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How Trump Got Rich
It had nothing to do with brains!
President Trump’s executive order sent a signal to Republicans that the administration was serious about winding down the Education Department. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesSome excerpts from Wikipedia:
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital in the New York City borough of Queens, the fourth child of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. He is of German and Scottish descent. He grew up with his older siblings, Maryanne, Fred Jr., and Elizabeth, and his younger brother, Robert, in a mansion in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. Fred Trump paid his children each about $20,000 a year, equivalent to $265,000 a year in 2024. Trump was a millionaire at age eight by contemporary standards. Trump attended the private Kew-Forest School through seventh grade.
He was a difficult child and showed an early interest in his father’s business. His father enrolled him in New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, to complete secondary school. Trump considered a show business career but instead in 1964 enrolled at Fordham University. Two years later, he transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics.
He was exempted from the draft during the Vietnam War due to a claim of bone spurs in his heels. …Starting in 1968, Trump was employed at his father’s real estate company, Trump Management, which owned racially segregated middle-class rental housing in New York City’s outer boroughs.
In 1971, his father made him president of the company and he began using the Trump Organization as an umbrella brand. Roy Cohn was Trump’s fixer, lawyer, and mentor for 13 years in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1973, Cohn helped Trump countersue the U.S. government for $100 million (equivalent to $708 million in 2024) over its charges that Trump’s properties had racially discriminatory practices. Trump’s counterclaims were dismissed, and the government’s case was settled with the Trumps signing a consent decree agreeing to desegregate; four years later, Trumps again faced the courts when they were found in contempt of the decree.
Before age thirty, he showed his propensity for litigation, no matter the outcome and cost; even when he lost, he described the case as a win. Helping Trump projects, Cohn was a consigliere whose Mafia connections controlled construction unions. Cohn introduced political consultant Roger Stone to Trump, who enlisted Stone’s services to deal with the federal government.
Between 1991 and 2009, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six of his businesses: the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, the casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts company.
In 1992, Trump, his siblings Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert, and his cousin John W. Walter, each with a 20 percent share, formed All County Building Supply & Maintenance Corp. The company had no offices and is alleged to have been a shell company for paying the vendors providing services and supplies for Trump’s rental units, then billing those services and supplies to Trump Management with markups of 20–50 percent and more.
The owners shared the proceeds generated by the markups. The increased costs were used to get state approval for increasing the rents of his rent-stabilized units. …Trump has said he began his career with “a small loan of a million dollars” from his father and that he had to pay it back with interest.
He borrowed at least $60 million from his father, largely did not repay the loans, and received another $413 million (2018 equivalent, adjusted for inflation) from his father’s company.
Posing as a Trump Organization official named “John Barron,” Trump called journalist Jonathan Greenberg in 1984, trying to get a higher ranking on the Forbes 400 list of wealthy Americans. Trump self-reported his net worth over a wide range: from a low of minus $900 million in 1990, to a high of $10 billion in 2015. In 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.3 billion and ranked him the 1,438th wealthiest person in the world.
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Supreme Court Temporarily Blocks Order Requiring Return of Wrongly Deported Migrant
The chief justice, acting on his own, issued an “administrative stay,” a brief pause meant to give the court time to consider the matter. The justices are expected to act in the coming days.
By Adam Liptak, Reporting from Washington, April 7, 2025
An appellate court panel likened Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s inadvertent deportation to an act of official kidnapping. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Monday temporarily blocked a trial judge’s order directing the United States to return a Salvadoran migrant it had inadvertently deported.
The chief justice, acting on his own, issued an “administrative stay,” an interim measure meant to give the justices some breathing room while the full court considers the matter.
The order came just hours after the administration asked the court to block the trial judge’s order instructing the government to return the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, by 11:59 p.m. on Monday.
Judge Paula Xinis of the Federal District Court in Maryland had said the administration committed a “grievous error” that “shocks the conscience” by sending Mr. Abrego Garcia, to a notorious prison in El Salvador last month.
In the administration’s emergency application, D. John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general, said Judge Xinis had exceeded her authority by engaging in “district-court diplomacy,” because it would require working with the government of El Salvador to secure his release.
“If this precedent stands,” he wrote, “other district courts could order the United States to successfully negotiate the return of other removed aliens anywhere in the world by close of business,” he wrote. “Under that logic, district courts would effectively have extraterritorial jurisdiction over the United States’ diplomatic relations with the whole world.”
In a response to the court, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said their client “sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafka-esque mistake.”
They added: “The district court’s order instructing the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return is routine. It does not implicate foreign policy or even domestic immigration policy in any case.”
Mr. Sauer, the administration’s lawyer, said it did not matter that an immigration judge had previously prohibited Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador.
“While the United States concedes that removal to El Salvador was an administrative error,” Mr. Sauer wrote, “that does not license district courts to seize control over foreign relations, treat the executive branch as a subordinate diplomat and demand that the United States let a member of a foreign terrorist organization into America tonight.”
The administration contends that Mr. Abrego Garcia, 29, is a member of a violent transnational street gang, MS-13, which officials recently designated as a terrorist organization.
Judge Xinis, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said those claims were being based on “a singular unsubstantiated allegation.”
“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” she wrote, “and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said there was no evidence that he posed a risk.
“Abrego Garcia has lived freely in the United States for years, yet has never been charged for a crime,” they wrote. “The government’s contention that he has suddenly morphed into a dangerous threat to the republic is not credible.”
Just before the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit unanimously rejected the department’s attempt to pause Judge Xinis’s ruling.
In a sharply worded order, two judges likened Mr. Abrego Garcia’s inadvertent deportation to an act of official kidnapping.
“The United States government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process,” wrote Judge Stephanie D. Thacker, who was appointed by Mr. Obama. “The government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”
Judge Thacker wrote that Judge Xinis’s order “requires only that the United States government exercise the authority and control it must have retained over the detainees it is temporarily housing in El Salvador,” adding that “requiring that the government effectuate and facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return is not a novel order.”
Judge Robert B. King, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, joined Judge Thacker’s opinion.
A third member of the panel, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, issued a concurring opinion agreeing that no stay was warranted but stopping short of the majority’s position that Judge Xinis had the power to tell the government to demand Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return.
“There is no question that the government screwed up here,” Judge Wilkinson wrote. But he drew a distinction.
“It is fair to read the district court’s order as one requiring that the government facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release, rather than demand it,” wrote Judge Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. “The former seems within the trial court’s lawful powers in this circumstance; the latter would be an intrusion on core executive powers that goes too far.”
Mr. Sauer said Judge Xinis’s order was one in a series of rulings from courts exceeding their constitutional authority.
“It is the latest in a litany of injunctions or temporary restraining orders from the same handful of district courts that demand immediate or near-immediate compliance, on absurdly short deadlines,” he wrote.
In a separate emergency application, the administration has asked the justices to weigh in on its effort to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants to the prison in El Salvador. The court has not yet acted on that application.
In filings to the court, the administration claimed that the migrants are members of Tren de Aragua, a violent street gang rooted in Venezuela, and that their removals are allowed under the act, which grants the president authority to detain or deport citizens of enemy nations.
The president may invoke the law in times of “declared war” or when a foreign government invades the United States. On March 14, President Trump signed a proclamation that targeted members of Tren de Aragua, claiming that there was an “invasion” and a “predatory incursion” underway as he invoked the wartime law.
In the proclamation, Mr. Trump claimed that the gang was “undertaking hostile actions” against the United States “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise” of the Venezuelan government.
Alan Feuer and Abbie VanSickle contributed reporting.
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2) With Trump’s Return, Netanyahu Faces Fewer Restraints On Gaza Than Ever
On the war, President Trump is more aligned than his predecessor with the aims of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his right-wing coalition.
By Michael D. Shear and Aaron Boxerman, April 8, 2025
Michael Shear and Aaron Boxerman reported from London
There was a time, not long ago, when Israel’s resumption of the war in the Gaza Strip three weeks ago — a renewed offensive that has already claimed more than a thousand casualties — would have unleashed fierce Western pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s prime minister.
The condemnations would have been swift, in public and in backroom conversations. The demands for restraint would have come from Europe and the White House, where during four years, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. sometimes tried, and often failed, to contain Mr. Netanyahu’s impulses.
Now Mr. Biden is gone, and President Trump has made it clear that he has no intention of continuing the finger-wagging of his predecessor. Europe is distracted by Mr. Trump’s trade war, and Mr. Netanyahu has consolidated his coalition’s majority in Israel’s Parliament, giving him more political space to act.
On Monday, Mr. Netanyahu sat next to Mr. Trump in the Oval Office as the president lauded him as “a great leader.” The prime minister did not get relief from the 17 percent tariffs Mr. Trump said will be levied on Israel — one of the key objectives of his trip — nor did he get immediate U.S. backing for military action on Iran’s nuclear facilities. And at times he appeared nonplused as Mr. Trump spoke at length about trade, immigration and the U.S. economy.
But on the overriding question of Israel’s renewed military campaign in Gaza, Mr. Trump was largely quiet. He made no mention of the Israeli attack on ambulances and a fire truck that came to light last week, and that killed 15 emergency workers, or the April 3 strike that killed dozens of people, including children, in a school-turned-shelter.
“I definitely think Netanyahu is trying to take advantage of what he thinks is increased room to maneuver,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. She said the prime minister appeared emboldened by Mr. Trump’s silence in the face of the escalating Israeli attacks inside Gaza after a cease-fire that lasted just two months.
The result, say observers inside and outside of Israel, is a prime minister unleashed, with fewer guardrails to constrain his actions in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. It means that Mr. Netanyahu is free to resume his overhaul of his country’s judicial system without denunciations from Washington. And it means a changed dynamic in a region that has been battered by 18 months of armed conflict.
Israel has now barred aid from entering Gaza for over a month. Israeli forces patrol parts of southern Lebanon and Syria, where Israeli leaders say they will remain indefinitely. One enemy, the powerful Lebanese militia Hezbollah, was badly weakened in war with Israel; another, the Assad regime in Syria, was toppled by rebels.
Critics of Mr. Netanyahu note that he has resisted global opinion for years, hawking himself to the Israeli public as a leader who would defy the world to protect the country. He shrugged off American and global criticism over the intensity of Israel’s response after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, in a military campaign that has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry.
“What little pressure there was could be dismissed and was dismissed,” said Daniel Levy, the president of the U.S./Middle East Project, a group based in London and New York.
