Kids Forced to Appear Alone in Court as Trump Ramps Up Deportations

The Trump administration is moving to radically expedite the removal of immigrant children, impeding the work of immigration advocates, CNN reported Tuesday.

Immigration hearings for children are being moved up by weeks or even months, making it increasingly difficult for children to obtain legal resources or relief. These are children who are either unaccompanied minors or are taken into custody after their parents are detained for immigration charges.

Children as young as 4 years old are subjected to frequent hearings and forced to provide updates on their cases, in some instances without legal help, CNN reported. Emily Norman, the East Coast regional director at Kids in Need of Defense, told the outlet that immigrant children were facing “enormous pressure,” leading some of them to wet themselves in court.

It sounds like advocates are facing increasing pressure too. Norman told CNN that a hearing for one child, originally scheduled for 2027, had been moved up to a week away.

At the same time, the Trump administration has made it increasingly difficult for immigrant children to be allowed to stay in the United States. Sponsors in the U.S. now face stricter documentation requirements and even risk arrest themselves. Another method of securing the children’s release in the United States is to acquire special immigrant juvenile status, or SIJ, a legal process that can put them on the path to receiving a green card if they have experienced abuse or neglect.

Steven Wright, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Immigrant Justice Center, told CNN that the process for that can take months. “In order to stop the government from removing the kids, I need to have that SIJ piece of paper. And they’ve given me a deadline that’s made it extremely difficult for me to get that SIJ piece of paper,” he said.

Immigrant children are often subjected to extended stays with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, during which they can be subjected to all kinds of alleged mistreatment and abuse, either at government shelters or foster homes.

However, advocates are concerned that accelerated timelines wouldn’t mitigate harm and could result in migrant children being returned to the same conditions they fled in their home countries. At the end of March, there were 2,173 children in the custody of the ORR, and their average stay was more than six months long, according to the Administration for Children and Families.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, told CNN the department was “focused on resolving cases involving unaccompanied children as quickly and efficiently as possible, consistent with the law.”

“Many of these children are at risk of trafficking and exploitation, and in some cases are brought across the border by cartels under dangerous and coercive conditions. Moving cases forward helps disrupt those networks and ensures children are returned to safe environments as quickly as possible,” he said. “Reducing time in custody also lowers taxpayer costs and ensures the system is operating as intended.”

CBS News’s 60 Minutes cut out large portions of its interview with President Trump in which he rambled about his ballroom, how hot his Secret Service agents are, and how the No Kings protests are just like the Ku Klux Klan.

An analysis by Decoding Fox News revealed that many portions of the interview, which took place Sunday following the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, simply never made it to air.

When CBS’s Norah O’Donnell asked Trump plainly why so many people seemed to want to kill him, Trump pivoted to his usual laundry list of accomplishments, like how the U.S. is the “hottest country in the world,” before going off the rails.

“They emptied our prisons into our country. They have mental institutions, insane asylums, into our country. And I don’t know if that’s controversial to say we have to move those people out, but we have and, but it is from the standpoint you’re doing something and you’re doing something that’s good,” he said. “Things like, men playing in women’s sports, I’m against it. Things like transgender for everyone. I’m against that. There’s so many things that I’m against. I don’t think they’re controversial. I think the other side is controversial, but I do a lot of things and I get things done.”

That wasn’t included in the interview that aired on the network. CBS also cut out the president’s massive rant against the No Kings protests. His broadcast answer was, “Well the, you see the reason you have people like that is you have people doing ‘No Kings’. I’m not a king. What am I, if I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.” His actual answer was much more troubling.

“You know, I’m not a king.… I see these No Kings which are funded just like the [Southern Poverty Law Center] was funded. You all that Southern Laws, financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, Oh, we’ve got to stop the KKK. And yet they give them hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. They work. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that, like Charlottesville, Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law,” Trump said—a completely outrageous claim given that neo-Nazis and white supremacists like Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes were there. “That was a Southern Law deal too. And it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election.”

Trump also claimed that CBS paid him $38 million in his settlement against the network for their editing of a Kamala Harris interview. They actually agreed to send $16 million to his presidential library.

“I’ve also won a lot of money from fake news media where they write falsely about me. And not that I want to sue people because I don’t. But I bring lawsuits against the fake news and brought lawsuits against your network, and you paid me $38 million because you did something that was so horrible with Kamala,” he said.

The edits CBS made here are severe, and depict a man who is much more petulant and incoherent than the broadcast would suggest.

