Trump’s Border Czar Fails to Answer One Easy Question on Deportation

Donald Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, was pressed Thursday on CNN about the administration’s efforts to bring back wrongly deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador in accordance with the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“Are you personally aware of any steps that have been taken to facilitate his return to the United States?” Kaitlan Collins asked Homan, citing Judge Paula Xinis’s assertion in federal court that the Trump administration has done “nothing” to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. Homan dodged the question and repeated the same lies.

“Look, I think he’s a citizen of El Salvador. He’s in El Salvador, he’s home. He’s a illegal alien with a final order of removal. He’s a MS-13 member, which is now classified as a terrorist,” Homan replied.

“So should I read that as to say nothing has been done to bring him back to the United States? That’s what it sounds like,” Collins said.

“I can’t speak to everybody in the administration. I can just tell you what my stance is, and uh, I think we did the right thing, I think he’s where he should be,” Homan said.

Homan’s response says everything about the intransigence of the Trump administration. They keep repeating that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 member, despite the fact that he has no criminal record and is a member of a building trades union. The administration claims he’s been sent “home” when his U.S. citizen wife and children are in Maryland.

At this point, the Supreme Court has ordered the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., Xinis has ordered the government to provide her regular updates on the steps it is taking, and an appeals court has rejected the Trump administration’s request to halt these proceedings. It’s clear that the White House is intent on ignoring every judicial check on its power, refusing to acknowledge that it has to abide by due process and return Abrego Garcia to the United States.

Donald Trump is furious that Senator Chris Van Hollen was able to meet with a man his administration wrongly deported to El Salvador.

In a post on Truth Social Friday morning, Trump attempted to mock the Maryland Democrat, who traveled all the way to Latin America to find Kilmar Abrego Garcia, after the Trump administration had him placed in a notorious Salvadoran prison due to an “administrative error.”

“Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone. GRANDSTANDER!!!” Trump wrote.

But Van Hollen’s public crusade to reunite with his deported constituent was precisely what allowed them to meet. Although Van Hollen was initially denied access to Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison known for human rights abuses, he’d made a strong case for being allowed access to Abrego Garcia. It’s still unclear exactly how the two were able to meet, but Van Hollen has promised to provide a “full update” on his return to the U.S.

The White House also took a shot on Van Hollen—in the most grotesque way possible.

In a post on X, Trump’s staff made a side-by-side of a photograph of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia and one of Trump meeting with Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a woman who was raped and killed by a Salvadoran man in 2023.

“We are not the same,” the post read.

The Trump administration has repeatedly trotted out Morin as a means of justifying its decision to send brown men who had nothing to do with that crime to a foreign prison.

But no one seemed more mad than El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, whom Trump paid $6 million to keep Abrego Garcia (and other deportees) in prison. He also attempted to ridicule Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garica.

“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” Bukele wrote on X.

“Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody,” Bukele wrote in a separate post.

The Trump administration has falsely claimed that Abrego Garcia was actually a “convicted” criminal and “top leader of MS-13,” despite only presenting thin evidence of Garcia’s gang affiliation. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a blistering ruling Thursday smacking down the White House’s latest attempt to stall Abrego Garcia’s return.

“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” the three-judge panel wrote in its unanimous ruling.

“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

The White House’s attempt to halt proceedings in the case of mistakenly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia was smacked down by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in a blistering ruling Thursday.

“It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” the panel wrote in its ruling. “Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.

“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear,” the ruling concluded.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration appealed a court order from U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland ordering the government to go through an expedited discovery process, allowing Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to question officials and make requests for documents about what federal officials are actually doing to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. In an unusually quick turnaround, the Fourth Circuit issued its ruling the next day,

Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador despite a 2019 immigration court ruling barring his removal from the United States, and the government has already admitted in court that his removal was an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government has to “facilitate” his return to the U.S., but the Trump administration has stonewalled, calling Abrego Garcia everything from a gang member to the equivalent of Osama bin Laden.