Still, the difference between then and now is striking, they say.
On Gaza, Mr. Biden repeatedly expressed support for Israel’s right to defend itself, prompting some in the United States to accuse him of not putting enough pressure on Israel to stop the deaths of civilians. But Mr. Biden did criticize the massive airstrikes during Israel’s military campaign, at one point calling it “over the top” and saying that the suffering of innocents has “got to stop.”
Last June, he accused Mr. Netanyahu of seeking to prolong the war for domestic political reasons. And while he never cut off the flow of weapons to Israel, Mr. Biden did delay the delivery of America’s largest bombs. Before the war, Mr. Biden also pressured the Israeli prime minister to temper his efforts to overhaul his country’s judicial system, a plan that critics called a blatant power grab and an existential threat to Israel’s liberal democracy.
“They cannot continue down this road — I’ve sort of made that clear,” Mr. Biden said, in a remarkably direct rebuke to one of America’s closest allies.
Now, that pressure has evaporated.
Mr. Trump has not challenged Mr. Netanyahu on the judicial plan. And the president's own actions — attacking judges and law firms that have displeased him — may be seen by Mr. Netanyahu as a kind of permission slip for his own efforts, analysts say.
One former senior U.S. official said Mr. Netanyahu sees Mr. Trump as a “fellow traveler” when it comes to his efforts to reshape the judiciary to his liking.
Nadav Shtrauchler, a former adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, said that the prime minister had experienced “a complete reversal” under the Trump administration that allowed him “much more room to operate.”
Mr. Netanyahu has even begun to echo Mr. Trump’s own rhetorical flourishes, repeatedly attacking his opponents as members of a “deep state” dedicated to persecuting him. “I haven’t heard any concerns from the Trump administration about ‘Israeli democracy’ or pressure on Netanyahu,” said Mr. Shtrauchler. “Just the opposite.”
At home, Mr. Netanyahu has stabilized his political position by removing almost every threat to his hard-right governing coalition, said Mr. Shtrauchler. And while his critics might consider the moves autocratic, he added, Mr. Netanyahu’s constituency remains resolutely behind him, giving him a free hand.
Defying his detractors, since the Oct. 7 attacks, the worst security failure in Israeli history, the prime minister has clawed himself back to a position of strength. Last month, he moved to fire his intelligence chief and his attorney general, actions seen as part of an effort to consolidate power and eliminate rivals.
In Europe, leaders who once spoke out forcefully about Mr. Netanyahu’s actions are distracted by Mr. Trump’s tariffs and the scramble to head off a global financial crisis. And the continent is still shaken by Mr. Trump’s pivot away from decades-long trans-Atlantic alliances and his outreach toward Russia.
Mr. Netanyahu appears increasingly unconcerned with what Europe thinks.
In recent days, his government blocked two British members of Parliament from entering Israel on a fact-finding mission, prompting David Lammy, the foreign secretary, to issue an angry statement calling it “unacceptable, counterproductive, and deeply concerning.”
In February, Mr. Netanyahu joined with Russia and Mr. Trump to oppose a European effort at the United Nations to express support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. And last week, Mr. Netanyahu received red-carpet treatment in Hungary from Viktor Orban, the country’s authoritarian leader, who is close with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Netanyahu thanked Mr. Orban for withdrawing his country from the International Criminal Court, which in November issued arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But Mr. Netanyahu’s latest actions in Gaza have been the most striking.
Opposition to his decision to restart the fighting has been fairly muted in Israel, though public polls suggest that most people want a deal to end the fighting and free the hostages held in Gaza, and that majorities of voters do not support the prime minister and his coalition. And Mr. Trump’s comments about Gaza’s future have changed the way Mr. Netanyahu talks about the region’s fate.
The president declared in February that he would support a mass deportation of Palestinians, to create a “Riviera” on the Gaza Strip, a proposal that would be a severe violation of international law. Since then, Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians have more openly talked about a future in which Israel controls the area indefinitely. On Tuesday, after Mr. Trump repeated the idea, Mr. Netanyahu praised it as a benefit to the people of Gaza.
“They’re locked in. And what is wrong with giving people a choice?” Mr. Netanyahu said, while also insisting falsely that Israel had not kept people inside Gaza from leaving for years. The prime minister said that he and the president had talked over lunch about countries which he claimed were willing to take in Palestinians who wanted to leave Gaza. Egypt and Jordan have repeatedly refused to do so.
“The president has a vision,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “Countries are responding to that vision. We’re working on it.”
In Israel, the idea that Palestinians would be deported from Gaza was once the province of a far-right fringe. It is now endorsed by the U.S. president and repeated by Mr. Netanyahu, and Israel’s defense minister has established an office to oversee the policy.
“The encouragement, the boost it has given is to a camp in Israel which is very extreme, very zero-sum and was gaining power but is now really feeling it can operationalize things,“ Mr. Levy said.
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3) ‘Where’s Alex?’ A Beloved Caregiver Is Swept Up in Trump’s Green Card Crackdown
An autistic young man loses his caretaker as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown expands to permanent U.S. residents convicted of minor crimes years ago.
By Miriam Jordan, Photographs by Caroline Gutman, April 9, 2025
Luke Ferris, right, and Alfredo Orellana, his caretaker.
Alfredo Orellana, 31, was not just a caregiver for Luke Ferris, a 28-year-old with severe autism. The pair worked out at the gym, got tacos and played video games together. They exchanged elbow bumps.
“It’s like Luke got a bro to hang out with,” said Mr. Ferris’s mother, Lena, from their home in Falls Church, Va.
Then suddenly, after four years, Mr. Orellana, who goes by Alex, was gone, locked up in an immigration detention center nearly 2,000 miles away.
A permanent U.S. resident, or green card holder, Mr. Orellana is facing deportation for trying to swindle a store out of $200 eight years ago when, his wife said, he was struggling with substance abuse.
The detention of Mr. Orellana and other green card holders is the latest sign that the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration is expanding far beyond people who are in the country illegally. Tasked with fulfilling President Trump’s campaign promise to carry out mass deportations, federal agents have been detaining permanent U.S. residents convicted of years-old minor offenses and moving to deport them.
Their families are reeling, as are some of the people they work for, like the Ferrises, who had come to rely on, and even cherish, Mr. Orellana’s care for Luke.
Ms. Ferris recently flew to Texas to visit Mr. Orellana, who is being held at the El Valle detention center there.
“How could anyone support getting rid of an amazing person providing a vital service to an American?” asked Ms. Ferris, who noted that her son’s care — and thus Mr. Orellana’s salary — is covered by Medicaid.
A labor shortage looms over the fast-growing industry that provides care to senior and disabled Americans, and immigrants like Mr. Orellana have been a key source of workers.
But under Mr. Trump, the Department of Homeland Security has taken a sprawling view of who should be targeted for deportation. A D.H.S. document reviewed by The New York Times said that Mr. Orellana was subject to removal from the United States for obtaining $200 “by false pretenses.”
Under immigration law, that constitutes a crime involving “moral turpitude” that can place a green card holder at risk of deportation, especially on re-entering the United States.
At the time of his trouble with the law, Mr. Orellana was in his early 20s and abusing drugs. After being convicted, he went to rehab. He became a peer supporter to others in recovery and found a calling caring for developmentally disabled people, according to his wife and employer.
Green card holders convicted of certain crimes can be deported. But the government has usually opted not to target those people unless they have committed particularly serious crimes, according to legal experts.
Mr. Orellana’s lawyer, Ben Osorio, compared arresting green card holders like his client to ticketing people for driving five miles over the speed limit, and fining everyone who jaywalks.
“We are living in an era of maximum enforcement,” he said.
Having a green card is a necessary step toward citizenship. As of 2023, there were 13 million green card holders in the United States. About nine million of them were eligible to become citizens, because they had been permanent residents for at least five years or had been married to a citizen for three years.
But many green card holders opt not to pursue citizenship. The application is expensive and the process is bureaucratic, requiring interviews with federal officials, extensive paperwork and a civics exam. Now, though, the difference between legal “permanent” residency and citizenship has become strikingly clear to many green card holders.
“It is an erroneous expectation that you are guaranteed to be here indefinitely when you have a green card,” said Gerald L. Neuman, an immigration scholar at Harvard Law School.
Green card holders concerned about being ensnared in the same dragnet as Mr. Orellana and others have flooded lawyers with queries. Several lawyers said they had been advising those with even minor offenses on their record to avoid international trips. Many of those people had traveled abroad without any problem before Mr. Trump took office, the lawyers said.
Erlin Richards, a green card holder since 1992, was returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic last month when he was detained at Kennedy Airport in New York, based on a 2006 conviction for marijuana possession in Texas. He had paid a fine and never spent a day behind bars, said his lawyer, Michael Z. Goldman.
In the two decades since he was convicted, Mr. Richards, 43, an electrician from the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent who has three U.S.-born children, said that he had been to Canada and his home country. But that was before Mr. Trump entered office.
In a phone interview from immigration detention in Elizabeth, N.J., he said that a federal officer at J.F.K. suggested that he had no discretion to let him go. “Haven’t you been watching the news? Trump is president now. We have to detain you,” Mr. Richards recalled being told.
His lawyer, Mr. Goldman, pointed out that “he’s locked up for carrying a substance that is legal in many states, including his home state of New York.”
Mr. Orellana, the caregiver, had traveled to South America to visit family, and last year he vacationed in Costa Rica with his wife, Anita, who is American. He cleared passport inspection on his return to the United States, where he has lived since age 4, and resumed caring for Mr. Ferris 40 hours a week.
In January, the couple flew to El Salvador to visit Ms. Orellana’s relatives. By the time they landed at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, Mr. Trump was in the White House.
At passport control, Mr. Orellana was taken aside by the authorities. He was kept for 12 hours in a room with his wife, she said, and instructed to return on Feb. 20 with official court documents.
The couple returned to Dulles with the documents, expecting that the matter would be settled. Instead, agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement took Mr. Orellana into custody.
“We were so shocked. We just could not believe it. We were both sobbing,” recalled his wife, an administrator at a clinic who is six months pregnant.
Mr. Orellana was detained for two weeks in Virginia before being roused at 3 a.m. to board a bus to Pennsylvania. From there he was flown, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, to Louisiana, his wife said. Then he was transferred to Raymondville, Texas, some 240 miles southeast of San Antonio near the U.S.-Mexico border, where he remains.
