AMERICA IS A FASCIST STATE
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
VIDEO:
March 19, 2025
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Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare statement Tuesday criticizing attacks by President Trump and his allies on federal judges. "For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision," he said. Roberts's statement came after Trump called for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered the Trump administration to stop using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants. On Saturday, the administration ignored Boasberg's order to turn around three deportation flights bound for El Salvador. We speak with The Nation's justice correspondent Elie Mystal on the Trump-led breakdown of constitutional order. "There's not a coming constitutional crisis," says Mystal. "We are in a constitutional crisis right now.”
Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.
LENGTH OF VIDEO: 23 MINUTES AND 15 SECONDS:
3/21/2025 - A Native Son
Weekly Wrap Up
Eddie
March 21, 2025
Summary
This week, Eddie Glaude, Jr. discusses pressing issues including the ongoing crisis in Israel and Gaza, the political landscape in the U.S., the case of Mahmoud Khalil, and the assault on higher education. He emphasizes the racial dynamics affecting education policy and the broader implications of current governmental actions, calling for collective resistance and awareness among citizens.
LENGTH OF VIDEO: 23 MINUTES AND 15 SECONDS
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/us/politics/trump-segregation.html
Trump Administration Dropped Policy Prohibiting Contractors From Having Segregated Facilities
The provision had been in place since the civil rights era.
by Erica L. Green
Erica L. Green is a White House Correspondent. She reported from Washington.
March 21, 2025
A bus station in Durham, N.C., in 1940. Credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
In 1962, removing a restroom sign at Montgomery Municipal Airport in Alabama, in compliance with a federal court order banning segregation. Credit: Associated Press
The Trump administration has removed a longstanding directive from the civil rights era that explicitly prohibited federal contractors from allowing segregated facilities, the latest move to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion policies from government operations that has drawn fierce rebuke.
The removal of the segregated-facilities policy was included in a memo last month from the General Services Administration, which manages federal property and oversees procurement for the federal government. The memo, which applies to all civilian federal agencies, was among the many directives from agencies aiming to purge safeguards put in place in the 1960s to comply with executive orders issued by President Trump on race and gender identity. In his first days in office, Mr. Trump directed agencies to rid themselves of “harmful” and “wasteful” diversity policies, and “gender ideology extremism.”
The memo, which came to light after it was reported by National Public Radio this week, drops several clauses from the G.S.A.’s Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is used to solicit contracts for services and supplies. The memo said the wording was “not consistent with the direction of the president.” Among the deletions is a policy, last updated in 2015, that stipulated federal contractors couldn’t have “segregated facilities,” such as waiting rooms, work areas, restrooms, lunchrooms and water fountains.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 still bars discrimination, and segregated facilities, in the United States. But civil rights groups have feared that Mr. Trump’s war on D.E.I. programs has signaled the federal government’s willingness to retreat from enforcing it.
Dariely Rodriguez, the acting co-chief counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that like Mr. Trump’s revocation of a decades-old order issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson barring discrimination in hiring for government contractors, the stripping of the segregation provision “weakens the very safeguards that promote equity and inclusion across multiple sectors, including workplaces.”
“The Trump administration’s actions are pressure-testing our democracy, eroding more than 60 years of progress,” Ms. Rodriguez said.
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 remains the law of the land,” she added, “but laws are only as strong as their enforcement.”
In a statement to The Times, Stephanie Joseph, a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration, said that the G.S.A. would “continue to ensure that our federal contractors comply with long established civil-rights provisions found in U.S. laws.” She also said, “G.S.A. is committed to supporting the president’s direction to streamline the federal contracting process to restore merit-based opportunity, enhance speed and efficiency, and reduce costs.”
Margaret Huang, the president and chief executive of the Southern Poverty Law Center, called the measure “another step backwards that threatens to create hostile work environments for women, people of color and others who have faced a history of employment discrimination.”
“We hope contractors have the good sense not to reintroduce segregation into the workplaces,” she said, “but this decision sends a clear message that the federal government does not care if they do.”
The White House dismissed the criticism as “unserious falsehoods” and “baseless reporting” that undermined Mr. Trump’s charge by his voters to unify the country.
“President Trump continues to follow the law in his pursuit to reverse the disastrous policies of the previous administration and unleash prosperity through deregulation,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. “Thanks to his leadership, businesses will face fewer bureaucratic roadblocks and have a smoother path to working with the federal government.”
The White House has argued that Mr. Trump’s executive orders were not aimed at any particular group of people and that agencies have had autonomy in implementing them. But the fallout has disproportionately focused on policies that impact Black people, like purges of employees of color and the erasure of their history.
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent, covering President Trump and his administration.
More about Erica L. Green
See more on: General Services Administration, Donald Trump, Lyndon B. Johnson
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/a-letter-from-palestinian-activist-mahmoud-khalil
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A Letter From Palestinian Activist Mahmoud Khalil
Khalil, who was unlawfully arrested in retaliation for his advocacy, details this violation of his free speech rights.
Mahmoud Khalil, Palestinian Rights Advocate
March 20, 2025
American Civil Liberties Union
ACLU
Earlier this month, recent graduate, activist, soon-to-be father, and legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested and detained in direct retaliation for his advocacy for Palestinian rights at Columbia University. Later, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) transferred him to a Louisiana detention facility 1,400 miles away from his home and his family.
Following his illegal arrest, a team of lawyers, including Amy Greer from Dratel & Lewis, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and CLEAR secured a court order to block his deportation. Since then, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Alina Das, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University (NYU) School of Law have joined his legal team. His lawyers are arguing that his detention violates his constitutional rights, including free speech and due process, and goes beyond the government’s legal authority.
Below, read a letter Khalil dictated over the phone from Immigrations and Customs (ICE) detention in Louisiana – his first public statement since his arrest.
Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana March 18, 2025
My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. 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.
Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.
Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.
"Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities."
On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours — I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.
My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.
I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba. I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention — imprisonment without trial or charge — to strip Palestinians of their rights. I think of our friend Omar Khatib, who was incarcerated without charge or trial by Israel as he returned home from travel. I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.
I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.
"I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear."
While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University. Presidents Shafik, Armstrong, and Dean Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns — based on racism and disinformation — to go unchecked.
Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration's latest threats. My arrest, the expulsion or suspension of at least 22 Columbia students — some stripped of their B.A. degrees just weeks before graduation — and the expulsion of SWC President Grant Miner on the eve of contract negotiations, are clear examples.
If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change — leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.
"Students have long been at the forefront of change — leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice."
The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.
Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.
Free Mahmoud Khalil
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/20/universities-trump-administration
US universities
US universities face choice to surrender or fight back against Trump’s ‘takeover’
‘Extraordinary fear’ takes hold at universities as Trump campaign threatens investigations or loss of federal funds
J Oliver Conroy
Thu 20 Mar 2025
US universities face choice to surrender or fight back against Trump’s ‘takeover’
‘Extraordinary fear’ takes hold at universities as Trump campaign threatens investigations or loss of federal funds
by J Oliver Conroy
20 March 2025
The Trump administration’s unprecedented pressure campaign on American higher education – which is forcing major universities to bow to its demands or risk investigations and the loss of millions of dollars in federal money – is so far facing little pushback from the schools affected.
That campaign escalated earlier this month, when the US government cancelled $400m in federal contracts and grants to Columbia University. In a subsequent letter, representatives of three federal agencies said they would reconsider that freeze only if Columbia agreed to conditions including more aggressively disciplining students who engage in pro-Palestinian disruptions, planning “comprehensive” reform of the school’s admissions policies, and placing one of school’s area studies departments under “academic receivership” – meaning under the control of an outside chair.
University of California imposes hiring freeze in response to Trump cuts
Read more
Other colleges and universities across the US have been watching to see how Columbia reacts to the letter, which is widely viewed as a test case for academic freedom. In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s former president, described the situation as “an authoritarian takeover”. Yet ahead of a Thursday deadline for compliance, the Wall Street Journal has reported that Columbia appears to be poised to yield to the Trump administration’s demands.
The government’s confrontation with Columbia, which critics describe as ideological blackmail and possibly illegal, is only one of a number of shots that the administration has fired in recent days across the bow of American elite higher education – and so far, opposition has been surprisingly minimal, as colleges and universities weigh whether to surrender, negotiate or fight back.
Many of the demands that the Trump administration is making are not lawful, Jameel Jaffer told the Guardian. Jaffer, who said that he did not speak for the university, is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia.
“They can’t require Columbia to take the steps that they’re demanding Columbia take, and no university could take these kinds of steps without completely destroying its credibility as an independent institution of higher education, or take these steps consistent with the values that are common to universities in the United States.”
