Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Gates

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https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/19 ... 7776299357

Donald J Trump
@ realdonaldtrump

I'm doing what I was elected to do, remove criminals from our Country, but the Courts don't seem to want me to do that. My team is fantastic, doing an incredible job, however, they are being stymied at every turn by even the US Supreme Court, which I have such great respect for, but would seemingly doesn't want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela or any other Country, for that matter -- People that came here illegally! The Courts are intimidated by the radical left who are quote playing the ref. Great Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito correctly wants to dissolve the pause on deportations. He is right on this! If we don't get these criminals out of our Country, we are not going to have a Country any longer. We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years. We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of illegals we are sending out of the country. Such a thing is not possible to do. What are ridiculous situation we are in. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

3:11 p.m. Apr 21, 2025

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Trump SETS MAJOR TRAP on HIMSELF in Supreme Court
By Michael Popok
MeidasTouch
Apr 23, 2025

One thing that is reliable is Trump posting things on social media that undermine his Administration’s legal positions and turn off the Supreme Court, which has the fate of his Administration in its hands. Now Trump is claiming that our 5th Amendment privileges and Due Process constitutional guarantees before some is imprisoned is a nuisance that should be ignored, just at the moment the Supreme Court is so deeply skeptical of him and his actions that they are entering 1 am orders without jurisdiction just to stop him from jailing people without due process. Michael Popok reports



Transcript

well one thing we learned consistently
about Donald Trump when he was a
criminal defendant is that he doesn't
care if his words and actions and social
media post are used against him in a
court of law he doesn't care about the
backfire and it's one of the things I
actually enjoy about Donald Trump is
that he is the definition of insanity
because he does the same thing over and
over again expecting a different result
now we have a new posting by him on
social media which confirms what we've
seen in his actions and will be used by
his adversaries and by the courts up to
the United States Supreme Court against
him he just declared on social media
that he doesn't believe in the due
process rights constitutional protect
protections and privileges that are the
bedrock principle of our constitutional
republic he doesn't believe in the fifth
amendment he doesn't believe that people
should have their day in court or when
he says "If we gave everybody a trial we
would be tied up for 200
years." I love when he says things out
loud that we've always recognized but
now we can actually use it against him
and what we're seeing is that the
Supreme Court is watching him carefully
they are deeply skeptical about the
Trump administration it is going
according to the plan that we had here
on Midas touch which is the longer he
talks the worse it is for Donald Trump
see he thinks as a megalomaniacal
egotistical narcissist that he is that
the longer he talks the more he'll
convince people the more of him is
actually better when the opposite is
true less Trump is better less talking
to paraphrase Hamilton he should talk
less and smile more but that's not this
president of the United States and all
of the people that are working hard to
restrain this lawless president are
happy that he gives them the ability to
use his own words against him i'm going
to use his own words against him right
here on the Midas Touch Network and on
Legal AF i'm Michael Popock let's dive
in uh so after his Easter screed there's
never a good time there's never a better
time to attack the American people our
justice system and your political
enemies than a major Christian holiday
like Easter especially coming off the
death of Pope Francis but to Donald
Trump it's just another news cycle
another news cycle for him to vomit on
the American people and the polls are
starting to reflect that more of Donald
Trump is not better more of his attacks
on the judiciary are not better it's
actually worse it's seeped into the
water
supply 58% of America thinks Donald
Trump should be impeached and removed
from office if he doesn't abide by the
US Constitution and continues to fight
against the United States Supreme Court
and the Supreme Court is worried here's
the new words that are going to be used
against Donald Trump in real time in his
cases and there's 150 of them or 140 of
them around the country and up at the
United States Supreme Court i mean he
has pending matters at the United States
Supreme Court there are at least a dozen
appeals that are at the Supreme Court
including on emergency bases and Donald
Trump just undermined all of them by
saying the the quiet part out loud they
have a joke in Washington that you know
what they call a Freudian slip in
Washington when you accidentally tell
the truth here's Donald Trump's Freudian
slip he said in effect that America
cannot give everyone a
trial which I'm sorry that means he's
not in favor of the fifth amendment and
due process rights so let me let me
juxtapose this for a
moment donald Trump on one hand says if
you attack the United States Supreme
Court you are a criminal and you should
be prosecuted while he attacks the
United States Supreme Court i mean when
he's not busy fistbumping John Roberts
and patting him on the belly and saying
"I'll never forget you." at the uh I
added the wink in the in the shot uh at
the joint session speech you know he's
busy uh criticizing the Supreme Court
who has his presidency in the palm of
their hands he needs all the votes he
can get but here's what he just said on
Monday i'm doing what I was elected to
do remove criminals from our country but
the courts don't seem to want me to do
that my team is fantastic doing an
incredible job however they are being
stymied at every turn by even the US
Supreme Court which I have such great
respect for but which seemingly doesn't
want me to send violent criminals and
terrorists back to Venezuela or any
other country for that matter we cannot
give here's here's the here's the kicker
we cannot give Trump wrote everyone a
trial because to do so would take
without exaggeration 200 years we would
need hundreds of thousands of trials for
the hundreds of thousands of illegals we
are sending out of the country such a
thing is not possible to do what a
ridiculous situation we are in okay
first of all we see that the court
systems know how to give due process
when it's required by the constitution
we just saw a couple of thousand Jan
6ers before they were pardoned by this
criminal president we just saw them get
processed through one courthouse in
America in Washington DC
primarily so we're not calling for and
there's different forms of due process
um what the Supreme Court ruled you know
we have two major rulings on immigration
and Donald Trump's policies in the last
month and a half we've got the JG
decision in which the Supreme Court said
6 to3 Trump for now you can you can
continue to use the Alien Enemies Act to
deport and remove but you got to give
notice and due process under the
Alien Enemies Act that's only supposed
to be when you're at war with a country
and you have enemy combatants in the
country how many countries are we at war
with i didn't even know we were at war
with Venezuela venezuela didn't even
know we were at war with Venezuela so
what is that a few hundred and so yes
you have to give notice and you have to
give due process and bring them before a
judge on habius corpus petition which is
what the Supreme Court said you had to
do yes that you have to do okay the rest
of the people you want to deport if you
want to uh remove their temporary
protective status if you want to get
them out of the country there are things
you have to do under immigration law to
properly do that doesn't mean you have
to bring them before a judge but if
you're going to deport them to a prison
which is invokes our criminal justice
system then you have to use due process
and um habius corpus petition
proceedings not everybody that this is
the canard this is the lie another a
series of lies by the Trump
administration this is like 10
Pinocchios he's not deporting everybody
as criminals but if you're going to call
somebody a c criminal and not just get
them out of the country and send them
back to their home country but send them
to a jail then you have to give due
process and it's it I don't know if
Donald I mean Donald Trump is either
criminally insane just a which it
may be or he finds by saying stupid crap
out loud that's not true to score cheap
political points that this will fool the
American
people and frankly he may not be wrong
because the polling is showing that to
his base and I mean the basist of base
the MAGA base he can do no wrong when it
comes to immigration and his attack on
the judges the more he pushes that
button the more on balance they think
he's doing okay he's got a plus one
favorability rating on immigration he's
-10 and 20 on every other topic meaning
his unfavorable rating is is between 10
and 20 points higher than his
favorability
rating so he's got to this is the only
thing he's got he's a onetrick pony he's
got to keep leaning on immigration
immigrants are criminals this this is
his
formula all immigrants are criminals
criminals must go to jail i want to jail
them without due process and if we but
this whole thing it's going to take
hundreds of thousands in order to get
rid of all of Joe Biden's illegally
that's a lie there's a small subset that
he apparently wants to put into jail if
he didn't want to put the the Trend
Deagua and the MS13
uh Narco gang into jail he could just
send them back to their home
countries release them to Venezuela but
because Venezuela wanted to put them in
a jail
uh or uh or sorry El Salvador wanted to
put them in a jail and because we were
storing in a jail Venezuelans in El
Salvador hence the fifth amendment due
process issue if you just want to send
them out of the country you don't have
that problem i mean there may be some
issues that that violate immigration law
you got to comply with immigration law
but this does not mean you're going to
have unlimited hundreds of thousands of
trials and if you didn't want hundreds
of thousands of trials then you should
have agreed to a class action to be
handled by Judge Boseberg in DC but you
didn't want that so you forced the
Supreme Court to order habius corpus
petitions individual or by class where
these people are located hence all of
the cases i do love the fact that he
does admit that his lawyers are getting
stymied by the attorneys general the
public interest groups the
ACLU who are batten about 900 against
the Trump administration right now they
want about 80% of their cases against
Trump last time but this is three and
four and five times more cases than we
ever saw before i said there's going to
be 4,000 total cases filed against Trump
administration before it's over at the
rate we're going that is going to be
true so I wanted to kind of burst burst
this bubble kind of explain the lie so
that we speaking truth to each other are
better prepared for our next debate on
the street for our next debate at a
rally for you know a rally a day keeps
fascism away as as Representative Raskin
says and then in addition to that um I
want to you know prepare everybody for
the midterms this has to be seared into
the memory we got to reprogram
everybody's minds we got a group of
people who don't believe in this country
or it's checks and balance or separation
of powers anymore because of Donald
Trump his first four years and now his
first 85 or 90 days well follow it all
right here.

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DOGE Insider EXPOSES MUSK’S SECRETS…Before HE QUITS
By Ben Meiselas
MeidasTouch
Apr 25, 2025

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas interviews former DOGE staffer Merici Vinton about the secrets Trump and Musk don’t want you to know about DOGE.



Transcript

well it seems we need to audit Doge it
seems like Doge has been the least
efficient thing uh with the government
elon Musk promised two trillion in cuts
and now he's saying maybe 150 billion
but that all seems BS as well i think we
need to investigate and look into what
the heck Doge was doing was it ever
about efficiency i don't think so or was
it about taking the data of people
getting access to people's private
medical information or social security
information and other sensitive data is
is that what it's about and by the way
you don't even have to you know take
what I'm saying in terms of
investigating or auditing Doge let's
talk about what one of Donald Trump's
other top adviserss Steve Bannon called
for this past week at a conference held
by Semaphore he said it needs to be
audited what was Elon Musk actually
doing watch Steve Bannon say it play
this clip we need to have a very
specific accounting of what he found as
far as fraud goes and and waste and I
mean details treasury's got to sign off
that omb's got to sign off and every
department head we need to know exactly
what it found because he went from two
trillion a year to one trillion a year
to $150 billion next year with nothing
this year none of this makes sense the
cuts you've seen that have been
announced are programmatic whether it's
USID or DOE that's a totally different
thing
none of it makes sense i can't believe
I'm saying it at least there I agree
with what Bannon's saying you know
remember when they were saying first
Elon Musk is the leader and then they
were saying "No Amy Gleason's the
leader." And it's like like who's Kaiser
Sosay right usual suspects who's Amy
Gleason who's this Amy Gleason person
leading this so we want to dig into the
facts here at the Midas Touch Network
about what is actually going on so why
don't we speak to a former career
staffer at the US Digital Services
someone by the name of Maurici Vinton uh
Maurici you worked at the US Digital
Services uh starting in 2021 uh you were
a former adviser at the IRS in that
capacity and consumer financial
protection bureau and what you did at
the US Digital Service Department which
became Doge with the stroke of the pen
as Donald Trump signed that order before
it became Doge was actually government
efficiency let me just brag about you a
little bit because your background was
you're an entrepreneur as an
entrepreneur you had an exit of a
successful business that you ran and
then you were thinking about what's the
next chapter in my life the next chapter
was I want to give back i'm patriotic i
want to help the United States with all
of my business background because I just
exited a company so you go into an area
that was similar to your strengths US
digital services and you start leading
some of these incredible programs you
co-found the digital team at CFPB the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau you
lead the tax credit implementation at
the US Digital Services one of the
programs that we all know about that
Trump's gutting you led the IRS free
direct tax filing system you are
creating efficiency then Musk came into
town so take it from there Maurici musk
comes into town trump signs the
executive order you're on the inside
you've since resigned you're like I'm
not I can't be here anymore but but tell
us what went down with the stroke of a
pen we had no idea that was coming and
so we found out the same time everyone
else did that night so inauguration
evening we received invitations to meet
with our new Doge colleagues everyone we
were told everyone was very excited to
meet us and the next day all 162 USDS
employees were brought in for 15minute
interviews with people who wouldn't who
would only provide their first names and
asked a series of questions that you
know felt like a loyalty test what do
you think about Doge and who is your
favorite USDS teammate not not the most
serious of questions given how complex
the work is in government and then it
was it was rudderless we didn't know
what the interviews were about we had we
really had no context or leadership
which was both jarring because obviously
Doge was up to something as we started
to see the USAD take over the CFPB
takeover but we had we couldn't even
determine who was like going to travel
uh if we could get travel approval and
then on Valentine's Day uh 42 of my
teammates were fired Valentine's evening
uh while most people are out to dinner
or on holiday with their family and then
that next week is when things started to
turn around and you know Doge took a
more active leadership in the USDS team
but we were we were also grateful that
we weren't asked to be a part of the
destruction that's not what brought us
to government we didn't find that
particularly efficient we we came into
government to design great experiences
for people to simplify people's
interactions with government not to take
down federal agencies well initially
when Doge was announced it was supposed
to be this thing outside of government
that was going to give advice to
Congress it had nothing to do at all
with the United States digital service
and then as you said there was this
mention of this merger to actually make
it this official thing and it seems like
they wanted to house it in the executive
branch for uh oversight or we should say
try to have a lack of oversight claims
that Elon Musk was trying to you know
avoid and then all of a sudden you're
like wait a minute I'm do I didn't sign
up for this to be Doge but you you hang
in there you hang in there for a little
bit you have you talk about this
Valentine's Day massacre where all of
your friends and colleagues 40 40 plus
get fired on Valentine's Day um you know
kind of out of nowhere then take us
through the next steps what happens as
Doge really asserts itself and then
really starts to impact critical
government services I think especially
at the IRS what what what starts to
happen when they assert control so I
viewed what happened at the IRS as you
know even though I was doge but as an as
a bystander I'd been on detail
effectively the way that the US digital
service used to work is you would be
sent out to agencies i was on detail on
loan to IRS to support the direct file
project and so when Doge arrived you
know it was kind of a bizarre series of
initial conversations you know you'd
bring people in to to do a briefing to
do an introduction to the agency i'll
never forget one of the first
conversations you know we're kind of in
this a bit of a brainstorming and one of
the Doge people goes "So everyone just
imagine there are no laws." And if if
you've ever met anybody at the IRS the
only thing that they're really
passionate about is the law taxes and
tax law and it was just this jarring
experience of somebody who's like you
know imagine there are no laws like
typically you would say wave a magic
wand or you know blue sky thinking and
and they just took a really different
approach and and from there it went like
they did at several other agencies which
is you ask for control and access over
the personnel systems so you can fire
people you ask for access to the data
i'm guessing to uh individuals data I'm
guessing to make determinations about
benefits and then finally you ask for
access to procurement systems and that
was so that you could cut contracts that
you didn't feel you know it wasn't based
on logic but that you didn't feel were
effective and when you cut a procurement
contract that's often a as Stephen B
Steve Bannon said that's often a body of
work that is stuff that is being
delivered to taxpayers or services
across government or you know the IRS
it's making IRS.gov more functional more
features for people and so it wasn't
really much of a rhyme or rhythm to how
they approach their cuts and it was not
efficient at all so USDS which you took
a job for in 2021 which had nothing to
do with getting rid of government
programs which was actually about
digitization of an outdated federal
government and you wanted to help you
were doing things like building these
systems direct tax pay tax credit
implementation you know focusing on
things like that musk comes in they
start doing loyalty tests they start
firing people then they start bringing
people like you who don't want to
dismantle and destroy that's not what
your skill set is that's not why you're
here that's not why you're giving back
but you start seeing what this group is
doing that's kind of did a hostile
takeover of USDS and made a dose so now
you're almost a bystander observing
what's taking place and now they're out
there saying things like whereas you
would be working with IRS okay let's do
direct file how do we get this more
efficiently how do we reduce call times
how do we make sure we're increasing our
tax revenue now these Doge people that
Musk brings in are saying "Imagine a
world where there are no laws what would
you do?" And these IRS people are
sitting around there saying "Huh?" You
know what's what's what's going on i got
to ask you this question because I've
always wanted to know amy Gleason who
you pro you know I'm sure from there let
me show you what the White House has
been saying about Amy Gleason this is
Caroline Levit Donald Trump's press
secretary this is from a few months ago
after they were claiming in court Doge
was claiming in court that Musk was
actually not leading Doge but somebody
else and they go "We all know it was Amy
Gleason here let's watch this."
Start her job as Doge administrator so
Amy Gleason has been the Doge
administrator for quite some time i
believe several weeks maybe a month i'm
not actually sure of the specific
timeline she's a career official um
she's doing her job as the administrator
of this organization um I know
everybody's very interested in in her
name and who she is and what she does
there's a lot of people who work for the
federal government they're just trying
to do their jobs and you know that's all
she's doing do staff told us yesterday
that they found out about her being the
administr administrator yesterday why is
that you have to ask them they're
clearly unaware i don't know
well what's your response to that first
did you ever know Amy Gleason to be the
leader of Doge
uh not until it was announced no so the
first time you ever found out that she
was either the leader of Doge or US
Digital Service you and others working
there the first time you ever knew was
it was announced by the White House in a
court filing or somewhere that's how you
found out oh Gleon's the boss now right
yeah she was on vacation it was a it was
a shock to all of us the prior week it
was clear that there was more
involvement from Doge but nobody had a
title and it wasn't clear to us that she
was going to be our you know the head of
Doge or or the US digital service the
way I view this and Amy's position is
there's I view it as multiple Dogs like
different cells almost so there's the US
digital service Doge USDS Doge then
there's I don't know what to call them
like roaming Doge so they sleep on the
floor of GSA and they go to different
agencies and ransack them and then
there's also more Dogees is is now
officially inside the organization in a
in an official capacity so the Bureau of
Fiscal Services the gentleman there was
Doge and is now I think the assistant
secretary is his title and he oversees a
government agency and so there's
different modes here that really kind of
show that whatever whatever is the most
effective approach is the approach that
they'll take how worried should American
citizens be right now about what Doge is
doing to the government the impact that
it's having whether it's at the IRS
which you have familiarity with the CFPB
which you have familiarity with or just
in general based on your experience i'm
really worried that people don't
understand that it's real i'm from
Nebraska and I know I remember what it
was like thinking DC is a bubble but
this is actually something that's
happening in DC and is impacting the
country when I joined the IRS in 2022
all IRS employees could talk about was
how they only answered 12% of calls that
year because they were under capacity
and then there were huge paper backlogs
doge has cut that capacity so I don't
know we I'm sorry we went from 12% to
88% the next year which is heroic and I
don't know what's going to what next
filing season is going to look like
that's going to impact people across the
country as they try to file their taxes
they don't know when their tax refunds
are going to come or their social
security checks are going to come so
those are kind of like the next year
worries i worry long-term about cancer
research medical research those grants
and and that funding of that research is
what has made America great and is what
has put us at the top of you know really
thinking about medical research
education grants and it seems like a lot
of that money the long-term investments
which is what government should be for
right not the short-term gains but the
long-term games gains those are going to
be that's gone and so I also really
worry what it's going to look like in a
few years when we won't have had those
breakthroughs
so you were on the inside there's been a
lot of talk about Doge um is there
anything that you think that's not being
discussed enough that you that you think
about that you think deserves more
attention and I mean it's rare for our
viewers and we've got millions of
subscribers here at the Midas Touch
Network to actually hear from someone
who was there what before it was Doge
who was there during the takeover who
saw it who has intricate knowledge of it
and based on your knowledge of working
with the IRS the CFPB and you building
these systems you're in a very unique
position to just share your wealth of
knowledge with the audience so I often
like when I end these interviews just to
say well what what do you want people to
know and there's no time limitation on I
I genuinely want you to share your
wealth of knowledge with our viewers
about what you've experienced what you
want them to know what people should be
thinking about so let let me toss it to
you there
i would say two things number one a lot
of the destruction that has been
happening across the federal government
is happened it it seems like a
constitutional crisis in the sense that
uh you can try to eliminate or delete a
federal agency overnight and that is
something that was set up by Congress
and paid for by taxpayers and I I don't
understand how Doge has been able to do
this legally and I hope that this is
something that there will be
accountability for and that's what we
should be demanding is accountability
for the actions that have happened and
are continuing to happen i do think and
I I really hope uh that we can rebuild
from this and that is actually what gets
what gives me hope and optimism is that
when we kind of take a step back and
I'll be honest the status quo was not
helping most people our institutions
were not super responsive to today's
problems and so there is an opportunity
to rethink how we do this but we have to
do it the right way and we have to do it
in a way that actually puts people and
their needs first um and really
understands the mission of government
the mission of what it is that you know
people need and and what government's
trying to deliver and that's that's what
I hope we can do you know in a few years
if we're given a chance um if if people
like you know that like me that want to
come back into government to rebuild are
given a chance to do that i don't think
this has been e efficient and I actually
think it's going to be incredibly
expensive to rebuild what's been what's
been done i think that's very hopeful
for our viewers and listeners to hear
though and I'm sure you speak also with
other workers others who had been fired
others who had resigned as as you had
resigned um about what happens next
obviously this is a catastrophe and it's
a mess but perhaps the fact that we are
seeing it now people understand the
importance of actual efficiency which is
what you were doing when you reduced uh
the ways the IRS was not responsive to
people to having an 85 to 90% responsive
rate so do there's a world where you and
you think the others in a future
situation future non-musk nonhostile
government takeover situation are
actually ready to come back in the
future and help rebuild
absolutely everyone is is ex you know is
devastated by what's happening and wants
to come back and they want to be a part
of a part of it i think there are
actually still great people inside that
are trying to do the right thing and I'm
so happy that they are able to have an
impact and try to push things in
directions that are productive and
constructive and so that there is still
pockets where you know it's it hasn't
been impacted yet u by DOA's cuts and
I'm grateful for for that and but yeah
everyone uh you know a lot of my
colleagues former colleagues were really
excited to to hopefully get the
opportunity
to come back and frankly to rebuild
people's trust that both you know fed
employees who have been uh this has been
a rough couple months for them to say
the least as well as people the
taxpayers who expect something expect
good government ex expect you know
things to be delivered their social
security checks to come on time and so
hopefully we can regain the trust and
you know things like direct file so Doge
cut direct file the free tax filing
product and hopefully we can we can
reimagine that and bring it back you
know That's something that people loved
and we need more projects like that we
can absolutely do that i you know I I
let me ask you more about that while I
got you i'm enjoying this interview so
much because of the wealth of knowledge
that you share tell me about that though
you built the free direct tax file
system that was beloved in the nation
people said this is efficient
musk Doge cut the free direct file
system one of the most popular things
and you were one of the leads who
created that what's your response to
that what do you want to tell American
people about that program
so direct file was a startup within
government effectively it was a team of
people who were passionate about new
feature releases and taking feedback
from our users to make the product
better in its first year direct file
incre it was just a pilot year so it was
very limited in the number of states it
was 12 states that that used direct file
last year and in that first year 86% of
users said direct file helped increase
their trust in the IRS so we have proof
that if you do a thing that people love
it actually helps them expect have
higher expectations and expect more from
government and trust in their government
to do that uh so the the other thing
that um that we're very proud of is so
direct file net promoter score is a
private sector kind of consumer index of
of how people love what they love the
products that they use and how they rate
them and direct files last year was 74
plus 74 and this year it's plus 82 I
believe uh Apple's is plus 72 so that is
how much people really loved a
government product and a government
service uh one more point because you
gave me the chance to talk about it
there's a you know every tax season
there's a meme of like why doesn't the
IRS you know the IRS asks me to do the
math and then they throw me in jail when
I get it wrong when they know all the
answers and we started to
prepopulate information that the IRS has
about you into your tax return so that
way it was more accurate and it took you
way less time i got texts from people
who were like "My kid did this in 10
minutes." I mean the average person it
takes them nine hours and costs them
$160 to do their taxes and Direct File
is free and it took a bunch of people 10
minutes to do it so it's a really great
example of government efficiency and
something that users love and Doge
didn't see or have didn't see any value
in it and ended up killing it uh the AP
reported they killed it last week
maurici Vinton thank you so much for
joining us and sharing the wealth of
knowledge from being on the inside
former US digital service doge staffer
Maurici Vinc Vinton thank you thank you
everybody hit subscribe.