Ms. Orellana said that she was trying to “push through” in spite of the toll that the ordeal had taken on her. They have a mortgage and car payments to keep up with.
The Ferris family canceled the baby shower that they had planned for the couple. Their hope is that Mr. Orellana will win his case in immigration court on April 25 and arrive home before his daughter’s due date, July 4.
Back in Virginia, Luke Ferris has three sisters he adores, but his relationship with Mr. Orellana is unique.
“Luke never had a person his age spend that much time with him,” Ms. Ferris said. “Alex taught him what it is to be and have a friend,” she said.
Luke longs for Mr. Orellana, and repeatedly asks, “Where’s Alex? Where’s Alex?” His parents have decided to tell him that his pal was visiting his ailing grandfather.
As the confinement dragged on, Ms. Ferris started writing her son letters, pretending to be Mr. Orellana. Luke receives them with glee and hangs them on the lime-green wall by his desk.
“I’m sorry my phone is broken,” said one recent letter, in which “Mr. Orellana” justified not calling. “I should be home in late April or May. Please start up my car and visit the cats.”
Luke Ferris visits Mr. Orellana’s house weekly to complete the tasks.
And every day, he wonders aloud whether another letter has arrived.
“Mailman?”
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4) Netanyahu Sticks By Trump’s Brazen Proposal for Gazans to Leave
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said his government was serious about “voluntary” migration, after an Oval Office meeting where President Trump appeared to have lost interest.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 9, 2025
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel visited the White House two months ago, President Trump sold him a brazen dream: The United States would take control of the Gaza Strip, move out the Palestinian population of about two million souls and turn the devastated seaside enclave into a glittering “riviera.”
This week, as the two leaders faced reporters again after meeting in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump appeared to have moved on, holding forth instead on U.S. border policy, his new tariffs, the plight of the hostages held in Gaza and the latest showstopper for Middle East policy — the opening of talks with Iran to curb its nuclear weapons program.
But Mr. Netanyahu did not let the Gaza idea — however unfeasible or potentially illegal — fade like a mirage. He raised it himself, saying that he and Mr. Trump had discussed the vision, including which countries might agree to accept Gazans.
Mr. Netanyahu and his government say they are serious about the idea but emphasize that they are speaking about facilitating the “voluntary” migration of Palestinians, in an apparent attempt to avoid any suggestion of ethnic cleansing. Critics say that it would hardly be voluntary if Gazans left, regardless, given that so many of their homes have been smashed to rubble.
Days after Mr. Trump’s original announcement, the Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, said he was establishing a special administration within the ministry focused on voluntary migration from Gaza. In late March, he appointed a senior ministry official, Yaakov Blitshtein, to head it.
Mr. Netanyahu told the reporters on Monday at the Oval Office that Gaza was the only war zone where civilians were “locked in,” unable to leave.
“We didn’t lock them in,” he said, without acknowledging years of severe Israeli restrictions on movement in and out of the enclave for what the country says are security reasons, a longstanding Israeli naval blockade of the territory and Israel’s refusal to allow Gazans to live within its borders. Egypt also strictly controls its border with the enclave.
“It’s going to take years to rebuild Gaza,” Mr. Netanyahu said, referring to the vast destruction wrought by Israel’s 18-month campaign, which was ignited by the October 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel. “In the meantime, people can have an option. The president has a vision. Countries are responding to that vision,” he added.
Israeli officials would not say which third countries they were talking to about taking in Palestinians. Mr. Trump had suggested regional neighbors like Jordan and Egypt. But he already appeared to be backing off from his relocation idea barely two weeks after proposing it, after those two countries flatly rejected the notion and said that peace could be achieved only by giving the Palestinians statehood.
Egypt has refused to take in large numbers of Palestinians during the war, fearing that their arrival would have a destabilizing effect and that ultimately they would not be allowed back into Gaza.
Mass displacement has fraught connotations in the region. About two-thirds of Gaza’s population is made up of Palestinian refugees who lost their homes during hostilities surrounding the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and their descendants. At that time, about 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from what is now Israel in what is known by Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”
Some alternative names of potential hosts have been floated by Israelis, such as Somaliland, a self-declared breakaway republic in northwestern Somalia in the Horn of Africa, but they may appear less appealing than remaining in Gaza.
Still, several countries have agreed to take in limited numbers of Gazans for humanitarian reasons, including Romania and Italy, which have treated children with medical conditions. And on Wednesday, President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia said his country was ready to offer temporary shelter to a first wave of around 1,000 medical evacuees from Gaza and children orphaned by the war there.
“We are ready to evacuate those who are injured or traumatized, and orphans,” he said as he was about to depart for a trip to the Middle East and Turkey. “We are ready to send planes to transport them,” he said, adding that the move was not meant for permanent resettlement.
When a reporter asked Mr. Trump on Monday if his Gaza emigration proposal was still on the table, he replied vaguely that it was “a concept that I had” and that people seemed to like, before passing the question over to Mr. Netanyahu.
Mr. Katz, the Israeli defense minister, said in a statement last month that Israel was “determined to realize the vision of U.S. President Donald Trump.” He said that checks by his ministry suggested that “at least 40 percent of Gaza’s residents are interested in migrating to other places.”
The administration, according to the statement, is supposed to ease exit routes by land, air and sea. But details remain scarce. The defense ministry declined requests for comment or information, as did the military’s department responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs and Israel’s population and borders authority.
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5) Death of Palestinian American Boy in West Bank Sparks Outcry
Amer Rabee, 14, was fatally shot by Israeli forces in the West Bank, according to his family. Community leaders gathered in New Jersey to demand justice.
By Shayla Colon, Published April 8, 2025, Updated April 9, 2025
“We cannot let this horrific crime be swept under the rug,” Rania Mustafa, the executive director of the Palestinian American Community Center, said at a news conference on Tuesday. Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times
Members of northern New Jersey’s Palestinian community gathered on Tuesday to condemn the recent killing of a Palestinian American boy by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank.
The boy, Amer Rabee, 14, was shot and killed in the town of Turmus Aya on Sunday, his family said. Two other Palestinian American teenagers who were with Amer at the time were shot and injured by the soldiers, the family said.
Amer, who was originally from Saddle Brook, N.J., moved with his family to the West Bank around 2013. The family said that since then, it had divided its time between the West Bank and New Jersey.
At a news conference on Tuesday, community leaders stood at a small wooden lectern at the Palestinian American Community Center in Clifton, N.J., to decry Amer’s death and call on the U.S. government to investigate the shooting. They were joined by Rami Jbara, an uncle of Amer’s, and by Amer’s father, Mohammed Rabee, who called in remotely from the West Bank.
“We cannot let this horrific crime be swept under the rug,” said Rania Mustafa, the center’s executive director.
“Our stories are consistently ignored,” she added. “Our people are consistently dehumanized. Our deaths are repeatedly ignored.”
The outcry over Amer’s death comes weeks after Israel launched a series of attacks on Gaza, breaking a cease-fire agreement in its war against Hamas. Just over 900 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers in the West Bank since Hamas’s attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to the United Nations. Roughly 30 Israelis have been killed in the West Bank during the same period.
When asked on Tuesday about Amer’s death, Israel’s military did not acknowledge him by name.
“During a counterterrorism activity in the area of Turmus Aya, I.D.F. soldiers identified three terrorists who hurled rocks toward the highway, thus endangering civilians driving,” the military said in a statement, using its initials. “The soldiers opened fire toward the terrorists who were endangering civilians, eliminating one terrorist and hitting two additional terrorists.”
At the news conference, Mr. Rabee recounted the events surrounding his son’s death. He said he had been at home taking a nap on Sunday when Amer left to pick almonds. Mr. Rabee said he later woke to a phone call in which he learned that his son had been wounded.
Mr. Rabee said he had called the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem seeking medical help, but that the aid did not arrive in time. He said he learned an hour later that his son was dead and that his body had been taken to an Israeli military camp. It was there, several hours later, that he found his son’s body in a bag, Mr. Rabee said.
Ayoub Ijbara, one of the teenagers with Amer on Sunday, was shot three times, but managed to flee and find help, according a statement from the community center, whose members spoke to Ayoub’s family. Surveillance footage showed that the soldiers fired 47 shots at the three boys while they were picking almonds, according to the statement.
“Amer was shot in the chest and fell backward to the ground,” the statement said. “The other two boys went to help him, but too many shots were fired and so they began to retreat.”
Ayoub, 15, had a six-hour surgery on Monday and is scheduled to have another procedure on Wednesday, according to the statement. The boy was born in Little Ferry, N.J., the community center said, and moved to Tennessee before he and his family relocated to Turmus Aya.
Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey called Amer’s death an “atrocity” in a social media post on Monday. The state’s governor, Philip D. Murphy, demanded in a statement that the Israeli government provide answers about why Amer had been killed, lamenting the “tragic loss of life.”
Asked about the shootings during a briefing on Tuesday in Washington, a State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, said that U.S. officials were “certainly aware of that dynamic,” but stopped short of criticizing the Israeli government, citing an ongoing investigation.
“We send condolences to the families involved. These were teenagers,” Ms. Bruce said. She noted reports that the Israeli military believed it was stopping an act of terrorism, adding: “We need to learn more about the nature of what happened on the ground.”
The Israeli military sent a black-and-white video with its statement on Tuesday that it said showed Amer and the two other teenagers throwing rocks.
Mr. Rabee said he had seen the video and that there was no way to tell if Amer was one of the three people. Even if he was, Mr. Rabee said, Amer did not deserve to die.
“This land is called holy land,” Mr. Rabee said. “There’s supposed to be peace in this land, not war.”
Lara Jakes contributed reporting.
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6) We Should All Be Very, Very Afraid
By Erwin Chemerinsky and Laurence H. Tribe, April 9, 2025
Mr. Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Tribe is an emeritus university professor of constitutional law at Harvard.
Jose Cabezas/Reuters
Of all the lawless acts by the Trump administration in its first two and a half months, none are more frightening than its dumping of human beings who have not had their day in court into an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador — and then contending that no federal court has the authority to right these brazen wrongs.
In an astounding brief filed in the Supreme Court on Monday, the solicitor general of the United States argued that even when the government concedes that it has mistakenly deported someone to El Salvador and had him imprisoned there, the federal courts are powerless to do anything about it. The Supreme Court must immediately and emphatically reject this unwarranted claim of unlimited power to deprive people of their liberty without due process.
That would seem to be the obvious response. It was Thomas Jefferson who called the right of habeas corpus to protect against unlawful detention one of the “essential principles of our government.”
