Education Department: President Trump is expected to sign an executive order on Thursday instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin dismantling the agency, which cannot be closed without the approval of Congress. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the administration expected some critical functions, including those related to student loans and special education funding, to continue to be run out of the reduced agency. Read more ›
American freed: The Taliban government in Afghanistan has released George Glezmann, an airline mechanic who was detained while visiting Kabul in 2022 as a tourist, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. U.S. officials went to Kabul to arrange for his release. Read more ›
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Deportation flights: The deadline has passed for Trump administration lawyers to provide a federal judge with more information about the flights that carried scores of migrants to El Salvador. The judge has set a hearing for Friday, as he examines whether the removals violated a court order. Trump administration lawyers are said to have determined that the 18th-century wartime law invoked in the deportations allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant.
Alan Feuer
Lawyers for some of the Venezuelan immigrants deported last weekend under a rarely invoked wartime statute are pushing back against the Trump administration’s contention that they are members of a violent criminal street gang.
In court papers filed late Wednesday night, the lawyers said that at least five of the immigrants who were flown without due process to El Salvador on Saturday were apprehended in part because they had tattoos that federal immigration agents claimed indicated ties to the gang, Tren de Aragua.
But the lawyers said that one of the men got his tattoo — of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball — because it resembled the logo of his favorite soccer team, Real Madrid. Another got a similar crown tattoo, the lawyers said, to honor the death of his grandmother.
A third immigrant was identified as being a member of the gang because of a tattoo on his left hand of a rose with paper money as its petals. But according to a sworn declaration filed by the man’s sister, the tattoo had no connection to a gang.
“He had that tattoo done in Aug. 2024 in Arlington, Tex., because he thought it looked cool,” the sister wrote.
The question of whether the deported Venezuelans actually have ties to Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration recently designated as a foreign terrorist organization, could be raised at a hearing set for Friday in Federal District Court in Washington.
The hearing is expected to feature a debate between the Justice Department and lawyers for the immigrants over whether Judge James E. Boasberg, who is handling the case, was right when he issued an order on Saturday temporarily pausing deportations of Tren de Aragua members under the wartime law, which is known as the Alien Enemies Act.
Almost from the moment Judge Boasberg’s provisional decision was entered, the White House and the Justice Department — echoed by a chorus of Mr. Trump’s allies online — have accused the judge of overstepping his authority by effectively commandeering the president’s prerogative to conduct foreign affairs.
But the question that Judge Boasberg is actually considering is whether Mr. Trump himself overstepped his authority by failing to comply with several specific provisions laid out in the Alien Enemies Act. The statute, which was passed in 1798, gives the government wide latitude during an invasion or a time of declared war to round up and summarily remove any subjects of a “hostile nation” over the age of 14 as “alien enemies.”
The administration has repeatedly claimed that those accused of membership in Tren de Aragua should be considered subjects of a hostile nation because they are closely aligned with the Venezuelan government and the leadership of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. The White House has also insisted that the arrival to the United States of dozens of members of the gang constitutes an invasion.
But lawyers for the deported Venezuelans argue that their clients are actually not gang members at all and should have the opportunity to prove it. The lawyers also maintain that while Tren de Aragua may be a dangerous criminal organization, it is not a nation state. Even if the group’s members have come to the United States en masse, they say, that does not fit the traditional definition of an invasion.
Moreover, they point out that the Alien Enemies Act has been invoked only three times in American history, all of them during times of clear-cut war: once during the War of 1812 and then again during World War I and World War II.
The conflict over whether Mr. Trump has properly invoked the Alien Enemies Act is the central — but not the only — dispute in the case, which has emerged in recent days as a flashpoint over the administration’s attempts to use extraordinary wartime powers to pursue its broader immigration agenda.
Judge Boasberg has also been trying for days to get the Justice Department to provide him with detailed data on two of the deportation flights to El Salvador in an effort to determine whether administration officials sent the planes on their way in violation of his original order stopping them.
The judge has asked the government to tell him — under seal if necessary — what time the planes took off from U.S. soil and from where, what time they left U.S. airspace and what time they landed. Much of this information appears to already be available in public flight databases, but the judge is seeking an official record from the administration.
He gave the Justice Department until noon on Thursday to file court papers with the flight data. But by Thursday afternoon, there was no public filing on the docket in the case, suggesting that department lawyers have submitted the papers to the judge under seal and also perhaps ex parte, meaning to him alone.
Alan Feuer
The noon deadline has passed for the Justice Department to provide a federal judge in Washington with data on two flights of Venezuelan immigrants sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador last weekend. There is no sign of a public filing on the docket in the case, suggesting that department lawyers have submitted court papers to the judge, James E. Boasberg, under seal and also likely ex parte, meaning to him alone.
Alan Feuer
The Justice Department, for the past few days, has stonewalled Judge Boasberg’s efforts to get detailed data on when the two flights left the United States and landed in El Salvador, in an effort to determine whether the Trump administration sent the planes on their way in violation of an order he had issued stopping them.
Alan Feuer
It is unclear at this point what, if anything, the government has filed to Judge Boasberg. But if it has provided him with private, sealed court papers, they could contain the flight data he has repeatedly asked for. However, it is possible that the Justice Department lawyers have invoked, under seal, a rare doctrine called the state secrets privilege in an effort to get around telling Judge Boasberg more about the deportation flights. That doctrine sometimes allows the government to shield information being used in court cases if it could jeopardize national security.
