Trump’s announcement sent stocks surging following days of volatility and losses. Follow along for live updates.

President Donald Trump pulled back Wednesday on a series of harsh tariffs targeting friends and foes alike in an audacious bid to remake the global economic order.

Trump’s early afternoon announcement followed a harrowing week in which Republican lawmakers and confidants privately warned him that the tariffs could wreck the economy. His own aides had quietly raised alarms about the financial markets before he temporarily suspended a tariff regime that he had unveiled with a flourish just one week earlier in a Rose Garden ceremony.

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The stock market rose immediately after the about-face, ending days of losses that have forced older Americans who’ve been sinking their savings into 401(k)s to rethink their retirement plans.

Ahead of Trump’s announcement, some of his advisers had been in a near panic about the bond markets, according to a senior administration official. Interest rates on 10-year Treasury bonds had been rising, contrary to what normally happens when stock prices fall and investors seek safety in treasuries. That unusual dynamic meant that at the same time the tariffs could push up prices, people would be paying more to buy a home or pay off credit card debt due to higher interest rates. Business looking to expand would pay more for a new loan.

Two of Trump’s most senior advisers, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, presented a united front on Wednesday, urging the president to suspend the tariffs in light of the bond market, the administration official said.

In a social media post, Trump announced a 90-day pause that he said he’ll use to negotiate deals with dozens of countries that have expressed openness to revising trade terms that he contends exploit American businesses and workers. One exception is China. Trump upped the tariff on the nation’s biggest geopolitical rival to 125%, part of a tit-for-tat escalation in an evolving trade war.

Trump’s reversal came one week after an appearance in the Rose Garden where he unveiled his plan to bring jobs back to the U.S. Displaying a chart showing the new, elevated tariffs that countries would face, Trump proclaimed, “My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day.”

It proved short-lived.

Markets plunged in anticipation of heightened trade wars, wiping out trillions of dollars in wealth. Democrats seized on the issue, looking to undercut a source of Trump’s popular appeal: the view that he can be trusted to steer the nation’s economy. 

“Donald Trump’s market crash has vaporized a whopping $104,000 from the average retirement account,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday in a speech on the Senate floor, hours before Trump’s reversal.

The episode laid bare the rifts within Trump’s team of senior advisers as the White House struggled to offer a clear, consistent argument about the duration of the tariffs. While Bessent seemed open to negotiations, Peter Navarro, a senior trade adviser, appeared to take a more hardline posture. 

Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO who has been advising Trump on the government workforce, called Navarro “dumber than a sack of bricks,” while Navarro described Musk as someone who is merely “a car assembler, in many cases.”

But the week-long drama also underscored the peril of a policy-making process that is often tied to the wishes and vagaries of one man: Trump.

Asked about the dustup between Musk and Navarro, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a golf partner of the president, said: “I don’t think it matters. The only one who matters is Trump.”

Markets tend to favor predictability, as do business leaders deciding where to build new plants. When Trump sets a course, however, there are bound to be detours.

One friend of his who spoke to him in recent days said that Trump gave no sign he was about to “back down quickly on this stuff.”

Trump believes that other countries trade unfairly and sees tariffs as a tool to make the U.S. more competitive, the person said.

“He’s very confident it’s going to work for him,” the person added, speaking on condition of anonymity.

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And yet in the runup to Wednesday’s announcement, Trump and his aides were also hearing from GOP lawmakers and outside allies urging an alternate path.

One was Larry Kudlow, who hosts a show on Fox Business Network and was a senior economic adviser in Trump’s first term.

Kudlow told NBC News that he has had “ongoing” talks with friends inside the West Wing about the need to negotiate with other countries before slapping them with tariffs that stand in perpetuity.

Describing Trump’s move Wednesday as “fabulous,” Kudlow added: “Dealmaking is the best thing to do. In the last 48 hours, Trump has gone from non-negotiating to negotiating. It’s very clear that Bessent is now the point man on trade. Very clear.”

Anxious GOP lawmakers also weighed in.

Graham said he spoke to Trump at length Tuesday night and told him he’s been hearing from car manufacturers who are worried about how the tariffs would affect their business. BMW operates a plant in Graham’s home state and is one of the companies the senator said he has spoken to.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., was also a lawmaker in touch with the administration, saying on Tuesday that he planned to have lunch with Bessent. On Wednesday, he told NBC News he was also talking to the White House. Kennedy likened Trump to the “pitbull who caught the car.” Now, he said, the question becomes: “What are you going to do with the car?”

After more market losses this week, and with pressure mounting from Republicans on Capitol Hill, Trump began having second thoughts. In his first term, he often viewed the ups and downs of the stock market as a kind of report card on his presidency, celebrating its rise. The downturn had gotten his attention.

“People were getting a little queasy,” he acknowledged Wednesday during an event with NASCAR racing champions.

“Over the last few days,” according to Trump, he began to more seriously consider pausing the additional tariffs, he told reporters later in the day in an Oval Office appearance. One prospect that intrigued him was personally negotiating new trade deals with the countries looking to get out from under the tariffs, the senior administration official added.

He’d made up his mind. Sitting with Bessent and Lutnick, he crafted the note announcing the 90-day postponement and ending, for the time being, the biggest economic crisis of his young presidency.

“We wrote it from our hearts, right?” Trump said. “It was written as something that I think was very positive for the world and for us, and we don’t want to hurt countries that don’t need to be hurt, and they all want to negotiate.”

The day closed with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up nearly 8%, erasing some — but not all — of the post-“Liberation Day” losses.

Messy as it all may have seemed, his administration insisted that all is unfolding as planned.

“You have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted Wednesday afternoon.

NBC News’ Katherine Doyle and Ryan Nobles contributed.

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DHS officials also announced Wednesday that the department would begin considering what it deems to be antisemitic activity on social media and “physical harassment of Jewish individuals” as grounds to revoke or deny immigration benefits. 

“This will immediately affect aliens applying for lawful permanent resident status, foreign students and aliens affiliated with educational institutions linked to antisemitic activity,” the announcement said. 

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, said the new policy was a return to “McCarthyism,” referring to the tactics used to identify alleged communists in the Cold War that violated privacy rights.

“The spirit of Joseph McCarthy is alive and well in the Trump administration, which has spent months dishonestly mischaracterizing legitimate criticism of the Israeli government’s war crimes in Gaza as antisemitic, pursuing witch hunts into American colleges, and threatening the free speech rights of immigrants,” CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said in a statement Wednesday.

The data analytic tools now being used to scour social media were enhanced during the Biden administration, a former Biden administration DHS official said. But to use them to search social media of nonviolent students, the official said, is different from what the previous administration intended.

“We were not targeting political activity or speech. We would only review them if they were inciting violence,” the former Biden administration official said. 

The tools the DHS task force is using are run by Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center and National Vetting Center, both of which are typically tasked with using software and data to keep potential security threats from entering the United States. Any potential red flags about a student are shared with Citizenship and Immigration Services, which in turn asks the State Department to make a determination about whether the student’s visa should be revoked.

If the State Department decides it should be revoked, the task force informs Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in local field offices to arrest and deport the student, the sources said. 

Before the task force was created, much of the investigative work would have been done at the field office level and shared with local ICE officers, the sources said. Now, according to the sources, agents are taking orders from people they may not know from the task force in Washington about whom to arrest without clear guidance about why they are being targeted.

Over the last month, nearly 300 international students have been stripped of their visas, according to media reports and universities that have reviewed their systems.  

ICE, which is part of DHS, runs the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which oversees foreign students on visas to study at U.S. academic institutions.

ICE’s critic

ICE Chief of Staff Jon Feere had been a vocal critic of the Student and Exchange Visitor Program before he joined the Trump administration this year.

Feere wrote dozens of articles for the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates for reduced immigration into the United States, many of which pointed to cases of fraud he alleged was rampant in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program.  

“Blatant, widespread fraud has become a central part of America’s foreign student program, and the government agencies responsible for putting an end to it have been asleep at the wheel for far too long,” Feere said in an article he published with the Center for Immigration Studies in August.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement: “There is no room in the United States for the rest of the world’s terrorist sympathizers, and we are under no obligation to admit them or let them stay here. Secretary [Kristi] Noem has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-Semitic violence and terrorism — think again. You are not welcome here.”

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Christopher Krebs, the former head of the federal government’s top cybersecurity agency, said the 2020 elections were won by Joe Biden, contradicting Trump’s claim that the election was stolen.

Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official, wrote an anonymous memoir that criticized Trump’s handling of classified documents and other conduct during his first term.

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One memorandum signed by Trump directed the Attorney General and the Homeland Security secretary to “take all appropriate action to review” the activities of Krebs. Another directed the Homeland Security secretary to review Taylor’s activities as a government employee.

The memo relating to Krebs described him as a “significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority.”

The other memo said Taylor “stoked dissension by manufacturing sensationalist reports on the existence of a supposed ‘resistance’ within the Federal Government.”

Krebs declined to comment. Taylor said on X that he wasn’t surprised by the president’s actions.

“I said this would happen,” Taylor wrote. “Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path.”

He added: “Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”

Taylor wrote an anonymous op-ed while he was working at the Department of Homeland Security in which he said many senior administration officials were trying to limit Trump’s impulses and frustrate his agenda. 

In his memoir, Taylor describes having heard about Trump’s interest in “tapping” the phones of White House aides in a bid to stanch media leaks.

Krebs was the first director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, of CISA, which under the Trump administration began offering cybersecurity and physical security help to state and local election officials.

Trump fired Krebs in a tweet in November 2020 over the agency’s Rumor Control website, which corrected falsehoods about election integrity, many of which Trump and his allies promoted.

Krebs was among the most vocal government officials debunking baseless claims about election manipulation, particularly addressing a conspiracy theory centered on Dominion Voting Systems machines that Trump’s lawyers have pushed.

As a prominent critic of Trump’s false claims that the election 2020 was stolen, Krebs has been a consistent target for Trump.

NBC News’ Chloe Atkins contributed.

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Federal agents swarmed a Dale City home March 27 and arrested 24-year-old Henrry Josue Villatoro Santos, charging him with possession of a firearm by a person who is in the country illegally.

The motion to drop the charge did not give a reason why, but The Washington Post reports sources familiar with the matter say it’s so they can fast-track Villatoro Santos’ deportation.

Santos’ newly-appointed public defender is asking the court to delay the dismissal for fourteen days in order to get his client immigration counsel.

He noted the “substantial risks” involved in his client’s transfer to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and recent deportations by the Trump Administration without due process.

Attorney General Pam Bondi described him as “one of the top leaders of MS-13” and “one of the top three for the entire country.” She said he is from El Salvador and will be deported.

News4 and Telemundo 44 spoke to Villatoro Santos’ mother, who shared copies of a federal search warrant affidavit showing agents seized multiple guns, ammunition, a letter from a jail outlining inmate “cliques” and immigration documents.

The front door of Villatoro Santos’ mother’s home was smashed from a battering ram. Her rear sliding glass door was smashed out.

President Donald Trump has blamed violence and gang growth on lax immigration policies. In his first term as president, Trump promised an all-out fight against MS-13, saying he would “dismantle, decimate and eradicate” the gang.

Not long after trading opened at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, Trump took to his Truth Social platform and wrote:

“BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!”

Four minutes later, he wrote:

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT”

Just before 1:30 p.m., Trump announced the pause, sending stocks soaring. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index saw its biggest one-day gain since 2008, rising nearly 12%; while the S&P 500 climbed 9.5% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average surged 8% or about 2,800 points.

Trump could have been generally urging people to buy into the market while prices were relatively low. That was the response Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick gave when asked about the posts Wednesday evening on CNBC.

“Donald Trump understands that … America is the greatest country, all right? We are the greatest country, and we have the capacity for incredible greatness. But someone needs to take the shackles off.”

But on social media, some users raised the prospect — without evidence — of market manipulation, while others began referring to the market’s sharp turn upwards as the “Trump Pump.”   

There is no evidence to suggest the president was seeking to manipulate markets or that he or any of his advisers acted on inside information

For Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer for former President George W. Bush who now teaches government ethics and security regulation at the University of Minnesota’s law school, the morning posts, at a minimum, leave Trump open to questions about his intentions.  

“This is a scenario that could expose the president to accusations that he engaged in market manipulation,” Painter said. 

Even before he’d been sworn in for his second term, Trump faced insider-trading criticisms amid the launch of his $TRUMP meme coin. In that incident, the Trump organization was explicit that a group of investors who were helping launch the coin stood to benefit from its release assuming its price went up. Still, reports showed other investors reaping outsized profits from the launch, including one crypto-wallet owner or owners who earned $109 million according to a New York Times analysis.

Some Democrats were quick to blast the president’s actions on Wednesday.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, told NBC News Wednesday that the Trump administration was “replete with grifters” and that “corruption was its middle name.” 

“Insider trading is a real threat, and I hope there will be a surge of penetrating investigations into the potential for manipulation and insider trading of securities,” Blumenthal said. “Since the knowledge of what Trump’s plans have been and may be is widely spread.”

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Sen. Adam Schiff, D-California — a frequent object of Trump’s scorn — also suggested an inquiry was warranted.

“Trump is creating giant market fluctuations with his on-again, off-again tariffs,” Schiff wrote on social media. “These constant gyrations in policy provide dangerous opportunities for insider trading. Who in the administration knew about Trump’s latest tariff flip flop ahead of time? Did anyone buy or sell  stocks, and profit at the public’s expense? I’m writing to the White House — the public has a right to know.”

A White House spokesman rejected the Democrats’ assertions.

“It is the responsibility of the President of the United States to reassure the markets and Americans about their economic security in the face of nonstop media fearmongering,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. “Instead of grasping at straws to try landing a punch on President Trump, Democrats should focus on working with the administration to restore American Greatness.” — WH Spokesman Kush Desai

A Department of Justice spokesperson declined to comment. The Securities and Exchange Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Painter said the incident could result in investigations “into who knew what and when before [Trump] announced he was going to postpone the tariffs on all the countries except for China.”

“This was a terrible idea to make those posts,” Painter said of Trump’s suggestion that it was “a great time to buy.” 

Painter further admonished Trump, saying “I would hope that he would focus on doing his job  — and try to calm the markets and have a predictable trade policy and let the markets do their thing without the White House giving what appears to be investment advice,” he said.

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Here’s a look at the facts.

CLAIM: “I call it beautiful, clean coal. I told my people, never use the word coal unless you put beautiful, clean before it.”

THE FACTS: The production of coal is cleaner now than it has been historically, but that doesn’t mean it’s clean.

Planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from the coal industry have decreased over the past 30 years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Energy lobbyist Scott Segal said that “the relative statement that coal-fired electricity is cleaner than ever before is true, particularly when emissions are measured per unit of electricity produced.”

And yet, coal production worldwide still needs to be reduced sharply to address climate change, according to United Nations-backed research.

Along with carbon dioxide, burning coal emits sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that contribute to acid rain, smog and respiratory illnesses, according to the EIA.

Over the past 15 years, the U.S. has seen a major shift from coal to natural gas for electricity use, a key reason U.S. carbon emissions have declined over that period.

Coal once provided more than half of U.S. electricity production, but its share dropped to about 16% in 2023, down from about 45% as recently as 2010. Natural gas provides about 43% of U.S. electricity, with the remainder from nuclear energy and renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged during his confirmation hearing in January that the burning of fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas — causes climate change. That’s because the combustion of fossil fuels is drastically increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, warming the planet.

___

TRUMP: “It’s cheap, incredibly efficient, high density and it’s almost indestructible.”

THE FACTS: Coal is one of the most expensive sources of new power generation. New coal plants would produce electricity at nearly $90 per megawatt hour on average, though no one in the U.S. is currently building or planning to build a new coal plant, according to estimates from the EIA.

Standalone solar without battery storage is the cheapest source of new power generation at about $23 per megawatt hour on average for new projects connecting to the grid in 2028, the EIA estimates. That includes tax credits and other subsidies under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which help reduce the cost of renewable energy.

New natural gas plants are expected to produce electricity at nearly $43 per megawatt hour, according to the estimates.

A nonpartisan climate policy think tank, Energy Innovation, found that 99% of existing U.S. coal plants are more expensive to keep running than if they’re replaced with local solar, wind, and battery storage. Americans immediately begin saving money when coal plants retire and communities transition to clean energy, according to Energy Innovation’s 2023 report.

“Trump has promised to cut American energy bills in half – this is yet another way he’s forcing Americans to pay more,” Greg Alvarez, a spokesperson with Energy Innovations, wrote in an email Tuesday.

Coal plants operated at full power about 42.4% of the time in 2023, according to EIA’s most recent data. In comparison, nuclear and geothermal plants ranked highest, at about 93% and 69.4%, respectively.

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CLAIM: “The value of untapped coal in our country is 100 times greater than the value of all the gold at Fort Knox.”

THE FACTS: Although the U.S. does have an abundance of coal, its estimated value is not nearly as high as Trump claims.

