America, This Is an Old and Brutal Tyranny

CredEric Lee/The New York Times

By Jamelle Bouie     NY Times

The Trump administration believes it can send anyone it wants, without due process or future legal recourse, to rot in a foreign prison.

It has argued as much in court. Lawyers for the Justice Department have asserted the president’s supposedly “inherent” authority to remove foreign nationals from the United States, and the White House is openly defying a court order to facilitate the return of an immigrant living in Maryland and sent, accidentally, to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.

The immigrant in question, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, is Salvadoran, has lived in the United States since 2011 and was granted protected status by an immigration judge in 2019. He was detained last month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, accused of membership in MS-13, a Salvadoran gang, and in short order was removed to El Salvador without so much as a hearing.

His family sued the government and, soon after, a Federal District Court judge ordered the administration to return Abrego Garcia to American shores. The Supreme Court upheld that decision in a unanimous ruling that also affirmed the Constitution’s clear guarantees of due process of law.


But the Trump administration won’t budge. Justice Department lawyers deny that the government has any responsibility to get Abrego Garcia home and insist that his removal wasn’t a mistake, although they won’t share the information that might support this claim on the grounds that it is sensitive and thus classified.

The White House has also taken this position outside of the courtroom. On Monday, during a state visit by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele — the administration’s enthusiastic partner in the rendition of immigrants abroad — Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that “no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States,” a tacit assertion that President Trump can ignore court orders requiring Abrego Garcia’s release. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that it was “not up to us” whether Abrego Garcia was returned, and Bukele himself said that “I’m not going to do it,” after incredulously asking how he was supposed to “smuggle” a “terrorist” back into the United States. For his part, Trump rejected calls to bring Abrego Garcia home and raised the possibility of sending “homegrown criminals” to El Salvador, even urging Bukele to construct new prisons for the people Trump hopes to exile there.
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More than a constitutional crisis, this is a fundamentally tyrannical assertion of illegitimate power. To claim the authority to remand any American, citizen or otherwise, to a distant prison beyond the reach of any legal remedy is to violate centuries of Anglo-American legal tradition and shatter the very foundations of constitutional government in the United States. It is to reduce the citizens of a republic to the subjects of a king. It is, in the language of the American revolutionaries, to enslave the people to a singular, arbitrary will. It is not for nothing that among the accusations listed in the Declaration of Independence is the charge that the king is guilty of “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences.”

The president’s rendition program constitutes a profound assault on American freedom as understood for the whole of this nation’s history. At the same time, while contemplating these removals, I am struck by the degree to which they aren’t completely foreign to the American experience.

Here, I’m thinking of the fraught legal status of free Black Americans in the antebellum United States. “The possibility of being kidnapped and sold into slavery was shared by the entire American free Black community, whether young or old, freeborn or freed slave, Northerner or Southerner,” explains the historian Carol Wilson in “Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780-1865.”

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Kidnapping of this sort was illegal in most of the states where it took place, but as Wilson notes it was still pervasive, “partly because of the potential for great profits from a successful kidnapping and sale of a free Black into slavery” and in part because “the racism of the majority of American whites rendered it unlikely that kidnappers would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

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We see both dynamics in the most famous kidnapping case of the era, that of Solomon Northup — dramatized in the 2013 film version of his book, “12 Years a Slave” — a free Black New York man who was seized under false pretenses, drugged and sold south to Louisiana, where he labored as a slave for more than a decade before he could secure the assistance necessary to win his freedom.

It goes almost without saying that it was slavery that made free Black people so vulnerable to kidnapping. As one abolitionist newspaper, The African Observer, noted in 1827, “Where a traffic in slaves is thus actively carried on, and sanctioned by existing laws, those colored persons who are legally free must necessarily hold their freedom by very precarious tenure.” The racial nature of slavery in the United States tied bondage and servitude to skin color. To be Black meant that you could be a slave regardless of whether you were.

It did not help the situation that ceaseless industrial demand for cotton made enslaved people extremely valuable. “By the 1850s,” writes Wilson, “slave prices had soared, with good field hands usually bringing at least a thousand dollars, and some artisans selling for more than twice that amount.”

“As long as slaves brought a good price on the market,” she continues, “there would be people unscrupulous enough to make money in this manner.”

