Judge Kicks DOGE Out of Social Security in Huge Blow to Elon Musk

A federal judge blocked Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the Social Security Administration Thursday.

The order, issued by District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander, prevents DOGE from accessing personally identifiable information, installing “any software” on SSA systems or devices, and accessing or disclosing SSA computer code.

The decision further demanded that Musk and his accomplices delete any sensitive SSA-related information currently in their possession.

Some of that information included Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, medical provider information, employer and employee payment records, employee earnings, addresses, bank records, and tax information.

In a memorandum opinion, Hollander said that DOGE had failed to provide its staffers with the proper training to sensitively navigate such systems, and that the government was instead “hitting a fly with a sledgehammer” in its pursuit to “modernize the system and uncover fraud.” She further accused the government of failing to provide “even a single reason” why DOGE needed “unbridled access” to the agency’s records.

“The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” Hollander wrote. “It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”

This story has been updated.

A Canadian politician is urging his constituents to stop traveling to the United States, in the midst of both increased aggressiveness toward Canadian travelers in the U.S. and outright antagonism from the Trump administration.

“Over the last three months our nation has faced an unprecedented threat from our nearest neighbor,” Canadian Member of Parliament Charlie Angus said on Thursday. “A threat to our borders, a threat to our sovereignty, a threat to our very right to exist as an independent democratic nation.… What concerns me is the targeting of Canadian citizens who are crossing the border to work or to visit.

“We have seen too many stories of citizens being pulled out of airport lines and being fingerprinted and deported as if they were criminals. Citizens being kidnapped to illegal detention by ICE. And it’s not just Canadians; we see the attack on backpackers, students, doctors, professors,” Angus continued. “I am here today to say to Canadians to avoid travel to the United States if at all possible, and to call our government to stand up for our Canadian citizens who are being denied their rights by arbitrary detention.”

This news comes shortly after the detention of Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney, who claims that ICE held her “in chains” for 12 days after she attempted to enter the U.S. from Mexico. Multiple European travelers have also been detained by ICE—a French scientist with texts critical of the Trump administration, a Welsh artist who was detained on a visa mix-up, and three Germans who were traveling legally. Trump’s continued campaign for Canada to become the fifty-first state—which is likely more of a contrived justification for his nonsensical tariff regime than an actual goal—certainly isn’t helping.

Our relationship with our northern neighbors is so strained that their politicians—who are in the middle of their own tight campaign season—don’t even want them crossing the border.

A Trump voter whose wife was detained by federal immigration agents apparently still does not regret siding with MAGA in November.

Bradley Bartell, a Wisconsin Trump supporter, witnessed the arrest of his Peruvian wife, Camila Muñoz, last month. Muñoz had overstayed her visa during the pandemic but had no criminal history and had recently applied for her green card—something that the couple believed could be enough to keep her from becoming a target of the Trump administration.

It wasn’t. Instead, ICE agents tore her away from her husband at the airport as the couple returned from their belated honeymoon in Puerto Rico. But that hasn’t hampered Bartell’s opinion of Donald Trump.

“I don’t regret the vote,” Bartell told Newsweek Wednesday.

Bartell has called on his elected leader to reform ICE. Through attempting to navigate America’s immigration system, Bartell said he discovered that the agency “never really has any information” and should be “revamped.”

“It’s all been a nightmare really, taking things as they come and moving forward,” Bartell told the publication. “We have an attorney. The system for getting people through seems to be very inefficient, so it is taking longer than it should.”

Bartell started a GoFundMe to raise $3,000 for Muñoz’s release from ICE custody.

“This money will be used for legal support and the bond money for my wife. Any and all support is deeply appreciated,” Bartell wrote on the public donation page, which so far has raised more than $900. “On top of the lawyer fees, I have been informed that the bond could run upwards of 10k.”

Bartell said he is considering moving himself and his son to Peru in the event that his wife gets deported back to her home country.

Trump has promised to enact the largest deportation program in U.S. history. His anti-immigrant rhetoric is predicated on the falsehood that the people who have entered the U.S. are murderers and rapists, and that they are a drain on the country’s economy and government resources as unemployed migrants struggle to obtain work and housing. In reality, undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. And in 2022, approximately 4.5 percent of the workforce was undocumented, contributing to some $75.6 billion in total taxes, according to the American Immigration Council.

Overstaying the length of your permitted immigration by expired visa or otherwise is considered an administrative violation—not a criminal one. But the Trump administration does not seem to care.

“We are prioritizing the worst of the worst and aliens with final removal orders. Secretary Noem’s message is clear: If you come to our country illegally, we will deport you, and you will never return,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security had previously told Newsweek about the administration’s immigration plans.

Still, Bartell doesn’t blame Trump for his administration’s expanded anti-immigration efforts.

“He didn’t create the system, but he does have an opportunity to improve it. Hopefully, all this attention will bring to light how broken it is,” Bartell told Newsweek.

Some of the other people who have been targeted by the immigration agency have lived in the U.S. for decades. They include a woman in her fifties who has lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years and is married to a U.S. citizen, a woman in her thirties who first came to the States as a teenager and has proof of valid permanent legal residency, a European woman in her thirties engaged to a U.S. citizen, and a woman engaged to a U.S. legal permanent resident and who has lived in the U.S. for nearly a decade, according to interviews and documents obtained by USA Today.