[admin]

Exclusive: Inside Trump’s First 100 Days
by Martin Schoeller and Eric Cortellessa
Time Magazine
Apr 25, 2025 4:00 AM MT
https://time.com/7280106/trump-interview-100-days-2025/

President Donald Trump emerges through a pair of handsome wooden doors on the third floor of the White House. On his way down the wide, carpeted staircase, he passes portraits of his predecessors. Nixon is opposite the landing outside the residence. Two flights down, he has swapped the placement of Clinton and Lincoln, moving a massive painting of the latter into the main entrance hall of the mansion. “Lincoln is Lincoln, in all fairness,” he explains. “And I gave Clinton a good space.” But it’s the portrait around the corner that Trump wants to show off.

It’s a giant painting of a photograph—that photograph, the famous image of Trump, his fist raised, blood trickling down his face, after the attempt on his life last July at a rally in Butler, Pa. It hangs across the foyer from a portrait of Obama, in tacit competition. When they bring tours in, everyone wants to look at this one, Trump says, gesturing to the painting of himself, in technicolor defiance. “100 to 1, they prefer that,” he says. “It’s incredible.”

Making his way out to the Rose Garden, he walks up the inclined colonnade toward the Oval Office, describing the other alterations to the decor, both inside and out. His imprint on his workspace is apparent. The molding and mantels have gold accents now, and he has filled the walls with portraits of other presidents in gilded frames. He has hung an early copy of the Declaration of Independence behind a set of blue curtains. The box with a red button that allows Trump to summon Diet Cokes is back in its place on the Resolute desk, behind which stands a new battalion of flags, including one for the U.S. Space Force, the military branch he established. A map of the “Gulf of America,” as Trump has rechristened the Gulf of Mexico, was propped on a stand nearby.

If Trump is making cosmetic changes to the White House, his effect on the presidency goes much deeper. The first 100 days of his second term have been among the most destabilizing in American history, a blitz of power grabs, strategic shifts, and direct attacks that have left opponents, global counterparts, and even many supporters stunned. Trump has launched a battery of orders and memoranda that have hobbled entire government agencies and departments. He has threatened to take Greenland by force, seize control of the Panama Canal, and annex Canada. Weaponizing his control of the Justice Department, he has ordered investigations of political enemies. He has gutted much of the civil service, removing more than a hundred thousand federal workers. He has gone to war with institutions across American life: universities, media outlets, law firms, museums. He pardoned or gave a commutation to every single defendant charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attacks, including those convicted of violent acts and seditious conspiracy. Seeking to remake the global economy, he triggered a trade war by unleashing a sweeping array of tariffs that sent markets plummeting. Embarking on his promised program of mass deportation, he has mobilized agencies across government, from the IRS to the Postal Service, as part of the effort to find, detain, and expel immigrants. He has shipped some of them to foreign countries without due process, citing a wartime provision from the 18th century. His Administration has snatched foreign students off the streets and stripped their visas for engaging in speech he dislikes. He has threatened to send Americans to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Says one senior Administration official: “Our success depends on his ability to shock you.”

What shocks constitutional scholars and civil libertarians is the power Trump is attempting to amass and the impunity with which he is wielding it. Trump has claimed Congress’s constitutional authority over spending and foreign trade, citing a loosely defined emergency. He has asserted control over independent agencies and ignored post-Watergate rules designed to prevent political meddling in law enforcement and investigations. When lower courts have ordered him to slow or reverse potentially illegal moves, he has at times ignored or publicly ridiculed them. In one case, he defied a Supreme Court order. Issuing a ruling in that fight, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee and arguably the most influential conservative jurist outside the high court, said the Administration’s behavior threatens to “reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood.”

In an hour-long interview with TIME on April 22, Trump cast the first three months of his term as an unbridled success. “What I’m doing is exactly what I’ve campaigned on,” he says. Which is true, in part. From deportations and tariffs to remaking America’s alliances and attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, Donald John Trump, the 45th and 47th President of the United States, is carrying out pledges to radically reshape America and its role in the world. He didn’t invent most of the problems he is aggressively going after, and supporters say he is doing more than predecessors from both parties to fix them. America’s immigration system has been broken for decades; Trump’s moves have slowed illegal border crossings to a trickle. Throughout the Cold War, U.S. strategists bemoaned military “free-riders” in Europe and East Asia; Trump has triggered previously unimaginable moves by Germany and Japan to spend more on their own, and their neighbors’, collective defense. China used its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 to launch a multidecade attack on those who sought to do business with them; Trump’s latest tariffs are the most aggressive effort to fight back. “I have solved more problems in the world without asking for or getting credit,” he says.

Trump has benefited from an enfeebled Democratic Party and compliant congressional Republicans who have abdicated legislative powers and long-held beliefs, whether out of cowardice or a desire to ride his coattails. There has been little meaningful or sustained backlash from the public. The civil-society leaders and corporate titans with the most political capital have largely acquiesced to Trump’s rule, choosing supplicancy over solidarity. The capitulation has only emboldened him.

It’s possible that Trump, 100 days in, is at the peak of his power. A resistance—if not one that resembles the first-term Resistance—is stirring to life. Trump’s protectionist policies threaten a recession of his own making; businesses big and small face the imminent threat of closure as they cut workers, close production lines, and try to stay afloat in the face of disruptions to supply chains and revenue of a scale not seen since the pandemic.. Universities have found greater courage in the face of Trump’s threats to their multibillion-dollar research budgets. Communities that rely on immigrant labor have bristled at the uptick in deportations. With consumer confidence at its lowest level in three years and inflation expected to climb as a consequence of the trade war, even meek Republicans have raised complaints about the impact of some of Trump’s moves on their political future. Polling finds that a larger share of Americans now live in fear of their government and Trump’s approval rating has slipped to 40%, according to a Pew survey, lower at this early stage in his term than that of any other recent President.

The self-declared mission of Trump and his top aides in his first 100 days has been to overwhelm opposition everywhere through this barrage of moves on all fronts. “He has ceded absolutely nothing to the bureaucracy—zero,” says White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. “Everything he wants to do or thinks is important for the country, we have figured out a way.” Even the most experienced government hands are struggling to keep track of every norm-breaking change in Washington, let alone where it will leave the country and the world. Trump’s top aides say he is only getting started. “He had four years to think about what he wanted to do,” says Wiles, “and now he wants it executed on.”

Trump’s early clemency for the rioters who had attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, set the tone for his relationship with Congress. His aides had been wrestling with which defendants should be pardoned or have their sentences commuted. Some worried that freeing all of them, including criminals convicted of violence or seditious conspiracy, would backfire. But on his first day in office, upon arriving at the White House from his inaugural ceremony, Trump settled the debate. "I don't want to talk about this anymore,” he said, according to two senior officials who were present. “Just do them all.”

Under Trump, Republican majorities in Congress have ceded power to a Chief Executive many are too timid to confront. Aided by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Trump gutted congressionally authorized government departments, from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the U.S. Agency for Global Media. He ordered the dismantling of the Department of Education, setting up a legal fight over an agency established through Congress in the 1970s. Trump withheld federal dollars from programs targeted in his Executive Orders, triggering lawsuits. In March, as Trump was preparing to roll out his tariffs, House Republican leadership slipped language into a stopgap funding bill to prevent any member of Congress from challenging the national emergency Trump has declared to implement them. “The President of the United States has the right, and arguably, I think, the responsibility, to deal with other nations who are engaging in unfair trade practices,” Speaker Mike Johnson tells TIME in an interview.

Trump’s blunt-force approach to his nominally co-equal partners in the Legislative Branch was on display in a meeting with House Republicans in April. Settling into the Cabinet room, members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus were prepared to buck a budget framework the Senate GOP had devised, blocking progress on a key agenda item. Trump was having none of it. The President walked in, flanked by top aides and Johnson, and proceeded to lecture the holdouts for nearly 45 minutes, according to two people in the meeting. “This is what I want,” Trump said. Representative Chip Roy interjected. “Mr. President, I hear you,” the Texas Congressman said. “But at the end of the day, I don’t trust this process. The Senate has screwed us over before.” Trump cut him off. “Don’t be a ball buster, OK?” The next morning, Roy voted to advance the measure, along with all but two other House Republicans. Roy’s office declined to comment.

The message from the President went out across his party: Don’t cross me. Even after he lost in 2020, Trump’s stalwart allies won primaries thanks to his backing, solidifying his hold on the GOP and turning it once and for all into an instrument of his agenda. Now much of the party are true believers in the MAGA creed and most of the rest have accepted that going along with the program is a career requirement. “They understand that President Trump is the most powerful force in politics in the modern era,” Speaker Johnson explains. “Everybody wants to be on this train—and not in front of it.”

Now Trump is trying to do the same thing with the federal government. Enter Musk’s DOGE. Claiming to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, Musk’s team has taken control of independent federal agencies and inflicted crippling cuts. About 75,000 federal employees accepted Musk’s offer of deferred buyouts. DOGE has all but demolished agencies like USAID, and is trying to do the same to others, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Sometimes it has been messy. When DOGE agents tried to take over the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonprofit created by Congress, the organization refused to let them in. The DOGE team came back with the FBI and D.C. police.

DOGE has also consolidated data from across government on individual Americans—pulling together for the first time in one place everything from Social Security numbers to student loan data to annual income. Those files have then been used to advance the White House’s objectives. The IRS struck an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to provide taxpayer data to help identify targets for deportation. A spokesperson for DOGE did not respond to requests for comment. Wiles says the operation has been the sharpest weapon in Trump’s fight to grab control of government powers. “Had we not done that, even with the discomfort it caused,” she adds, “then we would leave here in four years having cut the federal bureaucracy by 0.18%.”

Louis DeJoy was among the federal officials who learned a hard lesson about power in the new Trump era. The former CEO of a logistics company and a Trump megadonor, DeJoy was tapped to become Postmaster General in 2020. Hired to retool an agency on the brink of insolvency, he cut billions of dollars in contracts and embarked on a 10-year plan to centralize the U.S. Postal Service’s delivery network. But in March, he became embroiled in a struggle between Musk, who wants to privatize the Postal Service, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was maneuvering to fold it into his department. Meanwhile, officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection had asked the USPS to supply data to help its project of tracking migrants, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

On March 10, Musk dispatched two young former Tesla staffers to the USPS to embed inside the agency, nominally to cut costs. When DeJoy refused to give the DOGE officials access to sensitive USPS servers that contain the mailing addresses of every American, the aides complained to Musk, who then complained to Trump, the sources tell TIME. Sergio Gor, Trump’s director of personnel, called DeJoy and USPS board members, saying the President wanted him out, according to two sources familiar with the matter, and suggesting to DeJoy that Trump and Musk could make life uncomfortable for him. When it became clear the problem could only escalate, DeJoy, who had already announced plans to retire, resigned to take the target off the agency’s back. Gor did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

With Congress and the Executive Branch now largely compliant, it has fallen to the courts to determine the outer limits of Trump’s power. More than 100 cases have already been brought challenging him. And an administrative error by the Trump team in its aggressive program to deport undocumented migrants has turned into an incipient constitutional crisis.

In July 2024, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele had invited then Florida Representative Matt Gaetz and other lawmakers on a diplomatic visit. During a dinner at his lakefront compound, Bukele made an offer: he was willing to imprison migrants Trump wanted to deport in El Salvador’s famously harsh prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The next day, Bukele gave the U.S. delegation a tour of the facility, the largest prison in Latin America. “The conditions had zapped the inhabitants of any will to fight,” Gaetz recalls. “It’s tough to see the state of the human condition drained of hope.”

Gaetz pitched the plan to deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who pitched the plan to Trump, a senior administration source tells TIME. Trump instructed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to travel to El Salvador to strike an arrangement with Bukele, the source says. A deal was quietly sealed in February. “One of the reasons I like it is because it would be much less expensive than our prison system, and I think it would actually be a greater deterrent,” Trump says.

Days later, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used wartime law from the 18th century, to deport 238 alleged Venezuelan gang members to CECOT without giving them the chance to claim they had been detained in error or to profess their innocence in immigration court. U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump Administration to turn the planes around. The Administration ignored the order, Boasberg said, and the President lashed out, calling for the judge’s impeachment. In response, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public rebuke of Trump.

The conflict only grew when the Administration admitted that it had “mistakenly” flown a Maryland sheet-metal apprentice, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador as part of the deportations. “When I first heard of the situation, I was not happy,” Trump says. “Then I found out that he was a person who was an MS-13 member.” The man’s lawyers dispute that and other allegations. The Supreme Court ordered the Administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from CECOT, but it has refused to bring him back.

Asked if he had requested Bukele to turn Abrego Garcia over, Trump said he hadn’t. “I haven’t been asked to ask him by my attorneys,” he says. “Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.” As for the political outcry over his refusal to return a man mistakenly sent to a foreign prison without due process, Trump says he believes it will accrue to his advantage: “I think this is another men in women’s sports thing for the Democrats.”

Soon it wasn’t just immigrants who allegedly came to the U.S. illegally who were targeted. On March 25, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Ph.D. student at Tufts University, left her apartment to go to an Iftar dinner with friends. On the sidewalk, she was abducted by six plainclothes ICE officials and taken to a facility in central Louisiana. An immigration judge has denied her bond, while the government has yet to produce evidence of her alleged activities in support of Hamas or charge her with a crime. A DHS official has cited an op-ed she co-wrote with four other students last spring criticizing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a reason for her arrest. Trump says he is “not aware” of her case, but would consider asking the Justice Department to release any evidence they have against Ozturk. “I would have no trouble with it,” he says.

Trump always claimed without evidence that his four criminal indictments were the result of opponents’ using law enforcement for political ends. As President, he has openly wielded his control over the Justice Department’s prosecutors and the FBI’s investigators to target his perceived enemies. On April 9, he issued a memorandum directing the Justice Department to investigate Christopher Krebs, the former top cybersecurity official in Trump’s first term, who said there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Another directive ordered the DOJ to scrutinize former Trump Homeland Security official Miles Taylor, who authored an anonymous New York Times op-ed in 2018 that was harshly critical of the President.

Trump has also weakened internal checks on his power. In January, he fired the Inspectors General of 17 different agencies, gutting a watchdog system implemented after Watergate to guard against mismanagement and abuses of power. He replaced experienced prosecutors with loyalists. For his new U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, Trump picked Alina Habba, his former personal lawyer. In Washington, the nation’s largest and most important U.S. Attorney’s office, Trump tapped Ed Martin, a 2020 “Stop the Steal” organizer who had never been a prosecutor and who demoted the lawyers who brought cases against Jan. 6 rioters.

In his interview with TIME, Trump says he will always comply with the courts. But even legal scholars with an expansive view of executive authority have grown alarmed. The Administration has refused to spend money that Congress and the courts had told them to. Trump signed Executive Orders to remove individuals suspected of ties to foreign terrorist organizations.

Jack Goldsmith, a conservative Harvard Law professor who served in the George W. Bush Administration, argues that Trump’s “tsunami of legally questionable Executive Orders” and proclamations are part of a “scheme to rethink constitutional constraints” that has led to a “dangerous power struggle between the Trump administration and the federal judiciary.”

“Well,” Trump said, scanning a news story on his phone in the cabin of his private plane. “Look at that.” It was Dec. 14, and the President-elect was returning from the Army-Navy football game in Annapolis, Md., when he read that ABC had agreed to pay $15 million toward his presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit against anchor George Stephanopoulos. Aides burst into a round of applause. The settlement was part of a broader strategy. Trump believed that if ABC would cave, so too would other companies worried about getting on his bad side, according to three sources familiar with his thinking.

Trump tasked his incoming White House counsel David Warrington, staff secretary Will Scharf, and top policy adviser Stephen Miller to craft Executive Orders targeting other perceived corporate enemies. “That was the first break in the dam,” explains a source close to Trump. The message, the source says, would be: “Look, either we come after you, we shut you down, or you’re going to help me out.”

The Administration soon shot off letters to top law firms that represented Trump foes and universities known for progressive social activism, especially anti-Israel protests. Paul Weiss, Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden Arps, and other white-shoe firms quickly agreed to provide hundreds of millions in pro-bono work for Trump in exchange for relief from his attacks. “I’ve gotta be doing something right, because I’ve had a lot of law firms give me a lot of money,” the President tells TIME.

Universities followed. Columbia University agreed to overhaul its protest policies and change its Middle Eastern Studies curriculum to avoid Trump’s cutting $400 million of federal funding. CBS’s leadership is reportedly considering a settlement after Trump filed a $20 billion lawsuit against 60 Minutes. Trump has taken over the Kennedy Center for the Arts and ordered the Smithsonian to change its exhibits.

Trump is weakening the structures necessary for organized opposition, critics say. The more fragmented the country, the less its people can mount meaningful resistance; and the less citizens can make leaders responsive to their will, the less they become agents of their collective fate, they say. “At some point we have to understand the game,” Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy says. “His attempt to bully states, municipalities, not-for-profit universities, journalists, law firms, and corporations into pledges of loyalty—this is all part of a plan to seize power.”

Trump’s onetime Svengali, Steve Bannon, who remains close to the President, doesn’t disagree: “He is on a jihad to reform them first by bringing them to heel.”

Foreign leaders are used to that kind of treatment, but even they weren’t expecting Trump’s trade war. To explain his approach to tariffs, Trump favors a metaphor—the U.S. as the world’s department store. “I am this giant store,” he tells TIME. “It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, If you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.”

If the government’s setting prices sounds distinctly un-American, if not outright communist, Trump’s own allies in the GOP warned him about the dangers of unleashing the barrage of punitive duties on foreign imports, which ran from a 10% baseline up to 145%. When Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a libertarian, texted him a disquisition urging a retreat from tariffs, he says Trump shot back curtly: “TARIFFS ARE GREAT!”

The markets disagreed. Within a week of “Liberation Day,” economists across the U.S. government and at the Federal Reserve were seeing alarming signs. It wasn’t the precipitous drop in the S&P 500 that worried them. It was the market in U.S. Treasuries, which were tanking too. Normally when stocks sell off, investors shift their assets into the safe haven of U.S. government bonds, which offer a guaranteed payoff down the road. But now investors were parking their money in the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc instead. Worse, those who were looking to buy U.S. bonds from people who already owned them were having trouble agreeing on what they were worth. “The markets were not working as they normally do,” says one observer at the Federal Reserve. “This was extreme stress.”

In the face of a bond-market disarray, two of Trump’s top aides intervened. On Apr. 9, when one of Trump’s most loyal advisers, the trade hawk Peter Navarro, was occupied in another meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went into the Oval Office to make a plea to Trump: pause some of the tariffs. “Scott and I both agreed it was the right thing to do, and in the end, [Trump] said that makes sense,” Lutnick recalls. The two Cabinet heads stayed until Trump posted on Truth Social that he would temporarily lift reciprocal tariffs for 90 days. The markets immediately bounced back, though not to their pre–”Liberation Day” levels.

Trump tells TIME that he’s still convinced tariffs are necessary. “The bond market was getting the yips, but I wasn’t,” he says, adding that he would consider it a “total victory” if the U.S. still has tariffs as high as 50% on foreign imports a year from now. Trump says China’s President Xi Jinping has called him, and that his Administration is in active talks with the Chinese to strike a deal. Lutnick and another senior Administration official confirmed the talks, which Beijing disputes. “I don’t think that’s a sign of weakness on his behalf,” Trump says of Xi, adding that he expects to have a full slate of deals announced over the next three to four weeks. “”There’s a number at which they will feel comfortable,” Trump says. “But you can’t let them make a trillion dollars on us.”

Trump’s foreign transactionalism goes beyond tariffs. He has threatened an armed confrontation and economic warfare with Denmark, a NATO ally, to take over Greenland. He has said he wants to take back the Panama Canal even if it results in a military engagement against guerilla fighters. He’s also proposed displacing Palestinians from Gaza to turn it into a seaside vacation destination, what he calls “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

In some of these moves, one can discern tactical or strategic goals: Greenland has mineral resources the U.S. could use and is key for the growing competition in the Arctic. But others see more personal aims. Upon taking office, Trump paid homage to his expansionist designs by borrowing a painting of President James Polk from the House of Representatives and hanging it prominently in the Oval Office. A champion of manifest destiny, Polk oversaw the largest expansion of U.S. territory in history, acquiring Oregon, Texas, California, and most of the American Southwest. Asked if he’d like to be remembered for having expanded American territory as President himself, Trump says: “I wouldn’t mind.”