It was not just the market but the lack of full legal status in many of the states where they lived that made Black Americans vulnerable to kidnappers. As the historian Kate Masur shows in “Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction,” a number of Northern states adopted laws restricting civil and legal rights for their Black citizens. In 1807, for example, Ohio adopted laws that required free Black settlers to register in county courts (for a fee, of course) and obtain a guarantee of good behavior from at least two white landowners. The same laws also forbade them from testifying in cases, civil or criminal, in which one party was white, severely limiting their ability to defend their most basic rights, as Masur writes, “to enforce contracts, secure wages, or obtain justice in criminal cases.” This, too, was tied to slavery and to what it seemed to imply about anyone of African descent.

What does the antebellum kidnapping and sale of free Black Americans to slavery mean for us in the present? How does it relate to the president’s seizure and rendition of immigrants — and soon, perhaps, citizens — to a brutal foreign prison from which Trump has all but said they will not emerge?

Beyond the obvious parallels and similarities, the example of free Black Americans illustrates an important principle of political life. The question of who has rights — and of whose rights are to be respected — is inseparable from our treatment of those on the margins of political life. The mere existence of a group of nonpersons threatens the freedom of those who live within the scope of concern, however far from the center they might be.

Free Black people could not escape slavery. Nor, for that matter, could whites, whose rights to speak freely and gather as they pleased were threatened by the political power of slave owners, who had grown accustomed to dominating others as a way of life. The status of all Americans was, in truth, threatened by the existence of a class of people whose rights could be arbitrarily stripped from them, if they even had rights to begin with.

You cannot restrict unfreedom to a particular class of people. It will metastasize to consume the entire society. This was true of the slave system, where the large majority of people lived in conditions of servitude; it was true of the Jim Crow South, where economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement were the rule for Black and white Americans; and it will be true of our time for as long as we continue on the current path.

As of this writing, a majority of Americans disapproved of Trump’s overall job performance, but about half approved of his handling of immigration and supported his program of deportations. It is hard to know exactly what this means. Americans might believe the White House when it says that the only people affected by the immigration crackdown are people who have broken the law in one way or another — criminals who don’t deserve our sympathy. Americans might be unmoved by the fact that unauthorized entry is only a civil offense, or that most of the people renditioned by the administration have not been convicted of any crime.

Any American who looks at the president’s actions and nods his head in approval is sacrificing his freedom whether he realizes it or not. To allow Trump the authority to seize and disappear immigrants at will is to close the curtain on democracy for citizens, too. You cannot have despotism for some and freedom for others.

Harry Siegel: A chaotic mayoral election with Trump looming

Barry Williams for New York Daily News Voter with her dog Tubi to vote at Riverside Church Tuesday Nov. 5, 2024 in New York, New York.(Barry Williams for New York Daily News)
By Harry Siegel | harrysiegel@gmail.com


An uninhibited and revenge-oriented President Trump is escalating his full-scale assault on his enemies, very much including New York City and State.

His administration is revoking student visas and even green cards with no due process to speak of — often without informing those students or their schools it’s done so.

He’s personally threatening to pull all federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities like ours that don’t always cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

Big law firms based here are lining up to kiss the ring, with their chiefs pilgrimaging to the White House and Mar-a-Lago to pledge hundreds of millions each in pro bono services to causes favored by Trump in the hopes of purchasing or at least renting his indulgences as the president issues executive orders targeting individual firms and broadly demands lawyers stop working with or on behalf of his personal and ideological foes.

All this is prelude to a militarized mass-deportation agenda that, even before it’s fully operationalized, is already leading to dystopian arrests and manhunts of working moms and semi-random college students the government is flimsily tying to an expanding number of officially designated terror organizations.

Meantime, the White House is gleefully promoting torture-porn videos of people it’s shipping away seemingly almost at random to a hellhole El Salvadoran prison while pretty much mocking a federal judge’s order, affirmed by the Supreme Court, to try and return one of them after a Justice Department attorney conceded he’d been sent there due to an “administrative error.”

It’s a parade of horribles that’s just kicking off.

What’s the opposite of a spoiler alert? It turns out Trump wasn’t interested in ending “the weaponization of the federal government” but in wielding it as part of his full-on stress test of the United States Constitution.

That’s starting with the First Amendment’s protections against the government creating speech or religion winners and losers, the 14th Amendment’s race-blind promise that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,” and Article I’s commitment that “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.”

A message to my “common-sense” friends fed up with rolling riots of not always peaceful protesters and the compliant experts, journalists and administrators making endless allowances for these supposedly spontaneous movements on behalf of an increasingly ridiculous Democratic establishment whose combined excesses helped Trump convincingly win a second term four years after Americans handily rejected him:

This avalanche isn’t ending with your enemies.

