Trump Has a New Target for His Mass Deportations: U.S. Citizens

Donald Trump loves the idea of deporting American citizens to El Salvador—no, seriously he said that.

A reporter asked Trump Sunday whether he was considering an offer from El Savador President Nayib Bukele to “take American citizens in the federal prison population.”

“Well, I love that,” Trump replied.

“If we could take some of our twenty-time wise guys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head, and purposefully run people over in cars, uh if he would take them, I would be honored to give them,” Trump continued.

“I don’t know what the law says on that, but I can’t imagine the law would say anything different,” Trump said, claiming that it could likely save the U.S. money to house their prisoners in El Salvador. In fact, the law does say something different: It is illegal to deport U.S. citizens.

“I would only do according to the law,” Trump said. “But I have suggested that, you know, ‘Why should it stop just at people who cross the border illegally?’”

There are significant legal barriers to the deportation of U.S. citizens, even if they are incarcerated in the federal prison system. One legal expert told ABC News that removal to El Salvador could violate the Eighth Amendment protection from “cruel and unusual punishment,” which prevents the U.S. government from inflicting humiliating or torturous punishments for federal crimes.

U.S. Code 3621 requires an incarcerated person in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons to be able to be transported back to court—which obviously would be impossible if the prisoner is removed from U.S. custody to El Salvador, where the U.S. government is already claiming that it cannot remove a man wrongfully deported there. It also requires certain standards for prisons, which cannot be met in a foreign prison such as El Salvador’s CECOT, which is notorious for human rights abuses.

U.S. Code 4100, which established the Prisoner Transfer Program, says that an incarcerated person can only be transferred out of the U.S. to the country where they are a citizen or national, and can only be removed from the U.S. with their consent. A U.S. citizen can only be transferred to the United States.

The U.S. also has a law prohibiting the government “from expelling, extraditing, or otherwise effecting the involuntary return of a person to a country in which there are reasonable grounds for believing the person would be in danger of subjection to torture,” which one federal judge has already argued could apply to all removals to the notorious prison in El Salvador where Trump has sent deportees.

In February, when Bukele first offered to take U.S. citizens as part of a deal to take the alleged gang members the U.S. government has designated terrorists, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it was a “very generous” offer but that there were “obviously legalities involved,” like that pesky U.S. Constitution.

Meanwhile, Trump was initially enthusiastic about the idea.

“These are sick people. If we could get them out of our country, we have other countries that would take him. They could,” Trump said at the time.

At the time, Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, rebuked Bukele’s offer in a post on X: “Bukele is undoubtedly trolling, but to emphasize again: this is so incredibly illegal that there’s not even a hint of possible way to do it under any circumstances whatsoever. It violates international law and the U.S. constitution. Period. End of story.”

But the Trump administration hasn’t seemed particularly interested in following the letter of the law, as it invoked a wartime law to suspend due process and carry out the mass deportation of over 100 Venezuelan nationals in likely violation of a court order. The government claimed that the deportees were members of violent gangs, but it seems that several of them just had innocuous tattoos.

This story has been updated.

Elon Musk spent the weekend pushing for a “zero-tariff situation,” while his favorite president causes widespread economic uncertainty and dread doing the exact opposite.

“I’m hopeful, for example, with the tariffs, that at the end of the day I hope it is agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free-trade zone between Europe and North America,” Musk said on a video call on Saturday. “That’s what I hope occurs. And also, more freedom of people to move between Europe and North America if they wish to work in Europe, if they wish to work in America, they should be allowed to do so in my view. So that has certainly been my advice to the president.”

Musk also posted a clip of conservative economist Milton Friedman explaining the many steps that go into making a simple pencil—wood, graphite, steel—describing the global import and export market as a “magic of the price system.”

“That is why the operation of the free market is so essential,” Friedman continued in the clip. “Not only to promote productive efficiency but, even more, to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.”

“Free-trade zones” and economic peace and harmony are perhaps the lowest current priority for the Trump administration. His unprecedented trade war has caused the stock market to plummet, will surely cause prices on goods everywhere to skyrocket, and has made the United States a common economic enemy of the world, uniting countries with centuries of beef against us. This is not what the world’s richest man signed up for, and Musk’s subtweets suggest that there is disharmony between himself and the president. Combine this with the fact that Musk has lost $52 billion just this year and the rumors of him stepping away—which the administration vehemently denies—and it becomes plain to see that all is not right between Musk and Trump. The honeymoon is officially over.

On Monday morning, Donald Trump seemed to be celebrating even as the global stock market continued to plunge. 