He may more likely be remembered for having broken with decades of foreign policy embraced by Republican and Democratic Presidents, alienating NATO allies, and siding with Russia in its war with Ukraine. In his interview with TIME, Trump blamed Kyiv for initiating the war. “I think what caused the war to start was when they started talking about joining NATO,” the President says. The negotiated peace he is pursuing would hand Vladimir Putin some 20% of Ukrainian territory. “Crimea will stay with Russia,” Trump says.

The President prides himself on having mobilized Europeans to contribute more to their security and for advancing peace between Israel and some Arab neighbors in his first term. He hopes to make further progress on this last front on a planned trip to the Middle East. “Saudi Arabia will go into the Abraham accords,” he predicts. “That will happen.” He feels more confident, more ambitious, less encumbered by guardrails than he did in his first term as Commander in Chief. “Last time I was fighting for survival,” he tells TIME. “This time I’m fighting for the world.”

Trump is not the first President who has expanded presidential power. Franklin Roosevelt summoned wartime authorities to institute rationing and price controls, forcibly incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps, and tried to pack the Supreme Court with ideologically aligned judges. George W. Bush restructured the national-security apparatus after Sept. 11, handing the government extraordinary powers to surveil everyday Americans and detained al-Qaeda suspects at extrajudicial black sites abroad. Both those Presidents were dealing with attacks on the U.S. Trump’s second-term presidency is unlike anything his predecessors attempted.

Trump’s approach to power looks like that of foreign leaders like Viktor Orban of Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, argues Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University scholar. Those strongmen have won legitimate elections but then stacked the democratic decks in their favor by rewarding allies, punishing adversaries, crippling the media and civil society, and turning the state into an instrument of their own agenda and political preservation. “This is actually much faster, much more thoroughgoing than what we saw the first 100 days in Venezuela or Turkey or Hungary,” he tells TIME. “What worries me most has been how slow U.S. society has responded.” [???]

Some institutions are fighting back. Law firms Perkins Coie and WilmerHale won restraining orders from a federal judge. Harvard University refused to acquiesce. After Trump tried to shut down the U.S. Agency for Global Media, as well as the media outlets it oversees, including Voice of America and Radio Liberty, several brought suits to stay afloat. The Supreme Court has already intervened in several cases. But their capacity to constrain Trump is limited if he defies their orders. “The courts can't save us alone,” says Levitsky. “The judicial process is slow, and a lot can get broken in the meantime."

Opponents have howled about the threat Trump poses to the Republic for long enough that for many it’s easy to dismiss the talk of constitutional crisis. Yet the President himself stokes fears of a slippery slope to strongman rule with his blanket assertions of power, his disregard for democratic guardrails, and his talk of running for a third term, despite the 22nd Amendment’s prohibition. “There are some loopholes that have been discussed,” Trump says, “But I don’t believe in loopholes.”

Toward the end of the interview, TIME asks Trump whether he agrees with John Adams, a founder whose portrait he has framed in gold on his wall, who said the American republic was “a government of laws, not of men.” The President pauses to think it through. “I wouldn’t agree with it 100%,” he says. “We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you’re going to have honest men like me.” [???]

Once the tape recorder stops rolling, Trump offers a tour through his private spaces beyond the Oval. Framed copies of magazines with his face on the cover line the walls. He passes into the dining room, where he watched and did nothing as the Jan. 6 attack unfolded. A gold remote control and two boxes of Tic Tacs sit on the table. On the threshold above the door hangs the boxing belt that Zelensky left behind after their contentious meeting in late February. He leads his guests into his study, which aides have dubbed “the Merch Room.” There are two white breakfronts filled with MAGA memorabilia: hats of differing colors and varieties, gold Trump-branded sneakers, white Trump golf shirts, Trump coffee-table books, towels with his Trump 45/47 logo on them, and challenge coins featuring the Trump family crest inside the seal of the President of the United States. It may not be the traditional image of American presidential power, but it is his.

—With reporting by Alex Altman, Massimo Calabresi, Sam Jacobs, and Nik Popli/Washington, and Leslie Dickstein and Simmone Shah/New York

[admin]

Tech Bros have LIVES RUINED in AN INSTANT by Trump
by Dina Doll
MeidasTouch
Apr 26, 2025 MissTrial

The tech oligarchs are coming to find out that sucking up to Donald Trump hasn't worked out in the way they expected as Trump continues to target their businesses or shield them from government oversight. Dina Doll reacts.



Transcript

Elon Musk and the other tech
billionaires are finding out that having
a prime seat at the inauguration in
Trump world doesn't protect you all of
their support for Trump is in fact
backfiring my name is Dena Dah with the
Midas Touch Network let's break this
down so let's talk about Elon Musk first
and then we'll get to the others because
they have all seen that Trump is just
not very loyal and being so close to him
and in his fear is not so helpful to
their businesses elon Musk as we know
Tesla in their quarterly report sales
were down
70% massive decrease because Democrats
tended to buy his electric vehicle cars
and he has shown not only with the
really outrageous comments he was made
in the Oval Office or his Nazi salute at
the post inauguration rally his texts on
X his posts on X showing his racism his
sexism his far-right
ideology not just here in the US but
around the world are turning people off
again not just here but around the world
the cybert truck becoming a symbol for
all that is wrong today with the Trump
regime elon Musk Trump is now already
talking about in the past tense after
all Elon Musk did for him after his
business going down by his 70%
him leading the cause for Doge and in a
way that judges after judges have said
basically was an unconstitutional way
since he was never appointed and
confirmed as required by the
appointments clause of the constitution
he sent in Doge employees to all sorts
of agencies violating all sorts of laws
the lawsuits around that are just
starting we may likely see class action
lawsuits regarding the privacy
violations that have happened the social
security the former head of the Social
Security administration says that maybe
checks are going to be slowed the
lawsuits against Elon Musk and all that
he did in those days of Doge are just
beginning so after all that Elon Musk
did to destroy our country in the name
of Donald Trump Donald Trump is already
writing him off and this week in an
interview he referred to Elon Musk in
the past tense the only question is do
you think that was the first time Elon
Musk heard as we know Trump likes to
fire people by social media posts and
now maybe in a press conference i
wouldn't be surprised if that's how Elon
Musk heard trump says in the interview
quote "He was a tremendous help both in
the campaign and what he's done with
Doge he really helped the country saved
us a lot of money." All past tense
bye-bye Musk of course we know Mus
didn't actually save us money and he
himself they say his net worth went down
from about 400 billion to 300 billion so
his dealings with Trump in these about
95 days cost him $100
billion and his reputation which as they
say is priceless but Musk is not the
only tech oligarch who sat next to Trump
in that inauguration and thought by
sitting there they were insulated and
would get his protection well Meta and
Zuckerberg are finding out that donating
$1 million to Trump's inauguration
committee settling his the lawsuit that
Trump had against them for 15 million
basically another donation was not
enough for Trump to intervene in the FTC
lawsuit trying to break
up Instagram and Facebook it's an
antirust lawsuit basically saying that
they need to be separated because them
being combined is a violation of our
antirust laws trump could have
intervened he knows how to do this he
doesn't care about laws and oversight
and agencies and who is in charge when
he wants to do something he does
something and he did not lift a finger
for Zuckerberg that lawsuit is in trial
right now, let's talk about the Google CEO his
support also has backfired he sat there
as well at the inauguration and also
donated a million dollars to Trump's
inauguration committee but has the Trump
Department of Justice helped Google and
its own antirust lawsuit the answer is a
resounding no this is despite the fact
that the Department of Justice knows how
to intervene in cases see in point the
Eric Adams prosecution they were able to
not only get that case dismissed they
managed to have a whole bunch of
prosecutors resign and protest but when
it comes to Google nothing is done right
now the court will be deciding whether
or not Google has to spin off its Chrome
browser so if Google was hoping that
donating money and cozying up to Trump
would help them well it sure didn't in
fact their stock price is down 17% since
Trump took office because yes the
tariffs are going to be hurting them the
tariffs are going to be hurting them and
Trump didn't lift a finger trying to
help them in their antitrust lawsuit
amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos well he had
a lot to lose and he sure lost a lot in
the form of money and dignity especially
when it came to the Washington Post it
had a stellar reputation before he
decided to cozy up to Trump declined to
endorse anybody leading up to the
election despite the fact it was very
clear that Trump was going to do all the
things he's done to try to dismantle our
democracy he interfered with the
editorial board with editorials with
their editorial comics and again and
again the Washington Post once the
preeminent newspaper the ones who broke
Watergate losing subscribers losing
credibility losing the reputation
because he wanted to cozy up to Trump
and then his own personal reputation i
mean we just saw him with his Blue
Origin rocket ship putting up an all
female crew well the backlash around
that was so huge katie Perry herself is
trying to backtrack why she went on it
to begin with it was a disaster for all
involved and this is the direct result
of what Jeff Bezos did thinking that
because he had the money that he
deserved a place at the inauguration and
that because he was donating to what
Trump wanted him to donate or he was
deciding the editorial boards to do it
that somehow that he should be able to
do this his money gave him somehow the
right to have more of a say in this
country than us well the American people
we're the ones who buy things we're the
ones who decide whether or not to go to
Katy Perry's concert or not they
responded and they responded very
vocally jeff Bezos is seeing what
happens to your reputation with your
companies when you cozy up to Trump and
then let's just talk about the dollars
because Amazon is being hit the hardest
with Trump's tariffs because the vast
majority of goods that are sold on
Amazon yes are manufactured in China and
China is the one country that Trump is
still has his targets on it's still very
chaotic we have no idea where this is
going to go this is very bad for
Amazon's business so for all his trying
to cozy up for Trump hugely backfired
because of course Trump is not throwing
him a bone and trying to protect him he
just takes takes takes the rest of us
know that's what Trump is like but for
whatever reason Jeff Bezos thought he
was going to cozy up to Trump and
somehow he wasn't going to get affected
but he is getting affected both within
the money and certainly in the
reputation reporting is that all these
tech oligarchs are no longer visiting
Mara Lago asking for favors because they
have seen what has been happening to all
the other oligarchs who had already come
and already donated and expected
something from this man who never has
loyalty to anybody but himself if you
follow the first Trump term you would
see all of his underlings getting
prosecuted trump really not doing
anything about it i mean even the
January 6 he could have pardoned them
when he left office the first time he
chose not to he only did it when he
thought he might need them again when he
went office the second time this is how
Trump functions but these oligarchs
thought they were going to be different
and they're not different and the
American people are answering they're
answering with how they decide to buy
things target is seeing it with their
willingness to do away with this their
DEI initiative the the buyout the
boycotting buyout against Target is
hurting them immensely because people
are paying attention and they don't want
to support companies that are willing to
go along with Trump's hateful policies
and that has and these even these rich
men as rich as they are cannot be
insulated from this backfire

[admin]

Trump Refers to Elon Musk in Past Tense. This is a fun new development.
by Malcolm Ferguson
The New Republican
April 24, 2025/9:24 a.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/194335/tru ... past-tense


Donald Trump offers his hand to Elon Musk back stage during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

And just like that, the bromance is over. Elon Musk is preparing to step away from DOGE in May, and President Trump seems to be looking forward to being rid of his “special employee.” The president is already referring to the billionaire DOGE head in the past tense, even with a month left on his tenure.

“He was a tremendous help, both in the campaign and in what he’s done with DOGE,” Trump said at a press conference from the Oval Office Wednesday evening. “He was treated very unfairly by the—I guess you call it the public.… They took it out on Tesla.… He really helped the country. Saved us a lot of money.… He was always gonna ease out.”

Aaron Rupar
@atrupar

"He was a tremendous help" -- Trump speaks in the past tense about Elon Musk

3:54 PM · Apr 23, 2025

Musk has cast himself as this sacrificial lamb, taking on both so much responsibility with DOGE and so much hate and nastiness from the public that he simply cannot go on. And while the hate has been real—Tesla stocks have plummeted as Musk’s E.V. car company took a massive reputational hit—the damage Musk has already done to our federal government may be here long after he’s gone.

[admin]

[admin]

Read the Full Transcript of Donald Trump’s ‘100 Days’ Interview With TIME
by TIME Staff
Apr 25, 2025 4:01 AM MT
https://time.com/7280114/donald-trump-2 ... ranscript/


President Donald Trump at the White House on April 22, 2025, in front of a painting depicting the aftermath of the assassination attempt last July in Butler, Pa.Martin Schoeller for TIME

President Donald Trump sat down for an interview with TIME at the White House on April 22.

Over the course of the interview, Trump discussed a wide range of issues, including his trade war and the economy, immigration, presidential power, and the situations in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the interview conducted by TIME Senior Political Correspondent Eric Cortellessa and Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs. Click here to read our fact check.

TIME: Obviously, a lot has happened. We want to have a conversation about what your first 100 days have looked like in office. And we want to try to touch on as many different points as we can.

Trump: There’s a lot, right? A lot of things happening.

You know better than anyone that the President of the United States is the most powerful person in the world. At the same time, it seems like you are expanding the power of the presidency. Why do you think you need more power?

Well, I don't feel I'm expanding it. I think I'm using it as it was meant to be used. I feel that we've had a very successful presidency in 100 days. We've had people writing it was the best first month and best second month, and really the best third month. But that you won't know about for a little while, because it takes a little time in transition. You know, we're resetting a table. We were losing $2 trillion a year on trade, and you can't do that. I mean, at some point somebody has to come along and stop it, because it's not sustainable. We were carrying other countries on our back with, you know, with trade numbers, with horrible numbers, and we've changed it. You see the market fluctuates quite a bit. Today, it's up 1,000 or 1,200 points. It goes up and down, but that will steady out, and we're taking in tremendous amounts of money. We have, as you know, already, 25% on cars, 25% on steel and aluminum—

Mr. President, I think what we’re driving at is that you've taken congressional authority on trade and appropriations. You fired the heads of independent agencies. You're challenging the courts right now, as you know. You're using the levers of government to weaken private institutions like law firms and universities. Isn't this seizing power away from institutions and concentrating them inside the presidency?

No, I think that what I'm doing is exactly what I've campaigned on. If you look at what I campaigned on, for instance, you can talk about removing people from the country. We have to do it because Biden allowed people to come in through his open border crazy, insanity. He allowed people to come into our country that we can't have in our country. Many criminals—they emptied their prisons, many countries, almost every country, but not a complete emptying, but some countries a complete emptying of their prison system. But you look all over the world, and I'm not just talking about South America, we're talking about all over the world. People have been led into our country that are very dangerous. If you were walking down the street, and if you happen to be near one of these people, they could, they would kill you, and they wouldn't even think about it. And we can't have that in our country.

So you're not concentrating more power in the presidency?

I don't think so. I think I'm using it properly, and I'm also using it as per my election. You know, everything that I'm doing—this is what I talked about doing. I said that I'm going to move the criminals out. I saw what was happening early on when I heard that he had open borders, when I, because it was a hard thing to believe. I built hundreds of miles of wall, and then he didn't want to, and we had another, an extra hundred miles that I could have put up because I ordered it as extra. I completed the wall, what I was doing, but we have, I wanted to build additional because it was working so well. An extension. And he didn't want to do that. And when he said he wasn't going to do that, I said, “Well, he must want open borders.” There were sections that were being built. And he stopped to work on it, and I said, this guy actually wants to have open borders. That's going to be a tragedy for our country. That's going to mean that other countries will release into our country some very rough people.

We’d love to come back to immigration but maybe start with the economy. Obviously an issue you campaigned on as well. You promised that you would immediately bring down prices and usher in a golden age of America. The prices of gas and eggs have gone down, but the cost of other things remain—

The prices of groceries have gone down. The only price that hasn't gone down is the price of energy. The cost of energy, I'm sorry, well, energy has gone down, excuse me. Let me change that—is the interest rates. And interest rates have essentially stayed the same. But almost every other thing, I mean, you take a look at what's going on, and this is, we're taking in billions of dollars of tariffs, by the way. And just to go back to the past, I took in hundreds of billions of dollars of tariffs from China, and then when COVID came, I couldn't institute the full program, but I took in hundreds of billions, and we had no inflation.

But let’s focus on what is happening right now because—

We took in billions of dollars, we had no inflation. Now, if you take a look, the price of groceries are down. The price of energy is down.

Inflation remains pretty much the same. And the IMF is saying it’s going to go up.

No, Eric, you can't say what they think, because so far what I thought is right. I've been right about—

401ks are down. The Atlanta Fed says our economy is contracting -2.2% during quarter one.

Well, they may have said that, but so far, they've been, I mean, I've been right. If you look at all of the years that I've been doing this, I've been right on things. You're gonna—you're gonna have the wealthiest country we've ever had, and you're gonna have an explosion upward in the not-too-distant future. You know, I've been here now for three months, and I inherited eggs, I inherited groceries, I inherited energy. It was all going through the roof. And we had the highest inflation we've ever had as a country, or very close to it. And I believe it was the highest ever. Somebody said it's the highest in only 48 years. That's a lot, too, but I believe we had the highest inflation we've ever had. I've been here now for three months. And three months, we are taking in billions and billions of dollars from other countries that we never took in before. And that's just the start.

Well let’s talk about the tariffs. You want companies to build and make goods here in America.

Not in all cases. There are some products I really don't want to make here.

Like t-shirts?

I can’t–I can give you a list because I actually have a list, but if you want, I could give it to you.

Well, I mean, the question is, how can CEOs make long-term plans and investments if our tariff policy can change from day to day and still remains so uncertain?

How can they make long-term investments? I'll turn it around. How can they make long-term investments if our country is losing $2 trillion a year on trade?

Will you consider giving exemptions—

No wait, just so you understand. How can we sustain and how is it sustainable that our country lost almost $2 trillion on trade in Biden years, in this last year. That's not—when you talk about a company. I had the head of Walmart yesterday, right in that seat. I had the head of Walmart. I had the head of Home Depot and the head of Target in my office. And I'll tell you what they think, they think what I'm doing is exactly right.

Well, the CEOs of small businesses are saying they may not be able to last another two months with the current regime in place. Will you consider giving small businesses an exemption similar to what you've given to Big Tech?

I’d have to look at the individual business.

Would you consider it?

Our country is going to be very rich in not a long period of time. I've been doing this for three months, and if you look at the kind of numbers that we're taking in and the jobs, and if you look at, more importantly, the companies, the chip companies, the car companies, the Apple. $500 billion. Apple is investing $500 billion in building plants. They never invested in this country.

Small businesses are worried that you’re treating the Apples of the world better than you’re treating them.

No, I’m treating small businesses—small businesses will be a bigger beneficiary of what I'm doing than than the large businesses. But everybody's going to benefit.

If we still have high tariffs, whether it's 20% or 30% or 50%, on foreign imports a year from now, will you consider that a victory?

Total victory.

Why so?

Because the country will be making a fortune. Look, that's what China did to us. They charge us 100%. If you look at India—India charges 100-150%. If you look at Brazil, if you look at many, many countries, they charge—that's how they survive. That's how they got rich. Now, zero would be easy. Oh, zero would be easy, but zero, you wouldn't have any companies coming in. They're coming in because they don't want to pay the tariffs. Remember this, there are no tariffs, if they make their product here. There are no tariffs, if they make their product here. There are no tariffs. This is a tremendous success. You just don't know it yet, but this is a tremendous success what’s happening. We're taking in billions and billions of dollars, money that we never took in before. We're also, very importantly, because of that, because of the money we're taking in, those companies are going to come back and they're going to make their product here. They're going to go back into North Carolina and start making furniture again. They've already started. In Mexico, many car plants that were under construction have stopped. They're all coming into this country. We're gonna, you're gonna see car plants going at a level that you've never seen before.

Your trade adviser–

I'm also—chips. Look at Jensen.

Nvidia.

He's gonna spend $500 billion. Look at Mr. Wei from Taiwan.

Do you trust them when they say that? These businessmen who say, Oh, I'm gonna spend $500 billion.

Oh yeah. Well, I’ll tell you why I trust them. First of all, I think they’re trustworthy people. But more importantly, they have no choice, because they won't be able to pay the tariffs if they don't do it. The tariffs are bringing in the business. Remember, with all the, you know, questions you're asking about tariffs, there are no tariffs when you make your product here.

Sure, no, I understand, Mr. President—

Zero.

Your trade adviser, Peter Navarro, says 90 deals in 90 days is possible. We're now 13 days into the point from when you lifted the reciprocal, the discounted reciprocal tariffs. There's zero deals so far. Why is that?

No, there’s many deals.

When are they going to be announced?

You have to understand, I'm dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We're meeting with China. We're doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I've made all the deals.

Not one has been announced yet. When are you going to announce them?

I’ve made 200 deals.

You’ve made 200 deals?

100%.

Can you share with whom?

Because the deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don't have to pay it. They don't have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. Some have been horrible to us. Some have been okay. Nobody's been great. Nobody's been great. Everybody took advantage of us. What I'm doing is I will, at a certain point in the not too distant future, I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries. These are countries—some of them have made hundreds of billions of dollars, and some of them have made just a lot of money. Very few of them have made nothing because the United States was being ripped off by every, almost every country in the world, in the entire world. So I will set a price, and when I set the price, and I will set it fairly according to the statistics, and according to everything else. For instance, do they have the VAT system in play? Do they charge us tariffs? How much are they charging us? How much have they been charging us? Many, many different factors, right. How are we being treated by that country? And then I will set a tariff. Are we paying for their military? You know, as an example, we have Korea. We pay billions of dollars for the military. Japan, billions for those and others. But that, I'm going to keep as a separate item, the paying of the military. Germany, we have 50,000 soldiers—

I’m just curious, why don’t you announce these deals that you’ve solidified?

I would say, over the next three to four weeks, and we're finished, by the way.

You’re finished?

We’ll be finished.

Oh, you will be finished in three to four weeks.

I’ll be finished. Now, some countries may come back and ask for an adjustment, and I'll consider that, but I'll basically be, with great knowledge, setting—ready? We're a department store, a giant department store, the biggest department store in history. Everybody wants to come in and take from us. They're going to come in and they're going to pay a price for taking our treasure, for taking our jobs, for doing all of these things. But what I'm doing with the tariffs is people are coming in, and they're building at levels you've never seen before. We have $7 trillion of new plants, factories and other things, investment coming into the United States. And if you look back at past presidents, nobody was anywhere near that. And this is in three months.