Back to New York, you won’t hear much about any of this from Mayor Adams.

He’s a prime beneficiary of Trump’s indulgences, having publicly pledged not to criticize the White House even before it dropped the federal corruption charges Hizzoner was scheduled to stand trial on later this month in a move that Judge Dale Ho wrote “smacks of a bargain: Dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”

Sure enough, Adams had his first deputy mayor sign an executive order allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement back onto Rikers Island for the first time in a decade.

Adams, who was elected as a Democrat and is still registered to vote as one, is running for reelection as an independent now — meaning the city is primed for what would be its first meaningful general election in 12 years.

It’s a boggling contest, with a ranked-choice Democratic primary open only to registered party members followed by a most-votes-win general election that could include five different candidates ranging from a democratic socialist to a Guardian Angel, with three centrists sandwiched between them potentially cannibalizing votes from one another.

That’s cracked open a window for an historically unpopular mayor to somehow win a second term. At the least, it’s buying Adams a few more months where he’s not a pathetically lame duck.

Trump is just starting his term, and the city is about to commit to its course for the remainder of it.

Registered Democrats, who continue to have outsized electoral say here, should rank their top five picks in June and in the order they actually want them no matter their chances of winning to get most out of their vote.

And every New Yorker who has the right to vote still has time to register and then show up in November to decide on a mayor who will represent the city as our shared values are determined and then pressure-tested.

Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.

Black Americans Are Not Surprised

Christina Greer, NY Times


I think of my late grandmother Lillian McCray quite often these days. She might have completed only a portion of ninth grade, but living in the segregated South gave her and other Black people of her generation — she was born in 1921 — an education in what Americans are capable of. She saw a lot, maybe too much. In one of our many long talks on her Yulee, Fla., porch she said of this country, “The only time you should be surprised is when you’re surprised.”

There’s something about this moment that is shocking to many in my orbit. Watching a security camera video of a graduate student — from Tufts, my alma mater — who is legally in the country being picked up in broad daylight by masked government agents and hustled into an unmarked car. Witnessing people lose their jobs with no warning or justification. The presumption underlying these attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs that somehow only white men are qualified to do many jobs. Denying lawyers access to federal buildings so they can’t represent their clients properly. Seeing communities from Cincinnati to El Paso live in a state of fear from the police and bands of vigilantes.

“How can this be happening in America?” these people ask. “This is not the country I know, the country of rights and laws and due process.”

Needless to say, these people are almost all white and liberal and are not used to feeling this fear of arbitrary, brutal state authority. But this moment, the one that was explicitly promised by Project 2025 and Donald Trump when he was a candidate, looks a lot like what my grandmother experienced every day for much of her life. It is frightening and disappointing but not surprising if one knows anything about the Black experience in America. And not the sanitized just-so version of the Black experience in which America skips from slavery, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and somehow ends with a postracial America and Barack Obama.

Black people have seen this America before. We have endured throughout history’s progress and regress, watching the arc of justice bend with the changing winds. Until we reckon with our fellow citizens’ capacity — even hunger — for injustice, we will fail to meet, understand and survive this political moment. What I mean by that is the ability of some Americans (historically, almost all of them white, though increasingly there are multiethnic fellow travelers in MAGA these days) to burn this country to the ground before they share it with those deemed other and unworthy. I also mean how long it takes for almost everyone else to wake up to the danger these people pose not only to Black people but, yes, to everyone else, too.

Again, Black people are not surprised. Far too many well-meaning white Americans have been what I like to call ally ostriches, believing in progress while burying their heads in the sand when discussions around the past become uncomfortable. Or newer Americans, perhaps the children of immigrants of recent decades, who don’t see what business it is of theirs what violence slave owners or Jim Crow enforcers visited on their fellow citizens or the legacy of it. And now some of them are seeing people who look like them summarily deported. How did this happen?