There is extraordinary fear across university campuses at the very top level
–Veena Dubal, law professor
A chill has descended on American academia, advocates for freedom of expression say, with professors, graduate students and researchers fearful that they’ll lose jobs or funding – because of their political opinions, or merely because they work at an institution that has come under the Trump administration’s Medusa gaze.
The government also announced a taskforce on alleged antisemitism at 10 major universities; sent a letter to 60 schools warning that they are under investigation for discriminating against Jewish students; and arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student who led pro-Palestinian protests, under an obscure provision that gives the US secretary of state the power to deport foreign nationals whose presence in the US has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.
On Wednesday, the administration also announced that it was freezing $175m in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania because of the university’s policies allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports, which the administration has called “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls”.
The University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 8 December 2023. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
While the pushback from institutions themselves has been minimal, some college professors and university diversity officers sued last month in an effort to block a US Department of Education ultimatum calling for colleges and universities to cancel campus diversity initiatives or risk losing federal funding.
“There is extraordinary fear across university campuses at the very top level,” Veena Dubal, a law professor and the general counsel of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), told the Guardian.
“University administrators are terrified of losing millions and millions of dollars in funding,” she said, adding that “there is a lot of self-censorship going on” as medical researchers and others who previously considered their work apolitical reconsider that assumption.
Political winds are already forcing drastic budget cuts at many universities. Last week, Johns Hopkins said that it was eliminating more than 2,000 jobs due to funding cuts by the US Agency for International Development (USAid). Harvard has undertaken a hiring freeze.
The president of Wesleyan, Michael Roth, has vehemently criticized the Trump administration’s actions and what he calls universities’ insufficient response. Although he disagrees with many pro-Palestinian protesters, he recently told Politico that universities are suffering from an “infatuation with institutional neutrality” that makes “cowardice into a policy”.
Legal experts say that universities, such as Columbia, threatened with funding withdrawal have strong standing to sue, and expressed surprise and concern that they haven’t.
Although federal agencies can place conditions on money they give universities, Jaffer said, “they have the authority to demand those things only at the end of a [legal process] that they haven’t actually carried out.” In addition, “the first amendment still guarantees universities the right to shape their own expressive communities, and many of the demands that the administration is making would intrude on that right.”
Katrina Armstrong, the interim president of Columbia, said in a statement that this was “a critical moment for higher education in this country. The freedom of universities is tied to the freedom of every other institution in a thriving democracy.” She did not indicate how that rhetoric will translate into action. Columbia did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.
“I don’t think that it is wise for a university with a large endowment, that is the first university to be targeted in this way, to be taking this more conservative approach,” Dubal said of Columbia. “I think that if anyone is well-situated to lead the charge to help save higher education, it would be a university like Columbia.”
Others experts noted that many universities are probably calculating that resistance isn’t worth the cost. “I suspect we’ll see litigation over this,” Tyler Coward, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), told the Guardian, but also “see some universities capitulate and adopt the policies, including the speech-restrictive policies, that government is asking them to adopt”.
Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Inside Higher Ed that he believed that there were real antisemitic incidents on Columbia’s campus during anti-Israel protests, and that the university had mishandled them in a “clear violation” of federal anti-discrimination law.
But, he added, the federal government has “not been transparent” about what it is doing and not done enough to “convince me that these specific remedies are called for”.
Some observers have wondered if universities – some of which have lost millions of dollars as pro-Israel donors, unhappy about radically pro-Palestinian sentiment on campuses, pulled funding – are secretly pleased with the Trump administration’s actions, because it provides political cover to take decisions unpopular with students and faculty.
“I can only speculate,” Dubal said, “but it would not be surprising to me if, in fact, the board of trustees is playing a role in the non-aggressive approach that Columbia seems to be taking.”
Either way, she said, “I think it’s more clear to the public, to university faculty and students, that they are not playing the kind of role that we expect them to play in defending not just the university’s coffers, but all the values that higher education is built upon and, in fact, the laws of the nation.”
Explore more on these topics
US universities
Trump administration
US politics
US education
US campus protests
Mahmoud Khalil
Israel-Gaza war
news
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-approval-rating-polls.html
The Trump Administration’s First 100 Days
Trying to Cripple the Left: The president and his allies in Congress are targeting the financial, digital and legal machinery that powers the Democratic Party and much of the progressive political world.
F.T.C. Purge: President Trump fired the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, a rejection of the corporate regulator’s traditional independence that may clear the way for the administration’s agenda. Here’s what’s at stake.
Kennedy Center: A recording of Trump’s private remarks at a Kennedy Center board meeting shows that he mused about bestowing honors on dead celebrities and people from outside the arts.
Courts Dig for Truth: The litigation unleashed by Trump’s second term, combined with the president’s distortions and lies, is testing the judicial system’s practice of deferring to the executive branch’s determinations about what is true.
Bridging a Republican Divide: Vice President JD Vance made an explicit attempt to bridge warring factions within the Republican Party, arguing that the “tensions” between the populist and tech wings of the conservative movement could be overcome.
Education Department: The department was ordered by a federal judge to restore some federal grants that were terminated as part of the Trump administration’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Transgender Troops: A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from banning transgender people from serving in the military.
The Trump administration’s unprecedented pressure campaign on American higher education – which is forcing major universities to bow to its demands or risk investigations and the loss of millions of dollars in federal money – is so far facing little pushback from the schools affected.
That campaign escalated earlier this month, when the US government cancelled $400m in federal contracts and grants to Columbia University. In a subsequent letter, representatives of three federal agencies said they would reconsider that freeze only if Columbia agreed to conditions including more aggressively disciplining students who engage in pro-Palestinian disruptions, planning “comprehensive” reform of the school’s admissions policies, and placing one of school’s area studies departments under “academic receivership” – meaning under the control of an outside chair.
University of California imposes hiring freeze in response to Trump cuts
Read more
Other colleges and universities across the US have been watching to see how Columbia reacts to the letter, which is widely viewed as a test case for academic freedom. In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s former president, described the situation as “an authoritarian takeover”. Yet ahead of a Thursday deadline for compliance, the Wall Street Journal has reported that Columbia appears to be poised to yield to the Trump administration’s demands.
The government’s confrontation with Columbia, which critics describe as ideological blackmail and possibly illegal, is only one of a number of shots that the administration has fired in recent days across the bow of American elite higher education – and so far, opposition has been surprisingly minimal, as colleges and universities weigh whether to surrender, negotiate or fight back.
Many of the demands that the Trump administration is making are not lawful, Jameel Jaffer told the Guardian. Jaffer, who said that he did not speak for the university, is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia.
“They can’t require Columbia to take the steps that they’re demanding Columbia take, and no university could take these kinds of steps without completely destroying its credibility as an independent institution of higher education, or take these steps consistent with the values that are common to universities in the United States.”
There is extraordinary fear across university campuses at the very top level
–Veena Dubal, law professor
A chill has descended on American academia, advocates for freedom of expression say, with professors, graduate students and researchers fearful that they’ll lose jobs or funding – because of their political opinions, or merely because they work at an institution that has come under the Trump administration’s Medusa gaze.
The government also announced a taskforce on alleged antisemitism at 10 major universities; sent a letter to 60 schools warning that they are under investigation for discriminating against Jewish students; and arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student who led pro-Palestinian protests, under an obscure provision that gives the US secretary of state the power to deport foreign nationals whose presence in the US has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.
On Wednesday, the administration also announced that it was freezing $175m in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania because of the university’s policies allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports, which the administration has called “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls”.
The University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 8 December 2023. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
While the pushback from institutions themselves has been minimal, some college professors and university diversity officers sued last month in an effort to block a US Department of Education ultimatum calling for colleges and universities to cancel campus diversity initiatives or risk losing federal funding.
“There is extraordinary fear across university campuses at the very top level,” Veena Dubal, a law professor and the general counsel of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), told the Guardian.
“University administrators are terrified of losing millions and millions of dollars in funding,” she said, adding that “there is a lot of self-censorship going on” as medical researchers and others who previously considered their work apolitical reconsider that assumption.
Political winds are already forcing drastic budget cuts at many universities. Last week, Johns Hopkins said that it was eliminating more than 2,000 jobs due to funding cuts by the US Agency for International Development (USAid). Harvard has undertaken a hiring freeze.
The president of Wesleyan, Michael Roth, has vehemently criticized the Trump administration’s actions and what he calls universities’ insufficient response. Although he disagrees with many pro-Palestinian protesters, he recently told Politico that universities are suffering from an “infatuation with institutional neutrality” that makes “cowardice into a policy”.
