Hakeem Jeffries Reportedly Fed Up With Democrats’ Trips to El Salvador

Hakeem Jeffries actually wants his party to be less courageous in the face of executive abuse and constitutional crisis, according to reporting from The Bulwark.

The House minority leader was asked about the trips Democrats like Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representatives Robert Garcia, Yassamin Ansari, Maxwell Frost, and Maxine Dexter have made to El Salvador’s CECOT prison on behalf of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and other men extrajudiciously deported by the Trump administration.

Rather than offer any kind of support for the initiative taken by his party members, Jeffries took a page out of the party’s neoliberal leadership handbook and played dead. “Our reaction [to the trips] is that Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president in modern American history,” Jeffries responded, avoiding the question entirely to focus on Trump having bad polling numbers. But bad polling numbers won’t stop Trump from doing anything, much less stop him from deporting innocent people just for having tattoos or expressing solidarity with Palestine.

Jeffries’s disdain toward Democrats’ trips to El Salvador was corroborated by two sources who told The Bulwark that he is actually dissuading any future visits. “They want to let the El Salvador stuff slow down,” one staffer said. After initially refusing to respond, Jeffries’s office denied these claims, with a spokesperson stating that “Jeffries has repeatedly said, House Democrats will never stop fighting for the release of Mr. Abrego Garcia.”

This tiff over Jeffries’s nonanswer is a microcosm of the party’s current inability to acquiesce around a particular strategy or message. More moderate Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Jeffries seem content to stay mostly sedentary, betting on Trump running himself into the ground before he runs the country into the ground. Others—like Van Hollen, Representative Jamie Raskin, and all the others who are packing their bags for CECOT—don’t feel the need to wait for the obvious crisis to become an even bigger one.

House Republicans are trying to massively expand Donald Trump’s executive powers with a bill that is ostensibly about taxes and border security.

The House Judiciary Committee released a draft bill Monday that would move antitrust enforcement away from the independent Federal Trade Commission into the Justice Department. The bill would also require congressional approval for all new regulations, giving Republicans greater power over virtually the entire federal government.

Under the bill, federal agencies would have to submit portions of their rules to Congress, which would have to approve them within five years. If the rules aren’t approved, they would be gone, giving Republicans the ability to easily gut regulations they don’t like.

The committee is set to adopt the legislative draft at its meeting Wednesday and then include it in the House’s larger domestic policy bill, which Republicans plan to pass in the Senate via the reconciliation process. This would require a simple majority vote and is being used because the bill likely wouldn’t have enough votes otherwise.

“You’re having Congress basically involved in every agency decision,” said Republican Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma. “It’s somewhat controversial, and if you look at it historically, I think that’s probably why it hasn’t passed.”

The FTC would be gutted by the bill, and if it passes, Trump, or any other future president, would be able to control antitrust enforcement simply by issuing orders to the Justice Department.

“If you want to gut the agency who has shown itself willing to confront billionaire monopolists—and win—vote for this bill,” wrote Alvaro Bedoya on X Monday. Trump fired Bedoya as an FTC commissioner earlier this year, and Bedoya is challenging his firing in court.

The bill is another example of how Congress under Speaker Mike Johnson is abrogating its duty of checking the executive branch and instead is trying to give authoritarian President Trump even more power. Johnson is already trying to block House Democrats from opening up inquiries into the Trump administration, and if this draft bill goes through, Trump and his party would have considerable control over regulations and antitrust enforcement.

President Donald Trump got swindled as part of an ill-advised prisoner swap in return for El Salvador taking Venezuelan deportees with no criminal record, The New York Times reported Wednesday.  

At first, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele was reluctant to take noncriminal immigrants and was doubtful he could convince his constituents that doing so was within the country’s national interests. While the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that all 238 Venezuelans who were deported in March were members of Tren de Aragua, few of them actually had criminal records, and the criteria used to identify them as gang members were questionable. 

But Bukele saw an opportunity to get something he wanted. In return for taking Venezuelan detainees, he requested a list of high-ranking MS-13 members to be released into his custody. This immediately raised red flags for U.S. law enforcement officials, concerned over collaboration between Bukele’s government and MS-13.

Douglas Farah, an expert on El Salvador who previously collaborated with the Department of Justice on a task force targeting MS-13, told the Times that the Salvadoran government was trying to save its own skin. 

“What Bukele is desperate for is to get these guys back in El Salvador before they talk in U.S. court,” Farah said. 

The U.S. Treasury Department reported in 2021 that Bukele’s government had provided financial incentives to gangs to keep homicide numbers low, and said that gang members received special privileges in prisons, such as access to sex workers and mobile phones. The Justice Department has made similar allegations. 

