Federal judge blocks Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in military
A federal judge has granted an injunction that temporarily blocks the US military from enforcing Donald Trump’s executive order barring transgender people from military service while a lawsuit by 20 current and would-be service members challenging the measure goes forward.
Judge Ana Reyes stayed her order from going into effect until Friday morning to give the government to seek an emergency appeal.
Key events
Closing summary
We are wrapping up our live coverage of the day in US politics now, but will return on Wednesday to continue out chronicle of the second Trump administration.
Here are some of the day’s developments:
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A federal judge has ordered Elon Musk and his unofficial “department of government efficiency” to stop their dismantling of USAid, saying their move to rapidly shut down the agency tasked with managing foreign assistance was likely illegal.
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A federal judge has granted an injunction that temporarily blocks the US military from enforcing Donald Trump’s executive order barring transgender people from military service while a lawsuit by 20 current and would-be service members challenging the measure goes forward.
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Federal judge James Boasberg gave the Trump administration until noon on Wednesday to provide answers to specific questions about three flights carrying suspected Venezuelan gang members that left the United States despite his order preventing their departure.
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Trump escalated his rhetoric against the judicial branch, saying that a federal judge who attempted to block his deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members should be impeached. The comment prompted a rare public statement from John Roberts, the chief justice of the supreme court, who said impeachment “is not an appropriate response”.
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The Trump administration fired most of the board of the US Institute of Peace (USIP) and sent its new leader into the Washington DC headquarters of the independent organization on Monday in its latest effort targeting agencies tied to foreign assistance work.
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Trump and Putin “spoke about the need for peace and a ceasefire in the Ukraine war”, the White House said. But Russia has not accepted the 30-day ceasefire Ukraine agreed to, casting doubt on Trump’s ability to bring the fighting to a halt.
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The two Democratic commissioners at the US Federal Trade Commission, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, both said on Tuesday that they were “illegally fired” by Trump on Tuesday.
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In his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.
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On a rare day when Trump was not on live television, the president appeared in a new social media ad recorded in the Oval Office, pitching a new phone app from the Department of Homeland Security intended to make it easy for undocumented immigrants to “self-deport”.
Trump pitches ‘self-deportation’ app to undocumented immigrants
On a rare day when Donald Trump was not on live television, the president appeared in a new social media ad recorded in the Oval Office, pitching a new phone app from the Department of Homeland Security intended to make it easy for undocumented immigrants to “self-deport”.
In the ad, “Illegal Aliens: Self-Deport with the CBP Home App”, Trump makes it plain that “people in our country illegally can self-deport the easy way or they can get deported the hard way, and that’s not pleasant.”
He goes on to incorrectly state that the Biden administration’s CBP One app, which allowed asylum seekers to schedule appointments at the border, allowed “more than one million aliens to illegally enter the United States”.
The Trump administration turned off the CBP One app on his first day in office, and has now reworked it into what it calls “CBP Home”, an app to register their self-deportation.
As the Fox pundit Jesse Watters said in a segment on the new app shared on social media by DHS, the administration hopes that highly-produced video images of accused Venezuelan gang members being sent to a prison in El Salvador “will be enough to scare off” new migrants and convince people already in the US to leave before they are subjected to similar brutality.
What’s remarkable about the concept of self-deportation as a cornerstone of White House policy is that the idea was, originally, a joke, dreamed up by a pair of Mexican-American satirists in the 1990s.
In 2012, when Mitt Romney was asked in a Republican primary debate how he planned to repatriate millions of undocumented immigrants without the use of force, and he suggested that the ideal solution was to encourage them to “self-deport”, or return voluntarily to their countries of origin, he was widely mocked.
There is nothing funny about the concept of making life in the United States so uncomfortable for those who came here without legal status that they might leave willingly, and it has prompted states such as Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina to enact a series of brutal laws to discourage migrants from trying to stay.
But as I reported at the time, there is an argument to be made that the term self-deportation was invented in 1994 by the Mexican-American satirists Lalo Alcaraz and Esteban Zul. That year, “sickened” by a ballot initiative known as Proposition 187, which aimed to prohibit illegal immigrants from using state-run hospitals and schools in California, the comedians began posing as conservative activists who backed the measure.
The two men started a satirical media campaign to support the initiative, faxing radio and television stations a fake news release that touted the benefits of “self-deportation centers” and invited reporters seeking more information to call a Latino Republican and “militant self-deportationist” named Daniel D Portado. Eventually the men founded “Hispanics Against Liberal Takeover,” or Halto, and produced a mock radio ad, in which Portado claimed to support “California Gov Pete Wilson’s self-deportation message”.
After Romney drew attention to the term self-deportation in 2012, Alcaraz resurrected the character, on Twitter and YouTube.
David Smith
Donald Trump took another highly undiplomatic swipe at Canada on Tuesday as the neighbours remain locked in a trade war.
The president has imposed tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum and repeatedly suggested that Canada should surrender its sovereignty and join the US.