The president boasted on his Truth Social page of low oil prices, lower food prices, and of “Billions of Dollars a week from the abusing countries on Tariffs,” despite the tide of bad news from Dow futures, the S&P 500, and indexes across Europe and Asia resulting in a $9.5 trillion wipeout in global equity value.

After Trump’s baseline 10 percent tariff went into effect on Saturday, a market sell-off quickly ensued. When asked about it on Sunday, the president said, “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” claiming that such measures were needed to address the trade deficit with China. 

“We have to solve our trade deficit with China,” Trump said to reporters on Air Force One. “We have a trillion-dollar trade deficit with China; hundreds of billions of dollars a year we lose with China. And unless we solve that problem, I’m not going to make a deal.”

Meanwhile, the dollar is sliding while the euro is gaining value and stocks from construction equipment giant Caterpillar to Elon Musk’s Tesla are struggling. Trump’s tariffs have even soured his relationship with close ally Musk, who spent the weekend attacking administration officials including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and adviser Peter Navarro. 

It seems that the president is ignoring all of the indications of an insanely bad policy, even lashing out at a reporter who asked if there’s “pain in the market at some point you’re unwilling to tolerate,” calling her question “stupid.” The real question is how much pain the American people, as well as Trump’s Republican allies and supporters, are willing to tolerate. 

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to return an Salvadoran man who was deported to El Salvador back to the United States by midnight Monday.

Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error,” but White House officials insist that he has ties to the MS-13 gang and have even made the brazen claim that there’s nothing that any court can do to order Abrego Garcia back because he is no longer in U.S. custody. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ruled otherwise.

“This was an illegal act,” Xinis told an attorney for the Justice Department. “Congress said you can’t do it, and you did it anyway.” Vice President JD Vance and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have both accused Abrego Garcia of being an MS-13 gang member with no evidence of a criminal conviction, a fact Xinis stressed in her ruling.

“That’s just chatter, in my view. I haven’t been given any evidence,” Xinis said. “In a court of law, when someone is accused of membership in such a violent and predatory organization, it comes in the form of an indictment, a complaint, a criminal proceeding that has robust process so we can assess the facts.”

Abrego Garcia was found to face a legitimate fear of prosecution in his home country by a U.S. immigration judge in 2019, and was thus barred from being deported back to El Salvador. Immigration officials still rushed him onto a plane to El Salvador anyway, and now he’s being held in Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison notorious for human rights abuses.

Surprisingly, the Justice Department lawyer representing the government in this case said that even he wasn’t provided evidence.

“I am also frustrated that I have no answer for you on a lot of these questions,” said Erez Reuveni, an assistant director in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation. “The government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”

At one point, Xinis asked to see a 2019 immigration warrant for Abrego Garcia, to which Reuveni replied, “I do not have that order. It is not in the record.”

Reuveni said he has also asked his government clients why they couldn’t return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.

“When this case landed on my desk, I asked my clients that very question. I have not received to date an answer that I find satisfactory,” Reuveni said, and even asked Xinis before her ruling whether he could have 24 hours to persuade administration officials to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. without a further court ruling.

“I would ask the court to give us, the defendants, one more chance to do this,” Reuveni said. “That’s my recommendation to my client, but so far that hasn’t happened.” Ultimately, the judge ruled against the Trump administration, which is not likely to go over well considering that the U.S. has a $6 million deal with El Salvador to accept prisoners, brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But at the very least, there’s hope that Abrego Garcia, a married father of a child with autism, can receive justice and return home.

A federal judge ruled Friday that the president violated a court order to stop freezing federal funds by withholding Federal Emergency Management Agency relief to at least 19 states. The judge said that the Trump administration seemed to be making a “covert” effort to punish states whose immigration practices differed from the White House.

U.S. District Judge John McConnell issued an injunction in March on behalf of 23 states that sued the federal government after the White House moved to pause aid to states, ruling that the move ​​“fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government.”

On Friday, McConnell found that the Trump administration disregarded the court order, with at least 19 states, all of whom with Democratic attorneys general, presenting “undisputed evidence” that they were not receiving FEMA funds already appropriated by Congress.

Oregon, for example, still hasn’t received $120 million in funds meant for winter storms, flooding, landslides, wildfires, and flood mitigation. Hawaii said FEMA has yet to deliver $6 million to rebuild after wildfires devastated Maui in 2023.

For its part, the Trump administration claimed that it was creating a new review process for allocated funding. The states, however, said that they weren’t being given their funds since early February, which McConnell ruled was a clear violation of the order. The judge noted that this appeared to be in accordance with Trump’s executive order barring “sanctuary” states from receiving aid.

This isn’t the first court order that the Trump administration has violated, and it probably won’t be the last. But with a weak Congress, the judiciary is the only check on the president’s power right now, and in this case, millions of Americans struggling to recover from natural disasters are the ones who are suffering. Will there be accountability?

