Trump’s Deportation Plans to Libya Involve Some Chilling Threats

The Trump administration’s plan to deport immigrants to Libya was even more extensive and disturbing than initial reports suggested.

Under the plan, nationals from countries including Cambodia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and even Mexico were to be sent to the north African country still recovering from a civil war. According to court filings from immigration rights advocates, who filed an emergency request in Boston federal court to halt the deportations, ICE gathered one Vietnamese national, one Laotian, and four other detainees and demanded they sign paperwork agreeing to be sent to Libya.

When all six refused, they were handcuffed and placed into solitary confinement. Later on Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy ruled that any deportations to Libya of third-country nationals without the opportunity to object over torture concerns “would violate this Court’s Order.”

Libya’s two rival governments each denied on Wednesday that they had agreed to accept deported immigrants from the U.S. When asked about the plan Wednesday, Trump himself said, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the Department of Homeland Security.”

The idea that immigrants in the U.S. could be deported to a country like Libya, where “open slave markets” exist and where immigrants are detained in conditions described as a “hellscape” by Amnesty International, is shocking in itself. Even more shocking is that neither of the two entities who control Libya even agreed to accepting any immigrants from the U.S.

But the Trump administration has already taken an unprecedented step in sending immigrants to countries to which they have no connection, such as El Salvador and Rwanda. While a court order appears to have at least put a temporary brake on deportations to Libya, the White House will probably keep trying to skirt the law in trying to expel as many immigrants as possible.

When white smoke began pouring from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney Thursday, after as few as four ballots, many assumed that meant the sitting Catholic cardinals had selected the consensus front-runner Pietro Parolin, who had served as Pope Francis’s secretary of state since 2013, as the new pope. If there’s one thing you have to hand to the assembled leaders of the Catholic Church, it’s this: They do know how to surprise you. 

When the curtains of a balcony on St. Peter’s Basilica were drawn an hour later, Parolin did emerge—to announce that Robert Francis Prevost had been elected pope. Few had thought that the Chicago-born Prevost—now known as Pope Leo XIV—was a contender. But there he was: the first American pope in the history of the Catholic Church. 

Prevost, like Parolin, was a close ally of Francis. Ordained in 1982, he has spent much of his time in Peru and was appointed by Francis as bishop of Chiclayo in 2014. In 2023, he was appointed to the influential position of prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops. As with Parolin, Prevost is seen as a continuity pick, given his close ties to his predecessor. 

In his opening speech, the newly anointed Pope Leo XIV paid tribute to Francis, who had last been seen speaking on the same balcony shortly before Easter. “Let us keep in our ears the weak voice of Pope Francis that blesses Rome,” Leo XIV said. 

“The pope who blessed Rome, gave his blessing to the entire world that morning of Easter. Allow me to follow up on that blessing. God loves us. God loves everyone. Evil will not prevail,” he said in Italian as he addressed a massive, multinational crowd of more than 100,000 people. 

Prevost is seen as being to Francis’s right on LGBTQ issues. In 2013, shortly after assuming the papacy, Francis expressed openness toward gay parishioners, saying, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Prevost, meanwhile, has been critical of what he has called the “homosexual lifestyle” and culture, which encourages “sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel.” 

Like Francis, he is deeply critical of “gender ideology,” which he has said “seeks to create genders that do not exist.” Prevost’s record on what is arguably the single biggest issue in the church—rampant sexual abuse by clergy—is troubling. He not only provided housing to a priest who had been accused of abuse but provided him a residence that was near a Catholic school.  

He is, nevertheless, considerably more moderate on social issues than many other contenders. Like Francis, he is outspoken about the danger posed by climate change and the need to provide ministry, support, and sympathy to migrants and the poor. Last year, in an interview with the Vatican’s news outlet, he distilled his vision of the church, which is one in which leaders are constantly in communion with the poor. 

“The bishop is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom,” he said, but is “called authentically to be humble, to be close to the people he serves, to walk with them, to suffer with them.” 

