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      Woman in Florida deported to Cuba says she was forced to leave baby daughter

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      A mother deported to Cuba reportedly had to hand over her 17-month-old daughter to a lawyer while her husband, a US citizen, stood outside unable to say goodbye.Heidy Sánchez was told she was being detained for deportation to Cuba when she turned up at her scheduled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) check-in appointment in Tampa, Florida, last week.She was told her child, who has health problems and is still breastfeeding, had to stay in the US but could visit her in Cuba, NBC reported.The Trump administration is embroiled in controversy for removing children who are US citizens from the United States with a parent when the adult is deported. In this case, the child was reportedly not allowed to leave with her mother even though it was what both parents said they wanted.The administration’s anti-immigration crackdown has put many people in a difficult position because they risk being summarily detained and deported when turning up for routine Ice check-ins. Many people have followed this process without issue for years, and do not have a criminal record – but failing to turn up can bring an order for forcible removal from the US.“They never gave me the option to take my daughter,” Sánchez told NBC.Sánchez’s husband, Carlos Valle, is a US citizen. Both parents separately told NBC that their daughter is now crying all the time and calling for her mother, while Sánchez struggles to get wifi service in Cuba to sing her daughter to sleep.Valle was not allowed into the room where Sánchez was being interviewed by Ice agents with their daughter, attorneys told NBC. When told she was being deported, she was denied the chance to see her husband or hand over their daughter to him, with a lawyer having to fulfil that role instead.Claudia Cañizares, a Miami-based attorney for the family, said she tried to prevent the deportation but was given “the runaround” by the authorities. The Florida Democratic congresswoman Kathy Castor has said she is lobbying the administration on the family’s behalf.Ice did not respond to a request for comment from NBC. The Guardian has submitted a request for comment. More

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      Pam Bondi turning DoJ into Trump’s ‘personal law firm’, top experts warn