Even though Republican voters appear to be increasingly irate with the administration’s agenda, some supporters might never turn on Trump—even as their families are taken away from them. Famously, Trump has argued that he could commit murder and not lose the support of his base.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump said at a campaign stop in Iowa in 2016. “It’s, like, incredible.”

The Trump administration is escalating its crackdown on foreign students whom it accuses of supporting terrorism, detaining Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow and Indian citizen Badar Khan Suri Monday night.

Suri was detained by masked Department of Homeland Security agents outside of his Arlington, Virginia, home. They told him that his visa was revoked under the same law that Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was detained under: the Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives the Secretary of State the authority to deport someone if their presence has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Like Khalil, Suri had no prior criminal record and has not been charged with a crime, according to his lawyer, Hassan Ahmed. Ahmed argued in a federal court petition that Suri, who was in the United States on a student visa, is facing deportation due to his U.S. citizen wife, Mapheze Saleh, who is a Georgetown graduate student of Palestinian descent and therefore he opposes America’s Middle East policy.

Saleh has been targeted on social media, in right-wing media outlets, and even the Embassy of Israel in the U.S. due to the fact that her father, Ahmed Yousef, was once an adviser to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh more than a decade ago.

Ahmed told The New York Times that Suri was being punished “seemingly based on who his father-in-law was.” The Times also received a voice message from Yousef, a Gaza resident, who said he does not currently hold a senior position in Hamas and called the October 7 attacks on Israel “a terrible error.”

Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, said in an X post that Suri “was a foreign exchange student at Georgetown University actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.”

“Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas,” McLaughlin’s post continued, without providing any evidence.

Unlike in Khalil’s case, Suri’s university appears to be backing up the researcher, who also teaches classes at Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, part of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

“Dr. Khan Suri is an Indian national who was duly granted a visa to enter the United States to continue his doctoral research on peacebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are not aware of him engaging in any illegal activity, and we have not received a reason for his detention,” a university spokesperson said in a statement. “We support our community members’ rights to free and open inquiry, deliberation and debate, even if the underlying ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable. We expect the legal system to adjudicate this case fairly.”

Columbia University, in contrast, appears to be giving the Trump administration whatever it wants in the hopes that $400 million in federal funding will be restored to the institution. What university officials fail to realize is that giving in to the administration’s demands won’t save the institution, and in fact will deal a serious blow to academic freedom and free speech, effectively silencing every foreign college student in America.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt struggled Thursday to justify Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s shilling for Elon Musk’s Tesla.

During an appearance on Fox News Wednesday, Lutnick had urged viewers to buy stock in the Trump ally’s electric vehicle company because it “will never be this cheap again.”

“I mean who wouldn’t invest in Elon Musk, you gotta be kidding me!” Lutnick said.

Notably, Cabinet members do not typically endorse products, as the Code of Federal Regulations states that “public servants are generally barred from using their office’s platform to endorse companies and products.”

The next day, Leavitt was asked whether Lutnick’s recommendation to buy Tesla stock was the “stance of the administration.”

“I think the commerce secretary was reiterating that the president supports an American-made company, like Tesla, who produces a very good product for the American people, which was beloved by the American people—particularly Democrats—until Elon Musk decided to vote for Donald Trump,” Leavitt said.

But Musk didn’t just vote for Trump, he threw billions behind his presidential campaign and was rewarded with a fake Cabinet position at the head of the Department of Government Efficiency. While Musk initially enjoyed a postelection “Trump bump,” his stock has only suffered as he unleashed DOGE on the federal government, rifling through citizens’ private information, slashing essential programs, and hastily cutting massive swaths of the federal workforce.

A CNN poll found that 53 percent of Americans now hold a negative view of the billionaire bureaucrat—with only 35 percent holding a positive view. As public perception of Musk has cratered, so too have Tesla shares fallen. Tesla stock was down 5 percent over the last five days, 35 percent over the last month, and 42 percent since January, shedding nearly $121 billion of Musk’s personal net worth.

Leavitt then shifted topics slightly, expounding on what a “scary time” it was for Tesla owners amid a spate of vandalism incidents and widespread protests at dealerships.

“And now we’ve seen despicable and unacceptable violence taking place across our country at Tesla dealerships, against workers, employees, and also innocent Americans who drive these vehicles,” Leavitt said.

While Donald Trump, who held a surreal press event for Tesla at the White House last week, may be exempt from federal conflict of interest laws, Lutnick probably isn’t. And the Code of Federal Regulations specifically prohibits public officials from using their office for private gain.

Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm once run by Lutnick but now helmed by his children, also upgraded Tesla stock Wednesday, citing a buying opportunity. It seems Lutnick may be trying to rescue Musk’s falling stock to the benefit of his family business, as Cantor Fitzgerald held roughly 740,000 shares of Tesla stock at the end of 2024.

Unfortunately for Lutnick and Musk, the commerce secretary’s endorsement didn’t appear to do very much good: Tesla stock dropped 1.7 percent in premarket trading after his appearance on Fox News, as one of Wall Street’s most bullish Tesla advocates warned that Musk’s company was undergoing a “crisis.”