina are working hard to get back on their feet; they need FEMA to help them get the job done.”

Trump’s approval ratings are dropping steadily, with even Republican pollsters showing him “underwater,” meaning that more people disapprove of his presidency than approve of it.

Part of Trump’s fight with the Supreme Court is an attempt to demonstrate dominance as his numbers drop, but institutions, as well as the courts, are standing up to him. With Trump having won concessions from Columbia University and then announced those concessions were only the beginning of his demands, other universities are banding together to defend education, academic freedom, and freedom of speech.

On Monday, Harvard University took a stand against the administration’s demand to regulate the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” at Harvard, including its governance, admissions, programs, and extracurricular activities, in exchange for the continuation of $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and a $60 million contract. Harvard is the country’s oldest university, founded in 1636, and in 2024 had an endowment of more than $53 billion.

In a letter noting that the administration’s demands undercut the First Amendment and the university’s legal rights, Harvard’s lawyers wrote: “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. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle…. Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”

But Harvard didn’t stop there. It turned its website into a defense of the medical research funded by the federal grants Trump is threatening to withhold. It explains the advances Harvard researchers have made in cancer research, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, obesity and diabetes, infectious diseases, and organs and transplantation. It highlights the researchers, shows labs, and presents readable essays on different scientific breakthroughs.

As the administration slashes through the government with charges of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” Harvard’s president Alan Garber has made a stand on what he calls “the promise of higher education.”

“Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere,” he wrote. “All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom. We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity—and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world.”

—

Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/15/politics/abrego-garcia-case-hearing-xinis-discovery/index.html

Strength In Numbers

Trump's immigration agenda is not popular

To start this post, I am going to ask you a key question about immigration policy. But first, I need to establish a few facts based on recent news…

20 hours ago · 77 likes · 16 comments · G. Elliott Morris

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/lawfare-live--court-hearing-on-the-removal-of-abrego-garcia

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.79.0.pdf

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/politics/fact-check-trump-fema-hurricane-response/index.html

https://ncnewsline.com/2025/04/12/fema-will-stop-matching-100-of-helene-recovery-money-in-nc-stein-says/

https://newrepublic.com/article/194010/kilmar-abrego-garcia-case-trump-deported-error-another-hit

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-04-15/european-union-isn-t-optimistic-about-us-trade-war-ending-soon

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-boeing-orders-halt-to-jet-deliveries-bloomberg-trump-tariffs/

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-12/us-tariffs-war-with-china-australian-beef-exports-up/105166632

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-xi-meet-vietnam-leaders-kick-off-southeast-asia-tour-amid-us-tariffs-2025-04-14/

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-sumy-b034da8f4d83d08e5ea24c6033dbe3cf

https://thehill.com/policy/international/5249294-steve-witkoff-russia-ukraine-peace-talks/

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-blocking-g7-statement-denouncing-130116848.html

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/trump-ukraine-war-russia-disinformation/

https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/04/Letter-Sent-to-Harvard-2025-04-11.pdf

https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2025/the-promise-of-american-higher-education/

https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/04/Harvard-Response-2025-04-14.pdf

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/15/us/universities-responses-investigations-funding-freeze/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/harvard-trump.html

https://www.harvard.edu/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/27/trump-putin-ukraine-war-witkoff/

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-fund-managers-tariffs-b2730989.html

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-republican-pollster-2059924

Bluesky:

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April 14, 2025 - Letters from an American

2025-04-15T11:20:33.000Z

Two Months After Trump’s Funding Cuts, a Nonprofit Struggles to Support Refugees and Itself - ProPublica

2025-04-15T09:00:00.000Z

by Amy Yurkanin

When Max Rykov started reading a Jan. 24 letter sent to the leaders of the country’s 10 refugee resettlement agencies, he found the wording vague but ominous. The agencies were ordered to “stop all work” funded by the Department of State and “not incur any new costs.”

At first, he wondered if the order from the Trump administration was only targeting refugee work in other countries. Rykov, then the director of development and communications at a refugee resettlement partner in Nashville, began texting colleagues at other agencies. “What does it mean?” he asked.

By Monday, three days after the memo, it became clear. The Nashville International Center for Empowerment, along with similar nonprofits across the country, would not have access to the money the government had promised to refugees for their first three months in the United States. That day, NICE laid off 12 of its 56 resettlement staff members and scrambled to free up funds to pay for the basic needs of nearly 170 people dependent on the frozen grants.

