Trump Administration Live Updates: New Orders Will Escalate Immigration Crackdown, White House Says – The New York Times

Trump Administration
Executive orders: President Trump will sign two new executive orders on Monday to ramp up his administration’s immigration crackdown, said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. One will “unleash America’s law enforcement to pursue criminals” and the other is aimed at identifying “sanctuary cities” that don’t cooperate with immigration enforcement, Ms. Leavitt said.
Deportations: A 4-year-old and a 7-year-old, both with U.S. citizenship, were sent to Honduras last week with their mother, who was deported, the family’s lawyer said. Lawyers said the mother was not given an option to leave her children in the United States. Read more ›
War in Ukraine: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the Trump administration would decide this week whether to continue trying to broker a deal to end the war in Ukraine. It was not clear whether the remarks were meant to increase the pressure on Ukraine and Russia or whether Mr. Trump was seriously considering walking away. Read more ›
Ali Watkins
President Trump declared on Sunday that he would bring “Columbus Day back from the ashes” and reinstate its celebration as a holiday.
“I am hereby reinstating Columbus Day under the same rules, dates, and locations, as it has had for all of the many decades before!” the president said in a post on Truth Social, referring to the federal holiday named for Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer who sailed to the Americas on behalf of Spain more than 500 years ago.
The holiday has long been criticized by those who condemn the explorer for paving the way for European colonialism, which brought catastrophic diseases and led to the decimation of Indigenous populations in America.
But Columbus Day was never canceled as a federal holiday, and the second Monday in October is still widely referred to as such in the United States, and for many, it remains an important part of Italian American heritage.
With his declaration, Mr. Trump appeared to be referring to a proclamation issued by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2021. That decree also recognized the day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which recognizes the Indigenous communities that have lived in the Americas for thousands of years, and called for it to be celebrated alongside Columbus Day.
“The Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much,” Mr. Trump claimed in his social media post on Sunday.
In 2021, Mr. Biden became the first American president to formally recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day, vowing to “honor America’s first inhabitants and the Tribal Nations that continue to thrive today.”
But Mr. Biden did not rename the longstanding holiday, which is still officially known as Columbus Day. While several states and dozens of cities recognize the holiday as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, it is not considered a federal holiday, though there have been occasional efforts in Congress to make it one.
Mr. Biden’s 2021 declaration came amid heightened public debate about the erasure of Indigenous people in celebrations of Christopher Columbus, whose landing in North America led to centuries of exploitation and slaughter of Native American populations. At the time, dozens of Christopher Columbus statues were taken down, many in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the death of George Floyd in May 2020.
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Ana Swanson
The White House sent a notice to Senate offices strongly opposing a resolution that senators may vote on this week. The resolution would roll back Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs by terminating the national emergency that the levies are based on, although it seems unlikely lawmakers will actually curtail the president’s power. The House has taken steps so they are not required to vote on measures like this, and lawmakers likely wouldn’t have the numbers to override a presidential veto.
The notice says the administration is in talks with many governments after more than 75 countries expressed their willingness to negotiate and suggests the resolution would “signal that the United States is not serious about addressing structural imbalances in the global economy.” The president has paused his global tariffs until July to give countries time to negotiate, though some trade experts are skeptical about how much can be resolved in that short period.
Luke Broadwater
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, says President Trump will sign two new executive orders today to ramp up his immigration crackdown. She said one will “unleash America’s law enforcement to pursue criminals” and the second will direct the attorney general and secretary of homeland security to publish a list of state and local jurisdictions that the Trump administration considers “sanctuary cities.”
Luke Broadwater
On the White House lawn this morning, there are posters that appear to show illegal migrants who have been arrested as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown during the first 100 days of the president’s second term. The Trump administration has scheduled 8:30 a.m. briefings by the press secretary this week to try to set a narrative about his opening months in office. Today, President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, is expected to speak to reporters at the White House about “securing the border.”
Stacy Cowley
Two weeks ago, a three-judge panel from the federal appeals court in Washington lifted a freeze on firing employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with some conditions. The judges, ruling on a Friday night, said that workers could be fired if agency leaders determined, after a careful assessment, that they were not needed to carry out the bureau’s legally required responsibilities.