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      Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has taken radical steps to target his political foes, back a harsh agenda against undocumented immigrants and help business allies – steps which underscore its politicization under the attorney general Pam Bondi and undermine the rule of law, say ex-prosecutors and legal experts.Some even say that the department has in effect become Trump’s “personal law firm”.Since taking office a second time, Trump has relied on staunch loyalist Bondi and an elite group of justice department lawyers to investigate critics from his first administration plus political opponents and curb prosecutions of US business bribery overseas.Ex-prosecutors point to how Bondi and the department’s top lawyers have halted some major prosecutions, fired or forced out lawyers who didn’t meet Maga litmus tests, and were instructed by Trump to investigate a key Democratic fundraising vehicle as examples of how Trump and Bondi have politicized the justice department.Critics note that once Bondi became attorney general, she issued a memo establishing a “weaponization working group”, which pushed a false narrative that investigations by a special counsel into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election and his improperly retaining classified documents were politically motivated.The transformation of the Department of Justice under Bondi has put a premium for staff on “personal loyalty” to Trump, say ex-prosecutors, which has damaged the rule of law and provoked multiple rebukes from courts and the resignations or firings of veteran prosecutors.“The steps Trump and Bondi have taken using DoJ to punish enemies and reward allies while firing those who object radically transforms and politicizes DoJ in a way that not even the worst who have gone before them ever contemplated,” the former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig said.“Trump’s transmuting DoJ into his personal law firm is, in effect, a rejection of the founding principle of the rule of law.”Other ex-prosecutors see the department marching in dangerous legal lockstep with Trump’s agenda and damaging its mission to protect the rule of law.“Bondi and DoJ lawyers have certainly tried to make personal loyalty to Trump the justice department’s guiding principle,” said the Columbia law professor and ex-federal prosecutor Daniel Richman.Critics note Bondi has also echoed Trump’s dangerous rhetorical blasts against judges who have ruled against his administration’s sweeping and haphazard drive to deport undocumented immigrants by labeling them “low-level leftist judges who are trying to dictate President Trump’s executive powers”.After the FBI arrested a Milwaukee judge for allegedly obstructing the arrest of an undocumented immigrant, Bondi went on Fox News to threaten other judges who may defy their agenda. “They’re deranged. I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law, and they are not. We will come after you and we will prosecute you,” she said.Hundreds of lawyers and staff in the justice department’s civil rights division are now leaving the storied unit as its focus has shifted to Trump priorities such as pursuing cases against elite universities and student protesters, while curbing some civil and voting rights cases it has traditionally pursued, say critics.Other actions by the department under Bondi, an ex-Florida attorney general who later worked on Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment trial in 2020, and some elite justice department lawyers reflect its strong allegiance to Trump and have sparked strong criticism.They include an investigation of two officials, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, who served in his first term and clashed with him for, respectively, not backing his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and for voicing strong concerns in a 2018 New York Times op ed about how Trump threatened democracy.In another radical move, Trump issued an executive order in April telling the justice department to investigate unverified allegations that ActBlue, a major Democratic online fundraising vehicle, had engaged in improper fundraising schemes.Trump also reportedly prodded the Department of Justice to drop a five-count criminal fraud prosecution of the New York mayor, Eric Adams, that the elite justice department southern district had worked on for months, as Trump was eager to secure public support from Adams for his immigration agenda in the city.Some actions also appear aimed at helping allied business interests. In April, the justice department abruptly closed a cryptocurrency unit that was launched in 2022 and had successfully prosecuted dangerous criminal schemes involving North Korean hackers and other fraudsters, but which had come under fire from cryptocurrency leaders who helped fund Trump’s campaign last year.Trump’s justice department also has paused for six months prosecuting businesses that have been charged with violating the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which