Legal experts say that universities, such as Columbia, threatened with funding withdrawal have strong standing to sue, and expressed surprise and concern that they haven’t.
Although federal agencies can place conditions on money they give universities, Jaffer said, “they have the authority to demand those things only at the end of a [legal process] that they haven’t actually carried out.” In addition, “the first amendment still guarantees universities the right to shape their own expressive communities, and many of the demands that the administration is making would intrude on that right.”
Katrina Armstrong, the interim president of Columbia, said in a statement that this was “a critical moment for higher education in this country. The freedom of universities is tied to the freedom of every other institution in a thriving democracy.” She did not indicate how that rhetoric will translate into action. Columbia did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.
“I don’t think that it is wise for a university with a large endowment, that is the first university to be targeted in this way, to be taking this more conservative approach,” Dubal said of Columbia. “I think that if anyone is well-situated to lead the charge to help save higher education, it would be a university like Columbia.”
Others experts noted that many universities are probably calculating that resistance isn’t worth the cost. “I suspect we’ll see litigation over this,” Tyler Coward, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), told the Guardian, but also “see some universities capitulate and adopt the policies, including the speech-restrictive policies, that government is asking them to adopt”.
Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Inside Higher Ed that he believed that there were real antisemitic incidents on Columbia’s campus during anti-Israel protests, and that the university had mishandled them in a “clear violation” of federal anti-discrimination law.
But, he added, the federal government has “not been transparent” about what it is doing and not done enough to “convince me that these specific remedies are called for”.
Some observers have wondered if universities – some of which have lost millions of dollars as pro-Israel donors, unhappy about radically pro-Palestinian sentiment on campuses, pulled funding – are secretly pleased with the Trump administration’s actions, because it provides political cover to take decisions unpopular with students and faculty.
“I can only speculate,” Dubal said, “but it would not be surprising to me if, in fact, the board of trustees is playing a role in the non-aggressive approach that Columbia seems to be taking.”
Either way, she said, “I think it’s more clear to the public, to university faculty and students, that they are not playing the kind of role that we expect them to play in defending not just the university’s coffers, but all the values that higher education is built upon and, in fact, the laws of the nation.”
Explore more on these topics
US universities
Trump administration
US politics
US education
US campus protests
Mahmoud Khalil
Israel-Gaza war
news
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-approval-rating-polls.html
The Trump Administration’s First 100 Days
Trying to Cripple the Left: The president and his allies in Congress are targeting the financial, digital and legal machinery that powers the Democratic Party and much of the progressive political world.
F.T.C. Purge: President Trump fired the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, a rejection of the corporate regulator’s traditional independence that may clear the way for the administration’s agenda. Here’s what’s at stake.
Kennedy Center: A recording of Trump’s private remarks at a Kennedy Center board meeting shows that he mused about bestowing honors on dead celebrities and people from outside the arts.
Courts Dig for Truth: The litigation unleashed by Trump’s second term, combined with the president’s distortions and lies, is testing the judicial system’s practice of deferring to the executive branch’s determinations about what is true.
Bridging a Republican Divide: Vice President JD Vance made an explicit attempt to bridge warring factions within the Republican Party, arguing that the “tensions” between the populist and tech wings of the conservative movement could be overcome.
Education Department: The department was ordered by a federal judge to restore some federal grants that were terminated as part of the Trump administration’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Transgender Troops: A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from banning transgender people from serving in the military.
The Trump Administration’s First 100 Days
The Musk Effect: Elon Musk is seemingly everywhere, dominating the news out of Washington and beyond. His influence in the White House has raised complicated questions about how he could reshape the nation.
V.A. Mental Health System: Therapy and other mental health services for veterans have been thrown into turmoil amid the dramatic changes ordered by President Trump and pushed by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Law Firm Bends: Paul Weiss was targeted by an executive order. Its chairman, who had worked against Trump during his first term, then went to the Oval Office and cut a deal. Many in the legal field are condemning the agreement.
Migrant Children: The Trump administration notified aid organizations that it would cancel a contract that funds the legal representation of more than 25,000 children who entered the United States alone, a decision that leaves them vulnerable to swift deportation.
Columbia Agrees to Demands: The university agreed to overhaul its protest policies, security practices and Middle Eastern studies department in a concession to the Trump administration, which has refused to consider restoring $400 million in federal funds without major changes.
Attempts to Resolve Global Conflicts: Allies say the foreign policy version of “flood the zone” is working. But critics argue that the hurry-up approach in Israel, Ukraine and Iran may not lead to stable, durable solutions to conflicts around the world.
What Is DOGE?: The Department of Government Efficiency described in court filings bears little resemblance to the no-holds-barred approach taken by Musk and praised by Trump.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03/21/us/trump-news
LiveUpdated
March 21, 2025
Trump Administration Live Updates: Judge Suggests White House May Have Stretched Deportation Law Too Far
I
President Trump leaving the White House on Friday. Credit: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Where Things Stand
Deportation fight: A federal judge in Washington appeared deeply skeptical about the Trump administration’s use of a powerful but rarely used wartime law to deport scores of Venezuelan immigrants. In a hearing on Friday, the judge, James Boasberg, said he was concerned that President Trump was using the law when there was neither an invasion nor a declared state of war to deport migrants his administration determined were gang members, but the migrants were unable to contest the designation. Read more ›
Elon Musk: Mr. Trump rejected the idea that Elon Musk was going to be told about secret U.S. plans for a potential military conflict with China, even as he denied reporting that such a briefing had been planned to be held at the Pentagon. Mr. Musk, whose companies have major contracts with the U.S. military, instead had an 80-minute meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Read more ›
Homeland Security cuts: The Trump administration shut down three watchdog agencies in the Department of Homeland Security, gutting the offices responsible for conducting oversight of the president’s immigration crackdown. More than 100 staff members in the department’s civil rights office alone were fired. Read more ›
Zolan Kanno-YoungsTyler Pager and Hamed Aleaziz
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz reported from Washington, and Tyler Pager from New York.
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President Trump leaving the White House on Friday. Credit: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Where Things Stand
Deportation fight: A federal judge in Washington appeared deeply skeptical about the Trump administration’s use of a powerful but rarely used wartime law to deport scores of Venezuelan immigrants. In a hearing on Friday, the judge, James Boasberg, said he was concerned that President Trump was using the law when there was neither an invasion nor a declared state of war to deport migrants his administration determined were gang members, but the migrants were unable to contest the designation. Read more ›
Elon Musk: Mr. Trump rejected the idea that Elon Musk was going to be told about secret U.S. plans for a potential military conflict with China, even as he denied reporting that such a briefing had been planned to be held at the Pentagon. Mr. Musk, whose companies have major contracts with the U.S. military, instead had an 80-minute meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Read more ›
Homeland Security cuts: The Trump administration shut down three watchdog agencies in the Department of Homeland Security, gutting the offices responsible for conducting oversight of the president’s immigration crackdown. More than 100 staff members in the department’s civil rights office alone were fired. Read more ›
Zolan Kanno-YoungsTyler Pager and Hamed Aleaziz
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz reported from Washington, and Tyler Pager from New York.
A new front in Trump’s crackdown: legal immigrants and dissent.
Pedestrians crossing into California from Mexico through the San Ysidro port of entry last year. In a string of recent cases, visitors trying to enter the United States reported being turned back or detained. Credit: Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
U.S. immigration agents wearing masks arrested a Georgetown University academic outside his home in Virginia. They detained two German tourists for weeks when they tried to enter the country legally through the southern border. They knocked on doors at Columbia University apartments, searching for pro-Palestinian protesters.
The Trump administration has opened a new phase in its immigration agenda, one that goes well beyond the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
U.S. border officials are using more aggressive tactics, which the administration calls “enhanced vetting,” at ports of entry to the United States, prompting American allies like Germany to update their travel advisories. At the same time, the administration is targeting legal immigrants who have expressed views that the government believes threaten national security and undermine foreign policy.
The tactics have unnerved foreign tourists and sent a chill through immigrant communities in the United States, who say they are being targeted for speech — not for breaking any laws.
“Whether it’s speech and criticism, green cards, they’re really taking it to a whole new level,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a former Customs and Border Protection commissioner and an ex-police chief of four cities. Recalling the anti-immigration agenda in Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Kerlikowske said that “it’s déjà vu all over again on steroids.”
The administration says the arrests and detentions are about protecting Americans.
“The Trump administration is enforcing immigration laws — something the previous administration failed to do,” Tricia McLaughlin, the spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said when asked about the recent arrests. “Those who violate these laws will be processed, detained and removed as required.”
Mr. Trump’s hard line on immigration has been a centerpiece of his political identity for years.