Fox News interviewer Laura Ingraham put it to Trump that he is tougher on Canada than America’s adversaries. “Because it’s meant to be our 51st state,” he replied.
Brushing off an interruption, the president continued: “Look, I deal with every country indirectly or directly. One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.
“The people that – now, this was Trudeau – the people that – good old Justin, I call him ‘Governor Trudeau’. His people were nasty and they weren’t telling the truth. They never told the truth.”
Trudeau’s tenure as Canadian prime minister ended earlier this week after nearly a decade. He was succeeded by Mark Carney, who has said he has no current plans to visit Washington but hopes to have a phone call with Trump soon.
Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, called the release of 1,123 documents related to the 1963 assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on Tuesday proof that the administration “is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency”.
While many of the documents appear to have been previously released, including by the Biden administration, some previously redacted passages have now been made public.
On Fox, Laura Ingraham coaxes Trump into saying he can’t defy court orders
In an interview with Laura Ingraham broadcast on Tuesday evening, the Fox host coaxed Donald Trump into saying that he would not defy court orders and agreeing with her that attacks on Tesla dealerships are domestic terrorism.
On both subjects, the pattern of the conversation was similar, with Ingraham, a die-hard Trump supporter, struggling to contain the president’s rambling answers to her questions and pushing him to agree with what seemed to be the positions she wanted him to take.
When Ingraham asked, “Are there circumstances where you would defy a court order?” Trump used it as an opportunity to rehearse his grievances about having been prosecuted. “I think that number one, nobody’s been through more courts than I have,” Trump began. After the president began to talk about the judge who oversaw his conviction for scheming illegally influence the 2016 election through secret payments to a porn actor, Ingraham dragged him back to the point. “But going forward, would you – would you defy a court order?”
“No, I never did defy a court order,” Trump said, although he had raged earlier on Tuesday against a federal judge who suggested that his administration had defied his order by deporting accused members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador last week.
“And you wouldn’t in the future,” Ingraham, a trained lawyer who once clerked for supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, urged Trump to agree.
“No, you can’t do that,” Trump said, before immediately launching into an attack on what he called the “rogue judge” who is pressing the administration to explain why it seemingly disregarded his order to not continue with a deportation flight to El Salvador.
“We have very bad judges and these are judges that shouldn’t be allowed,” Trump said. “I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge? The judge that we’re talking about. Look at his other rulings, I mean rulings unrelated, but having to do with me: he’s a lunatic.”
His response to her line of questioning about the vandalism of Tesla dealerships was similar.
“Do you consider what’s happening an act of domestic political terrorism?” Ingraham asked.
“I do,” Trump responded, before launching into an extended monologue about how he “hardly knew Elon” until the 2024 campaign, but it turned out “that he liked me … better than Kamala, better than Joe”.
Ingraham interrupted to repeat her question: “But do you consider this an act of domestic terrorism?”
“Sure, sure, I think – I think so,” Trump answered. He then went on to echo the baseless charge made by the attorney general, Pamela Jo Bondi, in a statement on Tuesday that unknown figures were “operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes” which are “nothing short of domestic terrorism”.
Federal judge blocks Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in military
A federal judge has granted an injunction that temporarily blocks the US military from enforcing Donald Trump’s executive order barring transgender people from military service while a lawsuit by 20 current and would-be service members challenging the measure goes forward.
Judge Ana Reyes stayed her order from going into effect until Friday morning to give the government to seek an emergency appeal.
Senator Warren condemns FTC firings
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, has condemned the firing of two Democratic commissioners at the US Federal Trade Commission, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter.
“Donald Trump just illegally fired two independent commissioners at the FTC who fight big corporations that abuse consumers and workers,” Warren said in a statement. “Why? Trump’s billionaire donors expect a return on their investment. He works for them, not you. The courts must reinstate the commissioners”.
“The FTC was created by Congress to stop greedy corporations from ripping off consumers,” Emma Lydon, the managing director of the Warren-aligned Progressive Change Institute, said in a statement. “By attempting to illegally fire the Democratic commissioners, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are revealing their true aim: ensuring that megacorporations can steal, cheat, and lie with no consequences. This is an abuse of power and reeks of corruption. We look forward to watching this Administration lose in court.”
Four years’ worth of consumer protection information deleted from FTC website
As Wired magazine first reported on Tuesday, more than 300 blog posts have been deleted from the FTC website, “including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency’s landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft”.
A look at the FTC’s Business Blog reveals that the four most recent posts there now are three that were posted this month and one from December 2020. Current and former FTC employees, who spoke under anonymity for fear of retaliation, told Wired that the agency’s site “no longer includes any information published during former president Joe Biden’s administration”.
Among the deleted items, Wired explains, are several that documented violations of consumer protection laws by tech giants including Amazon.
One now deleted blog, titled “Hey, Alexa! What are you doing with my data?” explains how, according to two FTC complaints, Amazon and its Ring security camera products allegedly leveraged sensitive consumer data to train the ecommerce giant’s algorithms. (Amazon disagreed with the FTC’s claims.) It also provided guidance for companies operating similar products and services.
