US senator says margaritas in photo with wrongly deported man planted by El Salvador – as it happened

We’re closing this blog now. Here’s what happened today: Gary Shapley, the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, has been ousted after treasury secretary Scott Bessent complained to Donald Trump that Shapley had been installed without his knowledge and at the behest of billionaire Elon Musk, according to the New York Times. Citing five people with knowledge of ousting, the New York Times reports that Bessent believed that Musk “had done an end run around him” to get Shapley installed, despite the IRS having to report to Bessent’s department. Speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday, Donald Trump said that the US is having good conversations with China amid the ongoing trade war between the two countries. “By the way, we have nice conversations going with China … It’s, like, really very good,” he said. He did not offer additional details, Reuters reports. Speaking to reporters at Dulles airport in Washington on Friday afternoon, the senator Chris Van Hollen just accused the government of El Salvador of creating the hoax he called “Margarita-gate”, by placing a pair of cocktail glasses on the table between himself and Kilmar Ábrego García as they met the night before, to make it look as though they were enjoying drinks. Trump, asked about Ábrego García, the Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador, says he has “no interest in that prisoner”. A federal judge blocked a Trump administration policy banning people from changing gender markers on their passports, and using the letter X to denote non-binary gender. The state department previously froze all applications for passports with “X” sex markers and all changes to gender identity on existing passports in response. The American Civil Liberties Union asked the US supreme court to block what the group called the imminent deportation of a new group of Venezuelan men detained in Texas without the judicial review previously ordered by the court. In an emergency Friday court filing, ACLU lawyers said dozens of Venezuelan men held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Bluebonnet detention center in Texas were given notices indicating they were classified as members of the Tren de Aragua gang and would be deported under the Alien Enemies Act, and were told “that the removals are imminent and will happen tonight or tomorrow”. Keir Starmer and Donald Trump spoke about UK-US trade talks and Ukraine in a phone call on Friday, according to Downing Street. A statement from a No 10 spokesperson reads: “The leaders began by discussing the ongoing and productive discussions between the UK and US on trade. The Prime Minister reiterated his commitment to free and open trade and the importance of protecting the national interest.” Trump and his team will continue to study whether to fire the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, the White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said. “The president and his team will continue to study that matter,” Hassett told reporters at the White House in response to a question. The Trump administration has requested records from Harvard University on the money it receives from foreign funding, in the latest step in Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against the university. The education department said it sent a records request from Harvard “after a review of the university’s foreign reports revealed incomplete and inaccurate disclosures”. Trump has accepted the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s invitation to pay an official visit to Italy in the “very near future”, a joint statement by the leaders said on Friday. The statement came a day after the two leaders met at the White House in an attempt by Meloni to bridge the gap between the EU and the US amid trade tariff tensions. Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” and the Trump administration have spared the jobs of US Department of Transportation employees who provide support services for spacecraft launches by Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Starlink – a revelation that raises a new round of conflict-of-interest questions around Doge. In its most recent buyout announcement, the transportation department did not note that the positions spared supported Musk’s and others’ space operations. A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor probing whether the publication was “partisan” according a report by MedPage Today. Per MedPage: Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things. MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters. “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” the letter stated. The letter to CHEST was first posted on X by Eric Reinhart of Chicago. The probe fits with the Trump administration’s broader actions targeting independent medical research. The administration has tried to undercut research it deems to biased, including scientific studies it believes are forwarding “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”. In February, it also moved to block a crucial step in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) process for funding medical research. Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is building a master databased to surveil immigrants, according to a report by Wired. Per Wired’s Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott: Operatives from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) are building a master database at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that could track and surveil undocumented immigrants, two sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED. DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as voting records, sources say. This, experts tell WIRED, could create a system that could later be searched to identify and surveil immigrants. Privacy advocates and lawmakers have raised alarm that Doge employees have accessed the sensitive data of US citizens and immigrants. Earlier this month, a court filing revealed that a member of Doge had gained access to a government system that contains the personal data of unaccompanied immigrant children. The database, called the Unaccompanied Alien Children portal (UAC), contains extremely detailed information about thousands of minors who enter the United States alone, including individual children’s mental health and therapy records, as well as immigration records, photos and addresses of their family members. The American Civil Liberties Union asked the US supreme court to block what the group called the imminent deportation of a new group of Venezuelan men detained in Texas without the judicial review previously ordered by the court. In an emergency Friday court filing, ACLU lawyers said dozens of Venezuelan men held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Bluebonnet detention center in Texas were given notices indicating they were classified as members of the Tren de Aragua gang and would be deported under the Alien Enemies Act, and were told “that the removals are imminent and will happen tonight or tomorrow”. The ACLU has already sued to block deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of two Venezuelans held in the Texas detention center and is asking a judge to issue an order barring removals of any immigrants in the region under the law. In the new emergency filing, the ACLU warned immigration authorities were accusing other Venezuelan men held there of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang that would make them subject to deportation. The supreme court has allowed deportations under the 1798 law, but ruled unanimously they could proceed only if those about to be removed had a chance to argue their case in court and were given “a reasonable time” to contest their pending removals. The ACLU said a number of the men in Texas had already been loaded on a bus and urged the court to rule before they could be deported. A federal judge has blocked a Trump administration policy banning people from changing gender markers on their passports, and using the letter X to denote non-binary gender. Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating that government-issued identification documents exclusively use “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female”. The state department froze all applications for passports with “X” sex markers and all changes to gender identity on existing passports in response. The US district judge Julia Kobick, who was appointed by Joe Biden, sided with the American Civil Liberties Union’s motion for a preliminary injunction. “The Executive Order and the Passport Policy on their face classify passport applicants on the basis of sex and thus must be reviewed under intermediate judicial scrutiny,” Kobick wrote. “That standard requires the government to demonstrate that its actions are substantially related to an important governmental interest. The government has failed to meet this standard.” A federal judge ordered that Rümeysa Öztürk – a Tufts University PhD student who was ambushed and detained by immigration authorities near her home in Massachusetts and shuttled through three states before landing in a Louisiana detention facility – be brought to Vermont for a 1 May hearing. An immigration judge denied bond for Öztürk, saying she was both a “flight risk” and a “danger to the community”, according to the petition filed by her legal team. Lawyers had asked for her release after she suffered at least six asthma attacks since being apprehended and complained of inadequate medical care. During one incident, Öztürk testified, a nurse forcibly removed her hijab. The US district judge William Sessions on Friday said he would hear out Öztürk’s request for release, saying she “has presented viable and serious habeas claims which warrant urgent review”. Öztürk has argued she was wrongly detained after co-authoring a campus newspaper op-ed about Gaza. Donald Trump on Friday said his administration is implementing a move that will allow far more firings of federal employees and will make significantly more roles into politically appointed positions beholden to the president. The office of personnel management (OPM) on Friday published a new rule that invokes “Schedule F”, a prior attempt to reclassify wide swaths of federal workers not as civic service roles with protections regardless of who’s in power – but as political appointees who can be hired or fired based on their allegiances to the president. “If these government workers refuse to advance the policy interests of the President, or are engaging in corrupt behavior, they should no longer have a job,” Trump wrote on Friday on his Truth Social platform. “This is common sense, and will allow the federal government to finally be ‘run like a business.’” The president previously issued an executive order on his first day in office that reclassified a host of federal workers. The policy unveiled on Friday is one Trump first sought late in his first presidency. But Joe Biden overturned it after defeating him in the 2020 election. The idea aligns with a major plank of Project 2025, the conservative policy manifesto, which calls for a federal government more beholden to the executive branch to drive out a supposed “deep state” that stood in Trump’s way before he won his second presidency. Most federal government employees serve in roles that are not politically appointed. About 4,000 employees are in roles appointed based on who is in power. Friday’s move would expand that by about 50,000 people, prior estimates have shown. Speaking to reporters at Dulles airport in Washington on Friday afternoon, the senator Chris Van Hollen just accused the government of El Salvador of creating the hoax he called “Margarita-gate”, by placing a pair of cocktail glasses on the table between himself and Kilmar Ábrego García as they met the night before, to make