The Trump administration has moved to fire almost all employees at the homeland security department’s civil rights office, the New York Times reports, in a move that will undermine its ability to provide oversight as he implements hardline immigration policies.
Here’s more on the significance of the office’s closure, from the Times:
The more than 100 staff members were told they would be put on leave and formally fired in May, according to five current and former government officials. Mr. Trump also closed the ombudsman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, another office responsible for scrutinizing the administration’s legal immigration policies.
The moves were the latest attempt by Mr. Trump to root out civil rights divisions and oversight mechanisms across government agencies. But the shuttering of the Homeland Security Department’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties was particularly notable given the lack of transparency over the administration’s immigration crackdown.
Mr. Trump has been determined in his second term to ensure that his administration is made of up of loyalists who will not try to block his agenda.
Just this week, the Trump administration stonewalled a federal judge seeking information about the use of an 18th-century wartime law to deport immigrants with little to no due process to a prison in El Salvador.
“It’s a demonstration of their total contempt for any checks on their power,” said Deborah Fleischaker, a former civil rights office worker and chief of staff of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Biden administration. She said the office “endeavored to make the D.H.S. mission work with respect for civil rights, civil liberties and privacy.”
“This is a clear message that those things do not matter to this administration,” she added.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said the decision was meant to “streamline oversight to remove roadblocks to enforcement.”
“These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining D.H.S.’s mission,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”
This brings us to the end of another day of live coverage of Donald Trump’s second presidency. We will continue to chronicle events in the days and weeks ahead. In the meantime, here are some of the day’s developments:
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The Trump administration will revoke the temporary legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States, according to a Federal Register notice on Friday.
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Columbia University agreed to a series of changes demanded by the Trump administration as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal funding the government pulled this month amid allegations that the school tolerated antisemitism on campus.
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A US appeals court refused to pause a judge’s ruling requiring the administration to reinstate 25,000 workers at 18 federal agencies who lost their jobs as part of Trump’s purge of the federal workforce.
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The Trump administration has moved to fire almost all employees at the homeland security department’s civil rights office, the New York Times reported.
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At a hearing on whether or not the administration violated a judge’s order to turn around planes that were in the act of deporting people to El Salvador, the judge James Boasberg pledged to “get to the bottom of whether they violated my order”.
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The representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the senator Bernie Sanders reported on social media that 34,000 people turned out for their just-completed rally in Denver “to take on billionaires and win our country back”. They were preceded by an unusual opening act: Alvaro Bedoya, one of the FTC commissioners fired by Trump.
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Steve Witkoff, the real estate developer tasked with ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, revealed that Russian president Vladimir Putin sees Trump as “his friend”.
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According to a memo obtained by ABC News, the Trump administration cut off legal aid for 26,000 unaccompanied immigrant children on Friday.
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The Department of Homeland Security asked a Cornell University student who sued the Trump administration seeking to stop the president’s order aimed at foreign students accused of “antisemitism” was asked to “surrender” to immigration officials.
The US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the senator Bernie Sanders reported on social media that 34,000 people turned out for their just-completed rally in Denver “to take on billionaires and win our country back”.
Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Bluesky: “This was the largest political gathering in Denver since Obama in 2008. Also bigger than the 2024 DNC. And the largest ever rally in Bernie’s career (and obviously, mine too).”
“It tells me,” Sanders wrote on X, “that the American people will not allow Trump to move us into oligarchy and authoritarianism. We will fight back. We will win.”
The massive rally also heard from Alvaro Bedoya, one of the FTC commissioners who said he had been illegally fired by Donald Trump.
Steve Witkoff, the real estate developer with no diplomatic experience or subject-matter expertise whom Donald Trump has tasked with ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, revealed to Tucker Carlson that Russian president Vladimir Putin sees Trump as “his friend”.
In an interview posted on X, presidential adviser Elon Musk’s social media platform, Witkoff said that in his second meeting with Putin, the Russian president “got personal”.
