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:
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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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.
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