Every day I hear that question, spoken by these ostriches but also, increasingly, by those who blithely voted for Mr. Trump, thinking he didn’t intend to actually do those things he said he would do, or who just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Black woman or who feel some version of disbelief. As if the America of chattel slavery, of Native American expulsion and attempted extermination, of reckless imperial expansion, of Jim Crow, of internment camps has not been echoed by authoritarian regimes across the globe. I find myself reminding those who are surprised by this moment that my still very spry mother attended legally mandated segregated schools her entire life. The past has somehow turned into prologue, and the head-scratching of many tells me there is a fundamental lack of understanding of this country and what Americans are capable of. No, dear ostriches, not all Americans. But enough, and often enough.And in the midst of this fear and real threats to democracy, most Black people are not only not surprised but also tired out by explaining why all of this is not surprising. (And yes, I am aware there are a few Black ostriches, too.) That is why many of the 92 percent of Black women who have been the keepers of the Democratic Party and democracy writ large have been resoundingly silent. Why did no one listen to usPeople like Stacey Abrams, Vice President Kamala Harris and Representative Maxine Waters walked all of us through the political, social and economic ramifications of a second Trump term. Higher Heights for America mobilized for candidates across the country to help energize and educate the electorate. We talked about how what happens to the least of us could most definitely happen to the rest of us. The stories of the past horrors have been passed down. We know what has happened, and we see what is happening around us. However, at the moment, many Black women I know are taking a moment for ourselves.


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And so we’ve been learning line dances and gleefully watching Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, transfer snacks from a big bag to a small bag. It is not as if Black women have forgotten the principles of linked fate, what the political scientist Michael Dawson described as African Americans’ tendency to keep in mind the consciousness and interests of larger groups. (We’re all in this together.) It’s that Black women have been the cleanup women, literally and figuratively, for this country for generations. We’ve been warning of the dangers to our democracy and have been overlooked, our contributions downplayed.

As the “I didn’t think he would do this” chorus continues to grow, I can’t help but think what many really mean is, “I didn’t think he would do this to people like me.” Unlike in the past, though, it is clear that it will not be just immigrants and Black people experiencing the boot of oppression. If much of white America did not know the full story of how fragile this democracy and its rule-of-law norms are, they are going to experience what their fellow Americans are capable of. There is a reason Trump is so determined to root out any honest telling of this country’s historical faults, whether in school curriculums or the Smithsonian Institution.

This nation went backward before. Reconstruction lasted 12 years, then its advances were not only abandoned but also mostly undone. We must be honest about that. We got back on the right path only after an arduous struggle. If you’re wondering where Senator Cory Booker’s endurance came from, he was drawing on the memory of that struggle. (The act of outlasting the segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond’s 1957 marathon oration was crucial if you want to understand what he was doing, of course.) And maybe people are waking up. In Wisconsin, voters rejected Elon Musk’s meddling. On April 5, there were “Hands Off!” protests across the country.

American democracy must be tended to with eyes open to the future and lessons learned from the past. My grandmother knew that. But she never had the luxury of burying her head in the sand.


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THE LATEST ON TARIFFS: China Tariffs Remain.The Feud has put the world economy on edge.

China said it was raising its tariffs on American goods to 125 percent from 84 percent. It’s the third time China has retaliated in an escalating trade war.

The growing feud between the two economic superpowers has put the world economy on edge.

Stock markets remained volatile: The S&P 500 fell 3.5 percent yesterday, a day after it rose sharply. Some stocks around the world dropped slightly today.

New Talks With Iran Planned for Weekend

An anti-American mural in Tehran. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By David E. Sanger

I’m a White House correspondent covering national security issues.

Tomorrow, the United States will resume nuclear negotiations with Iran for the first time since Tehran lost most of its proxy forces — including thousands of fighters for Hamas and Hezbollah — and its bet that Donald Trump would not return to the Oval Office. No country has worked harder on a nuclear bomb without actually building one than the Islamic Republic. Nor has any country insisted more loudly that it wouldn’t build a weapon.

Now, despite years of technical setbacks, assassinated scientists and sabotaged nuclear facilities, Iran is almost capable of pulling it off — if it makes the political decision to do so, Western intelligence agencies say. It could produce bomb-grade fuel in weeks and a workable weapon in months to a year or so. Israel is once again threatening military action, and the United States has moved B-2 stealth bombers in range.

Trump insists military action won’t be necessary if Iran makes a deal — but it has to move fast at the point of a gun. So talks begin tomorrow in Oman between Trump’s personal negotiator, Steve Witkoff, and Iran’s foreign minister.

I’ve covered the Iranian nuclear program for more than two decades. Today, I’ll explain what changed in recent years and examine the chances that diplomacy might work.
Washington’s view

After Iran watched the United States oust regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, it stopped developing a nuclear warhead, U.S. intelligence concluded. But Tehran kept options open. It got better at enriching uranium even as it insisted the work was for power plants, medical isotopes and research.