On his first day back in office, he signed an executive order that aimed to empower border officers by directing the administration to “identify all resources that may be used to ensure that all aliens seeking admission to the United States, or who are already in the United States, are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”
Customs agents have wide latitude to search cellphones or computers of travelers crossing into the United States. According to Customs and Border Protection, however, such searches have typically been rare. In 2024, less than 0.01 percent of arriving international travelers had their electronic devices searched, the agency said.
Homeland security agents also have access to a large database called the National Targeting Center to detect risks among visitors to the United States. With the help of other nations sharing information about residents traveling to the United States, the database allows agents to flag visitors when they enter the nation’s ports.
It is not clear how much those tactics were used to pick up people in a string of recent cases in which visitors trying to enter the United States reported being turned back or detained. But two homeland security officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter in detail, acknowledged that officers were acting more aggressively after Mr. Trump’s executive order.
Two German tourists said they were stopped separately at border crossings at San Diego and Tijuana and sent to a crowded detention center, where they reported being denied a translator and being put in solitary confinement. A Canadian national said she was detained and put “in chains” when officers flagged her visa paperwork.
Homeland security agencies have not answered questions about either case.
This month, a French scientist was prevented from entering the country. France’s minister for higher education said U.S. Border Patrol agents found messages in which he expressed his “personal opinion” to colleagues and friends about Mr. Trump’s science policies.
Ms. McLaughlin denied that and said the scientist had confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory, which he had taken without permission and tried to conceal.
The scientist was working for France’s publicly funded National Center for Scientific Research. Representatives for the center said he did not wish to speak to the media, but they did not immediately respond to the Homeland Security Department’s allegations against him.
In another case, the department stopped and detained Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University who was trying to return to the United States after visiting relatives in Lebanon. The administration deported Dr. Alawieh despite her having a valid visa and a court order blocking her removal. Federal authorities said in a court filing that they found “sympathetic photos and videos of prominent Hezbollah figures” in her phone and that she attended the funeral for the leader of Hezbollah in February.
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Demonstrators in Providence, R.I., on Monday protesting the deportation of Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University professor. Credit: Scott Eisen/Getty Images
When it comes to scrutinizing people already living in the United States, investigators for Immigration and Customs Enforcement who typically focus on long-term inquiries have been searching videos, online posts and news clippings of campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war. They have then compiled reports on their findings for the State Department.
The government also appears to be getting information from private groups like the Middle East Forum, a conservative think tank. The group said in a statement that it had more than 15 active investigations on “national security issues” and would share results about “terror-aligned individuals and organizations with the relevant government agencies.”
A spokesman for the forum declined to answer questions about its communication with the Trump administration. But the statement from the group said it had a “three-decade history of sharing the results of our work with the appropriate government and law enforcement agencies on all issues where U.S. national security is concerned.”
To deport people living in the United States with green cards or valid visas, the Trump administration has invoked a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives the secretary of state sweeping power to expel foreigners who are seen as a threat to the country’s foreign policy interests.
Using that authority, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate who has Palestinian heritage and took on a prominent role in the pro-Palestinian protests at the school, and Badar Khan Suri, an Indian citizen who has been studying and teaching at Georgetown.
Mr. Khalil has a green card, which means he is a legal permanent resident. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has accused him of “siding with terrorists.”
Ms. McLaughlin has accused Dr. Suri of “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” without providing evidence.
According to an official familiar with Dr. Suri’s case, the State Department justified his deportation by arguing that he engaged in antisemitic activity that would undermine diplomatic efforts to get Israel and Hamas to agree to a cease-fire. He is in the United States on a visa for academics.
Dr. Suri’s wife, an American citizen of Palestinian descent, is the daughter of Ahmed Yousef, the former adviser to a Hamas leader who was assassinated last year in Iran.
According to a court filing from his lawyers, Dr. Suri was surrounded by masked homeland security agents outside his home in Virginia on Monday night, arrested and placed in an unmarked S.U.V. A judge has temporarily blocked his removal from the country.
Lawyers for Mr. Khalil and Dr. Suri argue that the administration is punishing them for speaking out for Palestinians. Neither man has been charged with a crime. They are being detained while their lawyers fight against their deportations.
Demonstrators outside Columbia University last week demanded the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist and legal permanent resident who was arrested by immigration authorities. Credit: Dave Sanders for The New York TimesChad Wolf, who served as the acting homeland security secretary near the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, defended the administration’s crackdown, contending that a visa is a discretionary benefit provided by the U.S. government.
“They’re going to use every lever that they have to protect the American people,” he said.
But free-speech advocates see a different dynamic at play. Will Creeley, the legal director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said he believed the Trump administration’s “clear motivation here is to chill speech.”
“Simply saying someone is aligned to a terrorist organization does not exempt them from First Amendment protections,” Mr. Creeley said. “The administration has not produced any evidence that Mr. Khalil’s expressive activity falls into the narrow or carefully defined exceptions to the First Amendment.”
Mr. Creeley’s group and others have filed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Khalil.
Janet Napolitano, who served as homeland security secretary during the Obama administration, said Mr. Trump’s recent crackdown on immigrants with legal status ran “contrary to what the First Amendment is all about.”
“When the justification is ‘you’re a threat to national security’ and it’s like one individual, I mean come on,” Ms. Napolitano said. “Let’s be real.”
March 22, 2025, 12:09 a.m. ETMarch 22, 2025
Zach Montague
In accordance with a judge’s ruling, the Pentagon said it would not put in place a ban on transgender troops until March 28, according to a memo filed Friday evening. The agreement allowed the government time to seek an emergency appeal of the judge’s decision to block the policy earlier this week.
March 21, 2025, 11:55 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
Reporting on the White House
Trump revokes security clearances for Biden, Harris, Clinton and more.
Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton were just two of Donald J. Trump’s opponents on the list. Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times
President Trump issued a memo late Friday night rescinding security clearances and access to classified information for a slew of erstwhile opponents including Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and “any other member of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s family.”
Mr. Trump had said back in February that he planned to remove his predecessor’s access to classified intelligence briefings. It was payback — Mr. Biden had done the same to him after he left office in the days after the Jan 6., 2021, attack on the Capitol.
A variety of figures who have tangled with Mr. Trump at one point or another were named in Friday’s memo. Some had already been mentioned by Trump officials as people who would soon have their security clearances revoked, so their inclusion in Friday’s memo did not come as a shock. Ms. Harris and Ms. Clinton, however, were seemingly new to the list. Taken together, the catalog of names read like an enemies list.
There were New York’s top two law enforcement officials, Letitia James (the New York attorney general) and Alvin L. Bragg (Manhattan’s district attorney), both of whom took on Mr. Trump.
There were prominent characters from the first impeachment brought against Mr. Trump in 2019, when he was shown to have tried to strong-arm Ukraine into helping him dig up dirt on Mr. Biden. Names included in Friday’s memo: Fiona Hill, a top foreign policy expert who testified during the impeachment hearings; Alexander Vindman, a lieutenant colonel who also testified; and Norman Eisen, a lawyer who oversaw that impeachment.
And there were the only two Republicans who served on the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
“I also direct all executive department and agency heads to revoke unescorted access to secure United States government facilities from these individuals,” Mr. Trump’s memo stated. “This action includes, but is not limited to, receipt of classified briefings, such as the President’s Daily Brief, and access to classified information held by any member of the intelligence community by virtue of the named individuals’ previous tenure in the Congress.”
The revocation is largely a symbolic action, but it could prevent those named from getting into federal buildings or retrieving classified materials.
In a social media post on Saturday morning, Mr. Kinzinger said the action “means literally nothing and is funny.”
“What else you got, guys?” he said in an accompanying video.
Since returning to office, Mr. Trump has used memos like the one he put out Friday to thwack at people who have tried to hold him accountable or who have otherwise crossed him. The memos have been wide-ranging in scope. Earlier this week, he put out one that pulled security protections for Mr. Biden’s adult children, Ashley and Hunter.
Last month, Mr. Trump nixed security clearances for Antony J. Blinken, the former secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the former national security adviser (both of whom were named again in Friday’s memo).
Mr. Trump has also stripped the security detail of his own former aides. Within hours of taking office, he targeted John Bolton, his former national security adviser turned enemy. Mr. Trump later did the same to Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state, and a former aide, Brian Hook.
March 21, 2025, 11:07 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
Reporting on the White House
President Trump called for rescinding security clearances and access to classified information for a slew of erstwhile opponents including Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and “any other member of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s family.” He had already moved to revoke clearances for Biden.
March 21, 2025, 10:37 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Tim Balk and Miriam Jordan
The Trump administration moved to end a program for migrants from 4 Caribbean and Latin American nations.