Within hours, Trump administration officials — working closely with Elon Musk’s associates at the Department of Government Efficiency — scurried to fire nearly all the agency’s employees. By the following Thursday afternoon, bureau leaders sent termination notices to nearly 1,500 employees, retaining barely 200 people, and ordered that the fired workers’ access to agency systems be shut down the next day.
A judge has again stopped the cuts for now. But the details of what happened at the agency, which oversees banks and lenders and enforces consumer protection laws, will be vital to determining if the firings can proceed. Hundreds of pages of newly released agency records, supplemented by narrative accounts filed in court by more than 20 agency employees, were submitted ahead of a hearing this week before Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington.
Judge Jackson halted the planned firings less than a day after the notices went out, saying that they went far beyond what the appeals court had allowed. Starting Tuesday, she will hold a two-day hearing to take witness testimony and decide whether to extend her order blocking the firings.
The consumer bureau has been on life support since February, when Trump officials arrived at the agency and began dismantling it. A series of federal court rulings prohibited the agency’s destruction. Congress created the agency in 2011 to add safeguards around mortgages and other consumer financial products, and only Congress has the power to abolish it.
Mark Paoletta, the agency’s chief legal officer and the mastermind behind the termination plan, defended the firings, saying in a legal filing that they would “right-size” an agency filled with “vast waste.” Russell Vought, the White House budget office director who also serves as the bureau’s acting director, has called the bureau a “woke and weaponized” agency.
But firing so many workers at once, with no transition period, would destroy the bureau’s ability to operate, employees warned their bosses in emails, chat messages and verbal conversations, according to court records. Within days, critical technical systems would fail, enforcement lawyers would miss court deadlines and agency data that federal courts had ordered be preserved would be lost, they said.
“I don’t think we can keep operating even for 60 days without keeping many of these folks,” Christopher Chilbert, the bureau’s chief information officer, wrote in an email the day the terminations were announced.
Adam Martinez, the agency’s chief operating office, responded: “Understood and I do not disagree. We will really need to spend the next week figuring out a path forward.”
Judge Jackson has asked for the testimony of Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old associate of Mr. Musk’s who carried out the terminations.
Mr. Kliger, a former Twitter summer intern who had no experience in government work before this year, joined the Office of Personnel Management in January as a senior adviser. He has carried out assignments for Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in at least nine agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, where he is said to have been recently ousted from.
Emails sent in the hours after the appeals court ruled that staff cuts could move forward show Mr. Musk’s officials scrambling to fire people as quickly as possible — at times moving so fast they appeared to forget which agency they were focused on.
Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old lawyer who leads DOGE’s State Department foreign aid actions, sent an email on Saturday from his U.S. Agency for International Development email address laying the groundwork for the reduction in force, the government’s version of a layoff. In a nod to specific language in the appellate court’s order, Mr. Lewin wrote, “Director Vought’s team and I will conduct an individualized assessment to, consistent with the DC Circuit’s stay, ensure that only nonstatutory positions are affected.”
Mr. Paoletta said in court filings that he worked with two other lawyers to conduct a unit-by-unit evaluation of the consumer bureau and determined that the bureau could function without 90 percent of its current staff.
“An approximately 200-person agency allows the bureau to fulfill its statutory duties and better aligns with the new leadership’s priorities and management philosophy,” he said.
But emails and other agency records show that up until nearly the moment the termination notices were sent, bureau officials were still debating the numbers. On the Tuesday before the notices went out, some workers trying to prepare materials believed 485 workers would remain.
Trump officials wanted those slated for termination to be cut off from the agency’s systems less than 24 hours after receiving their layoff notice. One human resources worker involved in the planning asked a manager how people who were traveling and unable to check their email before losing access would be notified of their firing.
“Many people have asked that question. No one making decisions really cares,” the manager responded. “It makes me sad.”
In legal declarations totaling more than 100 pages, department heads — who said they were not consulted by the Trump officials before the firings — and other workers depicted the terminations as reckless and riddled with errors.