it look as though they were enjoying drinks. Those photographs were posted on X by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, along with a caption that downplayed the seriousness of the situation by falsely claiming that the senator and the wrongly deported man had been “sipping margaritas” as they met on Thursday evening. But the senator said that the drinks were placed there during the meeting by someone from the Salvadoran government before the photographs were taken and that neither he nor Ábrego García had touched them. Van Hollen pointed out that there was visual evidence for this in the photographs: the rims of both glasses were covered in salt or sugar, but it was clear from the images that neither glass had been drunk from, since the rims were undisturbed. Van Hollen himself shared a photo of the meeting on X taken before the glasses were placed there, in which there were just cups of coffee and glasses of water on the table. “This is a lesson into the lengths that president Bukele” will go to, Van Hollen said, “to deceive people about what’s going on”. Bukele’s false assertion that the men sipped margaritas was widely shared by Trump supporters, including by a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, the House Republican conference and a correspondent for the pro-Trump outlet Newsmax, who mentioned it in a question to the president on Friday. When the Newsmax correspondent Mike Carter repeated the false claim that the senator had been pictured “sipping margaritas” with the wrongly deported man, Trump nodded and said, “Yeah”. The president then called the senator who was the victim of the hoax perpetrated by the Salvadoran president “a fake”. Later in his news conference, Van Hollen added that the Salvadoran government officials “actually wanted to have the meeting by the side of the pool in the hotel”. “They want to create this appearance that life is just lovely for Kilmar, which, of course, is a big, fat lie”, the senator said. Donald Trump retook the White House vowing to stage “the largest deportation operation in American history”. As previewed, the administration has set about further militarizing the US-Mexico border and targeting asylum seekers and refugees while conducting raids and deportations in undocumented communities, detaining and deporting immigrants and spreading fear. Critics are outraged, if not surprised. But few expected the new legal chapter that unfolded next: a multipronged crackdown on certain people seen as opponents of the US president’s ideological agenda. This extraordinary assault has come in the context of wider attacks on higher education, the courts and the constitution. Here are some of the most high-profile individual cases that have captured the world’s attention so far because of their extreme and legally dubious nature, mostly involving documented people targeted by the Trump administration in the course of its swift and unlawful power grab. The US representative Pramila Jayapal decried the move to remove even more immigrants and send them to El Salvador’s notorious prison for alleged gang members. “SCOTUS ruled that Trump had to give people adequate notice before deporting them. Yet today, there are reports that he’s deporting 177 immigrants with under 24 hours’ notice—not enough time to assert due process. We cannot stand by as this admin continues to disappear people,” she wrote. At the airport in Washington, the Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen is currently describing his meeting with Kilmar Ábrego García in El Salvador on Thursday. Here is the live video from the senator’s YouTube channel. In an emergency motion, lawyers for Venezuelan nationals in the US are raising alarm that their clients have been given 24 hours of notice that they will be removed from the US. The filing is part of a larger case from the American Civil Liberties Union, Democracy Forward and the ACLU of the District of Columbia challenging the Trump administration over the president’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to remove immigrants in the US. The filing indicates that the government is planning a fresh wave of deportations to El Salvador’s mega-prison, Cecot, where more than 275 immigrants have already been sent. The lawyers are asking for an immediate restraining order mandating that the government give people at least 30 days notice of removals. In their court filing, lawyers say clients received a document Friday from immigration officials, titled “Notice and Warrant of Apprehension and Removal under the Alien Enemies Act”. It reads: “You have been determined to be ... a member of Tren de Aragua.” “You have been determined to be an Alien enemy subject to apprehension, restraint and removal from the United States … This is not a removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” the notice reads. Here’s a look at where things stand: Gary Shapley, the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, has been ousted after treasury secretary Scott Bessent complained to Donald Trump that Shapley had been installed without his knowledge and at the behest of billionaire Elon Musk, according to the New York Times. Citing five people with knowledge of ousting, the New York Times reports that Bessent believed that Musk “had done an end run around him” to get Shapley installed, despite the IRS having to report to Bessent’s department. Speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday, Donald Trump said that the US is having good conversations with China amid the ongoing trade war between the two countries. “By the way, we have nice conversations going with China … It’s, like, really very good,” he said. He did not offer additional details, Reuters reports. Trump, asked about Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador, says he has “no interest in that prisoner”. Keir Starmer and Donald Trump spoke about UK-US trade talks and Ukraine in a phone call on Friday, according to Downing Street. A statement