Venezuelan migrants who were sent back home from Mexico on Thursday. Credit: Pedro Mattey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Trump administration said Friday that it was ending a Biden-era program that allowed hundreds of thousands of people from four troubled countries to enter the United States lawfully and work for up to two years.
The program offered applicants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela the opportunity to fly to the United States and quickly secure work authorization, provided they passed security checks and had a financial sponsor. They were allowed to stay for up to two years, which could be renewed.
Billed “legal pathways” by the Biden administration, the program was first introduced for Venezuelans in 2022, and was expanded to nationals of the other three countries the following year.
By the end of 2024, more than 500,000 migrants had entered the United States through the initiative, known as the C.H.N.V. program, an abbreviation of the countries covered by it.
The work permits and protection from deportation conferred under the program’s authority, called parole, would expire on April 24.
The program’s termination had been expected. On President Trump’s first day back in office, he ordered the Homeland Security Department to take steps to end it.
But the formal notice on Friday announcing its elimination throws into doubt the ability to remain in the United States for hundreds of thousands of people who could face grave danger or economic duress if they are forced to return to their home countries.
“It’s taking the livelihood away from thousands and thousands of people who are here legally, rendering them undocumented and putting their lives at risk,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an advocacy organization.
Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security spokeswoman, said in a statement that the “termination of the C.H.N.V. parole programs, and the termination of parole for those who exploited it, is a return to common-sense policies, a return to public safety, and a return to America First.”
Employers, like Amazon and Honda, which have struggled with worker shortages have hired many beneficiaries of the program since its inception.
“These people came here lawfully, and they have been contributing to the economy,” said Ms. Jozef.
A notice from Homeland Security, scheduled to be published in the federal register on Tuesday, said the termination of the program would take effect 30 days later.
“These programs do not serve a significant public benefit, are not necessary to reduce levels of illegal immigration, did not sufficiently mitigate the domestic effects of illegal immigration, are not serving their intended purposes, and are inconsistent with the Administration’s foreign policy goals,” said the notice.
Migrants without another legal basis to remain in the United States would be required to leave the country before their parole termination date, the notice said. If they do not leave, they could be targeted for deportation by immigration authorities.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration had cast the program, which survived legal challenges, as a way to bring order to the southern border by creating an alternative that allowed people from the four countries to enter the country legally, if they met certain conditions.
Under pressure on the issue of immigration in an election year, the Biden administration said last fall that it was allowing the program to lapse.
A separate but similar parole program created by the Biden administration has allowed some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the war with Russia to legally enter and temporarily stay in the United States. Mr. Trump said early this month that he would decide soon whether to end that program.
The end of the C.H.N.V. program comes as the Trump administration has broadened its crackdown on immigrants.
Setareh Ghandehari, an advocacy director at the rights group Detention Watch Network, said the development was “in line with the Trump administration’s multipronged strategy of wreaking havoc on immigrant communities and expanding the deportation and detention system.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
March 21, 2025, 9:01 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Tim Balk
Labor unions representing government workers and journalists have sued the Trump administration over its silencing of Voice of America, a U.S. government-supported broadcaster that had long delivered news to millions around the globe. Now its frequencies have gone dark or carry music.
March 21, 2025, 9:01 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Tim Balk
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, says the Trump administration targeted the service in violation of laws that “ensure the ongoing availability of VOA and protect journalists from Executive Branch overreach.”
March 21, 2025, 8:28 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Alexandra BerzonZach Montague and Tara Siegel Bernard
Social Security leader warns of a halt to the agency’s work, before backtracking.
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration warned on Friday that he might have to shut down the system that undergirds the agency. Credit: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration made a startling warning Friday that he might have to shut down the system that undergirds the agency, and then backtracked after a judge said he had misinterpreted a court order.
Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner, issued the warning in a series of interviews with news outlets, including Bloomberg News and The New York Times, in response to the judge’s order Thursday that barred Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team from access to sensitive records.
In the interviews, Mr. Dudek suggested that he was interpreting the ruling to mean that the entire system used for the agency’s work might need to shut down, since he considered many employees, including himself, to be affiliated with DOGE.
“At the very least, it means shutting down my broad unit, the C.I.O. and general counsel,” Mr. Dudek said Friday morning. “I don’t know how I can run an agency doing that. I guess I would have no choice but to terminate everyone’s access.”
Mr. Dudek told The New York Times then that he would comply with court orders and had already terminated the access for DOGE workers, as required, and was waiting for more court guidance.
While Mr. Dudek later confirmed that the agency’s work would continue, the mere possibility of a drastic halt at an agency that sends payments to more than 73 million people each month set off alarm bells among some lawmakers and beneficiary advocates. Forty percent of older Americans rely on Social Security as their primary source of income and would face economic hardship if benefits were not paid out on time, said John Hishta, senior vice president of campaigns at AARP.
“Social Security has never missed a payment,” Mr. Hishta said in a statement. “The commissioner should focus on making sure checks go out on time and people get the customer service they deserve.”
By Friday afternoon, the guidance Mr. Dudek was seeking had come. In an informal letter, Judge Ellen Hollander of the Federal District Court for the District of Maryland wrote that Mr. Dudek appeared to have misinterpreted an order she handed down the day before.
On Thursday, Judge Hollander had barred the agency’s top officials and their staff from granting Mr. Musk and anyone on his team unfettered access to a variety of the agency’s data systems.
The order, directed as much at DOGE as at the Social Security Administration, also instructed anyone affiliated with Mr. Musk who had already collected “non-anonymized” data to “disgorge and delete” any still in their possession.
Even so, Judge Hollander noted that she was not stopping the agency from continuing to work with Mr. Musk’s associates as long as privacy concerns were taken into account. And in the letter on Friday, she appeared puzzled that Mr. Dudek had concluded that nearly all members of his staff would need to have their longstanding employee access to the agency’s systems revoked.
“Such assertions about the scope of the order are inaccurate,” she wrote, citing news reports from earlier on Friday. “Employees of SSA who are not involved with the DOGE Team or in the work of the DOGE Team are not subject to the order.”
Soon after, Mr. Dudek issued a statement acknowledging the guidance and said that he wouldn’t shut down the agency.
“President Trump supports keeping Social Security offices open and getting the right check to the right person at the right time,” Mr. Dudek said in the statement, adding that employees would continue their work under the temporary restraining order.
The incident underscores what has been a chaotic month since Mr. Dudek, a fraud expert for the agency, became the acting commissioner after he collaborated with Mr. Musk’s associates, who were seeking to obtain access to agency data over higher-level officials’ opposition. In that time, rapid changes have arrived at a staid and cautious agency that sends $126 billion in payments to Americans each month, including deep proposed cuts to staffing, the restructuring of offices and announced changes in procedures for people making claims.
Mr. Dudek told The Times that he wanted to protect the Social Security system, which he said he had been a beneficiary of as a child, and thought that the DOGE officials could help. He acknowledged, though, that he had made mistakes.
His tenure may be short-lived regardless. On Tuesday, the Senate is holding hearings to consider Frank Bisignano, the chief executive office of a payment technology company, to be the new commissioner.
March 21, 2025, 8:23 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Miriam Jordan
The Trump administration halts funding for legal representation of migrant children.
The number of children who have crossed the southern U.S. border each year has increased sharply in the last decade or so. Credit: Jimena Peck for The New York Times
The Trump administration notified aid organizations across the country on Friday that it would cancel a contract that funds the legal representation of more than 25,000 children who entered the United States alone, a decision that leaves them vulnerable to swift deportation.
In a memo reviewed by The New York Times, the government instructed more than 100 nonprofits to immediately cease their work representing the minors. It terminated a contract that was up for renewal on March 29.
Advocates said the move would fast-track the children’s court cases, to their disadvantage, because many would be left without counsel in adversarial immigration proceedings. Children as young as 2 who are survivors of trafficking, trauma and abuse, and who are often too young to understand their legal rights, would be returned to countries where they could face harm, the advocates said.
“Children cannot be expected to navigate the harsh and complicated immigration legal system without an attorney,” said Ashley Harrington, managing attorney for the children’s program at Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network in Colorado.
“This brazen, heartless act endangers children’s lives,” she said.
The nonprofit represents about 200 minors, including three siblings, ages 7 to 13, who fled to the United States from Honduras alone last year after their parents were killed by gang members.
The number of children who have crossed the southern U.S. border each year without a parent or legal guardian has increased sharply in the last decade or so, reaching 128,000 in the 2022 fiscal year, according to government data. Most of them are from Central America.
The decision on Friday to halt funding to these organizations comes amid reports that the Trump administration intends to track down unaccompanied migrant children to ensure they appear in immigration court or are deported, if there is a final order of removal.