There are currently about 147.3 million troy ounces of gold stored at Fort Knox with a book value of approximately $6.2 billion, according to the U.S. Treasury. Gold closed on the open market Tuesday, trading at $2,990.20 per troy ounce, making its market value much higher, at about $440.6 billion. A troy ounce, a weight measurement for precious metals, is approximately 31.1 grams.

There were about 469.1 billion short tons of coal in U.S. reserves as of Jan. 1, 2024, according to the EIA, though only about 53% of that was available for mining. EIA estimates its value at approximately $598.3 billion. That’s more than all of the gold at Fort Knox, but far short of 100 times that amount. A short ton, also known as a U.S. ton, is equivalent to 2,000 pounds.

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TRUMP: “They’re opening up coal, coal plants all over Germany.”

THE FACTS: That’s not accurate. According to Germany’s economy ministry, 18 coal-fired power plants were shut down in 2024. “No new coal-fired power plants will be built,” a spokesman for the ministry said Wednesday in response to a question about Trump’s claims. The spokesperson noted the country plans to phase out coal-fired power generation by 2038 at the latest.

Germany did bring some coal-fired plants back online in 2022 and 2023 to deal with natural gas shortages after Russia invaded Ukraine. The government allowed up to six gigawatts of coal-fired power plants to return from the reserve to the market for a limited period of time. They were taken offline by the end of March 2024, according to Agora Energiewende, a Berlin-based climate policy think thank.

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Associated Press climate, environment and energy writer Matthew Daly contributed to this report.

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Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.

The request was made Wednesday to the Postal Regulatory Commission, which must OK the proposal. If approved, the 5-cent increase for a “forever” stamp and similar increases for postcards, metered letters and international mail would take effect July 13.

The proposed changes would raise mailing services product prices approximately 7.4%.

The Postal Service contends, as it did last year when it enacted a similar increase, that it’s needed to achieve financial stability.

Former U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy previously warned postal customers to get used to “uncomfortable” rate hikes as the Postal Service seeks to become self-sufficient. He said price increases were overdue after “at least 10 years of a defective pricing model.”

DeJoy resigned in March after nearly five years in the position, leaving as President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had floated the idea of privatizing mail service.

Deputy Postmaster General Doug Tulino has taken on the role of postmaster general until the Postal Service Board of Governors names a permanent replacement for DeJoy.

Trump has said he is considering putting USPS under the control of the Commerce Department in an effort to stop losses at the $78 billion-a-year agency, which has struggled at times to balance the books with the decline of first-class mail.

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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday touted two particular medications that have not been shown to work as first-line treatments for measles: the steroid budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin.

Although experts say there are no specific treatments proven to help people recover faster from measles, Kennedy claimed on X that the medications had been instrumental in treating around 300 children in Texas, and told Fox News that doctors prescribing them had seen “very, very good results.” Kennedy has been sharply criticized by medical experts for weeks for spreading misinformation about the measles vaccine and failing to encourage parents to vaccinate their children. (He has since said that the vaccine is the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles, and on Wednesday said that people should get it.)

Since January, measles has taken off in a primarily Mennonite community in Gaines County, Texas, where vaccine hesitancy is prevalent. Families in the community have turned to questionable remedies like budesonide to treat their illnesses — in some cases, at the recommendation of two Texas doctors, Dr. Ben Edwards and Dr. Richard Bartlett. 

On Sunday, Kennedy called Edwards and Bartlett “extraordinary healers” who have “treated and healed” hundreds of children with budesonide and clarithromycin, sharing a photo of himself and the doctors with three Mennonite families whose children had become ill. Two of the families had each recently lost a daughter to measles: 6-year-old Kayley Fehr died in February and 8-year-old Daisy Hildebrand died last week. Neither child was vaccinated.

Edwards, a conventionally trained doctor who has shifted to promoting natural remedies and prayer, has been operating a makeshift clinic in Seminole, offering children these unproven treatments — including, according to a video posted by an anti-vaccine group, while he said he was sick with measles. Edwards has allied himself with the anti-vaccine movement in recent months, hosting influencers and activists on his podcast, including Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center, Brian Hooker of Children’s Health Defense and Andrew Wakefield, the discredited British doctor behind a retracted study that fraudulently linked autism to the MMR vaccine.

In addition to the two measles deaths in Texas, an adult in New Mexico died in early March. While the death is still under investigation, the individual tested positive for measles after death. There have been 657 measles cases so far this year, the highest total since 2019 when there was a major outbreak in Orthodox Jewish communities in New York, according to NBC News’ tally of state health department data. Most are tied to the Texas outbreak, which has spilled into several neighboring states. The vast majority of patients were not vaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status. 

There are no treatments for measles itself, although children may need medical care to treat complications, such as pneumonia. Because of this, public health experts emphasize the importance of getting two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which are 97% effective at preventing the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

“There is no evidence to support the use of either aerosolized budesonide or clarithromycin for treatment of children with measles,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Prescribing treatments that have not been vetted in clinical trials amounts to experimenting on patients, added Dr. Susan McLellan, a professor in the infectious diseases division at the University of Texas Medical Branch.

“It is very understandable that people want to grasp onto a hopeful remedy,” McLellan said. “It is unfortunate when trusted providers of advice, such as those in higher levels of our government, are not very clearly stating what is upheld by scientific evidence and what is not.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said Kennedy has offered clear guidance that vaccines are the most effective way to prevent measles.

Edwards declined to comment. Bartlett did not respond to requests for comment.

The misinformation playbook

During the Covid pandemic, fringe doctors hyped unproven cures like ivermectin — an antiparasitic drug typically used for worm infections — while making unsubstantiated claims about the dangers of mRNA shots. Kennedy himself told podcaster Joe Rogan in 2023 that ivermectin was discredited because various groups stood to make money off Covid vaccines.

Edwards and Bartlett, the doctors treating measles patients in Texas, have a similar history of questioning vaccine safety. Edwards shared dubious claims about injuries and deaths related to Covid vaccines at a Texas state legislative hearing in 2021. And Bartlett touted budesonide as a “silver bullet” to treat Covid during the pandemic.

During the measles outbreak, they have each warned of risks associated with the MMR vaccine: Edwards claimed, falsely, that it causes “potentially” hundreds of deaths a year and Bartlett has said that the complications caused by measles, including brain swelling and pneumonia, can also be caused by the vaccine. In reality, the MMR vaccine, which is only given to children with healthy immune systems, has been overwhelmingly safe since its approval more than five decades ago, and has saved an estimated 94 million lives worldwide. Some people may experience temporary side effects such as a fever, rash or joint pain, which are expected after vaccination.

Measles, on the other hand, is highly contagious and can be life-threatening for the unvaccinated. On average, measles kills almost 3 out of every 1,000 people diagnosed. 

But anti-vaccine activists have tried to link the two recent pediatric deaths to medical malpractice instead, which NBC News could not verify. On an episode of Edwards’ podcast, “You’re the Cure,” on Monday, Bartlett attributed at least one measles death in the U.S. to “medical error,” claiming that a child had not been treated with the appropriate antibiotic for a secondary bacterial infection.

Covenant Children’s Hospital, which treated the first child who died, called such claims circulating online “misleading and inaccurate.” University Medical Center Children’s Hospital, which treated the second child, said in a statement Sunday that the patient had no known underlying health conditions and was receiving treatment for complications of measles while hospitalized.

Dr. Robert Malone, an anti-vaccine activist, similarly suggested in his newsletter over the weekend that the two pediatric deaths were due to medical error, and that budesonide could have saved at least one child’s life. 

What the science actually says

Budesonide is normally used to treat inflammatory diseases. In capsule form, it’s an effective treatment for Crohn’s disease. And its inhaled form can reduce asthma symptoms. 

Bartlett said on Edwards’ podcast that he realized, through divine intervention in March 2020, that budesonide could help save the lives of people who were critically ill with Covid. 

“While I was asleep, an answer to prayer came to me,” he said. “It will shut down the release of the cytokines, the inflammatory chemicals from the lung lining.”

He pointed to trials out of the University of Oxford that he said supported that claim. The trials showed that budesonide could shorten recovery times in nonhospitalized patients, but there’s no firm evidence that it can reduce the risk of hospitalization or death from Covid. 

Steroids should not be given early in the course of a viral infection like measles, because they inhibit the immune system, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“That’s not what you want to do,” he said. “Your immune system works for you” to fight measles.

Doctors do use steroids in people with Covid who have late-stage pneumonia if their immune system has become overactive, Offit said. 

Doctors prescribe budesonide, administered by either an inhaler or nasal spray, to reduce wheezing in people with asthma, he added. While people with measles develop a cough, they don’t really wheeze.

Kennedy’s suggestion that measles patients could benefit from clarithromycin similarly lacks context, pediatricians and infectious disease doctors said. 

Antibiotics are designed to kill bacteria, not viruses, so they don’t work against measles itself. But measles can weaken the body so much that people develop a bacterial infection such as staphylococcus or streptococcus. 

Offit said doctors typically treat such infections with a combination of antibiotics called vancomycin and ceftriaxone. These medications are given intravenously, he said, whereas clarithromycin usually comes in pill form. Studies show it’s more effective to treat severe infections, such as bacterial pneumonia or sepsis, with intravenous antibiotics, which help ensure that adequate levels of the antibiotics make it into the bloodstream. Patients who take antibiotics by mouth may not receive a high enough dose to combat a serious infection, because the medication has to go through the intestines, where it may not be fully absorbed.

“You don’t treat severe infections orally,” Offit said. “It would be too risky.”

Clarithromycin is also a broad-spectrum antibiotic, meaning it targets a wide range of bacteria, said Dr. Paul Kilgore, a professor at Wayne State University’s Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.

“If we treat with broad-spectrum antibiotics, we don’t know exactly what we’re treating [and] we run the risk of increasing antibiotic resistance,” he said.

Public health experts said touting these medications as first-line treatments sends the wrong message. 

“By mentioning such treatments without that context, RFK Jr. continues to distract away from the prevention measure that incontrovertibly works — the vaccine,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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Kilmar Abrego Garcia was detained on March 12 and flown on a Justice Department flight to a notorious prison – though he had legal status to live in the U.S.

His wife, Jennifer, said Wednesday that her husband’s deportation has destroyed her family’s happiness and their children’s innocence. She fought tears as she spoke on the Hill with Rep. Glenn Ivey and Sen. Chris Van Hollen.

“Kilmar, if you can hear me, I’m still fighting for you. Your brother, your mother, our children are still fighting for you. We’re not going to give up hope until the Supreme Court justices do the right thing,” she said.

Some supporters held signs reading “Bring Kilmar home.”

“We are with you in this fight for justice and we demand that Kilmar be returned home now. What has happened should never happen in the United States of America,” Van Hollen said.

Trump administration 21 hours ago

How a Chicago Bulls hat led to a Maryland dad being mistakenly shipped to an El Salvador prison

Trump administration Apr 8

Supreme Court weighing mistakenly deported Maryland man's return to US

Immigration Apr 4

Deported ‘in error': How a Maryland dad ended up in an El Salvador prison

Abrego Garcia’s family is awaiting word from the Supreme Court on its decision in his case.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to vacate a lower court’s order to release Abrego Garcia from the prison and return him to the U.S.

The solicitor general claimed Judge Paul Xinis did not have the authority to order Abrego Garcia’s release and return.

In their most recent court filing, his attorneys note he has not lived in El Salvador since 2011, when he was just 16. They say he has no criminal record there or here in the U.S.

The decision comes a day after the Supreme Court also sided with the Trump administration in another lawsuit filed over mass firings.

A split panel for the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the terminations of federal workers should probably be appealed through a separate employment process rather than fought out in federal court. Two judges appointed by Republican presidents sided with the administration, while a third Democratic appointed judge dissented.

The decision comes in a lawsuit filed by nearly two dozen states, who said the mass firings will cause irreparable burdens and expenses to support recently unemployed workers. They said at least 24,000 probationary employees have been terminated since Trump took office.

The states could still seek further review as the lawsuit continues to play out.

The Republican administration has argued that the states have no right to try to influence the federal government’s relationship with its own workers, but also had already reinstated some 15,000 workers to full duty or paid leave as the lawsuits played out, according to court documents.

The appeals court order halts a decision from U.S. District Judge James Bredar in Baltimore, who was one of two judges appointed by Democratic presidents who found that the Trump administration violated federal laws in carrying out the terminations at 20 agencies in the states that sued.

The Supreme Court blocked another order from U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco on Tuesday, finding that nonprofit groups lacked legal standing to sue over the firing of probationary workers. The case still has additional plaintiffs, however, and Alsup was weighing Wednesday whether to again order reinstatement on behalf of the state of Washington and labor groups.

Probationary workers have been targeted for layoffs across the federal government because they’re usually new to the job and lack full civil service protection.

The states suing the Trump administration in the Baltimore case are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, along with Washington, D.C.

___

Associated Press writer Janie Har in San Francisco contributed to this report.

The two pieces of evidence were not enough to keep Abrego Garcia in federal immigration custody in 2019, when authorities in Maryland arrested him, according to a court filing last month.

They appear to be the basis for shipping him to a foreign megaprison with no legal recourse nearly six years later.

‘Administrative error’ leads to deportation

Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three and protected legal resident who has lived in Maryland since 2011 and is originally from El Salvador, was deported to a high-security jail in El Salvador on March 15. The Trump administration admitted last week that his deportation was an “administrative error” due to his protected status, but refused to commit to bringing him home.

The administration challenged a judge’s Friday ruling that the government bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States. It argued that Garcia was a member of MS-13, citing the accusation from 2019, and said he posed a threat to national security.

“While there is no doubt a ‘public interest in preventing aliens from being wrongfully removed,’ there is an overwhelming public interest in not importing members of violent transnational gangs into this country,” lawyers for the Justice Department wrote in a filing on Friday.

Trump administration Apr 7

Supreme Court says US doesn't need to return mistakenly deported Maryland man by Monday

Trump administration Apr 6

What to know as deadline looms for Trump administration to return man mistakenly deported to El Salvador

The argument echoed claims made repeatedly by some of the administration’s highest-ranking officials in recent days, including Vice President JD Vance.

“What is it about congressional Democrats that get more angry at deporting violent gang members than they do at the victims of those violent gang members?” Vance said on Fox News last week. “I don’t even understand where they’re coming from. They’ve gone off the deep end, and they’ve got to come back to reality.”

Reality appears to be more nuanced.

Arrest in 2019 based in part on Chicago Bulls hat

On March 28, 2019, Abrego Garcia and three other noncitizens were apprehended by local authorities while soliciting work outside of a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Maryland, according to Abrego Garcia’s initial petition filed last month.

The court document states that upon his arrest, authorities with the Prince George County Police Department accused Abrego Garcia of being affiliated with MS-13. After he repeatedly denied being affiliated with the notorious international crime group and did not provide officers with information about other gang members, authorities turned Abrego Garcia over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the petition states.

Prince George’s County police officers then produced a Gang Field Interview Sheet for ICE that “explained that the only reason to believe Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was a gang member was that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie; and that a confidential informant advised that he was an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique,” the court document states.

Abrego Garcia then made multiple attempts to obtain additional information from local authorities to support the allegation that he was a gang member but was denied several times, the court document states. He simultaneously applied for asylum, arguing that gang members would torture or kill him if he was sent back to his home country, according to the court document.

The Prince George’s County Police Department declined to comment.

Judge issues protective order

While in custody, he married his wife, a U.S. citizen, at a Maryland immigration detention center, and was unable to be with her for the birth of their son, the court document states.

An immigration judge granted him a deportation protection order on Oct. 10, 2019, and he was released shortly afterward, according to the document. A more recent filing from Abrego Garcia’s attorney quotes the judge as describing Abrego Garcia as “credible.”

ICE never appealed the judge’s decision.

Nearly six years later, they apprehended Abrego Garcia in an IKEA parking lot while his 5-year-old son, who is autistic, was in the backseat of their car. ICE did not return a request for comment.

The Trump administration sent Abrego Garcia and nearly 300 others to a notorious megajail in El Salvador, defying a court order blocking the effort. The administration claimed the men were all Venezuelan gang members.

Court documents show that immigration officials relied on tattoos and social media activity to justify the gang affiliations.

Judge calls government claims ‘chatter’

Abrego Garcia’s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said in a phone call that the administration’s repeated accusations that his client is a gang member “endangers his life.”

He argued that, regardless, the administration did not have the right to deport him.

“A: We totally deny that it was true in 2019. B: There’s no allegation even from them that he’s done anything since 2019,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “And then C: Even if you believed that all of those things about him were true, they still concede that they can’t do what they did.”

At a hearing for Abrego Garcia’s case in U.S. District Court on Friday, Judge Paula Xinis chalked up the government’s claims to “just chatter.”

“In a court of law, when someone is accused of membership in such a violent and predatory organization, it comes in form of indictment or criminal proceeding so we can assess facts,” she said. “I haven’t seen any of those.”