Max Rykov arrived in the U.S. as a child and went on to become the director of development and communications at the Nashville International Center for Empowerment, which helps refugees resettle. (Arielle Weenonia Gray for ProPublica)

Rykov knew exactly what was at stake, and that delivered an additional dose of dread. Born in the former USSR, he and his family arrived in the U.S. as refugees in 1993, fleeing the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic devastation and discrimination against Soviet Jews. He was 4 years old, and it was bewildering. Though his family was part of one of the largest waves of refugee resettlement in U.S. history, they ended up in a place with few Russian immigrants.

Life in Birmingham, Alabama, a post-industrial city shaped by the Civil Rights movement and white flight, revolved around Saturday college football games and Sunday church. Rykov said his family felt “barren” in the U.S. away from their culture. Birmingham’s Jewish community was small and the Russian population tiny.

But a local Jewish organization sponsored the Rykovs and paired them with a “friendship family.” The group rented them an apartment and furnished it. Then the organization helped Rykov’s parents find work. And Birmingham’s Jewish community banded together to fund scholarships for Rykov and other Soviet refugee children to attend a private Jewish school, where Rykov felt less isolated.

He went on to attend the University of Alabama and overcame his feeling of otherness. After graduation, he found purpose in bringing people together through his work organizing cultural events, including arts festivals and an adult spelling bee, doing social media outreach for the Birmingham mayor and, in 2021, finding a dream job at a Nashville nonprofit devoted to the very efforts that he believes helped define him.

When Rykov heard that President Donald Trump’s second administration had ordered cuts to the refugee program, his thoughts raced to the Venezuelan refugee family his organization was assisting, an older woman in poor health, her daughter who cared for her and the daughter’s two children, one not yet kindergarten age. None of them spoke English, and there was no plan for how they would cover the rent, which was due in four days.

“This is a promise that we made to these people that we have reneged on,” he said. “Is that really what’s happening? Yeah, that’s exactly what’s happening.”

As the realization of what lay ahead set in, Rykov started to cry.

Over the next two months, the Trump administration carried out and defended its destabilizing cuts to the refugee program. The moves brought wave after wave of uncertainty and chaos to the lives of refugees and those who work to help resettle them.

One of the largest nonprofit agencies that carry out this work, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, laid off a third of its staff in February and said Monday that it would end all of its refugee efforts with the federal government. A Jewish resettlement organization, HIAS, cut 40% of its staff. As the groups fight legal battles to recoup the millions of dollars the government owes them, some have been forced to close resettlement offices entirely.

The Nashville International Center for Empowerment is still struggling to keep its own afloat. Although NICE staff members had anticipated some cuts to refugee programs under Trump, they said they were caught off guard when reimbursements for money already spent failed to appear and by the dwindling opportunities to seek recourse.

After a judge ordered the Trump administration to restart refugee admissions, the administration responded by canceling contracts with existing resettlement agencies and announcing plans to find new partners. And the administration has indicated it will remain resistant, refusing to spend millions appropriated by Congress for refugees.

“Many have lost faith and trust in the American system because of this,” said Wooksoo Kim, director of the Immigrant and Refugee Research Institute at the University of Buffalo. “For many refugees, it may start to feel like it’s no different from where they came from.”

In court documents, lawyers for the Department of Justice argued the U.S. does not have the capacity to support large numbers of refugees.

“The President lawfully exercised his authority to suspend the admission of refugees pending a determination that ‘further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States,’” the motion said.

In Nashville, that anxiety has been playing out week after week in tear-filled offices and in apartment complexes teeming with families who fled war and oppression.

Rykov couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by the extreme shift in attitudes about immigrants in just a few years. In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, his family’s dormant fears about Russia were reawakened — but they felt a surge of pride for the U.S. when it stepped up to help Ukraine and welcome its refugees.

Months after the invasion, Ukrainian athletes came to Birmingham for the World Games, which is similar to the Olympics. When they entered the stadium waving the Ukrainian flag, the crowd gave them a standing ovation. His parents, who’d never felt quite at home in the U.S., loudly joined in the “U-S-A” chant that followed.

But now, three years later, was all of America now ready to abandon refugees? Rykov was starting to see the signs, but he refused to believe it and instead recommitted himself to the work.

He and his colleagues reached out to every donor in their network and called an online meeting with local churches who might be able to help with rent payments, food, job searches and transportation.

Agencies would struggle without the help of the churches. And churches don’t have the resources, training or bandwidth to carry out the work of the agencies.