Tom Homan, the administration’s “border czar,” has said that 300,000 migrant children who entered the United States had been lost by the Biden administration, but immigration lawyers and human rights groups dispute that claim.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care of migrant children, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Critics said that the Trump administration’s decision to eliminate crucial federally funded services ran counter to its stated commitment to protect minors that fall prey to bad actors.
Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, which partners with private law firms to represent minors, said the elimination of the funds, collectively worth about $200 million annually, would make it all but impossible for many children to appear for their court hearings.
“The critical legal programs eliminated today have longstanding bipartisan support from Congress, not only because they protect children from danger, but because they also improve efficiencies in the immigration system by ensuring legal counsel for unaccompanied children who otherwise must navigate a complex court proceeding alone,” Ms. Young said.
Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, the government is required, to the “greatest extent practicable,” to provide legal representation to minors.
Unaccompanied children can win the right to remain in the United States by obtaining special immigrant juvenile status, if they can prove they were abused, abandoned or neglected; asylum, if they can show they were persecuted in their home country; or a protection for survivors of crime or trafficking. It is nearly impossible to receive any relief without a lawyer.
The Biden administration had increased access to legal services for unaccompanied minors.
In the 2024 fiscal year, nearly two-thirds of unaccompanied minors had representation when they appeared in court, according to official data. Children who have lawyers attend their hearings 95 percent of the time; those without representation attend only 33 percent of the time.
In recent years, thousands who have missed their court dates have been ordered to be deported.
March 21, 2025, 8:18 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Danielle KayeLauren Hirsch and Maureen Farrell
Paul Weiss deal with Trump faces a backlash from the legal profession.
President Trump said he would drop an executive order he signed against the law firm Paul Weiss. Credit...Andrew Kelly/Reuters
Some lawyers said the deal was driven by profit. Others said it was enabling autocracy. One said the move had prompted her to quit her legal job in disgust.
All over the legal world, lawyers on Friday were talking about the deal that Paul Weiss, one of the nation’s most prominent law firms, had made with President Trump to escape an onerous executive order that would have prevented it from representing many clients before the federal government. To avoid the hit to its business, the firm agreed to do $40 million worth of pro bono work for causes favored by the White House.
It was a striking development in the White House’s broad retribution campaign against big law firms that represented lawyers or prosecutors in the criminal cases against Mr. Trump before the 2024 election.
Paul Weiss’s move was a particular point of contention because of the firm’s standing in the legal community. The firm has long been dominated by Democrats and prided itself on being at the forefront of fights against the government for civil rights.
“They have all the resources they need to fight an unlawful order,” said John Moscow, who was a top prosecutor at the Manhattan district attorney’s office under Robert Morgenthau. “The example they are setting is to surrender to unlawful orders rather than fight them in court.”
Lawyers at firms both large and small took to social media to denounce the firm.
“Absolutely shameful and spineless behavior,” one lawyer posted on X.
“This is a time for soul-searching,” another lawyer, who used to work at Paul Weiss, wrote on LinkedIn.
“It’s not too late to leave your firm and find one with a backbone,” said a commenter on Paul Weiss’s corporate LinkedIn page.
Leslie Levin, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, said she was “deeply disappointed” that the firm had struck a deal with Mr. Trump, especially given its history.
Many large firms, she said, are struggling with how to respond to pressure from the Trump administration. But basing decisions on concern about harm to their business goes against key tenets of the legal profession, she said.
“Lawyers are supposed to stand up to the government when there’s an abuse of power, and a firm like Paul Weiss has the capacity to do that,” Ms. Levin said.
Another critic of Paul Weiss’s move, Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents whistle-blowers, including in a case that led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, said, “There are things where principle is stronger than the dollar.”
On Thursday, Mr. Trump said he had reached a deal with Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul Weiss, to drop the executive order he issued against the firm. The order would have restricted the firm’s security clearance — something that is often needed to review government contracts for corporate clients — and barred its lawyers from federal buildings.
In exchange, the firm agreed to represent clients no matter their political affiliation and do $40 million worth of pro bono work on causes that the Trump administration supports, such as fighting antisemitism.
Mr. Trump has issued executive orders targeting other law firms, too, including Perkins Coie, which opted last week to sue in federal court. A federal judge in Washington ruled that the order targeting Perkins was likely unconstitutional and issued a restraining order halting it. That legal battle is ongoing.
The American Bar Association released a statement this month condemning the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine major law firms, stating that these actions by the White House “deny clients access to justice and betray our fundamental values.” The association declined to comment on Friday on Paul Weiss’s arrangement with the White House.
Hundreds of associates at leading corporate law firms have signed an open letter calling on their employers to speak out against the Trump administration’s moves, arguing that the White House’s behavior could intimidate firms from taking on specific clients.
On Thursday, Rachel Cohen, an associate at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, shared screenshots on LinkedIn of a resignation email she had sent to the firm’s staff, citing the firm’s “lack of response to the Trump administration’s attacks on our peers.” Paul Weiss’s decision to make concessions to the Trump administration “has forced my hand,” Ms. Cohen wrote in her email.
In an interview, Ms. Cohen said Paul Weiss’s deal with Mr. Trump reflected “abject cowardice,’’ which would undermine the firm’s reputation and business prospects over the long term.
“At the end of the day, I think that it’s actually good for you as a business decision, as a major corporate law firm that charges exorbitant rates, if your clients can trust that you see the long-term impacts of these blanket executive orders,’’ Ms. Cohen said.
“And also, that you believe that the law exists.”
Skadden did not respond to requests for comment.
Some lawyers supported Paul Weiss’s decision to settle with Mr. Trump. They pointed out that the damage to the law firm’s business would have been significant.
Several lawyers said it was clear that many clients would have hit pause on their work with Paul Weiss since a great deal of their work involves the federal government.
“I totally understand kind of where Paul Weiss is coming from, because it was facing an existential threat,” said Ronald Barusch, a retired partner from Skadden Arps.
“Remember: Lawyers tell clients every day to make compromises on principle, that you need to settle disputes and resolve them,” Mr. Barusch said. “So they are probably following the advice they might give themselves.”
But, he added, it’s disappointing: “I like to see people standing up for the system.”
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale who has teamed up with Mr. Karp in pushing companies to take a stance on societal issues, like safeguarding democracy, argued that the deal would not significantly hamstring the firm’s ability to serve its clients.
Mr. Sonnenfeld added that many components of the deal were consistent with the firm’s pre-existing priorities, a sentiment that Mr. Karp expressed in an email to his staff.
“In no way does the agreement constrain Paul Weiss’s ability to zealously represent clients’ interests in their defense against Trump administration actions or regulatory litigation from executive agencies,” Mr. Sonnenfeld said.
But the Paul Weiss drama has raised bigger questions in the legal industry: What does it mean to be a lawyer if the administration can make demands on how a firm runs its business?
Paul Weiss “is merely rearranging the proverbial deck chairs on the Titanic,” Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, wrote on X. “With this administration, there will be no legitimate legal system and no need for actual lawyers.”
Jessica Silver-Greenberg contributed reporting.
March 21, 2025
Erica L. Green
Erica L. Green is a White House Correspondent. She reported from Washington.
The Trump administration dropped a policy that prohibited contractors from having segregated facilities.
A bus station in Durham, N.C., in 1940. Credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
In 1962, removing a restroom sign at Montgomery Municipal Airport in Alabama, in compliance with a federal court order banning segregation.Credit...Associated Press
The Trump administration has removed a longstanding directive from the civil rights era that explicitly prohibited federal contractors from allowing segregated facilities, the latest move to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion policies from government operations that has drawn fierce rebuke.
The removal of the segregated-facilities policy was included in a memo last month from the General Services Administration, which manages federal property and oversees procurement for the federal government. The memo, which applies to all civilian federal agencies, was among the many directives from agencies aiming to purge safeguards put in place in the 1960s to comply with executive orders issued by President Trump on race and gender identity. In his first days in office, Mr. Trump directed agencies to rid themselves of “harmful” and “wasteful” diversity policies, and “gender ideology extremism.”
The memo, which came to light after it was reported by National Public Radio this week, drops several clauses from the G.S.A.’s Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is used to solicit contracts for services and supplies. The memo said the wording was “not consistent with the direction of the president.” Among the deletions is a policy, last updated in 2015, that stipulated federal contractors couldn’t have “segregated facilities,” such as waiting rooms, work areas, restrooms, lunchrooms and water fountains.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 still bars discrimination, and segregated facilities, in the United States. But civil rights groups have feared that Mr. Trump’s war on D.E.I. programs has signaled the federal government’s willingness to retreat from enforcing it.
