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US supreme court maintains block on Trump deportations under Alien Enemies Act
Reuters is reporting that the US supreme court is keeping in place its order blocking the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act.
On 7 April, the supreme court ruled that those being removed under the law needed to be provided adequate notice that they were being removed under the Act so that they might be able to file a legal challenge.
Less than two weeks later, on 19 April, the supreme court ordered a halt to a deportation of migrants in Texas after being presented with evidence they weren’t being given adequate chance to file their removals.
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Closing summary
Our live coverage is ending now. In the meantime, you can find all of our live US politics coverage here. Here is a summary of the key developments from today:
The supreme court has rejected the Trump administration’s request to remove a temporary block on deportations of Venezuelans under a rarely used 18th-century wartime law. Over two dissenting votes, the justices acted on an emergency appeal from lawyers for Venezuelan men who have been accused of being gang members, a designation that the administration says makes them eligible for rapid removal from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Trump wrote on social media: “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!”
The Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya, NBC reports. Two people familiar with the move said that the plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya’s leadership.
Moody’s Ratings downgraded the United States’ credit rating today, lowering it one notch from the top-tier AAA to Aa1, citing mounting fiscal pressures and high interest rates. With this move, it now joins Standard & Poor’s, which downgraded the US in 2011, and Fitch Ratings, which followed suit in 2023, both assigning an AA+ rating.
Rightwing lawmakers derailed Donald Trump’s signature legislation in the House of Representatives, preventing its passage through a key committee and throwing into question whether Republicans can coalesce around the massive bill. The major and embarrassing setback raises the stakes for the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who had set a goal of Memorial Day to get the legislation passed through the House and on to the Senate.
Trump said the US will send letters to some of its trading partners to unilaterally impose new tariff rates, suggesting that Washington lacks the capacity to reach individual trade deals.
Trump accused the former FBI director James Comey of calling for his assassination in a coded social media post written in seashells. Comey’s Instagram post – a photograph of seashells on a beach arranged to spell the numbers 8647, which he captioned: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk” – was used by rightwing supporters of Trump to claim it was a call to assassinate the US president. Former FBI Director James Comey was escorted to the US Secret Service’s Washington Field Office on Friday afternoon for an interview, CNN reports.
Trump acknowledged that people are starving in Gaza and the US would have the situation in the territory “taken care of” as it suffered a further wave of intense Israeli airstrikes overnight. On the final day of his Gulf tour, the US president told reporters in Abu Dhabi: “We’re looking at Gaza. And we’re going to get that taken care of. A lot of people are starving.”
The Trump administration has terminated nearly 600 contractors at Voice of America, the US-funded international news network known for delivering independent journalism to countries with restricted press freedom. Among those dismissed are journalists from authoritarian countries who now face deportation, as their visas are linked to their jobs at VOA.
Ice effectively misled a judge in order to gain access to the homes of students it sought to arrest for their pro-Palestinian activism, attorneys say. A recently unsealed search warrant application shows that Ice told a judge it needed a warrant because the agency was investigating Columbia University for “harboring aliens”.
The former US ambassador to Ukraine, who resigned from the role in April, has said that she quit the post because she disagreed with Donald Trump’s foreign policy. Ambassador Bridget Brink, who served as ambassador to Ukraine from May 2022 until her departure last month, outlined the reasons for her departure for the first time in an op-ed published today by the Detroit Free Press. In the piece, Brink hit out at Trump for pressuring Ukraine rather than Russia and said she felt it was her duty to step down. “Peace at any price is not peace at all ― it is appeasement,” she wrote. More here.
US government records reveal Latin American leaders have spent millions hiring Washington’s top lobbyists to push for a laundry list of requests – from free-trade deals, security assistance and energy investments – to be heard by the Trump administration, according to an analysis by the Guardian and The Quincy Institute.
US district judge Paula Xinis expressed frustration on Friday that the Trump administration once again failed to provide sufficient details about its efforts bring back Kilmar Ábrego García, who was deported in error from the United States in March and sent to a prison in El Salvador.
The US Department of Homeland Security is reportedly considering an “out-of-the-box” pitch to participate in a television gameshow that would have immigrants compete to obtain US citizenship. Department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin described the pitch to the New York Times as a “celebration of being an American” and said the show would include challenges based on American traditions.
NBC News has done a deep dive on the artifacts that have been removed from the Museum of African American History and Culture, finding 32 removals since the Trump administration issued an executive order to remove certain pieces of history from the Smithsonian museums.
American abolitionist Harriet Tubman’s personal hymn book, with gospels that were sung as she led enslaved people to freedom, and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, are among some of the museum’s losses.
The museum said in late April that “recent claims that objects have been removed for reasons other than adherence to standard loan agreements or museum practices are false.”
A federal judge has indefinitely blocked the Department of Health and Human Services from cutting $11 billion in public health grants set aside for state and local health departments.
On Friday, judge Mary McElroy of the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island extended a temporary restraining order she issued last month, which had stopped the Trump administration from slashing pandemic-era funding for Washington DC and 23 Democratic-led states.
The states bringing the lawsuit claimed HHS violated the law by abruptly halting the grants without assessing the potential benefits or consequences of the decision.
Lauren Gambino
ICYMI, Lauren Gambino brings us the full report on the Supreme Court ruling today:
Supreme court blocks Trump bid to resume deportations under 1798 law
The supreme court has rejected the Trump administration’s request to remove a temporary block on deportations of Venezuelans under a rarely used 18th-century wartime law.