Read the entire transcript in full here.

New Jersey Representative Tom Kean Jr. has finally addressed the public regarding his multiweek absence from Congress.

“I want to thank my constituents and colleagues for their patience as I address a personal medical issue,” Kean said in a statement posted on X Monday evening. “My doctors continue to assure me that my recovery will be complete and that I will be back to the job I love very soon. I expect to return to a full schedule and be at 100 percent.

“I take my responsibilities seriously and have a strong record of showing up and delivering, which makes this absence all the more difficult,” Kean continued, thanking his congressional team for keeping his office in motion—despite his prolonged absence—and offering gratitude for the “patience” of his colleagues in the lower chamber.

Kean hasn’t voted on a single bill since March 5. Yet until yesterday, Kean and his staff never bothered to explain to his constituents why the 57-year-old lawmaker was missing in action.

The Garden State Republican only addressed public concern after members of his own party waged a small pressure campaign to make him speak.

GOP Representatives Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew—also from New Jersey—were unable to make contact with Kean. Van Drew told Politico last week that it had been “radio silence” from their colleague.

New York Republicans were similarly stumped in their efforts to call and text Kean, while other Republicans—such as Representative Don Bacon—were completely unaware of their ally’s absence until they couldn’t find him on the House floor.

“I was looking for him,” Bacon said last week. “I didn’t know it was that long.”

Their efforts culminated in a call between Kean and House Speaker Mike Johnson, who subsequently explained late last week that Kean had been dealing with an unspecified “personal health matter.”

Kean was elected to represent New Jersey’s 7th congressional district in 2022, and is months away from being thrust into a contentious midterm reelection cycle. He is currently unchallenged in the Garden State’s Republican primary, scheduled for June 2, but is likely to face tremendous opposition from Democrats come November.

Over the last several months, New Jersey’s 7th congressional district has shifted from a “lean Republican” advantage to a total toss-up, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report.

A federal judge has rejected the Department of Justice’s attempt to dismiss former U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey’s lawsuit challenging her wrongful termination.

Comey alleged that she’d been improperly terminated in July “solely or substantially” because her father is former FBI Director James Comey, a target of President Donald Trump’s reckless revenge scheme.

When she was terminated from her position at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, the notice simply cited Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which “vest[s]” the “executive Power” in the president.

Rather than challenge Comey’s allegations outright, the Department of Justice argued that she could not bring her claim to federal court but instead needed to go through the Merit Systems Protection Board. That board was established by the Civil Service Reform Act, or CSRA, of 1978.

In a 27-page order filed Tuesday, District Judge Jesse E. Furman rejected the government’s motion to dismiss the case. “Comey’s case does not fall within the purview of the CSRA’s scheme because she was fired pursuant to Article II of the Constitution, not pursuant to the CSRA itself,” Furman wrote.

Furman ordered the government to answer Comey’s claims within two weeks, and scheduled a pretrial conference in exactly one month.

President Trump is facing opposition to his ballroom from within his own party.

Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida doesn’t think taxpayers should foot the hefty bill for the White House addition, telling NBC News that the project should be privately funded.

“I don’t know why you would do it” using taxpayer dollars “if it’s all funded,” Scott told NBC. “We have $39 trillion in debt. Maybe we ought to stop spending money.”

Senators Josh Hawley and Rand Paul agreed.

“I think that the donors should all be public, but I don’t know why, if you’ve got private donors who want to do it ... I prefer that to the taxpayer being on the hook,” Hawley said. “But I think it’s a separate question as to whether we need to authorize it.”

“I am always conservative and he already has the money,” Paul told NBC. “And I’m not against putting in reconciliation and doing a nominal amount. I’m not for funding the whole $500 million. I think he’s already raised the money through private means.”

The opposition could jeopardize Trump’s plan to push forward his ballroom. On Monday, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, Katie Britt, and Eric Schmitt announced a bill to provide $400 million for Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the White House grounds.

Trump had initially said that the ballroom’s construction would be paid by private donations from corporations and wealthy individuals. Now costs have ballooned and the project includes an underground military installation, bomb shelters, and a hospital. Democrats are overwhelmingly against the project, arguing that it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars and needs congressional authorization.

“I have not seen a specific request with respect to the ballroom. But needless to say, we have to drive down the high cost of living. Life has become more expensive,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on Monday. “Not a vanity project that resulted from the destruction—that was unauthorized—of the East Wing of the White House.”