Will you call President Xi if he doesn’t call you?

No.

You won’t?

Nope.

Has he called you yet?

Yep.

When did he call you?

He's called. And I don't think that's a sign of weakness on his behalf.

But you would think it’s a sign of weakness if you called him?

I don’t–I just look—

Well, what did he say?

If people want to–well, we all want to make deals. But I am this giant store. It's a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I'll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.

This period of uncertainty will be over in three to four weeks?

I don’t think there’s any uncertainty there. The only thing—they have an option. They don't have to shop here. They can go someplace else, but there aren't too many places they can go. You understand what I mean though?

Sure. Your Treasury Secretary says this situation with China is unsustainable.

Oh I agree. You mean the way it is now?

Yes.

Or the way it was before I got here?

The current moment, too, he believes is unsustainable.

Well, no, they won’t do any business here, because at 145% it's going to be very rare that you see business.

But your conversations with Xi have made you feel like we’re moving towards a more productive—

Oh, there’s a number at which they will feel comfortable. Yeah. But you can’t let them make a trillion dollars from us. You can’t let them make $750 billion. See, that’s really what’s not sustainable when China makes a trillion dollars, or a trillion one, when we have almost $2 trillion worth of, I call it loss. Some people don't, but a lot of it’s loss. I say, when you have a trade deficit of $2 trillion I consider that loss.

Mr. President, there was a period of time on April 9 when the bond market was under extreme stress and there was a risk of a financial crisis far beyond what the plummeting stock market suggested.

I wasn’t worried.

What did your advisers tell you, though? You were in the Oval Office with Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick. What did they tell you to convince you to lift the reciprocal tariffs for the 90-day pause?

They didn’t tell me. I did that.

What made you decide?

It wasn’t for that reason.

It wasn’t for the bond market?

No, it wasn’t for that reason. I'm doing that until we come up with the numbers that I want to come up with. I've met with a lot of countries. I've talked on the telephone. I don’t even want them to come in.

You said the bond market was getting the yips.

The bond market was getting the yips, but I wasn’t. Because I know what we have. I know what we have, but I also know we won't have it for long if we allowed four more years of the gross incompetence. This thing was just running—it was running as a free spirit. This was—this was the most incompetent president in history.

In our interview last year, Mr. President, you committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders.

I said what?

You committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders—

Yeah.

When you and I spoke last April. Are you still committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders?

Sure, I believe in the court system.

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You haven't done so. Aren’t you disobeying the Supreme Court?

Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different.

Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?

I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you're saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don't make that decision.

Have you asked President Bukele to return him?

I haven’t, uh, he said he wouldn’t.

Did you ask him?

But I haven’t asked him positively, but he said he wouldn’t.

But if you haven't asked him, then how are you facilitating his release?

Well, because I haven't been asked to ask him by my attorneys. Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.

Do you believe he deserves his day in court?

I believe that they made him look like a saint, and then we found out about him. He wasn't a saint. He was MS-13. He was a wife beater and he had a lot of things that were very bad, you know, very, very bad. When I first heard of the situation, I was not happy, and then I found out that he was a person who was an MS-13 member. And in fact, he had a tattooed right on his—I'm sure you saw that—he had it tattooed right on his knuckles: MS-13. No, I believe he's a man who has got quite a past. This is no longer just a nice, wonderful man from Maryland, which people, which the fake news had me and other people for a period of time believing. Now, nobody believes that. And I think this is a very bad—I think this is another men-women’s sports thing for the Democrats.

Maybe, but Mr. President, whatever he might have done, whoever he might be affiliated with, doesn’t he deserve his day in court? Nazi saboteurs who came on our shores at Montauk during World War II had their day in court. Al Qaeda terrorists had their day in court.

I really give that to my lawyers to determine, that’s why I have them. That’s not my determination. It's something that, frankly, bringing him back and retrying him wouldn't bother me, but I leave that up to my lawyer. You could bring him back and retry him—

That’s exactly right. You could fix this simply by bringing him back and going through the legal process—

But I leave that decision to the lawyers. At this moment, they just don’t want to do that. They say we’re in total compliance with the Supreme Court.

What about the lower courts? Are you committed to complying with lower courts?

Sure. All courts.

One more question on this, sir. You took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. The Constitution says the Supreme Court is the ultimate authority once they issue a ruling. If you defy them, aren't you violating your oath?

I'm not defying the Supreme Court. I never defy the Supreme Court. I wouldn't do that. I'm a big believer in the Supreme Court, and have a lot of respect for the Justices.

You asked President Bukele of El Salvador to build out the CECOT prison to house American citizens. You said you would love to send “homegrown criminals” there—

No, I didn’t say that. I said if it were permissible according to the law, I would like to do that, yes.

Well, do you intend to send American citizens to foreign prisons?

I would love to do that if it were permissible by law. We're looking into that. When I have a person, these would be extreme cases. When I have a person that is a 28-time in and out person that goes out and tries to kill people every time he or she is out, I would have no problem with doing that whatsoever. We're talking about career criminals that are horrible people that we house and we have to take care of for 50 years while they suffer because they killed people. If you ask me whether or not I would do that, I would, but totally, and I think you have to leave this part of the sentence totally subject to it being allowed under law. And people are looking to see if it would be allowed under law. We have crime rates under Biden that went through the roof, and we have to bring those rates down. And unfortunately, those rates have been added to by the illegal immigrants that he allowed into the country.

Which Americans would you do that to?

I would do that to people that hit old ladies over the head with a baseball bat, for people that grab their bicycle? You saw that one where they dragged an old woman along the street on a motorcycle, a bicycle, a motorcycle, I think. People that push people into subway trains just before the train is ready to stop. You saw that? The man barely lived. Think of it. And a guy comes up to him, and from behind he pushes him. That's a serious, serious thing. People that shoot people in the back, people that are executioners. Yeah, I would have no trouble with that but subject to it being allowed by law.

Do you really want there to be gulags for American citizens in foreign countries?

Gulag? You define gulag.

Prisons like in the Soviet Union—

Look, I see where you’re coming from, from the moment this interview started, and it's fine, I don't mind. I've answered every question that can be answered by mankind or womankind, and I see where you're coming from. Rapid fire. You can't even wait for me to give you the answer. You should let me give you that final answer.

Go ahead, sir.

No, no, I’m not—I’m just saying, I see where you’re coming from, and you’re just so wrong. You’re so wrong. These are people that have been in jail for 20 times. They're career criminals. Do I have a problem with a career criminal that hits people with baseball bats when they're not looking, that pushes people into subways, that shoots people in the face or in the back? I have absolutely no problem with doing that, if the law allows it to be done and we're looking at it. And one of the reasons I like it is because it would be much less expensive than our prison system, and I think it would actually be a greater deterrent.

Sir, on that note, how much are we paying President Bukele for holding those prisoners?

I don’t know. I could get you the information, but we’re paying less than we would normally.

Did you personally approve those payments?

No, I didn’t.

Many of the Jan. 6 prisoners you pardoned pleaded guilty to or were convicted of violent crimes as part of the capital attack. Days before you pardoned them, J.D. Vance said “of course” you wouldn't include those who committed violence. What changed?

What changed where?

At what moment did you decide to include all of the defendants, including the ones who committed violent offenses?

Because I've watched in Portland and I watched in Seattle, and I've watched in Minneapolis, Minnesota and other places. People do heinous acts, far more serious than what took place on Jan. 6. And nothing happened to these people. Nothing. And I said, What a double standard it is. And we were talking about a very small group of people that are in your definition, most of these people should have been let out a long time ago. There's never been a group of people, maybe with one exception, I won't even go into it, one exception as a group. But there's never been a group of people that's been treated so horribly as the J6 people. You know, when I say peacefully and patriotically, nobody mentions that. When I say go peacefully and patriotically, nobody ever mentions that. Nobody mentions the fact that the unselect committee of political scum, the unselect committee, horrible people, they destroyed all evidence, they burned it, they got rid of it, they destroyed it, and they deleted all evidence. And we went in looking for evidence, and they said, I'm sorry, we don't have it anymore. It's been destroyed. If I ever did that, it would be unthinkable what you guys, what you two guys, would be doing and writing, but, you know, and nobody wants to talk about it, and you won't write about it, and nobody writes about it. It’s unbelievable, right? But people get it. I mean, people get it. They get what I'm saying, and they obviously believe it, because I had a hell of an election.

You campaigned on it, and you won decisively.

No and everything I campaigned. If you think of, you know, the way you ask me these questions, like, it's so serious that we're moving people out of the country. I said during the election that I'm going to move them out of the country, and that's what we're doing.

Can you talk a little bit about the budget?

Yeah. And if we didn't do it, then you two would not be safe. I guarantee it.

Some Republicans are considering raising taxes on millionaires in the package you're planning to pass that would extend your 2017 tax cuts. Do you support that idea?

Well, I’ll tell ya, I certainly don’t mind having a tax increase, and the only reason I wouldn't support it is because I saw Bush where they said, where he said “Read my lips” and he lost an election. He would have lost it anyway, but he lost an election. He got beat up pretty good. I would be honored to pay more, but I don't want to be in a position where we lose an election because I was generous, but me, as a rich person, would not mind paying and you know, we're talking about very little. We're talking about one point. It doesn't make that much difference, and yet, I could just see somebody trying to bring that up as a subject, and, you know, say, “Oh, he raised taxes.” Well, I wouldn't be, really, you know, in the true sense, I wouldn't. I'd be raising them on wealthy to take care of middle class. And that's—I love, that. I actually love the concept, but I don't want it to be used against me politically, because I've seen people lose elections for less, especially with the fake news.

Do you think it would help cover the cost that would be lost from getting rid of taxes on tips and some of these other proposals?

Well, that would be able to take it. See, that would be able to do it, but I would not mind personally paying more. But the concept is something that may not be acceptable to the public.

Experts estimate that the House Republican budget will result in more than $800 billion in losses to Medicaid over the next 10 years. Do you support that?

Due to what?

The House Republican budget that would cut roughly $800 billion from Medicaid.

I don’t think they’re going to cut $800 billion. They’re going to look at waste, fraud, and abuse.

So would you veto a bill if it had cuts to Medicaid?

If it was an increase, if we were deducting something from—I would, but it's waste, it's fraud and abuse is what we're looking for. And nobody minds that.

If Republicans send you a bill that cuts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, you commit to vetoing it?

If it cuts it, I would not approve.

So you would veto that?

I would veto it, yeah. But they’re not going to do that.

Would you support a ban on congressional stock trading?

Well, I watched Nancy Pelosi get rich through insider information, and I would be okay with it. If they send that to me, I would do it.

You'll sign it?

Absolutely.

The FTC is currently trying Meta for maintaining an illegal monopoly by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp. Do you think more companies need to be broken up?

It depends on the company, depends on the market, depends on what the company does. But I think that a lot of companies certainly have been looked at during the Obama and during the Biden regime certainly.

Do you think corporate monopolies have hurt average Americans?

In some cases, yeah. In some cases, not.

I’d like to ask you some questions about DOGE. You've put Elon Musk in charge of this cost-cutting operation. The question is, why is the government, through DOGE, amassing the sensitive personal information about everyday Americans, which was previously stored across different agencies, all in one place?

DOGE has been a very big success. We found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse. Billions of dollars being given to politicians, single politicians based on the environment. It's a scam. It's illegal, in my opinion, so much of the stuff that we found, but I think DOGE has been a big success from that standpoint.

[An aide interrupts the interview for President Trump to take a phone call from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi]

So if we can just come back to the question before the call, which is the database that DOGE is putting together Americans’ information. Why are they doing that?

Because we want to find waste, fraud, and abuse, and want to cut our costs.

Some officials have described what DOGE is doing is creating a central kind of “God-mode” view into government databases that has been, up until now, intentionally kept separate. The idea, they say, is to basically use this information to advance your policy goals. Is this an accurate characterization?

No, that’s inaccurate, as you know. I mean, it’s a crazy question. We just want to find fraud, abuse. We want to find who's on the rolls that shouldn't be, who's getting paid every month by the government that shouldn't be paid. Do these people exist? In many cases, they don't, in some cases, even worse, they do. They've been getting money, and they shouldn't be.

What does your administration plan to do with information obtained by the IRS and other agencies as part of the DOGE effort?

Well, I don’t know about the IRS, because, as you know, I’m not involved in it, but we’ve found tremendous waste, fraud and abuse. Tremendous.

Will any of it be used to track down and round up migrants as part of the deportation operation?

Not that I know of, no.

Let's talk about the cuts. As you know, Mr. President, a lot of American companies do business with the government. The DOGE cuts aren't just affecting government employees. They're also affecting American businesses that provide goods and services to the federal government. There were nearly 280,000 layoffs in March across virtually every sector. Why is it better for these people to be out of jobs?

Because we have to have an efficient country. And when the country gets down to bare knuckles, you're going to see, you're going to see something the likes of which this world has never seen before. We're going to make our country strong, powerful, and very rich again. Right now, our country is not sustainable. We're being ripped off by everybody in the world, other countries, other people, other militaries, are ripping us off. We're protecting countries for no money or for very minimal money, and that wasn't supposed to happen. We're not supposed to be protecting everybody. We're supposed to be, number one, taking care of ourself, and number two, helping people when we can, helping outside people and outside countries where we can. But we've been ripped off by levels that you've never seen. European Union sounds nice, but they've been very tough. $300 billion loss. China—hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. And I can go through a list, but I don't want to, because there are many friendly countries, our friendly countries, in many cases, are worse than our enemies. And it's not a sustainable model. It's not a sustainable possibility even, that a country can go through that and Biden let it get to a level that is seriously dangerous.

Well, many Americans certainly agree with you that they want to get rid of government fraud, waste, and abuse. They want to shrink the federal—

It’s not only government. It’s deals. It's horrible deals that have been made with other countries. As an example, China has been ripping us off for many years, until I came along. I raised, I upped tariffs on China, hundreds of billions of dollars. We've done hundreds of billions, hundreds.

But domestically, for instance, your administration blocked grants for the National Institutes of Health that funded research into infectious diseases, cancers, Alzheimer's—

Well maybe we didn't think they were right. You know, I mean, you look at the people, look at the money that was given away by others. We didn't get anything out of it.

Well what do you tell the families and people who are suffering from those diseases?

We're taking care of—we're spending a lot. I spent 58—we spent, let's see, I think $58 billion in the first term. We were spending tremendous amounts of money, and I am now, but they have to be a little bit careful. A lot of the money like Stacey Abrams got $2 billion on the environment. They had $100 in the account and she got $2 billion just before these people left—and had to do with something that she knows nothing about.

NIH is the world’s largest funder of cancer research—

Shouldn’t they be asking those questions? I could give you a list of abuse and waste and fraud, and you don't have any interest in hearing it. I mean, I just see by these questions, just wondering, with all of the bad things that have happened, with all of the things we found, you have no interest in those things. You only have an interest. So what about this? What about that? Our country is going to be strong again because of what we're doing, and this is not a sustainable model, what we're looking at. And I think very importantly, I had a great election. Won all seven swing states, won millions and millions of votes. Won millions of votes. They say it was the most consequential election in 129 years. I don't know if that's right, but it was certainly a big win, and that's despite cheating that took place, by the way, because there was plenty of cheating that took place.

In ‘24?

‘24, yeah. ‘20, of course. But ‘24 also, they tried. They tried that. They did their best. It's the only thing they're good at. But we're gonna have a great country again. Just remember, every single question you're asking, I campaigned on it. I campaigned on all the things you're talking about, all the things you're asking about, and openly campaigned. And we're given credit, even by radical left lunatics. We are given credit for that. We're given credit for saying, This is what I'm going to do. If you look at your questions, that's what I campaigned on.

Following that call, I'd love to hear a little bit about the role that you're playing on the world stage. And I think that you campaigned on that too.

It’s interesting because you see the relationship. I didn't want to wait, you know, have you leave the room, but you see the relationship. I have that relationship with many leaders. If I can stop losing 3,000 human beings a week on average, with Russia, Ukraine, it's only because of me, nobody else could have stopped it. I think we're going to do that, by the way. I think that'll be done. I think that we're going to make a deal with Iran. I think we're going to make a deal with Iran. Nobody else could do that.

You said you would end the war in Ukraine on Day One.

Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point, and you know, it gets, of course, by the fake news [unintelligible]. Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended.

Well what’s taking so long? When do you think it will be ended?

Well, I don’t think it’s long. I mean, look, I got here three months ago. This war has been going on for three years. It's a war that would have never happened if I was president. It's Biden's war. It’s not my war. I have nothing to do with it. I would have never had this war. This war would have never happened. Putin would have never done it. This war would have never happened. Oct. 6 would have never happened. Oct. 7 would have never happened. Would have never happened. Ever. You then say, what’s taking so long? Do you hear this, Steve? The war has been raging for three years. I just got here, and you say, what's taken so long?

Do you think peace is still possible if Putin is President?

I think peace is possible. You say if Putin is still president?

Yeah, if Putin is President. Can there be peace if Putin is President of Russia?

I think with me as president, there's—possible, if very probable. If somebody else is president, no chance.

If Putin can make peace?

Yeah, I think Putin will. I think Putin would rather do it a different way. I think he’d rather go and take the whole thing. And I think that because of me, I believe I'm the only one that can get this thing negotiated. And I think we’re a long way. We've had very good talks, and we're getting very close to a deal. And I don't believe anybody else could have made that deal.

Do you believe peace is possible if Zelensky is still President of Ukraine?

Yeah, I do. He is president now and I think we’re going to make a deal.

Should Ukraine give up any hope of ever joining NATO?

I don’t think they’ll ever be able to join NATO. I think that's been—from day one, I think that's been, that's I think what caused the war to start was when they started talking about joining NATO. If that weren't brought up, there would have been a much better chance that it wouldn’t have started.

Should Crimea go to the Russians? Should they get to keep Crimea?

Well, Crimea went to the Russians. It was handed to them by Barack Hussein Obama, and not by me. With that being said, will they be able to get it back? They've had their Russians. They've had their submarines there for long before any period that we're talking about, for many years. The people speak largely Russian in Crimea. But this was given by Obama. This wasn't given by Trump. Would it have been taken from me like it was taken from Obama? No, it wouldn't have happened. Crimea, if I were president, it would not have been taken.

Would it be acceptable to you in a deal if Crimea and the four other regions that Russia has taken from Ukraine would be folded into Russia under a final accommodation?

If Crimea will stay with Russia—we have to only talk about Crimea because that's the one that always gets mentioned. Crimea will stay with Russia. And Zelensky understands that, and everybody understands that it's been with them for a long time. It's been with them long before Trump came along. Again, this is Obama's war. This is a war that should have never happened. I call it the war that should have never happened.

You’ve talked about improving relations with Moscow. Are you pursuing negotiations with them on issues other than Ukraine?

No—

Like nuclear weapons stockpiles or testing?

But if a deal has happened, I can see us doing business with Ukraine and with Russia as a country.

You've talked about acquiring Greenland, taking control of the Panama Canal, making Canada the 51st state. Maybe you're trolling a little bit on that one. I don't know.

Actually, no, I’m not.

Well, do you want to grow the American empire?

Well, it depends as an empire, it wasn't, these are not things that we had before, so I'd view it a little bit differently if we had the right opportunity. Yeah, I think Greenland would be very well off if they I think it's important for us for national security and even international security. I think Canada, what you said that, “Well, that one, I might be trolling.” But I'm really not trolling. Canada is an interesting case. We lose $200 to $250 billion a year supporting Canada. And I asked a man who I called Governor Trudeau. I said, ”Why? Why do you think we're losing so much money supporting you? Do you think that's right? Do you think that's appropriate for another country to make it possible, for a country to sustain and he was unable to give me an answer, but it costs us over $200 billion a year to take care of Canada?” We’re taking care of their military. We're taking care of every aspect of their lives, and we don't need them to make cars for us. In fact, we don't want them to make cars for us. We want to make our own cars. We don't need their lumber. We don't need their energy. We don't need anything from Canada. And I say the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state.

Steven Cheung: We’re coming up on time, about 10 minutes.

Okay, we'll move quickly then. Last note: Do you want to be remembered as a president who expanded American territory?

Wouldn’t mind.

One more question on the cuts, sir. You've made cuts to homeland security, cyber defenses, the Nuclear Security Administration, your FBI chief is pushing to shift the bureau from domestic intelligence to criminal investigation. These are programs that were set up after September 11 to prevent terrorist attacks. Are you worried that this could be making America more vulnerable to an attack?

No. America will be much stronger.

If we are attacked, do you risk being blamed for letting down our defenses?

What does that mean?

If we are subject to an attack, do you risk being blamed because of these cuts?

I think I'll be blamed no matter what. I think if I make the country unbelievably successful, which it's not now, we owe $36 trillion right? It's, you know, when you think about it, a lot of money, a lot of money, but, but no, I think I'll be, I'll be blamed whether it's successful or not. I'm used to it.

You may be right about that. UNICEF says that more than 300 children have been killed and more than 600 have been wounded since the ceasefire in Gaza broke down. Who is to blame for those deaths?

I would say that the blame for that is Biden more than anybody else, because I had, as you know, Iran was broke, and he allowed them to become rich—

More than Hamas?

There was no money for Hamas. There was no money for Hezbollah. There was no money. Iran was broke under Trump, and you know that, he knows that, broke. They had no money, and they told Hamas, we're not giving you any money. When Biden came and he took off all the sanctions, he let China and everybody else buy all the oil, Iran developed $300 billion in cash over a four year period. They started funding terror again, including Hamas. Hamas was out of business. Hezbollah was out of business. Iran had no money under me. I blame the Biden administration, because they allowed Iran to get back into the game without working a deal.

You’ve begun direct talks with Iran. Are you open to meeting with Iran’s President or Supreme Leader?

Sure.

You reportedly stopped Israel from attacking Iran's nuclear sites.

That's not right.

It’s not right?

No, it’s not right. I didn’t stop them. But I didn't make it comfortable for them, because I think we can make a deal without the attack. I hope we can. It's possible we'll have to attack because Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. But I didn't make it comfortable for them, but I didn't say no. Ultimately I was going to leave that choice to them, but I said I would much prefer a deal than bombs being dropped.