Iran had that right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But the past five presidents feared it would be too easy for the theocracy — one that still reaches for chants like “Death to America” and threatens to obliterate Israel — to fabricate a bomb.

So Israel covertly killed a number of Iranian nuclear scientists. (Assassins wove through traffic to attach “sticky bombs” to their car doors.) The U.S. and Israel created a computer virus that seized control of nuclear centrifuges and blew them up.

The sabotage campaign helped bring Iranians to the negotiating table with the Obama administration, China, Russia and some European nations. Iran agreed to ship 97 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country. But the deal had weaknesses: Iran retained its nuclear-enrichment infrastructure and the deal would expire in 2030. In exchange, the U.S. and other nations lifted economic sanctions. Obama bet that, with time, a younger generation would push Iran to a more Western-leaning posture.

The agreement polarized Congress. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, lobbied against it, arguing the Iranians would cheat. Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018 — over the objections of national security aides who noted it was working. Then, in 2020, Trump ordered the U.S. military to kill a beloved Iranian general who had overseen many of the region’s deadliest strikes on Americans and their allies.

The Iranians vowed revenge, and they tried to hire a hit squad to assassinate Trump on the campaign trail, according to an indictment last year. (Iran denies involvement.) It began enriching uranium to near-bomb-grade quality. The country now has enough for roughly six bombs.
Tehran’s view

The remains of a ballistic missile fired by Iran against Israel. Amir Cohen/Reuters


Iran detests Trump, who says the country will be in “great danger” if it fails to strike a deal. But Trump is clearly more open than President Biden was.

Officials in Tehran feel defenseless, since Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen — all nurtured and supplied by the Islamic Republic — have been pummeled. Iran’s own missile attacks on Israel last year were a failure. And sanctions are still hurting.

I asked Rob Malley, who worked on the 2015 deal and then represented President Biden for talks with Iran that led nowhere, how the Iranians think about the latest two presidents. “Biden was lukewarm about a deal; Trump is eager. Biden fixates on domestic politics; Trump couldn’t care less. Biden was calculating; Trump, impulsive,” Malley told me. “Trump is throwing caution, prudence and logic to the wind. Which is why there is probably a greater chance of some kind of understanding now than there ever was under the prior administration.”

In short, Trump benefits from “madman theory”: The Iranians believe he may give Netanyahu the green light and the weapons to attack — or even join in the operation.
A possible deal

The Iranians clearly hope for an agreement like the one from 2015: Give up some fuel stockpiles but retain fuel-making capability. Trump’s national security adviser says a deal must require “full dismantlement” of the nuclear program, along with the ability to make missiles or support terror groups. Netanyahu says that the Iranians must “blow up” their facilities under American supervision. Of course, after denouncing the 2015 deal, Trump will be under pressure to get a better one that prevents Iran from rebuilding.

The most likely outcome for the weekend is that the two sides define what topics this negotiation is about. Trump refused on Wednesday to say how long talks could take. But American officials say they are determined not to get stuck quibbling over every facility, timeline and verification of compliance.

Of course, as Trump discovered in dealing with the Ukraine war, if this problem were easily solvable, it would have been resolved long ago.

Adm admits error after arrest and rendition of US resident Abrego Garcia

The government is not keen to correct its errors. On March 15 the government rendered to prison in El Salvador a legal U.S. resident, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the courts had ordered the U.S. not to send to El Salvador, where his life was in danger. The government has admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but now claims—without evidence—that he is a member of the MS-13 gang and that his return to the U.S. would threaten the public. Abrego Garcia says he is not a gang member and notes that he has never been charged with a crime.

On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7. The administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision yesterday, saying the government must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release, but asked the district court to clarify what it meant by “effectuate,” noting that it must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

The Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”

Legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained what happened next. Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by 9:30 a.m. today explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.

The administration made clear it did not intend to comply. It answered that the judge had not given them enough time to answer and suggested that it would delay over the Supreme Court’s instruction that Xinis must show deference to the president’s ability to conduct foreign affairs. Xinis gave the government until 11:30 and said she would still hold the hearing. The government submitted its filing at about 12:15, saying that Abrego Garcia is “in the custody of a foreign sovereign,” but at the 1:00 hearing, as Anna Bower of Lawfare reported, the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not have information about where Abrego Garcia is and that the government had done nothing to get him back. Ensign said he might have answers by next Tuesday. Xinis says they will have to give an update tomorrow.

