Summary
Closing summary
Our live coverage is ending now. In the meantime, you can find all of our live US politics coverage here. And you can also follow along with our continuing coverage of the US’s tariffs announcement here. Here is a summary of the key developments from today:
During a cabinet meeting, Donald Trump defended his tariff policies, saying, “We’re in great shape,” while warning that there may be a “transition cost”. The president’s abrupt decision to postpone the implementation of “reciprocal” tariffs by 90 days sparked accusations of market manipulation and insider trading. Meanwhile, former treasury secretary Janet Yellen called Trump’s economic policy the “worst self-inflicted wound” an administration has imposed on an otherwise well-functioning economy.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio said the government can deport Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil for his “beliefs”. In response to a judge’s request for evidence, the government submitted a two-page memo, in which it argues that the Trump administration may deport noncitizens whose “beliefs, statements or associations” represent a threat to US foreign policy interests. The memo was released the same day that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement shared, and then deleted, a social media post saying that it is responsible for stopping illegal “ideas” from crossing the US border.
The supreme court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant who was living in Maryland and has had a work permit since 2019, was stopped and detained by Ice agents on 12 March and questioned about his alleged gang affiliation.
A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration can require all people in the country without authorization to register with the federal government. Also today, the Washington Post reported that the Social Security Administration has added the names and social security numbers of more than 6,000 mostly Latino immigrants to a database used to track dead people, and the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is working to effectively cancel the Social Security numbers of immigrants with legal status.
The Trump administration is considering placing Columbia University under a consent decree, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The decision would mark a major escalation in the federal government’s crackdown on the Ivy League institution.
House speaker, Mike Johnson, was finally successful in muscling through a multitrillion-dollar budget framework that paves the way for Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”, just a day after a rightwing rebellion threatened to sink it. Now Republicans in both chambers need to come together to actually write the legislation and lay out the spending cuts they have promised to pay for the plan.
In the lastest struggle between state and federal officials, 16 states and Washington DC have sued the Trump administration to restore access to Covid-19 relief aid for schools. Last month, the education department announced that it would not honor an extended deadline for states to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of pandemic relief funding.
The lawsuit, filed in US district court in Manhattan, is led by New York state attorney general Letitia James and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. After the education department’s announcement, James said, New York state lost access to $134m in funding.
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