bars paying bribes to win deals abroad.Other moves seem to reflect Trump’s enmity towards journalists who report critically about his administration. In a reversal of recent department policy, Bondi revoked journalists’ free-speech protections by greenlighting authorities to force journalists to reveal confidential sources in leak investigations. Meanwhile, Bondi also seems willing to protect political allies, such as when she declined to open an investigation into “Signalgate” despite extensive documentation that top national security officials had improperly shared classified information as an attack was imminent in Yemen against the Houthis.Ex-prosecutors say that Bondi and the justice department’s willingness to make personal loyalty to Trump paramount damages the rule of law.Critics note the justice department has been rebuked by federal courts for stonewalling court orders and questions about some of its deportation actions and for not bringing home a Maryland man originally from El Salvador who was sent to a notorious Salvadorian prison as a result of what Ice has called an “administrative error”.“Never in history has DoJ broken so defiantly from respecting, as it’s obligated to do, the decisions of federal courts,” said the former prosecutor Ty Cobb, who was a counsel in the White House during Trump’s first term. “This is a war that Trump and Bondi are waging against the rule of law.”Richman noted more broadly that “outside the immigration area, most of what Bondi has actually done so far, however, has been negative – like dropping the case against Mayor Adams and cases against FCPA defendants and firing prosecutors”.Richman added: “We will soon see how this administration fares when it actually seeks a result in court, even if it’s only defensive. As the proceedings in the recent Maryland deportation case highlighted, courts demand a candor and respect for law that the justice department’s leadership finds inconsistent with the loyalty it demands.”Some veteran prosecutors who quit the department after Trump and Bondi took office say that the pair’s first moves raised red flags that prompted their departures.“Bondi has made clear – before becoming attorney general, and since – that she wants the Department of Justice to support President Trump unconditionally,” said Mike Romano, who resigned from the department in late March.Before he quit, Romano spent almost four years working on the prosecutions of Trump allies who stormed Congress on 6 January 2021 in an effort to thwart Joe Biden’s certification by Congress.Romano said that the night Bondi was confirmed “she issued a memorandum to all justice department employees in which she threatened to fire employees who refuse to defend the Trump administration’s actions, advance its arguments or sign its briefs. She and her subordinates have made good on those threats by firing people and forcing them to resign.”Romano stressed that “some of my colleagues were fired, and others were demoted, because they prosecuted people who rioted at the Capitol. At the public integrity section, four of my managers resigned, in lieu of being fired, when they refused to sign a motion to dismiss the case against Mayor Adams. These actions send a clear message to people still at the department: if you want to keep your job, disagreement won’t be tolerated.”Similarly, Barbara McQuade, a former prosecutor for Michigan’s eastern district who now teaches law at the University of Michigan, warned that Bondi’s memo setting up a “weaponization working group” actually “weaponizes law enforcement and undermines public confidence in government” because it pushes a “false narrative” about the two investigations of Trump by the former special counsel Jack Smith.McQuade emphasized that “in fact federal grand juries returned indictments in both cases, meaning that they found probable cause that the crimes were committed. DoJ’s Principles of Federal Prosecution prohibit prosecutors from making charging decisions on the basis of partisan politics.”Pointing to a further symbol of the justice department’s politicization under Bondi, McQuade cited her statement that a federal judge “supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans” and charged he “cannot be objective” because he issued a temporary restraining order blocking deportation of Venezuelan men to El Salvador without due process.“There is no evidence to suggest that the judge did anything other than apply the law to the case,” McQuade stressed. “He was applying the law to a highly suspect use of the Alien Enemies Act, a statute to be used during wartime.”Assessing Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice, Rosenzweig said the department was betraying its historic mission to protect the rule of law.“DoJ isn’t just another department like agriculture or HHS. It has a unique place in the US government as the home of the ‘rule of law’ and the guardian of what makes America special,” he said.“Thomas Paine said: ‘In America, the law is king.’ Trump wants to make his word the law and himself the king.” More

