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    What to Know About the 3 U.S. Citizen Children Removed to Honduras

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    Lawyers say the families wanted the children to remain in the United States. The Trump administration says the mothers requested the children’s removal. The dispute has constitutional stakes.The removal of three children with U.S. citizenship with their families to Honduras last week has prompted alarm that President Trump’s strict immigration enforcement may have crossed “illegal and unconstitutional” lines, as a federal judge in one of the cases put it.Lawyers for the two families involved said the mothers were not given an option to leave their children in the United States before they were deported. But Mr. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said the mothers requested the children’s removal.The cases have added to growing concerns that the Trump administration may be violating the Constitution in its increasingly stringent crackdown on immigration, including removing U.S. citizens, a desire that Mr. Trump has expressed in the past but that legal experts say runs against longstanding prohibitions.Here is a look at the cases and what is at stake.What happened?Three children who are U.S. citizens were removed to Honduras last week as part of the deportation of other members of their families.Two of the children, ages 4 and 7, belong to one Honduran family. The mother of those children had an outstanding deportation order and had shown up to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in on Thursday, said Gracie Willis, the raids response coordinator with the National Immigration Project, who is helping the family’s immigration lawyer with the case.The 4-year-old, Ms. Willis said, has cancer. The mother had shown up to the check-in with a lawyer but was quickly thrust into the deportation process. Her lawyer had no meaningful chance to try to stop the deportation in court, Ms. Willis said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      MAGA Pronatalism Is Doomed to Fail

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      Long before Donald Trump said he wanted to be known as the “fertilization president,” Hungary was trying mightily to promote traditional families and raise its lagging birthrate. “We are living in times when fewer and fewer children are being born throughout Europe,” its prime minister, Viktor Orban, said in 2019. Immigration, he argued, was no answer to this demographic shortfall. “We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children,” he said. “In our minds, immigration means surrender.”He then announced a seven-point “family protection action plan” meant to encourage marriage and baby-making. It included government loans of 10 million Hungarian forints (at the time almost $35,000) to women under 40 when they married, which would be forgiven if they had at least three children. Large families would receive help buying cars and houses, and women who had at least four children would be exempt from personal income taxes for life.Hungary became the intellectual center of the global pronatalist movement, hosting right-wing thinkers from around the world at biannual “demographic summits” in Budapest. In 2021, giving a speech in Virginia about the “civilizational crisis” of low birthrates, JD Vance lauded Orban’s family policies and asked, “Why can’t we do that here?”Now that Vance is vice president, the administration might be about to try. “The White House has been hearing out a chorus of ideas in recent weeks for persuading Americans to get married and have more children,” The New York Times reported on Monday. Proposals include baby bonuses for American mothers and a new affirmative-action program that would set aside almost a third of Fulbright scholarships for people who are married or have kids. Malcolm and Simone Collins, oft-profiled pronatalists hoping to seed the future with their elite genes, reportedly sent the White House a draft executive order establishing a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women with at least six children. (Similar prizes existed in both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.)But if Trump really wanted to arrest the decline in America’s fertility rate — which reached a historic low of 1.62 births per woman in 2023 — the best thing he could do is resign in concert with his entire administration. The crude chauvinism his presidency represents is a major impediment to the creation of healthy families.There are plenty of people on the left who find fear of falling birthrates unseemly. I don’t blame them; the pronatalist milieu is rife with misogyny, white supremacy and eugenics. But rapidly declining fertility really is a problem. It’s likely to lead to stagnant, geriatric societies without enough young working people to maintain, let alone expand, the social safety net.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Are Easter Baskets Getting Out of Hand?

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      Social media feeds are awash in images of lavish baskets overflowing with expensive gifts. Some parents are giving their children bikes. Others are pushing back.“Is it even Easter if you don’t get a new bike?”So asks Judy Newton, a mother of three in Philadelphia, in a recent video on TikTok.In the weeks before Easter this Sunday, social media feeds have been full of videos of parents filling baskets with more than just the usual marshmallow Peeps. Instead, they are packing blankets, stuffed animals, shoes and knickknacks into large wicker baskets, tote bags or plastic buckets. And, yes, they are also giving bikes.“When you see some people post their videos on social media, it looks like Christmas morning,” Ms. Newton said. “Now these kids are getting that for Easter.”Baskets have, of course, long been associated with Easter. But in the age of influencer-driven consumption, Easter has been joined by Halloween (“boo baskets”), Christmas (“brr baskets”), Valentine’s Day and virtually every other holiday (“Leprechaun baskets” for St. Patrick’s Day) as social media encourages people to celebrate by spending lavishly.The Easter Bunny can hardly keep up.