Are you worried Netanyahu will drag you into a war?

No.

Let’s talk about some of the issues with universities—

By the way, he may go into a war. But we’re not getting dragged in.

The U.S. will stay out of it if Israel goes into it?

No, I didn’t say that. You asked if he’d drag me in, like I’d go in unwillingly. No, I may go in very willingly if we can't get a deal. If we don't make a deal, I'll be leading the pack.

You're planning your first major foreign trip for your second term to the Middle East next month. What are the last hurdles for Saudi Israeli normalization?

Well, what I want, and the reason I'm doing it, is because Saudi Arabia, I happen to like the people very much, and the Crown Prince and the King—I like all of them, but they've agreed to invest a trillion dollars in our economy. $1 trillion. I'm then going to Qatar, and I'm then going to UAE, and then I'm coming back, and then we're making another. I think our foreign policy has been incredible, and it was before, and it is now. You sort of got a little glimpse of it.

Are you closer to a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal than you were before?

I have very good relationships in the Middle East, and I think all over the world. I think it's—well, the smarter people understand. I have stopped—I have solved more problems in the world without asking for or getting credit.

This would be a big one.

Which one?

Saudi-Israeli normalization. You had the Abraham Accords, one of your, you know, historic accomplishments—

Unfortunately, they did nothing. They did nothing with the Abraham Accords. We had four countries in there, it was all set. We would have had it packed. Now we're going to start it again. The Abraham Accords is a tremendous success, but Biden just sat with it.

Can you build on it to get the Saudi-Israeli normalization deal?

Well, I tell you what: I think Saudi Arabia will go into the Abraham Accords.

Yeah?

Yeah, and by the way, I think it will be full very quickly.

It would be a big deal if that happens.

They did nothing. Oh, that will happen.

That would be a big accomplishment. The State Department said it has revoked 300 student visas, primarily because of their participation in campus protests. I want to ask you about this, Mr. President, because you emphasized free speech as a cornerstone of your campaign, you castigated efforts to suppress it. But now it looks like your administration is deporting hundreds of people for engaging in speech you don't like. Why?

Tremendous anti-semitism at every one of those rallies. Tremendous, and I agree with free speech, but not riots all over every college in America. Tremendous anti-semitism going on in this country.

Are you worried that you're intimidating students or chilling free speech on American campuses and elsewhere throughout the country?

No, they can protest, but they can't destroy the schools like they did with Columbia and others.

Let’s talk about one case. Are you familiar with the case of the Tufts University student Reynessa Ozturk, who was arrested by a group of plain clothes officers. Well, she has since been accused by your government of having ties to Hamas. They have not revealed any evidence. Would you direct your Department of Justice to disclose the evidence that she is connected to Hamas?

I would have no trouble with it, no. I’ll look into it, but I’m not aware of the particular event.

You were harshly critical of what you called the weaponization of the Justice System under Biden. You recently signed memos—

Well, sure, but you wouldn’t be—if this were Biden, well, first of all, he wouldn't do an interview because he was grossly incompetent.

We spoke to him last year, Mr. President.

Huh?

We spoke to him a year ago.

How did he do?

You can read the interview yourself.

Not too good. I did read the interview. He didn't do well. He didn't do well at all. He didn't do well at anything. And he cut that interview off to being a matter of minutes, and you weren't asking him questions like you're asking me.

Well, we appreciate that you are able and willing to answer these questions. It says something about you, Mr. President.

I am indeed. I've been answering them for years and I’ve been getting elected by bigger and bigger numbers all the time, but you didn't ask questions like this to Biden, because if you did, he would have crawled under this beautiful desk.

You recently signed memos calling for an investigation of Chris Krebs, a top cybersecurity official in your first term. Isn't that, though, what you accused Biden of doing to you?

I think Chris Krebs was a disgrace to our country. I think he was—I think he was terrible. By the way, I don't know him. I'm not—I don't think I ever met him. I probably saw him around. You know, I have people come in, like the other one. He came in, and he's on CNN all the time as like an expert on Trump. I have no idea who he is. And Chris Krebs the same thing. I guess he probably said he knows me, but I have no idea. And you know, oftentimes I'll have some people sitting right here, and behind them will be 10 or 15 people from their agency or their office, and they'll stand there, and then all of a sudden, I'll hear that like I'm, you know, they're all time experts in me. I know very little about Chris Krebs, but I think he was very deficient.

You've used threats and lawsuits, other forms of coercion—

Well, I’ve gotta be doing something right, because I've had a lot of law firms give me a lot of money.

Why is that an appropriate use of presidential power?

Well, I think it is because I think they felt that the election was rigged and stolen and they didn't want to be a part of it. You think they gave me $100 million each for nothing? You know these law firms gave me $100 million worth of work, et cetera, and other things. And do you think they gave me that because I'm a nice guy? I don't think so. They gave it to me because they knew what they did wrong and they didn't want to get involved with it. And that's okay. That's the way it works, unfortunately.

But that is an appropriate use of presidential power, you think?

Which is?

The threats and the EOs against the law firms.

They pay–these are the top firms in the world. These are the biggest, the best: Cravath, Milbank Tweed, Paul Weiss. These are the toughest, smartest firms. They don't, they don't do this unless there's a little problem or a big problem.

Isn't cutting a deal with them to remove a threat from you and to do pro-bono work for causes you like just a form of extortion?

I don’t think it was a threat. I think they did that because, I assume they did it because they felt they did something wrong. Otherwise they would have, we would have had a lawsuit.

You once said you weren't sure how the Civil Rights Act quote “worked out.” Would America be better without it?

I never heard of that. Nobody’s ever asked me that before.

You said it in a 2020 interview.

I don't remember having said that.

Cheung: We have time for one more question.

When we spoke to you a year ago, we asked whether you would challenge the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms. You said, and I quote, “I'm going to serve one term. I'm going to do a great job, and I'm going to leave.” What changed?

Well, I’m serving two terms now.

You meant one in addition to the one you already served.

You mean one more. I have more people begging me to run again, but I haven't looked at even the possibility. But the only thing that's changed is they think I'm doing a great job, and they like the way I'm running the country. They have a border, which you didn't ask about, that's virtually totally closed. The best border we've ever had.

Border crossings are down substantially.

No, I mean, it's, it's really, people can't believe it. They interviewed some farmers, really beautiful people that lived on the other side. They were being drawn into fights and horror shows, and now, I mean, it was dangerous. One of them got very badly injured, and by an illegal migrant that came across. And they asked him, How is it now? He said, ”Thank God for Donald Trump. It's the best it's ever been. And I've lived here for 50 years.”

You recently said you were “not joking” about seeking a third term and that there were methods to do it. What methods?

I'd rather not discuss that now, but as you know, there are some loopholes that have been discussed that are well known. But I don't believe in loopholes. I don't believe in using loopholes.

You wouldn’t run as vice president to J.D. Vance?

I don’t know anything about, what, look, all I can say is this, I am being inundated with requests. I'm doing a good job. Great physical exam, and unlike every other president, I took the cognitive test and I aced it 100% and I bet you guys couldn't get 100% on that exam. It's a tough exam. You know, when you get into the mid questions, it gets to be pretty tricky and pretty tough, and the last questions are very tough, and I aced it. And I guarantee, I'd give you, I'd make a big, beautiful bet that you guys couldn't ace it. But anyway. But look, it's good to have you, it’s a very nasty interview. They don’t ask any of the good things.

One final question. Mr. President, you were showing us the new paintings you have behind us. You put all these new portraits. One of them includes John Adams. John Adams said we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men. Do you agree with that?

John Adams said that? Where was the painting?

It’s right here.

We’re a government ruled by laws, not by men? Well, I think we're a government ruled by law, but you know, somebody has to administer the law. So therefore men, certainly, men and women, certainly play a role in it. I wouldn't agree with it 100%. We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you're going to have honest men like me.

Thank you, Mr. President. We appreciate your time.

Thank you.

[admin]

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69 ... g-v-trump/

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69 ... g-v-trump/

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

LIYANARA SANCHEZ, as next friend on behalf of FRENGEL REYES MOTA,
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

D.A.R.H.,* as next friend on behalf of ANDRY JOSE HERNANDEZ ROMERO,
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

M.Z.V.V., as next friend on behalf of J.A.B.V.,*
El Valle Detention Facility
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

M.Y.O.R., as next friend on behalf of M.A.O.R.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

M.M.A.A., as next friend on behalf of G.A.A.A.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

DORYS MENDOZA, as next friend on behalf of M.R.M.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

EYLAN SCHILMAN, as next friend on behalf of T.C.I.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

Petitioners–Plaintiffs,

J.G.G.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

G.F.F.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

J.G.O.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

W.G.H.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

J.A.V.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

Plaintiffs,

v.

DONALD J. TRUMP, in his official capacity as President of the United States, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. 20500;

PAMELA BONDI, Attorney General of the United States, in her official capacity, 950 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC, 20530;

KRISTI NOEM, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in her official capacity, 245 Murray Lane SW, Washington, DC 20528;

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, 245 Murray Lane SW, Washington, DC 20528;

MADISON SHEAHAN, Acting Director and Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in her official capacity, 500 12th Street, SW, Washington, DC 20536;

U.S. IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT, 500 12th St. SW, Washington, DC 20536;

MARCO RUBIO, Secretary of State, in his official capacity, 2201 C Street, NW, Washington, DC 20520;

U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT, 2201 C Street, NW, Washington, DC 20520;

PETE HEGSETH, Secretary of Defense, in his official capacity, 100 Defense Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301; and,

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, 100 Defense Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301;

Respondents–Defendants.

Case 1:25-cv-00766-JEB Document 101 Filed 04/24/25

AMENDED CLASS ACTION
PETITION FOR WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS AND
COMPLAINT

1. INTRODUCTION

***

Trump OUTMANEUVERED by Legal Move HE DIDN’T EXPECT
MeidasTouch
Apr 27, 2025

The ACLU, using 2 new Supreme Court decisions critical of the Trump Administration, have filed a new lawsuit with Judge Boesberg in DC arguing that the Trump Administration controls the prison in El Salvador for those they sent there, and should be ordered to “facilitate” the return of the more than 137 people sent there to provide them with Due Process. Michael Popok takes a look at the ACLU’s smart strategy of using the vehicle of a class action to push their new petitions and attacks on Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, and to keep the case in DC and not in Texas, Trump’s preferred venue.




Transcript

When you're the Trump administration and
you lose back-to-back major issues before
the United States Supreme Court and the
Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on your
Immigration and Deportation policy and
your abuse of the Alien Enemies Act to
do it when you lose both of those things
including a 1:00 a.m in the morning
Supreme Court decision last Saturday you
know it's going to have a ripple effect
on your other cases and the American
Civil Liberties Union has just filed a
new amended class action in the same
court in the District of Columbia with
Jeb Booseberg presiding and now they're
trying to make an argument I think it's
a good one that the 150 or so people who
were already deported without notice
without due process and sent by Donald
Trump in the middle of the night under
the Alien Enemies Act to seek the prison
in El Salvador they are uh we're
obligated to give them due process
rights and the and constitutional rights
and just as in the Obrego Garcia case
before Judge Zinnus just as the
government needs to facilitate the
release of Obrego Garcia from that
prison they need to do the exact same
thing about those poor 150 that also got
deported without notice now look I don't
know if they're criminals or not but
that is something for a judge to decide
on notice and due process and that's
what's missing and I love this angle
that the ACLU has taken with its new
filing they've said "Judge certify this
class." The class or the subclass is all
those people that went on those first
flights and landed in El
Salvador they need to be returned
justice Abrego Garcia needs to be
returned so certify the class and issue
an injunction that requires the court
essentially to do what the Supreme Court
has said they need to do in the Abbrego
Garcia case so it's taking the teachings
from two recent cases one in particular
by the United States Supreme Court and
applying it here that's what I love
about the American Civil Liberties Union
and its lawyers they're smart they've
been here on the Midas Touch Network
recently and they have an angle of
attack an angle of approach that they're
using with this judge Judge Boseberg
there's multiple courts including from
the Supreme Court the Fourth Circuit
Court of Appeals the DC Court of Appeals
Judge Boseberg Judge Zinnus have all
said the same thing in unison we don't
know whether those people are criminals
or not but we're not at war with
Venezuela and and they're not enemy
combatants and you can't summarily
remove them from the country and then
offload them and delegate them to your
friends in El Salvador to stick in a
prison without responsibility to our
constitution i'm Michael Popach we have
responsibility to our constitution we're
the foot soldiers for our constitution
and to protect it here on the Midas
Touch Network let me jump in to the new
reporting and let me untangle a couple
of these threads here judge Boseberg had
an original case it's this one we call
it the JG case it was filed over a month
ago when those planes started departing
in the middle of the night to El
Salvador after Donald Trump made a
proclamation that we're at war to with
with Venezuela that's news to the
Venezuelans it's news to Congress who
hasn't declared a war and it's news to
everybody else he just used that as an
excuse to go after purportedly a
criminal gang called uh which goes by
the name of Trend de Aragwa named after
the northern state in Venezuela and to
say those are enemy combatants we're at
war uh they don't get due process but
even at war even if the alien enemies
act is being properly invoked it's only
been invoked during wartime three times
first war first world war second world
war of 1812 that's
it and as other judges have said in this
matter migration immigration the fact
that this gang came to this country
doesn't make them enemy combatants and
in any event the Supreme Court settled
this issue six to three in this very
case this JG case in front of Judge
Boseberg when they said um that uh
people that are removed have the right
through a writ of habius corpus to
petition the government and are entitled
to due process and notice and we know
that the first wave of 135 140 or so
didn't get any of it and that's why
we've got the new filing i'm going to
read to you from pages of it came in
three parts late yesterday it was the
amended class action suit the motion to
certify the class and a motion for
preliminary injunction but I'll
synthesize it all so you'll understand
it right here on the Midas Touch Network
let's start with the class action
petition here's what they say the
government this is on page two paragraph
5 the government has twice attempted
once successfully to remove individuals
under the Alien Enemies Act without any
meaningful process first on March 15 the
government secretly loaded people onto
planes published the proclamation and
removed 137 people within hours to a
brutal prison in El Salvador they
received no notice and no opportunity to
contest it on April 17th the government
provided individuals with an Englishonly
notice they speak Spanish they did not
inform them of their right to seek
judicial review and then they loaded
people onto buses towards the airport
only turning around after council the
American Civil Liberties Union filed an
emergency appeal to the Supreme Court
that's the 1:00 a.m result last Saturday
in which they said stop the Supreme
Court 7 to2 said stop not Vladimir stop
but stop deporting people without notice
until we get a full briefing and even
then stop um they went on to say in
their in their filing new filing these
repeated attempts to use the
proclamation to remove non-citizens
without any review of the determination
that they are al alien enemies violating
the alien enemies act violates the
constitution and the American uh the uh
uh administrative procedures act um
petitioners also bring this challenge to
remedy the unlawful detention of a
subclass held in the notorious terrorism
confinement center in El Salvador the
137 people wrongfully deported on March
15th remain in communicado and have not
spoken to their families or attorneys in
over a month their families are deeply
concerned for their safety especially
given reports of widespread physical and
psychological abuse in El Salvador the
continuing detention of the SECOT
subclass this 137 people in El Salvador
violates the Alien Enemies Act the fifth
amendment the Sixth Amendment and the
ETH amendment against cruel and unusual
punishment they go on on page 15 and by
the way one of the people that is part
of the class or representing the class
so smartly let me just give you this one
is a guy by the name of Andre Jose or
person by the name of Andre or Andre
Jose Hernandez Romero he's an openly gay
barber makeup artist
um and uh who has as this complaint
alleges has been constructively in
custody by the United States in El
Salvador ever since he's part of a list
of about 12 different plaintiffs who
were there to represent that particular
class on page 15 of the
complaint they say the following as
multiple this is paragraph 60 as
multiple judges have already found the
proclamation of war effectively is
unlawful first the proclamation does not
satisfy the statutory requirements for
proper invocation of the Alien Enemies
Act trende Aaragua a criminal
organization is not a nation or a
foreign government and is not part of
the Venezuelan government the United
States is not in a declared war with
Venezuela the United States cannot
declare war against Trenda because it's
not a nation and neither Venezuela nor
Trenda have invaded or threatened to
invade the United States nor has either
engaged in a predatory incursion within
the meaning of that statute there has
been no meaningful notice or meaningful
opportunity for individuals to challenge
their designation as alien enemies thus
there is thus a significant risk that
even individuals who do do not fall
under the terms of the proclamation will
be subject to it it violates the process
and protections that Congress has
prescribed as a result countless
Venezuelans are at imminent risk of
removal pursuant to the proclamation
without any hearing or meaningful review
regardless of the absence of any ties to
trend dee or the availability of claims
a and for some people it is too late
over 130 individuals were removed on
March 15th in their preliminary
injunction motion which which is hand
and glove filed with this particular
paper they say the following on page
one petitioners seek two primary forms
of preliminary relief this is by the
American Civil Liberties Union first for
the SECOT subclass that's 137 people
they seek an order requiring respondents
the government to immediately request
and take all reasonable steps to
facilitate the return of the subclass to
the United States from respondents
jailer in El Salvador so the two
concepts here they're making the
argument that the Trump uh Trump Trump
administration has custody of them even
though it's been delegated to El
Salvador and they're using the exact
language from the Abrago Garcia Supreme
Court ruling that just came out
endorsing Judge Zenis's decision in that
case that the language is appropriate
facilitate the return of the subclass
same language being used here developing
story new president being cited they
also want that includes but not limited
to requiring the government to request
that their contractors and agents in El
Salvador see how smartly they're making
El Salvador not a sovereign country but
rather the jailers that this United
States has hired agents and contractors
in El Salvador for the United States
transfer the CCOT subclass to the
physical custody of the US and require
the government to cease paying their
contractors and agents in El Salvador
and there's that term again to detain
the subclass um and then also stop
removal based on that now I think this
is super smart for a number of reasons
that I've already outlined it uses the
recent Supreme Court precedent 7-2 in
favor of notice and due process it
brings it as a habius corpus petition
which is what the majority wanted them
to do it also follows the 6 to3 decision
in this particular case the JG case also
about notice and due process and uh and
the requirement that there be notice and
due process um and that it be done by
rid of habius corpus so they straddle
these two decisions the Abrego Garcia
decision uh which is uh 90 and the JG
decision six to3 by the United States
Supreme Court about how to fashion their
new complaint just good lawyering by the
American Civil Liberties Union kudos to
them they've been on the network before
really appreciate their work now it's in
front of Boseberg now remember or I'll
remind you here boozeberg had was just
about to throw the book at the Trump
administration for violating his order
the order that was eventually modified
by the United States Supreme Court that
was put on hold by the appellet court
just above him the DC Court of Appeals
so that's separate but that doesn't say
that you know he originally said I don't
have jurisdiction over anybody in this
case because it has to be done by
individual petitions so the big fight's
going to be here whether class actions
are the right way to join together in in
DC before one judge so it's going to be
is this properly in DC is this properly
if it is Boseberg is fine but is it
fundamentally proper to put this case in
DC i think yes i agree the American
Civil Liberties Union but we'll have to
see what the Supreme Court says about
that can you do a class certification
for um to attack by rid of habius corpus
the constitutionality of Trump's actions
i think yes but that's going to be the
attack and then we're going to see what
happens at the next level of appeal up
to the United States Supreme Court if
the Supreme Court thought they were
going to be done for the summer and not
have to deal with an lawless presidency
and have to rein him in get ready for
more 1:00 a.m saturday morning orders
being issued and cancel your summer plan
Supreme Court because you know we've got
bloody bloody Donald Trump in the White
House uh that's a reference to Andrew
Jackson and nothing is going to stop him
except for the federal courts we're
going to try to stop him by speaking
truth to each other you're here on the
Meidas Touch Network

[admin]

Part 1 of 3

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69 ... g-v-trump/

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap ... .101.0.pdf

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

LIYANARA SANCHEZ, as next friend on behalf of FRENGEL REYES MOTA,
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

D.A.R.H.,* as next friend on behalf of ANDRY JOSE HERNANDEZ ROMERO,
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

M.Z.V.V., as next friend on behalf of J.A.B.V.,*
El Valle Detention Facility
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

M.Y.O.R., as next friend on behalf of M.A.O.R.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

M.M.A.A., as next friend on behalf of G.A.A.A.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

DORYS MENDOZA, as next friend on behalf of M.R.M.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

EYLAN SCHILMAN, as next friend on behalf of T.C.I.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

Petitioners–Plaintiffs,

J.G.G.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

G.F.F.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

J.G.O.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

W.G.H.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

J.A.V.,*
c/o American Civil Liberties Union,
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004;

Plaintiffs,

v.

DONALD J. TRUMP, in his official capacity as President of the United States, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. 20500;

PAMELA BONDI, Attorney General of the United States, in her official capacity, 950 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC, 20530;

KRISTI NOEM, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in her official capacity, 245 Murray Lane SW, Washington, DC 20528;

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, 245 Murray Lane SW, Washington, DC 20528;

MADISON SHEAHAN, Acting Director and Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in her official capacity, 500 12th Street, SW, Washington, DC 20536;

U.S. IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT, 500 12th St. SW, Washington, DC 20536;

MARCO RUBIO, Secretary of State, in his official capacity, 2201 C Street, NW, Washington, DC 20520;

U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT, 2201 C Street, NW, Washington, DC 20520;

PETE HEGSETH, Secretary of Defense, in his official capacity, 100 Defense Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301; and,

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, 100 Defense Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301;

Respondents–Defendants.

Case 1:25-cv-00766-JEB Document 101 Filed 04/24/25

AMENDED CLASS ACTION
PETITION FOR WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS AND
COMPLAINT

INTRODUCTION

1. Petitioners–Plaintiffs (“Petitioners”) and Plaintiffs1 are Venezuelan men threatened with imminent removal or who have already suffered removal under the President’s Proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act (“AEA”), a wartime measure that has been used only three times before in our Nation’s history: the War of 1812, World War 1, and World War II.

2. The Proclamation authorizes “immediate” removal of noncitizens that the Proclamation deems to be alien enemies, without any opportunity for judicial review. It also contorts the plain language of the AEA: arrivals of noncitizens from Venezuela are deemed an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” by a “foreign nation or government,” where Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, is deemed to be sufficiently akin to a foreign nation or government.

