Judge denies government’s attempt to dismiss Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to his deportation
A federal judge has turned down a request from the Trump administration to dismiss Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to his deportation, and ruled his case should be heard in New Jersey rather than Louisiana, where he is now detained.
In his decision, judge Jesse M Furman said that since Khalil’s attorney filed the challenge to his arrest while he was in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention in New Jersey, the case must be heard there. Government lawyers had asked that his petition be considered in Louisiana, where Khalil had been flown to after being arrested by Ice in New York City and then briefly held in New Jersey.
“Given that the District of New Jersey is the one and only district in which Khalil could have filed his Petition when he did, the statutes that govern transfer of civil cases from one federal district court to another dictate that the case be sent there, not to the Western District of Louisiana,” Furman wrote.
He added that “the Court’s March 10, 2025 Order barring the Government from removing him (to which the Government has never raised an objection and which the Government has not asked the Court to lift in the event of transfer) shall similarly remain in effect unless and until the transferee court orders otherwise.”
Key events
Donald Trump’s rhetoric against judges he disagrees with is tipping the country towards a constitutional crisis, a prominent conservative legal scholar said. Here’s more, from the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly:
Donald Trump has “declared war on the rule of law in America” and is pitching the country into a constitutional crisis, a prominent former conservative federal judge said.
“The president of the United States has essentially declared war on the rule of law in America,” J Michael Luttig told MSNBC. “In the past few weeks … the president himself has led a full-frontal assault on the constitution, the rule of law, the federal judiciary, the American justice system and the nation’s legal profession.
“When the president of the United States wages a war on the rule of law and the federal judiciary alley, America is in a constitutional crisis. The constitutional role of the president is to faithfully execute the laws. Needless to say, the president is doing anything but that at the moment. Most constitutional scholars have long agreed that a constitutional crisis exists at least when the president defies a court order. That’s essentially what the president is doing today and what it appears he intends to do in the future.”
Trump administration asks judge to withdraw noon deadline for details of deportation flights
The justice department has asked a federal judge to cancel his noon deadline for it to provide details of three deportation flights carrying suspected Venezuelan gang members that may have departed the United States on Saturday in violation of a court order.
In a motion to judge James Boasberg, the government criticized his demands for details and said releasing the information would jeopardize national security and diplomacy.
“In a series of orders this Court has requested the Government to provide it details about the movements of aircraft outside of the United States and interactions with foreign nations which have no bearing on any legal issue at stake in the case,” the motion reads.
The judge has signaled he is concerned that they defied his order on Saturday for the planes not to depart, or to turn around if they were in the air, as he considered a challenge to the government’s attempt to deport those onboard under the rarely-used Alien Enemies Act.
Here’s what the justice department said about that:
The Court’s pending questions relate to a comment by the Court to a Government attorney suggesting, incorrectly, that the attorney had the ability to divert aircraft operating at the President’s direction on an extraterritorial mission to remove members of a designated foreign terrorist organization from the United States in connection with one or more sensitive diplomatic agreements requiring months of negotiation. The comment betrayed a complete misunderstanding of the serious national security, safety, regulatory, and logistical problems presented by a fiat from the Court directed at pilots operating outside the United States and was made without regard to whether any such aircraft could feasibly be diverted or even had enough fuel to safely do so. Further, the Court did not pause the hearing to give the attorney an opportunity to act on the remark, nor did it memorialize the remark in the subsequent minute order.
There is no serious dispute that the Government complied with the minute order, and the pending questions are grave encroachments on core aspects of absolute and unreviewable Executive Branch authority relating to national security, foreign relations, and foreign policy. Even addressing the questions in an ex parte submission would result in an immediate flood of media inquiries and demands for the information, subjecting the diplomatic relationships at issue to unacceptable uncertainty about how the Court will address those demands. Worse, the risks created by addressing the Court’s pending questions would undermine the Executive Branch’s ability to negotiate with foreign sovereigns in the future by subjecting all of the arrangements resulting from any such negotiations – as well as the negotiations themselves – to a serious risk of micromanaged and unnecessary judicial fishing expeditions and potential public disclosure.
Trump to speak with Ukraine’s Zelenskyy as negotiations over ceasefire continue
Donald Trump is speaking this morning with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a day after the president spoke to Vladimir Putin as he aims to reach a ceasefire agreement in Ukraine.
A White House official said the call should have started around 10am. Here’s more on the result of Trump’s call with the Russian president yesterday, in which Putin agreed to what could best be described as a partial ceasefire:
A forthcoming book reveals that top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer, who is in a bit of hot water with his party at the moment, thought the GOP would retreat from its embrace of Maga ideology if Donald Trump lost last year’s election. Here’s more, from the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly:
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, insisted Republicans would move on from Donald Trump and go back to a past version of the party even as Trump’s return to power loomed last year, according to the authors of a new book on politics during the Biden administration.
The revelation comes as Trump’s second term has begin in a flurry of radical policy moves that have rocked the US’s political landscape and triggered fears of a slide into authoritarianism. It also comes amid serious Democratic backlash against Schumer for failing to provide stiff enough resistance to Trump’s actions.
