Fed Chair Issues Grim Warning About Consequences of Trump’s Tariffs

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned Wednesday that Donald Trump’s sweeping reciprocal tariff policy would likely raise inflation, despite the president’s many promises to lower prices upon entering office.

“The level of tariff increases announced so far is significantly larger than anticipated, and the same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth,” Powell said during an event hosted by the Economic Club of Chicago.

Powell’s words stand in marked contrast to Trump’s. During a press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele Monday, Trump claimed that he had “already solved inflation,” after the inflation rate had reached 2.4 percent in March, a six-month low.

“You know, if you look at the numbers, the numbers are incredible, actually. The stock market’s up,” Trump said. But that was only after he sent the stock market sinking with his announcement of blanket 10 percent tariffs on products from nearly every country in the world.

And that was in addition to the 25 percent tariffs he’d already announced on products from Canada and Mexico, as well as 25 percent tariffs on imported cars and autoparts. Not to mention his mounting trade war with China, which involved a 145 percent tariff on Chinese goods—with a temporary exception for electronics—that saddled the U.S. with a reciprocal 125 percent tariff on American exports to China.

When Trump announced a 90-day pause on his sweeping reciprocal tariffs, the stock market immediately shot back up, making millions for the president’s buddies at the expense of weakening the U.S. dollar and the U.S. Treasury market.

Powell warned that Trump’s economic policies were pushing the U.S. into uncharted territory. “There isn’t a modern experience for how to think about this,” Powell said Wednesday.

He added that the Federal Reserve might find itself “in the challenging scenario in which our dual-mandate goals are in tension,” referring to the central bank’s dual mandate of maximum employment and stable prices.

Powell said that if both prices and unemployment increased to a certain point, then the Fed “would consider how far the economy is from each goal, and the potentially different time horizons over which those respective gaps would be anticipated to close.”

The Trump administration is creating a legal justification to send immigrants without criminal records to the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

CBS News obtained a government memo showing an agreement between the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense creating broad discretion about who can be sent to the base. The criteria directly contradict President Trump’s comments about the Cuba base earlier this year, in which he said only the “worst” migrants should be sent there.

The memo doesn’t even mention criminality, stating that the departments agreed to use the base to detain immigrants with deportation orders who have “a nexus to a transnational criminal organization (TCO) or criminal drug activity.” Having a nexus, as defined by the memo, constitutes being part of a transnational criminal group or paying one “to be smuggled into the United States.”

Many immigrants crossing the southern U.S. border end up having to pay criminal groups to facilitate their journey, meaning this could be used to detain large numbers of people. And even if there’s no proof that they were involved with any criminal organization, the memo allows authorities to assume that they are if they’re from a country “where the preponderance of aliens from that country enter the United States in that fashion.”

The Trump administration has already flown some Venezuelan immigrants to Guantánamo Bay, but flew them back to the U.S. in February. Since then, it has reportedly held immigrants from different countries at the base before returning them to the U.S. or other countries. According to a DOD spokesperson, there are 42 immigrants still held at the base, including 10 “high-threat” detainees.

The fact that the Trump administration is using the Guantánamo base at all in its mass deportation efforts is egregious, considering that the base previously held detainees from the war on terror as a way to skirt the Geneva Conventions. Its revival suggests that administration officials see a need to dodge basic human rights laws in detaining immigrants.

Coupled with its sending of immigrants to El Salvador, the majority of whom also don’t have criminal records, the Trump administration’s use of Guantánamo Bay to hold immigrants it wants to deport is yet another human rights violation from officials who couldn’t care less.

A judge said Wednesday there is probable cause to hold Donald Trump’s administration in criminal contempt for refusing to turn around the El Salvador–bound planes carrying more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants last month. 

In a 46-page ruling, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote that the government’s actions “demonstrate a willful disregard” of his previous order that barred Trump from deporting the Venezuelan immigrants—the majority of whom have no criminal record—to El Salvador, where they are currently being held in CECOT, a prison notorious for human rights abuses. 

Trump deported the immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, an archaic law that has only been invoked three times before, most famously for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The White House’s blatant disregard of Boasberg’s order is “sufficient to conclude” that there is probable cause for criminal contempt, the judge wrote, adding that none of the government’s explanations have been satisfactory. 

Following Boasberg’s first ruling, Trump asked the Supreme Court to impeach the Obama-appointed judge, which Chief Justice Roberts refused, in a rare but telling public statement.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” Roberts said on March 18.   

