Senator Chris Van Hollen’s meeting with wrongly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador was stage-managed by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, right down to the table settings.

Bukele used the meeting to mount a propaganda campaign on X, posting photos from their meeting and claiming that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture,’” was “now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!”

In reality, those “margaritas” were glasses with cherries and salted rims, placed on the table in front of Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia by a Bukele aide in the middle of their meeting to stage a photo. The photo was quite different from the one Van Hollen shared.

Abrego Garcia’s attire of a button-down shirt with jeans and a baseball cap was also different from what he was photographed wearing when he arrived at El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison known for human rights abuses. Gone were the white shirt and pants uniform of the prison’s inmates, and the cap covered Abrego Garcia’s newly shaved head, a practice that every inmate at the facility experiences.

It all seems to have been choreographed by Bukele to refute the reports of what life is really like in the prison, as well as the rumors that Abrego Garcia may have been in poor physical condition or deceased.

Clearly, El Salvador’s president is using the visit and propaganda photographs as proof that Abrego Garcia is safe in his government’s custody. But the facts are that the building trades worker was mistakenly deported and should be immediately returned to the U.S. as ordered by the Supreme Court and lower court judges. But both the White House and Bukele continue to ignore the rulings and the law.

Donald Trump’s administration is moving forward with more expedited deportations under the Alien Enemies Act—despite a Supreme Court ruling that requires it to provide advance notice and a court hearing.

In a new filing Friday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that “dozens” of Venezuelan men held at the Bluebonnet Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, had received forms to expedite their removal from the United States under the AEA.

In a declaration, Attorney Karene Brown said that her client at Bluebonnet, who has a pending asylum claim and no removal order, had been approached by ICE agents Thursday and asked to sign a form that was only available in English.

Brown’s client only speaks Spanish, and he refused to sign the form. ICE agents informed him that the form was “coming from the president, and that he will be deported even if he did not sign it.”

An English-speaking Venezuelan man told her client that the form was a notice that he had been designated as a member of Tren de Aragua, and that he “must be removed” from the United States. He told her client that ICE had said he would be deported either Thursday or Friday to Venezuela.

Another man, Luis Yoender Mercado, who had a hearing scheduled for April 23, received a similar notice. He was told by ICE agents that he would be removed to El Salvador, according to a declaration from Michelle Brané, the executive director of an immigration nonprofit organization, who spoke directly with Mercado’s sister.

Brané said she had received messages from several people indicating that individuals at Bluebonnet were given notices that they were about to be removed.

In another declaration, attorney Travis John Collins said that his 18-year-old client at Bluebonnet had been “taken away” by ICE agents Thursday night, after being transferred to the facility earlier this week. Collin’s client’s father, who was also moved to Bluebonnet, saw his son through a window, who was crying as he held up a piece of paper.

“Another detainee who spoke English was able to read that the paper said, ‘Deportation.’ The country of removal was not visible,” Collins said. “Because he has no final immigration order, the government could only be seeking to remove him under the AEA, not the immigration laws.”

Collins’s young client and his relatives had originally been detained by ICE agents in March. Agents questioned the 18-year-old about a photograph of him holding a gun on Facebook, which they said proved his connection to TdA. According to Collins, the gun was actually a water pistol.

The ACLU’s filing stated that Brown’s client, “like other men against whom the Alien Enemies Act has already been used, does not have a final order of removal and is therefore not removable under the immigration laws.”

“There is no indication that, as with past AEA removals, lawyers were being provided with the form or told that their clients were being designated under the AEA,” the ACLU’s filing stated.

The ACLU asked the court to “certify a class” and grant a broader restraining order to prevent the removal of multiple individuals under the AEA.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that while the Trump administration could continue deportations under the AEA, it needed to provide detainees with the opportunity to file habeas corpus challenges, a complex and rarely successful legal procedure. The court also ruled that these needed to be filed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a MAGA-aligned court in Texas where the deportation flights are staged.

But crucially, detainees must be given the opportunity to “actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs,” the high court ruled. It seems the Trump administration is once again ignoring the order.

Members of the Trump administration have continued to insist that the Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t actually require them to give due process to detainees.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor emphasized this crucial point in her dissent, writing that “the government cannot usher any detainees, including plaintiffs, onto planes in a shroud of secrecy, as it did on March 15, 2025,” and that it could not “immediately resume removing individuals without notice.”

“To the extent the Government removes even one individual without affording him notice and a meaningful opportunity to file and pursue habeas relief, it does so in direct contravention of an edict by the United States Supreme Court,” she wrote.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration has ordered another American citizen to leave the country immediately.

Pamela Rioles Saeed, an immigration attorney in Arizona, received an email from Customs and Border Protection telling her that her parole was revoked and she must leave the United States within seven days, she told KNXV-TV. Rioles Saeed is a Boston-born American citizen and is not on parole.

“I thought this was for one of my clients, but then I saw that it was addressed only to me,” she told KNXV-TV.

Rioles Saeed is at least the second American immigration attorney to report receiving an email from the Department of Homeland Security in the last week. On April 11, American citizen and Massachusetts-based immigration lawyer Nicole Micheroni received an email telling her to leave the country immediately or risk being “subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States.” Micheroni also thought the email was meant for one of her clients, she told NBC Boston.