Devlin Barrett
Reporting from Washington
Trump administration lawyers have determined that an 18th-century wartime law the president has invoked to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant, according to people familiar with internal discussions.
The disclosure reflects the Trump administration’s aggressive view of presidential power, including setting aside a key provision of the Fourth Amendment that requires a court order to search someone’s home.
It remains unclear whether the administration will apply the law in this way, but experts say such an interpretation would infringe on basic civil liberties and raise the potential for misuse. Warrantless entries have some precedent in America’s wartime history, but invoking the law in peacetime to pursue undocumented immigrants in such a way would be an entirely new application, they added.
“It undermines fundamental protections that are recognized in the Fourth Amendment, and in the due process clause,” said Christopher Slobogin, a law professor at Vanderbilt University.
Last week, Mr. Trump quietly signed a proclamation invoking the law, known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. It grants him the authority to remove from the United States foreign citizens he has designated as “alien enemies” in the cases of war or an invasion.
His order took aim at Venezuelan citizens 14 or older who belong to the Tren de Aragua gang, and who are not naturalized or lawful permanent residents. “All such alien enemies, wherever found within any territory subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are subject to summary apprehension,” the proclamation said.
Senior lawyers at the Justice Department view that language, combined with the historical use of the law, to mean that the government does not need a warrant to enter a home or premises to search for people believed to be members of that gang, according to two officials familiar with the new policy.
A department spokesman declined to comment.
Christopher A. Wellborn, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, called the old law a relic that is dangerously prone to abuse — particularly when it comes to people’s right to privacy in their homes.
“The Fourth Amendment applies to everyone in the U.S., not just individuals with legal status,” he said. Taking away that right would be an “abuse of power that destroys our privacy, making Americans feel unsafe and vulnerable in the places where our children play and our loved ones sleep.”
The use of the law is contentious to start. It has been deployed just three other times, all during major wars, and it is unclear how the administration has deemed someone a member of Tren de Aragua.
Using the law to avoid warrant requirements would facilitate at least one part of the administration’s bid to deliver on the president’s campaign promise to cut down on immigration. Currently, immigration agents without a warrant can do little more than knock on a door and ask to come in.
Legal scholars have long criticized the law as prone to abuse. During World War II, in one of the darker chapters in the nation’s history, the law paved the way for citizens of Germany, Italy or Japan to be searched and detained.
In the past, the law has been interpreted to “extend the president’s authority to not only detaining and deporting noncitizens but also controlling their speech, movements and livelihoods,” Katherine Yon Ebright wrote in a 2024 study of the law for the Brennan Center for Justice.
Mr. Slobogin warned of the dangers inherent in the administration’s wide-ranging view of the president’s authority. The purpose of the Fourth Amendment, he said, was to ensure that someone independent of the executive branch — a judge — approved any decision to seize people or search their property.
Still, he acknowledged that the language of the Alien Enemies Act, particularly its reference to a “warrant of a president,” gave the government “at least a foot in the door with respect to arguing that the president can order this on his own authority.”
Past court cases leave unclear what a “warrant of a president” means, and whether such an order requires something similar to the probable cause standard of a judicial warrant.
Mr. Slobogin noted that a number of cases dating back to 1819 hold that the act gives the president power to remove people designated as “alien enemies” from the country “without resort or recourse to courts.” However, he added, those cases met a basic threshold that did not apply in the current situation: a declared war, or an “invasion or predatory incursion” by a foreign nation.
“That’s pretty clearly not what’s going on here,” he said.
Mr. Trump has long claimed that the country is being invaded by undocumented migrants, and has compared the problem to a war. But such rhetorical flourishes are far removed from a state of war like the one Congress declared against Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
In the American war effort that followed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify detentions and searches of Japanese Americans and others.
Their status as “enemy aliens” was sufficient cause “for warrantless house raids in search of contraband,” Ms. Yon Ebright wrote in her study.
In some cases, she noted, there were warrantless spot searches. In others, search warrants were obtained solely on the basis of someone’s status as a noncitizen of Japanese, German, or Italian descent. Government officials were looking not just for people in those instances, but also for items that had been declared contraband for them to possess, such as cameras and radios.
One U.S. military document from that time declared that all that was needed to justify a search under the wartime law was an official’s belief that an “alien enemy” may be found there. It asserted that “the question of probable cause will be met only by the statement that an alien enemy resides in such premises.”
Courts are only beginning to wrestle with the implications of Mr. Trump’s order after he promptly used the act to expel more than 100 Venezuelan citizens who the administration determined were members of Tren de Aragua.
The men were flown to El Salvador on Saturday and placed in a large prison complex, under an agreement in which the United States will pay about $20,000 a person each year for El Salvador to keep the men locked up.
A federal judge in Washington paused the administration’s use of the law while he considers the underlying legal issues, ordering any planes carrying migrants deported under the act to turn around. He is now weighing whether the administration violated that order.
The Justice Department has argued that it did not defy the judge’s orders, saying that he had limited authority on matters of immigration.
Matthew Goldstein
The newly appointed head of one of the nation’s top housing regulators is moving quickly to reshape not only the agency but also Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-controlled mortgage finance giants he oversees.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency, now under the direction of William Pulte, placed 35 unionized employees on administrative leave over the past two days, according to an email sent to members on Wednesday evening by the National Treasury Employees Union. The email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, said there had been no advance notice for the employees, who work in consumer protection, equal opportunity and research units.