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      Judge rules Alien Enemies Act does not allow White House to deport alleged gang members

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      The 18th-century Alien Enemies Act does not authorize Donald Trump to deport Venezuelan immigrants alleged to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang, a federal judge in Texas ruled on Thursday.The ruling from US district judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr is significant because it is the first sweeping and permanent injunction directly addressing whether the government can use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to deport alleged members of Tren de Aragua. Other judges have issued similar but more limited and preliminary rulings.The decision applies only to migrants detained in Rodriguez’s judicial district, the southern district of Texas, which includes Brownsville, McAllen and Houston. Trump appointed Rodriguez to the federal bench in 2018.Trump invoked the act in March declaring Tren de Aragua (TdA) a foreign terrorist organization that was invading the US. The rarely used law allows the president to deport people without full due process in times of war. The law is supposed to apply whenever there is a war between the United States and a foreign nation and when there is “any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States”.“While the Proclamation references that TdA members have harmed lives in the United States and engage in crime, the Proclamation does not suggest that they have done so through an organized armed attack, or that Venezuela has threatened or attempted such an attack through TdA members,” Rodriguez wrote in a 36-page opinion. “For these reasons, the Court concludes that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and, as a result, is unlawful.”The Trump administration has relied on the law to aggressively deport Venezuelan migrants, defying temporary injunctions from other judges telling the White House to halt the removals.On 7 April, the US supreme court ruled that those being removed under the law needed to be provided adequate notice that they were being removed under the Alien Enemies Act so that they might be able to file a legal challenge. Less than two weeks later, the supreme court ordered a halt to a deportation of migrants in Texas after being presented with evidence they weren’t being given adequate chance to file their removals. More

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      White House uses newly revealed allegations to support refusal to return Kilmar Ábrego García to US

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      The legal team behind Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man unlawfully deported to El Salvador, is demanding that the Trump administration “bring him back and give him a full and fair trial” as the administration releases new domestic abuse allegations.In a press release issued on Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cited allegations made by Ábrego García’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, that he abused her on several occasions in 2019 and 2020.Sura, a US citizen, filed a petition for protection against her husband in 2020, according to the new documents. She claimed to local police in Maryland that Ábrego García had kicked and verbally abused her, detained her against her will, and locked their children in a bedroom, among other accusations.She also claimed that, in 2019, he dragged her from a car by her hair. Ábrego García was never charged, according to Axios.The documents note that shortly after filing for the protective order in 2020, Sura asked the court to rescind it. She had said that their son’s birthday was approaching and Ábrego García had agreed to counseling.In response to the revelations from the DHS, Ábrego García’s lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, told the Guardian that “the whole country has spent the last month talking about Kilmar Ábrego García, and speaking for or against Kilmar Ábrego García” and that “the one person who hasn’t yet had the chance to speak is Kilmar Ábrego García”.“The government needs to bring him back and give him a full and fair trial. They can introduce all of this evidence, and he can respond in his own voice,” he said.Sandoval-Moshenberg also noted to Axios that the allegations were not related to the deportation.This move from the DHS comes on the heels of the administration resurfacing a separate protective order Ábrego García’s wife filed in 2021, also alleging domestic violence. In a statement, Sura said she filed the order “in case things escalated” but said that “things did not escalate”.“I decided not to follow through with the civil court process,” she said in April.“No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect. That is not a justification for Ice’s action of abducting him and deporting him to a country where he was supposed to be protected from deportation.”The Alliance for Immigrant Survivors argued in a letter last week that the White House had “weaponized” Sura’s decision to seek a temporary protection order in 2021 “in order to justify her husband’s illegal kidnapping and indefinite incarceration”.“To be clear, nothing in Kilmar Ábrego García’s history gives the government permission or an excuse to violate his right to due process or legitimize his illegal removal from the US,” the letter reads.The letter also said that the administration posted a court document online that exposed Sura’s family’s home address, forcing her and her children “into hiding”.“Attempts to traumatize and intimidate survivors, and turn their experiences into political theater, are unacceptable and damaging,” the letter adds.Despite a 2019 court order prohibiting him from being sent to El Salvador, Ábrego García was deported from the US to El Salvador in March. The Trump administration has repeatedly accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang, which was recently designated as a foreign terrorist organization; just last month, the administration posted documents online to bolster their claim that Ábrego García is a gang member.Ábrego García’s lawyers say that he had never been convicted of a crime in the US or El Salvador. They, along with his wife and labor union, have also repeatedly denied that he is a member of MS-13.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShortly after the deportation, the Trump administration admitted in a court filing that it was the result of an “administrative error”. In the weeks since, administration officials have reversed course and insisted that Ábrego García was not wrongly deported.A federal judge, backed up by the supreme court, ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Ábrego García’s release and provide evidence of the actions it has taken to get him back.Trump officials have argued that US courts lack jurisdiction since Ábrego García is not a US citizen and no longer in the country. The legal fight over his return is ongoing.On Thursday, Senators Chuck Schumer, Chris Van Hollen, Tim Kaine and Alex Padilla said they would require the Trump administration to produce a report on wrongful deportations to El Salvador.Ábrego García entered the US illegally in 2012 and was arrested in March 2019 along with three other people while looking for work at a Home Depot in Maryland.Police officers at the Prince George’s county police department said at the time that the men were “loitering” and identified Ábrego García as a member of MS-13, citing his clothing and information from a confidential source.Ábrego García challenged the determination, arguing that it was “hearsay”.Later that year, an immigration judge ruled that Ábrego García could not be deported back to El Salvador because he faced a credible fear of persecution. He was granted a “withholding of removal” order, preventing him from being sent to the Central American country.But on 12 March 2025, Ábrego García was detained by Ice officers who his lawyers say “informed him that his immigration status had changed”. He was deported to El Salvador, without a hearing, three days later and sent to a maximum-security prison.The White House has also accused Ábrego García of human trafficking due to a 2022 traffic stop during which he was found driving eight people from Houston to Maryland. He was not charged with any infraction, according to DHS, but received a warning citation for driving with an expired license. His wife said in a statement that he worked in construction and that he sometimes transported groups of workers between job sites.Ábrego García has since been moved out of the mega-prison to another prison in El Salvador. More