The Dow Jones plunged more than 2,000 points, or 5.1 percent, Friday as investors reacted to China’s retaliatory tariffs. The drop-off followed a 1,679-point decline the day before.

Beijing’s Commerce Ministry announced it would impose a 34 percent tariff on imports of all U.S. products as soon as April 10, matching the 34 percent tariff that Donald Trump announced he would impose on Chinese imports as part of his “Liberation Day” tariff strategy.

Despite publicly celebrating the enforcement of his plan, the U.S. president’s nonsensical economic strategy has tanked markets in just two days.

Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” the CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index (VIX), jumped to 44.4 by Friday afternoon—a 22.8-point jump since Wednesday, and a 26.5-point jump since the beginning of the year, according to data compiled by The Wall Street Journal, putting the economy on track for a bear market.

In a note to investors, JP Morgan said that Trump’s tariffs had a 40 percent chance of slingshotting the U.S. economy into a recession. JP Morgan underscored that the tariffs would cause a price surge—adding two percent to the Consumer Price Index—and additionally raise taxes on Americans by $660 billion a year, “the largest tax increase in recent memory by a longshot,” CNN reported Thursday.

“The impact on inflation will be substantial,” the analysts said, according to the network. “We view the full implementation of these policies as a substantial macroeconomic shock.”

Beyond the economic devastation, Trump’s tariffs have also landed the U.S. in legal hot water. China also announced Friday it would be suing the U.S. via the World Trade Organization, arguing that Trump’s tariff plan “seriously undermines” global trade.

“The United States’ imposition of so-called ‘reciprocal tariffs’ seriously violates WTO rules, seriously damages the legitimate rights and interests of WTO members, and seriously undermines the rules-based multilateral trading system and international economic and trade order,” the Commerce Ministry said. “It is a typical unilateral bullying practice that endangers the stability of the global economic and trade order. China firmly opposes this.”

The Trump administration is also facing lawsuits over the sweeping tariff plan at home.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance sued the president Thursday, claiming that Trump’s decision to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to enforce the tariffs—which impacts trade with some 200 countries—did not give him the power to “usurp” Congress’s right to control tariffs or “upset the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

In a press release, the right-wing group (which has financial ties to Leonard Leo and the Koch network) argued that the emergency statute “authorizes specific emergency actions like imposing sanctions or freezing assets to protect the United States from foreign threats.”

“It does not authorize the President to impose tariffs,” the NCLA wrote.

President Donald Trump has once again swooped in to save TikTok, after the president’s sweeping tariffs undermined a deal with China.

“My Administration has been working very hard on a Deal to SAVE TIKTOK, and we have made tremendous progress,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday.

The president said that he planned to sign an executive order to delay the enforcement of the U.S. TikTok ban for an additional 75 days.

Trump continued to say that U.S. officials hoped to continue negotiations with China, “who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs.”

“This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security! We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark.’ We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” Trump wrote.

Trump appeared to suggest that his “reciprocal tariff” policy, which placed a baseline 10 percent tariff on nearly every country in the world, was some kind of chip in negotiations over TikTok’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance. In 2024, Congress passed a law that required the firm to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to a non-Chinese owner, or see it banned in the U.S. Trump has now swooped in twice to rescue the app from going dark (after putting it on Congress’s radar in the first place).

In reality, Trump’s decision to impose steep tariffs on China has only gotten in the way of negotiations. The White House had nearly reached an agreement with China on TikTok, but the country hit the breaks after Trump’s tariff announcement Wednesday, the Associated Press reported.

After Trump imposed a 34 percent tariff on Chinese imports to the U.S. earlier this week, in addition to two previous rounds of 10 percent duties, China responded in kind, levying its own 34 percent tariff on all imports from the U.S. on Friday.

In 2024, the U.S. imported $438.9 billion worth of Chinese goods, and China imported $143.5 worth of American goods, according to the U.S. trade representative.

Trump previously signed an executive order in January to keep the app running for U.S. users for 75 days, “to permit my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course of action with respect to TikTok.” The grace period was set to expire Saturday, April 5.

This story has been updated.

Then they came for the gamers: Nintendo is delaying preorders of the Switch 2 in the wake of Trump’s sweeping, unprecedented tariffs on the entire world. Experts, meanwhile, think the device’s high cost is a direct result of the company anticipating the devastating effect of tariffs.

“Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date,” Nintendo said in a statement from IGN. “The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.”

The Switch is manufactured in China and Vietnam, countries that Trump placed 34 percent and 46 percent tariffs on, respectively. The Switch 2 is perhaps the most anticipated gaming console release of the year, as the first iteration was the third-bestselling gaming console of all time.