Schumer told Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater: “Here’s my hope … after this election, when the Republican party expels the turd of Donald Trump, it will go back to being the old Republican party.”
That insult may cause a splash at the White House in light of Trump’s abuse of Schumer, who he said last week was “not Jewish any more”, over the senator’s response to anti-Israel college protests.
Trump administration pulls $175m in funding from University of Pennsylvania over transgender athletes – report
Donald Trump has ordered the government to cancel $175m in funding to the University of Pennsylvania over its support of transgender athletes, and warned more cuts could come, Fox Business Network reports.
A senior administration official described the move as a “proactive punishment” for the university, and said it could have all its federal funding cut for allowing Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer who graduated in 2022, to compete. The initially cancelled contracts were issued by the departments of defense and health and human services.
The move against the University of Pennsylvania came after Trump withdrew $400m in grants and contracts from Columbia University, alleging it failed to protect students from antisemitism.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian’s Anna Betts, Mahmoud Khalil described himself as a “political prisoner” who the Trump administration was targeting to suppress dissent:
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.
The Trump administration, he said, “is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent”, warning that “visa-holders, green-card carriers and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”
The statement, which Khalil dictated to his friends and family over the phone from an Ice detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, railed against the US’s treatment of immigrants in its custody, Israel’s renewed bombardment of the Gaza Strip, US foreign policy, and what he described as Columbia University’s surrender to federal pressure to punish students.
Judge denies government’s attempt to dismiss Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to his deportation
A federal judge has turned down a request from the Trump administration to dismiss Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to his deportation, and ruled his case should be heard in New Jersey rather than Louisiana, where he is now detained.
In his decision, judge Jesse M Furman said that since Khalil’s attorney filed the challenge to his arrest while he was in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention in New Jersey, the case must be heard there. Government lawyers had asked that his petition be considered in Louisiana, where Khalil had been flown to after being arrested by Ice in New York City and then briefly held in New Jersey.
“Given that the District of New Jersey is the one and only district in which Khalil could have filed his Petition when he did, the statutes that govern transfer of civil cases from one federal district court to another dictate that the case be sent there, not to the Western District of Louisiana,” Furman wrote.
He added that “the Court’s March 10, 2025 Order barring the Government from removing him (to which the Government has never raised an objection and which the Government has not asked the Court to lift in the event of transfer) shall similarly remain in effect unless and until the transferee court orders otherwise.”
Maryland Democrat first in Congress to say Schumer should step aside as leader after government funding flap – report
Democratic congressman Glenn Ivey told constituents at a town hall meeting in his Maryland district that Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s Democratic minority leader, should step down from his position after a bitter intraparty fight over government funding last week, HuffPost reports.
Ivey is the first member of Congress to say Schumer should leave his leadership position, after the leader supplied enough votes to pass a Republican-backed government funding bill through the Senate. House Democrats had near-unanimously rejected the measure, and many in the party believe Schumer, who argued the bill was better than allowing a shutdown that could be exploited by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, gave up leverage he could have used against the administration.
“I respect Chuck Schumer. I think he had a great, long-standing career, did a lot of great things, but I’m afraid that it may be time for the Senate Democrats to get a new leader,” Ivey said.
“I know shutting down the government is not good, I’ve tried to oppose it every time I could, but in this particular instance, it was something that we needed to do.”
Schumer has been under fire from leftwing groups for his support of the bill, which will keep the government running through September but reduce spending on a number of Democratic priorities.
Government faces noon deadline to share details of migrant deportation flights
The justice department has until noon ET to share with federal judge James Boasberg specific details of three flights carrying alleged Venezuelan gang members that may have departed the United States despite him ordering them not to do so.
The case has raised concerns that the Trump administration is ready to violate court rulings in order to carry out its hardline immigration policies, though Donald Trump last night insisted in an interview that he would not allow that.
The government yesterday asserted that two of the three flights had already departed US airspace and hence were beyond Boasberg’s authority when he ordered on Saturday that they refrain from taking off, or turn back if they were in the air. Attorneys also revealed that a third plane, which departed after the judge’s ruling, was carrying migrants who had gone through the normal deportation process, rather than being expeditiously kicked out under the Alien Enemies Act, which is at issue in the case Boasberg is considering.
It’s unclear if what the government shares with Boasberg today will be made public, as justice department attorneys say they have national security concerns about revealing the information, and the judge yesterday said they can file it under seal. Here’s more about the case:
Donald Trump’s zeal to roll back environmental regulations could have real impacts on health in the United States, reports the Guardian’s Oliver Milman, Dharna Noor and Aliya Uteuova:
A push by Donald Trump’s administration to repeal a barrage of clean air and water regulations may deal a severe blow to US public health, with a Guardian analysis finding that the targeted rules were set to save the lives of nearly 200,000 people in the years ahead.
Last week, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provoked uproar by unveiling a list of 31 regulations it will scale back or eliminate, including rules limiting harmful air pollution from cars and power plants; restrictions on the emission of mercury, a neurotoxin; and clean water protections for rivers and streams.