from a No 10 spokesperson reads: “The leaders began by discussing the ongoing and productive discussions between the UK and US on trade. The Prime Minister reiterated his commitment to free and open trade and the importance of protecting the national interest.” Donald Trump and his team will continue to study whether to fire the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, the White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said. “The president and his team will continue to study that matter,” Hassett told reporters at the White House in response to a question. The Trump administration has requested records from Harvard University on the money it receives from foreign funding, in the latest step in Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against the university. The education department said it sent a records request from Harvard “after a review of the university’s foreign reports revealed incomplete and inaccurate disclosures”. Donald Trump has accepted the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s invitation to pay an official visit to Italy in the “very near future”, a joint statement by the leaders said on Friday. The statement came a day after the two leaders met at the White House in an attempt by Meloni to bridge the gap between the EU and the US amid trade tariff tensions. Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” and the Trump administration have spared the jobs of US Department of Transportation employees who provide support services for spacecraft launches by Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Starlink – a revelation that raises a new round of conflict-of-interest questions around Doge. In its most recent buyout announcement, the transportation department did not note that the positions spared supported Musk’s and others’ space operations. From the Guardian’s Edward Helmore and Léonie Chao-Fong and agencies: Jennifer Vasquez Sura, wife of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man the Trump administration has admitted it mistakenly deported to El Salvador, on Friday expressed relief to learn he is alive after a Democratic US senator managed to meet with him. “It was very overwhelming – the most important thing for me, my children, his mom, brothers was to see him alive, and we saw him alive,” Vasquez Sura told ABC in an interview. The Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen revealed on Thursday evening that he had met with Ábrego García at the maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as Cecot, where the autocratic regime holds prisoners without due process. Ábrego García was arrested by immigration agents in Maryland, where he lives and works with his family. He had been afforded a federal protection order against deportation to El Salvador, which the Trump administration ignored last month when it flew him and more than 200 Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador without warning or a court hearing, in a move that has fallen foul of judges in the US right up to the supreme court. For the full story, click here: The White House has released a list of the various activities scheduled for Easter celebrations next Monday. Part of the celebrations, which will be helmed by first lady Melania Trump, include: Be Best Military Card Writing Station, encouraging children to send messages of gratitude to American troops. Be Best Hopscotch, for the most energetic young guests. Space Exploration Experience, courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa). Hen to Home Activity, courtesy of the American Egg Board. Garden Café for Tasty Treats, courtesy of the American Egg Board. Play Garden, courtesy of the Toy Association. Bloom Bar and Carrot Planting, courtesy of the International Fresh Produce Association. Easter Candy Distribution, courtesy of the National Confectioners Association. Reading Nook, courtesy of Amazon. Family Photo Opportunity Celebrating Reading, courtesy of Amazon. Bunny Hop Stage, courtesy of YouTube. AI-Powered Experience and Photo Opportunity, courtesy of Meta. Ringing of the Bell Photo Opportunity, courtesy of the New York Stock Exchange. The children’s celebrations next week come amid Donald Trump’s widespread immigration crackdowns across the country that include efforts by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport unaccompanied immigrant children, as Reuters reported in February. Additionally, as part of sweeping budget cuts across the federal government, the Trump administration is reported to have cut funding last month to a legal program that provides representation for unaccompanied immigrant children. Donald Trump has said the US will ‘take a pass’ on a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine if ‘parties make it difficult’. The US president made the comments to reporters during the swearing-in ceremony for Mehmet Oz as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Gary Shapley, the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, has been ousted after treasury secretary Scott Bessent complained to Donald Trump that Shapley had been installed without his knowledge and at the behest of billionaire Elon Musk, according to the New York Times. Citing five people with knowledge of ousting, the New York Times reports that Bessent believed that Musk “had done an end run around him” to get Shapley installed, despite the IRS having to report to Bessent’s department. The Times further reports that Musk’s so-called “department of goverment efficiency” encouraged Shapley’s appointment through White House channels without consulting Bessent, according to the sources who spoke to the outlet. The next acting head of the IRS is expected to be the deputy treasury secretary, Michael Faulkender, the Times reported. He would hold the role until the president’s nominee for the permanent role, former Missouri congressman Billy Long, if approved by the Senate, takes over. Speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday, Donald