Trump’s tariffs have gamers everywhere bracing for aggressive price increases. “There’s no doubt that Nintendo and Sony bumped prices higher initially to pre-empt potential tariffs,” Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad wrote on X. “They are indeed higher than expected, but I wouldn’t expect the % price increase to be exactly in-line with the tariff.

“When [graphics processing unit] prices increased in February that’s because tariffs on China were 10%. When they increased again in March that’s because they were 20%,” he continued. “Now they’re 54% for China and other Asia markets incl. Vietnam are 46%. Unless reversed, expect all gaming hardware to see jumps.”

Others speculated that Nintendo waited until the very last minute to decide on a price increase due to the intense uncertainty surrounding the tariffs.

“Nintendo appears to be building in a buffer against these potential trade barriers while ensuring they maintain their traditional positive margin on hardware,” NYU professor Joost van Dreunen told IGN. “My view is that they probably had a range of pricing for the U.S. market in play up until the last minute due to the uncertainty on import tariffs.”

This reinforces the very basic economic concept of tariffs being a tax on the consumer more than anything else. And when used as wantonly and spitefully as Trump is using them, the price of everything, everywhere, shoots up.

A fifth of the jobs slashed at the Department of Health and Human Services were actually a mistake, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said.

Under the direction of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the health agency fired some 10,000 employees this week in an ongoing government reduction effort that Kennedy has said could downsize his department’s 82,000-employee workforce by as much as a quarter.

But by Kennedy’s own admission, that process is apparently so haphazard, rushed, and inefficient that it basically has to involve major mistakes that undermine the department’s work.

“Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut,” Kennedy told reporters on Thursday. “We’re reinstating them. And that was always the plan. Part of the DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning, is we’re going to do 80 percent cuts, but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we’ll make mistakes.”

Kennedy noted that some of the employees affected were not in administrative roles, as DOGE had promised, and that the layoff had affected the agency’s research work. One such program included a team of researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that monitors lead exposure in children.

“There were some programs that were cut that are being reinstated, and I believe that that’s one,” Kennedy said.

Other shuttered departments were responsible for research and policy recommendations on older adults, disabilities, HIV, minority health, mine safety, and smoking. It is unclear if these are among the research priorities that will return.

The negligent error is just one recent instance in which the “shock and awe” of the Trump administration’s federal makeover has resulted in dud details and mass confusion.

Since January, the Trump administration has fired more than 100,000 federal employees, killing the Education Department and attacking the Environmental Protection Agency. Mass layoffs were also conducted at the Department of Energy in February, where DOGE similarly and mistakenly nixed critical workers focused on nuclear safety.

Bringing those employees back wasn’t as easy as simply having them return to work the next day. Instead, dejected and “shell shocked” employees at the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration were reportedly considering early retirement or looking for work in more stable sectors, unsure if or when the Trump administration might try to dismiss them again, according to The Bulwark.

But tens of thousands more government jobs are expected to be on the chopping block as Trump pursues a second round of “voluntary” buyouts in the coming weeks.

The former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Robert Califf, condemned the Health Department layoffs in a statement on LinkedIn.

“The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed,” Califf wrote, describing the action as “a dark day for public health.”

Donald Trump is defending his tariff plan with poorly sourced hype videos.

The president shared an X video, a copy of a TikTok post, to his Truth Social account Friday morning calling his economic plans “genius” without much substance. The video starts out by saying Trump is crashing the economy on purpose and that billionaire investor Warren Buffett is praising the president for making “the best economic moves he’s seen in 50 years.”

This isn’t true at all, though. Last month, Buffett openly called Trump’s tariffs “a tax on goods” in an interview.

“Tariffs are actually, we’ve had a lot of experience with them. They’re an act of war, to some degree,” Buffett said. “I mean, the tooth fairy doesn’t pay ’em! And then what? You always have to ask that question in economics. You always say, ‘And then what?’”

Trump’s video goes on to make several other unsourced claims, including that the Federal Reserve will be forced to slash interest rates in May, allowing trillions of dollars in debt to be refinanced inexpensively. The video also claims that the dollar will be weakened and that mortgage rates will drop, and repeats Trump’s claims that tariffs will compel businesses to build in the U.S. and force farmers to sell more crops stateside as well. There is no indication that any of this will happen. Indeed, Trump is practically begging—or maybe threatening—Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to slash rates.

The video shows that Trump is deluded that his tariffs are going to succeed and is pushing any source that backs him up. The TikTok account that the video comes from lacks credibility, as it doesn’t even have a bio and seems to only post summary videos of news events without any indication of who is making them. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to plummet and Americans continue to worry about their jobs.