Xinis then ruled in favor of Abrego Garcia, ordering the government to bring him back to the U.S.

Supreme Court intervenes

But on Monday, at the request of the Trump administration, the Supreme Court issued an administrative stay that temporarily paused the order.

The Supreme Court also tossed out a lower court’s order blocking the Trump administration’s deportation of the 300 men. The administration did so without any legal process, citing the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law that allows the government to detain noncitizens during a period of war or invasion.

“It is a bad day to be a terrorist and criminal alien in the United States of America,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on X in the hours afterward.

In a post on his social media company Truth Social, President Donald Trump described the court’s decisions as “a great day for justice in America!”

In similarly unprecedented fashion, the Trump administration has been apprehending foreign students en masse, most of whom are Muslim, arguing that they pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy.

In response the Supreme Court’s ruling, Sandoval-Moshenberg again noted in a filing on Monday that Abrego Garcia has lived in the U.S. for years and has never been charged with a crime.

“The Government’s contention that he has suddenly morphed into a dangerous threat to the republic is not credible,” he wrote.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Trump’s sweeping global tariffs snap into effect, ushering in a new era of disruption
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This live blog on the Trump administration for Wednesday, April 9, 2025, has ended. See more coverage here.

The mere announcement of the duties last week sent shock waves through global markets and caused trillions of dollars in paper losses. Now, consumers and investors alike will begin to gauge the actual impact on the U.S. economy as the cost of the import taxes starts to flow through supply chains and into businesses and household budgets.

The average tariff faced by the dozens of nations Trump targeted is 29%, with many as high as 40%. The White House posted the full list here. Chinese imports will carry a cumulative rate of 104% because of new tariffs Trump imposed this year, on top of levies he had already enacted during his first term. Those took effect late Tuesday. 

Trump is seeking to reshape the global world economic order by reducing America’s reliance on foreign imports. Amid debate about how the country-by-country tariffs were calculated, Trump has acknowledged that his goal all along was to effectively erase or even reverse the U.S. trade deficit, which most economists say serves little purpose and is likely to lead to higher prices and potentially slower economic growth.

Already, Trump has instituted a 10% baseline tariff on goods brought into the United States. And while he said he would negotiate over trade, he gave little sign of relenting, only posting a note in the morning that he believed China would seek a deal alongside other potential agreements his administration is discussing with Japan, South Korea and other countries.  

Tariffs are nothing new, and many business leaders have long argued that the United States must do more to prevent some low-cost goods, especially from China, from flooding its markets. 

But Trump shocked the world with his attempt to bring to the United States the production of a vast array of goods that are, in most cases, produced more affordably overseas. 

“It’s too much too fast,” said Craig Fuller, founder and CEO of FreightWaves, a logistics consultancy. Businesses — especially small ones — are simply not equipped to alter their supply chains at the speed and scale Trump desires, he added, and will face enormous cost increases in the meantime while they try to reckon with them.  

“It’s not realistic,” Fuller said. 

Trump has shown little appetite for taking “no” for an answer, even as financial markets plunged.

On Monday, he told reporters at the White House that “I don’t mind going through it because I see a beautiful picture at the end,” because “tariffs will make this country very rich.”

Economists are not as sanguine about the tariff program. Many are sounding alarms about what could be next. In a note to clients ahead of Wednesday’s deadline, analysts with Wells Fargo said the tariffs would be likely to cause a “modest” stagflationary “shock” to the U.S. economy: As prices go up, they will contribute to eroding real income growth, causing spending and overall economic activity to contract, they said.

And if other countries retaliate with tariffs that are equivalent to the levies the United States has already slapped on them, they wrote, “then the contraction in real GDP is even deeper.” 

“The downturn in the economy causes the unemployment rate to rise from its current level of roughly 4% to about 5%,” they wrote.

That 5% unemployment figure echoes similar projections last week from analysts with JPMorgan, who said “the pinch from higher prices that we expect in the coming months may hit harder than in the post-pandemic inflation spike,” given that income growth was already slowing. 

“Moreover, in an environment of heightened uncertainty, consumers may be reluctant to dip too far into savings to finance spending growth.”

Several countries are already retaliating. With the tariffs’ taking effect Wednesday, Canada said it was instituting 25% duties on some U.S.-made automobiles and all U.S.-made auto parts. 

“President Trump caused this trade crisis — and Canada is responding with purpose and with force,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote Tuesday on X.

China has already hit back with 34% tariffs on American products — mostly energy and agricultural products — prompting Trump to say new duties on Chinese goods would go into effect Wednesday. China is also considering a ban on U.S. cultural exports like movies. 

Perhaps most worrisome is that lower borrowing rates Trump sought to better grapple with his budget plans have not materialized. Late Tuesday, the yield, or interest rate, that investors demand to lend money to the government had surged back above the level it had hit before Trump’s tariffs rollout last week.

For all the massive moves in financial markets that have already taken place, one expert says it may only be the beginning. 

“A historical shift in trade policy … will not be digested that quickly,” Jens Nordvig, founder and CEO of Exante Data financial consultancy, wrote late Tuesday on X. “It could take weeks and months and even quarters, before we have their full effects embedded.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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Melanie Krause, who had served as acting head since February, will step down over the new data-sharing document signed Monday by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The agreement will allow ICE to submit names and addresses of immigrants inside the U.S. illegally to the IRS for cross-verification against tax records.

Two people familiar with the situation confirmed Krause was resigning and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The IRS has been in upheaval over Trump administration decisions to share taxpayer data. Acting Commissioner Douglas O’Donnell announced his retirement from the agency after roughly 40 years of service in February as furor spread over Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency gaining access to IRS taxpayer data. Krause replaced him.

Acting chief counsel William Paul was removed from his role at the agency last month and replaced by Andrew De Mello, an attorney in the chief counsel’s office who is deemed supportive of DOGE, according to two other people familiar with the plans who were also not authorized to speak publicly.

Immigration Apr 8

IRS to share info with ICE about some undocumented immigrant taxpayers

Immigration Apr 7

Supreme Court lifts order blocking deportations under 18th century wartime law

The Treasury Department says the agreement will help carry out President Donald Trump’s agenda to secure U.S. borders and is part of his larger nationwide immigration crackdown, which has resulted in deportations, workplace raids and the use of an 18th century wartime law to deport Venezuelan migrants.

Advocates, however, say the IRS-DHS information-sharing agreement violates privacy laws and diminishes the privacy of all Americans.

The basis for the agreement is founded in “longstanding authorities granted by Congress, which serve to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans while streamlining the ability to pursue criminals,” said a Treasury official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to explain the agency’s thinking on the agreement.

Tom Bowman, policy counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said disclosing immigrant tax records to DHS for immigration enforcement “will discourage tax compliance among immigrant communities, weaken contributions to essential public programs, and increase burdens for U.S. citizens and nonimmigrant taxpayers. It also sets a dangerous precedent for data privacy abuse in other federal programs.”

Todd Lyons, acting ICE director, told reporters at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix on Tuesday that the agreement will help ICE find people who are collecting benefits they aren’t entitled to and are “kind of hiding in plain sight” using someone else’s identity.

Working with Treasury and other departments is “strictly for the major criminal cases,” Lyons said.

The IRS had already been called upon to help with immigration enforcement earlier this year.

Noem in February sent a request to Bessent to borrow IRS Criminal Investigation workers to help with the immigration crackdown, according to a letter obtained by the AP. It cites the IRS’ boost in funding, though the $80 billion infusion of funds the federal tax collection agency received under the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act has already been clawed back.

A collection of tax law experts for the NYU Tax Law Center wrote Monday that the IRS-DHS agreement “threatens to violate the rights that many more Americans have under longstanding laws that protect their tax information from wrongful disclosure or dissemination.”

“In fact, it is difficult to see how the IRS could release information to DHS while complying with taxpayer privacy statutes,” they said. “IRS officials who sign off on data sharing under these circumstances risk breaking the law, which could result in criminal and civil sanctions.”

The memo states that the IRS and ICE “will perform their duties in a manner that recognizes and enhances individuals’ right of privacy and will ensure their activities are consistent with laws, regulations, and good administrative practices.”

Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat contributed to this report from Phoenix.

State legislators faced a $3.3 billion deficit and hundreds of millions in cuts from the Trump administration.

The approved budget includes a 3% IT services tax and increases in marijuana and online sports betting taxes.

“We did, in fact, leave here with that deficit closed and a cash cushion to be able to weather the ongoing storm from what [President Donald] Trump and [Elon] Musk are doing to Maryland’s economy, Democratic House Majority Leader David Moon said.

The state’s wealthier residents also will pay more. Two new tax brackets will apply to those who make $500,000 per year and $1 million or more — a so-called millionaires tax.

Gov. Wes Moore says 94% of Marylanders will either see a cut in their income taxes or they’ll stay the same. But lawmakers also provided for local jurisdictions to impose a 0.1% “piggyback” tax on income.

“There are sacrifices that we are asking some Marylanders to make, but again, it’s for the benefit of the overall state economy,” Moon said.

The budget was condemned by Republican party leaders, who criticized the tax increases, including a $5 fee on each new tire purchased in the state

“This represents the largest tax hike in Maryland history — a staggering burden on working families, small businesses and retirees already struggling with inflation and economic uncertainty,” the Senate Republican Caucus said in a statement.

Lawmakers say they’ve yet to realize the full scope of how cuts from the Trump administration could affect the state. Legislative leaders haven’t ruled out the possibility of a special session if the cuts are too deep. A panel will monitor federal actions and provide updates to legislators to prepare them to respond to decisions in the nation’s capital.

“From public education, to health care and our federal workforce, we have already witnessed how recent federal actions threaten the economic stability of our state,” Maryland House Speaker Adrienne Jones, a Democrat, said. “We know these threats will continue after the General Assembly’s 2025 legislative session adjourns.”

Moore also noted concerns about continuing challenges that the heavily Democratic state faces from actions taken by the Trump administration, from federal job cuts to tariffs.

The governor described the Maryland revenue increases as tax reform that spares the middle class and brings tax cuts for many, while asking more of high-income residents. He said the state budget reductions were “the largest amount of cuts that you’ve seen in a Maryland state budget in 16 years.”

“We are continuing to deliver for the people of the state, particularly at a time when we’re seeing so much chaos coming from Washington, D.C.,” Moore told reporters Monday.

Trump administration Apr 8

Supreme Court weighing mistakenly deported Maryland man's return to US

Crime and Courts Apr 3

Maryland's Second Look Act would give some inmates shorter prison sentences

Republicans, who are outnumbered in both the House and Senate, have repeatedly noted that Maryland has been facing a big deficit since before Trump regained the White House in January. They criticized the tax increases and fees, noting a variety of them relate to vehicles and will affect anyone who drives.

“We could have done it differently,” said Del. Jesse Pippy, a Republican and the House minority whip, who said the budget could have been balanced without tax increases. “I think the taxpayers would have appreciated a different course of action.”

Here is a look at some of the highlights of legislation lawmakers have sent to the governor’s desk:

Immigration enforcement

A bill that would have banned police agencies from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement through the so-called 287(g) program failed to pass, but lawmakers did pass legislation creating guidance around ICE access to schools, hospitals, places of worship and other spaces.

Energy package

Lawmakers passed a package of measures aimed at addressing energy needs, including initiatives to generate more power from nuclear, natural gas, solar and battery storage. It also includes a small rebate on state ratepayers’ electric bills, with two installments adding up to an average of about $80.

Abortion funding

The Maryland Department of Health would have access to $25 million for an abortion grant program to help providers pay costs for the uninsured. The money comes from part of the federal Affordable Care Act that has collected fees from insurers to pay for abortion services for their policyholders.

Health care for young adults

Lawmakers approved a measure to make permanent a program that provides subsidies to help young adults get affordable health insurance.

Prescription drugs

A state board would have its authority expanded to set upper price limits for prescription drugs statewide, instead of only for state and local governments.

Second Look Act

People convicted of a crime between the ages of 18 and 25 who have served 20 years or more of a prison sentence would be able to petition for a reduction in sentence if they have not been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole or are a sex offender. The bill does not apply to offenders convicted of killing first responders.

Criminal records

Many more state residents would be able to expunge criminal records after completing their sentences. The measure also will require the state to automatically shield records from public view for roughly 175,000 people who were pardoned by the governor last year for minor cannabis convictions.

Slavery reparations

A statewide commission would study and recommend potential reparations for slavery and the lingering effects of racial discrimination.

Sex abuse lawsuits

Future liabilities from claims of sexual abuse at state and private institutions would be limited with caps on settlements from $890,000 to $400,000 for cases filed after May 31 for state institutions and from $1.5 million to $700,000 for private institutions.

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Are the new tariffs, scheduled to take effect on Wednesday, a bargaining chip to reach better trade deals? Or are they etched in stone in a mission to revamp the global economy?

Investors around the world were hanging on Trump’s every word, but he did little to clear up the situation.

“It can both be true,” he said. “There can be permanent tariffs, and there can also be negotiations.”

The markets skidded to a close. At a time when foreign leaders and business executives are desperate for clarity, the White House is sending mixed messages as it pursues conflicting goals.

Advisers have tried with some success to tamp down a days-long stock selloff by talking up tariffs as a starting point for negotiations, which could mollify Wall Street and jittery Republicans in Congress. But the president continues to insist that he can raise hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue with his new taxes on foreign imports, and he’s shown no willingness to back down from an agenda that he’s advocated for decades, even before entering politics.

The ongoing paradox could erode confidence in Trump’s leadership at home and abroad after he promised a booming economy and tax cuts, not depleted retirement accounts and fears of a recession. For now, as the tariffs are set to kick in, there’s no clear resolution for what could be the most significant overhaul of international trade in a generation.

When reporters asked Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, whether he understood the White House’s plan, he responded with a question of his own — “Does anybody?”

As a result, the U.S. stock market has been extremely volatile. The S&P 500 stock index initially posted gains on Tuesday morning on the possibility of negotiations, only to close down 1.57% as the White House said that the combined tariffs on China would be 104% starting on Wednesday.

Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, urged the White House to “settle the situation.”

He said the “perception as to whether or not there’s an end game is very important.” Tillis said he is “giving the administration the benefit of the doubt” for now. But he added that “you’ve got to get it done as quickly as you can get it done.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said Trump was causing economic chaos with the back-and-forth over tariffs.

“Who makes long term investments based on that?” she said. “Who hires people and trains workers based on the hope that Donald Trump will not change his mind again and again and again?”

Trump claimed on Tuesday that “America’s going to be very rich again very soon” and said his team was negotiating with other countries.

“I call them tailored deals,” he said. “Not off the rack. Highly tailored deals.”

The administration has yet to articulate its goals for any talks with trading partners, other than to suggest that negotiations could take several months and that nations might also need to dramatically overhaul their tax systems and regulations to satisfy Trump’s demands. Canadian and European officials are unsure about how to proceed, even as Trump administration officials insist that as many as 70 nations are looking to start negotiations.

Trump insists that he wants to erase trade deficits that have developed as the U.S. buys more products from other countries than it sells. On Tuesday morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that he spoke with South Korea’s acting president, Han Duck-soo, about “their tremendous and unsustainable” surplus.

“We have the confines and probability of a great DEAL for both countries,” he wrote. “Their top TEAM is on a plane heading to the U.S., and things are looking good.”

But on Monday, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would “eliminate the trade deficit with the United States,” Trump appeared unmoved.

Asked if he would hold off on new tariffs on Israel, the president said, “maybe not.”

“Don’t forget, we help Israel a lot,” he said, citing billions of dollars in military assistance to the country.

Trump has long advocated for tariffs as the solution to economic challenges, and his insistence that other countries are ripping off the United States is one of his most consistently expressed beliefs over the years.

Last Thursday, while flying to Florida aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters that “the tariffs give us great power to negotiate.”

On the flight back to Washington on Sunday, Trump described the tariffs as a necessity and said he was undeterred by the cratering stock market, adding that “sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

Peter Navarro, a leading trade adviser, has also taken a hard line.

“This is not a negotiation,” Navarro wrote in the Financial Times. “For the U.S., it is a national emergency triggered by trade deficits caused by a rigged system.”

But other officials like Kevin Hassett, the top White House economic adviser, and Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said scores of countries are lining up to negotiate with Trump over tariffs.

“It’s going to be a busy April, May, maybe into June,” Bessent told Fox News. He said Trump “gave himself maximum negotiating leverage, and just when he achieved the maximum leverage, he’s willing to start talking.”

Speaking Monday at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, Stephen Miran, chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, said the mixed messages over the purpose of the tariffs reflected a “healthy” internal debate.

“There are conflicting narratives because everybody has got an opinion,” he said. “And that’s fine. Disagreement is how you can enhance your arguments and avoid groupthink, and I think that’s very healthy.”

As for whether any deals could be reached before the tariffs take effect, Miran said, “that choice will ultimately remain with the president.”

Michael Strain, an economist at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Trump is pursuing incompatible goals.

