Trump’s Deportations to South Sudan Are More Twisted Than They Seem

The Trump administration is deporting immigrants to countries they aren’t from and refusing to tell judges where exactly, claiming that the information is classified.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy ordered the government to maintain its custody of immigrants on a plane that the immigrants’ attorneys said was headed to South Sudan, and said that authorities might be violating an injunction he issued in late March. The judge’s order came after a hearing in which administration officials refused to say where the flight was or even where it was going.

Lawyers for the immigrants told Murphy that at least two of them were told they were being sent to South Sudan, a country with instability, violence, and political unrest that the State Department warns Americans not to visit. One Justice Department lawyer told Murphy that a Vietnamese man was deported, but refused to provide any details about the flight, including how many other immigrants were on it.

“Where is the plane?” Murphy asked DOJ lawyer Elianis Perez.

“I’m told that that information is classified, and I am told that the final destination is also classified,” Perez responded, claiming that no court order was violated because the man wasn’t afraid of deportation.

But then Murphy asked Perez the authority the government was invoking to classify the location of the flight.

“I don’t have the answer to that,” Perez responded.

Murphy had ordered the government in March not to deport immigrants to countries they aren’t from without allowing them time to challenge their removal in court. He warned the administration that any government official who took part in Tuesday’s flight and knew about the order, including the pilots, could face criminal penalties.

“Based on what I have been told,” Murphy said, “this seems like it may be contempt.”

On multiple occasions, the administration has sent immigrants to countries they aren’t from, all over the world, including Rwanda, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama. The administration has resisted any attempts at oversight, and even judicial orders to stop or slow their actions, refusing to turn planes around. Secretary of State Marco Rubio even claimed he doesn’t have to listen to court orders.

Weeks after a judge ordered the government to allow immigrants some recourse to challenge their deportations, Trump officials still won’t listen. Will the courts have to enforce criminal sanctions against government officials to compel this administration to follow the law?

Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s own intelligence agencies found that Venezuela does not control the Tren de Aragua gang, directly contradicting Trump’s justification for invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants. But instead of admitting their mistake, they decided to lie.

“We need to do some rewriting … so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS,” said Joe Kent, Tulsi Gabbard’s chief of staff, according to leaked emails viewed by The New York Times. Kent, along with former acting National Intelligence Council head Michael Collins, largely rewrote the memo together. 

The original memo stated, “While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” according to the Times.

Trump has been claiming the exact opposite since he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in March to detain and deport Venezuelan immigrants without basic due process.

To support Trump’s use of the wartime powers act, Kent began to piece a story together in the hope that it’d make Trump’s actions look more reasonable.

“Flooding our nation with ‘migrants’ and especially ‘migrants’ who are part of a violent criminal gang is the action of a hostile nation, even if the gov of Venezuela isn’t specifically tasking or enabling TDA’s operations,” Kent wrote, in an email obtained by the Times. 

“Let’s just come out and say [Tren de Aragua] leaders are given sanctuary in Venezuela as their gang members commit horrendous crimes in America, then we can provide the context about our exact knowledge of relationship between TDA and the Venezuelan government,” he continued. Kent even went so far as to say that Tren de Aragua didn’t need logistical support from the Venezuelan government because former President Joe Biden had given it to them in his first term, another lie. 

This is clearly an administration that is making up justifications for its draconian policies as it goes. Whether it’s habeas corpus or birthright citizenship, this administration will look Americans in the eye and lie, over and over again, until their version of events is taken as truth. 

The president unveiled his designs for a “Golden Dome” defense system Tuesday, promising that the massive missile defense sytem—modeled on Israel’s “Iron Dome”—would protect America from international threats.

But when asked by a reporter whether military leaders actually want this supposed upgrade, Donald Trump couldn’t explain himself.

“Have military commanders asked for this system specifically?” asked a reporter. “Because [North American Aerospace Defense Command] had said previously that the current system was adequate, so what does this get the United States that isn’t already—”

“Somebody said the current system is adequate? There really is no current system,” the commander in chief interrupted. “We have certain areas of missiles and missile defense, but there’s no system. We just have some very capable weapons.

“This is a—there’s never been something like this, this is something that’s going to be very protective. Rest assured there won’t be anything like this, nobody else could be capable of building it, either,” Trump said.