Trump said that the US is having good conversations with China amid the ongoing trade war between the two countries. “By the way, we have nice conversations going with China … It’s, like, really very good,” he said. He did not offer additional details, Reuters reports. On Tuesday, China Daily, the country’s official state media published an editorial saying: “The US is not getting ripped off by anybody… The problem is the US has been living beyond its means for decades. It consumes more than it produces. It has outsourced its manufacturing and borrowed money in order to have a higher standard of living than it’s entitled to based on its productivity. Rather than being ‘cheated’, the US has been taking a free ride on the globalisation train.” For the full story on China’s latest response to the trade war, read here: A federal appeals court on Friday rejected a request by the Trump administration to allow it to move forward with removing temporary legal protections for about 350,000 Venezuelan migrants. Reuters reports that the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals declined to pause a lower-court judge’s 31 March order halting homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to terminate the temporary protected status granted to Venezuelans. Trump, asked about Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador, says he has “no interest in that prisoner”. He claims Ábrego García’s record is “unbelievably bad” and that he’s “not a very innocent guy”. This post was amended to delete Trump saying: “He’s a fake,” which was incorrectly reported to have been a reference to Kilmar Ábrego García. In fact, Trump made the statement about Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen. Trump said his entire life has been “one big negotiation” and that he can recognize when people are “playing” him. He tells reporters he needs to see “enthusiasm” from both sides to end the war in Ukraine. I think I see that enthusiasm. I think I see it from both sides. “Nobody’s playing me,” he adds. Donald Trump has been speaking to reporters during the swearing-in ceremony for Mehmet Oz as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. On the subject of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, Trump said: We’re going to get it done ideally. If for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult … we’re going to just take a pass. Hopefully we won’t have to do that. He said he believed there was a “good chance” of “solving the problem”. A federal judge who blocked the Trump administration from dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has ruled the agency cannot go forward immediately with plans to fire hundreds of employees. US district judge Amy Berman Jackson expressed concern that administration officials have not been complying with her earlier order that maintains the agency’s existence until she rules on the merits of a lawsuit seeking to preserve the bureau, the Associated Press reported. Jackson said she will bar the carrying out of any mass firings or cutting off of employees’ access to agency computer systems. A hearing has been scheduled for 28 April to hear testimony from officials. Keir Starmer and Donald Trump spoke about US-UK trade talks and Ukraine in a phone call on Friday, according to Downing Street. A statement from a No 10 spokesperson reads: The leaders began by discussing the ongoing and productive discussions between the UK and US on trade. The Prime Minister reiterated his commitment to free and open trade and the importance of protecting the national interest. The leaders also discussed the situation in Ukraine, Iran and recent action taken against the Houthis in Yemen. They agreed to stay in touch. Faced with a flurry of adverse court orders it would rather not follow, the Trump White House is increasingly deploying a strategy of claiming or even manufacturing its own uncertainty to dodge their effects without appearing to outright defy them. The Trump administration has faced several major legal setbacks in recent weeks, most notably in its efforts to deport undocumented immigrants without due process under the Alien Enemies Act or in spite of protective orders. In each of the two cases, when ordered to take specific steps to recall deportation flights or secure the release of a man wrongly deported, the administration has opted to adopt twisted readings of the order rather than comply. Read the full analysis: Trump officials create uncertainty to evade court orders rather than comply The White House posted an image of a New York Times article about the meeting between Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen and Kilmar Ábrego García in El Salvador on Thursday. Addressing Van Hollen, the White House said Ábrego García is “NOT coming back”. Donald Trump and his team will continue to study whether to fire the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said. “The president and his team will continue to study that matter,” Hassett told reporters at the White House in response to a question. Trump lambasted Powell as “always too late and wrong” in a Truth Social post on Thursday, condemning him for not lowering US interest rates. Trump has claimed Powell would resign if he asked him to. Powell himself has said that he would not resign if asked to do so by the president. We reported earlier that Vice-President JD Vance arrived in Rome earlier today for meetings with the Vatican No 2 and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. A statement from the White House says Vance met with Meloni and held a meeting with Italian deputy prime ministers Matteo Salvini and Antonio Tajani. The statement goes on: The leaders discussed the significant cultural and religious ties between the United States and Italy, ongoing efforts to ensure fair and reciprocal trade, and a peaceful resolution to the brutal war between Russia and Ukraine. The Trump administration’s demand for Harvard University’s foreign funding records comes after multiple moves against the university for rejecting the White House’s commands that it crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations. The Trump administration has asked the top attorney at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status, according to a Washington Post report. It is illegal for the president to direct the IRS to conduct an investigation or audit. The education department has also frozen $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multi-year contract value to Harvard. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has warned that Harvard would lose its ability to enroll foreign students if it did not meet demands the Trump administration demands to share information on some visa holders. The Trump administration has requested records from Harvard University on the money it receives from foreign records, in the latest step in Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against the university. The education department said it sent a records request from Harvard “after a review of the university’s foreign reports revealed incomplete and inaccurate disclosures”. A statement from education secretary Linda McMahon reads: Our review indicated that Harvard has not been fully transparent or complete in its disclosures, which is both unacceptable and unlawful. This records request is the Trump Administration’s first step to ensure Harvard is not being manipulated by, or doing the bidding of, foreign entities, which include actors who are hostile to the interests of the United States and American students. We hope Harvard will respect its own motto and be truthful in its federal filings and foreign relationships. Harvard’s statement said it has filed such reports for decades “as part of its ongoing compliance with the law”. As is required, Harvard’s reports include information on gifts and contracts from foreign sources exceeding $250K annually. This includes contracts to provide executive education, other training, and academic publications. Donald Trump is expected to attend the swearing-in ceremony for Dr Mehmet Oz as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Oz, a former heart surgeon and TV pitchman, was confirmed by the Senate earlier this month in a party-line 53-45 vote. He will manage health insurance programs for roughly half the country, with oversight of Medicare, Medicaid and Affordable Care Act coverage. There is nothing else on Trump’s public schedule today. A US citizen who was detained at the request of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) despite a county judge seeing his birth certificate has been released. Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, 20, was arrested by Florida highway patrol on Wednesday and charged with illegally entering the state as an “unauthorized alien” under a state immigration law that has been temporarily blocked since early this month. A county judge, LaShawn Riggans, inspected Lopez-Gomez’s US birth certificate and Social Security card and said she found no probable cause for the charge, the Florida Phoenix reported. But she said she did not have the authority to release Lopez-Gomez because Ice had formally asked the jail to hold him. The outlet reported that the judge apologized to Lopez-Gomez’s mother. Lopez-Gomez was released on Thursday evening, a spokesperson told CNN. They also posted a photo of Lopez-Gomez on social media, writing: “He is free!!” Donald Trump retook the White House vowing to stage “the largest deportation operation in American history”. The administration has set about further militarizing the US-Mexico border and targeting asylum seekers and refugees while conducting raids in undocumented communities and spreading fear. Critics are outraged, if not surprised. But few expected the new legal chapter that unfolded next: a multi-pronged crackdown on certain people seen as opponents of the US president’s ideological agenda. This assault has come in the context of wider attacks on higher education, the courts and the constitution. Here are some of the most high-profile individual cases that have captured the world’s attention so far, mostly involving documented people targeted by the Trump administration in the course of its unlawful power grab. A federal court yesterday denied the Trump administration’s effort to appeal a judge’s order for sworn testimony by government officials to determine if they complied with her instruction to facilitate the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador. In a blistering order, a three-judge panel from the 4th US circuit court of appeals unanimously refused to suspend Judge Paula Xinis’s order. The Trump administration’s claim it cannot do anything to free Ábrego García and return him to the US “should be shocking”, they wrote. It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. The government’s unwillingness to bring Ábrego García back “should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear”, the judges wrote. The supreme court said yesterday it would hear arguments on Donald Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship next month. Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship for the children of people who are in the US without documentation has been halted nationwide by three district courts around the country. Appeals courts have declined to disturb those rulings. The court said it would hear arguments in the case on 15 May, with a decision likely by late June or early July. Birthright citizenship automatically makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally. The right was enshrined soon after the American civil war in the constitution’s 14th amendment: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order seeking to prevent children born in the US, but without at least one parent who is a lawful permanent resident or American citizen, from being eligible for US citizenship. Donald Trump also posted about Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen’s meeting with Kilmar Ábrego García, the man wrongly deported to El Salvador, accusing the Democratic senator of being a “grandstander”. In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote: Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone. The Trump administration has dug in on its insistence that it cannot do anything to free Ábrego García from an El Salvador prison and return him to the US. Van Hollen’s trip has become a partisan flashpoint as Democrats have seized on Ábrego García’s deportation as what they say is a cruel consequence of Trump’s disregard for the courts. Republicans have criticized Democrats for defending him and argued that his deportation is part of a larger effort to reduce crime. Donald Trump praised Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni a day after welcoming her at the White House. Trump, posting on Truth Social this morning, wrote: Prime Minister Georgia Meloni of Italy was great yesterday in her visit to the White House. She loves her country, and the impression she left on everyone was FANTASTIC!!! The US is optimistic that it can end “the very brutal war” between Russia and Ukraine, Vice-President JD Vance said before a bilateral meeting with the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome on Friday. The meeting comes less than 24 hours after the pair met in Washington. Vance said: I want to update the prime minister on some of the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine … even in the past 24 hours, we think we have some interesting things to report on. Since there are the negotiations I won’t prejudge them, but we do feel optimistic that we can hopefully bring this war, this very brutal war, to a close. His comments came a few hours after the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said Donald Trump would walk away from trying to clinch a Russia-Ukraine peace deal within days unless there were clear signs that one could be done. Vance, who is in the Italian capital for the Easter weekend, added that the talks with Meloni would also focus on “trade negotiations, not only between Italy and the US but also with the EU”. After the meeting, the pair will have lunch with the Italian deputy prime ministers, Matteo Salvini and Antonio Tajani. Vance will also meet Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state. Donald Trump has accepted Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s invitation to pay an official visit to Italy in the “very near future”, a joint statement by the leaders said on Friday. The statement came a day after the two leaders met at the White House in an attempt by Meloni to bridge the gap between the EU and US amid trade tariff tensions. According to the joint statement, Trump and Meloni “confirmed their resolve to promote a mutually beneficial relationship and further strengthen the US-Italy strategic alliance across security, economic, and technological issues”. As we reported earlier, Vice-President JD Vance arrived in Rome earlier today for meetings with Meloni and to attend Easter weekend events at the Vatican. Chris Van Hollen, Democratic senator from Maryland, on Thursday met with Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man wrongfully deported to El Salvador. Van Hollen posted a photo of the meeting on X, writing: I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. He added that he had called Ábrego García’s wife “to pass along his message of love”. The meeting came in the hours after Van Hollen said he was denied entry into the El Salvador mega-prison Terrorism Confinement Center, or Cecot, while he was trying to check on Ábrego García’s wellbeing and attempting to push for his release. Several other Democratic lawmakers have signaled they would like to visit El Salvador and Cecot, including Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic caucus, and Robert Garcia, Yassamin Ansari and Maxwell Alejandro Frost, all members of the investigative House oversight committee. Delia Ramirez of the House homeland security committee has also asked for a visit to Cecot. The Democratic senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker, plans to travel to El Salvador, a source familiar with his itinerary said, as Democrats seek to pressure the Trump administration to return Kilmar Ábrego García, the wrongly deported Maryland resident. Booker’s trip to the Central American country would come after the Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen traveled there this week to meet with his constituent. Booker wrote on X earlier this week: The Supreme Court was clear: the Trump administration must act to facilitate the return of Kilmar Ábrego García to the United States. There is no room for debate – yet Trump is refusing, in defiance of a lawful court order. Every member of Congress should be standing up for the Constitution and demanding that the administration act to return Mr. Ábrego García to the U.S. and to his family.” Booker, who ran for president in 2020 and is viewed as a potential candidate again three years from now, has been particularly outspoken against Donald Trump. Earlier this month, he delivered a speech from the Senate floor warning of the “grave and urgent” danger presented by his presidency that ran for 25 hours and five minutes – the longest such speech ever. Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” and the Trump administration have spared the jobs of US Department of Transportation employees who provide support services for spacecraft launches by Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Starlink – a revelation that raises a new round of conflict of interest questions around Doge. In its most recent buyout announcement, the transportation department did not note that the positions spared supported Musk’s and others’ space operations. But the fiscal year 2025 transportation department budget reviewed by the Guardian details funding for positions in pipeline management, transportation management, air traffic control and cybersecurity that the document states are critical for commercial space operations, including SpaceX, Starlink and other entities. The decision to keep launch support staff employed while broadly cutting potentially thousands of other positions at the agency has raised fresh ethical questions about Musk and Doge’s aggressive assault on the federal workforce. Republicans in nearly half of state legislatures have proposed bills to require documentary proof of citizenship to vote. Conservatives in California are pushing for a voter ID ballot measure that would require citizenship verification to register to vote and photo identification to get a ballot. A Republican lawmaker in Pennsylvania filed a bill to create a voter ID in the swing state, praising voters in Wisconsin that voted to approve a new ID law in the midwestern battleground state. Donald Trump won both the electoral college and the popular vote last year, but his win hasn’t stopped the ongoing Republican quest to restrict access to elections. In fact, Republicans in state legislatures across the country have been emboldened by the president’s calls to secure US elections, even with no evidence that voter fraud is a legitimate problem. They have filed bills under the pretense of election integrity, including stricter voter ID provisions, documentary proof of citizenship requirements, hurdles for citizens’ ballot measures, restrictions on voter eligibility and the mail voting process, and pre-emptions that would make ranked choice voting illegal. US secretary of state Marco Rubio said Friday that the US may “move on” from trying to secure a Russia-Ukraine peace deal if there is no progress in the coming days, after months of efforts have failed to bring an end to the fighting. He spoke in Paris after landmark talks among US, Ukrainian and European officials produced outlines for steps toward peace and appeared to make some long-awaited progress, AP reported. A new meeting is expected next week in London, and Rubio suggested that could be decisive in determining whether the Trump administration continues its involvement. Rubio told reporters upon departure: We are now reaching a point where we need to decide whether this is even possible or not. Because if it’s not, then I think we’re just going to move on. “It’s not our war,” Rubio said. “We have other priorities to focus on.” He said the US administration wants to decide “in a matter of days.” US vice-president JD Vance arrived in Rome on Friday for meetings with the Vatican No. 2 and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, fresh off the Italian leader’s visit to the White House a day earlier, AP reports. Meloni, who has positioned herself as a bridge between the US and Europe, received praise from president Donald Trump for her crackdown on migration during a meeting at the Oval Office on Thursday. Vance, who attended the meetings, was scheduled to meet with the Italian leader Friday in Rome and planned to attend Easter weekend events at the Vatican. He was scheduled to meet with the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the White House said. Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the latest news over the next few hours. We start with news that Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen met in El Salvador with Kilmar Ábrego García, a man who was sent there by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation. Van Hollen posted a photo of the meeting on X, saying he also called Ábrego García’s wife “to pass along his message of love”. The lawmaker did not provide an update on the status of Ábrego García, whose attorneys are fighting to force the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the US. It was not clear how the meeting was arranged, where they met or what will happen to Ábrego García. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, posted images of the meeting minutes before Van Hollen shared his post, saying: “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” The Trump administration’s claim that it can’t do anything to free Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvador prison and return him to the US “should be shocking,” a federal appeals court said Thursday in a blistering order that ratchets up the escalating conflict between the government’s executive and judicial branches. A three-judge panel from the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously refused to suspend a judge’s decision to order sworn testimony by Trump administration officials to determine if they complied with her instruction to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. Judge J Harvie Wilkinson III, who was nominated by Republican president Ronald Reagan, wrote that he and his two colleagues “cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos.” For the full report, see here: In other news: James Comer, the chair of the House oversight committee, and Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican leadership, have launched an investigation into Harvard University, accusing the university of a “lack of compliance with civil rights laws”. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and two partners have emerged as frontrunners to win a crucial part of Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield. The supreme court said it will hear arguments next month over Donald Trump’s bid to restrict automatic birthright citizenship. In their unanimous opinion issued today, a US appeals court warned the Trump administration that battles against the judiciary could undermine public confidence. After weeks of strong rhetoric, the president told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday that he thought trade deals could be finished in the “next three or four weeks”. Trump on Thursday extended a government-wide federal hiring freeze that was set to expire this weekend. The Washington DC headquarters for the Department of Housing and Urban Development may soon be up for sale.