Much has been made of Prevost’s X account, which was recently confirmed to belong to the new pontiff by journalist Rocco Palmo. That account is mostly fairly standard Catholic stuff—pictures of church gatherings and community events. But it is outspoken on one subject: That JD Vance, the Catholic convert who is currently vice president, has views on migration that deviate substantially from the Gospels. Prevost has posted and reposted several posts and articles attacking Vance’s treatment of migrants. Pope Leo XIV will continue his predecessor’s work in one other notable way as well: By hating JD Vance. 

It’s clear that Pope Leo XIV cares deeply about the plight of migrants, like Francis before him. Whether he has strong feelings about deep-dish pizza or the Chicago Bears quarterback situation is another matter altogether. 

The first American-born pope is not a fan of the Trump administration.

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who is now Pope Leo XIV, has multiple posts on his X account that criticize or outright rebuke the words and policies of President Trump.

In February, he shared an article from the National Catholic Reporter titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” in response to Vance’s bastardization of the concept of ordo amaris, a narrow interpretation of love that Pope Francis himself admonished.

In April, he reposted Catholic writer Rocco Palmo, who wrote, “As Trump & Bukele use Oval to [aid] Feds’ illicit deportation of a US resident, once an undoc-ed Salvadorean himself, now-[Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjivar of Washington, D.C.] asks, “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?”

Pope Leo was also critical of Trump’s family separation policy. In 2018, he retweeted a scathing post from Cardinal Cupich: “There is nothing remotely Christian, American, or morally defensible about a policy that takes children away from their parents and warehouses them in cages. This is being carried out in our name and the shame is on us all.”

The new pope also has multiple reposts showing sympathy and support for George Floyd, the Black man whose police murder was a catalyst for racial justice movements in 2020. He reposted words in opposition to Trump’s refugee ban and Muslim ban, as well as articles on “rivers of blood” flowing from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Russian attack on a Catholic missionary headquarters in Mariupol.

The pope is expected to strike a Francis-like chord on issues of immigration and poverty, two things the current administration is directly opposed to.

President Donald Trump said Thursday that it was “a good thing, not a bad thing” that he’d crippled the international economy, putting workers’ livelihoods in jeopardy.

During a press briefing in the Oval Office, Trump downplayed concerns over job security sparked by a significant drop in cargo volumes as a result of his sweeping tariff policy and ongoing trade negotiations with China.

One reporter said that traffic at U.S. ports “has really slowed, and now thousands of dockworkers and truck drivers are worried about their jobs,” before being interrupted by the president.

“That means we lose less money, you know? When I see that, that means we lose less money,” Trump replied. He claimed that China had been making “over a trillion, 1.1 trillion, in my opinion.”

“And frankly if we didn’t do business, we would have been better off,” Trump continued. “So, when you say it slowed down, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Trumpian algebra dictates that shrinking trade with China may curtail the country’s trade deficit, but he doesn’t even know what a trade deficit is, let alone how big it is.

Unlike Trump’s enormous estimate, America’s trade deficit with China was just $295.4 billion in 2024. The president has previously claimed that the U.S. is losing $2 trillion a year on trade, but the country’s trade deficit with the rest of the world was $917.8 billion in 2024.

All of this comes back to Trump’s fundamental misunderstanding of economics. A deficit isn’t money lost but an indication that the U.S. has imported more goods and services than it exports. Economists say that having a trade deficit is not an inherently bad thing at all, because the U.S. simply can’t and shouldn’t make everything.

Trump’s continued insistence we’ve been taken for a ride betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of economics, built off a dislike of other countries. Crucially, when he says that the U.S. would be “better off” if they hadn’t done business with China, what he actually means is that China would be worse off, which to him is the same thing.

But what gets lost in Trump’s phony economic model? Actual workers, whose jobs at U.S. ports undoubtedly will be affected by a sudden reduction in trade.

In Seattle, port commissioner Ryan Calkins told CNN Wednesday night that there were “no container ships at berth.”