In a statement, the housing regulator said, “We are streamlining our Agency and its naming conventions, but F.H.F.A. will continue to follow all mandated laws.”
The regulator appears to be among the many federal agencies that are taking steps to comply with the Trump administration’s aim to cut costs by reducing the size of the government work force. The pace and scale of the cutbacks have sparked protests from employees and legislators.
Gray Kimbrough, an F.H.F.A. economist who was not among the affected employees, said in a social media post on Wednesday that those placed on leave had been rushed out of the building and given no time to pack up their personal items.
The National Treasury Employees Union represents about 500 of the more than 600 employees at the housing regulator, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance firms that have been under the control of the federal government since the 2008 financial crisis.
Fannie and Freddie do not write mortgages but they are critical players in the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market. The firms buy mortgages from banks and package them into bonds that are sold to institutional investors and insured against a default of the underlying loans. This helps keep the mortgage market running by freeing up capital for banks to write more home loans.
On Monday, Mr. Pulte ousted 14 board members at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and named himself chairman of the boards at both companies, which together employ roughly 15,000 nonunion workers. He sent an email on Wednesday to Freddie employees notifying them that they would be expected to work in the office five days a week beginning May 1. Employees at Fannie received an email on Thursday informing them they would soon be notified about a new return-to-office policy. Copies of both emails were reviewed by The Times.
Mr. Pulte, an heir of the founder of PulteGroup, one of the largest American home builders, began his new job with a promise to work to make home-buying more affordable. Mr. Pulte said he would “ensure that the dream of homeownership becomes a reality for as many Americans as possible,” in a news release announcing his swearing-in as director of the housing regulator.
Shawn McCreesh
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, provided some new details about the administration’s plans to dismantle the Education Department, with President Trump expected to sign an executive order this afternoon. She said from the White House driveway that “when it comes to student loans and Pell Grants, those will still be run out of the Department of Education” in Washington, even as the administration greatly reduces the size and reach of the agency. She added that a few of the other critical functions of the department, including funding special education and civil rights enforcement, will remain intact.
Edward Wong
Reporting from Washington
The Taliban on Thursday released George Glezmann, an American held since 2022 in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
Mr. Glezmann, an Atlanta native, was a Delta Air Lines mechanic who was detained while visiting Afghanistan as a tourist in December 2022. The State Department had officially designated him a wrongful detainee.
Mr. Glezmann boarded a Qatari aircraft in Kabul, the Afghan capital, to fly to Doha, Qatar, with U.S. and Qatari officials on Thursday. Qatar maintains close ties with the ruling Taliban government in Afghanistan and has hosted talks between it and U.S. officials. Negotiations between the first Trump administration and Taliban insurgents for a U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan occurred in Doha.
In his announcement of Mr. Glezmann’s release, Mr. Rubio thanked the Qatari government for its help. Adam Boehler, who had been President Trump’s pick for special envoy for hostage affairs, took part in the negotiations with the Taliban.
The meeting in Kabul between American and Taliban officials was the first known in-person contact of any significance between the two governments since Mr. Trump took office in January. Mr. Boehler was accompanied on the trip by Zalmay Khalilzad, the special envoy for Afghanistan reconciliation in the first Trump administration and a former ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations.
Mr. Boehler arrived at the meeting in Kabul dressed in a gray jacket, black sweater and black baseball cap. Mr. Khalilzad wore a navy suit and purple-and-red floral tie. They sat at a wooden table across from Amir Khan Muttaqi, the foreign minister of Afghanistan, and other Afghan officials, photographs of the meeting showed.
The Taliban toppled a U.S.-backed Afghan government in August 2021 and returned to power after President Joseph R. Biden Jr. executed the troop withdrawal that Mr. Trump had negotiated in his first term. The United States does not have diplomatic relations with the Taliban and has imposed sanctions on its officials. Moderate Taliban officials are seeking to normalize relations with the United States.
The United States does not maintain a presence in Kabul, unlike European countries, which have been more successful in negotiating releases of their citizens with the Taliban.
Mr. Rubio said on Thursday that Mr. Glezmann’s release was “also a reminder that other Americans are still detained in Afghanistan.”
The State Department said it was still seeking the return of six American detainees in Afghanistan and the remains of one U.S. citizen. The agency has not labeled them wrongfully detained, although one State Department official said the Americans were unjustly detained.
A wrongful detention designation means the U.S. government tries to prioritize freeing that citizen.
The department has focused on Mahmood Shah Habibi, an Afghan American businessman who was taken from his vehicle near his home in Kabul in August 2022, according to an F.B.I. report. Mr. Habibi worked for the Asia Consultancy Group, a telecommunications company based in Kabul.
The Taliban government released two Americans, Ryan Corbett and William Wallace McKenty, in late January in a prisoner swap arranged by the Biden administration. U.S. officials released Khan Mohammed, a member of the Taliban who had been imprisoned for life in California on charges of drug trafficking and terrorism. Mr. Biden gave a conditional commutation to Mr. Mohammed before he left office.
Christina Goldbaum contributed reporting from Damascus, Syria.
Edward Wong
The Taliban government in Afghanistan has freed George Glezmann, an airline mechanic who was detained while visiting Kabul in 2022 as a tourist, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said in a statement. The State Department said U.S. officials went to Kabul to arrange for his release. Rubio thanked Qatar for its role in the negotiations.