But Rykov knew that for the time being, he’d need more help than ever from church volunteers.

“Without your intervention here, this is gonna be a humanitarian disaster in Nashville,” he told them in the online meeting held about a week after the cuts. “And in every community, obviously, but we were focusing on ours. We’re not gonna be in a position to help in the same way much longer, and this is a stark reality that we’re facing.”

Then he went on the local news, warning that “this immediate funding freeze puts those recently arrived refugees really at risk of homelessness.” The responses on social media reflected the hate and intolerance that had polluted the national conversation about immigration.

“The common theme was, ‘Refugees? Do you mean “illegal invaders”?’” Rykov recalled. “People are so completely misinformed, clearly not reading the article or watching the story, and it’s very disappointing to see that. And I guess it’s sad too that I expect it.”

One Month After the Cuts “No Time to Screw Around”

In late February, church volunteer Abdul Makembe and a program manager from NICE squeezed into the cramped apartment of a family of five from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Both Makembe and NICE had been working with the family for months, but with the loss of funding, NICE could no longer offer support and had asked Makembe to be more involved.

Abdul Makembe, who immigrated from Tanzania, volunteers to help African families settle in the U.S. (Arielle Weenonia Gray for ProPublica)

A native of Tanzania, Makembe moved to Tennessee in the late 1970s. After working in infectious disease research and nonprofit management, which involved several trips to Africa, he retired in 2015 and began volunteering to help newly arrived African families. Rykov came to know him as a fixture of the refugee community, always eager to help.

In the apartment, Makembe perched on the edge of a couch and Mungaga Akilimali sat across from him on the floor.

“So, the situation has improved a little bit?” Makembe asked.

The Congolese man ran his hands over his head.

“The situation, so far, not yet,” Akilimali said. “I’m just trying to apply and reapply and reapply, but so far nothing.”

Akilimali and his family fled the Democratic Republic of Congo more than 10 years ago. Since 1996, soldiers and militias have killed 6 million people there and committed atrocities against countless civilians. War, political instability and widespread poverty have displaced millions of others.

Akilimali and his wife settled for a time in South Africa, where they encountered xenophobia and anti-immigrant violence. Immigrants and refugees have become political scapegoats there, spawning a rash of attacks and even murders. His wife, Bulonza Chishamara, nearly died there in 2018 after an ambush by an anti-immigrant mob.

Doctors gave her eight units of blood and Chishamara spent days paralyzed in a hospital bed, Akilimali said. She still walks with a limp.

The family had rejoiced when they got approved for refugee resettlement in 2024 in Tennessee. Their new life in Nashville began with promise. Akilimali, who speaks fluent English and trained as a mechanic, got a driver’s license and a job at Nissan.

However, he lost the job before his probationary period ended due to layoffs, and he hasn’t been able to find another one. NICE used to have a robust staff of employment specialists. But the cuts forced the organization to reassign them.

That left fewer resources for people like Akilimali, who had been in the U.S. longer than the three months during which new refugees were eligible for state department aid but who still needed help finding work.

For Rykov, the work of spreading awareness about the cuts and raising funds to offset them intensified throughout February. He and others working with refugees across the country were hoping that the courts might force the administration to release the federal money — that if they could keep things afloat in the short term, relief would come.

Then, on Feb. 25, a federal judge in Washington ruled in favor of the agencies. He ordered the administration to restore payments and restart refugee admissions.

The relief was short-lived. A day later, the administration canceled contracts with resettlement agencies, and lawyers for the administration have appealed the order. Their argument: The gutted refugee agencies no longer have capacity to restart resettlement, making it impossible to comply with court orders.

Rykov said some of the diminished number of remaining staff members began to look for new jobs.

After that, Rykov and his team kicked into emergency mode. They worked long hours making phone calls and arranging meetings with potential volunteers and donors.

“It was a cocktail of emotions,” he said. The generosity of donors and volunteers filled him with gratitude. But he couldn’t escape the sense of foreboding that consumed the office, where many desks sat empty and remaining employees voiced deepening concerns about the fates of their clients.

Rykov likened the urgent energy at NICE to the aftermath of a natural disaster. “There’s no time to screw around.”

At the same time, staffers worried about the cratering budget and the future of the organization. And it was hard not to notice how much the mood in Tennessee and around the country was shifting. In an order suspending refugee admissions, Trump described immigrants as a “burden” who have “inundated” American towns and cities.NICE had always felt protected, powered by an idealistic and diverse staff who chose to work in refugee resettlement despite the long hours and low pay. The cuts and the discourse eroded that sense of safety, Rykov said.

