Trump Administration Live Updates: Senator to Speak After Meeting With Wrongly Deported Man in El Salvador
Where Things Stand
"El Salvador meeting: Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland plans to hold a news conference on Friday after meeting in El Salvador with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the man whose wrongful deportation has caused a standoff between President Trump and the courts. Read more ›
Ukraine war: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that the United States would abandon efforts to end the war in Ukraine if meaningful progress isn’t made within days. “If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on,” Mr. Rubio told reporters, a day after meeting with President Emmanuel Macron of France. Read more ›
Consumer bureau layoffs: The Trump administration sent layoff notices on Thursday to a large number of employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Judge Amy Berman Jackson set an 11 a.m. hearing on Friday to determine if the government had violated her injunction to stop the dismantling of the agency. Read more ›
Hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio signaled that the U.S. might abandon the effort to make peace between Russia and Ukraine, Vice President JD Vance sounded a more optimistic note. As he met with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy in Rome, less than a day after her visit to the White House, Mr. Vance said he would update her on the peace talks and on “some interesting things” that had happened “even in the last 24 hours,” without providing details. He said he felt “optimistic that we can hopefully bring this war, this very brutal war, to a close.”
Mr. Vance, who is Catholic and plans to spend Easter in Rome, is set to meet with the Vatican’s secretary of state, Pietro Parolin, on Saturday.
After stonewalling a federal judge in Washington for weeks, the Justice Department has now blamed him for escalating tensions between the executive and judicial branches. The accusation against Judge James E. Boasberg came in an overnight filing asking a federal appeals court to prevent him from opening a contempt inquiry into whether the White House violated his order to stop two planes of migrants from being sent to El Salvador, as he has threatened to do.
Department lawyers accused the judge of overstepping his authority by seeking to tell the administration how to conduct its foreign policy, and by effectively trying to assume the role of an investigating prosecutor. “Occasions for constitutional confrontation between the two branches should be avoided whenever possible,” the lawyers wrote. “The district court’s criminal contempt order instead escalates the constitutional stakes by infringing core executive prerogatives.”
President Trump said on Thursday that the shooting at Florida State University in Tallahassee that killed two people and injured six was a “shame,” but suggested that it would not prompt him to support any new gun control legislation.
“These things are terrible, but the gun doesn’t do the shooting — the people do,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “It’s, you know, a phrase that’s used probably too often. I will tell you that it’s a shame.”
The United States will abandon efforts to end the war in Ukraine if it proves impossible to broker meaningful progress in the next several days, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said as he departed Paris on Friday a day after meeting with President Emmanuel Macron of France.
“If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on,” Mr. Rubio told reporters, adding that the Trump administration would decide “in a matter of days whether or not this is doable in the next few weeks.”
The independent federal agency that organizes community service work in the United States has placed on administrative leave almost all of its federal staff at the direction of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, according to people familiar with developments at the agency.
Those on leave include all of the employees of a national disaster response program, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information they provided.
The Trump administration sent layoff notices on Thursday to a large swath of employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, just days after a federal appeals court pared back an injunction that had prevented the agency’s leaders from carrying out plans to fire nearly all of the bureau’s workers.
The full scope of the cuts was not immediately clear, but by late afternoon, hundreds of workers across all of the agency’s major divisions had received reduction-in-force notices. Fired employees were told they would lose access to their email accounts and the agency’s work systems on Friday evening.
Senator Chris Van Hollen said on Thursday night that he had met in San Salvador with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whose wrongful deportation to El Salvador last month has become a flashpoint in the immigration debate and fueled a standoff between the Trump administration and the courts.
Mr. Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, shared a photo of the two men speaking on Thursday evening, hours after the senator had been denied entry to the prison where Mr. Abrego Garcia was being held."
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