The Supreme Court did however overturn Boasberg’s order at Trump’s request on April 7, giving the president the go-ahead to continue deporting innocent immigrants under the wartime powers act. Last week, the U.S. deported 10 more people it claimed were gang members to El Salvador, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Trump administration contended to Boasberg that the Supreme Court’s ruling should protect it from criminal contempt, but the judge clearly is fed up with the White House’s relentless excuses.

“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” Boasberg’s ruling reads.

This story has been updated.

Does MAGA have any idea what due process is? Do they care?

Donald Trump’s acolytes continue to insist against providing due process to undocumented immigrants the government claims are gang members.

In March, more than 200 alleged gang members, whose deportations to prison in El Salvador were expedited under the Alien Enemies Act, were denied the right to challenge their designation and removal under the AEA. In many cases, lawyers for the detainees were not even notified that their clients were being deported.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, an anti-immigrant legal activist, has set off on a campaign against “due process” for undocumented immigrants, or whatever he thinks due process is, in support of Trump’s mass deportation plot.

During an appearance on Fox News Tuesday night, while discussing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, Miller claimed that “under the due process that these Democrats so venerate for illegal invaders, it is legally impermissible for him to have one more minute in this country.”

But that’s not how due process works. It was a judge who originally stated that Abrego Garcia could not be removed to El Salvador, and the government’s mistake caused him to be deported.

Members of the Trump administration have claimed that Abrego Garcia is a “convicted” member of MS-13 who was “engaged in human trafficking,” without providing any evidence. Due process would present an opportunity for the government to present any legal justification for an individual’s removal, but because it apparently has none, the process must be elided.

Jack Posobiec, a MAGA activist, also had a loose understanding of what due process is.

“Did Rachel Morin get due process? Did Laken Riley get due process?” he wrote in a post on X Tuesday, referring to two women who were killed by undocumented immigrants. “No one ever asks that.”

Most people never ask about that because the question doesn’t make any sense.

Due process is a legal protection for all people against the U.S. government set out in the Fifth Amendment, and then applied to states in the Fourteenth Amendment.

“No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” the Fifth Amendment stated. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 1993 Supreme Court ruling that “it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”

Posobiec’s baseless comment echoes one from border czar Tom Homan, who said last month, “Due process? What was Laken Riley’s due process? Where were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of TdA, where was their due process?”

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that while the Trump administration could continue deportations under the AEA, it needed to provide detainees with the opportunity to file habeas corpus challenges, a complex and rarely successful legal procedure. The court also ruled that these needed to be filed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a MAGA-aligned court in Texas where the deportation flights are staged.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency claims to have found new unemployment benefit fraud, but the information is just recycled findings from the Joe Biden era.

Last week, Musk revealed the results of DOGE’s investigation into unemployment benefits, the latest federal safety net program to fall victim to the billionaire’s unbacked claims and flat-out lies. He revealed thousands of seemingly shocking fraudulent claims, like toddlers and thousands of people over 100 years old receiving unemployment checks.

DOGE reportedly found that 28,000 people under the age of 5 collected $254 million in benefits, nearly 10,000 people with listed birthdates more than 15 years from now received $69 million, and 24,500 people over 115 claimed $59 million benefits.

“Your tax dollars were going to pay fraudulent unemployment claims for fake people born in the future!” Musk wrote on X last week, using the information to rally the right against the federal safety net. “There was no sanity check for impossibly young or impossibly old people for unemployment insurance.”

But it turns out federal investigators discovered the same information years ago under Biden, and the claims weren’t fraudulent in the way Musk has made them out to be, according to a new report from The Guardian.

After Trump launched Covid-19 unemployment benefits in 2020 during his first term, the program became a target for identity theft and fraudulent claims. Within weeks, the Department of Labor warned states of an uptick in “imposter claims being filed with stolen or synthetic identities.”

To record the imposter claims but protect those whose identities were being stolen, states recorded “pseudo claims,” in which they’d change a person’s date of birth to prevent their information from leaking. That led to thousands of records of claims from toddlers and centenarians.

“Many of the claims identified … were not payments to individuals over 100 years of age, but rather ‘pseudo records’ of previously identified fraudulent claims,” a 2023 memo from the Labor Department reads.

Biden additionally allocated $2 billion to improve fraud detection in state unemployment programs, which resulted in 2,000 conditions and more than $1 billion in recovered funds. Despite this, MAGA has rallied around DOGE’s supposedly scandalous findings and is using them to justify the GOP’s assault on federal funding.

“Another incredible discovery,” Labor Secretary Loria Cahez-DeRemer wrote on X, following DOGE’s investigation reveal.

It turns out this “incredible discovery” was just another false claim from the billionaire used to justify his egregious attack on low-income people across the country.