“These tariffs cannot both be an instrument to reshape the global trading order, to shift the U.S. economy away from services and toward manufacturing … and also be a tool to negotiate lower trade barriers,” he said at a panel discussion at the Bipartisan Policy Institute.

Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, blamed Trump’s aides for the ambiguity, saying some of them “just like to talk.”

“There’s some uncertainty about what the president’s objective is and I think that’s a product of some of his aides, who gave conflicting reports on TV this weekend,” he said.

Kennedy said he supports Trump’s trade goals. But he’s also getting calls from businesses in his state, and he’s had no answers for them on what to expect.

Bessent visited with Republican lawmakers on Friday and told them that the tariffs were a “high level mark with the ultimate goal of getting them reduced” unless other countries retaliated, according to Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming.

“The president is a dealmaker if nothing else, and he’s going to continue to deal country by country with each of them,” Barrasso said.

But China already retaliated with plans for its own 34% tariffs, prompting Trump on Monday to threaten additional 50% tariffs against the country, for a total of 104%.

The U.S. president had a positive enough conversation with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba that the Nikkei stock index jumped 6% on Tuesday, yet it was still unclear how a deal would work.

Trump placed a 24% tariff on Japan and a separate 25% tariff on auto imports, much higher than the 1.9% average tariff rate charged by Japan, according to World Trade Organization data. Trump has called the auto tariffs “permanent” and also installed a permanent 10% baseline tariff on most countries, suggesting a limit as to how much rates could fall through negotiations.

House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana said Americans understand Trump is trying to address trade imbalances, and he emphasized his trust in the president.

“We are going to give him the space necessary to do it,” he said Monday.

Associated Press writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he plans to tell the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to stop recommending fluoridation in drinking water nationwide.

He’s creating a task force to study the issue.

The announcement comes as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announces it is reviewing new information on potential health risks with fluoride in drinking water.

RFK Jr. said this is something President Trump would do on day one. That didn’t happen, but Kennedy is making the push now.

The federal government does not set the standard for water fluoridation. That decision is made by states and local governments. But they largely follow the CDC’s guidance, because it’s considered the best scientific standard and has been for decades.

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Fluoride is added to water by the different water suppliers in and around Washington, D.C. Some suppliers meet or exceed CDC recommendations in order to help prevent tooth decay.

Kennedy, who oversees the CDC, cannot order communities to stop fluoridation. But the Health Secretary can direct the CDC to stop recommending it.

Furthermore, water providers in our region have said they plan to continue the process when News4 checked.

The US Environmental Protection Agency sets the maximum level of fluoride allowed in public water – and no systems are allowed to surpass that.

The EPA’s standard for changing its policy has a much higher bar than the CDC and requires an evidence base. News4 spoke with public health attorney Kathleen Hoke on what that means.

“The EPA could change its regulations, but they can’t do so without an evidence base,” Hoke said. “The legal standard is that they can’t act in an arbitrary and capricious manner, so they can’t just withdraw the regulations and then say there can be no fluoride in public waters, because they would get sued.”

“I think it would be incredibly difficult for the EPA to say there could be no fluoride at all, or some minuscule level in public waters, and have that survive litigation,” Hoke said.

In Kennedy’s fight to remove fluoride, he has connected it to lowering IQ’s in children, and claimed it causes bone breaks and disease. The IQ study he cites has been criticized because the data was collected from countries outside the U.S., where fluoride levels are more than double what’s recommended here.

Still, the issue has been at the center of heated debate, with Utah becoming the first state to ban fluoride in public drinking water despite pushback from dentists and health experts.

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At a rally outside the Office of Personnel Management Tuesday, Qua Crowner said she was laid off for participating in a diversity, equity and inclusion training course she was instructed to take under the previous administration.

“We followed the mission, we followed the leadership and now we’re being punished for it,” she said.

DEI is one of the many targets of the Trump administration, but the American Federation of Government Employees labor union says the administration isn’t only targeting DEI advocates and practitioners, but also people who happened to learn about DEI in a training the government offered them.

“These workers merely attended a DEI training years ago because their management encouraged it, and that was enough for them to get targeted by this administration, and that ain’t right,” AFGE National Vice President for Women and Fair Practices Kendrick Roberson said.

During his first two days back in office, President Donald Trump signed executive orders mandating the Office of Personnel Management terminate all activities related to DEI.

AFGE says the administration falsely claims DEI resulted in unqualified hires.

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“Federal jobs are not given as handouts to the underserved, and the best candidates are not overlooked because they are not brown enough or because they are not man enough,” Roberson said. “That is literally federal law. Let’s stop it with the lies.”

In March, a group of federal employees took legal action, alleging the administration sought to punish employees for what the administration perceived as their political views, which the complaint says violates the First Amendment. The legal action was filed with the Merit Systems Protection Board, which has yet to act.

“I come from a family of military veterans and civil servants,” Crowner said. “We were taught to leave our politics at the door. We serve everyone with no exceptions.”

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The directive served as a basis for a series of subsequent orders that called for defunding medical or educational institutions that have protections for transgender students, provide gender-affirming medical care to transgender youth or allow transgender girls or women to participate in women’s sports. Another order attempted to ban transgender people from the military. 

But some of those orders — and Trump’s later comments — lack context or include incorrect or misleading statements.

“For four long years, we had an administration that tried to abolish the very concept of womanhood and replace it with radical gender ideology,” Trump said on March 26 at a Woman’s History Month event at the White House.

“No matter how many surgeries you have or chemicals you inject, if you’re born with male DNA in every cell of your body,” he continued, presumably referring to the presence of a Y chromosome, “you can never become a woman — you’re not going to be a woman. And that’s why last month, I proudly signed a historic executive order to ban men from competing in women’s sports. … I also banned puberty blockers — can you believe I’m even saying this — and the sexual mutilation of minor youth.”

Trump’s first transgender-related order declared that people are either male or female at “conception.” But scientists say that excludes certain people and sex is not fully determined at conception.

His executive order targeting gender-affirming medical treatments for trans youth — which is not a ban — claimed that health care providers are “maiming and sterilizing” children and referred to gender-affirming care as “chemical and surgical mutilation.” That language is misleading and wrong. Gender-affirming care is supported by professional medical associations under specific guidance, and surgeries typically take place after age 18. Gender-affirming care is associated with improved mental health, and some medical interventions are reversible. 

Trump’s policies were followed by a series of lawsuits across the country. Federal judges have already blocked some orders from taking effect while the cases move through the courts, or questioned the administration’s plans. Two separate restraining orders and a preliminary temporary injunction have been issued to prevent the government from withholding or conditioning funding for medical institutions providing gender-affirming care.

A transgender person identifies with a gender that does not match their sex assigned at birth. Nearly 1.6 million people over the age of 13, or about 0.5% of the U.S. population, identify as transgender, according to a 2022 report by the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law’s Williams Institute. 

We reached out to the White House to ask for support for some of the statements in the executive orders, but we didn’t get a response.

‘Two Sexes, Male and Female’

In an order titled “defending women from gender ideology extremism,” signed by Trump on his first day in office, the administration declared that the U.S. will now officially only “recognize two sexes, male and female,” on all federal documents, statements, regulations, forms, communications or other messages. The order also called for banning transgender women, who are referred to as “men,” from “intimate single-sex spaces,” such as bathrooms, single-sex shelters, women’s prisons and sports.

Sex, the order dictated, should be understood as a person’s “immutable biological classification as either male or female,” and not as “a synonym for” gender. The order specifically directs agencies and federal employees acting in an official capacity to “use the term ‘sex’ and not ‘gender’” — yet Trump himself regularly conflates the terms, including in his inaugural address and his March 4 address to Congress.

Although one of the order’s stated purposes is to restore “biological truth,” it used a limited definition of how sex is understood by scientists, declaring that female means a person who “at conception” belongs “to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” and male is someone who “at conception” belongs “to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.” 

Scientists told us that although biological sex can be defined by the size of a person’s reproductive cells, or gametes, that definition doesn’t always work given there are multiple factors that define sex in humans.

“Sex is a catch-all phrase that actually refers to a constellation of features, not just one as they’ve defined it here,” Margaret M. McCarthy, a neuroscientist and pharmacology professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told us. 

Sex definitions typically refer to a construct based on genetic, physiological and anatomic traits. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referencing the American Psychological Association, has defined sex as a person’s “biological status as male, female, or something else,” which is “assigned at birth and associated with physical attributes, such as anatomy and chromosomes.” A 2022 consensus study report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine defined it as “a multidimensional construct based on a cluster of anatomical and physiological traits that include external genitalia, secondary sex characteristics, gonads, chromosomes, and hormones.”

In most cases, all facets of sexual development are congruent, McCarthy, who has studied sex differentiation for decades, told us. Typically, she said, an X and Y chromosome will lead to the development of testes, the production of testosterone, the development of a penis and the production of sperm. And typically, two X chromosomes will lead to ovaries, the production of estrogen and progesterone, the development of a uterus and a vagina, and the production of eggs.

But this is not always the case. According to the Pediatric Endocrine Society, about 1 in 4,500 people each year are born in the U.S. with a collection of medical conditions known as Differences of Sex Development that interfere with the typical male or female sex development described above. The definition in the executive order “should not and cannot apply” to people with a DSD, according to a statement from the organization. That’s because some people with a DSD, which is also called intersex, don’t produce sperm or eggs, produce both of them, or produce a reproductive cell that doesn’t match their biological sex development.

“Some people may have genitals that look typical for a male – with a penis – but have XX (‘female’) chromosomes and female body parts – a uterus and ovaries – due to medical conditions that affect the hormones. On the other hand, some people may have genitals that look typical for a female – with a vagina and no penis – but have XY (‘male’) chromosomes and testes on the inside of their bodies,” the statement reads.

Other professional and advocacy organizations, such as the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and interACT, which advocates for intersex people, have also said the definitions in Trump’s executive order are not accurate and exclude intersex people. 

In addition, the inclusion of “at conception” in the executive order’s definition of female and male is “technically incorrect,” McCarthy said. (The Department of Health and Human Services’ definitions, created in response to the order, do not include that language.)

Sexual differentiation is not complete when the sperm fertilizes the egg, or at conception, as the order may suggest — it occurs progressively during gestation and beyond. “The only thing that’s happened at conception is a transfer of an X or a Y chromosome to the ova. The gonads haven’t differentiated yet,” McCarthy explained, referring to the glands that could eventually produce reproductive cells.

Experts also objected to the administration’s description and erasure of gender and gender identity. Gender identity, the order declared, can’t be used as “a meaningful basis for identification” and reflects a “fully internal and subjective sense of self” that’s “disconnected from biological reality and sex.”

“A person’s gender is associated with but cannot be reduced to either sex assigned at birth or specific sex traits,” the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report says.

The CDC has defined gender as “cultural roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes expected of people based on their sex” and gender identity as a “person’s inner sense of being a boy/man/male, girl/woman/female, another gender, or no gender,” which comes about “as a result of a combination of inherent and extrinsic or environmental factors.”

“Nobody thinks that [gender] identity is ‘disconnected from biological reality,’” Anne Fausto Sterling, a professor emerita of biology at Brown University who is an expert in gender development, told us, adding that most scholars think it is “inborn and thus must have a biological origin.”

Finally, McCarthy said, the definitions in the executive order are not practical either. In our daily lives, when interacting with people, doing research or filling out a form, people are usually asked to self-identify. “You ask a person, are you male or female? You don’t say, show me your gametes or what size are your gametes,” she said. Sex assigned at birth, which ends up on birth certificates and passports, isn’t based on gamete size or “the biological function of their reproductive system,” as HHS guidelines recommend either, she said — it is typically assigned by doctors based on external genitalia.   

Medical Gender Transition Treatments

In a separate executive order issued on Feb. 28, Trump directed the federal government to take a series of actions to no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support” gender-affirming care for people under 19. The order used misleading language to refer to treatments that are supported by professional medical associations under specific guidance, and were previously considered beneficial by the federal government.

“Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions,” the order said. It later defined children as “individuals under 19 years of age.”

But experts have told us that gender-affirming surgeries typically take place after age 18, the legal age of adulthood in most states, and after a case-by-case assessment by a medical team. 

The majority of transgender children do not receive any medical treatments to transition. Instead, they may change their name, pronouns, or hair and dress as part of a social transition. When medical treatments do occur, they’re rarely surgical and begin during adolescence or after, as we’ve explained. Families with a child who identifies with a gender that doesn’t match their sex assigned at birth are offered counseling.

Guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health recommends care at different ages. Puberty blockers, or medications that delay the beginning of puberty, are the first medical intervention and are typically offered between ages 8 to 13 for girls and 9 to 14 for boys. Gender-affirming hormone therapy is typically offered around age 16, when adolescents are capable of making an informed decision that weighs the potential risks and benefits.

Trump’s executive order referred to gender-affirming care as “chemical and surgical mutilation” and said it does “blatant harm” to children. “Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated,” it continued. The order directed the attorney general to enforce laws against female genital mutilation, or cutting, which is illegal in the U.S. and other countries and refers to a cultural practice of removing or injuring female genitalia for no medical reason. The order also called for “ending reliance on junk science,” directing agencies to stop using guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

According to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, female genital mutilation has no health benefits and can lead to serious complications. It is considered a human rights violation. Practiced primarily in Africa and the Middle East, FGM is mostly performed on girls under 15 by people who are not health care providers. Gender-affirming surgery is always carried out in a medical setting, is consensual and is rarely performed on minors.

“[T]he Executive Order promotes misinformation, including that large shares of youth are seeking gender affirming medical care, which is not the case, that regret rates among those who do seek care are high, when regret rates are very low, and erroneously conflating ‘female genital mutilation’ and gender-affirming care,” Lindsey Dawson, associate director of HIV Policy and director of LGBTQ Health Policy at KFF, a health policy research organization, said in a report about the order.

In a cross-sectional study among insured people in the U.S., Harvard researchers and colleagues found that in 2019 there were no gender-affirming surgical procedures in transgender and gender diverse, or TGD, minors under 12 years of age — and that those in minors older than 12 “were rare and almost entirely chest-related.” Based on those findings, the researchers wrote, “concerns around high rates of gender-affirming surgery use, specifically among TGD minors, may be unwarranted.”

A separate study by some of the same Harvard researchers, published in JAMA Pediatrics in January, used insurance claims data and found that less than 0.1% of minors ages 8 to 17 with private insurance are transgender or gender diverse and received puberty blockers or hormones between 2018 and 2022. No child under 12 years of age received a hormone prescription.

“There’s not some massive wave of folks accessing care,” Landon D. Hughes, co-author of both Harvard studies and a fellow at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told NBC News earlier this year.

Studies suggest that gender-affirming care can improve the well-being and mental health of transgender youth, who have an increased risk of depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. While some of these findings have been criticized, there isn’t good evidence that gender-affirming care is harmful, as Trump’s executive order claimed.

“Although President Trump’s executive order describes gender-affirming care as ‘junk science,’ access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth is supported by a consensus of major medical associations in the U.S.,” Elana Redfield, federal policy director at the Williams Institute at UCLA’s School of Law, said in a brief following the order. “The order does not acknowledge any benefits of gender-affirming care, instead making unsubstantiated statements of widespread harm and disregarding decades of science that form the foundation of the services that are currently available to transgender youth.”

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Not All ‘Irreversible’

It’s important to note that not all medical gender-affirming interventions are “irreversible” nor do they make it impossible for someone to “conceive children of their own,” as the executive order said. 

As guidance from the AAP explains, only gender-affirming surgeries are fully irreversible and not all of them affect fertility. The effects of medications that suppress puberty are reversible, but the AAP notes that their impact on fertility is unknown and that fertility could be impacted if followed by the use of sex hormones.

The changes brought by gender-affirming hormone therapy can be reversed if hormones are stopped before these changes are fully developed, but they become irreversible after that happens, potentially impacting fertility, according to the guidance. 

The guidance sets a number of steps and criteria to make sure that individuals offered gender-affirming care are not what the executive order refers to as “impressionable children.” A multidisciplinary team of medical and mental health providers should screen, assess and monitor patients and make sure they are capable of fully understanding the risks and benefits of each intervention and discuss, when applicable, options to preserve fertility. 

There is very little reliable data on how often transgender people regret going through gender-affirming interventions or opt to “detransition.” Many studies have a short follow-up period and rely on patients reporting back to providers.

But the scientific literature doesn’t support the notion that “[c]ountless children soon regret that they have been mutilated,” as the order said.

As PolitiFact has reported, recent studies of medical gender-affirming interventions in adolescents show that rates of young people stopping or regretting treatment or detransitioning range from 1% to 9%, with most on the lower end.

A study by Princeton University researchers published in 2024 in JAMA Pediatrics that looked at the experiences of 220 young people using puberty blockers or hormones found that nine of them regretted the interventions, with four of them stopping treatment.

Another study looking at the outcomes of 1,089 young people who were assessed by the National Health Service Gender Identity Development Service in England from 2008 to 2021 found that 5.3% stopped treatment with puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones and reverted to identifying with their birth gender.