Over two dissenting votes, the justices acted on an emergency appeal from lawyers for Venezuelan men who have been accused of being gang members, a designation that the administration says makes them eligible for rapid removal from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
The court, which returned the case to a federal appeals court, had already imposed a temporary halt on deportations from a north Texas detention facility in a middle-of-the-night order issued last month.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Donald Trump responded on social media, with a post that claimed: “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!”
“The Supreme Court of the United States is not allowing me to do what I was elected to do,” Trump added in a subsequent post, in which he also claimed, falsely, that the justices “ruled that the worst murderers, drug dealers, gang members, and even those who are mentally insane, who came into our Country illegally, are not allowed to be forced out without going through a long, protracted, and expensive Legal Process, one that will take, possibly, many years for each person.”
Read the full story here:
After the firm Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of the United States, the White House placed the blame on the Biden administration:
“The Trump administration and Republicans are focused on fixing Biden’s mess by slashing the waste, fraud, and abuse in government and passing The One, Big, Beautiful Bill to get our house back in order,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said. “If Moody’s had any credibility, they would not have stayed silent as the fiscal disaster of the past four years unfolded.”
President Donald Trump used the “n-word” to refer to nuclear weapons on Fox News host Bret Baier’s show on Friday evening.
During the segment, Trump spoke about the India-Pakistan conflict that unfolded over the weekend.
“It was getting deeper, and I mean more missiles. Everyone was stronger, stronger, to a point where the next one was gonna be you know what. The n word. You know what the n word is, right?,” Trump said.
Baier said, “nuclear,” before thanking Trump for the clarification.
Trump chuckled and said, “It’s the n word. That’s very nasty word, right? In a lot of ways. The n word used in a nuclear sense,” he said.
Trump’s use of the term “n-word” in reference to nuclear weapons drew criticism for its separation from the word’s widely understood association with a history of racial violence and discrimination in the United States.
Former FBI Director James Comey was escorted to the US Secret Service’s Washington Field Office on Friday afternoon for an interview, CNN reports.
According to the Associated Press, the meeting lasted about an hour.
Agents are questioning Comey in connection with a social media post he shared yesterday, which showed seashells arranged on a beach spelling out “86 47”, a phrase widely interpreted online as a call to remove Donald Trump, the 47th president, from office.
Comey is not in custody and is cooperating voluntarily, sources told CNN.
Comey “knew exactly what that meant,” Trump said in a Fox News interview. “A child knows what that meant. If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination.”
It looks like Axios obtained some of the audio of the interviews between former president Joe Biden and special counsel Robert Hur in October 2023.
Biden is heard struggling to recall the year his son died, when he left the vice-presidency, when Donald Trump was elected, and why he had classified documents.
The recordings include long pauses, occasional slurred speech and mumbled responses, Axios reports.
The newly released audio offers a better look into why the White House resisted calls to release the recordings last year, as concerns about Biden’s memory and cognitive sharpness mounted.
The recordings come less than a week until a new book on that topic – Original Sin, by Axios’ Alex Thompson and CNN’s Jake Tapper – will be released.
The New York Times is reporting that the Trump administration is planning to release audio of former president Joe Biden’s 2023 interview with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents.
The audio recording could be released as early as next week.
Biden was interviewed at the White House in October 2023 by Robert K Hur, who had been appointed to investigate whether crimes had been committed related to classified documents found at Biden’s former office and home after he left the Obama administration.
José Olivares
Ice used ‘false pretenses’ for warrant to hunt for Columbia students, lawyers say
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) effectively misled a judge in order to gain access to the homes of students it sought to arrest for their pro-Palestinian activism, attorneys say.
A recently unsealed search warrant application shows that Ice told a judge it needed a warrant because the agency was investigating Columbia University for “harboring aliens”. In reality, attorneys say, Ice used the warrant application as a “pretext” to try to arrest two students, including one green card holder, in order to deport them.
What the unsealed document shows is that the agency “was manufacturing an allegation of ‘harboring’, just so agents can get in the door,” Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said. “What Ice was actually trying to do is get into these rooms to arrest them.”
The “harboring aliens” statute is applied to those who “conceal, harbor, or shield from detection” any immigrant who is not authorized to be in the US.
The search warrant, which was first reported by the Intercept, relates to two Columbia University students, Yunseo Chung and Ranjani Srinivasan, whom Ice sought to deport over their purported pro-Palestinian activism.
Read the full story here:
Moody’s Ratings downgraded the United States’ credit rating today, lowering it one notch from the top-tier AAA to Aa1, citing mounting fiscal pressures and high interest rates.
A credit rating signals how likely a country (or company) is to repay its debt.
“This one-notch downgrade on our 21-notch rating scale reflects the increase over more than a decade in government debt and interest payment ratios to levels that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns,” the agency said in a statement.
With this move, it now joins Standard & Poor’s, which downgraded the US in 2011, and Fitch Ratings, which followed suit in 2023, both assigning an AA+ rating.
The US continues to run a large budget deficit, with interest costs on Treasury debt climbing amid both rising rates and increased borrowing.
So far this fiscal year, the deficit has reached $1.05 trillion, a 13% jump from the same period last year. An uptick in tariffs helped slightly narrow the gap last month.
Trump slams Supreme Court over decision to block attempts to deport Venezuelans to prison in El Salvador
President Donald Trump criticized the Supreme Court’s decision blocking his administration’s attempt to send Venezuelans whom he says are gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
He wrote on social media: “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!”
His remarks come after the Supreme Court kept in place its order blocking the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act.
“Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster,” the ruling said.