Dariely Rodriguez, the acting co-chief counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that like Mr. Trump’s revocation of a decades-old order issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson barring discrimination in hiring for government contractors, the stripping of the segregation provision “weakens the very safeguards that promote equity and inclusion across multiple sectors, including workplaces.”
“The Trump administration’s actions are pressure-testing our democracy, eroding more than 60 years of progress,” Ms. Rodriguez said.
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 remains the law of the land,” she added, “but laws are only as strong as their enforcement.”
In a statement to The Times, Stephanie Joseph, a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration, said that the G.S.A. would “continue to ensure that our federal contractors comply with long established civil-rights provisions found in U.S. laws.” She also said, “G.S.A. is committed to supporting the president’s direction to streamline the federal contracting process to restore merit-based opportunity, enhance speed and efficiency, and reduce costs.”
Margaret Huang, the president and chief executive of the Southern Poverty Law Center, called the measure “another step backwards that threatens to create hostile work environments for women, people of color and others who have faced a history of employment discrimination.”
“We hope contractors have the good sense not to reintroduce segregation into the workplaces,” she said, “but this decision sends a clear message that the federal government does not care if they do.”
The White House dismissed the criticism as “unserious falsehoods” and “baseless reporting” that undermined Mr. Trump’s charge by his voters to unify the country.
“President Trump continues to follow the law in his pursuit to reverse the disastrous policies of the previous administration and unleash prosperity through deregulation,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. “Thanks to his leadership, businesses will face fewer bureaucratic roadblocks and have a smoother path to working with the federal government.”
The White House has argued that Mr. Trump’s executive orders were not aimed at any particular group of people and that agencies have had autonomy in implementing them. But the fallout has disproportionately focused on policies that impact Black people, like purges of employees of color and the erasure of their history.
March 21, 2025, 5:22 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Karoun Demirjian
Reporting from Washington
The Trump administration sees bias in a judge and tries to push her off a case.
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Lawyers for the Justice Department said in a filing that Judge Beryl A. Howell has shown animus toward President Trump.Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images
The Trump administration filed a motion on Friday seeking to disqualify Judge Beryl A. Howell from presiding over a lawsuit brought by the law firm Perkins Coie over an executive order stripping its lawyers of their security clearances and denying them access to government buildings.
In the motion, lawyers for the Justice Department argued that Judge Howell, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, had “repeatedly demonstrated partiality against and animus towards the president,” complaining about comments she made during hearings in the Perkins Coie case, as well as remarks in other proceedings and public appearances.
“Defendants deserve a court proceeding free from concerns about impartiality,” the motion read, demanding that Judge Howell recuse herself and “return this matter to assignment before a judge free from any appearance of hostility toward this administration and is otherwise unconnected with any matter related” to past investigations of the president.
Earlier this week, the Trump administration tried to get another judge on the court removed, accusing Judge James E. Boasberg of “highly unusual and improper procedures” in a case challenging the Trump administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to accelerate deportations of Venezuelan migrants.
Last week, Judge Howell issued a temporary restraining order in the Perkins Coie case, precluding the administration from barring the firm’s lawyers from accessing the government, though it did not reinstitute their security clearances.
It was her latest ruling against President Trump and his allies, who have taken umbrage at some of her past decisions, particularly in her oversight of grand jury investigations in inquiries involving his ties with Russia and his handling of classified documents.
In 2019, Judge Howell ruled that the House, then run by Democrats, had a right to view the secret grand jury materials that had been redacted from a report examining Mr. Trump’s dealings with Russia, prepared by a team led by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
Last month, she ruled that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had to disclose some records from its investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents, even though it was no longer investigating him.
And in between, she made several decisions regarding the grand jury investigations into the cases stemming from the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, earning the ire of Mr. Trump and his followers.
Friday’s motion cited Judge Howell’s past handling of cases involving Mr. Mueller’s report, as well as the subsequent investigation by another special counsel, John Durham, into the origins of the F.B.I.’s inquiry into Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia. It also listed complaints over how Judge Howell had, in a November 2023 speech, made an oblique reference to how the country could make a move toward “authoritarianism,” a reference that prompted some House Republicans at the time to file a complaint against her. She did not mention Mr. Trump by name.
“This court has not kept its disdain for President Trump secret,” the motion reads. “It has voiced its thoughts loudly — both inside and outside the courtroom.”
March 21, 2025, 4:37 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Troy Closson
Columbia makes concessions to Trump amid bid to reclaim federal funds.
Columbia University was accused by the Trump administration of a systemic failure to protect students and faculty members “from antisemitic violence and harassment.” Credit: Bing Guan for The New York Times
Columbia University agreed on Friday to overhaul its protest policies, security practices and Middle Eastern studies department in a remarkable concession to the Trump administration, which has refused to consider restoring $400 million in federal funds without major changes.
The agreement, which stunned and dismayed many members of the faculty, could signal a new stage in the administration’s escalating clash with elite colleges and universities. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and dozens of other schools face federal inquiries and fear similar penalties, and college administrators have said Columbia’s response to the White House’s demands may set a dangerous precedent.
This week, the University of Pennsylvania was also explicitly targeted by the Trump administration, which said it would cancel $175 million in federal funding, at least partly because the university had let a transgender woman participate on a women’s swim team.
Columbia, facing the loss of government grants and contracts over what the administration said was a systemic failure to protect students and faculty members “from antisemitic violence and harassment,” opted to yield to many of the administration’s most substantial demands.
The university said it had agreed to hire a new internal security force of 36 “special officers” who will be empowered to remove people from campus or arrest them. The wearing of face masks on campus will also be banned for the purpose of concealing identity during disruptions, with exceptions for religious and health reasons.
Columbia will also adopt a formal definition of antisemitism, something many universities have shied away from even as they, like Columbia, faced pressure to do so amid protests on their campuses over the war in Gaza. Under the working definition, antisemitism could include “targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them” or “certain double standards applied to Israel,” among other issues.
Taken together, the administration’s plan — issued in an unsigned, four-page letter — reflected a stunning level of deference to the Trump administration from a top private research university.
Columbia’s interim president, Katrina A. Armstrong, said in a separate letter that the university’s actions were part of its effort to “make every student, faculty and staff member safe and welcome on our campus.”
“The way Columbia and Columbians have been portrayed is hard to reckon with,” Dr. Armstrong said. “We have challenges, yes, but they do not define us.”
She added: “At all times, we are guided by our values, putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make.”
The Trump administration demanded each of the changes in a letter to Columbia officials on March 13. It was not immediately clear whether the university’s actions would be sufficient to reclaim the $400 million in federal money. A spokeswoman for the Education Department, one of three federal agencies named in the letter, did not immediately respond on Friday to a request for comment, including to questions about the potential restoration of federal funding.
In perhaps the most contentious move, Columbia said it would appoint a senior vice provost to oversee the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department. The White House had demanded that the department be placed under academic receivership, a rare federal intervention in an internal process that is typically reserved as a last resort in response to extended periods of dysfunction.
Columbia did not refer to the move related to the Middle Eastern studies department as receivership, but several faculty members said that it appeared to resemble that measure.
Legal scholars and advocates for academic freedom expressed alarm on Friday over what they described as Columbia’s dangerous surrender to President Trump at a perilous moment for higher education. Some critics of the university’s response said they feared the White House could target any recipient of federal funds, including K-12 public schools, hospitals, nursing homes and business initiatives.
Sheldon Pollock, a retired former chair of the university’s Middle Eastern studies department, said in a text message that “Columbia faculty are utterly shocked and profoundly disappointed by the trustees’ capitulation to the extortionate behavior of the federal government.”
“This is a shameful day in the history of Columbia,” Dr. Pollock said, adding that it would “endanger academic freedom, faculty governance and the excellence of the American university system.”
The moves by Columbia were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The school’s response to the administration’s demands was the latest turn in a turbulent phase that began 17 months ago, when pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students organized competing protests in the days after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Since then, the Manhattan campus has experienced a rare summoning of the police to quell protests, the president’s resignation and the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate, by federal immigration officials.
The extraordinary cancellation of funding for the university escalated the crisis, imperiling research that includes dozens of medical and scientific studies. (The university did not mention the loss of funds in outlining the steps it was taking.)
On social media, Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, called it “a sad day for Columbia and for our democracy.”
Others said that a wholesale overhaul was appropriate in light of the conflict and tension on campus in recent semesters.
Ester R. Fuchs, who co-chairs the university’s antisemitism task force, said that many of the administration’s changes appeared to be issues that the group had previously highlighted.
“What’s fascinating to me is a lot of these are things we needed to get done and were getting done, but now we’ve gotten done more quickly,” said Dr. Fuchs, who is also a professor of international and public affairs and political science.