Matthew Goldstein
A union representing some workers at one of the nation’s top housing regulators said in an email that at least 35 unionized employees at the agency were put on administrative leave in the past two days. The National Treasury Employees Union said the move came without warning, days after William Pulte took over as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and ousted numerous board members at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-controlled mortgage finance firms that the F.H.F.A. regulates.
Nataliya Vasilyeva
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said on Thursday that Russian and American officials were working out the details of a round of talks on the war in Ukraine, after Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia spoke earlier this week. Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, told Russian news agencies that Russian and American officials will meet on Monday in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
Danielle Kaye
New claims for U.S. unemployment benefits inched up last week, according to data released today by the Labor Department. Claims rose to 223,000, up 2,000 from the previous week, after seasonal adjustments. Jobless claims are still relatively high among federal workers, especially in Washington and Virginia, as they have been for the past few weeks. But the thousands of federal employees targeted for dismissal by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency do not seem to be fully reflected in the data yet.
Jeanna Smialek
Reporting from Brussels
Officials from the European Union said on Thursday that they would delay their retaliation against President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs — including 50 percent levies on American whiskey and other goods — until the middle of next month.
The move is meant to give officials time to refine the list of products that will be hit while also allowing more time to strike a deal with the United States, said Olof Gill, a spokesman. The first wave of E.U. tariffs was originally set to kick in on March 31, with a second wave coming a few weeks later.
The postponement could allow officials to reconsider whether they want to impose such big tariffs on sensitive products like bourbon. And it comes as Europe tries to prevent its trading relationship with the United States — arguably the globe’s most important — from devolving into a tit-for-tat trade war that costs consumers and companies on both sides of the Atlantic.
“The E.U. and the U.S. enjoy the largest bilateral trade and investment relationship in the world,” Maros Sefcovic, the bloc’s trade commissioner, said during a speech in Brussels on Thursday. “It should be a priority for both sides to protect and further develop this relationship.”
Mr. Sefcovic, who is in charge of negotiating trade matters for the E.U., talked to his American counterparts by phone last week. He said on Thursday that he had learned that the Trump administration did not want to negotiate on trade until after April 2, when the United States is expected to announce a new and even more sweeping round of tariffs on its global trading partners.
“For them, this should serve as a base line for redefining and rebuilding U.S. trading relations with the rest of the world,” Mr. Sefcovic said. “Only then may partners be able to engage on possible negotiations.”
The delay in negotiation has complicated the original start date for Europe’s retaliatory tariffs, which E.U. policymakers had always hoped would be a tool to prod the Americans to the negotiating table.
The E.U. announced its tariff package last week in response to steel and aluminum tariffs that began on March 12. The European plan was originally meant to take effect over two phases.
The first — the one that is now delayed — would have allowed a set of tariffs that had been instituted during Mr. Trump’s first presidency and then suspended during the Biden administration to snap back into place at higher levels. Whiskey, motorcycles and a range of other products would have been affected.
The second phase would have placed new tariffs on a wide array of American products. Member states were meant to consult on the proposed list, set out in a 99-page document covering everything from lingerie to soy products to machinery parts. Those tariffs were set to begin in mid-April.
Now, all of the tariffs are expected to take hold next month, adding heftier levies on up to 26 billion euros, about $28 billion, worth of exports.
Slowing down the process could allow officials more time to take feedback into account and make edits, relevant at a moment when the continent’s plan has already met with a prompt and painful response from Washington.
Mr. Trump said he would impose a crushing 200 percent tariff on European champagne, wine and other alcohol to retaliate against Europe’s plan to hit American whiskey in particular.
That threat has stoked alarm among European leaders from wine-producing nations. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, has warned against a “vicious circle” of trade measures, and François Bayrou, the prime minister of France, has said Europe is at risk of “hitting the wrong targets.”
Whiskey was originally placed on the tariff list during Mr. Trump’s first trade war, in 2018, as a way to target Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who was then the majority leader. Bourbon is an important export from his home state. But with a new crop of leaders in Congress and surrounding Mr. Trump, the political calculus around such products has shifted.
Hanging over everything is what more might happen before mid-April.
While details on the new tariffs that the United States might impose on April 2 remain scant, Europe has been bracing for their impact. Mr. Trump has at times threatened that levies on cars and other products could be as high as 25 percent — a painful blow to German automakers, for instance.
Mr. Sefcovic said on Thursday that the United States could also unleash further trade measures on copper, wood and shipbuilders.
Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, suggested on Thursday that tariffs were being used as “blackmail,” and that they could both sharply reduce European growth and add uncertainty to the outlook for price inflation.
But she said that if the E.U. responded by striking closer trade deals both internally and with other trading partners, it could offset those potential consequences.
“The answer to the current shift in U.S. trade policies should be more, not less, trade integration, both with trade partners around the globe and within the E.U.,” Ms. Lagarde said.
Aurelien Breeden
Reporting from Paris
A French scientist was prevented from entering the United States this month because of an opinion he expressed about the Trump administration’s policies on academic research, according to the French government.
Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for higher education and research, described the move as worrying.
“Freedom of opinion, free research and academic freedom are values we will continue to proudly uphold,” Mr. Baptiste said in a statement. “I will defend the possibility for all French researchers to be faithful to them, in compliance with the law, wherever they may be in the world.”
Mr. Baptiste did not identify the scientist who was turned away but said that the academic was working for France’s publicly funded National Center for Scientific Research and had been traveling to a conference near Houston when border officials stopped him.
The U.S. authorities denied entry to the scientist and then deported him because his phone contained message exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed his “personal opinion” on the Trump administration’s science policies, Mr. Baptiste said.