“That happens every once in a while at normal times, but it’s pretty rare,” Calkin said. “And so to see it tonight is I think a stark reminder that the impacts of the tariffs have real implications.”

Ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, have already seen a 44 percent drop in docked vessels from the same time last year, according to NBC4 News.

Trump also has no concern for consumers, who soon will begin to see shortages on goods from other countries, and an inevitable price increase on the scant products that remain. The president has suggested that concerns over shortages are as trivial as having fewer dolls and pencils.

FBI Director Kash Patel seems to be interpreting the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution how he sees fit, contradicting legal precedent. 

At a Senate hearing Thursday, Patel was asked by Senator Jeff Merkley if people deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 had the constitutional right to due process, which the Trump administration claims is not the case. 

“Are you gonna launch an investigation of the reported violation of the due process of several hundred individuals?” Merkley asked Patel. The FBI director’s answer was not comforting, as he began by saying, “It’s not for me to call the balls and strikes on it.”  

“Your position is that every one of those individuals is by constitutional right afforded due process. I don’t know the answer to that,” Patel replied, before questioning whether immigrants sent to El Salvador were afforded due process. 

“You haven’t read the Constitution? It says ‘all persons,’” Merkley said, adding that “it concerns me you’re not familiar with the core concept of due process applying to all persons.”  

Patel was evasive on whether he would enforce the law against other agencies found to be violating the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, claiming that no government agencies were doing so and the Supreme Court had not ruled to that effect. 

Patel’s stance shows that the Trump administration is interpreting the law, and even federal court rulings that are supposed to be binding, to serve its own mass deportation agenda. Already, the administration continues to defy a Supreme Court ruling urging the return of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador, where he was mistakenly deported in March. 

As a Trump appointee with very little law enforcement experience, it’s not surprising that Patel is pushing legal limits, and probably crossing them, to defend Trump expelling as many people from the United States as possible. It’s funny that Patel sees this as his job as head of the FBI, even as he isn’t living up to many of his other responsibilities.

Chief Justice John Roberts offered a gentle rebuke of Donald Trump’s escalating attacks on the judiciary. 

During a fireside chat Wednesday night marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York in Buffalo, Roberts emphasized the importance of judicial independence. 

“In our Constitution, judges and the judiciary is a coequal branch of government separate from the others with the authority to interpret the constitution as law, and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the president,” Roberts said. “And that innovation doesn’t work if the judiciary is not independent.

“Its job is to, obviously, decide cases, but in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or of the executive, and that does require a degree of independence,” he said.

The chief justice’s impartial recounting of the nation’s founding document flies in the face of the Trump administration’s efforts to sidestep the checks and balances provided by the judiciary. 

Roberts also doubled down on his rare public criticism of Trump, after the president called to impeach a federal judge who ruled against his illegal deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. 

“Well, I’ve already spoken to that, and impeachment is not how you register disagreement with decisions,” Roberts said. 

But Roberts’s mild criticism may not be enough, as the administration has escalated into making direct threats. When announcing his inane plan to reopen Alcatraz Sunday, Trump listed “judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals” alongside the “criminals” and “thugs” he hoped to imprison there. 

Josh Gerstein, a senior legal affairs reporter at Politico, suggested that there may be a method to Roberts’s missing madness. 

“Subdued Roberts seemed to be keeping his powder dry since many of the big fights, like law firms, deportations, contempt, are making their way to the court or already there,” Gerstein wrote on X Thursday.  “A reasonable strategy, but that’s not some rousing defense of the judiciary or separation of powers.”

Gerstein noted that Roberts’s “‘judicial independence’ stuff” was “thinner” than his 2024 Year End report on the federal judiciary, which had compared political bias to doxxing and disinformation as some of the “illegitimate activity” that threatens independent judges. At the time, his comments seemed to echo Trump’s complaints about critics who went after judges that ruled in his favor. Now the Trump administration has taken to attacking so-called “activist” judges who rule against him. 

Roberts’s refute is comparatively limp when held beside Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s recent indictment of the right-wing campaign of threats being used to intimidate judges.

“The threats and harassment are attacks on our democracy, on our system of government. And they ultimately risk undermining our Constitution and the rule of law,” Jackson said last week.

Trump had a press conference Thursday to explain to everyone that the beautiful, spectacular trade deal that he’s made with Britain is actually unfinished.

“The final details are being written up in the coming weeks; we’ll have it all very conclusive, but the actual deal is a conclusive one,” Trump said to reporters with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on the other line. “We think just about everything has been approved, so good for both countries.”

While details remain extremely unclear, this “deal” is said to include greater market access and mutually lowered tariffs.

Trump taking a victory lap for an unfinished, undefined deal immediately raised eyebrows.

“Why Britain? And why now? … You’ve described this deal as a full and comprehensive deal, and yet … clearly, there’s much more work left to do,” said James Matthews of Sky News. “With respect, are you overstating the reach and significance of this deal, because you’re a president who needs a result at a difficult time?”

Trump proceeded to ramble, almost completely avoiding Matthews’s question.

“I think that it’s a great deal for both parties.… It opens up a tremendous market for us. It works out very well, very well. A lot of assets, you see the chart. Those are tremendous assets. But we’ve been trying, and when you say, ‘Why us?’ meaning your country; we’ve been trying for years, and they’ve been trying for years to make a deal.… This is a maxed-out deal, not like you said it, really incorrectly. This is a maxed-out deal that we’re gonna make bigger. And we’ll make it bigger through growth.”

The framework of the deal that has been announced would reduce U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to 0 percent and reduce auto tariffs to 10 percent, while leaving in a baseline 10 percent tariffs on all other products. Trump also bragged about greater market access in the United Kingdom for American beef, before being reminded by a reporter that the U.K. doesn’t accept American beef because of its higher food standards.

The Trump administration apparently deported two U.S. citizen children—ages 5 and 4—after surreptitiously luring their mother to an immigration appointment. 

Denisse Parra Vargas and her husband, Omar, had just dropped off their three children at school in Austin, Texas, last Thursday when they were pulled over by Texas state troopers ostensibly for having an expired license plate. But then, the police officers turned the couple over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as suspected undocumented immigrants. 

Omar was sent to an ICE detention center and then deported to Mexico, but Parra Vargas was fitted with an electronic bracelet and told to report to a processing center near Austin on Tuesday. An Austin-based criminal justice and immigration advocacy organization, Grassroots Leadership, said to the Daily Beast that “she was told that if she showed up, then she would be eligible for asylum as well as a work permit.”

Parra Vargas complied, and showed up on Tuesday with her three children, two of whom are U.S. citizens, for what she thought was a routine appointment. But then she and all of her children seemed to disappear in ICE custody. Grassroots Leadership scrambled its legal team to try to find them. 

“We were just trying to figure out where she was,” a spokesperson for the organization said. “ICE was not giving us information.”

Even entering Parra Vargas’s information into ICE’s online detainee locator wasn’t showing any results. Then Parra Vargas called the organization to tell them that she had been deported to Mexico with her three children.

“When she called from the other side of the border, she said that she signed a paper, but she wasn’t sure exactly what it was,” the spokesperson said. “She did not understand what she was signing.”

ICE seems to have disregarded the fact that two of Parra Vargas’s children are citizens and could have stayed in the U.S. with a caretaker. She does not appear to have been informed of her options, Grassroots Leadership said. 

“She never had a chance to consult with anybody,” the organization’s spokesperson told the Daily Beast. “Any efforts from our end to be able to advocate for her release, or even for our legal team to be able to work on her release, none of that was possible because we weren’t even able to locate her.”

Parra Vargas’s situation fits a pattern of haphazard and cruel immigration actions from the Trump administration. Her two U.S. citizen children aren’t the first Americans to be swept up by ICE or even deported in President Trump’s second term. Jose Hermosillo, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen with learning disabilities, was detained by a Border Patrol officer while visiting Tucson, Arizona, and spent 10 days in ICE detention before being released. 