      @kendra.crabtree Easter basket for girls!!! 🫶🏼💕 #easter #easterbasket #easterbasketideas #easter2025 #resurection #jesusisthereason #girlmom #fostermom #girls #spoiled ♬ original sound – KENDRA CRABTREE “Every holiday now, we make baskets,” said Talia Stenson, a mother and social media content creator in Sacramento. “And I think as the years have gone on, people just go above and beyond with these baskets, and now they’re almost a little too overboard.”

      @haileyjoor #easterbasket #easter2025 #boymom #basket #toddlermom #sahm ♬ original sound – mw🎧🧡 We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Takeaways From New Research About A.D.H.D.

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      Scientists who study the condition are wrestling with some fundamental questions about the way we define and treat it.As diagnoses of A.D.H.D. and prescriptions for medications hit new record highs, scientists who study the condition are wrestling with some fundamental questions about the way we define and treat it. More than 15 percent of American adolescents have been diagnosed with A.D.H.D., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including 23 percent of 17-year-old boys. A total of seven million American children have received a diagnosis.Normally, when a diagnosis booms like this, it’s because of some novel scientific breakthrough — a newly discovered treatment or a fresh understanding of what causes the underlying symptoms. I spent the last year interviewing A.D.H.D. scientists around the world for my magazine article, and what I heard from them was, in fact, the opposite: In many ways, we now understand A.D.H.D. less well than we thought we did a couple of decades ago. Recent studies have shaken some of the field’s previous assumptions about A.D.H.D. At the same time, scientists have made important discoveries, including some that are leading to a new understanding of the role of a child’s environment in the progression of his symptoms.At a moment of national concern about our shrinking attention spans, this science suggests that there may be some new and more effective ways to help the millions of young people who are struggling to focus.Below are the key findings from the new research.A.D.H.D. is hard to define — and recent science has made it harder, not easier.A.D.H.D. has always been a tricky condition to diagnose. One patient’s behavior may look quite different from another’s, and certain A.D.H.D. symptoms can also be signs of other problems, from anxiety and depression to childhood trauma and autism spectrum disorder. Twenty years ago, researchers thought they were on the verge of ending that controversy by finding a distinct “biomarker” for A.D.H.D. — a single gene that would reliably predict the disorder, or a physical difference in the brain that you could spot on an M.R.I. But today scientists acknowledge that the search for a biomarker has mostly come up empty, which means the diagnosis remains fluid and somewhat subjective.Adding to the confusion, a study published last October found that only about one in nine children diagnosed with A.D.H.D. experiences consistent symptoms all the way through childhood. More often, the researchers found, symptoms come and go, sometimes disappearing for a few years, sometimes returning. Together with other research, this study has led some in the field to conclude that our traditional conception of A.D.H.D. as an inherent biological fact — something you simply have or don’t have, something wired deep in your brain — is both inaccurate and unhelpful. A new model considers A.D.H.D. differently: not as a disorder you always have in some essential way, but as a condition you experience, sometimes temporarily.Medications like Adderall and Ritalin can have a positive effect on children’s behavior – but the results often don’t last.The biggest long-term study of A.D.H.D. treatments found that after 14 months of treatment, a daily dose of Ritalin did a better job of reducing children’s symptoms than nondrug interventions like therapy or parent coaching. But then the effect started to fade, and by 36 months, the relative benefit of the drug treatment had disappeared altogether. The symptoms of the children in the medication treatment group were no better than those of the ones assigned to behavioral interventions — and no better than a comparison group that was given no intervention at all.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Experts Doubt Kennedy’s Timetable for Finding the Cause of Autism