It was not immediately clear what led the border authorities to stop the scientist, why they examined the contents of his phone or what they found objectionable about the conversations.
Customs officers are allowed to search the cellphone, computer, camera or any other electronic device of any travelers crossing the border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, although the agency says that such instances are rare. In 2024, less than 0.01 percent of arriving international travelers had their electronic devices searched, according to the agency.
Mr. Baptiste’s office declined to provide further details about the case. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Paris also declined to comment.
A spokeswoman for the National Center for Scientific Research said that the scientist who was turned back did not wish to speak to the media and declined to comment further.
The Agence France-Presse news agency reported earlier on the scientist’s refused entry to the United States.
Mr. Baptiste, the minister, has been particularly vocal over the past few weeks in denouncing threats to academic freedom in the United States, where funding cuts and layoffs by the Trump administration have targeted institutions of higher education, scientific research and the federal government’s own scientific work force.
Mr. Baptiste has urged French universities and research institutes to welcome researchers seeking to leave the United States.
“Europe must be there to protect research and welcome the talent that can contribute to its success,” Mr. Baptiste wrote on social media after meeting with his European counterparts in Warsaw on Wednesday to address “threats to free research in the United States.”
Jennifer Jones, the director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group in the United States, said she worried that cases like the one involving the French scientist would have a chilling effect on research collaboration across borders.
“My fear is that these are early cases with many more to follow,” Dr. Jones said. “I am hearing from my network that people are very concerned about any kind of international travel in either direction.”
“And that should worry all of us,” she added. If scientists limit their movements to conferences and other events designed to advance research, she said, “it is the public that is going to suffer.”
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
Erica L. GreenZolan Kanno-Youngs and Maggie Haberman
Erica L. Green, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Maggie Haberman cover the White House. They reported from Washington.
News Analysis
President Trump called for one federal judge seeking basic information about his deportation efforts to be impeached amid mounting concern about a constitutional showdown.
Another judge found that Mr. Trump’s efforts to shut down a federal agency probably violated the Constitution and stripped Congress of its authority.
The president was accused of overstepping his executive authority yet again in firing two Democratic commissioners from an independent trade commission.
And that was just Tuesday.
Nearly two months into his second term, Mr. Trump is trying to consolidate control over the courts, Congress and even, in some ways, American society and culture.
His expansive interpretation of presidential power has become the defining characteristic of his second term, an aggressive effort across multiple fronts to assert executive authority to reshape the government, drive policy in new directions and root out what he and his supporters see as a deeply embedded liberal bias.
“We’ve never seen a president so comprehensively attempt to arrogate and consolidate so much of the other branches’ power, let alone to do so in the first two months of his presidency,” said Stephen Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
Congress, which is controlled by Republicans, has ceded some of its core duties to Mr. Trump, handing off elements of the legislative branch’s spending authority to the White House and standing aside as congressionally chartered agencies are shuttered. The president has threatened to “lead the charge” against the re-election of the rare Republican who dares challenge his agenda, and the party has bent to his will at every turn.
Mr. Trump has dismantled independent measures of checks and balances, fired inspectors general and installed loyalists at the Justice Department willing to carry out his campaign of retribution. He has targeted private law firms with connections to those he views as political enemies and cowed previously skeptical or hostile business leaders into pledging public support, even as he has imprinted his “MAGA” stamp on the private sector by trying to dictate hiring practices.
His efforts to reshape institutions in his image have not been limited to the government and policy. Mr. Trump has tried to spread his influence through the arts, as well, by making himself chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
But Mr. Trump’s latest target — the judiciary — has been described by constitutional scholars and historians as perhaps the most alarming power play to date.
The Trump administration brushed off an order by James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, who sought to pause the deportation of a group of migrants, many of whom received little to no due process. Administration officials said that most of the migrants were from Venezuela and that all of them were affiliated with gangs. But officials did not release the migrants’ names or evidence of their alleged crimes.
Mr. Trump has called for Judge Boasberg to be impeached, arguing on social media that “if a President doesn’t have the right to throw murderers, and other criminals, out of our Country because a Radical Left Lunatic Judge wants to assume the role of President, then our Country is in very big trouble, and destined to fail!”
The White House did not respond late Wednesday to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump has never been consistent in his attacks on the judicial system generally and on judges in particular. Last week during a speech at the Department of Justice, he suggested that criticism of Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Florida jurist who dismissed the classified documents case against him last summer, may not be legal.
But he has applied the same logic of fairness to court cases that he has to presidential elections: They’re fair if he wins but not if he loses.
In one way or another, Mr. Trump has been a party to lawsuits going back to the 1970s, as a private developer and later as a candidate and president. When he has lost cases, he has tended to attack the judges in question as partisan activists or worse.
When he wins, he praises the judge in question.
Mr. Trump’s allies say he is using his power to enact an agenda that he promised during the campaign, and that he is executing Article II of the Constitution, which sets out the powers of the president.
“President Trump’s doing the unthinkable in Washington — he’s doing what he told Americans he was going to do, and he’s doing it fast,” said Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, a conservative advocacy group.
Still, a few traditionally right-leaning voices have expressed concern.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page, for example, said Mr. Trump had campaigned on deporting gang members, “but it’s still troubling to see U.S. officials appear to disdain the law in the name of upholding it.” The New York Post ran a headline on its opinion page that said: “Trump, don’t heed the dangerous urge to attack the rule of law.”