As scientists have explained, people detransition for multiple reasons and not all people who stop treatment regret that care. Some stop due to undesired side effects of hormones or of transitioning, such as discrimination, and some stop when they’ve reached the results they wanted. Similarly, a person who regrets transitioning may still consider themselves transgender, and someone who stops identifying as transgender may not regret gender-affirming care.

Regret rates are typically even lower in adults, and studies show adults regret other plastic surgeries more often than gender-affirming surgery.

Correction, April 8: We misquoted a Pediatric Endocrine Society statement and incorrectly said that 4,500 people in the U.S. are born with a Difference of Sex Development every year. The correct statistic is 1 in 4,500 people.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

President Trump signed the “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” executive order on March 27, establishing the task force to increase police presence in public areas, maximize immigration enforcement, expedite concealed carry licenses and crack down on Metro fare evasion.

According to the internal memo obtained by News4, Orville Greene is the chair of the task force. The memo states Greene is the director of the Homeland Security Council Transitional Threat Directorate.

Greene was formerly a New York City Police Department officer and, more recently, a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) special agent in Detroit.

Trump’s order called for respresentatives of “key government agencies” to sit in on the task force, including the Department of the Interior, Department of Transportation, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the
U.S. attorneys’ offices for D.C., Maryland and the Eastern District of Virginia.

In the memo, Greene raises the possibility of adding more agencies to the task force, including the DEA, U.S. Capitol Police, the Federal Protective Service, Amtrak Police, the General Services Administration and the National Capital Planning Commission. He also called for local representatives from the D.C. government to be participants.

Greene’s memo, which was sent to D.C. officials as part of an invitation to participate in the meeting, detailed the focus of the meeting and the goals of the task force.

At the top of the meeting agenda: reviewing D.C.’s enforcement of and compliance with federal immigration law, improving police recruitment and retention, reviewing the concealed carry permits process and cleaning up public monuments, memorials and homeless encampments.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said she opted not to send any representatives to the meeting. Bowser said she sent a written response instead.

Bowser said she has some requests of the task force and the Trump administration.

“Number one, we need the House to pass the budget fix, and we need it to happen this week. We also outlined what we understand recently that the NPS, the National Park Service, has been impacted by cuts and they have reduced the number of trash pickups on the Mall. So we’re asking them to restore, I think, three times daily trash pickups on the Mall,” Bowser said. “We saw with the cherry blossom weekend, some overflowing trash cans. That’s not beautiful. So we want that fixed.”

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As for the task force’s focus on public safety, Bowser had another request.

“I asked [the chief of police] if this task force could could help with police presence in any way, what would be the request? The request was more patrols from Park Police on the parkways that are in or approach the District: George Washington Parkway, Suitland Parkway and B.W. Parkway,” Bowser said.

In February, Trump said he supports putting D.C. directly under federal control.

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The announcement of the agreement came in a document filed late Monday in a case challenging the legality of the IRS sharing tax information with other agencies. The document was filed with several key parts blacked out.

“There is an agreement that calls for information sharing, which is a reversal of what IRS said in the past it would not share,” said Alan Morrison, an attorney at Georgetown School of Law who is of counsel on the case challenging the lawsuit. The attorneys in the lawsuit are asking the DHS to file a clean copy, without redactions.

The DHS has sought to use tax filing information to find people in the United States without legal status in support of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation operation.

Many people without legal status pay billions in taxes, filing under tax identification numbers. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022. According to its analysis, $59.4 billion went to the federal government and $37.3 billion to state and local governments.

It is illegal to release personal tax information and the IRS has long refused to share identities of undocumented taxpayers with other agencies.

But the law provides some specific exceptions, including information for investigations not related to taxes and involving claims the individual is in violation of or suspected of being in violation of federal criminal law.

Morrison said “so far as we can tell,” the deal is limited to that exception.

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“We are challenging whether they can share the information (by) trying to claim exception for criminal investigations,” he said. “But we think what they really want is location information and you need a court order for that.”

For months, IRS officials have resisted disclosing what has long been guarded information, but Trump has replaced the agency’s leadership with staff more friendly to his taxpayer information sharing plan.

“The government filed this at 11:10 last night. We have three days to respond. They hatched the agreement that they say is complete, but it is significantly redacted. It is impossible to tell what the impact is without knowing more,” Morrison told NBC News.

He said that when he first tried to read the DHS’ filing, “I couldn’t figure out what kind of words were missing … How can we possibly know what they are doing if we have not seen this?” he asked.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to an NBC News request for comment and for information on the redacted portions of the agreement.

According to the DHS’ court filing, ICE, in its requests to the IRS, must ask for the name and address of the person whose information it wants, the tax periods relating to its request, the federal criminal statute under which the individual is being investigated or relating to any nontax-related criminal proceeding involving the individual, and reasons why disclosing the information might be relevant to the nontax-related criminal investigation or proceeding.

He said the DHS has identified two possible crimes that would authorize the IRS to share the information with ICE. But he said the DHS hasn’t said what crimes it has identified or whether it has names of people who have committed or are suspected of committing those crimes, which it must have to get the information.

“One thing they said, so far at least as of yesterday, there were no pending requests for this information and if they do request it, they have to go through some processing,” he said.

The agreement was reached only after several months of upheaval at the IRS and pressure from the administration, including by Elon Musk’s DOGE operation.

The agreement is certain to generate more terror among immigrants, many of whom have paid taxes for years to ensure they were not violating U.S. law and jeopardizing potential future opportunities for legal status.

Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., a member of the House Ways and Means Committee which has jurisdiction over taxes, said in a news release that “the IRS should never be weaponized to target immigrant families … No one should fear that filing their taxes puts their family at risk.” Gomez, whose parents are Mexican immigrants, added that he’ll try to stop the measure through the committee.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation and the legal battle that has followed is being seen as a test case on the Trump administration’s deportation authority.

The Supreme Court is weighing arguments from Abrego Garcia’s lawyer and the Trump administration’s lawyer.

In a new filing Tuesday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued the preliminary injunction filed by Judge Paula Xinis should be vacated because “the court’s order takes the remarkable and unprecedented step of compelling the United States to succeed by 11:59 p.m. yesterday in negotiating Abrego Garcia’s release and return from El Salvador or face contempt.”

Sauer went on to write, “…courts cannot order the Executive to conduct the country’s foreign relations in a particular way because under Article II ‘the transaction of business with foreign nations is executive altogether.’”

Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, has argued if the government of El Salvador can give a tour of the prison to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, they can remove Abrego Garcia and send him home. He said he has cases in which ICE has admitted its mistakes and tried to correct them.

“What happened to Kilmar is not out of the ordinary. There have been wrongful deportations in the past and in every prior such case, the United States government has really bent over backwards to fix it, to make it right, to bring the person back,” he said. There is plenty of case law and cases in which this has occurred.”

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In a friend of the court brief file with the Supreme Court, three constitutional law professors, including Harvard professor emeritus Laurence Tribe, wrote: “In this case the Executive Branch is effectively asserting absolute, unreviewable authority to remove an individual from the United States even where the removal was in conceded violation of a court order.”

They went on to say, “If the Solicitor General’s argument were correct, the Executive Branch would possess a shuddering degree of power – power that the President could wield in extreme and extraordinary ways, including against American citizens that the President simply disfavors.”

During a CNBC interview Monday, Navarro took a shot at Musk, saying the billionaire Tesla CEO is “not a car manufacturer” but a “car assembler” who obtains cheap parts for Tesla vehicles from abroad.

“We all understand in the White House, and the American people understand, that Elon’s a car manufacturer, but he’s not a car manufacturer. He’s a car assembler, in many cases,” Navarro said.

He said that at Musk’s Tesla plant in Texas, a portion of the engines — at least for electric vehicles — contain batteries that come from Japan and China and other electronics are imported from Taiwan.

“The difference is, in our thinking and Elon’s on this, is that we want the tires made in Akron. We want the transmissions made in Indianapolis. We want the engines made in Flint and Saginaw. And we want the cars manufactured here,” Navarro said.

He went on to suggest that acquiring car parts from foreign countries is “bad for our economics” and “bad for our national security.”

“We want them to come here and with Elon, it’s fine. He’s a car man. He’s a car person. That’s what he does. And he wants the cheap foreign parts. And we understand that, but we want ’em home,” said Navarro, who added “and everything’s good with Elon.”

Replying to an X post of the Navarro interview, Musk said that Navarro is “truly a moron.”

“What he says here is demonstrably false,” Musk wrote in one post, adding in another post that Tesla “has the most American-made cars. Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks.”

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Musk broke with Trump on Saturday on the tariffs, saying at an event that he wants to see a “zero-tariff situation” between the U.S. and Europe.

Navarro responded to Musk’s comments during an interview with Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” saying: “It was interesting to hear Elon Musk at the beginning talk about a zero-tariff zone with Europe. He didn’t understand that. The thing that’s, I think, important about Elon to understand, he sells cars.”

Asked if there was an internal rift between the two Trump advisers, Navarro said that there is “no rift here.” He added, “We don’t mind him saying whatever he wants, but just the American people need to understand that we understand what that’s all about. It’s fine.”

Navarro, a longtime ally of the president, butted heads with other White House officials during Trump’s first term, but has remained a key part of Trump’s inner circle over the years.

“He went to jail for President Trump. I’m not sure how much more you could show loyalty, which is what President Trump values,” a former Trump adviser told NBC News. “Sure, Elon is his guy and they get along great, but there is just another level there” with Navarro.

“If this turns out to be an all-out war, I very much doubt Peter is the one who is going to come out on the wrong end of it,” the former adviser said. “I really wish it was not so public and am not sure how exactly it will play out, but I know that the president very much values what Peter did for him.”

Navarro served four months in federal prison last year after he was convicted of contempt of Congress for defying a congressional subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Hours after his release from prison in July, he took the stage at the Republican National Convention and fiercely defended Trump.

Asked Tuesday about the apparent beef between Musk and Navarro, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “These are obviously two individuals who have very different views on trade and on tariffs. Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., reacted to the dispute on the Senate floor. “The chaos within the Trump administration was shown a few minutes ago when Elon Musk called Peter Navarro, the chief architect of these tariffs, a moron. That’s Musk’s word. He called him a moron,” Schumer said.

“Their plan is so crazy, so controversial, that this administration cannot get its act together with them calling names about each other, to — against one another, about this tariff plan.”

NBC News’ Julia Jester, Macklin Fishman, Matt Dixon, Frank Thorp V and CNBC’s Eamon Javers contributed.

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State leaders in Minnesota and New York said they will not comply with an Education Department order to gather signatures from local school systems certifying compliance with civil rights laws, including the rejection of what the federal government calls “illegal DEI practices.” Chicago’s mayor promised to sue over any cuts. California and Vermont told schools they don’t need to respond.

It amounts to some of the most forceful opposition yet as the Education Department uses federal funding as leverage to enact President Donald Trump’s agenda on issues from DEI to campus antisemitism and transgender athletes. The White House has targeted colleges and K-12 schools alike, but unlike universities that rely greatly on federal grants and contracts, school systems get the vast majority of their money from state and local sources.

In a letter Monday to the Education Department, Minnesota’s education chief said the Trump administration overstepped its authority with its latest demand, adding that there’s nothing illegal about DEI.

“Threats to this funding without backing in law or established requirements put key programs at risk that students and schools depend on every day,” said Willie Jett, Minnesota’s education commissioner.

It follows a Friday letter from New York’s education office challenging the federal government’s latest demand. It said New York already has provided assurances that it follows federal law and “no further certification will be forthcoming.”

The Trump administration set a deadline for schools to disavow DEI

The U.S. Education Department told state agencies in a letter Thursday they must sign a document saying they follow federal antidiscrimination laws and get the same assurance from schools. The document threatens to cut federal money for any civil rights violation, including using DEI practices “to advantage one’s race over another.”

On Tuesday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon commended Puerto Rico for being the first to submit its certification. “Every state that wants to continue receiving federal funds should follow suit,” McMahon posted on X.

The letter does not carry the force of law but threatens to use civil rights enforcement to rid schools of DEI practices. Schools that continue such practices “in violation of federal law” can face Justice Department litigation and a termination of federal grants and contracts, it said.

The letter initially gave states 10 days to submit the certification. On Monday, the Education Department extended the deadline to April 24.

A department spokesperson said the agency is “simply asking school districts to certify they are following the law and not using race preferences or pernicious race stereotypes in schools.”

The nation’s largest teachers union is asking a federal court to block the order, saying some schools are already clamping down on DEI practices as the government raises the stakes. The National Education Association filed the motion in Republican-led New Hampshire, which is moving to comply with the federal demand.

Schools in many states are already required to affirm compliance with antidiscrimination laws, and even some GOP-led states question whether they need to get the new document signed by each district. Missouri’s education office said schools’ previous assurances should be sufficient, and it will reach out to districts “if additional information is necessary.”

Others are moving to follow the order, including Virginia and Arizona, where state education chief Tom Horne said the order “aligns completely with my philosophy.”

The pushback contrasts with colleges’ responses to government demands

The resistance from some states stands in contrast with the response from universities targeted by the federal government. As the Trump administration has made demands upon colleges including Columbia University and Harvard University, some students and faculty have implored institutions to do more to defend their values and academic freedom.

The stakes are different for colleges, which depend on federal money that makes up nearly half the total revenue at some institutions. Federal funding makes up a smaller portion of K-12 school budgets — roughly 14%.

Vermont’s education chief assured schools the state supports DEI practices and said superintendents won’t need to sign the certification. Instead, the state will assure federal officials it’s already following federal law, Zoie Saunders, the state’s education secretary, said in a letter to school districts.

“Nothing about this directive requires a change to our diversity, equity and inclusion practices, and we’re not going to change,” Saunders said in a news release.

The Illinois board of education rebuked the federal agency, saying it’s “attempting to exert power over every district in the country — even as it claims it’s returning education to the states.” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat, said his city is willing to go to court over the order, which he called federal overreach.

The New York and Minnesota letters both cite past comments from Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary during his first term, extolling the virtues of diversity and inclusion. In a 2020 memo to agency staff, DeVos wrote that “embracing diversity and inclusion are key elements for success.” The states argue the Education Department is shifting its position without explanation.

The states also accuse the Education Department of making broad declarations about the illegality of DEI without citing policies that violate federal law. Minnesota’s letter said if the federal agency has identified DEI practices that violate civil rights law, “we request advisement of them.”

Many states said they were still reviewing the letter.

___

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

“Changes to the Underground Railroad page on the National Park Service’s website were made without approval from NPS leadership nor Department leadership,” NPS spokeswoman Rachel Pawlitz said late Monday in an email. “The webpage was immediately restored to its original content.”

She did not say who ordered the changes or for what reason. The changes — first reported by The Washington Post — included removing Tubman’s picture from the top of the page and making multiple edits to the text. A side-by-side analysis of the pages, using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, revealed changes that removed references to slavery and changed descriptions about the issue and its brutal realities.

For example, the original opening sentence referenced the railroad’s core role in “the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight.” The edited version called the railroad “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement” and described how it “bridged the divides of race, religion, sectional differences, and nationality.”

The issue comes amid sweeping government changes to comply with President Donald Trump’s campaign against so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies in the federal government. In some cases, officials have scrambled to remove and then restore online content as changes came to light.

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Trump has also targeted the Smithsonian network of museums, which includes the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He has tasked Vice President JD Vance with heading up the effort to purge what Trump termed “improper ideology” in the Smithsonian’s depictions of American history.

Among the public controversies has been the Pentagon’s wholesale deletions of pages related to the Navajo Code Talkers’ contributions in World War I and baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s military career. Both of those pages were quickly restored when the deletions drew public outcry.

When the Harriet Tubman edits first came to light, NPS officials acknowledged the changes but denied any intention to downplay her role or soften the realities of America’s history with slavery.

“We celebrate her as a deeply spiritual woman who lived her ideals and dedicated her life to freedom,” Pawlitz said, citing dozens of pages about her, as well as two parks named for her. “The idea that a couple web edits somehow invalidate the National Park Service’s commitment to telling complex and challenging historical narratives is completely false.”

The revelation of the NPS edits drew an immediate backlash from civil rights figures. Bernice King, daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., posted on Instagram Monday that the changes constitute “an attack on truth, an attempt to erase history that would help us improve society today, a refusal to be uncomfortable.”

The decision to grant the administration’s request means the federal government doesn’t have to take steps to bring back some workers who were laid off while litigation moves forward before a federal judge in California, NBC News reports.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, two of the court’s liberal justices, noted they dissented from the unsigned decision.

The order indicated that some of the nonprofit groups that sued may not have legal standing to press their claims.

Further complicating matters, a judge in Maryland issued a similar ruling that applies to the same agencies at issue in the California case as well as others. That decision, which requires affected employees in 19 states and the District of Columbia to be kept on paid administrative leave while litigation continues, remains in place.