The reporter then asked again if the military had actually asked for the space-based missile defense system, to which Trump replied that he had suggested it and military leaders “loved the idea.”

“It’s the way it’s got to be, right?” Trump said, leaning over the Resolute Desk.

Trump requested that Congress appropriate $25 billion in its most recent tax bill to get his Golden Dome dream off the ground, claiming that a final price tag would waver around $175 billion on a projected three-year timeline. But those numbers fall far below what the Congressional Budget Office calculated. Last month, the congressional analysis group estimated that the space-based components of the plan alone would cost more than half a trillion dollars over the next 20 years.

“It’s amazing how easy this one is to fund,” Trump said Tuesday, sounding exceedingly confident that he would be able to secure money for the project from Congress, days after Republicans lapsed on his reconciliation bill for being too expensive. “People actually love it.”

The gold-obsessed real estate developer formally plotted out his Golden Dome idea in a January 27 executive order, throwing the responsibility on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to figure out the details. But since then, critics have wondered if the massively expensive program would cut into funding for America’s preexisting defense programs, including an Air Force project replacing 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles from the 1970s with updated versions.

The Trump administration’s economic plan has dashed America’s credit score, rocking the nation’s lending reputation. And experts warn this could be the beginning of the end.

Credit firm Moody’s downgraded the nation’s score Friday, reporting that it appears increasingly unlikely that the U.S. economy will be able to keep up with its rising debt and interest payments, rattling what was once an unshakable confidence in U.S. growth.

Major international lending entities, such as Deutsche Bank, viewed the score drop as just another indicator that time is running out on solving America’s national debt.

“Yesterday felt like we were somewhere along the line of a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ with regards to the U.S. fiscal situation,” Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid wrote, in a note obtained by Fortune Tuesday. “Hard to know where in that thousand we are but probably much nearer a thousand than at zero even as yesterday saw an initial sell-off reverse as the session went on.

“At the end of the day the loss of the final U.S. triple-A rating late on Friday night doesn’t change anything much immediately but it keeps the drip, drip, drip of poor fiscal news building up against the debt sustainability dam in the background.”

Ratings from Moody’s and other firms inform companies and groups both foreign and domestic regarding how much they need to pay in order to borrow money.

Moody’s was the last of the three major bond-rating agencies to downgrade America’s formerly spotless score, signaling that the nation is a bigger credit risk than it has been in decades. It also indicates that the time in which the U.S. could borrow seemingly infinite sums of money—without the risk of inflation—is coming to a close.

America’s national debt is currently more than $36.8 trillion, as of the time of publishing.

The Trump administration, however, has not yet looked inward for an explanation to the sour score. Instead, it has pushed blame onto the Biden administration, claiming that Republicans are still working overtime to trim the national deficit while they push forward a reconciliation package that would add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt to afford tax cuts for multimillionaires and corporations.

“I do want to assure everyone that the deficit is a very significant concern for this administration,” top White House economist Stephen Miran told reporters Monday. “We’re determined to bring it down and to undo the damage to the fiscal health of the United States that was wrought by the Biden administration and its reckless policies.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, meanwhile, brushed off the score downgrade as a “lagging indicator” of U.S. performance, urging investors to disregard the news.

Trump enacted his sweeping tariff plan in order to offset the jaw-droppingly expensive extension to his 2017 tax cuts, but America has yet to see any gains from the economic agenda. Instead, the tariffs have destabilized American markets while simultaneously undermining U.S. dominance in the global economy.

Whether or not the deficit actually affects the economy is still in debate. But having investors believe in the health of the economy is critical.

“The government deficit isn’t a problem until investors think it is,” Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, told Axios Monday. “And they’re increasingly telling us that the deficit is a problem.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio flippantly said he does not have to listen to court orders at a Senate hearing Tuesday.

Senator Chris Van Hollen asked Rubio about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador on the government’s own admission. Rubio repeated the Trump administration’s false claims of Abrego Garcia’s gang membership and alleged crimes.

“We deported gang members. Gang members, including the one you had a margarita with. And that guy is a human trafficker, and that guy is a gang banger, and the evidence is going to be clear in the days to come,” Rubio said, referring to Van Hollen’s visit to El Salvador last month to verify Abrego Garcia’s well-being.