Jefferson’s concerns are underscored by the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a lawful resident of the United States, whom the federal government admits it wrongly deported to El Salvador. He has been incarcerated in El Salvador along with some 200 Venezuelan migrants deported there last month by the Trump administration, which says they were involved in criminal and gang activity.
On Friday, Judge Paula Xinis of the United States District Court in Maryland ordered Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return. In a subsequent opinion issued on Sunday, she wrote that “there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention or removal.” His detention, she added, “appears wholly lawless.”
One might think the Trump administration would at least try to correct its grievous mistake by attempting to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release through diplomatic channels. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has been called “a great friend of the United States” by Marco Rubio, President Trump’s secretary of state.
But no, the Trump administration does not seem willing to lift a finger to fix the calamity it created for Mr. Abrego Garcia and his family.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, responded to Judge Xinis’s order by saying the judge should contact President Bukele because “we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.” Her suggestion that a federal judge play the role of a diplomat, rather than provide legal relief to Mr. Abrego Garcia, is unworthy of any presidential administration.
Why hasn’t the Trump administration acted to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release? After all, he is there because of a government screw-up.
The answer can only be that it is using this case to establish a truly chilling proposition: that no one can stop the Trump administration from imprisoning any people it wants anywhere else in the world. In its brief to the Supreme Court, the administration argues that the only remedy available to a person in custody is a writ of habeas corpus, a court order that a person in custody be brought before the court to determine if the detention is lawful. But the administration also contends that federal courts have no authority to issue such a writ when the person is held in a foreign prison.
There can be no doubt about what this means.
There would be nothing to stop the government from jailing its critics in another country and then claiming, as it is now, that the courts have no jurisdiction to remedy the situation. Armed with this power, the government would know that Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the F.B.I. or any federal law enforcement agency could apprehend any people, ignore the requirements for due process and ship them to El Salvador or any country that would take them. These individuals would have no legal recourse whatsoever from any American court. The administration could create its own gulags with no more judicial review than existed when Stalin did the same thing in the Soviet Union.
Judge Xinis ordered the government to return Mr. Abrego Garcia by 11:59 p.m. on Monday. The Supreme Court paused that order on Monday to allow the justices to review the matter. But it shouldn’t take much time for the court to conclude that every minute Mr. Abrego Garcia is wrongly incarcerated is a minute too long.
The Supreme Court also handed down a ruling on Monday in a case involving the Trump administration’s mid-March decision to remove noncitizens in the United States who are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua without any hearing at all. Five Venezuelans went to court to block the president’s plan, and a Federal District Court judge did just that. But roughly 200 Venezuelans were deported anyway. The administration has argued that, if it needed any authority to take that action beyond the power inherent in the presidency, such authority could be found in the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
But as Judge Karen Henderson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit explained in a March 26 decision concerning the deportation of those roughly 200 Venezuelans, that 1798 law was limited to formally declared wars or imminent military invasions of the United States. Until the Trump administration, the law had been invoked only three times — during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, when it was used to intern Americans of Japanese ancestry. That action has since been all but universally condemned as a shameful overreaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
By invoking the Alien Enemies Act, the government claims it can circumvent the usual procedures for deportation, including due process.
In an unsigned opinion, which the Supreme Court handed down on Monday, a 5-to-4 majority (with Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberals in the minority) said the Trump administration could continue to deport Venezuelan migrants using the 1798 law. But the court also said migrants fighting deportation in this case could challenge their detentions, though only through habeas corpus petitions, which it said needed to be filed in federal court in Texas, where they were held, not in Washington, D.C., where the government officials who made the decision on their fate are. The court said these individuals should be given notice and a hearing before being deported.
As for those who have already been deported to El Salvador and imprisoned there, it is troubling that the court did not speak to whether they can get any relief from the courts.
The justices did not answer critical questions like: Can the government use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in this manner? Did the lower court have the authority to issue the order to stop individuals from being taken to El Salvador? Is there any legal basis for the Trump administration to put individuals in an El Salvador prison? And, crucial to Mr. Abrego Garcia’s pending case, will the court reject the Trump administration’s claim that no federal court can hear a habeas corpus petition of someone held in a foreign country?
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent, identified how much is at stake: “The implications of the government’s position” are “that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal. History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.”
If the government can disappear any people it wishes, dump them in a Salvadoran dungeon and prevent any court in this country from providing relief, we all should be very, very afraid.
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7) Egg Prices Continued to Rise in March
Egg prices have reached record highs as bird flu outbreaks have hit poultry farms and forced producers to cull tens of millions of hens.
By Madeleine Ngo, April 10, 2025
“And even though a drop in wholesale egg prices typically translates to lower prices at the grocery store, retailers do not necessarily have to pass all of the savings to consumers. ‘They don’t have to lower it all the way to reflect how much the price really fell in the wholesale market,’ said Christopher B. Barrett, an agricultural economist at Cornell University.”
Egg prices have stayed elevated in recent months as bird flu outbreaks have hit poultry farms. Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
For weeks, President Trump has repeatedly boasted that his administration had managed to bring egg prices down. But new data on Thursday showed that egg prices at the grocery store continued to climb in March.
Egg prices rose 5.9 percent over the month, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They climbed at a slower rate, though, after rising 10.4 percent in February and 15.2 percent in January.
Compared with a year earlier, egg prices are up 60.4 percent.
Egg prices have reached record highs in recent months as bird flu outbreaks have hit poultry farms and forced producers to cull tens of millions of hens. But Mr. Trump, who had vowed to bring down grocery prices while on the campaign trail, has continued to claim victory on egg prices. This month, Mr. Trump said that egg prices had dropped 59 percent, and on Monday, he said that egg prices were down 79 percent.
Consumers might not be feeling relief because the president is not referring to retail egg prices. He is instead pointing to the wholesale price of eggs, which has fallen by roughly half since the beginning of his second term.
Wholesale egg prices dropped from a national average of $6.55 a dozen on Jan. 24 to $3.26 on April 4, according to data from the Agriculture Department. Wholesale egg prices are also down from a peak of more than $8 a dozen at the end of February.
But the average retail price for a dozen large eggs reached $6.23 in March, up from $5.90 the month before, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
It could take several weeks for the decrease in wholesale prices to pass through to retail prices, said David Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State University. “All indications are that there’s some relief coming for consumers,” he said. “Even then, there are a lot of other factors that determine the price of eggs.”
Wholesale egg prices have come down significantly as poultry farms report fewer bird flu outbreaks, supply has increased and consumer demand has weakened, economists say. But it is difficult to know exactly how much retail egg prices could come down. New avian flu outbreaks could continue to put pressure on egg prices. And even though a drop in wholesale egg prices typically translates to lower prices at the grocery store, retailers do not necessarily have to pass all of the savings to consumers.
“They don’t have to lower it all the way to reflect how much the price really fell in the wholesale market,” said Christopher B. Barrett, an agricultural economist at Cornell University.
In response to high egg prices, the Trump administration said late last month that it had expanded biosecurity assessments to prevent further outbreaks and was working on reducing regulatory barriers to boost supply. Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that the administration’s work to combat bird flu had “paid off” and that officials were “carrying out their mandate to ‘Make America Wealthy Again.’”
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8) How Hamas and the U.S. Tried to Strike a Hostage Deal
Officials met Hamas three times, breaking with a policy against contacting a group the U.S. considers a terrorist organization. But Israeli opposition and shifting positions doomed the effort.
By Adam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Doha, Qatar, April 10, 2025
Demonstrators holding posters of hostages, including Edan Alexander, a dual Israeli and American citizen, in Tel Aviv. Credit...Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Americans were in a hurry.
Adam Boehler, a senior U.S. official, wanted Hamas to agree to the release of the last living American Israeli hostage in Gaza so that President Trump could announce his freedom during a speech to Congress.
The two sides were still haggling as Mr. Trump arrived at the Capitol, and they failed to meet the deadline, according to four people familiar with the discussion, leaving the president to make only a passing reference to hostages in Gaza.
Still, the talks, which eschewed decades of entrenched animosity, carried on the next day, demonstrating how eager the two sides were to make a deal.
It all started, and ended, in March. Even though the United States has backed Israel in its campaign in Gaza against Hamas, which launched the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that killed some 1,200 people in Israel, Trump administration officials met with senior Hamas officials in Qatar three times, the four people said. The meetings were a break with longstanding U.S. policy against contact with the armed group, which the United States considers a terrorist organization.
Mr. Trump had made releasing all the hostages a key goal, aiming to show success where the Biden administration struggled. In a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, though, his comments on hostages were largely overshadowed by tariff talk and Iran diplomacy.
The March talks underscored the Trump administration’s ad hoc approach to diplomacy. But in the face of furious Israeli opposition, Hamas’s hesitation and the Trump administration’s shifting position, an agreement to free the hostage, Edan Alexander, never came together.
This account is based on conversations with six people familiar with the closed-door meetings, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
The talks were separate from Israel and Hamas’s deadlocked attempts to extend their troubled cease-fire. The first phase of that agreement signed in January had expired without a deal to transition to the second phase, which called for the end of the war and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Mr. Netanyahu has said the war will not end until Hamas’s military wing and government are dismantled, while Hamas appears willing only to give up control of civilian government but not its arms.
The deadlock left U.S. officials with the impression that it was only a matter of time until Israel resumed its military operations in Gaza, imperiling Mr. Alexander and the release of the bodies of four other Israeli Americans, two people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Boehler believed that Hamas might want to make a gesture to Mr. Trump and that a side deal could build momentum toward serious discussions about Phase 2, they said.
The White House’s National Security Council didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.
The day of the first meeting, after iftar, the fast-breaking meal during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, three Hamas officials welcomed Mr. Boehler, a private equity investor who was Mr. Trump’s nominee for special envoy for hostage affairs, and his adviser, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School. They met in a sitting room with a large mural of al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and a picture of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political chief slain by Israel in July.
Past midnight, the officials reflected on the historic nature of the meeting and ate knafeh, a Middle Eastern pastry, and drank freshly squeezed orange juice. They also discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Oct. 7 attack, four people familiar with the conversation said.
The Hamas officials, Taher al-Nono, Basem Naim and Osama Hamdan, made an effort to appeal to their American counterparts’ sensibilities, according to the four people. Mr. al-Nono argued that Hamas was trying to secure freedom for Palestinians — a value he said was cherished by Americans. Some 50,000 people have been killed in the war, according to Gazan health authorities, who don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants, and some protesters in Gaza have called on Hamas to step aside.