As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens. Indeed, both President Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have proposed that very thing.

Tonight, Trump signed a memorandum to the secretaries of defense, interior, agriculture, and homeland security calling for a “Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions.” The memorandum creates a military buffer zone along the border so that any migrant crossing would be trespassing on a U.S. military base. This would allow active-duty soldiers to hold migrants until ICE agents take them.

By April 20, the secretaries of defense and homeland security are supposed to report to the president whether they think he should invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to enable him to use the military to aid in mass deportations.

Self-Deporting by being Added to the “Social Security death master file.”

Three Trump officials told Sophia Cai of Politico that DOGE staffers embedded in agencies across the government are expanding government cooperation with immigration officials, using the information they’re gleaning from government databases to facilitate deportation. On Tuesday, DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi sent the first 6,300 names of individuals whose temporary legal status had just been canceled. On the list, which Moghaddassi said covered those on “the terror watch list” or with “F.B.I. criminal records,” were eight minors, including one 13-year-old.

The Social Security Administration worked with the administration to get those people to “self-deport” by adding them to the agency's “death master file.” That file is supposed to track people whose death means they should no longer receive benefits. Adding to it people the administration wants to erase is “financial murder,” former SSA commissioner Martin O’Malley told Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz, Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac, and Tara Siegel Bernard of the New York Times. Those people will not be able to use credit cards or banks.

On Tuesday, Acting Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Melanie Krause resigned after the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security agreed to share sensitive taxpayer data with immigration authorities. Undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes, in part to demonstrate their commitment to citizenship, and the government has promised immigrants that it would not use that information for immigration enforcement. Until now, the IRS has protected sensitive taxpayer information.

Rene Marsh and Marshall Cohen of CNN note that “[m]ultiple senior career IRS officials refused to sign the data-sharing agreement with DHS,” which will enable HHS officials to ask the IRS for names and addresses of people they suspect are undocumented, “because of grave concerns about its legality.” Ultimately, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed the agreement with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

Krause was only one of several senior career officials leaving the IRS, raising concerns among those staying that there is no longer a “defense against the potential unlawful use of taxpayer data by the Trump administration.”

Makena Kelly of Wired reported today that for the past three days, DOGE staffers have been working with representatives from Palantir and career engineers from the IRS in a giant “hackathon.” Their goal is to build a system that will be able to access all IRS records, including names, addresses, job data, and Social Security numbers, that can then be compared with data from other agencies.

But the administration’s attempt to automate deportation is riddled with errors. Last night the government sent threatening emails to U.S. citizens, green card holders, and even a Canadian (in Canada) terminating “your parole” and giving them seven days to leave the U.S. One Massachusetts-born immigration lawyer asked on social media: “Does anyone know if you can get Italian citizenship through great-grandparents?”

Trump’s retreat

Eric Lee/The New York Times

When it comes to tariffs, President Trump is a creature of habit.

He first rolls out new levies with bluster. He claims they will solve a major problem: They’ll help stop fentanyl trafficking across the Mexican and Canadian borders. They’ll bring back manufacturing. They’ll rebalance trade. They’ll collect trillions in revenue.

Soon, the markets panic. Investors worry about the higher prices and lower economic growth that tariffs will cause. Stocks tank. Business leaders call the White House to complain — or, worse, vent publicly about Trump and his methods.

Then, the president rolls back his plans. We reached that final stage yesterday. Trump paused his so-called reciprocal tariffs on every nation but China for 90 days. The move leaves a universal 10 percent tariff on all other countries except Canada and Mexico, which face separate duties. But it undoes some of the most shocking tolls — 20 percent on the European Union, 24 percent on Japan, 46 percent on Vietnam.

Markets rallied at the news. The S&P 500, which had flirted with bear-market territory, shot up almost 10 percent. But stocks haven’t fully recovered from the chaotic “Liberation Day” announcement last week, and the United States remains in an open trade war with China, which faces a 125 percent penalty on its goods. And what happens when the pause ends? Today’s newsletter looks at the fallout from this latest tariff episode.
Unclear goals

The Port of Los Angeles. Maggie Shannon for The New York Times


From the start, the president has faced one key question about his plan: What’s the point?

On the campaign trail, Trump spoke about the need for tariffs to revitalize U.S. manufacturing, and JD Vance fantasized about once again making toasters in America. Trump also said the tolls would bring in tax revenue.