The one person Mr. Paoletta left in the Office of Servicemember Affairs, a legally required unit that aids military workers, had already accepted the government’s deferred resignation offer and would be retiring in September. He had turned in his work equipment and lost access to agency systems, workers said — meaning the office would be unstaffed if the firings proceeded.
The head of another legally required department said that he and all of his workers had received termination notices, despite Mr. Paoletta’s testimony that one worker had been retained.
“If there is such a person, that person has not reached out to me or, to my knowledge, to anyone else in my office to understand how we fulfill our statutory mandate,” the department head said.
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Eduardo Medina
Federal agents raided an underground nightclub in Colorado early Sunday morning and detained more than 100 people who they said were undocumented immigrants, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The raid occurred at a club in Colorado Springs, about 70 miles south of Denver. Federal officials said there were more than 200 people inside the club at the time, including 114 who were in the country illegally. More than a dozen active-duty members of the U.S. military were detained as well, they said.
Officials said agents found weapons and illicit drugs inside the nightclub, including cocaine, methamphetamine and a mixture of powdered drugs known as pink cocaine.
Jonathan C. Pullen, the DEA Rocky Mountain Division special agent in charge, said in a news conference that the club had been under law enforcement surveillance for months and that “drug trafficking, prostitution and crimes of violence” had been taking place inside the club.
Mr. Pullen said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement took custody of the immigrants detained at the club. He said the members of the military were “running security at the club and involved in some of these crimes.”
The service members were handed over to the criminal investigation division of the U.S. Army.
A spokeswoman for Fort Carson, an Army post in Colorado, said in a statement on Sunday night that “there were some Fort Carson service members present at the location during” the raid.
“Each person involved in this incident is presumed innocent until proven guilty. We will look at everyone’s situation on a case-by-case basis,” the spokeswoman said. “Illegal activities of any kind do not represent our military values.”
Mr. Pullen said that during the investigation of the club, law enforcement officers saw members of the Hell’s Angels, MS-13 and Tren de Aragua gangs inside the club.
“I don’t have the information about whether those members were there tonight, but we’re still working through a lot of that, because we have so many people in custody,” Mr. Pullen said.
The D.E.A. and several members of the Trump administration posted videos and photos of the raid on their social media accounts on Sunday.
In one video posted on X by the D.E.A.’s Rocky Mountain Division, agents can be seen breaking through a window as red and blue police lights flash around them. When the agents crack the window, several people run out of the building and raise their hands as law enforcement agents appear to point weapons at them.
Another video showed a line of dozens of people with their arms tied behind their backs.
The agency said that the undocumented immigrants who were detained were placed on buses “for processing and likely eventual deportation.”
Mr. Pullen said there were about 300 law enforcement agents from several agencies who participated in the raid.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi praised the raid in a statement on social media, saying that two people with existing warrants had been arrested.
The raid was the latest display of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration, which appear to be struggling to round up enough people to meet Mr. Trump’s mass deportation goals.
The administration has publicized its raids in big cities and its deportation flights to Latin America, using tactics steeped with showmanship that have profoundly unnerved immigrant communities.
Efforts on Sunday to reach local immigrant advocacy groups for comment were not immediately successful.
President Trump’s administration has been criticized for wrongly deporting people, including U.S. citizens, who have been caught up in the crackdown.
A federal judge said on Friday that the Trump administration had deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras “with no meaningful process” and against the wishes of her father.
Minho Kim
Reporting from Washington
Investigators have arrested a person accused of being involved in the theft of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s handbag at an upscale Washington hamburger restaurant last weekend, the Secret Service said Sunday.
Matt McCool, a special agent at the Secret Service, said in a statement that the suspect did not seem to have targeted Ms. Noem because of her position. He did not release the suspect’s name, but he described the person as “a serial offender” who had tried to use Ms. Noem’s credit card and gain access to her electronic devices.
Ms. Noem’s purse was snatched from underneath her chair on April 20, Easter Sunday, as she dined with her family at The Capital Burger in downtown Washington. The bag contained the secretary’s driver’s license, medication, apartment keys, blank checks, department badge, passport and $3,000 in cash.