The affected agencies in the California case are the departments of Veterans Affairs, Defense, Energy, Interior, Agriculture and Treasury.

The Trump administration, in an initiative spearheaded by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, has sought to dramatically decrease the number of federal employees, sparking a fierce legal fight.

California-based U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that fired probationary employees should be reinstated because the process used was legally flawed.

The Trump administration argued Alsup did not have the authority to reinstate the workers and made the problem worse by micromanaging the process. Lawyers also argued that the various labor unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, and other groups that sued did not have a direct stake in the firings.

The Supreme Court decision only addressed the claims made by the nonprofit groups, as those were what Alsup’s ruling was based on. The union claims could yet lead to further court action.

No individual federal employees are involved in the lawsuit.

Alsup’s ruling “violates the separation of powers, arrogating to a single district court the Executive Branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines,” then-acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris said in court papers.

“That is no way to run a government,” she added. 

Harris said the Maryland case is different because the judge, James Bredar, only required the workers to be put on administrative leave and did not order that they be fully onboarded. Bredar’s case is also at an earlier stage of the legal process, meaning his ruling is only provisional.

Harris noted that the Department of Agriculture is also subject to a decision issued by the Merit System Protection Board, a federal agency set up to protect federal workers, that required thousands of workers to be reinstated.

Lawyers for the challengers pointed out in court papers that the government had already said in a different filing that it has “substantially complied” with the reinstatement order, reducing the need for the Supreme Court to intervene.

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The World Food Program, the largest provider of food aid, appealed to the U.S. to roll back the new cuts in a social media post Monday. The unexpected round of contract cancellations has targeted some of the last remaining humanitarian programs run by the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to two U.S. officials, a United Nations official and documents obtained by the AP.

“This could amount to a death sentence for millions of people facing extreme hunger and starvation,” WFP said on X.

The agency said it was in contact with the Trump administration “to urge for continued support” for lifesaving programs and thanked the United States and other donors for past contributions.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other administration officials had pledged to spare emergency food programs and other life-and-death aid from deep cuts to U.S. foreign assistance. There was no immediate comment Monday from the State Department.

The projects were being canceled “for the convenience of the U.S. Government” at the direction of Jeremy Lewin, a top lieutenant at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency who was appointed to oversee the elimination of USAID programs, according to termination notices sent to partners and viewed by the AP.

Programs targeted by Trump administration

In Syria, a country battling poverty, hunger and insecurity after a 13-year civil war and an insurgency by the Islamic State group, some $230 million in contracts with WFP and humanitarian groups was terminated in recent days, according to a State Department document detailing the cuts that was obtained by the AP.

The single biggest of the targeted Syria programs, at $111 million, provided bread and other daily food to 1.5 million people, the document says.

About 60 letters canceling contracts were sent over the past week. An official with the United Nations in the Middle East said all U.S. aid to WFP food programs across Yemen, another war-divided country that is facing one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, has been stopped, apparently including food that already had arrived in distribution centers.

WFP also received termination letters for U.S.-funded programs in Lebanon and Jordan, where Syrian refugees would be hit hardest, the U.N. official said.

Some of the last remaining U.S. funding for key programs in Somalia, Afghanistan and the southern African nation of Zimbabwe also was affected, including for those providing food, water, medical care and shelter for people displaced by war, one of the U.S. officials said.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

Current and former USAID experts and partners said some $560 million in humanitarian aid was cut to Afghanistan, including for emergency food assistance, the treatment of severely malnourished babies, lifesaving medical care, safe drinking water, and emergency mental health treatment for survivors of sexual and physical violence.

Another of the notices, sent Friday, abruptly pulled U.S. funding for a program with strong support in Congress that had sent young Afghan women overseas for schooling because of Taliban prohibitions on women’s education, said an administrator for that project, which is run by Texas A&M University.

The young women would now face return to Afghanistan, where their lives would be in danger, according to that administrator, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Larger impact of cutting aid

The abrupt end of WFP programs threatens some of the world’s most vulnerable populations, many of which depend on such food aid, according to humanitarian groups. The U.S. and other donors long have seen efforts to ease humanitarian crises as being in their strategic interest by stemming mass migration, conflicts and extremism, which struggles for resources can bring.

WFP chief Cindy McCain said in a posting on social media that the cuts “undermine global stability.”

Rubio had notified Congress and courts last month that USAID contract cuts were over, with about 1,000 programs spared worldwide and more than 5,000 others eliminated. That added to the shock of the new cuts.

The Trump administration has accused USAID of wastefulness and advancing liberal causes.

Trump’s freeze on all foreign assistance through USAID and the State Department led to a brief shutdown of services at the al-Hol camp, where tens of thousands of alleged Islamic State fighters and their families are kept under guard.

That shutdown raised fears of an uprising or breakout at the camp. U.S. officials quickly intervened to restore services.

The State Department document obtained by the AP identifies two newly terminated contracts, run by Save the Children and the U.N. Population Fund, which provided mental health services and other care to women and children at al-Hol. It was not immediately clear if any other services were affected at the camp.

The U.S. had been the major funder of the WFP, providing $4.5 billion of the $9.8 billion in donations to the food agency last year.

___

Magdy reported from Cairo and Biller from Rome. AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

This live blog on the Trump administration for Tuesday, April 8, 2025, has ended. See more coverage here.

Sixty-five years later, when so much is now done online, this mine is largely still how the Office of Personnel Management manages the documents of the 100,000 or so retirements from federal service each year.

Processing a retirement can take months, with a single missing signature sometimes setting the task back days or weeks. 

“It is still done on paper,” said Alita Haniwalt, an OPM program manager in retirement claims. “I think it becomes overwhelming because there are no two retirements that are the same.”

Over the years, the warehouse-like OPM space inside the mine — which is 220 feet underground — has accumulated more than 400 million individual records, spread across 26,000 file cabinets, in some places stacked 10 high. Cardboard boxes and paper files in manila envelopes seem to sprout from shelves and pile up on tables as they’re shuttled from station to station. 

In the days following President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the mine quickly drew the attention of Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, a Tesla board member and Musk friend, said he was recruited to the project after he walked into a meeting where it was already being discussed. 

“They were talking about how it’s a place where all the papers are stored for a manual retirement process. It’s been around for decades. It’s been tried to be digitized for decades, unsuccessfully, and it’s a painful, slow process,” Gebbia said. “And they turn and look at me and go: ‘Joe, you know how to build digital products with great user experience. Can you help us?’”

NBC News was granted rare and exclusive access to the mine Monday, when DOGE staffers arrived to tour it and plan the next steps in modernizing the OPM operation there. 

In February, under the direction of DOGE, OPM staffers processed their first all-digital, no-paperwork federal retirement. The team was given a one-week goal, and it completed the retirement in two days. 

“It really became a proof point and a rallying cry to everyone to say this is possible. Now we get to go build the product behind that and actually do something that’s scalable,” Gebbia said. 

Matt MacIsaac, who runs day-to-day operations at the mine for OPM, said that while Musk’s Oval Office invocation of his workplace as a location ripe for a DOGE overhaul initially surprised him, he supported the modernization push.

“We’re ready to make this process better, make it more efficient and really get what we need for the civil servants,” said MacIsaac, who has worked for OPM since 2009 and in the mine since 2016.

Gebbia said the overhaul won’t involve closing the mine office, where 450 OPM employees work. The larger Iron Mountain facility bills itself as “a highly secure and resilient location” not only for storing records, but also as a data center.

“So the mine will always be here, and so will these paper records, but we can build a process where there’s no new paper added to the mine, step one, and step two, we can build a process where no paper has to leave the mine,” Gebbia said.

Gebbia said federal retirees could see changes as early as May 1.

“We’re working at startup speed, so we’re working through iterations right now, and our next one will be testing with retirees on May 1,” he said. “We’re moving at an incredible pace.”

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If the plan is fully implemented, the total tariffs on goods imported into the U.S. from China would be as much as 104%. In response, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said China “firmly opposes” Trump’s tariff threats, calling its previous countermeasures “entirely justified.”

“If the U.S. insists in its own way, China will fight to the end,” the ministry said in a statement Tuesday, adding that Trump’s threat to escalate tariffs on China is a “mistake upon a mistake.”

NBC News reached out to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment on Trump’s threat of an additional 50% tariff but did not immediately receive a response.

Trump threatened the new 50% duty on China, effective Wednesday, if Beijing doesn’t withdraw its 34% tariffs on the all U.S. goods by Tuesday, which China imposed in retaliation to the levies announced last week by the Trump administration on Chinese goods.

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“Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “Negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately.”

Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs are scheduled to take effect Thursday.

The commerce ministry urged the U.S. to cancel all unilateral tariff measures against China and resolve trade disputes through dialogue.

“Pressure and threats are not the correct way to deal with China,” it said. “China reiterates that there are no winners in a trade war, and protectionism leads nowhere.”

“China will resolutely take countermeasures to safeguard its own interests,” the ministry added.

Trump said Sunday that China could get a reduction in tariffs if it approves a deal to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations. He confirmed reports that China and the U.S. had been “pretty close” to a deal on the video sharing app, but said Beijing backed out due to the additional 34% tariff he announced on Chinese goods last week.

“If I gave a little cut in tariffs, they’d approve that deal in 15 minutes, which shows you the power of tariffs,” he told reporters on Air Force One.

TikTok’s China-based owner ByteDance said Saturday that it is still in negotiations with the U.S. government and has not reached any agreement. 

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“We’re not looking at that,” Trump said Monday when asked if he was thinking about taking more time to enact his sweeping tariffs. Instead, the president said countries could work to restore balance in trade relations with the U.S. through other actions.

“We have many, many countries that are coming to negotiate deals with us,” Trump said. “They’re going to be fair deals, and in certain cases, they’re going to be paying substantial tariffs.”

For some, those discussions are already underway, with the president touting a “very good” conversation with Japan on Monday, and saying that he expects that his administration will soon be speaking with China, among other nations. Tariffs on China are expected to rise to 104% on Wednesday.

Still, when asked if the tariffs are permanent or open to negotiation — a point that his advisers struggled to clarify last week — Trump insisted that “they can both be true.” 

“There could be permanent, and there could also be negotiations, because there are things that we need beyond tariffs,” he said. “So we’re going to get fair deals and good deals with every country.”

Trump’s comments follow days of market turbulence following his announcement last week of sweeping global tariffs. U.S. stock markets closed down again Monday after wavering through the day.

During an extended back-and-forth over his tariff plans, the president broached his tariff agenda in legacy-defining terms, telling reporters that “it would be nice to serve the nice, easy term, but we have an opportunity to change the fabric of our country.”

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He added, “It’s the only chance our country will have to reset the table — because no other president would be willing to do what I’m doing or to even go through it. Now, I don’t mind going through it because I see a beautiful picture at the end.” 

Next to him sat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who moments earlier had promised to eliminate “very quickly” a trade deficit with the United States, as well as certain trade barriers. For nations looking to get back on even footing with the White House, Netanyahu said Israel could “serve as a model.”

“Sometimes you have to take medicine,” Trump said over the weekend. 

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Experts say the end of remote work could have ripple effects in the U.S. economy.

“I wasn’t caregiving for my child while working, but [remote work] allowed me to pick up my son on time, drop him off on time and just be able to work and have a career as a single mom,” one federal worker mom said.

After 14 years of serving the government while working remotely, President Donald Trump’s order to report to an office full-time changed her life and her career. Without the ability to work remotely or money to pay for afterschool child care, she didn’t see any way to keep her job and also care for her child.

When she received the now-infamous Fork in the Road email from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, pressuring federal workers to resign or risk being laid off, she decided taking the deferred resignation was her best option. She said she didn’t want to pull her son out of his school and move closer to D.C. amid threatened layoffs.

“I didn’t want this. I was forced to take this route,” she said.

‘Thought I would have to quit’

In Montgomery County, Maryland, another federal worker mom also found herself having to make a tough decision.

The Department of Homeland Security employee primarily worked from home for years. She thought the contract she signed protected her telework arrangement. Then Trump’s order said she needed to report to the office full time within weeks.

She and her husband had been able to avoid putting their son in day care thanks to help from family and her husband’s flexible work schedule. Suddenly, they were scrambling to find child care. The federal worker said she felt “unbelievably lucky” to find a day care spot for $1,600 per month. Her husband began working overtime to help cover the cost, they’re watching their household expenses and they’re feeling the loss of family time they once had together.

“I have to drop him off very early in the morning and then either leave early from work or just pick him up really late,” she said.

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She’s a fourth-generation civil servant proud of her years of government service. The return-to-office order made her and her colleagues feel degraded at work, but she plans to stay.

“I have no plans of leaving. I want to stick this job out. I just love it so much,” she said.

‘We might see a reduction in women’s labor force participation’

The return-to-office order is forcing caregivers to make difficult choices that could matter for the economy more broadly, said Kate Bahn, chief economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to sustaining a thriving economy that includes women.

“When you have really limited choices, you’re not necessarily making a good choice, you’re just making the best choice you can for yourself,” she said.

Bahn’s research shows that in over half of American families, women serve as the co-breadwinner or sole breadwinner.

“Not having those incomes, their families would not have adequate economic well-being,” she said.

Ending remote work isn’t just tough for many individual caregivers; it also may push sizable numbers of women out of the workforce altogether, said Bahn, who’s a new mom herself.

“We might see a reduction in women’s labor force participation. So, women just dropping out altogether because they can’t manage caregiving responsibilities alongside their jobs,” she said. “Or we’ll see women making really constrained choices when they do work, so, taking a job that’s maybe suboptimal for them, they don’t like as much, they don’t earn as much, but they just don’t have another choice because it’s the only thing that works with their caregiving responsibilities.”

Six in 10 women surveyed by Bahn’s group said job flexibility determines whether they’ll accept a job offer. Without flexibility, 4 in 10 said they would reduce their hours or leave their jobs altogether.

Data shows women are already underrepresented in the federal government, at 45%, compared to 58% in the private sector, according to federal data and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The White House said data was not available on how many women have resigned, retired or been laid off from the federal workforce since Inauguration Day.

Why Rep. Brittany Pettersen says policies supporting parents matter

The impact of workplace restrictions is being felt at the highest levels of government.

“These systems are not made for us. They’re made for, historically, for older, wealthier white men,” said Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a Democrat who represents Colorado’s 7th District.

Just four weeks after Pettersen gave birth to her second son, she found herself flying across the country with her newborn so she could vote on critical legislation. Congress required in-person voting. She championed a bill to allow proxy voting for new parents, but it hasn’t gained needed support.

“These are common-sense changes that we can do to make sure that people like me who have just given birth aren’t putting their health at risk and their newborn’s health at risk,” she said.

Pettersen argues creating policies to support parents in Congress will ultimately help the families they represent.

“When we start to change the people who are elected and the life experiences that they have, you’re gonna start to see policies change that are actually supporting the families that are struggling the most right now,” she said.

‘Taking a leap of faith’

In Loudoun County, the federal worker who decided to leave her career after over a decade packed up her son’s toys and considered how they would both adjust to the next chapter in their lives. Her son would make new friends at a new school, and she would look into starting her own consulting firm in her hometown.

“It’s scary. It’s really scary and overwhelming. But I’m taking a leap of faith,” she said.

She said the return-to-office order forced her to choose between showing up at the office and showing up for her son, and she chose her son.

“As a single mom, most importantly to me, I’ve been able to successfully and substantially provide for my son. I don’t want to cry,” she said, fighting tears. “For me, it means the world to provide for my son and not have to ask for any help.”

Reported by Tracee Wilkins, produced by Andrea Swalec and Katie Leslie, shot by Jeff Piper and Evan Carr, and edited by Jeff Piper

President Donald Trump attempted to put on a similar parade during his first term in office but had to cancel it because of cost concerns.

The Trump administration has been contacting local leaders in the D.C. area about having a parade. The size and scope of the parade is unclear.

June 14 will be the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. It’s also Trump’s 79th birthday, a celebration that could include a parade, the Washington City Paper’s Tom Sherwood first reported.

“I would say that it’s in its early stages,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser confirmed. “Yes, they have reached out.”

Bowser cautioned that a true military parade with heavy equipment like tanks would come with a cost.

“Military tanks on our streets would not be good,” she said. “If military tanks were used, they should be accompanied with many millions of dollars to repair the roads.”

“We all know that President Trump likes big, grandiose events,” said Sherwood, a former News4 reporter and analyst. “And this is his chance to have a parade that he can oversee from the Pentagon to in front of the White House.”

Infrastructure like the 14th Street Bridge would have to be tested to see if it could support the parade, officials said.

Trump wanted a parade in 2018 during his first term, but it didn’t work out, Sherwood said.

“The military leaders said it would cost too much, nearly $90 million; Mayor Bowser ridiculed the idea on the Twitter system and said it would cost us $20 million just for public safety,” Sherwood said. “So, he canceled it — angrily canceled it. But this time around, it doesn’t sound like he is gonna cancel.”