“President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump, from the leading Russian artist, and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump,” Witkoff said.
“It was such a gracious moment, and [he] told me his story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president,” Witkoff continued. “Not because he was the president of the United, he could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him, and he was praying for his friend.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says he will unveil a plan next week to upgrade the aging, under-staffed US air traffic control system next week.
In a video message posted on Elon Musk’s social media platform X, Duffy, a former Fox television host, said that he had just left a meeting with the president in which the he “laid out a plan to upgrade air-traffic control, briefed him on it, he loves it. He said, ‘Listen, go work with Congress, sell them on it, get the money up front”.
The question of who will get that money could be acontentious one. Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Federal Aviation Administration was “close to canceling a $2.4 billion contract to overhaul a communications system that serves as the backbone of the nation’s air traffic control system and awarding the work to Elon Musk’s Starlink”.
Musk, the president’s top adviser, wrongly said last month that the current system air traffic control facilities and FAA offices use to communicate with one another was operated by a Starlink rival, Verizon.
In fact, a contract to upgrade the system was awarded to Verizon in 2023 and the old system, from another company, is still in operation.
In an appearance with his former co-hosts on Fox and Friends this week, Duffy revealed that his department is already working with employees from another of Musk’s firms. “We have some SpaceX engineers that are helping us” on the new system, Duffy said.
Duffy said earlier this month that he planned to ask Congress for tens of billions of dollars for a multi-year effort to revamp air traffic control and boost hiring after a series of aviation safety incidents raised alarm.
Voice of America employees, journalists and unions sued the Trump administration in New York on Friday, saying that the shutdown of Congressionally-funded news outlets violated the workers’ First Amendment right to journalistic freedom, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit alleges that the US Agency for Global Media, its acting director Victor Morales, and Special Adviser Kari Lake violated several laws when they placed over 1,300 employees on leave and cut funding for several news services last Saturday.
The plaintiffs include the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), The NewsGuild-CWA, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), Reporters Without Borders (RSF), and seven individual workers. VOA White House bureau chief Patsy Widakuswara is the lead plaintiff.
In an Oval Office encounter last week, Trump signaled his contempt for VOA’s journalism by brushing off a question from Widakuswara.
When Widakuswara asked the visiting Irish premier, Micheál Martin: “What about the president’s plan to expel Palestinians out of Gaza? Are you discussing that with him and giving him your opinion?” Trump interrupted to say: “Nobody is expelling any Palestinians. Who are you with?” After Widakuswara answered: “I’m with Voice of America, sir.” Trump replied: “Oh, no wonder” and ended the exchange by calling on another reporter to ask a question more to his liking.
“Authoritarian censorship regimes like the Kremlin and the Chinese Communist Party are loudly cheering for the death of Voice of America”, Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders USA said in a statement. “It’s clear that Donald Trump’s action will encourage harsher crackdowns against journalists and press freedom, putting VOA and RSF staff, correspondents, volunteers, and supporters in greater danger. RSF is compelled to act to protect VOA and the broader press freedom community”.
“Voice of America was founded to spread the truth and fight propaganda from lawless authoritarian regimes—so it’s no surprise that the Trump administration is trying to dismantle it. This blatant political takeover isn’t just an attack on our members’ jobs—it’s an assault on press freedom, journalistic integrity, and democracy the world over”, said Everett Kelley, whose union represents VOA and Office of Cuba Broadcasting employees.
VOA abruptly stopped published news reports last Saturday, when some of its journalists discovered that they had been locked out of the network’s offices in Washington.
According to Nieman Lab, VOA’s 17 local-language WhatsApp channels sent their last updates on Saturday as well.
Misha Komadovsky, another VOA White House correspondent, note that all of VOA’s satellite channels suddenly started running a promotional video that echoed the style of state telvision in authoritarian regimes, with on-screen text that read: “VOA will present the polices of the United States”.
According to memo obtained by ABC News, the Trump administration cut off legal aid for 26,000 unaccompanied immigrant children on Friday.