In February, a tech company offered him a job in Birmingham. It was a chance to be closer to his parents and back in the city where he’d come of age — a reminder of an era that felt kinder than the current one. He took the job.

“Working at NICE, it’s the best job I ever had and the most meaningful job I ever had,” he said.

Rykov packed up a few things from NICE. A Ukrainian flag lapel pin. A signed photograph of him and his coworkers. In his Birmingham apartment, he placed the picture on a bookshelf next to one of him and his parents at his high school graduation.

By the time he left, NICE’s refugee resettlement team was down to 30 employees; it had been 56 before the cuts. For its part, NICE has vowed to carry on. The organization has paired 24 families with volunteer mentors since the funding cuts.

Church volunteers, who were accustomed to helping furnish and decorate apartments for new arrivals, now had to help prevent evictions. They had to track down documents and help complete paperwork lost in the confusion of the nonprofit’s layoffs. And the group of mostly retired professionals now had to assist with the daunting task of finding unskilled jobs for refugees who didn’t speak much English.

Two Months After the Cuts One Volunteer, Many People in Need

On a mid-March morning, Makembe woke at 6 a.m. to begin tackling his volunteer work for NICE. Despite the long hours he clocks volunteering, the 74-year-old has kept his energy level and his spirits up. As he left the garage apartment he shares with his wife in a rough north Nashville neighborhood, he made sure to double-check the locks.

On this day, he was working not with the Akilimali family but with a family of four who recently arrived from Africa. The child needs to see a specialist at the Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt.

It was Vanderbilt that brought Makembe to Nashville decades ago, for his master’s degree in economic planning. He followed that with a doctorate in health policy and research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Over the years that followed, he made repeated trips back to Tanzania to do research on malaria and parasitic infections.

All that took a toll on Makembe’s marriage, and he and his first wife divorced when his two children were very young. They are now grown and successful. His son is an accountant and his daughter recently finished law school and works at a firm in New York. That leaves him more time to spend with refugees.

But the volunteer work does bring some financial stress. He is trying to save $5,000 to apply for a green card for his wife, which is tough. Because he spent much of his career working outside the U.S., Makembe receives less than $1,000 a month from Social Security. He drives a 2004 Toyota that was donated to his church to aid the congregation’s work with refugees, but he pays out of pocket for gas and car insurance. The costs can add up. It’s not uncommon for him to burn a quarter tank of gas a day when he is volunteering.

Makembe’s church, Woodmont Hills Church, is a significant contributor to the city’s refugee resettlement work — an ethos shared by its current congregants but that has led to the loss of members over the years. Though it had a congregation nearing 3,000 members in the late ’90s, attendance shrank as the church’s ideology grew more progressive and Tennessee’s grew more conservative. It’s now down to 800 members.

Yet the church remained steadfast in its commitment to helping refugees. Its leaders invited NICE to hold classes in its empty meeting rooms and made space to house a Swahili church and a Baptist church formed by refugees from Myanmar. And when NICE lost funding, Woodmont Hills members donated their time and money.

Makembe has helped dozens of refugees over the years but was particularly worried for the family he had to take to the Children’s Hospital that March morning, serving as both driver and translator. They arrived right before Trump cut off funding, and they had struggled to get medical care for their 5-year-old’s persistent seizures. A doctor at a local clinic had prescribed antiseizure medication, but it didn’t work, and the child experienced episodes where his muscles tensed and froze for minutes at a time.

Nashville has world-class medical facilities, but NICE no longer had staff available to help the family understand and navigate that care, leaving them frustrated.

It took months for the family to get in to see a specialist. During the long wait, Makembe said, the boy’s father began to lose hope. His son’s seizures had become longer and more frequent. Makembe stepped in to help them get a referral from a doctor at the local clinic.

The child’s father had to miss the doctor’s appointment that March morning so that he could go to an interview at a company that packages computer parts. Both he and his wife had been searching for jobs and striking out. Makembe has tried to help but has run into barriers. He does not have the same connections with labor agencies that NICE staffers did.

Makembe said he wants to get the child enrolled in a special school for the fall and find a wheelchair so his mom won’t have to carry him.

And that’s just this family. Makembe said new refugees have been waiting for months to get job interviews. When he visits the five families he mentors, their neighbors approach him asking for help. Many of their requests are for the assistance NICE and other refugee agencies once offered.