Two days after the first meeting, Mr. Boehler returned to talk with Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s top negotiator, the four people said. Mr. al-Hayya said Hamas would normally demand the release of 500 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli detention in exchange for a hostage like Mr. Alexander, but in a gesture of good will and to save time, it would ask for only 250, including 100 serving life sentences.
Mr. al-Hayya said that he believed that the United States could push the Israelis into releasing that many people, according to two people familiar with the discussion.
An aide to Mr. al-Hayya and Mr. Naim, a spokesman for Hamas who speaks broadly for the organization, did not respond to detailed requests for comment. A Palestinian official confirmed the broad details of the talks on condition of anonymity.
Later that day, Mr. Boehler offered 100 prisoners serving life sentences and promised to release 150 lower-level prisoners at a future date in exchange for Mr. Alexander, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Israel has roughly 300 prisoners serving life sentences in custody and officials have been wary of giving too many up in exchange for a single hostage.
Mr. Boehler was coming under pressure from Israel over the talks. He received an angry phone call from Ron Dermer, Mr. Netanyahu’s adviser, expressing his frustration that Mr. Boehler had not informed Israel in advance, according to two people familiar with the call. The next day, Axios reported that Mr. Boehler had met with Hamas — a leak that U.S. officials said they believed was orchestrated by Israeli officials to sabotage the talks. Mr. Dermer did not return a request for comment.
The United States often consults with Israel about sensitive national security matters, but Trump administration officials may not have wanted to keep Israeli officials in the loop because Israel had disrupted a previous attempt to meet Hamas leaders.
In that case, immediately after Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, Mr. Boehler traveled to Doha, Qatar, where he hoped to meet with Hamas officials, among other reasons for the trip. But when the Israeli prime minister’s office caught wind of Mr. Boehler’s plans, Israeli officials intervened with the White House, according to two people familiar with the events. The White House called off the meeting.
During the March meetings, Mr. Boehler was in close contact with Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, coordinating positions and providing updates, the two people said.
Before the third and final meeting with Hamas, on March 5, U.S. officials no longer felt their offer was possible. They decided that the most they could propose would be 100 prisoners, without a promise that they would be serving life sentences, for Mr. Alexander.
The offer would also include the release of Palestinian women and children for the four bodies of the Israeli American hostages, the resumption of aid deliveries to Gaza and a plan to dispatch Mr. Witkoff to Doha to iron out the details of the exchange and jump-start a conversation about Phase 2, two people familiar with the matter said. Days earlier, Israel had cut off the entry of aid to the territory to pressure Hamas.
The meetings also touched on Hamas’s vision for the future of Gaza. Mr. al-Hayya told his American interlocutors that Hamas was open to a five- to 10-year truce, in which the group would lay down its weapons.
Among other suggestions, Mr. al-Hayya also said that Hamas wanted two leaders of the defunct Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, who were convicted in the United States in 2008 of providing “material support” to the group, to be set free, according to four people familiar with the conversation.
At the end of the last meeting, Mr. Boehler told Mr. al-Hayya that his latest offer was final and might no longer be on the table if Hamas did not accept it by the time his plane took off in a few hours, four people briefed on the matter said. Mr. al-Hayya suggested Hamas would not accept it, even if he wanted the deal himself.
A week later Hamas issued a statement that it was ready to make a deal to release Mr. Alexander and the bodies of the American Israeli hostages. The offer was similar to the one proposed by Mr. Boehler, two people familiar with its contents said.
But it was too little, too late: Mr. Boehler was no longer negotiating directly with the group. When Mr. Witkoff traveled to Doha in mid-March, he demanded Hamas agree to the release of multiple living hostages without guarantees on the end of the war.
Days later, Israel restarted its bombing campaign in Gaza, with Mr. Alexander still in captivity.
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting to this article.
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9) Israeli Airstrike in Gaza City Leaves Many Dead, Health Officials There Say
The strike on a home left other bodies buried under the rubble, according to the Gazan authorities. The Israeli military said it had been targeting a Hamas operative.
By Vivian Yee and Ameera Harouda, Photographs by Saher Alghorra, Published April 9, 2025, Updated April 10, 2025
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo and Ameera Harouda from Doha, Qatar. Saher Alghorra photographed and reported from Gaza City.
An Israeli airstrike on a Gaza City neighborhood killed 23 people on Wednesday, including eight children, and left more than 70 wounded, Gaza’s Civil Defense service said. About 20 people remained missing, but rescuers had little equipment to pull them from the rubble, the group said.
The Israeli military said it had been targeting a Hamas operative who it said was responsible for planning attacks. It did not name the operative or give further details. Civil Defense’s death toll, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, could not be independently verified. Gaza’s Health Ministry had not yet released a death toll.
A Civil Defense spokesman, Mahmoud Basal, said the strike had destroyed eight homes in Shajaiye, an already hard-hit area.
Video footage published by Reuters showed rescuers trying to free dust-caked people from the wreckage with little but shovels, tools and their bare hands. They strained to push a collapsed ceiling off a man who was trapped flat underneath.
Two men picked their way through the moonscape that had been the street, lifting a small body in a colorful blanket. A donkey cart pulled another blanket-wrapped body away.
Hazem Rajab, 49, was sitting on his living room couch when he heard a sudden explosion and the ceiling caved in, he said in a phone interview.
Rescuers arrived about 15 minutes later, he said. Mr. Rajab said he was protected by a concrete pillar that had fallen over him and two of his children. But his 12-year-old son, Yusuf, was killed.
It had been only about three months since Mr. Rajab’s wife, another son and three of their daughters were killed in “the greatest loss of our lives,” Mr. Rajab said.
Additional airstrikes hit elsewhere in the neighborhood on Wednesday, Mr. Basal said, but rescuers had not yet been able to respond to those strikes.
Israel has faced international condemnation for airstrikes that have killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza. The Israeli military says Hamas operatives embed among civilians. On Wednesday, it said that it had taken “numerous steps” to reduce harm to civilians before striking, using aerial surveillance, “other intelligence” and precise weaponry.
A New York Times investigation has found that the Israeli military has loosened its rules on how many civilians it can endanger with each airstrike, and international law experts note that Israel has an obligation to protect civilians.
Dozens of wounded survivors on Wednesday were sent to Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, where Khamis Elessi, a volunteer doctor, said bloodied children were crowded into the emergency room.
“It makes you want to cry,” Mr. Elessi, 56, said in a phone interview. “When I see these kids, I imagine what if they were mine. I don’t care if two parties are fighting each other, but the kids have nothing to do with it.”
Many in the emergency room were being treated on the floor because the hospital had no free beds, he said. Gaza’s health care system is struggling to cope with casualties, particularly after Israel blocked all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza on March 2, including medical supplies and fuel.
The sounds of crying and screaming filled the hospital’s morgue, where the dead were laid out. One man screamed as he gripped his son’s body. His relatives had to pull him away.
Gaza health officials say that more than 50,000 people have been killed since Israel began striking Gaza in October 2023 in response to the Hamas-led attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 people.
The Israeli military said on Friday that its forces had begun operating in Shajaiye to expand what the military has characterized as a buffer zone next to Israel’s border with Gaza.
The military had ordered people to leave parts of northern Gaza late last week as it stepped up its ground campaign, though Mr. Basal said the Israeli military had not included the street that was hit in the evacuation zone.
Photographs and videos verified by The New York Times show that buildings leveled in the Israeli strike are just outside the evacuation zone, within the area that Israeli forces called for civilians to head to. Israel has said that it will target Hamas wherever it believes the armed group to be.
Many in evacuation zone complied with the order, though some chose to stay, saying that they could not face more upheaval after enduring displacement after displacement earlier in the war. Israel is holding an increasing amount of territory, leaving Gazans even fewer places to go.
Alaa al-Sosi, 42, said she and her children would have to return to Shajaiye after fleeing the area on Wednesday. “We have no other place to stay,” she said.
During the first 15 months of war, the fighting between the Israeli military and Hamas reduced much of Shajaiye to a wasteland. A shaky cease-fire paused the fighting and allowed more humanitarian help to enter Gaza from January to March, but Israel renewed airstrikes after the two sides failed to reach an agreement to extend the truce.
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10) Hundreds of Israeli Air Force Reservists Call for Halt to Gaza War
A letter signed by reservists and retired officers accused the government of endangering hostages held by Hamas, highlighting a growing divide over the handling of the war.
By Natan Odenheimer and Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 10, 2025
The Israeli air force has been a key part of the country’s campaign in Gaza. Credit...Abir Sultan/EPA, via Shutterstock
Hundreds of reservists and retired officers in Israel’s air force signed a letter on Thursday urging the Israeli government to agree to a deal with Hamas to return hostages, even at the price of stopping the war in Gaza.
The letter, which was signed by roughly a thousand people, including a former chief of staff and other former senior military leaders, laid bare a growing divide in the Israeli military over the handling of the war. The air force has been a key part of Israel’s effort in Gaza, carrying out strikes that have flattened much of the enclave and left thousands dead.
The appeal reflected heightened concern about the fate of the hostages after a shaky cease-fire between Israel and Hamas collapsed in mid-March. The hostages have been in the captivity of militants in Gaza for more than 18 months.
The letter immediately drew a rebuke from the Israeli prime minister’s office, which said that “statements that weaken the Israel Defense Forces and strengthen our enemy during wartime” were “unforgivable.”
The Israeli military said it had decided to discharge active-duty reservists who signed the letter, though the numbers that could be dismissed were not expected to be high. Most of the people who signed the list were not active duty, the military said. The timing of the dismissals was not clear.
The letter was an unusually large-scale show of criticism from members of the air force about the way the war has been run. The military branch, in particular, has been a notable voice of opposition to the government.
Air force pilots threatened to stop serving in the military during nationwide protests in 2023 against deeply divisive government efforts to reduce the power of institutions, including the Supreme Court, that had acted as a check on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
The campaign was suspended after the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023, but last month the government returned to the effort, passing legislation that gave politicians more control over choosing judges.
At key points throughout the war, top military officials have pressed for a cease-fire behind the scenes, hoping to bring home more hostages and give weary troops a break. In January, Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire, but the war resumed after Israel and Hamas failed to extend it.
The letter on Thursday claimed that continuing the war would lead to the deaths of the hostages and argued that it was driven by political interests, rather than security.
“Stop the fighting and return all of the hostages — now!” it said. “Every day that passes endangers their lives.”