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      North Carolina helps kids earn college degrees in high school. It’s a lifeline for immigrant families

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      Daniel is a high school senior in rural North Carolina. Soon, he will graduate with a high school diploma, an associate degree and a paralegal certification from a local community college. He’s just 17, but he’ll be able to apply for positions at law firms and begin earning an almost $50,000 salary straight out of high school.“The early college program really set me up for success because even though I’m young, I’ll be able to help financially support my family,” said Daniel, a first-generation Salvadorian American who is only using his first name to protect undocumented family members. “I’ve done all of this because of support from my mother and family. I owe everything I’ve accomplished to them and I want to give back.”It’s been a long road for Daniel, who was accepted into a competitive Cooperative Innovative high school while still in middle school. These small, public high schools are located on North Carolina community college campuses, and they enable teens to simultaneously work toward completion of a high school diploma and an associate degree. It’s one of three paths that eligible North Carolina high school students can take as part of Career and College Promise (CCP): a free, statewide dual enrollment program established by the North Carolina state legislature in 2011, and that also facilitates college transfer or further technical education. The program helped Daniel get ahead of the curve, and so far it’s paid off. The teenager was just accepted into Vanderbilt University.According to North Carolina educators who spoke to the Guardian, dual enrollment is one of the state’s best kept secrets – especially for first-generation Latino students like Daniel.And because CCP is open to all qualified high school students, the program offers an extraordinary benefit to undocumented young people. As college students, undocumented immigrants are ineligible for most financial aid and otherwise considered “non-residents”, requiring them to pay out-of-state tuition at more than double the cost to residents. However, undocumented high school students participating in dual enrollment can attend up to four years of community college free of charge.But thanks to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant vision for the US, students from immigrant families are now afraid – and so too are North Carolina community college educators and administrators, who fear their schools will be targeted for their efforts to extend educational opportunities to Latino communities. For safety reasons, most of the students, educators and administrators who spoke to the Guardian chose to remain anonymous.Engines of equity and accessLatinos have been the fastest growing demographic in North Carolina since the 1990s, with young Latino citizens in particular accounting for much of the growth. Many of these young people are the US citizen children of immigrants or come from mixed-status families where only some family members have authorization to be in the US.But even with 30 years to adjust to shifting demographics, the education system in North Carolina was largely ill-equipped to serve Latino students – especially in rural communities where a large percentage of the state’s Latino population resides.One rural community college staff administrator responsible for Latino engagement has worked tirelessly over the last few years to reach students like Daniel, whom they helped usher through College and Career Promise. They see it as part of their job to spearhead efforts to bring bilingual programs and classes to their community college, hire members of the immigrant community to teach, and perform outreach at local Latino community events. They also work closely to problem-solve with individual students, whether that means referring an undocumented student to scholarship opportunities or walking a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) recipient through the process of obtaining employer-sponsored in-state tuition. Just a few short months ago, these were efforts the staff administrator would have trumpeted – but times have changed.“I am afraid it might call attention to us in a negative way,” they said. “I saw how parents were too scared to drive to schools in [North Carolina] … and how people knew which roads not to take due to the police presence. I don’t want to widely call attention to us as being immigrant-friendly when the goal of this administration is to quash that.”There are valid reasons to be fearful. The Trump administration’s targeting and defunding of institutions with DEI policies have led many to preemptively comply out of fear of losing federal funding, and now that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) rescinded a previous policy warning against carrying out immigration enforcement in “sensitive locations”, schools are fair game for immigration raids. In recent weeks, hundreds of foreign college students have also had their visas revoked by the Trump administration, though it changed course and restored some students’ status after widespread media attention and court challenges.It was because of “serious concerns for the safety of students and the entire campus community” that officials from another North Carolina community college located in a mid-sized city initially spoke on the record, but later decided to remain anonymous. An administrator responsible for Latino student engagement there told the Guardian that when community colleges are forced to hide their efforts to make education more accessible, it also means hiding services from students and community members who need them the most.Alice Dolbow, a senior adviser at the North Carolina non-profit LatinxEd, issued an important reminder to schools now afraid to make these efforts public: helping immigrant and first generation students access higher education is “not against the law”. Her organization focuses on developing Latino education leaders in higher education.“I think many districts found themselves unexpectedly transformed by the increase in immigration,” Dolbow said. “Interestingly, community colleges are catching up at a much faster rate than our K-12 schools and our four-year universities. Programs like CCP are great for all students; they are engines of equity and access for all North Carolinians, including undocumented students. I want to be clear that any programs that happen to also help undocumented students access higher education are not ‘loopholes’. We are not ‘taking advantage of the system’. We are operating within the system and under the laws we have, and we are doing what the laws and system allow.”Latino students in the state – many of whom come from mixed-status families – are also a lifeline for North Carolina community colleges. Before 2020, community college enrollment in the state was on a slow decline. Then, 69,000 CCP students participated in dual enrollment during the pandemic. While community colleges don’t track the immigration status of students in the CCP program, it’s clear that more targeted outreach to the state’s young, growing Latino population can transform community college enrollment and the trajectory of Latino and immigrant families in the state.In many ways, community colleges are primed to serve immigrant communities. They offer flexible schedules; English classes for adults; continuing education; and curriculum programs that can lead to certificates, diplomas and degrees. In recent years, North Carolina has made considerable leeway to recruit Latino students of all kinds, in part, by hiring Latino educators to oversee Latino student engagement and outreach.