ABC reports that the interior department, which handles contracts for the office of refugee resettlement, informed organizations that collectively receive over $200m in federal grants to represent unaccompanied minors that the contract was partially terminated.
Last month, the administration issued a stop-work order to the legal aid groups in February, before rescinding that order within 48 hours.
Advocates say some of the children are just a few months old, and others are school-aged, including teenagers. Many are in exceedingly vulnerable situations and have been abused either in their home countries or in the US, or are minors who have been trafficked.
Two California researchers said Friday that a US government health publication instructed them to remove data on sexual orientation from a scientific manuscript that had been accepted for publication, the Associated Press reports.
The researchers also said they were told to remove the words “gender,” “cisgender” and “equitable” from their paper, which looked at smoking among rural young adults.
The reason given for the changes was to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump, researchers Tamar Antin and Rachelle Annechino said in a blog post where they included screenshots of the revisions.
Instead of complying, the researchers withdrew their paper from Public Health Reports, the official journal of the US Surgeon General and US Public Health Service.
A Cornell University PhD student earlier this month sued the Trump administration seeking to stop the president’s order aimed at foreign students accused of “antisemitism”. Days later, the Department of Homeland Security emailed to request that the student “surrender” to immigration officials.
Momodou Taal, a dual citizen of the UK and Gambia, is one of three Cornell students who are plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to block the enforcement of Trump executive orders aimed at deporting foreign university students and staff involved in pro-Palestinian protest.
“Only in a dictatorship can the leader jail and banish political opponents for criticizing his administration,” Taal, 31, wrote in a statement accompanying the lawsuit, which was submitted by lawyers at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), a civil rights group, on 16 March.
Social media users are calling Columbia University “King’s College” as news breaks that the university has caved to Donald Trump’s political demands in hopes of reversing his federal funding cuts.
“King’s College” is the wealthy Ivy League school’s original name, from its founding in 1754, during the reign of George II, when New York City was part of England’s North American colonies. The school was renamed “Columbia College” after the American Revolution.
Giving it that name again is a way of criticizing both Trump and the university for what some people see as undemocratic behavior.
Trump revokes legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans
Donald Trump’s administration will revoke the temporary legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States, according to a Federal Register notice on Friday, in the latest expansion of his crackdown on immigration. It will be effective on 24 April.
The move cuts short a two-year “parole” granted to the immigrants under former president Joe Biden that allowed them to enter the country by air if they had US sponsors.
Crux of Columbia’s deal with Trump: new political oversight of Middle East scholars
Many elements of a wealthy private university’s deal with Trump to restore its federal funding will receive new scrutiny in the days to come, but early reports suggest one concession is key: Columbia’s agreement, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “to appoint a senior vice provost with broad authority to oversee the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies as well as the Center for Palestine Studies”.
“Faculty at Columbia and nationwide are expressing deep reservations about letting the federal government dictate how they can operate an academic department,” the WSJ notes. “The new vice-provost, appointed by Columbia, will review curriculum, nontenure faculty hiring and leadership ‘to ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced.’”
Again, Columbia is not a government-run university. It is a private university, with a large private endowment.
As Columbia University, a private institution with an endowment of roughly $15bn, announced it was giving in to Donald Trump’s political demands on how to treat students and the governance of an academic department, other Ivy League leaders took a different stance.
The news about Columbia’s caving to the Trump administration’s demands has put a new spotlight on an essay from earlier this week by Princeton University’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, who calls on other universities to resist:
… the government is using grants that apply to Columbia science departments as a cudgel to force changes to a completely unrelated department that the government apparently regards as objectionable.
Nobody should suppose that this will stop at Columbia or with the specific academic programs targeted by the government’s letter. Precisely because great research universities are centers of independent, creative thought, they generate arguments and ideas that challenge political power across fields as varied as international relations, biology, economics, and history. If government officials think that stifling such criticism is politically acceptable and legally permissible, some people in authority will inevitably yield to the temptation to do so.
