Judge grudgingly gives Trump administration another day to answer questions on deportation flights
A federal judge has granted the Trump administration’s request to delay responding to his demand for details of three deportation flights that may have been allowed to proceed to their destinations in violation of his order.
Judge James Boasberg said the government had another 24 hours – until noon eastern time tomorrow – to either provide details of the flights’ itineraries and who they were carrying or to invoke a doctrine that would allow the government to shield the information on national security grounds.
In his order, Boasberg, who on Saturday night said that any of the three planes carrying migrants should not proceed to their destinations as he weighed a challenge to their deportation under the Alien Enemies Act, signaled he was not happy with the government’s arguments.
“Although their grounds for such request at first blush are not persuasive, the Court will extend the deadline for one more day,” Boasberg wrote.
“The Court seeks this information, not as a ‘micromanaged and unnecessary judicial fishing expedition’” as the Trump administration had argued, “but to determine if the Government deliberately flouted its Orders issued on March 15, 2025, and, if so, what the consequences should be.”
He also signaled he was skeptical that the government will prevail if it invokes the state secrets doctrine to keep the information confidential on national security grounds:
The Government’s Motion is the first time it has suggested that disclosing the information requested by the Court could amount to the release of state secrets. To date, in fact, the Government has made no claim that the information at issue is even classified. Classification is generally considered to be less protective than the state-secrets privilege … It thus appears to be an uncommon occurrence for the disclosure of unclassified information to threaten state secrets.
Boasberg also criticized the Trump administration’s argument that sharing the details he requested “would result in an immediate flood of media inquiries and demands for the information.”:
Defendants make that claim despite their own extensive promotion of the particulars of the flights. For example, the Secretary of State has revealed many operational details of the flights, including the number of people involved in the flights, many of their identities, the facility to which they were brought, their manner of treatment, and the time window during which these events occurred …
The Court is therefore unsure at this time how compliance with its Minute Order would jeopardize state secrets.
Key events
The day so far
The Trump administration continues to face skepticism from federal courts, particularly when it comes to their attempts to push the boundaries of immigration enforcement. A federal judge ordered Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil’s case moved from Louisiana, where he is being detained and where judges may be more conservative, to New Jersey. Separately, justice department lawyers sparred with federal judge James Boasberg over his demand for details of three migrant deportation flights that may have taken place in violation of his order. The government criticized the judge’s request and ask that he drop his noon deadline for them to answer his questions. Boasberg partially agreed, giving the Trump administration until 12pm tomorrow to either answer his questions, or outline national security related reasons why they are not able to.
Here’s what else is going on today:
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Donald Trump spoke with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and said they were “very much on track” towards a ceasefire agreement.
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The US Institute of Peace has sued after agents from the department of government efficiency took over its building, with the help of police.
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The University of Pennsylvania lost $175m in federal funding at the order of the Trump administration, which accused them of allowing transgender athletes to play.
The deportations of suspected Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act came as Donald Trump implements hardline policies to arrest undocumented immigrants and swiftly deport them.
That push includes reauthorizing the detention of entire families, something he allowed during his first administration, but which Joe Biden stopped. The practice essentially means children will be locked up alongside their parents, and today, 21 Democratic senators asked the Trump administration to curb the practice:
We strongly object to the failed and inhumane practice of detaining migrant families. We are deeply disturbed by reports that your Administration has revived this cruel policy, which has proven to be ineffective, costly, and devastating for children and families.
There is a widespread consensus in the United States that family detention poses serious risks to the physical and mental well-being of children. Medical and child welfare experts— including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association—have consistently condemned this practice, warning that even short-term detention fails to meet basic child welfare standards and exposes children to lasting trauma. Even the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) own medical consultants have concluded that family detention presents a “high risk of harm to children and families.” The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Advisory Committee on Family Residential Centers also determined that family detention should be discontinued.
Here’s more on what family detention means, in practice:
Judge grudgingly gives Trump administration another day to answer questions on deportation flights
A federal judge has granted the Trump administration’s request to delay responding to his demand for details of three deportation flights that may have been allowed to proceed to their destinations in violation of his order.
Judge James Boasberg said the government had another 24 hours – until noon eastern time tomorrow – to either provide details of the flights’ itineraries and who they were carrying or to invoke a doctrine that would allow the government to shield the information on national security grounds.
In his order, Boasberg, who on Saturday night said that any of the three planes carrying migrants should not proceed to their destinations as he weighed a challenge to their deportation under the Alien Enemies Act, signaled he was not happy with the government’s arguments.
“Although their grounds for such request at first blush are not persuasive, the Court will extend the deadline for one more day,” Boasberg wrote.
“The Court seeks this information, not as a ‘micromanaged and unnecessary judicial fishing expedition’” as the Trump administration had argued, “but to determine if the Government deliberately flouted its Orders issued on March 15, 2025, and, if so, what the consequences should be.”
He also signaled he was skeptical that the government will prevail if it invokes the state secrets doctrine to keep the information confidential on national security grounds:
The Government’s Motion is the first time it has suggested that disclosing the information requested by the Court could amount to the release of state secrets. To date, in fact, the Government has made no claim that the information at issue is even classified. Classification is generally considered to be less protective than the state-secrets privilege … It thus appears to be an uncommon occurrence for the disclosure of unclassified information to threaten state secrets.
Boasberg also criticized the Trump administration’s argument that sharing the details he requested “would result in an immediate flood of media inquiries and demands for the information.”:
Defendants make that claim despite their own extensive promotion of the particulars of the flights. For example, the Secretary of State has revealed many operational details of the flights, including the number of people involved in the flights, many of their identities, the facility to which they were brought, their manner of treatment, and the time window during which these events occurred …
The Court is therefore unsure at this time how compliance with its Minute Order would jeopardize state secrets.
Trump says ‘very much on track’ after call with Zelenskyy
Donald Trump said his call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy has wrapped up, and the two sides are “very much on track” on reaching a deal to halt fighting in Ukraine.
The US president added that secretary of state Marco Rubio and national security adviser Michael Waltz will provide further details later. Trump’s call came after he spoke with Russia’s Vladimir Putin yesterday, which resulted in the two leaders saying they had agreed to a ceasefire on attacking energy and infrastructure targets in Ukraine.
We have a separate live blog following the negotiations and European news at large, and you can follow it here:
The US Institute of Peace and several of its board members have sued the Trump administration after agents of Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency (Doge) gained access to the building with the help of police earlier this week, the Associated Press reports.
The lawsuit contends the takeover is illegal, and outlines the extent to which staff at the Washington DC non-profit attempted to prevent Doge operatives from getting into its building. Here’s more, from the AP:
The lawsuit accuses the White House of illegal firings by email and said the remaining board members – Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Defense University President Peter Garvin – also ousted the institute’s president, George Moose.
In his place, the three appointed Kenneth Jackson, an administrator with the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the lawsuit.
DOGE staff tried multiple times to access the building Monday before successfully getting in, partly with police assistance.
The institute’s staff had first called the police around 3 p.m. Monday to report trespassing, according to the lawsuit. But the Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement that the institute’s acting president — seemingly a reference to Jackson — told them around 4 p.m. that he was being refused access to the building and there were “unauthorized individuals” inside.
“Eventually, all the unauthorized individuals inside of the building complied with the acting USIP President’s request and left the building without further incident,” police said.
The lawsuit says the institute’s lawyer told DOGE representatives multiple times that the executive branch has no authority over the nonprofit.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit.
Donald Trump’s rhetoric against judges he disagrees with is tipping the country towards a constitutional crisis, a prominent conservative legal scholar said. Here’s more, from the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly:
Donald Trump has “declared war on the rule of law in America” and is pitching the country into a constitutional crisis, a prominent former conservative federal judge said.
“The president of the United States has essentially declared war on the rule of law in America,” J Michael Luttig told MSNBC. “In the past few weeks … the president himself has led a full-frontal assault on the constitution, the rule of law, the federal judiciary, the American justice system and the nation’s legal profession.
“When the president of the United States wages a war on the rule of law and the federal judiciary alley, America is in a constitutional crisis. The constitutional role of the president is to faithfully execute the laws. Needless to say, the president is doing anything but that at the moment. Most constitutional scholars have long agreed that a constitutional crisis exists at least when the president defies a court order. That’s essentially what the president is doing today and what it appears he intends to do in the future.”
Trump administration asks judge to withdraw noon deadline for details of deportation flights
The justice department has asked a federal judge to cancel his noon deadline for it to provide details of three deportation flights carrying suspected Venezuelan gang members that may have departed the United States on Saturday in violation of a court order.
In a motion to judge James Boasberg, the government criticized his demands for details and said releasing the information would jeopardize national security and diplomacy.
“In a series of orders this Court has requested the Government to provide it details about the movements of aircraft outside of the United States and interactions with foreign nations which have no bearing on any legal issue at stake in the case,” the motion reads.
The judge has signaled he is concerned that they defied his order on Saturday for the planes not to depart, or to turn around if they were in the air, as he considered a challenge to the government’s attempt to deport those onboard under the rarely-used Alien Enemies Act.
Here’s what the justice department said about that:
The Court’s pending questions relate to a comment by the Court to a Government attorney suggesting, incorrectly, that the attorney had the ability to divert aircraft operating at the President’s direction on an extraterritorial mission to remove members of a designated foreign terrorist organization from the United States in connection with one or more sensitive diplomatic agreements requiring months of negotiation. The comment betrayed a complete misunderstanding of the serious national security, safety, regulatory, and logistical problems presented by a fiat from the Court directed at pilots operating outside the United States and was made without regard to whether any such aircraft could feasibly be diverted or even had enough fuel to safely do so. Further, the Court did not pause the hearing to give the attorney an opportunity to act on the remark, nor did it memorialize the remark in the subsequent minute order.
There is no serious dispute that the Government complied with the minute order, and the pending questions are grave encroachments on core aspects of absolute and unreviewable Executive Branch authority relating to national security, foreign relations, and foreign policy. Even addressing the questions in an ex parte submission would result in an immediate flood of media inquiries and demands for the information, subjecting the diplomatic relationships at issue to unacceptable uncertainty about how the Court will address those demands. Worse, the risks created by addressing the Court’s pending questions would undermine the Executive Branch’s ability to negotiate with foreign sovereigns in the future by subjecting all of the arrangements resulting from any such negotiations – as well as the negotiations themselves – to a serious risk of micromanaged and unnecessary judicial fishing expeditions and potential public disclosure.
Trump to speak with Ukraine’s Zelenskyy as negotiations over ceasefire continue
Donald Trump is speaking this morning with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a day after the president spoke to Vladimir Putin as he aims to reach a ceasefire agreement in Ukraine.
A White House official said the call should have started around 10am. Here’s more on the result of Trump’s call with the Russian president yesterday, in which Putin agreed to what could best be described as a partial ceasefire:
A forthcoming book reveals that top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer, who is in a bit of hot water with his party at the moment, thought the GOP would retreat from its embrace of Maga ideology if Donald Trump lost last year’s election. Here’s more, from the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly:
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, insisted Republicans would move on from Donald Trump and go back to a past version of the party even as Trump’s return to power loomed last year, according to the authors of a new book on politics during the Biden administration.
The revelation comes as Trump’s second term has begin in a flurry of radical policy moves that have rocked the US’s political landscape and triggered fears of a slide into authoritarianism. It also comes amid serious Democratic backlash against Schumer for failing to provide stiff enough resistance to Trump’s actions.
Schumer told Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater: “Here’s my hope … after this election, when the Republican party expels the turd of Donald Trump, it will go back to being the old Republican party.”
That insult may cause a splash at the White House in light of Trump’s abuse of Schumer, who he said last week was “not Jewish any more”, over the senator’s response to anti-Israel college protests.
Trump administration pulls $175m in funding from University of Pennsylvania over transgender athletes – report
Donald Trump has ordered the government to cancel $175m in funding to the University of Pennsylvania over its support of transgender athletes, and warned more cuts could come, Fox Business Network reports.
A senior administration official described the move as a “proactive punishment” for the university, and said it could have all its federal funding cut for allowing Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer who graduated in 2022, to compete. The initially cancelled contracts were issued by the departments of defense and health and human services.
The move against the University of Pennsylvania came after Trump withdrew $400m in grants and contracts from Columbia University, alleging it failed to protect students from antisemitism.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian’s Anna Betts, Mahmoud Khalil described himself as a “political prisoner” who the Trump administration was targeting to suppress dissent:
In his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.
“I am a political prisoner,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to the Guardian. “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.”
Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last spring, was arrested and detained in New York on 8 March by federal immigration authorities who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.
The Trump administration, he said, “is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent”, warning that “visa-holders, green-card carriers and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”
The statement, which Khalil dictated to his friends and family over the phone from an Ice detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, railed against the US’s treatment of immigrants in its custody, Israel’s renewed bombardment of the Gaza Strip, US foreign policy, and what he described as Columbia University’s surrender to federal pressure to punish students.
Judge denies government’s attempt to dismiss Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to his deportation
A federal judge has turned down a request from the Trump administration to dismiss Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to his deportation, and ruled his case should be heard in New Jersey rather than Louisiana, where he is now detained.
In his decision, judge Jesse M Furman said that since Khalil’s attorney filed the challenge to his arrest while he was in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention in New Jersey, the case must be heard there. Government lawyers had asked that his petition be considered in Louisiana, where Khalil had been flown to after being arrested by Ice in New York City and then briefly held in New Jersey.
“Given that the District of New Jersey is the one and only district in which Khalil could have filed his Petition when he did, the statutes that govern transfer of civil cases from one federal district court to another dictate that the case be sent there, not to the Western District of Louisiana,” Furman wrote.
He added that “the Court’s March 10, 2025 Order barring the Government from removing him (to which the Government has never raised an objection and which the Government has not asked the Court to lift in the event of transfer) shall similarly remain in effect unless and until the transferee court orders otherwise.”