Arlington leaders say they also got a heads up about the parade planning.

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In a bitterly divided decision, the court said the administration must give Venezuelans who it claims are gang members “reasonable time” to go to court.

But the conservative majority said the legal challenges must take place in Texas, instead of a Washington courtroom.

The court’s action appears to bar the administration from immediately resuming the flights that last month carried hundreds of migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. The flights came soon after President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since World War II to justify the deportations under a presidential proclamation calling the Tren de Aragua gang an invading force.

The majority said nothing about those flights, which took off without providing the hearing the justices now say is necessary.

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Trump administration asks Supreme Court to lift order barring deportations under wartime law

Trump administration Mar 15

The Alien Enemies Act: What to know about a 1798 law that Trump has invoked for deportations

In dissent, the three liberal justices said the administration has sought to avoid judicial review in this case and the court “now rewards the government for its behavior.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined portions of the dissent.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said it would be harder for people to challenge deportations individually, wherever they are being held, and noted that the administration has also said in another case before the court that it’s unable to return people who have been deported to the El Salvador prison by mistake.

“We, as a Nation and a court of law, should be better than this,” she wrote.

The justices acted on the administration’s emergency appeal after the federal appeals court in Washington left in place an order temporarily prohibiting deportations of the migrants accused of being gang members under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act.

“For all the rhetoric of the dissents,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion, the high court order confirms “that the detainees subject to removal orders under the AEA are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.”

The case has become a flashpoint amid escalating tension between the White House and the federal courts. It’s the second time in less than a week that a majority of conservative justices has handed Trump at least a partial victory in an emergency appeal after lower courts had blocked parts of his agenda.

Several other cases are pending, including over Trump’s plan to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of parents who are in the country illegally.

Trump praised the court for its action Monday.

“The Supreme Court has upheld the Rule of Law in our Nation by allowing a President, whoever that may be, to be able to secure our Borders, and protect our families and our Country, itself. A GREAT DAY FOR JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site.

The original order blocking the deportations to El Salvador was issued by U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge at the federal courthouse in Washington.

Attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of five Venezuelan noncitizens who were being held in Texas, hours after the proclamation was made public and as immigration authorities were shepherding hundreds of migrants to waiting airplanes.

Boasberg imposed a temporary halt on deportations and also ordered planeloads of Venezuelan immigrants to return to the U.S. That did not happen. The judge held a hearing last week over whether the government defied his order to turn the planes around. The administration has invoked a “ state secrets privilege ” and refused to give Boasberg any additional information about the deportations.

Trump and his allies have called for impeaching Boasberg. In a rare statement, Chief Justice John Roberts said “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

___

Associated Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report.

Also on Monday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it is reviewing “new scientific information” on potential health risks of fluoride in drinking water. The EPA has primary authority to set the maximum level of fluoridation in public water systems.

Kennedy told The Associated Press of his plans after a news conference with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in Salt Lake City.

Kennedy can’t order communities to stop fluoridation, but he can tell the CDC to stop recommending it and work with the EPA to change the allowed amount.

Utah last month became the first state to ban fluoride in public drinking water, pushing past opposition from dentists and national health organizations who warned the move would lead to medical problems that disproportionately affect low-income communities.

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Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed legislation barring cities and communities from deciding whether to add the cavity-preventing mineral to their water systems. Water systems across the state must shut down their fluoridation systems by May 7.

Kennedy praised Utah for emerging as “the leader in making America healthy again.” He was flanked by Utah legislative leaders and the sponsor of the state’s fluoride law.

“I’m very, very proud of this state for being the first state to ban it, and I hope many more will,” he said.

Kennedy oversees the CDC, whose recommendations are widely followed but not mandatory. State and local governments decide whether to add fluoride to water and, if so, how much — as long as it doesn’t exceed a maximum set by the EPA, which is currently 4 milligrams per liter.

Zeldin said his agency was launching a renewed examination of scientific studies on the potential health risks of fluoride in drinking water to help inform any changes to the national standards.

“When this evaluation is completed, we will have an updated foundational scientific evaluation that will inform the agency’s future steps,” Zeldin said. “Secretary Kennedy has long been at the forefront of this issue. His advocacy was instrumental in our decision to review fluoride exposure risks, and we are committed to working alongside him, utilizing sound science as we advance our mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

Fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces cavities by replacing minerals lost during normal wear and tear, according to the CDC. In 1950, federal officials endorsed water fluoridation to prevent tooth decay, and in 1962 set guidelines for how much should be added to water.

Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, has called fluoride a “dangerous neurotoxin” and said it has been associated with arthritis, bone breaks and thyroid disease. Some studies have suggested such links might exist, usually at higher-than-recommended fluoride levels, though some reviewers have questioned the quality of available evidence and said no definitive conclusions can be drawn.

In November, just days before the presidential election, Kennedy declared Donald Trump would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day as president. That didn’t happen, but Trump later picked Kennedy to run the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he has been expected to take some kind of action. Meanwhile, some localities have gone ahead with deciding whether to keep adding fluoride.

Related to all this: A massive round of staffing cuts last week across federal agencies included elimination of the CDC’s 20-person Division of Oral Health. That office managed grants to local agencies to improve dental health and, in some cases, encourage fluoridation.

Fluoride can come from a number of sources, but drinking water is the main one for Americans, researchers say. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population gets fluoridated drinking water, according to CDC data. The addition of low levels of fluoride to drinking water was long considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century.

About one-third of community water systems — 17,000 out of 51,000 across the U.S. — fluoridated their water, according to a 2022 CDC analysis. The agency currently recommends 0.7 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water.

But over time, studies have documented potential problems. Too much fluoride has been associated with streaking or spots on teeth. Studies also have traced a link between excess fluoride and brain development.

A report last year by the federal government’s National Toxicology Program, which summarized studies conducted in Canada, China, India, Iran, Pakistan and Mexico, concluded that drinking water with more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter — more than twice the recommended level in the U.S. — was associated with lower IQs in kids.

Utah Oral Health Coalition chairperson Lorna Koci said Monday that she hopes other states push back against the removal of fluoride and that Kennedy’s visit to celebrate her state’s fluoride ban underscores the political motivations of those who support it.

She predicted children will have more cavities as a result and said backers of the fluoride ban in Utah spread false information that raised doubts about its effectiveness.

Opponents of the law warned it would disproportionately affect low-income residents who may rely on public drinking water containing fluoride as their only source of preventative dental care.

“This seems to be less about fluoride and more about power,” Koci said.

Stobbe reported from New York. Associated Press writer Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana contributed reporting.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday that the U.S. will be revoking all visas of South Sudanese passport-holders because of the transitional government’s refusal to accept U.S. deportees from the country in a “timely manner.” 

For Maluach, whose team lost in the Final Four of the NCAA tournament against the University of Houston just hours after the announcement, a future in the U.S. is now uncertain.

“It is time for the Transitional Government of South Sudan to stop taking advantage of the United States,” Rubio said in a statement. 

Frank Tramble, vice president of communications, marketing and public affairs at Duke, said in a statement that the school is aware of the announcement from the State Department. 

“We are looking into the situation and working expeditiously to understand any implications for Duke students,” Tramble said. 

According to State Department travel data, 46 nonimmigrant visas were issued to South Sudanese nationals in January. It’s a smaller figure compared to some other East African countries to which the U.S. issued nonimmigrant visas numbering in the hundreds in that same month, such as Uganda and Tanzania. The sweeping visa ban, which also includes a pause on any further issuance of new visas, is effective immediately. Rubio said in the statement that the policy would be reviewed “when South Sudan is in full cooperation.”

The State Department did not immediately respond to NBC News’ requests for comment. 

For many basketball fans, the news came as a shock as Maluach has been poised to be a first-round pick in the NBA draft in June. Maluach, a freshman center, shined during March Madness, recording double figures in the Sweet Sixteen game against University of Arizona and the Elite Eight game against the University of Alabama, before his team exited the tournament after losing the semifinals. 

Maluach, who represented South Sudan at the Olympics last year, said that his journey to the prestigious Blue Devils basketball program has been shocking, even to him. 

“It never really crossed my mind that one day I’ll be playing for Duke,” Maluach told NBC News last week. “I didn’t know I was going to go to college,” much less “be able to play in a Final Four.”

The visa news comes as tensions have been growing in South Sudan, which could be headed for another civil war. A 2018 power-sharing agreement between President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar ended five years of civil war. But as of last month, violent clashes between the factions have ramped up once again. 

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The temporary order comes hours after a Justice Department emergency appeal to the Supreme Court arguing U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis overstepped her authority when she ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to the United States.

The court asked Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to respond by Tuesday at 5 p.m.

On Friday, Xinis gave the administration until just before midnight Monday to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return.

“The district court’s injunction — which requires Abrego Garcia’s release from the custody of a foreign sovereign and return to the United States by midnight on Monday — is patently unlawful,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in court papers, casting the order as one in “a deluge of unlawful injunctions” judges have issued to slow President Donald Trump’s agenda.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit sided with Kilmar and denied the government’s request for a stay. Pending what the Supreme Court decides, the order to return him to the U.S. by just before midnight Monday still stands.

“The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process, the ruling by the three-judge panel says. “The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”

Abrego Garcia’s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said the government has the power to bring his client back home.

“I don’t think there is anyone in this country who genuinely believes that if we didn’t just pick up the phone and make a good faith phone call, that we couldn’t get him back within a day or two,” he said on MSNBC on Monday afternoon. “I mean, the connections between our government and the government of El Salvador when it comes to these deportations, to this prison – they put Kristi Noem inside the walls of the prison and they got her back out. They can get him back out”.

The administration has conceded that Abrego Garcia should not have been sent to El Salvador because an immigration judge found he likely would face persecution by local gangs. But he is no longer in U.S. custody and the government has no way to get him back, the administration argued.

The Trump administration is separately asking the Supreme Court to allow Trump to resume deportations of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members to the same Salvadoran prison under an 18th century wartime law.

The federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, denied the administration’s request for a stay. “There is no question that the government screwed up here,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a brief opinion accompanying the unanimous denial.

The White House has described Abrego Garcia’s deportation as an “administrative error” but has also cast him an MS-13 gang member. Attorneys for Abrego Garcia said there is no evidence he was in MS-13.

Xinis wrote that the decision to arrest him and send him to El Salvador appears to be “wholly lawless,” explaining that little to no evidence supports a “vague, uncorroborated” allegation that Abrego Garcia was once an MS-13 member.

Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran national who has never been charged or convicted of any crime, was detained by immigration agents and deported last month.

He had a permit from DHS to legally work in the U.S. and was a sheet metal apprentice pursuing a journeyman license, his attorney said. His wife is a U.S. citizen.

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In 2019, an immigration judge barred the U.S. from deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.

A Justice Department lawyer conceded in a court hearing that Abrego Garcia should not have been deported. Attorney General Pam Bondi later removed the lawyer, Erez Reuveni, from the case and placed him on leave.

This live blog on the Trump administration has ended. See more coverage here.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a green card holder who is originally from El Salvador and has lived in the United States since 2011, was mistakenly deported to the notorious jail on March 15, along with Venezuelan men whom Trump administration officials claimed were gang members.

Authorities apprehended Abrego Garcia in an Ikea parking lot March 12, according to his attorney, with his 5-year-old autistic son in the back seat of his car.

The Trump administration called his deportation an “administrative error.”  

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said Friday that the deportation was unlawful and ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the United States by 11:59 p.m. Monday.

On Saturday, Justice Department lawyers asked Xinis to hold off while the administration appealed her order. She refused. 

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Justice Department places attorney who struggled to explain Maryland man's deportation on leave

“Defendants seized Abrego Garcia without any lawful authority; held him in three separate domestic detention centers without legal basis; failed to present him to any immigration judge or office; and forcibly transported him to El Salvador,” she wrote Sunday. “Once there, U.S. officials secured his detention in a facility that, by design, deprives its detainees of adequate food, water, and shelter, fosters routine violence; and places him with his persecutors.”

It’s not clear whether the administration will make the deadline set by Xinis or whether the deadline will hold. The appeals court could issue a decision as soon as Sunday night.

Justice Department lawyers have already claimed they are unable to return Abrego Garcia because he is in Salvadoran custody. And the administration has already been accused in another immigration case of skirting — if not outright ignoring — a judge’s order not to deport Venezuelan migrants to the same Salvadoran prison. 

The Justice Department has argued that the court had no power to order Abrego Garcia returned and that it was intruding on President Donald Trump’s foreign policy powers. 

Xinis shot back at the arguments Sunday, “They do indeed 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.”

“As a practical matter, the facts say otherwise,” she wrote.

Abrego Garcia, 29, fled El Salvador and came to the United States to escape gang violence when he was a teenager, his lawyer has said. Starting around 2006, gang members stalked, hit and threatened to kidnap and kill him in an attempt to extort his parents, the lawyer said in a court filing.

In 2019, Abrego Garcia and three other noncitizens were arrested looking for work in front of a Home Depot in Prince George’s County, Maryland, according to the filing. Police accused Garcia of involvement in the MS-13 gang, claiming a confidential informant told them he was an active member, according to court documents. 

While he was in custody that year, Abrego Garcia contested the allegations that he was a gang member and asked an immigration judge for an order that would prevent his deportation to El Salvador, according to court documents. 

An immigration judge granted his request, fearing that his return to El Salvador might result in his torture or death. He was released from custody. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not appeal the judge’s order. 

But the Trump administration has maintained that Abrego Garcia is a gang member. In a motion seeking to prevent Xinis’ order from taking effect, the administration argued, without providing any proof, that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 member and a threat to American national security.

“The public interest cuts firmly against ordering Abrego Garcia — a member of a designated terrorist organization, who is in turn no longer eligible for withholding relief — back to the United States,” lawyers for the Justice Department wrote. “And on the other side of the ledger,” the lawyers continued, Xinis had failed “to offer any compelling irreparable harm that would justify this injunction.” 

Abrego Garcia’s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, has repeatedly disputed the administration’s claims, and Xinis has chalked up the government’s allegations to “just chatter.”

“In a court of law when someone is accused of membership in such a violent and predatory organization, it comes in the form of indictment or criminal proceeding so we can assess facts,” she said. “I haven’t seen any of those.”

Justice Department attorney Erez Reuveni told Xinis at a hearing Friday that “we concede he should not have been removed to El Salvador” and responded “I don’t know” when Xinis asked why he was being held.

Xinis referred to the remarks in her opinion Sunday.

“As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” she said.

Reuveni was placed on leave after his comments in court.

“At my direction, every Department of Justice attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Bondi likened Reuveni’s comments to “a defense attorney walking, conceding something in a criminal matter.” 

“That would never happen in this country,” she said.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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Trump’s announcement sent stocks surging following days of volatility and losses. Follow along for live updates.

As of Sunday evening, S&P 500 futures had fallen 2.8%. Futures in the tech-heavy Nasdaq also fell 3.7%, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 900 points in volatile trading. Future for the Russell 2000, which tracks the stocks of smaller companies, were off 3.7%.

Futures markets, which are a way for traders to move stocks when the major exchanges are closed, are an implied measure for how stocks will act when the markets do open, generally at 9:30 a.m. ET weekdays.

The situation was not better in other parts of the world. Stock futures in Japan were briefly halted after futures for the country’s Nikkei 225 and Topix indexes declined by more than 8%. Circuit breakers kick in on the Japanesese stock exchanges when the Nikkei or Topix move more than 8% in either direction.

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When they did open, the Nikkei dropped sharply, down more than 6% Sunday, while Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 fell 5.3%. South Korea’s Kospi index fell 5%

Even the price of bitcoin, which showed signs Friday of having resisted the wider market downturn, fell as much as 5.6%.

The declines mean another savage day awaits investors when trading officially opens at 9:30 a.m. ET Monday. The losses would come on top of a two-day free-fall last week that was the worst 48-hour period in market history, with $6.6 trillion in value wiped out.

The main U.S. benchmark for crude oil fell 3.7%, to just under $60 per barrel, its lowest level since April 2021.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump signaled little intention to back off his proposal, under which tariffs would rise as much as 79% for countries like China.

“THIS IS AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION, AND WE WILL WIN. HANG TOUGH,” Trump wrote Saturday on Truth Social. “it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

On Sunday evening, he doubled down again, posting: “We have massive Financial Deficits with China, the European Union, and many others. The only way this problem can be cured is with TARIFFS, which are now bringing Tens of Billions of Dollars into the U.S.A. They are already in effect, and a beautiful thing to behold. The Surplus with these Countries has grown during the ‘Presidency’ of Sleepy Joe Biden. We are going to reverse it, and reverse it QUICKLY. Some day people will realize that Tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!”

Asked about the markets plunge late Sunday aboard Air Force One, Trump said it was sometimes necessary to “take medicine,” and that no deal would come with China unless the U.S.’s trade deficit with it was addressed.

He also said he was not purposely engineering a market sell-off — an assertion that contradicts a TikTok Trump posted and then re-posted over the weekend.