… The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research. Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.
New York Times: Does the $400m of federal cuts at Columbia have special significance for Trump?
The New York Times has highlighted a decades-old real estate dispute between Columbia University and Donald Trump, noting that dispute also hinged on $400m.
Today, the newspaper reports:
Some former university officials are quietly wondering whether the ultimately unsuccessful property transaction sowed the seeds of Mr Trump’s current focus on Columbia. His administration has demanded that the university turn over vast control of its policies and even curricular decisions in its effort to quell antisemitism on campus. It has also canceled federal grants and contracts at Columbia – valued at $400 million.
The New York Times reports that the Trump Organization and the White House declined to comment on the story.
Why didn’t Columbia University file a lawsuit to fight back against Trump?
Yesterday, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked why Columbia, one of the wealthiest private institutions in the US, had not filed a lawsuit to protect itself from the political demands Trump was making.
Today, after Columbia announced it was giving in to several of the president’s demand, an unnamed Columbia University administrator offered several reasons for Columbia’s choice not to battle Trump in court, including that school leaders had some agreement with what Trump wanted, the Wall Street Journal reports:
A Columbia senior administrator said the school considered legal options to challenge the Trump team but ultimately determined the federal government has so many available levers to claw back money, it would be a difficult fight. Additionally the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.
How US news organizations are characterizing Columbia’s deal with Trump:
Wall Street Journal: Columbia Yields to Trump in Battle Over Federal Funding
New York Post: Columbia caves to Trump’s demands after $400M threat over campus antisemitism, will institute mask ban and more oversight
New York Times: Columbia Makes Concessions to Trump Amid Bid to Reclaim Federal Funds
Axios: Columbia complies with Trump demands to regain $400 million in funding
Columbia University has agreed to a series of changes demanded by the Trump administration as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal funding the government pulled this month amid allegations that the school tolerated antisemitism on campus, Reuters reports. More reactions to this news shortly, but first, what Reuters is reporting:
Columbia acquiesced to most of the administration’s demands in a memo that laid out measures including banning face masks on campus, empowering security officers to remove or arrest individuals, and taking control of the department that offers courses on the Middle East from its faculty.
The Ivy League university’s response is being watched by other universities that the administration has sanctioned as it advances its policy objectives in areas ranging from campus protests to transgender sports and diversity initiatives.
Among the most contentious of the nine demands, Columbia agreed to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department under a new official, the memo said, taking control away from its faculty. The demand had raised alarm among professors at Columbia and elsewhere, who worried that permitting the federal government to dictate how a department is run would set a dangerous precedent.
Republican lawmakers in the US House of Representatives last year criticized at least two professors of Palestinian descent working in the department for their comments about the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The school has also hired three dozen special officers who have the power to arrest people on campus and has revised its anti-discrimination policies, including its authority to sanction campus organizations, the memo said. The school also said it is searching for new faculty members to ‘ensure intellectual diversity.’
A few more key details from today’s deportation flights hearing
As we noted earlier, judge James Boasberg spent some time in a hearing today criticizing the justice department’s conduct and rhetoric in the lawsuit over whether the Trump administration can use an 18th century wartime law to rapidly deport Venezuelans to El Salvador.
But the judge also took issue with the substance of their legal argument. During Friday’s hearing, Boasberg also said the Trump administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan immigrants carries “incredibly troublesome” policy ramifications, the Associated Press reported.
“Why was this law essentially signed in the dark and these people essentially rushed on to planes?” Boasberg asked. “It seems to be that you only do that if you know it’s a problem and you want to get them out of the country before lawsuits can be filed.”
The judge pointed to the US supreme court’s finding that people imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay after the 11 September 2001, terrorist attacks were entitled to challenge whether they had any ties to al-Qaida.
Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports that Lee Gelernt, the lawyer for the ACLU, also said at the hearing that some people on the deportation flights from the US to El Salvador were returned from El Salvador after the government refused to take them, raising more questions about the speed of the deportations.