But neither of these goals — manufacturing and revenue — is achievable unless the tariffs remain in place. Manufacturers won’t shift production back to the United States if they think the incentive to do so will soon disappear.

Some of Trump’s allies have built a different case for tariffs: that they are a negotiating tactic, one that gets other countries to remove their own trade barriers against the United States. But this implies that the tariffs are fleeting and will vanish when Trump lands new trade deals.

In other words, the stated goals contradict each other.

Trump’s announcement yesterday muddled things further. On one hand, Trump and his cabinet said that the pause would give them time to complete new trade deals, suggesting that they were a negotiating tactic. On the other hand, Trump is keeping the 10 percent universal tariffs. Are they now permanent? The administration hasn’t provided a clear answer.

If the intention was hard to parse, so were the methods. “Only an hour or so ago, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, stood in front of the White House and said that the reversal on tariffs was the president’s strategy ‘all along,’” my colleague Ben Casselman wrote yesterday. “Now Trump himself is saying that he made the decision in response to the market turmoil.”

One reason for the mixed message is disagreement within the administration. [Behind the scenes, senior members of Mr. Trump’s team had feared a financial panic that could spiral out of control and potentially devastate the economy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and others on the president’s team, including Vice President JD Vance, had been pushing for a more structured approach to the trade conflict that would focus on isolating China as the worst actor while still sending a broader message that Mr. Trump was serious about cracking down on trade imbalances.]

Over the weekend, Bessent pressed Trump to use the tariffs to get concessions. (He said the president “is the most deft negotiator there is,” according to an inside look at White House deliberations that my colleagues published yesterday.) Trump refused, believing the market pain was “short-term.” He changed his mind after the bond market faltered.

What’s next

Once the pause ends in 90 days, we could go through another round of economic chaos. That kind of uncertainty has rattled markets throughout Trump’s second term, and it will likely continue as long as the tariff threat looms.

It’s easy to forget, but Trump’s original idea on the campaign trail — the one that alarmed economists to begin with — was a universal 10 percent tariff. Now he has it. That levy is still one of the largest tax hikes since World War II. It will lead to higher prices and slower growth, and poorer Americans will disproportionately pay for it. The United States will suffer more from the ensuing trade war than any other major economy besides Mexico, experts estimate.

Trump has undone some of the expected damage by abandoning his plan, for now. But America still taxes trade much more than it did before Trump’s presidency — and that will continue to roil the world’s economy.

More on tariffs

China makes lots of the clothing Americans buy, as well as toys and electronics. Here’s a guide to how the tariffs could affect prices.

Ratings at Fox Business and CNBC have soared.

Canada expects to raise billions from retaliatory tariffs, and it has promised to use the money to help companies under threat from the U.S.

Trump’s auto tariff hasn’t changed. People in the English town of Solihull, where Jaguar Land Rover employs thousands, are stressed.

Trump spared Russia from tariffs. But falling oil prices could hurt its economy even more. Plunge in Oil Prices Threatens Russia’s Vast Spending on Ukraine War The lower revenues, a result in part of President Trump’s trade war, could prove more damaging to the Russian economy than the penalties the United States and its allies have already imposed.

A Leadership Crisis Compounds the Decline of the Palestinian Cause

 

Protests against Hamas erupted in the Gaza Strip last month. Photo: Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press

By 

Marcus Walker

 April 8, 2025 5:30 am ET

RAMALLAH, West Bank—The Palestinians’ national cause has reached its lowest ebb in nearly 80 years, and there is no one to turn it around.

The Gaza Strip is in ruins. Many residents might leave or be pushed out following the war sparked by the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Palestinian territory in the West Bank is divided by ever-expanding Israeli settlements. Middle East countries have been building ties with Israel, and allies such as Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah were battered by Israeli attacks last year.

Palestinians, meanwhile, are fighting with each other, caught between violent groups such as Hamas and the secular nationalist party Fatah, which governs parts of the West Bank and is widely seen as corrupt and ineffective.

Destroyed buildings in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: hatem khaled/Reuters

No third force has been able to break that duopoly. No new generation is emerging in either party to offer a fresh vision or strategy.

Opinion polling has been difficult and intermittent during the war, but in a survey last fall by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, a think tank in Ramallah, 35% of Gazans said they supported Hamas. In the West Bank, Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, fared even worse, with support reaching just 18%.