Critics of Mr. Netanyahu have accused him of prioritizing his political survival over the return of the hostages. Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners have threatened to leave the coalition if he ends the war without defeating Hamas.
Maj. Gen. Nimrod Sheffer, a former senior air force officer, said he had signed the letter because he felt the hostages in Gaza were becoming increasingly vulnerable. The Israeli government has said it believes 24 of the remaining 59 hostages to be alive.
“It is immoral to abandon 59 hostages in Gaza,” General Sheffer said in a phone interview. “Someone needs to say loud and clear that they need to come home,” he added. “We can’t stay quiet anymore.”
For Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s renewed bombing campaign has brought about immense devastation. More than 1,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the war restarted, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its casualty counts.
Israeli officials said that the airstrikes have targeted Hamas militants and their weapons infrastructure and that they were meant to ramp up pressure on the group to free more hostages. On Thursday, the Israeli military said that it had killed a Hamas commander who had participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Gaza’s Civil Defense, an emergency rescue service under the Hamas-run interior ministry, said on Wednesday that a strike in the Shajaiye neighborhood of Gaza City had killed at least 23 people, including eight children. Israel has accused Hamas of embedding in civilian areas. The bodies of 40 people killed by Israel arrived at hospitals across Gaza on Wednesday, according to the Health Ministry.
The Israeli military’s latest offensive in Gaza has included widespread evacuation orders, encompassing roughly half of the territory, according to a New York Times analysis of Israeli military maps. Satellite imagery also shows that the Israeli military was taking over Rafah, with forces closing in on the southernmost city in Gaza from two directions.
Last week, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel would establish a new corridor in Gaza, which he hinted would cut off territory in the southern city of Rafah from the rest of the strip. The Morag Corridor appeared to take its name from a former Israeli settlement in southern Gaza, from which Israel withdrew in 2005.
Samuel Granados and Lauren Leatherby contributed reporting.
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11) How This Trade War Is Different From All Other Trade Wars
By acting on his own, President Trump has broken with more than 200 years of U.S. history in which Congress set the direction of trade policy.
By Jeff Sommer, April 11, 2025
Jeff Sommer writes Strategies, a weekly column on markets, finance and the economy.
If the on-again, off-again tariff announcements by President Trump have struck you as unusual, that’s for good reason. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
That’s the estimation of Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth economic historian whose 2017 book, “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy,” is the leading work on the subject. I called him for perspective. He told me that what we were experiencing was way outside the historical norm. One man alone has risked the first global trade war since the 1930s by raising tariffs to levels unseen for more than a century. The president’s actions, he said, represent a “big break with history.”
Even if Mr. Trump removes the tariffs — he announced a 90-day pause for some of the highest ones on Wednesday, while keeping a 10 percent base line for virtually all imports from around the world — his go-it-alone stance is a major departure. However the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war, a dreaded relic of the Great Depression, have begun in the 21st century.
The consequences are still unfurling, but the stakes are high. They include the possibility of a global recession and geopolitical shifts that may not be in the interests of the United States — all occurring because of the swiftly shifting decisions by the president of the United States.
Until now, it had always taken decades of consensus building to bend the trajectory of trade policy, Professor Irwin said. When the country changed course in earlier times, Congress played the dominant role. Even when it began delegating authority to negotiate trade deals to the president in the 1930s, Congress set the direction of U.S. tariffs: downward.
Now, it’s unquestionably the president who has taken the United States on a new and hazardous path. “This is of historical significance,” Professor Irwin said.
In the past, wars provided the impetus for change. The Civil War and World War I led to higher tariffs enacted by Congress after lengthy discussion, and those were “big breaks” with history, Professor Irwin said. Tariffs began falling in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and with some exceptions, including the Biden and first Trump administrations, they remained fairly low.
“But here we are, in a peacetime economy,” Professor Irwin said. “We’re basically at full employment, 4 percent. There’s no societal consensus that there’s a big problem with trade, and yet we have one person, the president, radically changing the direction of U.S. trade policy.”
The Fallout
Stock markets have been swirling — falling for days, then leaping in delight on Wednesday at news that some of the U.S. tariffs had been delayed. It was the biggest one-day gain since the financial crisis of 2008, with the benchmark S&P 500 stock index rising 9.5 percent and erasing some of the losses that investors have had to endure this year. By Thursday, though, the enthusiasm had ebbed. The S&P 500 fell 3.5 percent for the day.
Whether the markets keep rallying, or sink back into a maelstrom of worry, is likely to depend on what Mr. Trump does about the direction of tariff policy, which economists view, in an overwhelming consensus, as wrongheaded and profoundly dangerous.
Until Wednesday, the president’s series of tariff announcements had set off expectations of sharply rising prices for households and businesses alike, raising a strong possibility that a spreading global trade war could send the U.S. economy spiraling into a recession and cause vast human hardship.
After the president said he was delaying some tariffs, Goldman Sachs abruptly dropped its forecast that a recession was likely. Even so, the Goldman prognosis was bleak: “We are reverting to our previous non-recession base-line forecast with G.D.P. growth of 0.5 percent and a 45 percent probability of recession.”
China has retaliated with tariffs of its own. By Thursday, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods had reached 145 percent; China reciprocated with tariffs on U.S. products, raising them on Friday to 125 percent. Negotiations were underway with many countries — but not China — the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said. “Do not retaliate,” he said, “and you will be rewarded.” The European Union said it would delay its plans for retaliation for 90 days.
Congressional resistance to the Trump trade policy has begun, with a mainly Democratic effort in the Senate to end the “national emergency” that the president declared as the legal justification for his tariffs. But as my colleague Ana Swanson wrote, the odds against such an effort’s succeeding quickly are high. Even if it passed in the Senate, it’s not clear that a resolution to roll back the tariffs would ever reach the House floor. If it did, and passed there, Mr. Trump could veto it, and overriding a veto with a two-thirds vote isn’t likely in the current political firmament.
The Sweep of History
As unusual as the Trump administration’s swerves on tariffs have been, they are possible only because Congress has been delegating authority on trade policy to the president in stages, starting in 1934.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution expressly reserves for Congress the power to impose tariffs.
Congressional dominance over trade policy shifted substantially after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 ushered in the catastrophic global trade war and worsened the Great Depression. Then, as now, economists overwhelmingly opposed a tariff increase, imploring President Herbert Hoover not to sign the bill into law, but he did anyway.
That disastrous legislation was a product of what historians call congressional “logrolling” — the trading of votes by legislators to secure favorable action on projects of interest to each one — that had largely determined trade policy. U.S. tariffs in the 1930s increased for domestic reasons — largely, to protect local industry — without much advance thought about the global consequences.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s evident that the tariffs were major factors in a dire turn in world history, said Dale Copeland, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. In the 1930s, Britain and France turned inward and focused their commerce within their imperial empires, while the United States, a nascent power, had a sphere of influence of its own, Professor Copeland said.
Japan did not yet have such an empire. It set about acquiring one in China and in Southeast Asia, at least in part, because within a year of the enactment of Smoot-Hawley, Japan had “lost most of its trade” and decided that it needed “other ways to get supplies of raw materials and oil and other important things,” Professor Copeland said. Tariff barriers created enormous international tensions and perverse incentives, lessons that “the world has already learned, and may need to relearn now,” he said.
Ed Clissold, senior U.S. strategist at Ned Davis Research, an independent financial research firm, said the geopolitical implications of rising tariffs needed to be studied closely. “If we cut off trade with China and raise tariffs on other countries in the region, China’s going to focus even more heavily in Southeast Asia,” he said.
Emily Bowersock Hill, chief executive of Bowersock Capital Partners, a wealth management firm in Lawrence, Kan., said that without checks on his behavior, Mr. Trump was making erratic geopolitical moves.
“It’s taken decades to establish the reputation of the United States around the world,” she said. “Our reputation, our alliances, our brand were a primary advantage. It wouldn’t take much to lose all of that.”
The U.S. presidency has always been powerful, but in the past, presidents were hemmed in by law, custom and politics. As the wild swings of recent days show, however, Mr. Trump is unaffected by most of those restraints. More than in the past, the direction of the markets and the global economy depends on the mood of the president.
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12) Supreme Court Sides With Wrongly Deported Migrant
A trial judge had ordered the Trump administration to take steps to return the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from a notorious prison in El Salvador.
By Adam Liptak, Reporting from Washington, April 10, 2025
Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, second from right, during a demonstration in support of her husband, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, in Greenbelt, Md., last week. Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have called his deportation “a Kafka-esque mistake.” Credit...Rod Lamkey Jr. for The New York Times
The Supreme Court on Thursday instructed the government to take steps to return a Salvadoran migrant it had wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
In an unsigned order, the court stopped short of ordering the return of the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, indicating that courts may not have the power to require the executive branch to do so.
But the court endorsed part of a trial judge’s order that had required the government to “facilitate and effectuate the return” of Mr. Abrego Garcia.
“The order properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” the Supreme Court’s ruling said. “The intended scope of the term ‘effectuate’ in the district court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the district court’s authority.”
The case will now return to the trial court, and it is not clear whether and when Mr. Abrego Garcia will be returned to the United States.
“The district court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs,” the Supreme Court’s ruling said. “For its part, the government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”
The ruling appeared to be unanimous. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a statement that was harshly critical of the government’s conduct and said she would have upheld every part of the trial judge’s order.
“To this day,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “the government has cited no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison. Nor could it.”
Justice Sotomayor urged the trial judge, Paula Xinis of the Federal District Court in Maryland, to “continue to ensure that the government lives up to its obligations to follow the law.”
A Justice Department spokesman responded to the order by focusing on its reference to the executive branch.
“As the Supreme Court correctly recognized, it is the exclusive prerogative of the president to conduct foreign affairs,” the spokesman said. “By directly noting the deference owed to the executive branch, this ruling once again illustrates that activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy.”
Andrew J. Rossman, one of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, expressed satisfaction with the Supreme Court’s action.
“The rule of law won today,” he said. “Time to bring him home.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife described the effect the case has had on their family and said she would keep pursuing his return to the United States.
“This continues to be an emotional roller coaster for my children, Kilmar’s mother, his brother and siblings,” Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, his wife, said on Thursday, adding that “I will continue fighting until my husband is home.”
Judge Xinis had said the Trump administration committed a “grievous error” that “shocks the conscience” by sending Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador despite a 2019 ruling from an immigration judge. The immigration judge granted him a special status known as “withholding from removal,” finding that he might face violence or torture if sent to El Salvador.