Both papers are part of the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, Mr. Trump’s on-again, off-again ally.
The judiciary, created to provide checks and balances to both the executive and legislative branches, has only rarely faced such open defiance, experts say. Some of Mr. Trump’s top lieutenants have suggested he has a right to defy court orders.
“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vice President JD Vance declared last month.
“I don’t care what the judges think — I don’t care what the left thinks,” Mr. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said this week during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.”
Mr. Trump’s allies often point out that he is doing what he said he would do during his campaign, when his policy platform, Agenda 47, laid out an agenda of maximalist presidential power. He and his advisers believe he was stymied in his first term through investigations and a resistant federal bureaucracy.
Some of his closest allies, including Russell T. Vought, Mr. Trump’s current and former director of the Office of Management and Budget, spent years preparing for the possibility of a second Trump presidency, searching for pockets of independence in the executive branch that could be seized.
Mr. Vought and other Trump allies have advocated a doctrine called the unitary executive, a legal theory that all power in the executive branch flows from the president.
“The great challenge confronting a conservative president is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch — to the American people,” Mr. Vought wrote in the conservative blueprint for a Republican presidential transition, Project 2025. He added that it would take “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
One of the dozens of executive orders that Mr. Trump signed since taking office, which called for taking over “independent regulatory agencies,” asserted similar goals. “For the federal government to be truly accountable to the American people, officials who wield vast executive power must be supervised and controlled by the people’s elected president,” the executive order states.
Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a former acting deputy Homeland Security secretary in the first Trump administration and a contributor to Project 2025, said those who criticize Mr. Trump’s use of executive power “are doing so primarily to weaken the presidency and this president in particular under the guise of ‘conventional wisdom’ that has no constitutional foundation.”
Critics of how Mr. Trump is approaching his executive authority say the unitary executive theory does not mean that everything the executive branch does is legal.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University who studies fascism and authoritarianism, singled out what she said were some of Mr. Trump’s most troubling behaviors: the expansion of executive power, the politicization of the other branches of government, the dismantling of an oversight and accountability structure, and the targeting of those who seek to hold the president and his allies accountable.
“The ultimate beneficiary of the acts that we’re seeing happen, whether it’s with the judiciary or other agencies, is Trump himself, because it’s an expansion of his personal power,” she said. “The scale and the speed of what’s going on is terrifying.”
Ryan MacKate Conger and Theodore Schleifer
Elon Musk declared last month that the federal government was engaged in “utterly insane” activity, claiming without evidence that it had distributed $100 billion to people without Social Security numbers.
Two days after Mr. Musk’s comments, one of his key lieutenants, Steve Davis, began pressing the Social Security Administration for information. Mr. Davis called the agency’s leaders to insist they give a young engineer from Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to databases that contained sensitive information about Americans.
Mr. Davis’s demand was “unprecedented,” Tiffany Flick, a former Social Security official, said in a sworn statement this month for a lawsuit filed by federal employees trying to block access to the data. She added that she could feel Mr. Davis grow impatient in the hours before the DOGE engineer was eventually permitted to investigate “the general myth of supposed widespread Social Security fraud.”
Deploying staff into federal agencies is just one task that Mr. Davis has carried out recently for Mr. Musk, as the world’s richest man continues an all-out effort to reshape the U.S. government. At every turn, Mr. Davis has backed his boss, laying the groundwork for cost cutting during the presidential transition, slashing diversity initiatives, meeting lawmakers and helping to send a governmentwide “Fork in the Road” email that urged workers to resign.
Those actions demonstrate how Mr. Davis, 45, has effectively become the day-to-day leader of DOGE. He has more power than Amy Gleason, the Trump administration’s acting DOGE administrator, two people close to the effort said, adding that Ms. Gleason has sometimes been in the dark about Mr. Davis’s decisions.
How Mr. Davis got to this position is hardly a secret. For more than 20 years, the engineer has devoted himself to fulfilling Mr. Musk’s desires, following the billionaire to his various companies, including the rocket maker SpaceX and the social media platform X. Mr. Davis wholeheartedly believes Mr. Musk will bring about humanity’s progress, according to interviews with 22 friends, former colleagues and government officials.
For Mr. Musk, Mr. Davis represents the ideal employee — an engineer who will throw himself at any task, even if he has no expertise in the area, two former colleagues said. Mr. Musk has especially praised Mr. Davis’s ability to excise waste, once likening his lieutenant to a cancer-killing treatment.
“Steve is like chemo,” Mr. Musk said at a transition meeting before President Trump took office. “A little chemo can save your life; a lot of chemo could kill you.”
Mr. Musk and Mr. Davis have bonded deeply over cost cuts. At SpaceX, Mr. Davis devised ways to build rockets more cheaply. He also oversaw layoffs at Twitter, which was renamed X. At DOGE, he is coordinating engineers and lawyers to find $2 trillion that Mr. Musk has promised to eliminate from the federal budget.
Mr. Davis is so loyal to Mr. Musk that he and his partner, Nicole Hollander, 42, who joined the General Services Administration to cut federal real estate costs, have set up a base of operations on the agency’s sixth floor in Washington. It is guarded by a full security detail, three agency employees said.
Adam Green, a progressive organizer who befriended Mr. Davis about a decade ago when they lived in Washington, said Mr. Davis was once a “fun outside-the-box thinker,” who had turned into a “blind servant” to Mr. Musk.