“It is our job as community colleges to respond to the economic needs of the region, and it’s our job to educate the workforce that responds to those local economic needs,” explained the administrator from the mid-sized city. “If you have this growing population, it’s your job to serve them and by doing that, you are better serving your state.”There’s data to support the assertion. In 2018, the statewide network of 58 public community colleges that make up the North Carolina community college system partnered with population scientists to examine demographic shifts in the state. Latino student outreach was identified as a primary tool to increase community college enrollment and thus, help North Carolina remain competitive in the changing economy.The state has only three “Hispanic-serving Institutions” (HSI), defined in federal legislation as accredited, degree-granting public or private nonprofit institutions of higher education with 25% or more total undergraduate Hispanic full-time equivalent student enrollment. But that’s enough to rank North Carolina among the top 10 states in emerging HSIs, and each of North Carolina’s three existing HSIs are community colleges.‘College is … starting to feel impossible’Still, gaps in community colleges’ outreach, engagement and investment in Latino students become starkly visible when considering the experiences of undocumented students.Olivia, who is also using a pseudonym, is a North Carolina 18-year-old who benefited from dual enrollment as a high school student. After graduation, she’s struggled to pay the exorbitant cost of community college tuition as an undocumented student. Well-meaning community college administrators instructed her to apply for federal student aid, not understanding that her immigration status bars her from receiving it. Others referred her to scholarships she spent hours applying for, only to later learn the scholarships were only available to US citizens.“I feel like every year, I’ve learned about something different that I can’t do,” said Olivia, who came to the US when she was six months old. “I can’t legally work. I can’t get a driver’s license. I can’t leave the country. College is starting to feel like another thing that’s impossible. I’m starting to really worry that I have to give up on school.”Olivia’s dream is to be a pediatrician, but currently she can only afford one community college class a semester. To her parents, it appears as if she’s not working hard enough on her education.“But I’m working myself to the bone,” Olivia insisted. “I just feel like I’m not getting anywhere, and there’s a lot of pain in wanting to be something greater than you’re allowed to be.”Gabriela (also using a pseudonym) understands how hard it is to plan for the future when options are limited. When she was 14, she moved from El Salvador to North Carolina, where she became the first in her family to graduate from high school.CCP would have gone a long way to help the now 21-year-old toward her ultimate goal of becoming an elementary school teacher, but no one ever informed her of the program.Community college administrators who spoke to the Guardian said there are many challenges to getting the word on CCP out. Many high schools don’t have bilingual staff to inform parents of these opportunities. High school counselors tend to focus on advanced learning and programs for students who are headed to traditional four-year colleges instead of CCP.“As an adult, I’ve heard about all of these opportunities that would have made such a difference in my life. I’m 21 and starting from scratch,” said Gabriela. She is legally able to work in the US and has a job as a teacher’s assistant at an elementary school. Like Olivia, Gabriela has encountered administrators who were confused about why she didn’t qualify for in-state tuition. She told another administrator she was undocumented and that person later asked for her social security number.Working at a school only reinforces exactly what she wants to do professionally – and how that career path seems increasingly out of reach. Gabriela works at a school with many undocumented and mixed-status families. Under the Trump administration, many parents are afraid of participating in school life, fearful that something as innocuous as going on a field trip will require government-issued identification that they can’t provide and thus, potentially getting them on Ice’s radar.“I want to comfort them, but at any moment I know that I can be the one who is deported,” Gabriela said. “My work permit can be taken away at any moment, and what happens if I’ve enrolled in school? There are no good options. I want to remain hopeful, but I also feel like: do I really want to go back to school now? Putting myself through school will be such a sacrifice. What if I can’t do anything with my education?”North Carolina organizations such as UndocuCarolina and Pupusas for Education work to fill information and financial gaps in the state for undocumented students, Daca recipients and young people with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). But according to Glenda Polanco, too many North Carolina students are forced to make “decisions about their future out of desperation”.Polanco is the program director of Pupusas for Education, which started in 2016 to provide scholarships to undocumented students through food sales and has since turned into a non-profit organization to support Latino students. Polanco, now 32, was able to take advantage of early college as a North Carolina high school student, but she didn’t understand at the time that college classes would no longer be free after she graduated high school. If not for an extraordinary act of kindness in the form of a North Carolina couple who paid Polanco’s way through university, college would have been out of the realm of possibility.Polanco acknowledges that she was “lucky”. but says she can still remember moments of sheer panic about the cost of school and her future as an immigrant with a temporary status.“With the young people we work with … there is this daunting, insanity-provoking question: why does it have to be this hard?” Polanco said. “I don’t really have a good answer for them, and the anxiety and depression that comes with that uncertainty takes a toll. There is a psychological impact on the immigrant community – including on our parents. They want to give us the world, but none of us can really say what’s going to happen tomorrow.” More