The administration contends that Mr. Abrego Garcia, 29, is a member of a violent transnational street gang, MS-13, which officials recently designated as a terrorist organization.
Judge Xinis, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said those claims were based on “a singular unsubstantiated allegation.”
“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” she wrote, “and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived.”
In the administration’s emergency application seeking to block Judge Xinis’s order, D. John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general, said she had exceeded her authority by engaging in “district-court diplomacy,” because it would require working with the government of El Salvador to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release.
“If this precedent stands,” he wrote, “other district courts could order the United States to successfully negotiate the return of other removed aliens anywhere in the world by close of business,” he wrote. “Under that logic, district courts would effectively have extraterritorial jurisdiction over the United States’ diplomatic relations with the whole world.”
In a response to the court, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said their client “sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafka-esque mistake.”
They added: “The district court’s order instructing the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return is routine. It does not implicate foreign policy or even domestic immigration policy in any case.”
Mr. Sauer said it did not matter that an immigration judge had previously prohibited Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador.
“While the United States concedes that removal to El Salvador was an administrative error,” Mr. Sauer wrote, “that does not license district courts to seize control over foreign relations, treat the executive branch as a subordinate diplomat and demand that the United States let a member of a foreign terrorist organization into America tonight.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said there was no evidence that he posed a risk.
“Abrego Garcia has lived freely in the United States for years, yet has never been charged for a crime,” they wrote. “The government’s contention that he has suddenly morphed into a dangerous threat to the republic is not credible.”
Mr. Sauer said Judge Xinis’s order was one in a series of rulings from courts exceeding their constitutional authority.
“It is the latest in a litany of injunctions or temporary restraining orders from the same handful of district courts that demand immediate or near-immediate compliance, on absurdly short deadlines,” he wrote.
In her statement on Thursday, Justice Sotomayor wrote that it would be shameful “to leave Abrego Garcia, a husband and father without a criminal record, in a Salvadoran prison for no reason recognized by the law.”
She added that the government’s position “implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
“That view,” the justice wrote, “refutes itself.”
Alan Feuer, Aishvarya Kavi and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
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13) Stay or Go? Israel’s Evacuation Orders Leave Gazans Facing an Excruciating Choice.
A new declaration targeted eastern Gaza City, including several areas that had been declared evacuation zones. The United Nations said 390,000 people had been displaced in recent weeks.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 11, 2025
Palestinians in the Shajaiye neighborhood of Gaza City last week after an evacuation order. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The Israeli military issued new evacuation orders for neighborhoods in Gaza City on Friday as it pressed forward with its offensive in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, once again delivering a painful choice to Palestinians about whether to stay or go.
The orders targeted eastern Gaza City, including several parts that the military had declared evacuation zones last week. The move suggested that some people had remained in their homes even after the Israeli military had urged them to leave.
Since the two-month cease-fire between Israel and Hamas collapsed in March, Israel has issued a succession of orders across Gaza, covering roughly half of the territory. The orders have left Palestinians in the north, many of whom returned home when the truce came into effect, debating whether to stay in their neighborhoods despite the danger or to leave and yet again face the miserable conditions of displacement.
While the United Nations has said that over 390,000 people have been displaced in recent weeks, the exact number of people remaining in evacuation zones was unclear.
“We don’t want to leave,” said Ahmad al-Masri, 26, a resident of Beit Lahia in northern Gaza who has spurned evacuation orders for his town. “Where will we go? It’s so very tiring.”
In some parts of Gaza, the military has called for people to leave and later invaded by ground. In other areas, it has put out evacuation orders, but has not sent in infantry. At least some Palestinians who have disregarded evacuation orders said they would leave if Israeli tanks move into their neighborhoods.
“I’m dealing with the reality on the ground,” Mr. al-Masri said.
Since the cease-fire broke down, the Israeli military has embarked on a major bombing campaign and seized territory in a tactic that Israeli officials have said was intended to compel Hamas to release more hostages.
Adding to the uncertainty, Arab mediators and the United States have struggled to bridge gaps between Hamas and Israel to restore the cease-fire and to bring about exchanges of hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
Over the course of the war, Palestinians have endured a marathon of hope and heartbreak as mediators have expressed optimism about talks only for a deal to remain elusive, or fall apart completely.
On Thursday, President Trump suggested that a new agreement could be in the offing. “We’re getting close to getting them back,” Mr. Trump told reporters at a meeting of his cabinet, referring to hostages.
The American president did not offer specific details, and representatives for Hamas and the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel did not immediately return requests for comment.
The military said its recent campaign had dismantled weapons infrastructure and killed militants. On Thursday, the Israeli military said that a day earlier in Gaza City’s Shajaiye neighborhood it had killed a Hamas commander who had participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Hamas did not comment on the claim.
The Palestinian Civil Defense, an emergency rescue service under the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, said that 23 people had been killed in strikes in Shajaiye on Wednesday, without distinguishing between civilians and combatants. Israel has said that Hamas embeds in civilian areas, though legal experts say that it still has an obligation to protect civilians.
“The Israel Defense Forces is acting with great force in your areas to destroy the terrorist infrastructure,” Avichay Adraee, the Arabic-language spokesman for the military, said on Friday, announcing the evacuation orders for eastern Gaza City.
The Israeli offensive has included evacuation orders encompassing roughly half of the territory, according to a New York Times analysis of Israeli military maps. Satellite imagery also shows that the Israeli military is taking over Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, with forces closing in from two directions.
More than 1,500 people in Gaza have been killed since the cease-fire fell apart and more than 50,000 people have been killed since the start of the war, according to the Gaza health ministry. The ministry also does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its casualty counts. Doctors at hospitals have said many of those wounded and killed in recent weeks have been children.
The United Nations said Friday that Israel’s actions in Gaza increasingly threatened the ability of Palestinians to continue living in the territory. Since mid-March, Israel has issued 21 evacuation orders to Palestinians in Gaza and launched some 224 attacks on Gaza residential buildings and tents, Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights chief, Volker Türk, told reporters on Friday.
“The death, the destruction, the displacement, the denial of access to basic necessities within Gaza and the repeated suggestion that Gazans should leave the territory entirely raise real concerns as to the future viability of Palestinians as a group in Gaza,” she said.
Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting.
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14) She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her
President Trump’s immigration crackdown ensnared Kseniia Petrova, a scientist who fled Russia after protesting its invasion of Ukraine. She fears arrest if she is deported there.
By Ellen Barry, April 11, 2025
Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard scientist, in 2021. She has been in a Louisiana prison since Feb. 16. Credit...Polina Pugacheva
A barracks-style detention center in Louisiana is jammed with around 90 immigrant women, mostly undocumented workers from central and South America, sharing five toilets and following orders shouted by guards.
There is also, among them, a Russian scientist.
She is 30 years old, shy and prone to nervous laughter. She cannot work, because her laptop was confiscated. She plays chess with other women when the guards allow it. Otherwise, she passes the time reading books about evolution and cell development.
For nearly eight weeks, Kseniia Petrova has been captive to the hard-line immigration policies of the Trump administration. A graduate of a renowned Russian physics and technology institute, Ms. Petrova was recruited to work at a laboratory at Harvard Medical School. She was part of a team investigating how cells can rejuvenate themselves, with the goal of fending off the damage of aging.
On Feb. 16, customs officials detained her at Logan International Airport in Boston for failing to declare samples of frog embryos she had carried from France at the request of her boss at Harvard.
Such an infraction is normally considered minor, punishable with a fine of up to $500. Instead, the customs official canceled Ms. Petrova’s visa on the spot and began deportation proceedings. Then Ms. Petrova told her that she had fled Russia for political reasons and faced arrest if she returned there.
This is how she wound up at the Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, La., waiting for the U.S. government to decide what to do with her.
Ms. Petrova’s case is being watched by thousands of young, highly educated Russians who, like her, fled the country after Russia invaded Ukraine. It has also caught the attention of prominent figures in Russia’s political opposition who warn that, for the United States, delivering a dissident scientist to President Vladimir V. Putin would be crossing an especially foreboding line.
For her part, Ms. Petrova is seeing the United States from a new and unsettling vantage point. “I feel like something is happening generally in America,” she said, in an interview over a video link. “Something bad is happening. I don’t think everybody understands.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has twice refused her lawyer’s petition for parole, contending that she is a flight risk and a threat to U.S. security. Ms. Petrova sometimes mentally rehearses what she would do if she were, in fact, deported to Russia. She cannot say for sure when or if she would be arrested, she said, but the threat of political repression would always be present.
“This is the problem of this kind of autocratic regime — the people who stay there are kind of hostages,” she said. “That is the fear of being there. You don’t know what will happen. You don’t know if they will come for you or they won’t.”
Harvard has made little comment about Ms. Petrova’s detention. A spokeswoman said this week that the university “is closely following the rapidly shifting immigration policy landscape and the implications for its international scholars and students,” and is “engaged with Ms. Petrova’s attorney on this matter.”
Many in the research community there only learned about it two weeks ago, when Ms. Petrova’s co-workers started a GoFundMe appeal to help pay her legal expenses. The news sent shudders through a sprawling community of scientists who immigrated to the United States for careers in research. It comes amid deep cuts in federal funding for science that, to many, signal that a period of openness and progress may be ending.
Ms. Petrova is not giving up on her work. As she awaits her hearing, she is studying meiosis, a type of cell division that allows egg and sperm cells to reset epigenetic marks, pointing the way to possible strategies to stop aging. All she can think of is getting back to her laboratory.
“I was in paradise,” she said. “I would very much like to stay in paradise.”
A ‘supernerd’
Ms. Petrova had just finished her master’s degree when Konstantin Severinov, a prominent molecular biologist, recruited her for an ambitious, high-profile project in Moscow.
Dr. Severinov, who leads a laboratory at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, had been asked to design a Russian genome-sequencing center, backed with $250 million in funding from Rosneft, the state-owned oil company. He was assembling a team to help build a database structure and write code.
He described Ms. Petrova as a “supernerd,” the product of especially intense, competitive scientific training. Her skills, which combined computer science and biology, were “very, very marketable,” he said in an interview, in demand at genomics centers all over the world.
Dr. Severinov wanted her on the team, he said. The job was interesting scientifically and “highly advantageous financially.” But it required passing a security clearance, he said, and Ms. Petrova would not promise to stop supporting Russia’s political opposition.