Mr. Davis, Mr. Musk, Ms. Hollander and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Davis began working for Mr. Musk in 2003, when the tech entrepreneur plucked him out of a Stanford aeronautics graduate program. Mr. Davis became the 14th employee at SpaceX. He quickly endeared himself to Mr. Musk by finding less expensive ways to develop rocket parts, including making a shuttle steering device for a hundredth of the price.
His frugality led to mistakes. In 2007, Mr. Davis removed components from SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket that prevented fuel from sloshing inside the vehicle, three former colleagues said. That caused the fuel to unbalance the rocket during a test flight, and it shut down midair before reaching orbit.
By 2008, Mr. Davis had moved to Washington and was later named SpaceX’s director of advanced projects. He had a broad range of responsibilities at the company, including finding land around Boca Chica, Texas, for what would become Starbase, SpaceX’s rocket launch facility.
On the side, Mr. Davis pursued an economics doctorate and opened Mr. Yogato, a frozen yogurt shop that offered discounts to customers who answered trivia questions. He joined the board of the Atlas Society, a nonprofit dedicated to the teachings of the libertarian author Ayn Rand.
In 2018, Mr. Musk appointed Mr. Davis to lead the Boring Company, a start-up that aims to build tunnels under major metropolitan areas to ease congestion.
“In general there is almost zero R&D in tunnels in America,” Mr. Davis said at a presentation for the company that year. “So trying new things is actually helpful for us.”
The Boring Company opened a tunnel in Las Vegas in 2021, but has run into regulatory roadblocks elsewhere. That frustrated Mr. Musk, who berated Mr. Davis and threatened to fire him, three people who have worked with Mr. Davis said. The stress weighed on Mr. Davis, and he sometimes pulled out his hair, five people close to him said.
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After Mr. Musk bought Twitter in 2022, Mr. Davis helped slash the company’s costs, telling people that he hoped to eliminate more than $500 million. He was so dedicated that on some nights, he stayed with Ms. Hollander and their newborn baby at Twitter’s San Francisco office.
Mr. Davis also oversaw the installation of a personal bathroom for Mr. Musk there, telling one employee not to bother obtaining a construction permit.
“We don’t have to follow the rules,” Mr. Davis said, according to a 2023 lawsuit from former Twitter workers who accused the company and Mr. Musk of violating the terms of their employment agreements.
Some workers complained about Mr. Davis’s cost cutting to Linda Yaccarino, who became X’s chief executive in 2023, and asked her to rein him in, two people with knowledge of the discussions said. He left X soon after.
When Mr. Musk stumped for Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania during last year’s presidential campaign, Mr. Davis relocated to hotels in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to oversee a super PAC that Mr. Musk had backed, three people said. Mr. Davis helped conceive a $47-a-head petition that Mr. Musk promoted to turn out Trump voters, and cited his Twitter cost cutting as a way of doing things cheaply at the super PAC.
After Mr. Trump won the election, Mr. Davis joined a transition “landing team” and interviewed candidates for Mr. Musk’s efficiency commission. He also met with agencies that employed engineers to assess the technical talent that DOGE might tap, three government officials said. Mr. Musk included Mr. Davis in recruiting pitches to potential government hires, according to an internal email seen by The New York Times.
After Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Davis pushed administration officials to let him email all government employees at once, two people with knowledge of his efforts said. That led to a January email blast known as the “Fork in the Road,” which included a governmentwide resignation offer.
When leaks about the resignation offer circulated in the media, Mr. Davis rebuked officials for not controlling their staffs and accused them of embarrassing Mr. Musk, two people said.
Mr. Davis pushes for Mr. Musk’s priorities daily with Mr. Trump’s advisers, two people with knowledge of the conversations said. He has alerted administration officials to diversity, equity and inclusion programs that are targeted for cuts and individuals to be removed from government boards.
Mr. Davis, who can be blunt and undiplomatic, especially in late-night texts, has also clashed with some of Mr. Trump’s staff. He and his colleagues upset some White House advisers with the way DOGE tried to place some of their recruits at the Pentagon, three people said.
Throughout, Mr. Davis has studiously avoided attention. Mr. Musk and the White House have not mentioned him. In Washington, Mr. Davis mostly avoided having his picture taken until this month, when he spoke at the DOGE Caucus, a House of Representatives group that works with the cost-cutting task force.
“Wrapped a great meeting with @elonmusk and Steve Davis on their goals for the @DOGE,” Representative Aaron Bean, Republican of Florida, posted on X. The message included a photo of Mr. Davis holding a microphone and smiling beside Mr. Musk.
Reporting was contributed by Kirsten Grind, Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
An earlier version of this article said Steve Davis helped create a Jewish lifestyle website, Gather the Jews. He was not involved in its founding.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] more
Sarah Maslin Nir and Maggie Haberman
The Trump administration scrambled to minimize fallout on Thursday after exposing personal information, including Social Security numbers, of hundreds of congressional staff members, intelligence researchers and even an ambassador when releasing files pertaining to the death of President John F. Kennedy.
The exposure of personal details, as well as long-guarded secrets about Cold War spycraft, came as a result of the National Archives uploading 64,000 pages of documents related — some very tangentially — to Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
White House officials acknowledged on Thursday that it was only after the papers were made public that they began combing through them for exposed details.
On Wednesday, the White House ordered that the pages be combed for exposed Social Security numbers, and officials directed the Social Security Administration to issue new numbers to the affected people, according to a senior administration official, in an extraordinary response to mitigate the potential harm of the leaks. They will also be offered free credit monitoring.