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      We’ve never seen a more error-prone, incompetent presidency | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      As we pass the 100-day mark of Donald Trump’s second term, it’s time to take note of a key element of how this administration governs: by mistake. I’m being serious. Have we ever seen a more error-prone, incompetent and fumbling presidency? In their rush to implement a barely concealed authoritarian agenda, this administration is producing a litany of blunders, gaffes and slip-ups. At times, they’ll seek to hide those mistakes by projecting a shield of authoritarianism. At other times, they’ll claim the mistake as a method of walking back an unpopular authoritarian agenda item. Either way, it’s a unique style of rule, one that I call “rule by error”.On 11 April, for example, the White House’s taskforce on antisemitism sent Harvard University a letter detailing a laundry list of actions that Harvard would have to undertake if the university wanted to avoid having over $2bn of multiyear federal grants frozen by the government. But the actions were extreme and would have resulted in the end of Harvard’s intellectual independence. Days later, Harvard wrote back: “Nah, I’m good,” they told Trump’s people. (More precisely, they wrote that the university is “not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration”.)Harvard’s response garnered much popular support against a bullying Trump administration, including a photo caption in the Onion that read: “Nation Can’t Believe It’s On Harvard’s Side.” Then, a few days later, several unnamed officials told the New York Times that the Trump administration’s letter, which had been signed by three officials from the administration and sent on official letterhead from an official email account, had been sent to Harvard by mistake. Oops.Maybe it was sent in error, which frankly still speaks poorly of this administration, but it’s also possible that as the wind began blowing favorably in Harvard’s direction, some in the administration were looking for a way out of the trap they had set for themselves.But that’s hardly the only error this administration has admitted to, nor is it the worst, not by a long shot. Kilmar Ábrego García, an Salvadorian man who lived in Maryland with his wife and five-year-old child, was grabbed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents on 12 March and deported three days later to El Salvador, despite having a deportation protection order forbidding him from being sent there. In a 7 April court filing, Robert Cerna, the acting Ice field office director, admitted that Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error”.Did owning up to this error result in the return of Ábrego García? Absolutely not. Trump’s administration continues to this day to defy the courts while doubling down on its own failures. During a recent Oval Office meeting between the US president and Salvadorian president, Nayib Bukele, White House aide Stephen Miller disputed even the existence of an error, despite all the evidence. “The only mistake that was made is a lawyer put an incorrect line in a legal filing that since has been relieved of duty,” Miller said, presumably referring in his tortured English to the fact that the administration fired Erez Reuveni, a career justice department attorney who represented the government in court during the Ábrego García case. The lesson here? You’re better off shooting the messenger than correcting your own mistake.If those errors aren’t enough evidence to constitute a philosophy of error, there’s still plenty more. What about the official notice the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent to some Ukrainian refugees in the United States. More than 240,000 Ukrainians have been settled in the United States under a program titled “U4U” that began under Joe Biden’s presidency. On 3 April, some Ukrainians, it’s unclear how many, received a notice telling them: “DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole,” referring to their legal status to stay in the country. “Unless it expires sooner, your parole will terminate 7 days from the date of this notice,” the email said. Then it warned its recipients: “Do not attempt to remain in the United States–the federal government will find you. Please depart the United States immediately.”This would unquestionably be a terrifying communication to receive. When CBS News, which first reported the story, asked DHS about the notice, the government replied: “A message was sent in error to some Ukrainians under the U4U program. The U4U parole program has not been terminated.” Sorry!Or how about the time when Nicole Micheroni, a US-born American citizen and immigration lawyer received an email from the Trump administration telling her to self-deport. “It is time for you to leave the United States,” the email read. “If you do not depart the United States immediately you will be subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States.” Oops! They did it again.Or what about using the messaging app Signal to plan a bombing campaign, and then adding a journalist to this top-secret chat? Who hasn’t made this mistake before! And then done it again!How about the widely accepted fact that the calculation the administration has used to determine their outrageous and misguided tariff policy is just plain wrong. The American Enterprise Institute, a center-right thinktank, looked into Trump math and found that it inflates the tariffs that Trump assumes countries are levying on the US by four times. Then again, who cares!Remember when they told us that the US government was sending $50m of condoms to Gaza? The aid was actually sent to a province in Mozambique named Gaza and was earmarked for HIV and tuberculosis prevention. No condoms were part of the aid. Asked about the error, Elon Musk said: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” but then he repeated part of the lie by saying: “I’m not sure we should be sending $50m worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly.”There are plenty more mistakes (tariffs on penguins, anyone?), but you get the point. Trump constantly complains about the existence of some shadowy “deep state”, when in reality he and his entire administration ought to be in a deep state of shame, considering the constant stream of errors and blunders that constitute their rule. No wonder Trump’s job approval rating at the 100-day mark is at a piddly 42%, the second lowest of any president in the last 80 years, according to a new NPR/PBS/Marist News poll. (The lowest? Trump in his first term, by a single point.)People on the right often view Trump as some sort of political genius. Michael Moore, on the other hand, once labeled Trump an “evil genius”. But all I see is a man and an administration who use mistakes to cover up evil practices and use evil practices to excuse mistakes. That’s not genius. It’s dangerous. And if we don’t understand “rule by error” and how to dismantle it, we will all be doomed to live out its mistakes.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York More