The DHS recently sent out a number of parole termination notices in an effort to get immigrants to self-deport as soon as possible, a number of news outlets have reported. Saeed said that another attorney in her chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association had told her other lawyers in his office had received similar notices.

Some of the emails may have been sent to “unintended recipients,” such as lawyers representing those immigrants, by mistake, DHS said in separate statements to NBC Boston and KNXV-TV.

Rioles Saeed said she will ignore the statement for now and urged other American citizens who receive the message to do the same. “There is a true recklessness coming from the government and shows an intimidating attitude towards our immigrant clients,” she told KNXV-TV.

The threatening messages come amid the Trump administration’s aggressive and unlawful deportation efforts, which include revoking nearly 1,000 international student visas and disobeying court orders to deport more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to a Salvadoran megaprison. The president has even publicly pondered the possibility of deporting American citizens to El Salvador—an illegal (and terrifying) but increasingly imminent possibility.

Americans are starting to see through Donald Trump’s economic promises as he continues to tank the economy with his volatile approach to global trade.

A new poll from The Economist/YouGov, conducted April 13–15, shows that Trump’s economic approval is at an all-time low. Fifty-two percent of respondents said the economy is getting worse, up 5 percent from “Liberation Day,” when Trump implemented reciprocal tariffs of 10 percent or more on about 90 countries, sending stock markets plummeting to a generational low. He then rescinded the majority of those tariffs days later (but increased the ones on China), causing confusion and chaos for consumers and small-business owners.

Three-quarters of voters said they thought tariffs “will increase the price of goods they buy,” and about two-thirds of Americans think the state of the stock market is Trump’s fault, according to the YouGov poll.

As data journalist G. Elliott Morris pointed out Friday in a Substack post, Trump’s average net economic approval in YouGov polls over the last month is -6 percent, the worst he’s ever polled as president. While handling the outbreak of Covid-19 during his first term, Trump’s net economic approval rating was 3 percent, Morris noted.

Trump ran his 2024 presidential campaign on the promise of economic prosperity and change for millions of Americans fed up with inflation and the high cost of living. He pledged an “end to the devastating inflation crisis,” lower prices, tax cuts, and a tariff scheme that would bolster American manufacturing. But as the likelihood of a recession inches closer, just three months into Trump’s term, people are clearly starting to lose faith in the president’s disastrous economic plan. Forty-two percent of respondents said they “strongly or somewhat oppose” Trump’s budget, and the percentage of Americans who say the economy is their top concern has increased since Trump took office, the poll found.

The president’s performance isn’t flailing in just the Economist/YouGov poll, either. Investor sentiment has only been lower a handful of times since this data started being recorded, including post-9/11 and during the 2008 global financial crisis, according to a review of economic polls from The Independent.

In a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll of 1,000 respondents conducted April 4–9, nearly two-thirds of people said they don’t think Trump is handling inflation well and 58 percent think he is mishandling trade policy.

“Three months into his second administration, the honeymoon might be over for President Donald Trump,” Tatishe Nteta, the poll’s director, said in a statement. Hopefully he’s right.

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.

Collins: Are you personally aware of any steps that have been taken to facilitate his return to the United States?Homan: Look, I think he’s a citizen of El Salvador. He’s in El Salvador, he’s home.

Collins: So nothing has been done? pic.twitter.com/vmIMJ47Evz

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 18, 2025

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.

A U.S. citizen was arrested for entering the state of Florida as an “unauthorized alien” under a state law that shouldn’t have been enforced in the first place.

Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez was set to remain in jail for 48 hours under an ICE hold, according to the Florida Phoenix. His mother and a community advocate presented his birth certificate and Social Security card during a hearing in Leon County, but the judge said that she had no authority to release him due to the court’s jurisdiction.

🚨A U.S. born citizen was arrested in Florida for entering the state as an “unauthorized alien.” His mother and a community advocate showed his birth certificate during a hearing in Leon County. The judge said she had no authority to release him. pic.twitter.com/lwQQMQuUVR

— Jackie Llanos (@LlanosJackie) April 17, 2025

Lopez Gomez was released Thursday evening after his story received media attention and protesters gathered at the Leon County jail where he was being held.

Lopez Gomez, 21, was born in Georgia. According to court records, he was assigned a judge as well as a public defender. He appears to have been arrested and charged under an “anti-immigration” law passed in Florida two months ago, despite the fact that the law is currently under a temporary restraining order and isn’t supposed to be enforced.

It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts swept up an American citizen, and it happened to be aided by local authorities in Florida. Before Trump was even sworn in as president, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pledged his cooperation with the Trump administration’s attempts to deport as many immigrants as possible.

Why did local authorities completely disregard a federal court ruling in order to arrest Lopez Gomez, and then disregard the fact he’s a natural-born U.S. citizen? Is this a mistake, or are they taking their lead from the president, who is currently disregarding a court order from the Supreme Court?

* This piece has been updated to correct the nature of Lopez Gomez’s arrest.

This story has been updated with news of Lopez Gomez’s release.