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      The nation’s health secretary announced that he planned to invite scientists to provide answers by September, but specialists consider that target date unrealistic.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, pledged on Thursday to seek out experts globally to discover the reasons for the increasing rates of autism in the United States.“We’ve launched a massive testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world,” Mr. Kennedy announced at a cabinet meeting held by President Trump. “By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.”“There will be no bigger news conference than that,” Mr. Trump replied.But scientists who have worked for decades to find a cause greeted Mr. Kennedy’s predicted timeline with skepticism.They said that a single answer would be hard to identify in a field of possible contributors including pesticides, air pollution and maternal diabetes.Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and expert on environmental toxins, pointed to the current mass layoffs and cutbacks for research at Mr. Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services as one reason for doubting such quick progress.“Given that a great deal of research on autism and other pediatric diseases in hospitals and medical schools is currently coming to a halt because of federal funding cuts from H.H.S.,” he said, “it is very difficult for me to imagine what profound scientific breakthrough could be achieved between now and September.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon,’ by Grace Lin

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      THE GATE, THE GIRL AND THE DRAGON, by Grace LinFall into a hole and thump into Wonderland. Open a wardrobe and step into Narnia. Board a train on Platform 9¾ and end up at Hogwarts. Crossing thresholds comes naturally to children, which is one of the reasons middle grade fantasy is so popular. The quests are timeless.Cue Grace Lin, whose latest novel, “The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon,” embraces this trope as well. Her setting is a bustling urban center, in the middle of which stands the Old City Gate. Passing through it is uneventful for humans (aside from entering a neighborhood filled with dangling red lanterns and traditional foods and crafts), but for a group of mythical creatures called Gongshi, it’s the only way back to their realm of grasslands, rivers and mountains.Gongshi are lively and fun-loving, but once they’re in the modern world they manifest as stone, standing silent and still. They hide in plain sight in the form of statues, highway pillars and necklace pendants. Lifeless to the human eye, they watch over the city’s populace and protect them from danger. All Gongshi take their job seriously — except for one.Lin’s main character, Jin, is a Gongshi lion cub who would rather play with his friends than play guardian. Early in the book, he becomes angry at his father and accidentally knocks over the Sacred Sphere, a golden ball that is never to be moved. As it bounces out of the house and through the Old City Gate, Jin chases after it, trying desperately to catch it. But he fails, and the gate clangs shut behind him. Jin is now stuck on the wrong side. Will the impetuous cub ever see his parents again?From “The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon.”Grace LinFor the remaining 300 pages, Jin is on a quest to reopen the gate and return home, an adventure that’s both physically and emotionally taxing. Along the way he meets a girl, a sculptor and a dragon who takes the shape of a worm — not all of whom he can trust. Meanwhile, the other Gongshi spend several chapters also trying to reopen the gate, in hopes of rescuing Jin and retrieving the Sacred Sphere.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      RFK Jr. Offers Qualified Support for Measles Vaccination

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      In an interview with CBS, the health secretary also suggested he wasn’t familiar with massive cuts to state funding for public health.In a rare sit-down interview with CBS News, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, recommended the measles vaccine and said he was “not familiar” with sweeping cuts to state and local public health programs.The conversation was taped shortly after his visit to West Texas, where he attended the funeral of an 8-year-old girl who died after contracting measles. A raging outbreak there has sickened more than 500 people and killed two young children.In clips of the discussion released Wednesday, Mr. Kennedy offered one of his strongest endorsements yet of the measles vaccine. “People should get the measles vaccine, but the government should not be mandating those,” he said.A few moments later, however, he raised safety concerns about the shot, as he has previously: “We don’t know the risks of many of these products because they’re not safety tested,” he said.For months, Mr. Kennedy has faced intense criticism for his handling of the West Texas outbreak from medical experts who believe that his failure to offer a full-throated endorsement of immunization has hampered efforts to contain the virus.Moreover, he has promoted unproven treatments for measles, like cod liver oil. Doctors in Texas believe its use is tied to signs of liver toxicity in some children arriving in local hospitals.Throughout the outbreak, Mr. Kennedy has often paired support for vaccines with discussions of safety concerns about the shots, along with “miraculous” alternative treatments.Over the weekend, he posted on social media that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was “the most effective way” to prevent the spread of measles — a statement met with relief from infectious disease experts and with fury from his vaccine-hesitant base.That night, he posted again, this time applauding “two extraordinary healers” who he claimed had effectively treated roughly 300 measles-stricken children with budesonide, a steroid, and clarithromycin, an antibiotic.Scientists say there are no cures for a measles infection, and that claiming otherwise undermines the importance of a vaccination.Later in the CBS interview, Mr. Kennedy was pressed on the administration’s recent move to halt more than $12 billion in federal grants to state programs that address infectious disease, mental health and childhood vaccinations, among other efforts.(A judge has temporarily blocked the cuts after a coalition of states sued the Trump administration.)Mr. Kennedy said he wasn’t familiar with the interruptions, then asserted that they were “mainly D.E.I. cuts,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion programs that have been targeted by the Trump administration.Dr. Jonathan LaPook, CBS’s medical correspondent, asked about specific research cuts at universities, including a $750,000 grant to researchers at the University of Michigan to study adolescent diabetes.“I didn’t know that, and that’s something that we’ll look at,” Mr. Kennedy said. “There’s a number of studies that were cut that came to our attention and that did not deserve to be cut, and we reinstated them.” More