In a release just before futures trading began Sunday, the White House published a brief note that recognized administration officials for outlining Trump’s plan to end “the globalist policies of economic destruction that have shipped American jobs and industries overseas at the expense of American workers.”

The baseline 10% tariffs took effect Saturday, with dozens of countries facing higher so-called reciprocal tariffs beginning Wednesday. China said Friday it would impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the United States beginning this Thursday, the day the U.S. tariffs are set to rise on Chinese goods — from 20% to at least 54%.

Goldman Sachs analysts wrote over the weekend that the “tariff pandora’s box has been opened,” adding that the U.S. action against China in particular was “substantially higher than our economists’ previous base case and most investors had expected.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS News in an interview Sunday morning that the White House was not considering extending the start date for the tariffs.

“There is no postponing. They are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks,” Lutnick said.

“The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America and be automated,” he said. “The tradecraft of America — workers are going to fix” the robots.

While Trump’s Cabinet has been aligned behind him, the overwhelming consensus among economists and high-profile business executives has been that the tariffs are a mistake. One surprising source of criticism was Elon Musk, who hit out Saturday at the White House senior adviser for trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro. Navarro shot back in an interview Sunday that Musk was “simply protecting his own interests.”

But it’s not clear that Musk’s interests are particularly different from those of any of the many businesses that rely on the modern global economic system and its cross-border supply chains. Tesla, alongside SpaceX, last month submitted a letter warning the U.S. trade representative of the impact of tariffs and the threat of retaliatory ones to its bottom line.

Trump declined to criticize Musk Sunday, when a reporter asked him about Musk’s call for zero tariffs between the U.S. and Europe.

“Well, the problem is that Europe has made a fortune with us,” Trump replied aboard Air Force One. “You know, Europe also has had a tremendous surplus with the United States. Europe has treated us, it’s a little smaller, but they’ve treated us very, very badly.”

Ahead of the futures open Sunday evening, Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities financial group, cut his price forecasts for Tesla’s stock by 43% and for Apple’s by 23%.

“The economic pain that will be brought by these tariffs are hard to describe and can essentially take the U.S. tech industry back a decade in the process while China steamrolls ahead,” he wrote.

He added that the tariffs as currently constituted would unleash “economic Armageddon and stop the U.S. tech world in its tracks.”

There were other signs of the gravity of the situation. Stan Druckenmiller, one of the most successful Wall Street investors in history, published a post on X for only the fifth time to correct another poster’s summary of an interview he gave.

“I do not support tariffs exceeding 10% which I made abundantly clear in the interview you cite,” he wrote.

The massive market downdrifts are in response not to the imposition of tariffs — which have been enacted by most presidential administrations — but rather to the scale of what Trump has proposed. Rather than simply tax imports into the United States, Trump seeks to upend an entire economic order that was premised on global trade and cooperation, with the United States transitioning to a service-oriented economy and away from having to rely on labor-intensive manufacturing.

The cost of transitioning back to the kind of export-oriented economy Trump proposes is virtually incalculable, since it would also entail a relatively lower standard of living for a majority of people in the United States for an indefinite period of time.

In the meantime, at least one Wall Street firm is already forecasting that unemployment is poised to climb from 4.2% to 5.3% and for the economy to contract.

“The pinch from higher prices that we expect in coming months may hit harder than in the post-pandemic inflation spike” because average income growth has been slowing, analysts with JPMorgan wrote in a note to clients late Friday.

They said they expect a significant pull-back in consumer spending — which drives 80% of the U.S. economy — as a result of the economic uncertainty.

Hedge fund investor Bill Ackman, an ardent supporter of Trump’s 2024 campaign, posted a lengthy note on X warning of the consequences to the economy should Trump fail to back off.

“The President has an opportunity on Monday to call a time out and have the time to execute on fixing an unfair tariff system,” he wrote. Alternatively, “we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down. May cooler heads prevail.”

Raquel Coronell Uribe contributed.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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Trump’s announcement sent stocks surging following days of volatility and losses. Follow along for live updates.

Trump’s announcement sent stocks surging following days of volatility and losses. Follow along for live updates.

“Staff from the Department of Government Efficiency are currently working at Peace Corps headquarters and the agency is supporting their requests,” the Peace Corps’ press office said, without specifying what work DOGE is undertaking or how the agency is accommodating its requests.

The National Peace Corps Association said a DOGE representative arrived Friday and additional staff were expected through the weekend. The nonprofit organization, which supports the agency’s mission, told members it was on watch for news of any funding cuts.

“These visits at other federal agencies have led to major funding cuts,” the association said in a post to Facebook. “We don’t yet know the full impact, but we’re watching closely.”

The White House and DOGE did not immediately respond to NBC News’ requests for comment.

The Peace Corps has struggled to meet its staffing goals in recent years, with its “fill rate,” a measurement that reflects its ability to accommodate requests for volunteers, dropping from 94% in fiscal year 2019 to 63% in fiscal year 2023, according to agency data.

Funding for the Peace Corps amounts to less than a tenth of a percent of the total federal budget and costs the average taxpayer under a few dollars a year.

The Peace Corps’ budget in the 2024 fiscal year was $430.5 million, according to a recent financial report. The Biden administration requested the agency receive $479 million this fiscal year, but Congress has yet to pass a funding authorization following President Donald Trump’s election in the fall.

Legislation to expand resources for the agency, including by allowing volunteers to receive larger payments after their service, has received bipartisan support in previous years, but has failed to garner enough support to become law.

The Peace Corps is not a foreign aid agency, but it engages in international development and assistance, with volunteers working in sectors that include education, health, youth development, community economic development, environment and agriculture. The Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees oversee the agency’s activities and programs.

The Peace Corps only restored its geographic footprint to pre-pandemic levels in the last fiscal year, with more than 3,300 volunteers serving in 61 countries. The agency planned to expand its work into the Indo-Pacific region this year, but it is unclear if those plans will continue.

The Peace Corps was established through executive order by President John F. Kennedy on March 1, 1961 and formally authorized by Congress on September 22, 1961.

Over 240,000 Americans have served in the agency since it was founded, and trainees were deployed recently to Armenia, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic.

DOGE’s presence at the Peace Corps comes months after the Elon Musk-led group began dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Peace Corps and USAID have collaborated through various initiatives, most notably the Small Project Assistance Program, which provides grants to Peace Corps volunteers on assignment in countries around the world for development projects.

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At the hearing, the government attorney, Erez Reuveni, expressed frustration over not having information the judge was seeking in the case of the deported man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and made clear he had was not getting much help from his superiors.

Abrego Garcia “should not have been removed,” he said, adding that he didn’t know why Garcia was ever arrested. “I am also frustrated that I also have no answers for you on a lot of these questions,” he said.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement following the news that Reuveni had been placed on leave, “At my direction, every Department of Justice attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States. Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”

The action caps off another week of friction between the judicial branch and the Trump administration, which some judges have blasted for its litigation tactics.

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Judge gives US 3 days to bring mistakenly deported Maryland man home

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ICE says deporting Maryland man with protected status was a mistake

When asked Friday by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis if he had any evidence that showed why Abrego Garcia was arrested, Reuveni said, “The absence of evidence speaks for itself.” He added, “The government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”

When asked by Xinis why the U.S. couldn’t, practically speaking, get Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., Reuveni said he had the same question.

He said that when the case landed on his desk, “the first thing I did was ask my client the same question. I have not yet received an answer that I find satisfactory.” 

Abrego Garcia was deported to an infamous El Salvador prison on March 15. He is a protected legal resident and had been living in Maryland since 2011.

In court filings Monday, the government said Abrego Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error.”

Abrego Garcia filed suit last week demanding to be returned to the U.S., but Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem argued that the government does not have the authority to demand Abrego Garcia — who is originally from El Salvador — be returned.

Still, Xinis ruled Friday that the government must return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. by Monday at 11:59 p.m. 

Administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, have claimed that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang member. Abrego Garcia’s lawyer has said that he does not have a criminal record in the U.S. or El Salvador, and fled El Salvador to escape gang violence.

An immigration judge specifically barred Abrego Garcia from being returned to El Salvador in 2019, saying it was “more likely than not that he would be persecuted” in the country.

The Trump administration argued Saturday that Xinis did not have the authority to “engage with a foreign power” and demand Abrego Garcia’s return. It asked the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals to pause Xinis’ order, and additionally asked Xinis to pause her own ruling while appeals are underway.

Reuveni’s name was not listed on the government’s Saturday afternoon motion to stay Xinis’ order.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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So-called Hands Off! demonstrations were organized for more than 1,200 locations in all 50 states by more than 150 groups, including civil rights organizations, labor unions, LBGTQ+ advocates, veterans and elections activists. The rallies appeared peaceful, with no immediate reports of arrests.

Thousands of protesters in cities dotting the nation from Midtown Manhattan to Anchorage, Alaska, including at multiple state capitols, assailed Trump and billionaire Elon Musk ‘s actions on government downsizing, the economy, immigration and human rights. On the West Coast, in the shadow of Seattle’s iconic Space Needle, protesters held signs with slogans like “Fight the oligarchy.” Protesters chanted as they took to the streets in Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, where they marched from Pershing Square to City Hall.

Demonstrators voiced anger over the administration’s moves to fire thousands of federal workers, close Social Security Administration field offices, effectively shutter entire agencies, deport immigrants, scale back protections for transgender people and cut funding for health programs.

Musk, a Trump adviser who runs Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X, has played a key role in the downsizing as the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. He says he is saving taxpayers billions of dollars.

Asked about the protests, the White House said in a statement that “President Trump’s position is clear: he will always protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for eligible beneficiaries. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ stance is giving Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits to illegal aliens, which will bankrupt these programs and crush American seniors.”

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Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign advocacy group, criticized the administration’s treatment of the LBGTQ+ community at the rally at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where Democratic members of Congress also took the stage.

“The attacks that we’re seeing, they’re not just political. They are personal, y’all,” Robinson said. “They’re trying to ban our books, they’re slashing HIV prevention funding, they’re criminalizing our doctors, our teachers, our families and our lives.”

“We don’t want this America, y’all,” Robinson added. “We want the America we deserve, where dignity, safety and freedom belong not to some of us, but to all of us.”

In Boston, demonstrators brandished signs such as “Hands off our democracy” and “Hands off our Social Security.”

Mayor Michelle Wu said she does not want her children and others’ to live in a world in which threats and intimidation are government tactics and values like diversity and equality are under attack.

“I refuse to accept that they could grow up in a world where immigrants like their grandma and grandpa are automatically presumed to be criminals,” Wu said.

Roger Broom, 66, a retiree from Delaware County, Ohio, was one of hundreds who rallied at the Statehouse in Columbus. He said he used to be a Reagan Republican but has been turned off by Trump.

“He’s tearing this country apart,” Broom said. “It’s just an administration of grievances.”

Hundreds of people also demonstrated in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, a few miles from Trump’s golf course in Jupiter, where he spent the morning at the club’s Senior Club Championship. People lined both sides of PGA Drive, encouraging cars to honk and chanting slogans against Trump.

“They need to keep their hands off of our Social Security,” said Archer Moran of Port St. Lucie, Florida.

“The list of what they need to keep their hands off of is too long,” Moran said. “And it’s amazing how soon these protests are happening since he’s taken office.”

The president golfed in Florida Saturday and planned to do so again Sunday, the White House said.

Activists have staged nationwide demonstrations against Trump and Musk multiple times since Trump returned to office. But before Saturday the opposition movement had yet to produce a mass mobilization like the Women’s March in 2017, which brought thousands of women to Washington after Trump’s first inauguration, or the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that erupted in multiple cities after George Floyd’s killing by police in Minneapolis in 2020.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, protesters said they were supporting a variety of causes, from Social Security and education to immigration and women’s reproductive rights.

“Regardless of your party, regardless of who you voted for, what’s going on today, what’s happening today is abhorrent,” said Britt Castillo, 35, of Charlotte. “It’s disgusting, and as broken as our current system might be, the way that the current administration is going about trying to fix things — it is not the way to do it. They’re not listening to the people.”

Among thousands marching through downtown San Jose, California, were Deborah and Douglas Doherty.

Deborah, a graphic designer, is a veteran of the 2017 Women’s March and was nervous that fewer people have turned out against Trump this time. “All the cities need to show up,” she said. “Now people are kind of numb to it, which is itself frightening.”

___

Associated Press journalists Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, Fatima Hussein in West Palm Beach, Florida, Erik Verduzco in Charlotte, North Carolina, Nicholas Riccardi in San Jose, California, and Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed.

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Mahmoud Khalil, who is in custody in Louisiana as his case moves through courts, called his March 8 arrest by immigration authorities an “abduction” in an op-ed published Friday in the Columbia Spectator.

Titled “A Letter to Columbia,” the piece was dictated and verified by his attorney, the student newspaper said.

“Since my abduction on March 8, the intimidation and kidnapping of international students who stand for Palestine has only accelerated,” Khalil said in the op-ed.

He said Columbia’s leadership has suppressed student dissent over Israel’s war in Gaza, which it launched after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack by Hamas.

Khalil is a lawful U.S. permanent resident with a green card, his attorney has said. His legal team has said his detention is a violation of his due process and First Amendment rights.

Federal officials have said that he led activities “aligned to Hamas,” which the United States has designated a terrorist organization. 

He has not been charged with committing any crime, and an attorney of his has said there is no evidence he has provided any kind of support to a terrorist organization.

The Trump administration is seeking to deport him under a provision in federal immigration law that allows the secretary of state to deport noncitizens deemed a threat to U.S. foreign policy.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last month that the State Department has revoked 300 or more student visas. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” Rubio said at a news conference in Guyana.

In the op-ed, Khalil referred to other students who have been arrested and are facing deportation — including Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk.

The Department of Homeland Security has said that Öztürk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” 

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Öztürk was one of several people who co-wrote an opinion piece in the Tufts University student newspaper that called on the university to label Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide.”

Tufts has defended Öztürk and said the opinion piece was consistent with speech permitted under its policies of free expression.

“The University has no further information suggesting that she has acted in a manner that would constitute a violation of the University’s understanding of the Immigration and Naturalization Act,” Tufts said Wednesday.

Khalil in his Columbia Spectator op-ed said that Öztürk and others have been snatched by the state.

“The situation is oddly reminiscent of when I fled the brutality of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and sought refuge in Lebanon,” Khalil said.

Rubio has defended the revocation of visas by saying that, “No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”

A judge has also temporarily blocked the planned deportation of Öztürk.

The war in Gaza sparked student protests at universities across the country, with demonstrators calling attention to the civilian death toll as well as issues of Palestinian rights. Some have labeled the protests and behavior antisemitic.

Columbia President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik resigned in August, following months of criticism over protests on the Manhattan campus.

The Trump administration last month canceled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia, accusing the university of “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Columbia then agreed to a list of demands in order to start negotiations to try and restore the funding.

Khalil in Friday’s op-ed urged students to continue their efforts. “It is incumbent upon each of you to reclaim the University and join the student movement to carry forward the work of the past year,” he wrote.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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Obama rebuked Trump without explicitly naming him over the federal government’s threats against universities and students who exercise free speech, its targeting of law firms, and the new tariffs imposed on foreign countries.

“I don’t think what we just witnessed in terms of economic policy and tariffs is going to be good for America, but that’s a specific policy,” Obama said in his remarks at Hamilton College in New York. “I’m more deeply concerned with a federal government that threatens universities if they don’t give up students who are exercising their right to free speech,” he said.

Obama said he’s more troubled by a White House that takes aim at law firms that represent ideas or parties that its occupants disagree with, and that the administration has punished media outlets. Trump has signed executive orders penalizing major law firms and lawyers, prompting outrage within the legal community. The White House has also barred The Associated Press from coverage over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

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“That kind of behavior is contrary to the basic compact we have as Americans,” he said.

Obama suggested that Republicans would be outraged if he had done similar things as president.

“Imagine if I had pulled Fox News’ credentials from the White House press corps,” he said, adding, “It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me or a whole bunch of my predecessors.”

He added, “I say this not on a partisan basis. This has to do with something more precious, which is who are we as a country and what values do we stand for?”

His final message during his speech was that “history zigs and zags and there are times of conflict and there are times of stupidity and there are times of danger,” but he wants people to remain resilient.

“Don’t get discouraged,” he said. “I know it’s a little crazy right now, but we’re going to be OK.”

Former Vice President Kamala Harris also spoke out against the Trump administration at the Leading Women Defined Summit in California on Thursday. She said that the country is witnessing “progress being rolled back” and a “sense of fear” taking hold nationwide.

“We are seeing those who are capitulating to clearly unconstitutional threats,” she said. “And these are the things that we are witnessing each day in these last few months in our country. And it understandably creates a great sense of fear.”

Harris, who has kept a low profile since losing to Trump in November’s presidential election, said that “fear has a way of being contagious” but that “courage is also contagious.”

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about their remarks. 

Michele Norris contributed.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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