Earlier on Tuesday, the two Democratic commissioners on the FTC revealed that they had been “illegally fired” by Donald Trump.
‘I am a political prisoner,’ Mahmoud Khalil tells the Guardian in first public statement
In his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.
“I am a political prisoner,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to the Guardian. “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.”
Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last spring, was arrested and detained in New York on 8 March by federal immigration authorities who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.
“My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night,” Khalil added. “With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.”
Read the rest of Khalil’s statement:
Both Democrats on Federal Trade Commission say Trump ‘illegally fired’ them
The two Democratic commissioners at the US Federal Trade Commission, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, both said on Tuesday that they were “illegally fired” by Donald Trump on Tuesday.
Trump is already being sued for firing members of other independent regulatory agencies including the National Labor Relations Board.
Bedoya posted a statement on X in which he said: “This is corruption plain and simple”.
“The FTC is an independent agency founded 111 years ago to fight fraudsters and monopolists”, Bedoya wrote. “Now the president wants the FTC to be a lapdog for his golfing buddies”.
Slaughter said in a statement to the American Prospect that Trump’s illegal action violated “the plain language of a statute and clear Supreme Court precedent”.
She added:
The law protects the independence of the Commission because the law serves the American people, not corporate power. The reason that the FTC can be so effective for the American people is because of its independence and because its commissioners serve across political parties and ideologies. Removing opposition voices may not change what the Trump majority can do, but it does change whether they will have accountability when they do it. The administration clearly fears the accountability that opposition voices would provide if the President orders Chairman Ferguson to treat the most powerful corporations and their executives—like those that flanked the President at his inauguration—with kid gloves.
I have served across administrations, including during the last Trump administration, and throughout my entire time as a commissioner I applied the same criteria in my work: that the law must be enforced without fear or favor. I have dedicated myself to executing the Commission’s statutory mandate to protect consumers and promote competition, fighting against illegal business practices that make groceries more expensive, healthcare inaccessible, and compromise people’s privacy and security; it has been my greatest honor to serve.
As Deepak Gupta, former senior counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, explained recently on Slate’s Amicus podcast, in the 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor v United States, the US supreme court upheld a law that permitted FTC commissioners to be fired only for good cause, such as neglecting their duties. That ruling shields a number of independent, bipartisan multi-member agencies from direct control by the White House.
As Gupta noted, the idea that government needed independent agencies and people with experts to solve complex problems was introduced during the New Deal era, to replace what was known as “the spoils system”, in which the incoming president rewarded friends, campaign staffers and other supporters with appointments to federal government positions for which they had no qualifications or expertise.
Ed Martin, the combative interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, and a 2020 election denier who helped lead the Stop the Steal movement, plans to use his office to investigate possible election law violations, according to an email seen by Bloomberg Law.
Martin, who publicly called the 2020 “rigged” in 2021, said in the office-wide email that he had established a “Special Unit: Election Accountability,” or SUEA.
The unit “has already begun one investigation and will continue to make sure that all the election laws of our nation are obeyed”, Martin wrote. “We have a special role at this important time.”
David Becker, the director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told Talking Points Memo that Martin “seems to be misunderstanding his jurisdiction and the federal laws around elections and voting, and without more information, it’s unclear what is being done here other than furthering conspiracy theories that he’s embraced in the past”.
Martin is a veteran anti-abortion activist who has argued for a national ban without exceptions for rape or incest, falsely claimed that “no abortion is ever performed to save the life of the mother” and discussed the possibility of jailing doctors who perform abortions and women who get abortions.
Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, has criticized the chief justice of the supreme court, John Roberts, for defending the federal judge who tried to block the government’s showy deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador.
After Donald Trump reacted to Judge James Boasberg’s ruling by calling for his impeachment, Roberts said in a statement: “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
Responding on X, the social network owned by Elon Musk, Lee wrote:
Impeachment is a non-justiciable political question assigned by the Constitution to Congress—one of the two political branches of the U.S. government—and not to the courts
Frankly, I’m surprised that Chief Justice Roberts is publicly opining on such matters
Musk himself had posted a similar comment hours earlier. Lee, a former critic of Trump who had called on him to drop out of the 2016 campaign before becoming a public convert, also shared Musk’s comment and added, of the arch-conservative Roberts, “This isn’t the first time he’s treaded on legislative power”.
Here is more from our colleagues Hugo Lowell and Joseph Gedeon on the Roberts intervention:
Marina Dunbar
Trump’s trade war has had an incredible impact on the popularity of Canada’s Liberal Party, as new polling suggests a stunning reversal of public opinion.
For the first time, projection shows the Liberals with a 55% chance of a majority government, according to the closely watched website 338Canada, which tracks and aggregates national polls, converting those figures into projected election results. In January, these odds stood at less than 1%.
The shifting polls reflect the outsized role played by a teetering and unpredictable US president, and it underscores the incentives for newly minted prime minister Mark Carney to call a snap election in the coming days.
Read more about it here:
