Heidy Sánchez says she was told her 17-month-old, who has health problems and is breastfeeding, couldn’t go with her
A mother deported to Cuba reportedly had to hand over her 17-month-old daughter to a lawyer while her husband, a US citizen, stood outside unable to say goodbye.
Heidy Sánchez was told she was being detained for deportation to Cuba when she turned up at her scheduled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) check-in appointment in Tampa, Florida, last week.
Continue reading...President says neither NPR nor PBS ‘presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events’
Donald Trump has signed an executive order seeking to cut public funding for NPR and PBS, accusing the news outlets of being biased.
NPR and PBS are only partly funded by the US taxpayer and rely heavily on private donations.
Continue reading...Justice department calls on court to hold judge’s order against ending temporary protected status for 300,000
The Trump administration asked the US supreme court on Thursday to intervene and assist in its attempt to strip temporary protected status (TPS) from more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants in the US, a move that would clear the way for their deportation.
The justice department asked the supreme court justices to put on hold a federal judge’s order from March that halted the decision of the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to terminate the temporary legal status that previously was granted to some Venezuelans.
Continue reading...Decline in output and new orders in April allied with rising uncertainty is prompting layoffs, survey finds
Britain’s factories suffered a slump in export orders last month as Donald Trump’s globally unsettling tariff regime sent overseas demand for UK goods tumbling at the fastest pace in five years.
Manufacturers reported rising economic and trade uncertainties in April as some tariffs took effect and other threatened border taxes loomed, forcing them to lay off workers for a sixth consecutive month.
Continue reading...More than 250 lawyers have left or been reassigned since January as critics fear ‘end of the division as we’ve known it’
More than 250 attorneys in the justice department’s civil rights division have either left, been reassigned, or accepted a buyout offer since January , according to an estimate provided to the Guardian by people familiar with the matter. The significant decrease in personnel underscores how Donald Trump is gutting the arm of the federal government responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws.
About 235 attorneys in the division’s civil enforcement sections have accepted buyouts or have quit the justice department and roughly another 20 have been reassigned or detailed to do other work within the agency, including handling public records requests and internal agency complaints.
Continue reading...Trump and Musk have gut National Institutes of Health and experts are wary of private efforts’ ability to replicate public service
The federal government has slashed research since Donald Trump took office – hacking away at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its grants, staff and long-held partnerships with academia.
Now, some private companies said they want to pick up strands of research that might have otherwise been funded by the federal government. The effort has stoked little optimism among experts, who caution that private efforts cannot remotely replicate the breadth, depth or public service provided by federal funding.
Continue reading...Executive order cites national security to strip bargaining rights from more than 1 million federal workers
The Trump administration is seeking to strip collective bargaining rights from large swaths of federal employees in a test case union leaders argue is part of a broader attack on US labor unions that could land before the US Supreme Court.
A Trump win would deliver a severe blow to labor unions in the US. Some 29.9% of all federal workers were represented by labor unions in 2024 compared to 11.1% for all US workers.
Continue reading...Move seals a deal to create a fund the Trump administration says will begin to repay roughly $175bn provided to Ukraine
The US and Kyiv have signed an agreement to share profits and royalties from the future sale of Ukrainian minerals and rare earths, sealing a deal that Donald Trump has said will provide an economic incentive for the US to continue to invest in Ukraine’s defense and its reconstruction after he brokers a peace deal with Russia.
The minerals deal, which has been the subject of tense negotiations for months and nearly fell through hours before it was signed, will establish a US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund that the Trump administration has said will begin to repay an estimated $175bn in aid provided to Ukraine since the beginning of the war.
Continue reading...Administration in touch with Nayib Bukele over detention of wrongly deported man, according to two people
The Trump administration has been in touch directly with the Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele in recent days about the detention of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The nature of the discussion and its purpose was not clear because multiple Trump officials have said the administration was not interested in his coming back to the US despite the US supreme court ordering it to “facilitate” Ábrego García’s release.
Continue reading...Funding will not be continued next year after bill signed in 2022 helped schools hire more mental health workers
The Trump administration is moving to cancel $1bn in school mental health grants, saying they reflect the priorities of the previous administration.
Grant recipients were notified on Tuesday that the funding will not be continued after this year. A gun violence bill signed by Joe Biden in 2022 sent $1bn to the grant programs to help schools hire more psychologists, counselors and other mental health workers.