Van Hollen interrupted and tried to refute Rubio’s lies, telling Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch that Rubio “can’t make unsubstantiated claims like that.”

“Secretary Rubio should take that testimony to federal court in the United States because he hasn’t done it under oath,” Van Hollen asserted, only to be reprimanded by Risch. Then Rubio made his outrageous claim about the federal judiciary.

“There is a division in our government between the federal branch and the judicial branch. No judge, and the judicial branch, cannot tell me or the president how to conduct foreign policy,” Rubio said. “No judge can tell how I have to outreach to a foreign partner or what I need to say to them. And if do reach to that foreign partner and talk to them, I am under no obligation to share that with the judiciary branch.”

First of all, Rubio completely gets the branches of government wrong, as there are three of them: the executive branch, consisting of the presidency; the legislative branch, comprising Congress; and the judicial branch, made up of the federal court system. But perhaps even more troubling, Rubio also declared that he did not believe in the Constitution’s separation of powers, in which the three branches exist together in a system of checks and balances.

Rubio betrayed what seems to be the Trump administration’s actual beliefs about the U.S. government: that the presidency is more like an absolute monarchy that isn’t subject to congressional or judicial oversight. The conservative-controlled Supreme Court seems to have inspired that belief last year in its ruling on presidential immunity. Now, as President Trump deports immigrants without evidence or due process, we are seeing the actions of a president who believes he is above the law.

Step aside, presidents and prime ministers: Vice President JD Vance says he wants to work with the newest world leader, Pope Leo XIV.

Vance told NBC News Tuesday that he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had discussed U.S. foreign policy during his first meeting with the new pontiff, who hails from Chicago.

“We talked a lot about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza. We talked a lot about the Russia-Ukraine situation,” Vance said. “It’s hard to predict the future, but I do think that not just the pope, but the entire Vatican, has expressed a desire to be really helpful and to work together on facilitating, hopefully, a peace deal coming together in Russia and Ukraine.”

President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social Monday that “the Vatican, as represented by the Pope” was “very interested” in hosting negotiations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

But the Vatican gave no indication it intends to wade into talks. In a statement about the meeting Monday, the Vatican said, “There was an exchange of views on some current international issues, during which hope was expressed that humanitarian law and international law be respected in areas of conflict and that there be a negotiated solution between the parties involved.”

Earlier this month, Pope Leo had called for an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, where the U.S. has directly funded Israel’s relentless slaughter of Palestinians in violation of international law. Since entering the White House, Trump has approved at least $12 billion in arms sales to Israel.

Pope Leo also called for an end to the “war of words and images,” and to end the targeting of journalists—which seemed, again, to be an indirect criticism of Trump’s administration and the MAGA movement. The pontiff had previously shared criticism of Trump’s immigration policies during his first administration, as well as some of Vance’s statements about Catholicism. The noted White Sox fan has also distanced himself from the MAGA crowd by advocating for gun reform and ending racism.

Now it seems Vance is hoping to make nice so as not to alienate a huge swath of the world’s population.

“We have an American pope of the world’s largest single religion—a guy who doesn’t have an army, but who I think has an incredible amount of capacity to convene and to influence not just Europe but, really, the entire world,” Vance told NBC News.

“I hope it’s the beginning of a very good relationship because I think he does care a lot about peace,” he said. “If there is a single most productive thing [from the trip], my hope is that it will be that the relationship between us and the Vatican leads to a lot fewer people getting killed and a lot less humanitarian disaster.”

The United States has maintained diplomatic relations with the papal state for more than 40 years, when former President Ronald Reagan established a partnership with Pope John Paul II to open an embassy in the Holy See.

The president’s threats against Bruce Springsteen are not a joke.

In a post on Truth Social early Monday, Donald Trump said he would be directing the federal government to conduct a “major investigation” into how much money Kamala Harris paid celebrity musicians to endorse her during her 2024 campaign, including the likes of Springsteen, Beyoncé, and U2’s Bono.

One day later, the late-night post appeared less like a stray arrow and more like an administrative agenda.

“Accountability for a class of people who act as if they’re above the law may be uncomfortable for Rolling Stone, but it’s refreshing to the American people,” Trump White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Rolling Stone Tuesday. Fields said that the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission would “act independently in [their] decision-making” as to whether or not they would get involved, as they have final jurisdiction over such an investigation.