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      Trump news at a glance: US and Ukraine sign long-awaited minerals deal; Noem doubles down on deportation threat

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      Ukraine and the US have signed a deal pushed by President Donald Trump that will give the US preferential access to Ukrainian mineral resources and fund investment in Ukraine’s reconstruction.The accord establishes a joint investment fund for Ukraine’s reconstruction as Trump tries to secure a peace settlement in Russia’s three-year-old war in Ukraine.After fraught negotiations, which almost collapsed at the last minute, the agreement is central to Kyiv’s efforts to mend ties with Trump and the White House, which frayed after he took office in January.Here are the key stories at a glance:US and Ukraine sign minerals deal after months of negotiationsThe US and Kyiv have signed an agreement to share revenues from the future sale of Ukrainian minerals and rare earths, sealing a deal that Donald Trump has said will provide an economic incentive for the US to continue to invest in Ukraine’s defense and its reconstruction after he brokers a peace deal with Russia.Read the full storyKristi Noem says Ábrego García would be deported if returned to USKristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, said that if Kilmar Ábrego García was sent back to the US, the Trump administration “would immediately deport him again.” Ábrego García is a Salvadorian man who the Trump administration has admitted was mistakenly deported from Maryland last month. Noem’s comments come as a federal judge again directed the Trump administration to provide information about its efforts so far, if any, to comply with her order to retrieve Ábrego García from an El Salvador prison.Read the full storyTrump officials contacted El Salvador president about Ábrego García, sources sayBehind the scenes, the Trump administration has been in touch directly with the Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele in recent days about the detention of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, according to two people familiar with the matter.The nature of the discussion and its purpose was not clear because multiple Trump officials have said the administration was not interested in his coming back.Read the full storyTrump pressures journalist to accept doctored photo as realDonald Trump lashed out at an ABC journalist in a tense TV interview to mark 100 days of his second term in office, in which among other confrontations he angrily pushed correspondent Terry Moran to agree with him that a doctored photo was actually real, telling him: “Why don’t you just say yes.”Read the full storyUS economy shrinks in first quarter of Trump 2.0The US economy shrank in the first three months of the year, according to official data, triggering fears of an American recession and a global economic slowdown. Donald Trump, who returned to the White House promising to “make America great again”, sought to blame Joe Biden for the figure.Read the full storyUS supreme court open to religious public charter schoolsThe US supreme court’s conservative majority seemed open to establishing the country’s first public religious charter school as they weighed a case that could have significant ramifications on the separation of church and state.Read the full storyColumbia student freed after federal judge orders releaseMohsen Mahdawi walked out of immigration detention after a federal judge in Vermont ordered his release. The Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University had been detained and ordered deported by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being charged with a crime.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Detainees at an immigrant detention center in the small city of Anson, Texas, sent the outside world a message as a drone flew by: SOS.

      The US is treading the path followed by democracies that descended into authoritarianism and dictatorship, former ambassadors to countries that underwent autocratic takeovers warned.

      The Trump administration is moving to cancel $1bn in school mental health grants, saying they reflect the priorities of the previous administration.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 29 April 2025. More

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      Trump officials contacted El Salvador president about Kilmar Ábrego García, sources say

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      The Trump administration has been in touch directly with the Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele in recent days about the detention of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, according to two people familiar with the matter.The nature of the discussion and its purpose was not clear because multiple Trump officials have said the administration was not interested in his coming back to the US despite the US supreme court ordering it to “facilitate” Ábrego García’s release.The contacts produced no new developments after Bukele rejected the outreach, the people said. The supreme court had ordered the administration to return Ábrego García to the US so that he would face immigration proceedings as he would have, had he not been sent to El Salvador.The discussions appeared to be an effort by the Trump administration to window dress the underlying legal case and build a paper trail it could reference before the US district judge Paula Xinis, who previously ruled that Donald Trump raising the matter in the Oval Office was insufficient.Ábrego García has since been moved out of Cecot, the mega-prison officials known as the terrorism confinement center, to another prison in El Salvador since the supreme court ruling which the administration has repeatedly tried to manufacture uncertainty around or otherwise misrepresent.The recalcitrance from the US administration to comply has been on display for weeks as senior Trump advisers have become increasingly determined to use it as a case to test the extent of presidential power and its boast that the courts have no practical way to ensure quick compliance with orders.At a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said he would “never tell” if he had been in touch with Bukele. CNN earlier reported Rubio has had discussions with Bukele directly. The New York Times reported there had been a diplomatic note sent to Bukele.“I would never tell you that. And you know who else I’ll never tell? A judge,” Rubio said as he sat next to Trump, adding it was “because the conduct of our foreign policy belongs to the president to the united states and the executive branch, not some judge”.And in an interview with ABC News that aired the night before, the US president himself said he “could” tell El Salvador to return Ábrego García.When it was raised to him that he had the ability to call Bukele and say “send him back right now”, Trump deflected responsibility. “I’m not the one making this decision. We have lawyers that don’t want to do this,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe remarks could yet pose major headaches for the justice department in court as it prepares in the coming weeks to face a series of probing questions from Ábrego García’s lawyers, in writing and in depositions, about the administration’s efforts to comply with the supreme court ruling.By Trump saying that his lawyers had told him not to call Bukele, it could open the department up to bruising questions about whether they were deliberately flouting the order and place them in threat of contempt.After a closed-door hearing on Wednesday in federal district court in Maryland, Xinis refused the justice department’s request to extend a pause in discovery proceedings, ordering it to respond to questions from Ábrego García’s lawyers about his detention by this Friday.Xinis also said in an expedited deposition schedule that Ábrego García’s lawyers could interview up to six administration officials – including Robert Cerna, a top official at Ice, and Joseph Mazarra, the acting general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security – by next Thursday. More