3. But the AEA has only ever been a power invoked in time of war, and plainly only applies to warlike actions: it cannot be used here against nationals of a country—Venezuela— with whom the United States is not at war, which is not invading the United States, and which has not launched a predatory incursion into the United States.

4. Multiple judges—including this Court—have already held that there is likely no authority for the government’s actions. See, e.g., J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-5067, 2025 WL 914682, at *5–10 (D.C. Cir. Mar. 26, 2025) (Henderson, J., concurring) (AEA predicates of “invasion” or “predatory incursion” not met); id. at *13 (Millett, J., concurring) (“The Constitution’s demand of due process cannot be so easily thrown aside.”); D.B.U v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-01163, 2025 WL 1163530, at *9–12 (D. Colo. Apr. 22, 2025); J.G.G. v. Trump, No. CV 25-766 (JEB), 2025 WL 890401, at *2 (D.D.C. Mar. 24, 2025) (Boasberg, J.) (“before [petitioners] may be deported, they are entitled to individualized hearings to determine whether the Act applies to them at all”).

5. Nevertheless, the government has twice attempted (once successfully) to remove individuals under the AEA without any meaningful process. First, on March 15, the government secretly loaded people onto planes, published the Proclamation, and removed at least 137 people within hours to a brutal prison in El Salvador. Those removed received no notice of their designation nor any opportunity to contest it. Second, on April 17, the government provided individuals with an English-only notice form that did not inform them of their right to seek judicial review. Hours after distributing the notices, the government loaded people onto buses and drove them towards the airport, only turning around after counsel filed an emergency appeal in the Supreme Court.

6. These repeated attempts to use the Proclamation to remove noncitizens without any review of the determination that they are alien enemies violate the AEA, the APA, and the Constitution. For that reason, Petitioners, Plaintiffs, and the putative class that they represent seek this Court’s intervention to restrain these summary removals, and to determine that this use of the AEA is unlawful and must be halted.

7. Petitioners also bring this challenge to remedy the unlawful detention of a subclass held in the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (“CECOT”) prison in El Salvador. The 137 people wrongly deported on March 15 remain incommunicado and have not spoken to their families or attorneys in over a month now. Their families are deeply concerned for their safety, especially given reports of widespread physical and psychological abuse in Salvadoran prisons. The continuing detention of the CECOT Subclass in El Salvador violates the AEA, Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment, and Eighth Amendment.

JURISDICTION AND VENUE

8. This case arises under the Alien Enemies Act (“AEA”), 50 U.S.C. §§ 21–24; the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), 5 U.S.C. § 701, et seq.; the Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”), 8 U.S.C. § 1101, et seq. and its implementing regulations; the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”), see Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 (“FARRA”), Pub. L. No. 105-277, div. G, Title XXII, § 2242, 112 Stat. 2681, 2681-822 (1998) (codified as Note to 8 U.S.C. § 1231); and the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

9. This Court has subject matter jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 et seq. (habeas corpus), art. I, § 9, cl. 2 of the U.S. Constitution (Suspension Clause), 28 U.S.C. § 1331 (federal question), 28 U.S.C. § 1346 (United States as defendant), 28 U.S.C. § 1361 (mandamus), and 28 U.S.C. § 1651 (All Writs Act). Respondents-Defendants (“Respondents”) have waived sovereign immunity for purposes of this suit. 5 U.S.C. §§ 702, 706.

10. The Court may grant relief pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2241; 28 U.S.C. § 2243; the Declaratory Judgment Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2201 et seq.; 28 U.S.C. § 1331; the All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1651; and the Court’s inherent equitable powers.

11. Venue is proper in this District under 28 U.S.C. § 1391(e)(1) because Respondents are agencies of the United States or officers of the United States acting in their official capacity, Respondents reside in this District, and a substantial part of the events or omissions giving rise to the claim occurred in this District.

PARTIES

Petitioners and Plaintiffs

12. Petitioner Frengel Reyes Mota is a Venezuelan national who has been transferred by the government from an immigration detention facility in Texas to CECOT. Mr. Reyes Mota fled Venezuela and sought asylum in the United States after violence from paramilitary groups. As his “next friend,” his wife Liyana Sanchez, brings this action on his behalf. Mr. Reyes Mota’s wife saw his name on a public list of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and became alarmed that the U.S. government had removed and detained him at CECOT. Ms. Sanchez has not been able to speak with her husband since his removal. She desires that her husband be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of his membership in a gang.

13. Petitioner Andry Jose Hernandez Romero is a Venezuelan national who has been transferred by the government from an immigration detention facility in Texas to CECOT. Mr. Hernandez Romero sought asylum in the United States after he was targeted for his sexual orientation as well as his refusal to promote government propaganda while working for a government-affiliated television station. Before he fled Venezuela, armed men connected to the government had been following and threatening him. Mr. Hernandez Romero entered using the CBP One app and passed his credible fear interview. As his “next friend,” his mother D.A.R.H., brings this action on his behalf. Mr. Hernandez Romero’s mother discovered that her son had been deported when his name appeared in a news article listing Venezuelans deported to El Salvador. She later heard from a journalist who told her that Andry was at CECOT, was being mistreated by guards, and was begging for his release. D.A.R.H. has done everything possible to support her son since his deportation, including speaking with his lawyer and trying to find any information about where he is. But D.A.R.H. has been unable to contact her son since he was sent to El Salvador. She desires that her son be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of gang membership.

14. Petitioner J.A.B.V. is a Venezuelan national who has been transferred by the government from an immigration detention facility in Texas to CECOT. He fled Venezuela and sought asylum in the United States after he was violently targeted after the campaigned for the opposition leader. J.A.B.V. was abducted by masked men, beaten, and told he would be killed if he campaigned again. He was then held for several days at a police center, where he was tortured. J.A.B.V. passed his credible fear interview. As his “next friend,” his mother, M.Z.V.V., brings this action on his behalf. M.Z.V.V. saw J.A.B.V.’s name on a public list of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and became alarmed that the U.S. government had removed and detained him at CECOT. M.Z.V.V. has not been able to speak with her son since his removal. She desires that her son be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of his membership in a gang.

15. Petitioner M.A.O.R. is a Venezuelan national who has been transferred by the government from an immigration detention facility in Texas to CECOT. He was in the process of seeking protection in the United States. As his “next friend,” his sister, M.Y.O.R., brings this action on his behalf. M.Y.O.R. saw M.A.O.R.’s name on a public list of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and became alarmed that the U.S. government had removed and detained him at CECOT. M.Y.O.R. has not been able to speak with her brother since his removal. She desires that her brother be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of his membership in a gang.

16. Petitioner G.A.A.A. is a Venezuelan national who has been transferred by the government from an immigration detention facility in Texas to CECOT. He fled Venezuela and sought asylum in the United States due to the violence in his town at the hand of a paramilitary group. As his “next friend,” his mother, M.M.A.A., brings this action on his behalf. M.A.A.A. saw J.A.B.V.’s name on a public list of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and became alarmed that the U.S. government had removed and detained him at CECOT. M.M.A.A. has not been able to speak with her son since his removal. She desires that her son be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of his membership in a gang.

17. Petitioner M.R.M. is a Venezuelan national who is currently has been transferred by the government from an immigration detention facility in Texas to CECOT. As his “next friend,” his mother Dorys Mendoza, brings this action on his behalf. Ms. Mendoza saw M.R.M.’s name on a public list of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and became alarmed that the U.S. government had removed and detained him at CECOT. Ms. Mednoza has not been able to speak with her son since his removal. She desires that her son be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of his membership in a gang.

18. Petitioner T.C.I. is a Venezuelan national who is currently in criminal custody and detained in New Jersey. After leaving Venezuela, he turned himself into immigration authorities and was granted humanitarian parole. As his “next friend,” his criminal defense attorney Eylan Schilman, brings this action on his behalf. T.C.I. informed Mr. Schilman that officials approached him to sign a form in English that he was a member of Tren de Aragua and subject to removal. T.C.I. refused to sign because he denies membership in Tren de Aragua or any other gang. Mr. Schilman desires that his client be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of his membership in a gang.

19. Plaintiff J.G.G. is a Venezuelan national who is detained at El Valle Detention Center in Texas. J.G.G. is seeking asylum, withholding of removal, and CAT protection because he fears being killed, arbitrarily imprisoned, beaten, or tortured by Venezuelan state police, since they have previously done so to him. J.G.G. was nearly removed on March 15 pursuant to the Proclamation. He was pulled off the plane at the last minute due to this Court’s TRO. Despite the fact that J.G.G. is not involved whatsoever with Tren de Aragua, he fears that the government will continue trying to deport him because he has tattoos and because they have previously attempted to deport him under the Proclamation.

20. Plaintiff J.A.V. is a Venezuelan national who is detained at El Valle Detention Center in Texas. J.A.V. is seeking asylum because of his political views and fear of harm and mistreatment by multiple criminal groups, including TdA. J.A.V. is not and has never been a member of TdA—he was in fact victimized by that group and it is the reason why he cannot return to Venezuela. J.A.V. was nearly removed on March 15 pursuant to the Proclamation. However, he was spared from immediate deportation due to this Court’s TRO. J.A.V. fears that the government will continue trying to deport him because he has previously been designated an alien enemy.

21. Plaintiff G.F.F. is a 21-year-old Venezuelan national who is detained at Orange County Jail in New York. G.F.F. and his family fled Venezuela in part due to threats from TdA based on his sexual orientation and gender non-conformity. He also fears persecution from Venezuelan state actors, including police and paramilitary groups. G.F.F. entered the United States in May 2024 and was released on his own recognizance after passing a credible fear interview. G.F.F. was nearly deported pursuant to the Proclamation on March 15; he was taken off the plane after this Court issued its initial TRO. G.F.F. strongly denies any association with TdA. G.F.F. fears that the government will continue trying to deport him because it has filed an I-213 identifying him as an “associate/affiliate of Tren de Aragua” and because the government previously attempted to deport him under the Proclamation.

22. Plaintiff W.G.H. is a 29-year-old Venezuelan national who is detained at El Valle Detention Center in Texas. W.G.H. is seeking asylum because he was extorted and threatened by multiple criminal groups in Venezuela, including TdA. W.G.H. is extremely afraid of returning to Venezuela or being sent to El Salvador. W.G.H. was almost deported on March 15, despite the fact that he has repeatedly denied any connection to TdA whatsoever. He was removed from the plane after this Court’s TRO. W.G.H. W.G.H. fears that the government will continue trying to deport him because it has filed an I-213 stating that W.G.H. “has been identified as a Tren de Aragua gang associate” and because he was previously designated under the Proclamation.

23. Plaintiff J.G.O. is a 32-year-old Venezuelan national who is detained at Orange County Jail in New York. J.G.O. is seeking asylum in the United States because he actively protested against the Maduro regime in Venezuela and fears torture, imprisonment, or death on account of his political activism if he returns. J.G.O. was nearly deported on March 15, but was removed from the plane after this Court’s TRO. J.G.O. fears that the government will continue trying to deport him pursuant to the AEA because he has been questioned about gang affiliation and because he has already been designated under the Proclamation. J.G.O. vehemently denies any affiliation with a gang.

Respondents-Defendants

24. Respondent Donald Trump is the President of the United States. He is sued in his official capacity. In that capacity, he issued the Proclamation under the Alien Enemies Act.

25. Respondent Pamela J. Bondi is the U.S. Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, which is a cabinet-level department of the United States government. She is sued in her official capacity.

26. Respondent Kristi Noem is the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which is a cabinet-level department of the United States government. She is sued in her official capacity. In that capacity, Respondent Noem is responsible for the administration of the immigration laws pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1103.

27. Respondent U.S. Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) is a cabinet-level department of the United States federal government. Its components include Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”). Respondent DHS is a legal custodian of Petitioners.

28. Respondent Todd Lyons is the Acting Director of ICE. Respondent Lyons is responsible for ICE’s policies, practices, and procedures, including those relating to the detention of immigrants during their removal procedures. Respondent Lyons is a legal custodian of Petitioners. Respondent Lyons is sued in his official capacity.

29. Respondent ICE is the subagency of DHS that is responsible for carrying out removal orders and overseeing immigration detention. Respondent ICE is a legal custodian of Petitioners.

30. Respondent Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State, which is a cabinet-level department of the United States government. He is sued in his official capacity. In that capacity, Respondent Rubio negotiates and enters into contracts or agreements with El Salvador for the removal and detention of Petitioners and others, and would be responsible for facilitating the return of Petitioners sent to El Salvador or any other country.

31. Respondent U.S. Department of State (“DOS”) is a cabinet-level department of the United States federal government.

32. Respondent Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense, which is a cabinet-level department of the United States government. He is sued in his official capacity. In that capacity, Respondent Hegseth oversees the Department of Defense and acts as the principal defense policy maker and advisor.

33. Respondent U.S. Department of Defense (“DOD”) is a cabinet-level department of the Unite States federal government.

BACKGROUND

The Alien Enemies Act

34. The AEA is a wartime authority enacted in 1798 that grants the President specific powers with respect to the regulation, detention, and deportation of enemy aliens.

35. The AEA, as codified today, provides that “[w]henever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.” 50 U.S.C. § 21.

36. The AEA can thus be triggered in only two situations. The first is when a formal declared war exists with a foreign nation or government. The second is when a foreign nation or government perpetrates, attempts, or threatens an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.

37. To trigger the AEA, the President must make a public proclamation of the declared war, or of the attempted or threatened invasion or predatory incursion. Id.

38. Section 21 of the AEA also provides that noncitizens must be afforded a right of voluntary departure. Only noncitizens who “refuse or neglect to depart” are subject to removal. Id. § 21.

39. Section 22 of the AEA specifies the terms of departure for aliens designated as enemies. It grants noncitizens the full time to depart as stipulated by any treaty between the United States and the enemy nation, unless the noncitizen has engaged in “actual hostility” against the United States. If no such treaty exists, the President may declare a “reasonable time” for departure, “according to the dictates of humanity and national hospitality.” Id. § 22.

40. The Act has been used only three times in American history, all during actual or imminent wartime.

41. The AEA was first invoked several months into the War of 1812, but President Madison did not use the AEA to remove anyone from the United States during the war.

42. The AEA was invoked a second time during World War I by President Wilson. Upon information and belief, there were no removals effectuated pursuant to the AEA during World War I.

43. The AEA was used again during World War II, though it was never used as a widespread method of removal.

44. On December 7, 1941, after the Japanese invaded Hawaii in the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt proclaimed that Japan had perpetrated an invasion upon the territory of the United States. The President issued regulations applicable to Japanese nationals living in the United States. The next day Congress declared war on Japan.

45. On the same day, President Roosevelt issued two separate proclamations stating that an invasion or predatory incursion was threatened upon the territory of the United States by Germany and Italy. The President incorporated the same regulations that were already in effect as to Japanese people for German and Italian people. Three days later Congress voted unanimously to declare war against Germany and Italy.

46. Congress declared war against Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria on June 5, 1942. Just over a month later, President Roosevelt issued a proclamation recognizing that declaration of war and invoking the AEA against citizens of those countries.

47. Under these proclamations, the United States infamously interned noncitizens from Japan, Germany, Italy, Hungary Romania, and Bulgaria (with U.S. citizens of Japanese descent subject to a separate order that did not rely on the AEA).

48. It was not until the end of hostilities that the President provided for the removal of alien enemies from the United States under the AEA. On July 14, 1945, President Truman issued a proclamation providing that alien enemies detained as a danger to public peace and safety “shall be subject upon the order of the Attorney General to removal from the United States.” The Department of Justice subsequently issued regulations laying out the removal process. See 10 Fed. Reg. 12189 (Sept. 28, 1945). It was never used as a widespread method of removal.

Systemic Overhaul of Immigration Law in 1952

49. Following the end of World War II, Congress consolidated U.S. immigration laws into a single text under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (“INA”).

50. The INA, and its subsequent amendments, provide for a comprehensive system of procedures that the government must follow before removing a noncitizen from the United States. The INA provides the exclusive procedure by which the government may determine whether to remove an individual. 8 U.S.C. § 1229a(a)(3).

51. In addition to laying out the process by which the government determines whether to remove an individual, the INA also enshrines particular forms of humanitarian protection.

52. First, the INA provides that “[a]ny alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival . . . ), irrespective of such alien’s status,” may apply for asylum. 8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)(1). To qualify for asylum, a noncitizen must show a “well-founded fear of persecution” on account of a protected ground, such as race, nationality, political opinion, or religion. 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(42)(A).

53. Second, Congress has barred the removal of an individual to a country where it is more likely than not that he would face persecution on one of these protected grounds. 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3). That protection implements this country’s obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees. The relevant form of relief, known as “withholding of removal,” requires the applicant to meet a higher standard with respect to the likelihood of harm than asylum; granting that relief is mandatory if the standard is met absent limited exceptions.

54. Third, the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) prohibits the government from returning a noncitizen to a country where it is more likely than not that he would face torture. See 8 U.S.C. § 1231 note. That protection implements the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 (“FARRA”), Pub. L. No. 105-277, div. G, Title XXII, § 2242. As with withholding of removal, CAT relief also requires the applicant to meet a higher standard with respect to the likelihood of harm than asylum and relief is mandatory if that standard is met. There is no exception to CAT relief.

President Trump’s Proclamation Invoking the AEA

55. On March 14, the President signed the AEA Proclamation at issue here. It provides that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA, are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.” See Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua (Mar. 15, 2025).2

56. Although the AEA calls for a “public proclamation,” 50 U.S.C. § 21, the administration did not make the invocation public until around 3:53 p.m. EDT on March 15.

57. The Proclamation alleges that Tren de Aragua is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening predatory incursions, hostile actions, and irregular warfare.

58. The Proclamation thus states that all Venezuelan citizens ages fourteen or older alleged to be members of Tren de Aragua—and who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents—are alien enemies.

59. The Proclamation provides no means or process for individuals to contest that they are members of the TdA and do not therefore fall within the terms of the Proclamation. Nor does it provide individuals with an opportunity for voluntary departure, as required by Section 21. Nor does it provide the grace period required under Section 22, during which individuals can arrange their affairs. The Proclamation instead invokes Section 22’s exception by claiming that all individuals subject to the Proclamation are “chargeable with actual hostility,” and pose “a public safety risk.”

60. As multiple judges have already found, the Proclamation is likely unlawful.

61. First, the Proclamation does not satisfy the statutory requirements for proper invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization, is not a nation or foreign government and is not part of the Venezuelan government. The United States is not in a declared war with Venezuela. The United States cannot declare war against Tren de Aragua because it is not a nation. And neither Venezuela nor Tren de Aragua have invaded or threatened to invade the United States, nor has either engaged in a “predatory incursion” within the meaning of the AEA.

62. Moreover, there is no meaningful notice or meaningful opportunity for individuals to challenge their designation as alien enemies. There is thus a significant risk that even individuals who do not fall under the terms of the Proclamation will be subject to it.

63. The Proclamation also violates the process and protections that Congress has prescribed elsewhere in the country’s immigration laws for the removal of noncitizens.

64. As a result, countless Venezuelans are at imminent risk of removal pursuant to the Proclamation without any hearing or meaningful review, regardless of the absence of any ties to TdA or the availability of claims for relief from and defenses to removal. And for some people, it is too late. As described in more detail below, over 130 individuals were removed on March 15 to a prison in El Salvador known for dire conditions, torture, and other forms of physical abuse—possibly for life. They have lost all contact with their attorneys, family, and the world.

Implementation of the Proclamation and Subsequent Litigation

65. Upon information and belief, prior to the public issuance of the Proclamation, Respondents developed a memorandum for federal law enforcement officers with guidance on implementation of the Proclamation.

66. Prior to the public issuance of the Proclamation, ICE had moved Venezuelan detainees into position such that, when the Proclamation was made public, the detainees were already being transported to the airport and loaded onto planes.

67. Those flights took off quickly and, despite this Court’s order to return individuals on the flights who were being removed pursuant to the AEA, the planes continued to El Salvador where the individuals were promptly detained in that country’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (“CECOT”).

68. The government also sent eight Venezuelan women to CECOT, presumably pursuant to the Proclamation. However, upon landing, Salvadoran officials informed U.S. officials that CECOT does not imprison women. The government returned the eight Venezuelan women to the United States, along with a Nicaraguan man whom they also attempted to send to CECOT.

69. Petitioners received no advance notice of the basis for their removal. Neither Petitioners nor their attorneys were told that they had been designated “alien enemies.” They were not told that they could challenge that designation. Nor were they given an opportunity to do so. They were not even told where the plane was going when they boarded.

70. It later emerged that Respondents had a notice form asserting that an individual is an “alien enemy” and stating that they are “not entitled to a hearing, appeal, or judicial review of this notice and warrant of apprehension and removal.” But the CECOT Subclass received no such notice. Nor did their lawyers.

71. It also emerged that Respondents used a checklist to identify alleged TdA members. The checklist gave points for certain characteristics. Eight points meant the individual was “verified” as TdA. The checklist included characteristics such as “subject has tattoos denoting membership/loyalty to TDA” and “subject possesses written rules, constitution, membership certificates, bylaws, etc. indicating . . . membership of or allegiance to TDA.”

72. Whether most (or perhaps all) of the class members lack ties to TdA remains to be seen, because the government secretly rushed the men out of the country and has provided Petitioners with no information about the class. But evidence since the flights on March 15 increasingly shows that many members of the CECOT Subclass removed to El Salvador are not “members” of TdA as is required to fall within the Proclamation; many have no ties to TdA at all.

73. Respondents’ errors are unsurprising because the methods they employ in the checklist are flawed. For example, the checklist relies on indicators like tattoos or other iconography, despite the fact that TdA does not have common tattoos or symbols. It also relies on possessing an official “indicia” of the organization, like membership certificate or written rules—but the government’s own declarants have conceded that TdA is “decentralized” and “loosely organized.”

74. These mistakes are devastating. Individuals who are wrongly designated are deported to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, as has already occurred to a number of class members. Respondents have repeatedly taken the position that they cannot or will not take any meaningful steps to facilitate the return of individuals from CECOT.

75. Since March 15, Respondent DOD has operated at least one flight transporting individuals from the United States to CECOT in El Salvador. Several of those individuals were alleged to be affiliated with TdA.

76. Respondents have custody or constructive custody over the individuals designated under the AEA, including those detained at CECOT. Respondents are responsible for the restraints on the liberty of these individuals.