But Trump’s assertion that Harris paid for endorsements isn’t correct. Harris’s campaign was roundly scrutinized for cashing big checks to celebrity production companies, including $165,000 to Beyoncé’s Parkwood Production Media LLC on November 19 and $1 million to Oprah’s Harpo Productions for services that they provided during her campaign. Harpo provided the stage and staff during her livestreamed Detroit town hall, while Beyoncé was paid for “campaign event production,” according to FEC records, weeks after she made a guest appearance at the Democratic presidential nominee’s Houston rally in October. (On Monday, Trump claimed without citation that Beyonce had received $11 million to walk on stage and endorse Harris without performing.)

Springsteen’s production company, meanwhile, received $76,000 from the Harris campaign after he performed as a musical guest at Harris’s Georgia rally in October.

“Campaign finance laws require campaigns to pay fair-market value to vendors. If she failed to pay any of these companies for performing services at an event or rally, it would constitute an illegal in-kind contribution to the campaign in two ways: The contribution would exceed donation limits, and companies are not permitted to donate directly to candidates,” reported Rolling Stone.

The president’s decision to hone in on campaign finance corruption, per those who have spoken to him in recent months, boils down to one word: revenge. Despite skirting consequences by winning the presidency, Trump has seemingly not gotten over the fact that he is the first U.S. president convicted as a felon (and the first convicted felon to become president). Trump was convicted last year on charges related to campaign finance fraud for issuing hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.

“Democrats pretended to care about campaign finance violations when they persecuted President Trump with their lawfare,” Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer close to Trump who is a key player of the MAGA legal elite, told Rolling Stone. “Maybe they shouldn’t have thrown stones in glass houses. Nobody is above the law.”

Trump and Springsteen have traded barbs for years, but Trump’s fury against the “Born in the USA” singer was reignited last week when the rock star told a crowd in Manchester, England, that the Trump administration was “taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers.”

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ’n’ roll, in dangerous times,” Springsteen said Wednesday. “In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.”

That sparked Trump’s multi-day tirade against The Boss, writing on Truth Social that the singer of one of his favorite campaign tracks was actually “highly overrated.”

“Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy—Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country,” Trump posted after clips of Springsteen’s remarks went viral. “If I wasn’t elected, it would have been GONE by now!”

“This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!” Trump added.

In response, Springsteen spoke out again on Saturday, telling another stadium crowd in Manchester that Trump was “unfit” to be president.

“Things are happening right now that are altering the very nature of our country’s democracy, and they’re too important to ignore,” he said.

One House Republican is calling out the Trump administration’s lies that the “big, beautiful” budget bill won’t raise the deficit.

Speaking to CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday, Representative Thomas Massie said that “Under the policies of this bill, we’re going to add $20 trillion dollars to the debt over the next 10 years, which is three and a half to $5 trillion more than would have been added otherwise.”

When Raju told Massie about the White House’s claims that the bill is deficit neutral, Massie chuckled. 

“That’s a joke,” the Kentucky congressman, whose votes often align with libertarian principles. 

Earlier in the day, President Trump attacked Massie after a meeting with House Republicans on Capitol Hill.

“I don’t think Thomas Massie understands government. I think he’s a grandstander, frankly,” Trump said. “We don’t even talk to him much, I think he should be voted out of office.”  

Trump’s threats to oust Massie may not go very far, as he was able to survive a primary challenge in the 2024 election despite facing attack ads over his criticism of Israel. He ended up winning with 75 percent of the vote, and even stepped up his criticisms over the next year. 

Massie has long been skeptical of the Trump administration claims about fiscal responsibility, and is not likely to cave and vote for the budget bill if there’s any indication that it would increase the budget deficit. With the GOP’s narrow margin in the House, the bill would likely need near-unanimous approval to pass, and Massie’s opposition could inspire other Republicans to join him.

The likely next head of the Internal Revenue Service refuses to say whether President Trump is allowed to use the agency to strip organizations of their nonprofit status as he sees fit. 

Senator Elizabeth Warren had IRS commissioner nominee Billy Long visibly shaken with a series of questions during his confirmation hearing Tuesday regarding the legality of Trump levying the IRS against nonprofit groups he doesn’t like. 