One thing many Palestinians agree on is how much internal divisions have weakened them in the unequal struggle with Israel.

The dream of Palestinian statehood was already gathering dust in the years before the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks that killed 1,200, left 251 as hostages and sparked a year and a half of war. The failure of the peace process under the 1990s Oslo Accords left the Palestinian Authority as little more than a junior partner in Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank, rather than a steppingstone to independence.

Around 2010, the majority of both Palestinians and Israelis stopped believing in the two-state solution—dividing the land to end the century-old conflict. Meanwhile Israel was building friendly relations with several Arab countries, bypassing the Palestinians.

Hamas hoped the Oct. 7 attack would revive the Palestinian cause while putting itself at the head. For many months afterward, around 70% of Palestinians approved of the attack, mainly because it put the Palestinian issue back in the global spotlight, according to several surveys by the PCPSR.

But public opinion turned, especially in Gaza, as the war brought far more pain than gain. Just over half of respondents still approved of the Oct. 7 attack as of last fall, including 39% in Gaza.

The war in Gaza has killed more than 50,000 people, according to local health authorities, who don’t say how many were combatants. Much of the enclave lies in ruins, and the bulk of its population of more than two million people has been displaced multiple times.

While the exact death toll remains uncertain, there is little doubt more Palestinian civilians and fighters have been killed in Gaza than in any previous round of fighting in the century-old conflict, including the 1948 war that saw the foundation of Israel and the flight or expulsion of around 750,000 Palestinians from their homes.

With Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah faring badly in fighting with Israel last year, and Sunni Arab governments acting only as diplomatic mediators, it is the Palestinians rather than Israel who are growing more isolated in the Middle East.

“October 7 is a turning point in the history of the conflict—the last nail in the coffin of a two-state solution based on 1967 borders,” said Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “Palestinians can see the end of their national project coming, and Hamas just made it more plausible.”

Fatah supporters have also grown disillusioned with party leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is also president of the Palestinian Authority. The 89-year-old veteran of the Palestinian struggle was once seen as a more moderate successor to the longtime national figurehead Yasser Arafat. But he’s now widely seen as merely clinging to office after blocking elections for nearly 20 years. Between 80% and 90% of Palestinians want him to resign, the PCPSR’s surveys have found.

Among the limited political alternatives on offer, some surveys say the left-wing  leader who enjoys the most support, and could beat Abbas and other unloved leaders of Fatah and Hamas in a head-to-head presidential election is Marwan Barghouti, who has been in an Israeli jail since 2002 for his role in the violent Second Intifada. But Israel’s government is steadfastly opposed to releasing him.

 

Thousands of working people in New York City live in shelters, unable to afford apartments despite holding down decent-paying jobs.

The Latest From Trump Land

The Supreme Court.  Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

The Supreme Court blocked a lower court’s order directing the administration to rehire thousands of probationary federal workers. The court’s early rulings on Trump’s plans have been narrow and technical, as though it wants to avoid the larger questions of government power, Adam Liptak writes. At the administration’s direction, the I.R.S. agreed to help ICE officials find immigrants to deport. Several top agency officials are preparing to resign in response. The government froze more than $1 billion in funding for Cornell and $790 million for Northwestern as it investigates the universities over accusations of racial discrimination and antisemitism. The Justice Department is disbanding a team that investigates cryptocurrency crimes. A federal judge ordered the White House to restore The Associated Press’s reporting access, which it limited after the wire service refused to adopt the term “Gulf of America.”

Trump’s global tariffs took effect. Includes104% Tariff on China.

 

Workers in Guangzhou, China.  Qilai Shen for The New York Times

President Trump’s global tariffs took effect this morning. They hit nearly all U.S. allies and raised import taxes on Chinese goods to at least 104 percent. Stocks slumped in Asia and Europe in response. Investors are worried about a global recession. (Read the latest news here.)

China has retaliated with its own tariffs, set to take effect at midday, and the European Union is preparing a response. Many world leaders are trying to negotiate. Trump said 70 governments had approached the U.S., and many have scheduled phone calls and sent delegations to Washington. The administration is expected to begin talks with Japan and South Korea.

Still confused by the tariffs? These charts will answer all your questions.

• Elon Musk called Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” as tensions between the two exploded.
• Trump wants to eliminate trade deficits with every U.S. trading partner. Many economists say that doesn’t make sense.
• The global trading system is another example of the Trump administration tearing something apart, only to reveal that it has no plan to replace it, David Sanger writes.