77. Individuals detained at CECOT are detained at the behest of Respondents, and Respondents are paying El Salvador millions of dollars to detain them, as Respondent Secretary Rubio has publicly explained.

78. Respondents are outsourcing part of the United States’ prison system to El Salvador. Respondent Secretary Noem has publicly described the transfer of U.S. residents to CECOT as “one of the tools” in the United States’ “toolkit” “that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

79. Upon information and belief, Respondents are aware that the Salvadoran government mistreats and tortures individuals detained in CECOT.

80. Respondents are attempting to deliberately prevent individuals designated under the AEA, including individuals detained at CECOT, from seeking judicial review.

81. Respondents have also taken the position that noncitizens subject to the Proclamation are not be afforded credible fear interviews, nor will claims for protection under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) be recognized.

82. Petitioners obtained a TRO against Respondents’ unlawful action from this Court on March 15. Respondents sought a stay of the TRO in the D.C. Circuit. The D.C. Circuit denied the motions for stay in a per curiam opinion. J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-5067, 2025 WL 914682 (D.C. Cir. Mar. 26, 2025). Judge Henderson, concurring, found that the orders were appealable but that Respondents had failed to establish a likelihood of success on the merits because, in her preliminary view, that the AEA’s statutory predicates of “invasion” and “predatory incursion” were not met. Id. at *1–13 (Henderson, J., concurring). Judge Millett, also concurring, wrote that the order was not appealable and that if the court were to reach the merits, Respondents were unlikely to prevail on their jurisdictional arguments and that the balance of equities weighed against Respondents. Id. at *13–31 (Millett, J., concurring). Judge Walker dissented, acknowledging that Petitioners had a right to contest their designation as enemy aliens under the Proclamation but contending that those claims must be brought in habeas in the district of confinement. Id. at *31–40 (Walker, J., concurring).

83. Respondents then sought a stay in the Supreme Court. The Court held that “AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act . . . within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.” Trump v. J.G.G., No. 24A931, 2025 WL 1024097, at *2 (U.S. Apr. 7, 2025).

84. Despite the Supreme Court’s clear instructions, Respondents again attempted to remove individuals under the AEA with inadequate process. On April 16, within hours of a district court in the Northern District of Texas denying a TRO and deferring decision on class certification, the government gave detainees a Bluebonnet Detention Center in Texas an English-only form, not provided to any attorney, which nowhere mentioned the right to contest the designation or removal, much less explained how detainees could do so. ICE officers told detainees that they would be removed within 24 hours.

85. Petitioners’ counsel sought relief at the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court. Petitioners’ counsel also sought relief in this court, in the form of a request to expedite their TRO regarding notice. This Court held a hearing in which Respondents stated that they would not remove anyone that same day, but Respondents reserved the right to remove people under the AEA the following day.

86. At 12:51 a.m. EDT on Saturday, April 19., the Supreme Court directed the government not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of the Court.

87. On April 23, 2025, Respondents submitted a declaration in the Southern District of Texas, under seal, with information about the notice process that the government had for individuals designated for removal under the AEA. See Cisneros Decl., J.A.V. v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-072 (S.D. Tex. filed Apr. 23, 2025), ECF No. 45, Exhibit D. That declaration and its accompanying exhibit were unsealed the next day. Oral Order, J.A.V. v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-072 (S.D. Tex. Apr. 24, 2025). The declaration states that individuals are given 12 hours’ notice ahead of scheduled removal and that if they express an intent to file a habeas petition, they are given 24 hours to actually file that petition. Cisneros Decl. ¶ 11. The notice process is patently inadequate as a matter of due process.

CLASS ALLEGATIONS

88. Petitioners and Plaintiffs bring this action under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 23(a) and 23(b)(2) on behalf of themselves and a class of all other persons similarly situated.

89. This Court has already certified a class of “All noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to the March 15, 2025, Presidential Proclamation entitled ‘Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua’ and its implementation.”

90. Petitioners and Plaintiffs seek to amend the class definition to: “All noncitizens who have been, are or will be subject to the March 2025 Presidential Proclamation entitled ‘Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua’ and/or its implementation.”

91. Petitioners further seek to certify the following subclasses under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 23(a) and 23(b)(2):

a. “CECOT Subclass”: All noncitizens in custody at the Terrorism Confinement Center (“CECOT”) in El Salvador who were, are, or will be subject to the March 2025 Presidential Proclamation entitled “Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren De Aragua” and/or its implementation.

b. “Criminal Custody Subclass”: All noncitizens in criminal custody who were, are, or will be subject to the March 2025 Presidential Proclamation entitled “Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren De Aragua” and/or its implementation.

92. Petitioners and Plaintiffs, together, seek to represent the class, and seek injunctive and declaratory relief for Claims I–VIII, as specified below.

93. Petitioners Frengel Reyes Mota, Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, J.A.B.V., M.A.O.R., G.A.A.A., and M.R.M. are currently detained in CECOT and also seek to represent the CECOT Subclass. They seek habeas, injunctive, and declaratory relief for Claims I–XIII, as specified below.

94. Petitioner T.C.I. is currently detained in criminal custody and also seeks to represent the Criminal Custody Subclass. He seeks habeas, injunctive, and declaratory relief for Claims I–IX, as specified below, in addition to Claims X–XIII, as specified below, insofar as the Criminal Custody Subclass face an imminent risk of removal and detention at CECOT or a facility with equivalent conditions.

95. Plaintiffs are the original Plaintiffs in J.G.G. v. Trump: J.G.G., G.F.F., J.G.O, W.G.H., and J.A.V. Because Plaintiffs have filed habeas actions in their districts of confinement and do not seek relief in this Court through the writ of habeas corpus, they continue to be designated as “Plaintiffs,” not “Petitioners.” Among other things, Plaintiffs continue to seek—as a matter of due process—meaningful notice of the government’s intent to remove them. See J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 24A931, 2025 WL 1024097, at *2 (U.S. Apr. 7, 2025) (per curiam) (due process requires government to provide detainees notice that they are subject to removal “within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue”). Because this claim is a precondition to the effective exercise of habeas rights, it lies outside of habeas. In addition, Plaintiffs continue to advance their original claims in equity and under the Administrative Procedure Act. See Claims, infra.

96. The proposed class and subclasses satisfy the requirements of Rule 23(a) and Rule 23(b)(2).

97. The proposed class and both subclasses satisfy the requirements of Rule 23(a)(1) because they are so numerous that joinder of all members is impracticable. Besides the five originally named petitioners who were nearly removed on March 15, 2025, there are at least 137 individuals were actually removed to the CECOT prison on March 15 pursuant to the AEA. After those removals, on March 18, 2025, the government identified 54 members of TdA in detention, 32 in criminal custody and 172 on its nondetained docket. That means there were roughly nearly 400 people in the entire class as of mid-March 2025, of whom at least 137 were in the CECOT subclass and 32 in Criminal Custody subclass. The government also confirmed that it continues to monitor and identify more TdA members. On April 18, 2025, the government attempted to remove dozens more Venezuelan men pursuant to the AEA.

98. Joinder is also impracticable because class members are largely detained and unrepresented, in addition to being geographically spread out. Joinder is also impracticable because many in the proposed class and subclasses are pro se, indigent, have limited English proficiency, and/or have a limited understanding of the U.S. judicial system. Despite over 130 subclass members at CECOT, Respondents have not provided information about the individuals detained there and are holding them incommunicado, without any access to the outside world, let alone the ability to communicate with any existing or potential counsel. Due to their imprisonment and isolation from the world, the CECOT subclass members cannot practically bring their own challenges. Similarly, Respondents will not provide information about any of the class members in the United States, even to their immigration counsel. Because of the swift timeline for notice and removals, class and subclass members are not able to effectively seek judicial review on an individual basis.

99. The proposed class and both subclasses satisfy the commonality requirements of Rule 23(a)(2). The members of the proposed class and subclasses are subject to a common practice: designation under the Proclamation and either the threat or actual summary removal pursuant to the AEA. The suit raises at least one question of law common to the entire class: what notice and process is due for those who are designated under the Proclamation. The suit also raises other questions of law common to members of the proposed class and both subclasses, including whether the Proclamation and its implementation violate the AEA, the INA, and the statutory protections for asylum seekers. Moreover, the subclasses share common questions of law and fact regarding the conditions of confinement at CECOT, and whether their current or imminent imprisonment there violates the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments.

100. The proposed class and both subclasses satisfy the typicality requirements of Rule 23(a)(3), because the claims of the representative Plaintiffs and Petitioners are typical of the claims of the class. Each proposed class member, including the Plaintiffs, has experienced the same principal injury (inability to challenge their designation), based on the same government practices (the implementation of the Proclamation without meaningful notice), which is unlawful as to the entire class. Each proposed CECOT subclass member, including the proposed CECOT subclass representatives, Frengel Reyes Mota, Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, J.A.B.V., M.A.O.R., G.A.A.A., and M.R.M., has experienced or faces the same principal injury (unlawful removal to CECOT), based on the same government practice (the Proclamation and its implementation), which is unlawful as to the entire subclass because it violates the AEA, the INA, the APA, and various provisions of the Constitution. Similarly, each proposed Criminal Custody subclass member, including the proposed Criminal Custody subclass representative, T.C.I., also faces the same principal injury (imminent removal to CECOT), based on the same government practice (the Proclamation and its implementation), which is unlawful as to the entire subclass because it violates the AEA, the INA, the APA, and various provisions of the Constitution.

101. The proposed class and both subclasses satisfy the adequacy requirements of Rule 23(a)(4). The representative Plaintiffs and Petitioners seek the same relief as the other members of the class, including a meaningful procedure for notice and opportunity to be heard that comports with due process. The representative Petitioners seek the same relief as the other members of both subclasses—among other things, an order declaring the Proclamation unlawful and an injunction preventing enforcement of the Proclamation and to facilitate their return to the United States. In defending their rights, Plaintiffs and Petitioners will defend the rights of all proposed class members and subclass members fairly and adequately.

102. Both the class and subclasses are represented by experienced attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Democracy Forward Foundation. Proposed Class Counsel have extensive experience litigating class action lawsuits and other complex systemic cases in federal court on behalf of noncitizens.

103. The class and subclasses also satisfy Rule 23(b)(2). Respondents have acted (or will act) on grounds generally applicable to the class and subclasses by subjecting them to summary removal under the Proclamation rather than affording them the protection of immigration laws. Injunctive and declaratory relief is therefore appropriate with respect to the class as a whole. Habeas, injunctive and declaratory relief is also appropriate with respect to both subclasses as a whole.

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Part 2 of 3

HARM TO PLAINTIFFS AND PETITIONERS

104. Countless Venezuelans fear imminent removal under the Proclamation based on flimsy allegations that they will have no change to rebut. And named Plaintiffs J.G.G., J.A.V., G.F.F., W.G.H. and J.G.O. all fear removal under the Proclamation because the government has previously attempted to remove them as alien enemies. While the named Plaintiffs as of today have obtained temporary relief in other proceedings, that relief is temporary and in the absence of it, they are at imminent risk of unlawful removal.

105. For the Plaintiffs, Petitioners, and putative class members who have not yet been removed to El Salvador, they face serious harm if they are removed to El Salvador, where they will be subject to egregious conditions at CECOT. Many Plaintiffs and Petitioners also fear return to Venezuela, where they have a well-founded fear of persecution.

106. Petitioner T.C.I. also fears removal under the Proclamation because the government has previously pressured him to sign a paper stating that he was a member of Tren de Aragua and subject to removal. He has not obtained any temporary relief and is at imminent risk of unlawful removal.

107. Petitioner T.C.I. also fears removal to Venezuela, where he will be targeted by gang members, as with many putative subclass members.

108. Petitioners Frengel Reyes Mota, Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, J.A.B.V., M.A.O.R., G.A.A.A., and M.R.M. are already facing serious harm after being removed to El Salvador, where they are currently subject to egregious conditions at CECOT.

CAUSES OF ACTION

FIRST CLAIM FOR RELIEF

Ultra Vires, Violation of 50 U.S.C. § 21
(Class and Subclasses against All Respondents)

109. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

110. The AEA does not authorize the removal of noncitizens from the United States absent a “declared war” or a “perpetrated, attempted, or threatened” “invasion or predatory incursion” into the United States by a “foreign nation or government.” See 50 U.S.C. § 21. The Proclamation mandates Petitioners’ and Plaintiffs’ removal under the AEA where those preconditions have not been met, and Petitioners imprisoned at CECOT have already been removed under the AEA where those preconditions were not met.

111. The AEA also does not authorize the removal of noncitizens from the United States unless they “refuse or neglect to depart” from the United States. See 50 U.S.C. § 21. The Proclamation mandates Petitioners’ and Plaintiffs’ removal under the AEA where those preconditions have not been met, and Petitioners have been removed under the AEA where those preconditions were not met.

112. The AEA Process, which was purportedly established pursuant to the authority of 50 U.S.C. § 21, was not authorized by that law.

113. The application of the AEA Process to Petitioners and Plaintiffs is therefore ultra vires.

114. The application of the AEA Process to Petitioners and Plaintiffs is contrary to law. See 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A).

SECOND CLAIM FOR RELIEF
Violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1101, et seq.
(Class and Subclasses against All Respondents)

115. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

116. The INA, 8 U.S.C. § 1101, et seq., sets out the sole mechanisms established by Congress for the removal of noncitizens.

117. The INA provides that a removal proceeding before an immigration judge under 8 U.S.C. § 1229a is “the sole and exclusive procedure” by which the government may determine whether to remove an individual, “[u]nless otherwise specified” in the INA. 8 U.S.C. § 1229a(a)(3).

118. The AEA Process creates an alternative removal mechanism outside of the immigration laws set forth by Congress in Title 8.

119. The INA’s “exclusive procedure” and statutory protections apply to any removal of a noncitizen from the United States, including removals authorized by the AEA. Because the AEA Process provides for the removal of Petitioners and Plaintiffs without the procedures specified in the INA, it violates 8 U.S.C. § 1229a and the INA.

120. As a result, the application of the AEA to Petitioners and Plaintiffs, which will result or has resulted in their removal from the United States, is contrary to law. See 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A).

121. In addition, by refusing to grant Petitioners and Plaintiffs access to the procedures specified in the INA, Respondents have withheld and unreasonably delayed actions mandated by the statute. 5 U.S.C. § 706(1).

THIRD CLAIM FOR RELIEF

Violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1158, Asylum
(Class and Subclasses against All Respondents)

122. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

123. The INA provides, with certain exceptions, that “[a]ny alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 1225(b) of this title.” 8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)(1).

124. Respondents’ application of the AEA Process to Petitioners and Plaintiffs prevents them from applying for asylum in accordance with 8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)(1), and is therefore contrary to law. See 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A).

FOURTH CLAIM FOR RELIEF

Violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3), Withholding of Removal
(Class and Subclasses against All Respondents)

125. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

126. The “withholding of removal” statute, INA § 241(b)(3), codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3), bars the removal of noncitizens to a country where it is more likely than not that they would face persecution.

127. Respondents’ AEA Process and regulations violate the withholding of removal statute because they do not provide adequate safeguards to ensure that Petitioners and Plaintiffs are not returned to a country where it is more likely than not that they would face persecution. As a result, Respondents’ actions against Petitioners and Plaintiffs are contrary to law. See 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A).

128. In addition, by refusing to grant Petitioners and Plaintiffs the procedural protections to which they are entitled, Respondents have withheld and unreasonably delayed actions mandated by the statute. 5 U.S.C. § 706(1).

FIFTH CLAIM FOR RELIEF

Violation of the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 (“FARRA”), codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1231 note
(Class and Subclasses against All Respondents)

129. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

130. FARRA prohibits the government from returning a noncitizen to a country where it is more likely than not that he would face torture.

131. Respondents’ AEA Process and regulations violate FARRA because they do not provide adequate safeguards to ensure that Petitioners and Plaintiffs are not returned to a country where it is more likely than not that they would face torture. As a result, Respondents’ actions against Petitioners and Plaintiffs are contrary to law. See 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A).

132. In addition, by refusing to grant Petitioners and Plaintiffs the procedural protections to which they are entitled, Respondents have withheld and unreasonably delayed actions mandated by the statute. 5 U.S.C. § 706(1).

SIXTH CLAIM FOR RELIEF

Violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A)
(Class and Subclasses against All Respondents except Respondent Trump)

133. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

134. The APA provides that courts “shall . . . hold unlawful and set aside agency action” that is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion.” 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A).

135. Respondents’ actions are arbitrary and capricious. Respondents have failed to consider relevant factors in applying the AEA Process, including the risk of torture and other inhumane treatment at CECOT, and Venezuelans’ fear of persecution and torture in their home country. Respondents also relied on factors Congress did not intend to be considered, and offered no sufficient explanation for their decision to remove them from this country.

136. The subjection of Petitioners and Plaintiffs to the AEA Process is arbitrary and capricious because it also departs from existing agency policies prohibiting the return of individuals who fear persecution or torture, without providing a reasoned explanation for departing from these policies.

SEVENTH CLAIM FOR RELIEF

Ultra Vires, Violation of 50 U.S.C. § 22
(Class and Subclasses against All Respondents)

137. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

138. The APA provides that courts “shall . . . hold unlawful and set aside agency action” that is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.” 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A).

139. The AEA requires that noncitizens whose removal is authorized by the AEA, unless “chargeable with actual hostility, or other crime against the public safety,” be allowed the full time stipulated by treaty to depart or a reasonable time in which to settle their affairs before departing. See 50 U.S.C. § 22. The Proclamation denies Petitioners and Plaintiffs any time under Section 22 to settle their affairs, because it declares everyone subject to the Proclamation to be “chargeable with actual hostility” and to be a “danger to public safety,” without any kind of individualized determination.

140. The AEA Process thus contravenes 50 U.S.C. § 22 and is ultra vires.

141. The application of the AEA Process to Petitioners and Plaintiffs is contrary to law. See 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A).

EIGHTH CLAIM FOR RELIEF

Violation of Due Process Under the Fifth Amendment
(Class and Subclasses against All Respondents)

142. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

143. The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment provides in relevant part that: “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” U.S. Const. amend. V.

144. In denying Petitioners and Plaintiffs adequate notice and meaningful procedural protections to challenge their removal, the Proclamation violates due process.

145. The Proclamation also denies Petitioners and Plaintiffs the opportunity to voluntarily depart and any time to settle their affairs before departing and thus violates the due process.

NINTH CLAIM FOR RELIEF

Violation of Habeas Corpus
(Subclasses against All Respondents)

146. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

147. Detainees have the right to file petitions for habeas corpus to challenge the legality of their detention and raise other claims related to their detention or to the basis for their removal.

148. The ongoing or imminent detention of Petitioners under the Alien Enemies Act has violated, continues to violate, and will violate their right to habeas corpus. See U.S. Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 2 (Suspension Clause); 28 U.S.C. § 2241.

TENTH CLAIM FOR RELIEF

Ultra Vires, Post-Removal Imprisonment in Violation of 50 U.S.C. § 21
(Subclasses against All Respondents)

149. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

150. When the AEA’s conditions have been met, the AEA authorizes a series of actions the executive branch may take with respect to alien enemies residing in the United States: in particular, alien enemies are liable to be “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed.” 50 U.S.C. § 21. But the AEA does not authorize the detention of alien enemies after they have been removed from the United States.

151. The ongoing or imminent imprisonment of Petitioners in El Salvador, following their removal, contravenes the AEA and is ultra vires.

152. The ongoing or imminent imprisonment of Petitioners in El Salvador, following their removal, is contrary to law. See 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A).

ELEVENTH CLAIM FOR RELIEF

Punitive Civil Detention in Violation of the Fifth Amendment
(Subclasses against All Respondents)

153. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

154. Detention under the auspices of the AEA, like other forms of immigration detention, is civil detention. Civil detention is subject to due process constraints and must therefore be justified by a regulatory, nonpunitive purpose. See Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 535, 538-39 (1979). Those held in such detention have a due process right not to be subjected to any condition, practice, or policy that constitutes punishment.

155. Respondents are detaining or will imminently detain Petitioners at CECOT for the purpose of punishment and with the expressed intent to punish.

156. Respondents have identified no legitimate reason for transferring and holding detainees at the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, other than to deter future migration to the United States, induce self-deportation, and coerce people into giving up claims and accepting deportation. These are impermissible justifications for civil immigration detention.

157. Respondents’ ongoing or imminent detention of Petitioners at CECOT also subjects them to punitive conditions that violate their due process rights as civil detainees. See Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U.S. 307, 321-22 (1982).

158. Respondents’ ongoing or imminent detention of Petitioners at CECOT subjects them to harsher detention conditions than they would face in U.S. prisons and immigration detention facilities—hallmarks of punitive detention.

159. For these reasons, detention at CECOT constitutes unlawful punishment, in violation of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

TWELFTH CLAIM FOR RELIEF

Criminal Punishment in Violation of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments
(Subclasses against All Respondents)

160. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

161. Imprisonment at CECOT, based on unproven accusations of criminal conduct, constitutes criminal punishment in violation of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. Respondents’ intent to criminally punish Petitioners is plain from the circumstances of their confinement at CECOT and from Respondents’ own statements. Hallmarks of criminal punishment include a finding that a person committed acts in violation of a criminal law, the stigma inherent in such a determination, and a resulting deprivation of liberty.

162. Respondents have made or will imminently make summary determinations that Petitioners are “terrorists” and members of a “criminal organization,” with no due process.

163. Senior U.S. government officials, including President Trump, have made statements reiterating these accusations and conclusory findings that Petitioners are “criminals,” making their intent to punish clear and amplifying the resulting stigma.

164. Respondents have deprived or will imminently deprive Petitioners of their liberty, subjecting them to criminal detention at CECOT in some of the most punitive conditions imaginable.

165. The Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee fundamental protections in connection with criminal punishment, including the right to notice of the government’s allegations, the right to counsel, the right to trial by a jury, the right to proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and the protection against double jeopardy.

166. Respondents have not afforded Petitioners any of these protections, despite subjecting them to ongoing or imminent criminal punishment.

167. By the actions described above, Respondents have denied or will imminently deny Petitioners the process they are due with regard to their ongoing seizure and detention, in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

168. By the actions described above, Respondents have denied or will imminently deny Petitioners the fundamental protections of the Sixth Amendment.