Continue reading...Oklahoma case is part of a broader push to erode separation of church and state, and a test of role of religion in schools
The US supreme court’s conservative majority seemed open to establishing the country’s first public religious charter school as they weighed a case Wednesday that could have significant ramifications on the separation of church and state.
The Oklahoma state charter school board approved the application for St Isidore, a Catholic virtual charter school. The ACLU and other groups filed suit, as did Republican attorney general Gentner Drummond. The state supreme court sided with Drummond, ruling that the US and Oklahoma constitutions “prohibit the state from using public money for the establishment of a religious institution”.
Continue reading...With seven-day pause expiring Wednesday, Paula Xinis says administration must provide sworn testimony by May
A federal judge on Wednesday again directed the Trump administration to provide information about its efforts so far, if any, to comply with her order to retrieve Kilmar Ábrego García from an El Salvador prison.
The US district judge Paula Xinis in Maryland temporarily halted her directive for information at the administration’s request last week. But with the seven-day pause expiring at 5pm, she set May deadlines for officials to provide sworn testimony on anything they have done to return Ábrego García to the US.
Continue reading...US homeland security secretary said Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador ‘not under our control’
Kristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, said that if Kilmar Ábrego García was sent back to the US, the Donald Trump administration “would immediately deport him again”.
Noem repeated White House assertions about Ábrego García, a Salvadorian man who the Trump administration has admitted was mistakenly deported from Maryland last month, in a new interview with CBS.
Continue reading...Former top official calls for Rodney Scott to be blocked from CBP role over handling of investigation into Anastasio Hernández Rojas’s death
Rodney Scott, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has been accused by a former top official of orchestrating a “cover-up” over the death of a man detained while trying to enter the country from Mexico, according to a letter obtained by the Guardian.
Scott is a former US border patrol chief who has supported the president’s vow to build a wall along the border with Mexico and criticized Joe Biden’s handling of immigration policy. As commissioner of CBP, Scott would lead one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies, which encompasses the border patrol and staffs ports of entry across the United States.
Continue reading...Texas officials say 87 patients hospitalized as researchers say country at tipping point for return of endemic measles
Measles cases in Texas rose to 663 on Tuesday, according to the state’s health department, an increase of 17 cases since 25 April, as the US battles one of its worst outbreaks of the previously eradicated childhood disease.
Cases in Gaines county, the center of the outbreak, rose to 396, three more from its last update on Friday, the Texas department of state health services said.
Continue reading...Trump administration has been cracking down on people who leak information to the media since January
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said on Monday it has started using polygraph tests to aid investigations aimed at identifying the source of leaks emanating from within the law enforcement agency.
“We can confirm the FBI has begun administering polygraph tests to identify the source of information leaks within the bureau,” the bureau’s public affairs office told Reuters in a statement.
Continue reading...World now in era of repressive regimes’ impunity, climate inaction and unchecked corporate power, says report
The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency have “supercharged” a global rollback of human rights, pushing the world towards an authoritarian era defined by impunity and unchecked corporate power, Amnesty International warns today.
In its annual report on the state of human rights in 150 countries, the organisation said the immediate ramifications of Trump’s second term had been the undermining of decades of progress and the emboldening of authoritarian leaders.
Continue reading...Escalation from US military suggests previous restraints on causing civilian casualties have been relaxed
“I am the candidate of peace,” Donald Trump declared on the campaign trail last November. Three months into his presidency, not only is the war in Ukraine continuing and the war in Gaza restarted, but in Yemen, the number of civilian casualties caused by US bombing is rapidly and deliberately escalating.
Sixty-eight were killed overnight, the Houthis said, when the US military bombed a detention centre holding African migrants in Saada, north-west Yemen, as part of a campaign against the rebel group. In the words of the US Central Command (Centcom), its purpose is to “restore freedom of navigation” in the Red Sea and, most significantly, “American deterrence”.
Continue reading...Musk’s Doge targets National Labor Relations Board with cuts and terminated leases as union speaks out
Democrats have warned that cuts to the US’s top labor watchdog threaten to render the organization “basically ineffectual” and will be “catastrophic” for workers’ rights.
The so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has targeted the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for cuts and ended its leases in several states.
Continue reading...Virginia representative says he will not seek re-election in Congress, citing return of esophageal cancer
Gerry Connolly, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives’ key oversight committee, has announced he will not run for re-election and resign his committee post, citing a return of the cancer for which he previously been successfully treated.
The Virginia Democrat was elected as the party’s ranking member on the high-profile committee last December, after its former chair, the Maryland representative Jaime Raskin, moved on to the judiciary committee.
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