Still, the Trump administration agreed to Bukele’s terms, convinced it was getting a great deal for the scale of its massive deportation undertaking. 

In addition to the $6 million the Trump administration paid to hold deportees at CECOT, the prison notorious for human rights abuses, U.S. officials agreed to send a dozen senior members of MS-13. This included César Humberto López-Larios, who was arrested in June and had been awaiting trial on several terrorism charges. Bukele has not yet received his complete list of MS-13 members, but U.S. officials said there were plans to send more, according to the Times. 

The Times separately reported Wednesday that Bukele had outright rejected a diplomatic request from the U.S. government to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador in March as the result of an “administrative error.” In an interview on ABC News Tuesday night, Trump claimed that he could get Abrego Garcia back with just a phone call but that he wouldn’t because he was “not the one making this decision; we have lawyers who don’t want to do this.”

Donald Trump’s performance numbers may be down, but his head is right where it should be: ruminating over last September, when former Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with 60 Minutes.

Since the interview aired, the president has insisted that the network had selectively edited Harris’s answers to a question regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a detail made all the more confusing since CBS’s 60 Minutes and Face the Nation cut and aired different portions of her 21-second response on different days. An independent review by the Federal Communications Commission showed that the two answers were in fact cut from the same longer response. As odd as the discrepancy was for viewers, editing answers for time is considered general practice in television news.

But as of this week, Trump has seemingly decided to rope The New York Times into the alleged offense, claiming that the newspaper’s reporting that the case is “baseless” is tantamount to “tortious interference” and, apparently, worth its own lawsuit.

Trump sued CBS for $10 billion after the interview, claiming that the different clips amounted to “election interference” and merited the network losing its broadcast license. He also argued, at the time, that Harris should drop out of the presidential race over the GOP-baked scandal.

“The case we have against 60 Minutes, CBS, and Paramount is a true WINNER,” Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday. “They cheated and defrauded the American People at levels never seen before in the Political Arena. Kamala Harris, during Early Voting and, immediately before Election Day, was asked a question, and gave an answer, that was so bad and incompetent that it would have cost her many of the Votes that she ended up getting. It was a disastrous answer!”

Against evidence, Trump further claimed that Harris’s real answer was “removed and deleted”—“every word of it,” he wrote—and “replaced” with a response to a completely different question.

“In other words, 60 Minutes perpetrated a Giant FRAUD against the American People, the Federal Elections Commission, and the Federal Communications System,” the president continued.

He then accused the Times—an entirely separate media organization—of being in on the scandal, claiming that the newspaper’s “noncurable case of TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” makes it “liable for tortious interference.”

“Nothing like this, the illegal creation of an answer for a Presidential Candidate, has ever been done before, they have to pay a price for it, and the Times should also be on the hook for their likely unlawful behavior,” Trump wrote. “It is vital to hold these Liars and Fraudsters accountable!”

CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is reportedly moving to settle the lawsuit—much to the dismay of network staff—so that Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone can close a business deal that would require Trump’s sign-off.

As if he didn’t have enough problems, Donald Trump is still ranting about crowd sizes.

During a sparsely attended rally in Warren, Michigan, Tuesday night to mark his disastrous first 100 days in office, the president turned his attention to the elephant in the room—or lack of thereof—while complaining about the popular “Fight Oligarchy” tour led by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“And they get crowds, they say, ‘Oh, the crowd was—!’ Our crowds are so much bigger than their crowds, their crowds are smaller! If I ever had a crowd like their biggest crowd, they’d say it’s over for Trump,” the president said.

At a rally in Los Angeles earlier this month, Sanders said there were “some 36,000” attendees.

Last month, Sanders’s communications director said that Sanders and AOC had amassed an audience of 30,000 supporters at their rally in Denver.

Trump seems to have taken their popularity personally because, even as president, he seems to have trouble filling seats.

As Trump bragged about his massive crowd sizes Tuesday, multiple empty seats were visible in the stands behind him in footage shown by Fox News. Trump spoke at the Macomb Community College’s Sports & Expo Center, which has a seating capacity of “more than 4,000,” according to the college’s website.

“The capacity of tonight’s venue was 4000 and it was set up using about 3/5 of the space,” wrote S.V. Date, the White House correspondent for HuffPost, on X. “And there were still plenty of empty seats.”

Meanwhile, a massive group of roughly 3,000 people gathered outside of the college to protest Trump’s appearance. While it is typical for a president to partake in a series of rallies to mark his first 100 days in office, Trump’s appearance in Michigan will be his only public address, according to the Associated Press. Administration officials have said Trump is more effective when he stays at the White House.

Sanders is expected to appear in Philadelphia Thursday at a rally with the AFL-CIO to celebrate May Day.