169. For these reasons, the ongoing or imminent imprisonment of Petitioners at CECOT constitutes criminal punishment that violates the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.

THIRTEENTH CLAIM FOR RELIEF

Conditions of Confinement in Violation of the Eighth Amendment
(Subclasses against All Respondents)

170. All of the foregoing allegations are repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.

171. The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

172. Under the Eighth Amendment, Respondents must provide for Petitioners’ basic human needs, including food, shelter, medical care, and reasonable safety. DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dept. of Social Svcs., 489 U.S. 189, 199-200 (1989). Respondents must also avoid the use of excessive physical force.

173. In subjecting Petitioners to ill treatment, unsafe conditions, inadequate subsistence, inadequate medical care, and excessive physical force at CECOT, Respondents are violating or will imminently violate Petitioners’ Eighth Amendment rights to decent and humane treatment in criminal confinement.

PRAYER FOR RELIEF

WHEREFORE, Petitioners and Plaintiffs respectfully pray this Court to:

a. Certify this action as a class action on behalf of the proposed class and subclasses, appoint the Petitioners and Plaintiffs as class representatives; Petitioners as subclass representatives; and undersigned counsel as class counsel;

b. Order Respondents to provide notice of AEA designation to Plaintiffs, Petitioners, and class counsel, and an opportunity to challenge such designation at least 30 days prior to the removal date;

c. Grant a writ of habeas corpus that (1) enjoins Respondents from removing Petitioners pursuant to the Proclamation or, in the event they have already been removed to CECOT, that orders Respondents to facilitate their return to the United States; and (2) enjoins Respondents from detaining Petitioners or otherwise regulating them pursuant to the Proclamation;

d. Enjoin Respondents from removing Petitioners and Plaintiffs from the United States pursuant to the Proclamation;

e. Enjoin Respondents from detaining or otherwise regulating Petitioners and Plaintiffs pursuant to the Proclamation;

f. Declare unlawful the Proclamation and the AEA Process, including detention of Petitioners at CECOT;

g. Order Respondents to facilitate the return of the CECOT Subclass to the United States;

h. Award Plaintiffs’ counsel reasonable attorneys’ fees under the Equal Access to Justice Act, and any other applicable statute or regulation; and

i. Grant such further relief as the Court deems just, equitable, and appropriate.

INTRODUCTION

1. Petitioners–Plaintiffs (“Petitioners”) and Plaintiffs1 are Venezuelan men threatened with imminent removal or who have already suffered removal under the President’s Proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act (“AEA”), a wartime measure that has been used only three times before in our Nation’s history: the War of 1812, World War 1, and World War II.

2. The Proclamation authorizes “immediate” removal of noncitizens that the Proclamation deems to be alien enemies, without any opportunity for judicial review. It also contorts the plain language of the AEA: arrivals of noncitizens from Venezuela are deemed an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” by a “foreign nation or government,” where Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, is deemed to be sufficiently akin to a foreign nation or government.

3. But the AEA has only ever been a power invoked in time of war, and plainly only applies to warlike actions: it cannot be used here against nationals of a country—Venezuela— with whom the United States is not at war, which is not invading the United States, and which has not launched a predatory incursion into the United States.

4. Multiple judges—including this Court—have already held that there is likely no authority for the government’s actions. See, e.g., J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-5067, 2025 WL 914682, at *5–10 (D.C. Cir. Mar. 26, 2025) (Henderson, J., concurring) (AEA predicates of “invasion” or “predatory incursion” not met); id. at *13 (Millett, J., concurring) (“The Constitution’s demand of due process cannot be so easily thrown aside.”); D.B.U v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-01163, 2025 WL 1163530, at *9–12 (D. Colo. Apr. 22, 2025); J.G.G. v. Trump, No. CV 25-766 (JEB), 2025 WL 890401, at *2 (D.D.C. Mar. 24, 2025) (Boasberg, J.) (“before [petitioners] may be deported, they are entitled to individualized hearings to determine whether the Act applies to them at all”).

5. Nevertheless, the government has twice attempted (once successfully) to remove individuals under the AEA without any meaningful process. First, on March 15, the government secretly loaded people onto planes, published the Proclamation, and removed at least 137 people within hours to a brutal prison in El Salvador. Those removed received no notice of their designation nor any opportunity to contest it. Second, on April 17, the government provided individuals with an English-only notice form that did not inform them of their right to seek judicial review. Hours after distributing the notices, the government loaded people onto buses and drove them towards the airport, only turning around after counsel filed an emergency appeal in the Supreme Court.

6. These repeated attempts to use the Proclamation to remove noncitizens without any review of the determination that they are alien enemies violate the AEA, the APA, and the Constitution. For that reason, Petitioners, Plaintiffs, and the putative class that they represent seek this Court’s intervention to restrain these summary removals, and to determine that this use of the AEA is unlawful and must be halted.

7. Petitioners also bring this challenge to remedy the unlawful detention of a subclass held in the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (“CECOT”) prison in El Salvador. The 137 people wrongly deported on March 15 remain incommunicado and have not spoken to their families or attorneys in over a month now. Their families are deeply concerned for their safety, especially given reports of widespread physical and psychological abuse in Salvadoran prisons. The continuing detention of the CECOT Subclass in El Salvador violates the AEA, Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment, and Eighth Amendment.

JURISDICTION AND VENUE

8. This case arises under the Alien Enemies Act (“AEA”), 50 U.S.C. §§ 21–24; the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), 5 U.S.C. § 701, et seq.; the Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”), 8 U.S.C. § 1101, et seq. and its implementing regulations; the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”), see Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 (“FARRA”), Pub. L. No. 105-277, div. G, Title XXII, § 2242, 112 Stat. 2681, 2681-822 (1998) (codified as Note to 8 U.S.C. § 1231); and the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

9. This Court has subject matter jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 et seq. (habeas corpus), art. I, § 9, cl. 2 of the U.S. Constitution (Suspension Clause), 28 U.S.C. § 1331 (federal question), 28 U.S.C. § 1346 (United States as defendant), 28 U.S.C. § 1361 (mandamus), and 28 U.S.C. § 1651 (All Writs Act). Respondents-Defendants (“Respondents”) have waived sovereign immunity for purposes of this suit. 5 U.S.C. §§ 702, 706.

10. The Court may grant relief pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2241; 28 U.S.C. § 2243; the Declaratory Judgment Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2201 et seq.; 28 U.S.C. § 1331; the All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1651; and the Court’s inherent equitable powers.

11. Venue is proper in this District under 28 U.S.C. § 1391(e)(1) because Respondents are agencies of the United States or officers of the United States acting in their official capacity, Respondents reside in this District, and a substantial part of the events or omissions giving rise to the claim occurred in this District.

PARTIES

Petitioners and Plaintiffs

12. Petitioner Frengel Reyes Mota is a Venezuelan national who has been transferred by the government from an immigration detention facility in Texas to CECOT. Mr. Reyes Mota fled Venezuela and sought asylum in the United States after violence from paramilitary groups. As his “next friend,” his wife Liyana Sanchez, brings this action on his behalf. Mr. Reyes Mota’s wife saw his name on a public list of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and became alarmed that the U.S. government had removed and detained him at CECOT. Ms. Sanchez has not been able to speak with her husband since his removal. She desires that her husband be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of his membership in a gang.

13. Petitioner Andry Jose Hernandez Romero is a Venezuelan national who has been transferred by the government from an immigration detention facility in Texas to CECOT. Mr. Hernandez Romero sought asylum in the United States after he was targeted for his sexual orientation as well as his refusal to promote government propaganda while working for a government-affiliated television station. Before he fled Venezuela, armed men connected to the government had been following and threatening him. Mr. Hernandez Romero entered using the CBP One app and passed his credible fear interview. As his “next friend,” his mother D.A.R.H., brings this action on his behalf. Mr. Hernandez Romero’s mother discovered that her son had been deported when his name appeared in a news article listing Venezuelans deported to El Salvador. She later heard from a journalist who told her that Andry was at CECOT, was being mistreated by guards, and was begging for his release. D.A.R.H. has done everything possible to support her son since his deportation, including speaking with his lawyer and trying to find any information about where he is. But D.A.R.H. has been unable to contact her son since he was sent to El Salvador. She desires that her son be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of gang membership.

14. Petitioner J.A.B.V. is a Venezuelan national who has been transferred by the government from an immigration detention facility in Texas to CECOT. He fled Venezuela and sought asylum in the United States after he was violently targeted after the campaigned for the opposition leader. J.A.B.V. was abducted by masked men, beaten, and told he would be killed if he campaigned again. He was then held for several days at a police center, where he was tortured. J.A.B.V. passed his credible fear interview. As his “next friend,” his mother, M.Z.V.V., brings this action on his behalf. M.Z.V.V. saw J.A.B.V.’s name on a public list of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and became alarmed that the U.S. government had removed and detained him at CECOT. M.Z.V.V. has not been able to speak with her son since his removal. She desires that her son be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of his membership in a gang.

15. Petitioner M.A.O.R. is a Venezuelan national who has been transferred by the government from an immigration detention facility in Texas to CECOT. He was in the process of seeking protection in the United States. As his “next friend,” his sister, M.Y.O.R., brings this action on his behalf. M.Y.O.R. saw M.A.O.R.’s name on a public list of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and became alarmed that the U.S. government had removed and detained him at CECOT. M.Y.O.R. has not been able to speak with her brother since his removal. She desires that her brother be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of his membership in a gang.

16. Petitioner G.A.A.A. is a Venezuelan national who has been transferred by the government from an immigration detention facility in Texas to CECOT. He fled Venezuela and sought asylum in the United States due to the violence in his town at the hand of a paramilitary group. As his “next friend,” his mother, M.M.A.A., brings this action on his behalf. M.A.A.A. saw J.A.B.V.’s name on a public list of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and became alarmed that the U.S. government had removed and detained him at CECOT. M.M.A.A. has not been able to speak with her son since his removal. She desires that her son be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of his membership in a gang.

17. Petitioner M.R.M. is a Venezuelan national who is currently has been transferred by the government from an immigration detention facility in Texas to CECOT. As his “next friend,” his mother Dorys Mendoza, brings this action on his behalf. Ms. Mendoza saw M.R.M.’s name on a public list of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and became alarmed that the U.S. government had removed and detained him at CECOT. Ms. Mednoza has not been able to speak with her son since his removal. She desires that her son be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of his membership in a gang.

18. Petitioner T.C.I. is a Venezuelan national who is currently in criminal custody and detained in New Jersey. After leaving Venezuela, he turned himself into immigration authorities and was granted humanitarian parole. As his “next friend,” his criminal defense attorney Eylan Schilman, brings this action on his behalf. T.C.I. informed Mr. Schilman that officials approached him to sign a form in English that he was a member of Tren de Aragua and subject to removal. T.C.I. refused to sign because he denies membership in Tren de Aragua or any other gang. Mr. Schilman desires that his client be able to challenge his designation as an “alien enemy” and to defend himself against the false allegations of his membership in a gang.

19. Plaintiff J.G.G. is a Venezuelan national who is detained at El Valle Detention Center in Texas. J.G.G. is seeking asylum, withholding of removal, and CAT protection because he fears being killed, arbitrarily imprisoned, beaten, or tortured by Venezuelan state police, since they have previously done so to him. J.G.G. was nearly removed on March 15 pursuant to the Proclamation. He was pulled off the plane at the last minute due to this Court’s TRO. Despite the fact that J.G.G. is not involved whatsoever with Tren de Aragua, he fears that the government will continue trying to deport him because he has tattoos and because they have previously attempted to deport him under the Proclamation.

20. Plaintiff J.A.V. is a Venezuelan national who is detained at El Valle Detention Center in Texas. J.A.V. is seeking asylum because of his political views and fear of harm and mistreatment by multiple criminal groups, including TdA. J.A.V. is not and has never been a member of TdA—he was in fact victimized by that group and it is the reason why he cannot return to Venezuela. J.A.V. was nearly removed on March 15 pursuant to the Proclamation. However, he was spared from immediate deportation due to this Court’s TRO. J.A.V. fears that the government will continue trying to deport him because he has previously been designated an alien enemy.

21. Plaintiff G.F.F. is a 21-year-old Venezuelan national who is detained at Orange County Jail in New York. G.F.F. and his family fled Venezuela in part due to threats from TdA based on his sexual orientation and gender non-conformity. He also fears persecution from Venezuelan state actors, including police and paramilitary groups. G.F.F. entered the United States in May 2024 and was released on his own recognizance after passing a credible fear interview. G.F.F. was nearly deported pursuant to the Proclamation on March 15; he was taken off the plane after this Court issued its initial TRO. G.F.F. strongly denies any association with TdA. G.F.F. fears that the government will continue trying to deport him because it has filed an I-213 identifying him as an “associate/affiliate of Tren de Aragua” and because the government previously attempted to deport him under the Proclamation.

22. Plaintiff W.G.H. is a 29-year-old Venezuelan national who is detained at El Valle Detention Center in Texas. W.G.H. is seeking asylum because he was extorted and threatened by multiple criminal groups in Venezuela, including TdA. W.G.H. is extremely afraid of returning to Venezuela or being sent to El Salvador. W.G.H. was almost deported on March 15, despite the fact that he has repeatedly denied any connection to TdA whatsoever. He was removed from the plane after this Court’s TRO. W.G.H. W.G.H. fears that the government will continue trying to deport him because it has filed an I-213 stating that W.G.H. “has been identified as a Tren de Aragua gang associate” and because he was previously designated under the Proclamation.

23. Plaintiff J.G.O. is a 32-year-old Venezuelan national who is detained at Orange County Jail in New York. J.G.O. is seeking asylum in the United States because he actively protested against the Maduro regime in Venezuela and fears torture, imprisonment, or death on account of his political activism if he returns. J.G.O. was nearly deported on March 15, but was removed from the plane after this Court’s TRO. J.G.O. fears that the government will continue trying to deport him pursuant to the AEA because he has been questioned about gang affiliation and because he has already been designated under the Proclamation. J.G.O. vehemently denies any affiliation with a gang.

Respondents-Defendants

24. Respondent Donald Trump is the President of the United States. He is sued in his official capacity. In that capacity, he issued the Proclamation under the Alien Enemies Act.

25. Respondent Pamela J. Bondi is the U.S. Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, which is a cabinet-level department of the United States government. She is sued in her official capacity.

26. Respondent Kristi Noem is the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which is a cabinet-level department of the United States government. She is sued in her official capacity. In that capacity, Respondent Noem is responsible for the administration of the immigration laws pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1103.

27. Respondent U.S. Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) is a cabinet-level department of the United States federal government. Its components include Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”). Respondent DHS is a legal custodian of Petitioners.

28. Respondent Todd Lyons is the Acting Director of ICE. Respondent Lyons is responsible for ICE’s policies, practices, and procedures, including those relating to the detention of immigrants during their removal procedures. Respondent Lyons is a legal custodian of Petitioners. Respondent Lyons is sued in his official capacity.

29. Respondent ICE is the subagency of DHS that is responsible for carrying out removal orders and overseeing immigration detention. Respondent ICE is a legal custodian of Petitioners.

30. Respondent Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State, which is a cabinet-level department of the United States government. He is sued in his official capacity. In that capacity, Respondent Rubio negotiates and enters into contracts or agreements with El Salvador for the removal and detention of Petitioners and others, and would be responsible for facilitating the return of Petitioners sent to El Salvador or any other country.

31. Respondent U.S. Department of State (“DOS”) is a cabinet-level department of the United States federal government.

32. Respondent Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense, which is a cabinet-level department of the United States government. He is sued in his official capacity. In that capacity, Respondent Hegseth oversees the Department of Defense and acts as the principal defense policy maker and advisor.

33. Respondent U.S. Department of Defense (“DOD”) is a cabinet-level department of the Unite States federal government.

BACKGROUND

The Alien Enemies Act

34. The AEA is a wartime authority enacted in 1798 that grants the President specific powers with respect to the regulation, detention, and deportation of enemy aliens.

35. The AEA, as codified today, provides that “[w]henever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.” 50 U.S.C. § 21.

36. The AEA can thus be triggered in only two situations. The first is when a formal declared war exists with a foreign nation or government. The second is when a foreign nation or government perpetrates, attempts, or threatens an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.

37. To trigger the AEA, the President must make a public proclamation of the declared war, or of the attempted or threatened invasion or predatory incursion. Id.

38. Section 21 of the AEA also provides that noncitizens must be afforded a right of voluntary departure. Only noncitizens who “refuse or neglect to depart” are subject to removal. Id. § 21.

39. Section 22 of the AEA specifies the terms of departure for aliens designated as enemies. It grants noncitizens the full time to depart as stipulated by any treaty between the United States and the enemy nation, unless the noncitizen has engaged in “actual hostility” against the United States. If no such treaty exists, the President may declare a “reasonable time” for departure, “according to the dictates of humanity and national hospitality.” Id. § 22.

40. The Act has been used only three times in American history, all during actual or imminent wartime.

41. The AEA was first invoked several months into the War of 1812, but President Madison did not use the AEA to remove anyone from the United States during the war.

42. The AEA was invoked a second time during World War I by President Wilson. Upon information and belief, there were no removals effectuated pursuant to the AEA during World War I.

43. The AEA was used again during World War II, though it was never used as a widespread method of removal.

44. On December 7, 1941, after the Japanese invaded Hawaii in the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt proclaimed that Japan had perpetrated an invasion upon the territory of the United States. The President issued regulations applicable to Japanese nationals living in the United States. The next day Congress declared war on Japan.

45. On the same day, President Roosevelt issued two separate proclamations stating that an invasion or predatory incursion was threatened upon the territory of the United States by Germany and Italy. The President incorporated the same regulations that were already in effect as to Japanese people for German and Italian people. Three days later Congress voted unanimously to declare war against Germany and Italy.

46. Congress declared war against Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria on June 5, 1942. Just over a month later, President Roosevelt issued a proclamation recognizing that declaration of war and invoking the AEA against citizens of those countries.

47. Under these proclamations, the United States infamously interned noncitizens from Japan, Germany, Italy, Hungary Romania, and Bulgaria (with U.S. citizens of Japanese descent subject to a separate order that did not rely on the AEA).

48. It was not until the end of hostilities that the President provided for the removal of alien enemies from the United States under the AEA. On July 14, 1945, President Truman issued a proclamation providing that alien enemies detained as a danger to public peace and safety “shall be subject upon the order of the Attorney General to removal from the United States.” The Department of Justice subsequently issued regulations laying out the removal process. See 10 Fed. Reg. 12189 (Sept. 28, 1945). It was never used as a widespread method of removal.

Systemic Overhaul of Immigration Law in 1952

49. Following the end of World War II, Congress consolidated U.S. immigration laws into a single text under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (“INA”).

50. The INA, and its subsequent amendments, provide for a comprehensive system of procedures that the government must follow before removing a noncitizen from the United States. The INA provides the exclusive procedure by which the government may determine whether to remove an individual. 8 U.S.C. § 1229a(a)(3).

51. In addition to laying out the process by which the government determines whether to remove an individual, the INA also enshrines particular forms of humanitarian protection.

52. First, the INA provides that “[a]ny alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival . . . ), irrespective of such alien’s status,” may apply for asylum. 8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)(1). To qualify for asylum, a noncitizen must show a “well-founded fear of persecution” on account of a protected ground, such as race, nationality, political opinion, or religion. 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(42)(A).

53. Second, Congress has barred the removal of an individual to a country where it is more likely than not that he would face persecution on one of these protected grounds. 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3). That protection implements this country’s obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees. The relevant form of relief, known as “withholding of removal,” requires the applicant to meet a higher standard with respect to the likelihood of harm than asylum; granting that relief is mandatory if the standard is met absent limited exceptions.

54. Third, the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) prohibits the government from returning a noncitizen to a country where it is more likely than not that he would face torture. See 8 U.S.C. § 1231 note. That protection implements the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 (“FARRA”), Pub. L. No. 105-277, div. G, Title XXII, § 2242. As with withholding of removal, CAT relief also requires the applicant to meet a higher standard with respect to the likelihood of harm than asylum and relief is mandatory if that standard is met. There is no exception to CAT relief.

President Trump’s Proclamation Invoking the AEA

55. On March 14, the President signed the AEA Proclamation at issue here. It provides that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA, are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.” See Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua (Mar. 15, 2025).2

56. Although the AEA calls for a “public proclamation,” 50 U.S.C. § 21, the administration did not make the invocation public until around 3:53 p.m. EDT on March 15.

57. The Proclamation alleges that Tren de Aragua is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening predatory incursions, hostile actions, and irregular warfare.

58. The Proclamation thus states that all Venezuelan citizens ages fourteen or older alleged to be members of Tren de Aragua—and who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents—are alien enemies.

59. The Proclamation provides no means or process for individuals to contest that they are members of the TdA and do not therefore fall within the terms of the Proclamation. Nor does it provide individuals with an opportunity for voluntary departure, as required by Section 21. Nor does it provide the grace period required under Section 22, during which individuals can arrange their affairs. The Proclamation instead invokes Section 22’s exception by claiming that all individuals subject to the Proclamation are “chargeable with actual hostility,” and pose “a public safety risk.”

60. As multiple judges have already found, the Proclamation is likely unlawful.

61. First, the Proclamation does not satisfy the statutory requirements for proper invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization, is not a nation or foreign government and is not part of the Venezuelan government. The United States is not in a declared war with Venezuela. The United States cannot declare war against Tren de Aragua because it is not a nation. And neither Venezuela nor Tren de Aragua have invaded or threatened to invade the United States, nor has either engaged in a “predatory incursion” within the meaning of the AEA.

62. Moreover, there is no meaningful notice or meaningful opportunity for individuals to challenge their designation as alien enemies. There is thus a significant risk that even individuals who do not fall under the terms of the Proclamation will be subject to it.

63. The Proclamation also violates the process and protections that Congress has prescribed elsewhere in the country’s immigration laws for the removal of noncitizens.

64. As a result, countless Venezuelans are at imminent risk of removal pursuant to the Proclamation without any hearing or meaningful review, regardless of the absence of any ties to TdA or the availability of claims for relief from and defenses to removal. And for some people, it is too late. As described in more detail below, over 130 individuals were removed on March 15 to a prison in El Salvador known for dire conditions, torture, and other forms of physical abuse—possibly for life. They have lost all contact with their attorneys, family, and the world.