Now the Trump administration has the option of appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court. But since they’re already ignoring one ruling from the high court, what do they expect if the ruling doesn’t go their way? The easiest way to make the case of Abrego Garcia go away is to follow the law and return him from the El Salvador gulag where he is being held.

Read the Fourth Circuit’s ruling here.

Donald Trump may be trying to shield his old buddy Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, from being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, The Washington Post reported Thursday. 

David Eisner, a senior presidential appointee at the U.S. Department of Treasury, wrote to senior staff at the IRS that Lindell, a “friend of the president,” was “concerned he may have been inappropriately targeted” after receiving his second audit in as many years, according to two people familiar with the request and records reviewed by the Post.  

Eisner’s inquiry was then referred to the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. 

Nina Olson, who served as the national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019, told the Post the request from the Trump official was “so inappropriate.”

“In my 18 years as the national taxpayer advocate with over 4 million cases that came into the Taxpayer Advocate Service, in that time with taxpayers experiencing significant problems with the IRS, I have never had a Treasury official write me about a case,” she said.

Lindell claimed that the Treasury had “misconstrued” his request and claimed he had been trying to ask about an employee retention credit he’d received from the IRS. He said he’d already emailed the agency weeks ago and been referred to the Treasury. 

Lindell, a former millionaire, spent months after the 2020 presidential election pushing theories about a grand conspiracy between electronic voting companies to keep Trump out of the White House. Lindell is facing a series of expensive lawsuits for not only allegedly defaming these companies but attempting to profit from his conspiracies. 

During a hearing in U.S. District Court Wednesday, Lindell refused to pay the more than $50,000 he owes to Smartmatic, after filing a frivolous counterclaim against the electronic voting company he smeared. The MyPillow CEO insisted that he couldn’t pay because his company was already $70 million in debt and was already paying garnishments to the IRS.  

“I’m in ruins,” he claimed, tearfully. 

Some of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s allies are claiming measles is actually a government bioweapon. Don’t worry, they have a hundred-dollar cure for it.

Wired reported Thursday that Mikki Willis, a notorious Covid-19 conspiracy theorist, said the virus is being used to strategically target Mennonite communities, a group at the center of the recent measles outbreak in Texas that killed two unvaccinated children. Willis has long been a supporter of Kennedy, whose anti-vaccination group Children’s Health Defense helped fund Willis’s conspiracy documentary Plandemic.

“I’m not going to be careful by calling it a virus,” Willis said, in a measles webinar hosted last week by his supplement company, Rebel Lion. “I’m going to call it what it is, and that is a bioweapon, and my belief after interviewing these families is that this has been manipulated and targeted towards a community that is a threat because of their natural way of living.”

To be clear, measles is not a bioweapon, it’s a disease that’s been around since the ninth century.

Rebel Lion is selling a measles-prevention protocol online for hundreds of dollars, which includes a supplement called Fierce Immunity Capsules, which costs $50 a bottle, Wired reported. Rebel Lion claims the capsule ingredients were manufactured with AI technology.

The U.S. has seen more than 700 measles cases this year, 561 of which occurred in Texas. Amid a flurry of vaccine misinformation from anti-vax influencers and Kennedy himself, cases among unvaccinated children are skyrocketing. Some anti-vax influencers claim measles poses no threat to human health; others have gone so far as to claim the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine is fatal.

Since being confirmed as the secretary of health and human services, Kennedy has spread doubt about the vaccine’s safety, instead advising people to take vitamin A, which is toxic in high quantities. Then, earlier this month, he said the MMR vaccine was the most effective way to stop the measles’ spread, a long-awaited but confusing admission from the lifelong vaccine skeptic.

“The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” Kennedy wrote on X.

To add to the confusion, hours later, he praised anti-vax doctor Richard Bartlett, whom he called an “extraordinary healer” for providing unproven measles treatments such as the steroid budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin.

Bartlett participated in Rebel Lion’s webinar last week and touted the Fierce Immunity capsules as a legitimate defense against the deadly disease, snatching the opportunity to capitalize on the country’s public health crisis and the fear that comes with it.