“I sent you the statute, you’ve had three weeks to talk to the lawyers about it. So let’s jump in. Mr. Long, is it illegal for the president to direct the IRS to revoke a taxpayer’s nonprofit status?”

“In the first place, he wouldn’t do that—”

“That’s not my question, Mr. Long, please don’t start down this—”

“Are we on section 72-12 or 72-17?”

“I’m at 26 U.S.C 72-17. Do I need to read it to you?” 

“Prohibits any member of the executive branch to request the IRS to conduct or terminate an audit on a taxpayer,” Long read aloud from the statue. 

“Alrighty. So is it illegal?”

“I’m gonna follow the law, and if that’s the law, yes.” 

“That is the law, so I just want to be clear, is it illegal for the president of the United States to instruct the IRS to remove a taxpayer’s nonprofit status?” 

Long recited the statute again in response. 

“Is that a yes?” Warren pressed.

“I’d have to go to the lawyers at the IRS to tell me.” 

“Come on, you just read it!”

“I know, but see, the instance that you’re speaking about in there, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see …” he tailed off. 

“Look, it says ‘it shall be unlawful for any applicable person’—which in this case includes the president—‘to request directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer.’” Warren asked Long once again if what Trump has already threatened to do is illegal. 

“I’m not gonna have the answer that you need, and I apologize, but like I said—”

“Why are you not having the answer? You’ve had three weeks to consult with lawyers, the statute is about as clear as plain English—”

“Well if I say I’m gonna follow the law, why would you need to ask me the question?” 

“Because I wanna make sure that you understand what the law says. If you think ‘follow the law’ means you just get to make it up on the spot, then you don’t get to be the IRS commissioner. The point here is to follow the law as it is written.… Can the president of the United States legally tell the IRS to change someone’s nonprofit status?”

Long again refused to answer. 

Warren and Long continued to spar, with Warren getting more frustrated and Long getting more flustered as neither of them got anywhere with their questioning and Long refused to plainly state that he wouldn’t let his future boss force him to break the law. 

“You know, Mr. Long, you’d have a lot more credibility if you just say ‘yes.’ It’s clear that the statute makes it illegal for the president to direct the IRS vis-à-vis any particular taxpayer. And the fact that you wanna sit there and dance around about this tells me that you shouldn’t be within a thousand miles of the directorship of the IRS.”  

Trump has repeatedly threatened to strip universities like Harvard of their nonprofit status. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are working to give him more power to kill just about any nonprofit he disagrees with .

Did Donald Trump just hurt his own chances of passing his “big, beautiful bill”?

After the president urged Republican lawmakers to get behind his sweeping legislation at the closed-door House Republican Conference Tuesday, several moderate GOP members from blue states messaged House Speaker Mike Johnson to tell him they weren’t on board, according to Punchbowl News.

Trump had specifically pressured Republican members of the SALT caucus, a bipartisan group fighting to restore state and local tax, or SALT, deductions, to agree to legislation that would cap the deductions at only $30,000 for anyone making $400,000 or less.

The group of lawmakers have pushed to significantly increase that limit, arguing that it’s hurting middle-class residents in their high-tax states, such as New York, California, and New Jersey. Trump’s 2017 tax bill had previously capped those deductions at $10,000.

Republican members of the group include New York Representatives Andrew Garbarino, Nick LaLota, Mike Lawler, and Nicole Malliotakis, New Jersey Representative Tom Kean, and California Representative Young Kim.

On Tuesday, the president reportedly told lawmakers to “let SALT go,” according to The Hill. One source said that the president had specifically targeted Lawler, who represents New York’s 17th congressional district, just north of New York City. “I know your district better than you do,” Trump said. “If you lose because of SALT, you were going to lose anyway.”

Lawler’s seat goes up for grabs in 2026. He has not yet said whether he will run for reelection.

A White House official told The Hill that Trump’s main message was that Republicans could circle back later on SALT, and should focus on getting the bill passed now. South Carolina Republican Mark Norman told Punchbowl News that he’d gotten a slightly different message from the president: “Forget SALT.”

It seems that Trump’s visit has only caused members of the SALT caucus to dig in even more.