He ended up hiring her as an outside consultant. “She turned out to be a principled person who just would not bow,” he said. He was, at times, frustrated by her impracticality — “you can call it childish, you can call it principled, you can call it different ways,” he said.
“I would say, among many young scientists, there are some which are very, very career-oriented — in a good way,” he said. “They know what needs to be done to promote themselves. She is not of that kind. She is, in a way, like a daydreamer. She is different.”
She was raised by two engineers — her mother a specialist in radio communications and her father a computer programmer, said Vladimir Mazin, a close family friend. He described Ms. Petrova as a “passionate scientist” who, on vacation in the countryside, carried her laptop with her to breakfast and dinner so she could continue training neural networks, a type of machine learning.
“Kseniia is one of those people who are truly interested in obtaining new knowledge, in finding out something that hasn’t been known before,” he said. “That’s what she is interested in. Everything else is secondary.”
In her late teens, she supported the opposition-minded Russians who took to the streets to oppose Mr. Putin’s return to the presidency. Then she began joining them. Ms. Petrova made no secret of her views; she recalled being asked, in the job interview for the genomics center, to promise she would not post criticism of Mr. Putin on social media. She refused.
“I think in each country, scientists are opposed to autocratic government,” she said.
On Feb. 24, 2022, when Mr. Putin sent columns of Russian tanks across the border into Ukraine, she joined protests that surged through Moscow’s streets. On March 2, she was arrested, charged with an administrative violation, fined about $200 and released.
It was clear that things were changing quickly, Ms. Petrova said. The handful of news sources she relied on for objective information “closed immediately,” she said. Ms. Petrova feared the border would close as well. She left the country two days later.
She said that after this, it became “really obvious” that if she wanted to be a scientist, she had to leave: “I changed my decision from ‘I will never leave Russia’ to ‘I am leaving Russia immediately.’”
Many of her classmates left at the same time. Some found lucrative jobs writing code for banks or private companies. Ms. Petrova had an offer from a lab in Britain. But she was looking for something particular — “the kind of science,” as she put it, “that I would call beautiful.”
Welcome to the frog palace
Leon Peshkin, a principal research scientist in Harvard’s department of systems biology, had been looking to hire someone for a year.
The Kirschner Lab, where Dr. Peshkin works, is investigating the earliest stages of cell division. These changes are easy to observe in the eggs of the xenopus frog, which are large and hardy. To lure Marc W. Kirschner to Harvard, the university constructed a vast aquarium where females bob in circulating water, known internally as the “frog palace.”
Dr. Peshkin’s team is interested in sperm and egg cells, and how they repair damage as an embryo develops. They needed someone equally fluent in machine learning and cell biology, Dr. Peshkin explained in a post on Kaggle, an online community for data scientists. Ms. Petrova reached out.
When she arrived in Boston in May 2023, Dr. Peshkin was shocked to discover that she had not brought a suitcase; she carried a backpack. It became clear, he said, that she was “extremely ascetic,” entirely wrapped up in her research.
“I thought the Russia of my childhood was gone, the Russia of this crazy, dedicated, ascetic scientist is gone,” he said. Over the months that followed, Dr. Peshkin watched her focus intensely for many hours; he saw what she could pull off in a few days of coding. “She is probably strongest I’ve seen,” he said. “I am at Harvard for 20 years.”
Ms. Petrova found ways to speed up everyone’s work. In a dark, enclosed room with a laser-based Raman microscope, William Trim, a postdoctoral fellow, spent his days examining the migration of lipids through tissue.
He painstakingly noted his findings by hand, a task that could take up to two hours each day. “You don’t need to do that,” he said Ms. Petrova told him. She wrote him a script that did the job in seconds. “Any problem I have with data, she has a solution,” Dr. Trim said. They became close friends, and he eventually offered her a room in his apartment.
“All she did was science,” he said. “She would be coming home at 1 a.m. sometimes, because she just spent all day — 14, 15 hours — tweaking the flow rates of five tubes that all coalesce into one place to get this cell into a droplet.”
Dr. Peshkin worried she would burn out. He was relieved when she told him she was taking a vacation to France, where the pianist Andras Schiff was giving a concert. She bought theater tickets and planned trips to see friends from Moscow, now scattered across Europe.
She would also make time for work. Dr. Peshkin collaborates with a laboratory in Paris, where one of the scientists had figured out how to slice superfine sections of a frog embryo.
No one at Harvard knew how to do it; high-quality samples would substantially speed up their work. A few times, their French colleagues had tried to mail the embryo samples, but they thawed in transit and arrived too damaged to use.
“I said, ‘Well, you’re there,’” Dr. Peshkin said. “Why don’t you get this package?”
A shift in the atmosphere
Ms. Petrova’s return flight from Paris landed in Boston on the evening of Feb. 16. As the plane sat on the tarmac, she texted back and forth with Dr. Peshkin, trying to confirm how she should handle the package in customs. But by then, the passengers were already filing off the plane, he said, and Ms. Petrova cut short the conversation.
At first, Ms. Petrova said, her re-entry felt normal. At passport control, an officer examined the J-1 visa that Harvard had sponsored, identifying her as a biomedical researcher. The officer stamped her passport, admitting her to the country.
Then, as she headed toward the baggage claim, a Border Patrol officer approached her and asked to search her suitcase. All she could think was that the embryo samples inside would be ruined; RNA degrades easily. She explained that she didn’t know the rules. The officer was polite, she recalled, and told her she would be allowed to leave.
Then a different officer came into the room, and the tone of the conversation changed, Ms. Petrova said. This officer asked detailed questions about the samples, Ms. Petrova’s work history and her travel in Europe. The official then informed Ms. Petrova that she was canceling her visa and asked her whether she was afraid to be deported to Russia.
“Yes, I am scared to go back to Russia,” she said, according to a Department of Homeland Security transcript provided by her lawyer. “I am afraid the Russian Federation will kill me for protesting against them.”
Ms. Petrova’s attorney, Greg Romanovsky, said that Customs and Border Protection had overreached its authority by canceling her visa. He acknowledged that she had violated customs regulations but said it was a minor offense, punishable by forfeiture and a fine.
To cancel her visa, Mr. Romanovsky said, the agents needed to identify grounds for excluding her. “There are many, many grounds of inadmissibility, but violating a customs rule is certainly not one of them,” he said.
Lucas Guttentag, a professor at Stanford Law School, reviewed documents in the case and agreed. He said that Ms. Petrova had been legally admitted to the United States, and then “the government itself created the alleged improper immigration status that is now the basis for her detention.”
“Subjecting anyone to this process is wrong, and this case is both shocking and revealing,” said Mr. Guttentag, who served as a senior Justice Department advisor under President Biden and senior advisor to the D.H.S. during the Obama administration.
A spokesperson for the D.H.S., asked why Ms. Petrova’s visa had been canceled, said that a canine inspection found petri dishes and vials of embryonic stem cells in her luggage without proper permits.
“The individual was lawfully detained after lying to federal officers about carrying biological substances into the country,” the spokesperson said. “Messages on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them. She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”
When the border patrol agent canceled Ms. Petrova’s visa, she became an undocumented immigrant, among the thousands detained since Mr. Trump took office. She was sent to the Richwood Detention Center to await a hearing in which she will present her case for asylum to an immigration judge.
“If she wins, she will not be deported,” Mr. Romanovsky said. “If she loses, she will be deported to Russia.”
He has also filed a petition for her release in federal court, and pressed ICE to release her on parole. “I am basically pleading for mercy,” he said. “In a different environment, I think she would have been out a long time ago.”
Ms. Petrova has spent the last month in a dormitory lined with rows of bunk beds. It is cold, and at night, the women sometimes shiver under thin blankets. Once a day, they are allowed an hour outside. Breakfast comes at different times, sometimes as early as 3:30 a.m. The hardest thing, she said, is the constant noise. The facility’s psychiatrist gave her earplugs to help her sleep.
Unable to work, she observes the women around her. Around half are Latin Americans in their 30s and 40s who crossed the border for economic reasons, she said. A second group is made up of Asians and citizens of former Soviet states, who crossed the border legally, seeking political asylum.
None of them deserve to be held under these conditions, she said. “I thought this was impossible, to be in this situation,” she said. “Even immigrants here, they have to have some rights. But it seems that nobody really cares about our rights here.”
It has challenged the view of America that she formed in Russia. “This is not the kind of America I used to know,” she said.
An empty bench
Ms. Petrova’s things are still scattered around the laboratory at Harvard — a flower garland, a sleeping bag, a guitar. Before she went on vacation, she programmed a drip irrigator to water the plants on her window sill, and once a day, for five minutes, it whirs into action.
Her colleagues are distracted and anxious; work in the laboratory has stalled. When Dr. Peshkin made the rounds of Harvard laboratories, asking colleagues to send letters of support for her to ICE, many of them confessed that they were afraid to put their names on paper — because they were in the country on temporary visas as well.
“Something has happened to the fabric of society,” he said. “Something is happening.”
Worry about her case has also radiated across networks of Russian émigrés and scientists.
“She is an indicator that the world is becoming almost evil and dangerous for people who are homeless and mean no harm to anyone,” said Dr. Severinov, the biologist who recruited Ms. Petrova in Russia. “It is an irony that this is becoming so on both sides of the pond.”
Marina Sakharov-Liberman, the granddaughter of the Soviet physicist and dissident Andrey Sakharov, has been following the case from her home in London. She said it was “extraordinary” that Harvard had not more publicly protested Ms. Petrova’s detention and demanded her release.
“That is something that I would expect in Russia,” she said. “Everyone would be afraid. If someone was ‘disappeared,’ the institutions would be silent. Very few people would raise their voices and risk their positions.”
No one at Harvard feels worse than Dr. Peshkin. Again and again, he has asked himself why he allowed Ms. Petrova to take the risk of carrying the samples. He rereads the text exchange he had with Ms. Petrova while she was sitting on the plane.
“I mean, anybody in my place would say, ‘Please don’t take the box,’” he said.
Ms. Petrova does not blame Dr. Peshkin. She does not even complain much about life in detention. If she had access to a laptop, and could analyze data from her laboratory at Harvard, “it would be good enough,” she said.
But she worries that, when this is all over, she will no longer be able to work at the same level. “Even if I am released, I will feel myself much less safe,” she said. “Of course it will affect my efficiency. I will be very afraid. What if I get rearrested?”
Alina Lobzina and Kate Selig contributed reporting.
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