Late last month, the Trump administration was caught lying about undocumented immigrant women being deported with their U.S. citizen children. Similar to Parra Vargas, the women were prevented from communicating with legal counsel while in ICE custody. It appears that in order to get around the pesky constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, the Trump administration is deporting them anyway if they’re kids. 

RFK Jr.’s old running mate thinks someone is controlling him—and it isn’t Trump. 

Former vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan was both surprised and dismayed by the nomination of Casey Means, a pseudoscientific doctor with zero clinical experience, for U.S. surgeon general. 

“Yes, it’s very strange. Doesn’t make any sense. I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment (and that people much more qualified would be). I don’t know if RFK very clearly lied to me, or what is going on,” Shanahan wrote on X Wednesday evening. “It has been clear in recent conversations that he is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions (and it isn’t President Trump). With regards to the siblings, there is something very artificial and aggressive about them, almost like they were bred and raised Manchurian assets.”

The other sibling Shanahan is referring to is Means’s brother Calley, who is an adviser to RFK Jr.

There’s a lot going on here. What’s actually strange is how shocked and betrayed Shanahan seems to feel about this. The man whose ticket she ran on has for decades pushed conspiracy theories about vaccines causing autism, Black people having naturally stronger immune systems, and the Covid-19 pandemic being prolonged by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates, among other views. This all sounds perfectly in line with someone like Means, a snake oil salesman who has called vaccine mandates “criminal.” 

And who does she possibly think is controlling RFK Jr. if not Donald Trump? Laura Loomer? QAnon? His MAHA disciples? The remnants of the worm in his brain? It’s likely RFK Jr. is just lying to Shanahan in these “recent conversations” they’ve had. She might even be lying to herself. 

“Calley and Dr. Casey Means, siblings on a mission to end corruption and help Make America Healthy Again,” Shanahan wrote in response to a post from Calley Means last September. Means thanked her and called her an inspiration. What changed between now and then?

Someone here is misrepresenting their views on the Means nomination. It’d be helpful if Shanahan started naming some names as to who this mysterious puppet master controlling RFK Jr. is. 

Donald Trump threw yet another tantrum Thursday about Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s latest alert that the president’s tariffs will cripple economic growth.

“‘Too Late’ Jerome Powell is a FOOL, who doesn’t have a clue,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Other than that, I like him very much!

“Oil and Energy way down, almost all costs (groceries and ‘eggs’) down, virtually NO INFLATION, Tariff Money Pouring Into the U.S.—THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF ‘TOO LATE!’ ENJOY!” Trump added.

The Federal Reserve chair issued a fresh warning Wednesday about inevitable stagflation. “If the large increases in tariffs that have been announced are sustained, they’re likely to generate a rise in inflation, a slowdown in economic growth, and an increase in unemployment,” said Powell.

Since first imposing his sweeping “reciprocal” tariff policy, Trump has repeatedly attacked Powell for not lowering the interest rates to offset any economic damage, dubbing him “Mr. Too Late” and “a major loser,” and even calling for his termination.

As tariff tensions rise, Trump has taken to pushing his own lies about prices.

While the price of oil has been falling, it spiked Thursday, buoyed by optimism about trade talks between the U.S. and China. That has not, however, translated into cheaper prices at the gas pump. Trump has repeatedly claimed the price of gas is only $1.98, but U.S. drivers were actually paying more than $3 a gallon as of Monday.

Trump’s claims about the falling price of groceries are also questionable.

“I’m not aware of any data that supports that,” said Tucker Balch, a finance professor at Emory University, who spoke to ABC News about Trump’s claims of lowered prices in the checkout aisle. The already high prices of groceries have stayed relatively stable throughout the first 100 days of Trump’s presidential term, according to data from the federal government.

Trump has also lied about how much money his tariffs are actually making. In April, he claimed that they were raking in $2 billion per day. In reality, they’d collected closer to $250 million each day, according to Customs and Border Protection.