Ms. Noem’s spokeswoman previously said that the thief had hooked the secretary’s bag with his foot, dragged it across the floor and put a coat over it before leaving the restaurant. Although several Secret Service agents were accompanying Ms. Noem, they were more than 20 feet away from her at the time to give her privacy to enjoy a meal with her family.
In a social media post about the arrest, Ms. Noem described the suspect as a “career criminal” and a foreign national who had entered the United States illegally. The Secret Service did not confirm Ms. Noem’s allegation but directed the questions to federal prosecutors assigned to the case. Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, said the suspect had entered the United States illegally and that law enforcement officials were seeking more people connected to the theft.
Mr. McCool, the Secret Service agent, said in a statement that five law enforcement agencies, including Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, were involved in the investigation.
The theft was the latest episode that raised questions about the Secret Service, which has been under intense scrutiny since Donald J. Trump was the target of two assassination attempts last year as a presidential candidate.
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Rachel Nostrant
A 4-year-old and a 7-year-old with U.S. citizenship were deported alongside their mother to Honduras last week, the family’s lawyer said, adding to the recent string of American citizens caught in the cross hairs of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The children and their mother were put on a flight to Honduras on Friday, the same day another child with U.S. citizenship, a 2-year-old girl, was sent to that country with her undocumented mother.
Lawyers for both families said the mothers were not given an option to leave their children in the United States before they were deported. In the case of the 2-year-old, whose 11-year-old sibling was also sent to Honduras, a federal judge in Louisiana expressed concern that the administration had deported the American child against the wishes of her father, who remained in the country.
But President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, denied that any American child was deported. Speaking about the 2-year-old’s case on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Mr. Homan said that federal immigration agents gave her mother a choice of whether to be deported with or without her child, and that she had left the country with her daughter at her discretion.
The children are from two different families who were living in Louisiana. The mother of the 2-year-old is pregnant, and the 4-year-old, a boy, has a rare form of late-stage cancer, the families’ lawyers said. They said the boy had no access to his medications or his doctors while he was in custody with his 7-year-old sister and mother.
The moves come as the Trump administration has ramped up its immigration enforcement and mass deportation efforts. In Florida last week, nearly 800 immigrants were arrested in an operation involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and state law enforcement officials.
Immigration advocates and the American Civil Liberties Union have condemned the administration’s actions, raising concerns of due process.
Gracie Willis, a lawyer with the National Immigration Project who is involved in the 2-year-old’s case, said, “What we saw from ICE over the last several days is horrifying and baffling,” referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But the administration has stood firm. “Having a U.S. citizen child after you enter this country illegally is not a get-out-of-jail free card,” Mr. Homan said.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said on Sunday that it was common for parents who face deportation to want to be removed with their children, noting that the mother of the 2-year-old had made that choice.
“We take our responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to ensure that children are safe and protected,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
Both families were detained earlier last week during routine check-ins with ICE. They were in the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, a probationary program that allows people undergoing immigration proceedings to stay in the country.
The 2-year-old and her mother, along with an 11-year-old sibling who is not an American citizen, were detained April 22. The family with the 4-year-old and 7-year-old was detained Thursday morning, said Erin Hebert, their lawyer.
When they were detained, the families were taken hours away from New Orleans, the site of their appointments, their lawyers said, adding that they were prohibited from communicating with other family members or their lawyers. Lawyers for both families said that they were not able to reach the mothers until after they had arrived in Honduras.
Ms. Hebert said she had attended the appointment with the family she is representing, but the family was quickly taken into custody before she could speak with them. She said that she and her team plan to challenge the family’s deportation but are still evaluating their next steps.
In a brief order issued on Friday from Federal District Court in the Western District of Louisiana, Judge Terry A. Doughty asked why the administration had sent the 2-year-old — identified in court records only as V.M.L. — to Honduras with her mother even though her father had sought, through an emergency petition on Thursday, to stop her from being sent abroad.
Judge Doughty, a Trump appointee, said that he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process,” and set a hearing for May 16 to explore the issue.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ms. Hebert said. “There is just no good-faith interpretation for what happened to these children.”
Alan Feuer, Minho Kim, Hamed Aleaziz and Brandon K. Thorp contributed reporting.
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