Summary
Here’s a wrap-up of the day’s key events:
The Associated Press has sued three Trump administration officials over access to presidential events, citing the first amendment. “The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government,” the AP said in its lawsuit, which names the White House chief of staff, Susan Wiles; deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich; and the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.
The White House is working to develop a network of military bases where immigrants will be held prior to deportation, the New York Times reports. The first hub is expected to be at Fort Bliss in Texas, near the border with Mexico, but further sites are being considered at bases across the US.
Donald Trump has ordered the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) out of the job, after data showed deportations lagged during his first month in office, Reuters reports, citing an administration official and two other sources. The president’s decision to reassign Caleb Vitello, who took over as acting Ice director when Trump was sworn in, came after government data showed that 37,660 people had been deported in his first month in office, below the 57,000 monthly average during the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency.
After the US Department of Justice asked federal judge Dale Ho to dismiss Adams’s corruption charges, Ho responded with a decision that he would not immediately dismiss the case, but delay his trial indefinitely. Ho is also appointing an outside lawyer, Paul Clement from the law firm Clement & Murphy PLLC, to present arguments against the prosecutors’ bid to dismiss to help him make a decision.
Donald Trump repeated his criticisms of Ukraine in remarks to a group of governors, while also speaking fondly of his interactions with Vladimir Putin. “I’ve had very good talks with Putin” and “not such good talks with Ukraine”, the president told a meeting of the National Governors Association, which featured Democratic and Republican leaders of states nationwide.
National security adviser Mike Waltz told a crowd of Donald Trump loyalists that he believes the president will receive the Nobel peace prize. “This is the presidency of peace. He’s going to end the war in Europe. He is going to end the wars in the Middle East. He is going to reinvest the United States and our leadership in our own hemisphere, from the Arctic to the border to Panama all the way down to our good friends in Argentina,” Waltz told the Conservative Political Action Conference.
The Senate’s Republican majority has passed a budget plan that will pay for Donald Trump’s mass deportations and other hardline immigration policies, the Associated Press reports. The resolution, approved after a longer series of amendment votes that stretched all night on Thursday and into Friday morning, is the first step in Congress approving funding for one of Trump’s campaign planks. It comes in tandem with a plan moving through the House of Representatives, which the GOP also controls, to extend tax cuts enacted under Trump’s first term and make dramatic cuts to the federal social safety net.
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A US federal judge denied labor groups’ request to issue a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s efforts to wind down operations at USAid.
In an order issued on Thursday, US district judge Carl Nichols wrote:
Weighing plaintiffs’ assertions on these questions against the government’s is like comparing apples to oranges.
Where one side claims that USAID’s operations are essential to human flourishing and the other side claims they are presently at odds with it, it simply is not possible for the Court to conclude, as a matter of law or equity, that the public interest favors or disfavors an injunction.
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