Lee Zeldin, the EPA’s administrator, called the extraordinary series of rollbacks the “greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen” and declared it a “dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion”. One of the most consequential actions will see the EPA reconsider a landmark 2009 finding that greenhouse gases harm human health, which has been used to underpin laws aimed at addressing the climate crisis.
But the rules targeted by Zeldin have immediate, measurable benefits to Americans’ health even without considering the longer-term impacts of the climate crisis. In total, the regulations on the hit list will prevent nearly 200,000 deaths over the next 25 years, by helping avoid an array of heart, respiratory and other health problems worsened by air and water pollution, according to assessments conducted by the EPA itself.
Trump administration planning new tariffs on ‘trillions’ of dollars of imports – reports
The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration is planning additional tariffs on imports to the US running into “trillions” of dollars.
Speaking anonymously to the paper, a person described as familiar with the planning confirmed the sum involved would be in the “trillions” of dollars.
It said that an earlier administration plan to group countries into three broad bands had been rejected, with the plan now “calibrating a new tariff rate for each trading partner”.
Donald Trump has previously described the plan to impose the tariffs on 2 April as a “liberation day”.
George Joseph and Yoav Gonen report for the Guardian
The administration of New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, is continuing to pay more than $500,000 a month to a hotel developer who could potentially provide valuable testimony to prosecutors against the mayor and several of his top allies.
The developer, Weihong Hu, was indicted last month for allegedly bribing a New York City non-profit’s CEO. The indictment charges that she gave the non-profit’s executive stacks of cash and helped him purchase a $1.3m townhouse in exchange for more than $20m in city-funded contracts for her two Queens hotels and a catering company. Hu has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Despite these allegations brought by the US attorney for the eastern district of New York, Adams’s administration has continued to pay one of Hu’s companies more than $542,000 a month to host another non-profit program at one of her Queens hotels, according to two city officials with knowledge of the matter.
Republicans have been put in a bind by Donald Trump’s confrontation with the judiciary and the rebuke handed out by the chief justice of the supreme court, John Roberts.
On his Truth Social platform, the president called for Judge James Boasberg to be impeached, calling him “a troublemaker and agitator” and “crooked”.
In a rare public intervention, Roberts said: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
Political website the Hill quotes a senior Republican strategist saying:
Republicans, by and large, will support Trump publicly because of the situation, we’re dealing with Venezuelan gang members and most Americans agree they should have been deported.
Privately, most congressional Republicans will think this is really going right up to the line on having a constitutional crisis and that situations like this need to be avoided in the future. They do believe in due process.
The former Republican senator Judd Gregg also commented, saying:
When you arbitrarily try to cancel the rule of law, which is what Trump is trying to do, and leave by the edict of an individual, whether he is president or not, you’re creating almost a banana republic-type of event.
How does it affect Republicans? Significantly. Because even though senior Republicans in the Senate may disagree and hopefully would disagree strongly, it’s the president who’s head of the party and is defining the party.
The Associated Press reports that one program shuttered by the Trump administration cutting off funding to USAid is in Vietnam, where clean-up efforts have been halted.
At a former American airbase in southern Vietnam, the removal of toxic soil contaminated with the US army’s Agent Orange defoliant has been abruptly stopped, and work to clear unexploded American munitions and landmines has also been ended.
It quotes an American Vietnam war veteran who has dedicated his time to humanitarian programs in the country for the last three decades, Chuck Searcy, saying: “It doesn’t help at all. It is just another example of what a lot of critics want to remind us of: You can’t depend on the Americans. It is not a good message.”
About 2,200 files comprisng more than 63,000 pages concerning the assassination of John F Kennedy have been posted on the website of the US National Archives and Records administration. The Trump administration claims they were previously classified.
The Associated Press reports that the National Archives says the vast majority of its collection of more than 6m pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have already been released.
No major revelations appear to be contained in the documents so far, with the New York Times reporting on the release with the headline “Here’s what to know. (Oswald still did it.)”
Adam Nagourney wrote for the paper that “Trump, in teasing the release on Monday, said there would be no redactions – but an early review found that some information appeared to have been blocked out.”
The paper quoted historian David J Garrow saying: “This dump is profoundly more impenetrable than all the previous more annotated ones.” Many of the documents released appeared to be hard to read.
Pentagon reportedly looking to cut civilian workforce by at least 50,000
The Pentagon is reported to be hoping to reduce its civilian workforce by about 50,000 to 60,000 people, chiefly through voluntary means, it has been reported.
ABC News quotes one senior defense official saying: “The number sounds high, but I would focus on the percentage, a 5% to 8% reduction is not a drastic one. [It] can be done without negatively impacting readiness, in order to make sure that our resources are allocated in the right direction.”
The cuts are expected to come from freezing hiring, dismissing probationary workers with less than one or two years service, and by people taking up an offer to resign on full pay until the end of September.
Welcome and opening summary …
Hello, and welcome to the Guardian’s rolling coverage of US politics and the second Donald Trump administration. Here are the headlines …