“I’m very much worried,” he said. “I mean, they have no idea of what to do.”

April 14, 2025 - Letters from an American

2025-04-15T04:59:58.000Z

Today, U.S. president Donald J. Trump met in the Oval Office with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, along with a number of Cabinet members and White House staff, who answered questions for the press. The meeting appeared to be as staged as Trump’s February meeting with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, designed to send a message. At the meeting, Trump and Bukele, who is clearly doing Trump’s bidding, announced they would not bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home, defying the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bukele was livestreaming the event on his official X account and wearing a lapel microphone as he and Trump walked into the Oval Office, so Trump’s pre-meeting private comments were audible in the video Bukele posted. “We want to do homegrown criminals next…. The homegrowns.” Trump told Bukele. “You gotta build about five more places.” Bukele appeared to answer, “Yeah, we’ve got space.” “All right,” Trump replied.

Rather than being appalled, the people in the room—including Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Attorney General Pam Bondi—erupted in laughter.

At the meeting, it was clear that Trump’s team has cooked up a plan to leave Abrego Garcia without legal recourse to his freedom, a plan that looks much like Trump’s past abuses of the legal system. The White House says the U.S. has no jurisdiction over El Salvador, while Bukele says he has no authority to release a “terrorist” into the U.S. (Abrego Garcia maintains a full-time job, is married to a U.S. citizen, has three children, and has never been charged or convicted of anything.) No one can make Trump arrange for Abrego Garcia’s release, the administration says, because the Constitution gives the president control over foreign affairs.

Marcy Wheeler of Empty Wheel noted that “all the people who should be submitting sworn declarations before [U.S. District Court] Judge Paula Xinis made comments not burdened by oaths or the risk of contempt, rehearsed comments for the cameras.” They falsely claimed that a court had ruled Abrego Garcia was a terrorist, and insisted the whole case was about the president’s power to control foreign affairs.

As NPR’s Steven Inskeep put it: “If I understand this correctly, the US president has launched a trade war against the world, believes he can force the EU and China to meet his terms, is determined to annex Canada and Greenland, but is powerless before the sovereign might of El Salvador. Is that it?”

On April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “there were no legal grounds whatsoever for [Abrego Garcia’s] arrest, detention, or removal.… Rather, his detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” The Supreme Court agreed with Xinis that Abrego Garcia had been illegally removed from the U.S. and must be returned, but warned the judge to be careful of the president’s power over foreign affairs.

At the Oval Office meeting, when Trump asked what the Supreme Court ruled, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller said it had ruled “9–0…in our favor,” claiming “the Supreme Court said that the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9–0 unanimously.” Legal analyst Chris Geidner of Law Dork called Miller’s statement “disgusting, lying propaganda.”

He also noted that when the administration filed its required declaration about Abrego Garcia’s case today, it included a link to the Oval Office meeting, thus submitting Miller’s lies about its decision directly to the Supreme Court. Geidner wished the administration's lawyers: “Good luck there…!”

Legal analyst Harry Litman of Talking Feds wrote: “What we all just witnessed had all the earmarks of a criminal conspiracy to deprive Abrego-Garcia of his constitutional rights, as well as an impeachable offense. The fraud scheme was a phony agreement engineered by the US to have Bukele say he lacks power to return Abrego Garcia and he won't do it.”

As Adam Serwer wrote today in The Atlantic, The “rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law.”

Serwer notes that if the administration actually thought there was enough evidence to convict these men, it could have let the U.S. legal process play out. But Geidner of Law Dork noted that Trump’s declaration this morning that he wanted to deport “homegrown criminals” suggests that the plan all along has been to be able to get rid of U.S. citizens by creating a “Schroedinger’s box” where anyone can be sent but where once they are there the U.S. cannot get them back because they are “in the custody of a foreign sovereign.”

“If they can get Abrego Garcia out of the box,” Geidner writes, “the plan does not work.”

On August 12, 2024, in a discussion on billionaire Elon Musk’s X of what Trump insisted were caravans coming across the southern border of the U.S., Trump told Musk that other countries were doing something “brilliant” by sending streams of people out of their country. “You know the caravans are coming in and…who’s doing this are the heads of the countries. And you would be doing it and so would I, and everyone would say ‘oh what a terrible thing to say.’”