Normally, personal information like names, Social Security numbers and home addresses are scrubbed from declassified files.
William A. Harnage, a former government contractor, learned from a reporter that the White House had leaked his personal information in a file from 1977. “I consider it almost criminal,” said Mr. Harnage, 71.
In fact, the exposure could have violated U.S. privacy law, according to Mark S. Zaid, a national security lawyer and outspoken critic of Mr. Trump who has also pushed for the release of the Kennedy documents. But whether the people affected could sue for damages depended on several technicalities, he said, including the storage systems used for the data.
“The bottom line is that Social Security numbers are among the most prized data that the U.S. government seeks to protect,” Mr. Zaid said. “It is an egregious breach.”
Mr. Trump’s eagerness to make the files public without redactions, fulfilling a promise he has made since his first campaign, caused the private information to be exposed. Even as his supporters praised the release as government transparency at its finest, the administration has hastily tried to explain and remedy the situation.
“President Trump delivered on his promise of maximum transparency,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in an email, adding: “At the request of the White House, the National Archives and the Social Security Administration immediately put together an action plan to proactively help individuals whose personal information was released in the files.”
The exposed data left officials rushing to deal with the potentially serious consequences, demonstrating the challenges caused when Mr. Trump makes abrupt policy moves.
His national security team was stunned and forced to scramble after the president announced on Monday that he would release the Kennedy documents with only 24 hours’ notice. Administration officials had been working to make the records public since January, when Mr. Trump signed an executive order mandating it.
But that process was still underway on Monday afternoon when Mr. Trump, during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, said the files would be made available the next day. By Tuesday evening, some of the country’s top national security officials had spent hours trying to assess any possible hazards.
Administration officials knew before the documents went out that releasing them without redactions would expose some personal information, according to one person with knowledge of the effort who was granted anonymity to discuss the deliberations.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence, championed the untouched pages. “President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” she wrote in an X post on Tuesday, adding, “Promises made, promises kept.”
Despite the limited number of redactions, nothing found in the papers so far has pointed to a second gunman or other conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. Any new information was largely related to the C.I.A.’s clandestine Cold War operations, including spying on erstwhile allies.
A former lawyer for the Trump campaign, Joseph diGenova, 80, was among the people whose personal data was revealed to the public, according to The Washington Post. “It’s absolutely outrageous,” Mr. diGenova, a frequent and ardent supporter of the president, told the newspaper, adding, “It’s like a first-grade, elementary-level rule of security to redact things like that.”
Mr. Trump himself has expressed little interest in the contents of the Kennedy files, telling The New York Times in September 2021 that he was “not that curious” about the papers. He released a larger trove of Kennedy-related documents during his first term, though he relented to intelligence officials and allowed redactions — something he would later express regret for doing.
Judy K. Barga, who supports the president, nonetheless said the leak of her personal data is “not good for anybody.” Ms. Barga, 80, is a former government contractor whose Social Security number was exposed.
“People’s private information should be kept private,” she said.
Hank Sanders and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
The U.S. government has detained an Indian citizen who was studying and teaching at Georgetown University, and said he had been deemed “deportable” for violating the terms of his student visa.
The academic, Badar Khan Suri, was detained at his home in Rosslyn, Va., on Monday night, according to his lawyer, Hassan Ahmad. Mr. Suri was “awaiting his court date in immigration court” in Alexandria, La., Mr. Ahmad said.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said Mr. Suri was “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.” Ms. McLaughlin didn’t provide evidence to support the claim.
Mr. Suri has no criminal record and has not been charged with a crime, according to Mr. Ahmad. Politico first reported on the news of Mr. Suri’s detention.
Mr. Ahmad said that Mr. Suri denied all of the allegations made in Ms. McLaughlin’s statement. He said that he believed the accusations against Mr. Suri were “seemingly based on who his father-in-law was,” but that he was still researching the case.
Mr. Suri’s wife is Palestinian American. Her father, Ahmed Yousef, is a former adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader whom Israel assassinated last year in Iran. Mr. Yousef confirmed in a voice message that Mr. Suri is his son-in-law and said that Mr. Suri was not involved in any “political activism,” including on behalf of Hamas.
Mr. Yousef, who lives in Gaza, said he left his position in the Hamas-run government in Gaza more than a decade ago and does not currently hold a senior position with the militant group. He has publicly criticized Hamas’s decision to attack Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which set off the war in Gaza.
Ms. McLaughlin said that Mr. Suri had “close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior adviser to Hamas,” and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had deemed him “deportable.”
Ms. McLaughlin said Mr. Suri was detained under a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which the administration is using to try to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and legal permanent resident who had a prominent role in the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia.
The measure says the Secretary of State can initiate deportation proceedings against any noncitizen whose presence in the United States he deems a threat to the country’s foreign policy interests. Mr. Trump had said earlier this month that Mr. Khalil’s case was the first of “many to come.” Civil rights groups have said such arrests of immigrants with some form of legal status are a clear violation of the First Amendment.
While both men were deemed deportable under the same statute, Mr. Suri was studying in the United States on a J-1 student visa while Mr. Khalil had a green card.
Georgetown University, where Mr. Suri was a postdoctoral fellow, said in a statement that it was not aware of Mr. Suri “engaging in any illegal activity, and we have not received a reason for his detention.”
“Seeing our government abduct and jail another innocent person is beyond contemptible,” Mr. Ahmad said.
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
