Summary
The FBI arrested Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly helping a man evade US immigration authorities as they sought to arrest him at her courthouse. In its criminal complaint, the FBI alleges that Dugan escorted Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an undocumented immigrant, and his lawyer out of the courtroom through the jury door on 18 April as a way to help avert his arrest.
Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, deemed the arrest a move by Trump to “undermine our judiciary”. The FBI director Kash Patel posted about the arrest on X and then quickly deleted it, for reasons that are as yet unknown.
The Trump administration moved to restore the student visa registrations of potentially thousands of foreign students in the US whose legal status had recently been abruptly terminated. As Politico notes: “[T]he justice department announced the wholesale reversal in federal court after weeks of intense scrutiny by courts and dozens of restraining orders issued by judges who deemed the mass termination of students from a federal database – used by universities and the federal government to track foreign students in the US – as flagrantly illegal.”
DoJ rescinds policy restricting subpoenaing journalists. In a memo, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi said the policy instated by her predecessor, Merrick Garland, would need to be revoked “in order to identify and punish the source of improper leaks.”
Donald Trump appeared to state that the US position on the future of Crimea was that it would “stay with Russia”, despite the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy ruling out such a recognition as a red line for his country in any potential peace deal. Trump made the comments in an interview with Time magazine in which he also claimed without evidence that the Chinese president Xi Jinping had called him - prompting another rebuke from the Chinese government that the US and China had not been in talks over trade – and said that he was open to meeting Iran’s supreme leader or president as the two countries began talks on Iran’s nuclear programme.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump claims that Russia and Ukraine are “very close to a deal” and that most of “the major points are agreed to”.
The Trump administration is starting to remove exhibits from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and returning those pieces to the original owners. The removal of these artifacts comes after Trump issued an executive order that targeted the Smithsonian for promoting “ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives”.
George Santos, the disgraced former representative, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison, bringing an end to an extraordinary controversy that began with a fraudulent congressional campaign. Santos lied extensively about his life story both before and after entering the US Congress, and was ultimately convicted of defrauding donors. He sobbed in court as he was sentenced in Long Island, New York. Read the story here.
Joe Kasper, the chief of staff to the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was central to a dramatic power struggle at the Pentagon, unexpectedly left his post. Despite Hegseth’s assurances just days ago that Kasper would merely transition to “a slightly different role” within the department, Kasper confirmed to Politico that he will instead return to government relations and consulting, maintaining only limited Pentagon ties as a special government employee. Read the story here.
Judge calls hearing into two-year-old US citizen being deported
A federal judge has called for a hearing to determine whether a two-year-old US citizen was deported by the Trump administration to Honduras with her mother with “no meaningful process”, Politico is reporting and court documents show.
The baby, identified as VML in court documents, was with her mother and sister when they were detained and queued for deportation during a regular check-in at the New Orleans Ice office on Tuesday.
“The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” the judge wrote. “But the Court doesn’t know that.”
The judge who was looking to speak with the mother to verify this claim, called immigration officials but was notified the family had been released in Honduras. The hearing is set for 16 May “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process”, the judge wrote.
Updated