He continued: “The fact is, it’s brilliant for them because they're taking all of their bad people, really bad people and—I hate to say this—the reason the numbers are much bigger than you would think is they’re also taking their nonproductive people. Now these aren’t people that will kill you…but these are people that are nonproductive. They are just not productive, I mean, for whatever reason. They’re not workers or they don’t want to work, or whatever, and these countries are getting rid of nonproductive people in the caravans…and they’re also getting rid of their murderers and their drug dealers and the people that are really brutal people….”

Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained the larger picture: “On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.” He compared it to the Nazis’ practice of pushing Jews into statelessness because “[i]t is easier to move people away from law than it is to move law away from people. Almost all of the killing took place in artificially created stateless zones.”

Yesterday, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) requested a meeting with Bukele today “to discuss the illegal detention of my constituent, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.” He said that he would travel to El Salvador this week if Abrego Garcia “is not home by midweek.”

Judge Xinis has set the next hearing in Abrego Garcia’s case for tomorrow, April 15, at 4:00 p.m.

Today, Dauphin County Magisterial District Judge Dale Klein denied bail for Cody Balmer, the 38-year-old man charged in connection with the arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro on April 13, saying he is a danger to the community. Balmer allegedly set alight beer bottles full of gasoline in the same room in the governor's mansion where, just hours before, the family had held a Passover meal. Shapiro and his wife Lori, their four children, and another family were asleep in the house. Emergency personnel rescued the people and pets, but the historic mansion sustained significant damage.

Balmer said he has a high-school education. He is currently unemployed, does not have any income or savings, and has been living with his parents. Balmer was charged with assault in 2023, allegedly punching both his wife (from whom he is now separated) and their 13-year-old son in the face during an argument. He was due in court this week. His mother says he has mental health issues.

Balmer said he “harbor[ed] hatred” for Governor Shapiro and would have beaten him with a hammer if he had found him.

Governor Shapiro called it “an attack not just on our family, but on the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania…. This type of violence is not okay. This kind of violence is becoming far too common in our society. And I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another, or one particular person or another. It is not okay and it has to stop. We have to be better than this. We have a responsibility to all be better.”

—

Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-presidency-tarrifs-bukele-visit-04-14-25/index.html

https://www.vanhollen.senate.gov/news/press-releases/van-hollen-requests-meeting-with-president-bukele-to-discuss-return-of-kilmar-abrego-garcia-announces-intent-to-travel-to-el-salvador-this-week-if-abrego-garcia-is-not-returned

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/bukele-trump-court-order/682432/

Law Dork

Trump told us the horrifying reason why Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not back in the U.S.

We are approaching one month since the United States illegally sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the CECOT “terrorism” prison in El Salvador on the third March 15 flight that took people to the prison…

8 hours ago · 307 likes · 42 comments · Chris Geidner

Talking Feds Substack

Monsters, Inc.

Passover began this past weekend with the traditional meal and discussion known as the “seder.” “Seder” means order, and the meal requires a precise liturgy unchanged for thousands of years. (The English translation has undergone a few rewrites to soften up the edges of what is a fairly martial story.) I was struck, as I hadn't been previously, by the f…

13 hours ago · 568 likes · 137 comments · Harry Litman

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.31.0.pdf

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/us/pennsylvania-governor-arson-what-we-know-hnk/index.html

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2025/04/14/who-cody-balmer-harrisburg-pa-arson-shapiro/83079845007/

https://6abc.com/post/possible-motives-surface-cody-balmer-arrested-allegedly-setting-pennsylvania-governor-josh-shapiros-residence-fire/16169308/

https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/04/14/what-trump-wants-from-the-nayib-bukele-presser/

CNN video:

2025/04/13/us/video/governor-josh-shapiro-pennsylvania-residence-fire-arson-speech-digvid

Bluesky:

marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3lmrzhj4nzk2x

msmalarkey24.bsky.social/post/3lgensrxpa22w

acyn.bsky.social/post/3lms3y2hcdv27

chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3lmsmeben5k2m

harrylitman.bsky.social/post/3lms6l5glhs2g

timothysnyder.bsky.social/post/3lmsvkbpvik2g

realDonaldTrump/status/1823144316014911820?lang=en comments begin at 1:24.

nprinskeep/status/1911822827722031615

April 13, 2025 - Letters from an American

2025-04-14T16:26:41.000Z

Who owns SpaceX? - Musk Watch

2025-04-14T11:31:11.000Z

In 2023, a group of six Republican senators, including J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, sponsored legislation that would require Chinese and other foreign investors to disclose their stakes in U.S. aerospace companies. The bill’s primary sponsor, Rubio, and one of its cosponsors, Vance, have since left the Senate for the White House. But their concerns about Chinese investors gaining a foothold in the highest levels of the U.S. aerospace industry have since been confirmed.

A recent ProPublica report found that SpaceX, Elon Musk’s privately owned rocket company, discreetly allows Chinese investors to purchase its shares through offshore investment schemes. The investments are made through special-purpose vehicles used to conceal investors’ identities. The arrangement also makes it difficult to know how much investment SpaceX has received from Chinese investors.

The SPACE Act, first introduced by Rubio in 2021, would require foreign investors to notify regulators if they acquire a stake worth more than 2% in a U.S. aerospace company. “The [U.S. Securities and Exchange] Commission shall require any foreign person who, after acquiring directly or indirectly the beneficial ownership of any equity security… of more than 2 percent of the class, to file with the Commission,” reads the 2023 version of the bill, which was cosponsored by now-vice president Vance. Rubio now serves as Secretary of State.

Among the bill’s Republican cosponsors were Senators John Cornyn, Marsha Blackburn, Roger Wicker, and former Senator Mike Braun, now the governor of Indiana. The SPACE Act demonstrates the security concerns that lawmakers in Washington have long held regarding Chinese investments in U.S. aerospace firms. It also raises questions about whether any of its sponsors would stand by the bill now that Musk serves as President Trump’s most powerful advisor. The offices of Rubio, Vance, Blackburn, Wicker, and Braun did not respond to requests for comment.

SpaceX has received billions in federal contracts to launch U.S. spy satellites and the Pentagon’s celestial communications network, making the involvement of Chinese nationals in the company a national security concern.

In December, Iqbaljit Kahlon, a top SpaceX investor who has arranged for Chinese investors to buy into the company, testified that SpaceX deems investments from China “acceptable” if they are channeled through offshore vehicles. “The primary mechanism is that those investors would come through intermediate entities that they would create or others would create,” Kahlon testified in a Delaware court, according to ProPublica. He continued: “Typically they would set up [British Virgin Islands] structures or Cayman structures or Hong Kong structures and various other ones.”

Kahlon’s investment firm has played a middleman role for investors looking to acquire coveted shares of SpaceX, the most valuable private company in the world. In 2021, Kahlon was working with a Chinese firm seeking to invest in SpaceX. But, according to Kahlon, Musk quashed the $50 million deal after Chinese media outlets reported on it. In the same Delaware court, SpaceX chief financial officer Bret Johnsen testified that the arrangement would not be “helpful for our company as a government contractor,” adding that news of Chinese investment would “[arm] our competitors with something to use as a narrative against us.”

While that deal fell apart, resulting in the dispute now playing out in Delaware, Kahlon testified that he had previously arranged for other Chinese investors to buy into SpaceX. (SpaceX has continued to allow Kahlon’s firm, Tomales Bay Capital, to purchase its shares.)

SpaceX previously stifled an effort by Senate Republicans to compel NASA to vet its contractors for financial ties to China. In late 2019, Senator Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican, introduced amendments to the NASA Authorization Act that would require NASA to review prospective contractors’ affiliations and financial relationships with the Chinese government. The amendments would also require the U.S. comptroller general to conduct a review of NASA contracts for “unacceptable transfers of intellectual property or technology” to entities owned by or affiliated with the Chinese government.

The measure was approved by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. However, Gardner, who lost his reelection bid in 2020, said lobbyists for SpaceX killed the provision.“We had heard through the grapevine that it was SpaceX, but we never heard from them directly,” Gardner told the Wall Street Journal in 2022.

April 13, 2025 - Letters from an American

2025-04-14T05:27:19.000Z

This evening, lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal court that the administration does not believe it has a legal obligation to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States, despite a court order to do so.

The 29-year-old Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. about 2011 when he was 16 to escape threats from a gang that was terrorizing his family. He settled in Maryland with his older brother, a U.S. citizen, and lived there until in 2019 he was picked up by police as he waited at a Home Depot to be picked up for work as a day laborer. Police transferred him to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After a hearing, an immigration judge rejected his claim for asylum but said he could not be sent back to El Salvador, finding it credible that the Barrio 18 gang had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”

Ever since, Abrego Garcia has checked in annually with ICE as directed. He lives with his wife and their three children, and has never been charged with any crime. The Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, and he joined a union, working full time as a sheet metal apprentice.

On March 12, ICE agents pulled his car over, told his wife to come pick up their disabled son, and incarcerated Abrego Garcia, pressing him to say he was a member of MS-13. On March 15 the government rendered Abrego Garcia to the infamous CECOT prison for terrorists in El Salvador, alleged to be the site of human rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial killings. The U.S. government is paying El Salvador $6 million a year to incarcerate the individuals it sends there.

On March 24, Abrego Garcia’s family sued the administration over his removal.

On March 31 the government admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but said he couldn’t be brought back because, in El Salvador, he is outside the jurisdiction of the United States. It also accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang and said that bringing him back to the U.S. would threaten the public.

On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7.

In her opinion, filed April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “[a]lthough the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal.…. [H]is detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the 'custodian,' and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction.”

The administration had already appealed her April 4 order to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision on Thursday, April 10, requiring the Trump administration “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,” but asking the district court to clarify what it meant by “effectuate,” that release, noting that it must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

The Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by 9:30 a.m. on April 11 explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.

But the administration evidently does not intend to comply. On April 11, the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not have information about where Abrego Garcia is and ignored her order to provide information about what the government was doing to bring him back. Saturday, it said Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in CECOT. Today, it said it had no new information about him, but said that Abrego Garcia is no longer eligible for the immigration judge’s order not to send him to El Salvador “because of his membership in MS-13 which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.”

There is still no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.

Today, administration lawyers used the Supreme Court’s warning that the court must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs” to lay out a chilling argument. They ignored the Supreme Court’s agreement that the government must get Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador, as well as the court’s requirement that the administration explain what it’s doing to make that happen.

Instead, the lawyers argued that because Abrego Garcia is now outside the country, any attempt to get him back would intrude on the president’s power to conduct foreign affairs. Similarly, they argue that the president cannot be ordered to do anything but remove domestic obstacles from Abrego Garcia’s return. Because Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, is currently in the U.S. for a visit with Trump, they suggest they will not share any more updates about Abrego Garcia and the court should not ask for them because it would intrude on “sensitive” foreign policy issues.

Let’s be very clear about exactly what’s happening here: President Donald J. Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal, kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country, and then claim that there is no way to get that person back.

All people in the United States are entitled to due process, but Trump and his officers have tried to convince Americans that noncitizens are not. They have also pushed the idea that those they are offshoring are criminals, but a Bloomberg investigation showed that of the 238 men sent to CECOT in the first group, only five of them had been charged with or convicted of felony assault or gun violations. Three had been charged with misdemeanors like petty theft. Two were charged with human smuggling. In any case, in the U.S., criminals are entitled to due process.

Make no mistake: as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error either because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens.

Trump has said he would “love” to do exactly that, and would even be “honored” to, and Bukele has been offering to hold U.S. citizens. Dasha Burns and Myah Ward of Politico reported Friday that former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is pitching a plan to expand renditions to El Salvador to at least 100,000 criminal offenders from U.S. prisons and to avoid legal challenges by making part of CECOT American territory, then leasing it back to El Salvador to run.

When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says, “The president's idea for American citizens to potentially be deported, these would be heinous violent criminals who have broken our nation's laws repeatedly," remember that just days ago, Trump suggested that a former government employee was guilty of treason for writing a book about his time in the first Trump administration that Trump claimed was “designed to sow chaos and distrust” in the government.

Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.

At least some people understand this. The president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey, received a standing ovation when he said to a room full of his fellow union workers: “We need to make our voices heard. We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re the building trades, the backbone of America. You want to build a $5 billion data center? Want more six-figure careers with health care, retirement, and no college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk, you call us!... And yeah, that means all of us. All of us. Including our brother [International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers] apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now! Bring him home!”

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Notes:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.31.0.pdf

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.65.0.pdf

https://apnews.com/article/who-is-abrego-garcia-e1b2af6528f915a1f0ec60f9a1c73cdd

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

The Supreme Court Finally Rules

Late this afternoon, the Supreme Court issued a 9-0 response to the government’s application to vacate federal District Judge Paula Xinis’ order that the Trump administration return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from prison in El Salvador to the United States. Xinis had ordered him returned by the end of the day on Monday. The Supreme Court let him sit for an ad…

3 days ago · 3264 likes · 348 comments · Joyce Vance

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.64.0.pdf

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-records-show-about-migrants-sent-to-salvadoran-prison-60-minutes-transcript/

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-04-10/about-90-of-migrants-sent-to-el-salvador-lacked-u-s-criminal-record