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      RFK Jr. to Kick Off MAHA Tour on Fighting Chronic Disease

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      After a second measles death in West Texas, the health secretary is expected to begin a tour through the Southwest to showcase nutrition legislation, among other priorities.A day after attending the funeral of an unvaccinated child who died of measles, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will kick off a tour through Southwestern states on Monday, spotlighting initiatives that emphasize nutrition and lifestyle choices as tools for combating disease.The Make America Healthy Again tour, which will take Mr. Kennedy through parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, is intended to draw attention to some of the secretary’s common-ground interests, but the first day is scheduled to end with a highly contentious one: a news conference to highlight Utah’s new law that bans adding fluoride to public drinking water supplies.The tour comes as questions grow about the federal government’s response to a measles outbreak in West Texas that has spread to other states. The death of an unvaccinated 8-year-old girl there last week was the second confirmed fatality from measles in a decade in the United States. Mr. Kennedy attended the girl’s funeral on Sunday and met with her family before continuing to Utah.Mr. Kennedy’s staff said that over the course of three days, he planned to visit multiple health centers, including a medical school’s “teaching kitchen” to train students on managing chronic disease using dietary choices. He is scheduled to meet with leaders of Navajo Nation to discuss the cultural and logistical challenges of providing high-quality health care to tribal groups and to visit a charter school in New Mexico that “integrates healthy eating and physical fitness into its daily student life.”During his first months in office, Mr. Kennedy’s policies have been unfurled with great brouhaha, but the secretary himself has been relatively low profile, particularly for an official with his degree of fame. The White House has encouraged Mr. Kennedy to take a more public-facing approach to his role, but the timing of his first major push out in the country will require toeing a careful line around the most conspicuous issue on the table.Public health experts say the measles outbreak that has now infected nearly 500 people in West Texas is driven by low vaccination rates. Mr. Kennedy, who is famously skeptical of vaccine safety, shifted his rhetoric after the little girl’s funeral, posting on X: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jay North, Child Star Who Played ‘Dennis the Menace,’ Dies at 73

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      Mr. North was best known for playing the towheaded Dennis Mitchell on the television series, which ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963.Jay North, who played the well-meaning, trouble-causing protagonist of the popular CBS sitcom “Dennis the Menace” from 1959 to 1963, died on Sunday at his home in Lake Butler, Fla. He was 73.His death was confirmed by Laurie Jacobson, a friend of Mr. North’s for 30 years. The cause was colorectal cancer, Ms. Jacobson said.Mr. North played the towheaded Dennis Mitchell, who roamed his neighborhood, usually clad in a striped shirt and overalls, with his friends, and often exasperated his neighbor, a retiree named George Wilson, who was played by Joseph Kearns. Herbert Anderson played Dennis’s father, and Gloria Henry played his mother.Dennis winds up causing lots of trouble, usually by accident.In one episode, a truck knocks over a street sign, and Dennis and a friend stand it up — incorrectly. Workmen then dig a gigantic hole, meant to be a pool for a different address, in Mr. Wilson’s yard.The show, which was adapted from a comic strip by Hank Ketcham, presented an idyllic, innocent vision of suburban America as the 1950s gave way to the tumultuous ’60s.But things were not easy for Mr. North behind the scenes.Many years after “Dennis the Menace” ended, Mr. North said that his acting success came at the cost of a happy childhood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More