She added: “We are completely supportive of principles of academic freedom.”
Among other changes, the university also said that the administration would work to adopt a universitywide “position of institutional neutrality.” It said that it would move an independent panel of faculty, students and staff members who handle disciplinary procedures under the provost’s office — and that members would be “restricted to faculty and administrators only.”
The school also agreed to review its admissions policies for potential bias after it “identified a recent downturn in both Jewish and African American enrollment,” and last week announced a range of disciplinary actions against an undisclosed number of students.
Despite the overhaul, the current fraught chapter in Columbia’s 270-year history may not be over. The Trump administration has told the university that meeting its demands was “a precondition for formal negotiations” over a continued financial relationship and that the White House may call for other “immediate and long-term structural reforms.”
Columbia’s changes are notable for their scope and for how quickly they were made. But it is not the only institution to make concessions as the White House indicates that its campaign against elite universities and colleges will not end at the Morningside Heights campus.
Federal money is the lifeblood of major research universities, and some have begun to keep quiet on hot-button issues in hopes of escaping the administration’s ire. Many, including the University of California this week, have retreated from diversity-related efforts.
Many of the changes Columbia agreed to make involve issues that have been points of contention on campus for some time.
Face masks, for example, emerged as a source of conflict last year amid the Gaza protests, with demonstrators saying they should be able to conceal their identities to avoid being doxxed, and others arguing that mask-wearing makes it harder to hold protesters accountable if their actions veer into harassment.
The detainment this month of Mr. Khalil, a prominent figure in the protests who stood out because he chose not to wear a mask, cast a spotlight on the issue.
But putting the Middle Eastern studies department, which has long been in a pitched battle over its scholarship and the employment of professors who describe themselves as anti-Zionist, under outside scrutiny provoked unique outrage.
Columbia said that the senior vice provost would review curriculum and hiring in several programs, including the Center for Palestine Studies and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. The university said the move was aimed at “promoting excellence in regional studies.”
But Michael Thaddeus, a Columbia math professor who described reading Dr. Armstrong’s letter with “profound disappointment and alarm,” called it “a giant step down a very dangerous road.”
He worried that the Middle Eastern studies department would effectively be run by “a member of Columbia’s thought police” who could interfere with anything from course offerings to faculty appointments. “It strikes at the heart of academic freedom,” Professor Thaddeus said.
“Of all the bad things,” he continued, “this one is really the worst.”
Katherine Rosman contributed reporting.
March 21, 2025, 4:34 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Eileen Sullivan
A federal appeals court on Friday denied the Trump administration’s request that agencies hold off on reinstating thousands of fired probationary workers. A federal district court in Maryland recently ordered that 17 federal agencies reinstate fired probationary employees. The next hearing in that case is set for Wednesday. The appellate judges said that because the next hearing is so soon, there is no need to grant the government’s request.
March 21, 2025
Michael M. Grynbaum
Trump attacks reporting on Musk’s planned meeting on China war plans.
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Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, President Trump acknowledged the prospect of a conflict of interest were Elon Musk to be briefed on the closely guarded military secrets.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
President Trump claimed on Friday that a report in The New York Times, which detailed plans for Elon Musk to receive a briefing at the Pentagon on U.S. military plans for any prospective war with China, was “made-up” and “fake.”
The Times said afterward that it stood by the reporting in the article, which was first published on its website on Thursday evening. The plan for Mr. Musk to receive the top-secret briefing was also reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Hours after The Times’s report, Mr. Trump denied that Mr. Musk would be briefed on the Pentagon’s military plans involving China. On Friday morning, Mr. Musk met for 80 minutes with the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. The Times and The Journal reported that the briefing was changed to an unclassified meeting after the coverage in the press.
Mr. Musk is the billionaire chief executive of private companies with significant financial interests in China. His companies also hold major contracts with the U.S. government.
Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, Mr. Trump acknowledged the prospect of a conflict of interest were Mr. Musk to be briefed on the closely guarded military secrets. “Elon has businesses in China and he would be susceptible perhaps to that,” the president said.
But Mr. Trump claimed that The Times’s report “was a fake story” and that “it was meant to undermine whatever relationship the Pentagon has with Elon Musk.” He said that he checked with his senior aides after reading the article and was told, “This is ridiculous.”
Mr. Trump went on to assail The Times in language that he has often deployed against news organizations when he is displeased with their coverage. “It’s such a dishonest newspaper, it’s such garbage,” he said of The Times, adding, “They have fake sources, or they don’t have sources. I think they make most of it up.”
The New York Times said in a statement on Friday: “We stand by our reporting and will continue to pursue the facts and share them fully and fairly with the public.”
“Our job is to report news that is in the public interest,” said a Times spokeswoman. “Elon Musk is the chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, and a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China. The Pentagon’s plans to brief him on confidential military secrets related to China raised clear conflicts of interest.”
Earlier on Friday, Mr. Trump claimed that Mr. Musk was visiting the Pentagon to discuss cost savings as part of his role leading the Department of Government Efficiency. “He’s there for DOGE; not there for China,” Mr. Trump said, using an acronym for the department. “And if you ever mentioned China, he would walk out of the room.”
March 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-YoungsHamed AleazizAdam Goldman and Eileen Sullivan
Reporting from Washington
Trump shuts down three watchdog agencies overseeing his immigration crackdown.
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Secretary Kristi Noem of the Homeland Security Department in January. The Trump administration told more than 100 staff members they would be put on leave and eventually transferred or fired.Credit...Pool photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta
The Trump administration shut down three watchdog agencies in the Department of Homeland Security on Friday, gutting the offices responsible for conducting oversight of President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The cuts affect the civil rights branch of D.H.S. and two ombudsman offices: one overseeing immigration detention and another responsible for scrutinizing the administration’s legal immigration policies, according to five current and former government officials. More than 100 people at the civil rights office alone are losing their jobs.
The move comes as the Trump administration ramps up its deportation campaign, in some cases removing people from the country with little to no due process. Mr. Trump has been trying to root out oversight mechanisms across government agencies, but targeting D.H.S. was notable given the lack of transparency over the crackdown.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said the decision was meant to “streamline oversight to remove roadblocks to enforcement.”
“These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining D.H.S.’s mission,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”
Critics say it’s an attempt to sidestep any scrutiny.
“It’s a demonstration of their total contempt for any checks on their power,” said Deborah Fleischaker, a former civil rights office worker and chief of staff of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Biden administration. She said the office “endeavored to make the D.H.S. mission work with respect for civil rights, civil liberties and privacy.”
“This is a clear message that those things do not matter to this administration,” she added.
The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the two ombudsman offices, which were responsible for investigating allegations from migrants, their families and the public, have looked into Mr. Trump’s immigration policies over the years.
One such investigation during Mr. Trump’s first term investigated his use of the Remain in Mexico policy, which forced migrants to wait in Mexico until their court appearance.
The final report in 2021 found that the administration had placed unaccompanied children and people with mental health and other medical issues into the program. By the time the report was released, Mr. Trump was out of office and the program had been rescinded.
The civil rights office also conducted oversight of the other agencies under the Homeland Security Department, including the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The cuts come as the administration pursues large-scale job cuts in a “reduction in force.” The effort to eliminate government offices has been led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.
Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said the mass firing at the Homeland Security Department was an attempt to ensure “that there will be no transparency or oversight of his extreme agenda.”
The Trump administration has faced scrutiny for evading oversight more broadly in recent weeks, including from the judiciary branch.
At a hearing on Friday afternoon, a federal judge vowed to press on in determining whether the Trump administration violated his initial order stopping deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, an obscure law from 1798.
“The government is not being terribly cooperative at this point,” Judge James E. Boasberg said, “but I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order and who was responsible.”
Mr. Trump has been determined in his second term to ensure that his administration is made of up of loyalists who will not try to block his agenda. He has called for Judge Boasberg to be impeached.
March 21, 2025, 3:10 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Stephanie Saul
ICE tells a Cornell student activist to turn himself in.
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Momodou Taal was among a group of pro-Palestinian activists who shut down a career fair on the Cornell campus last year.Credit...Seth Wenig/Associated Press
The Trump administration moved early Friday to detain an international student at Cornell University who has led protests on its Ithaca, N.Y., campus, in what appeared to be the latest effort to kick pro-Palestinian activists out of the United States.
A lawyer for Momodou Taal, a doctoral student in Africana studies, said in court papers that he had been notified by email early Friday morning that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was seeking Mr. Taal’s surrender.
Last year, Mr. Taal was among a group of pro-Palestinian activists who shut down a career fair on the Cornell campus that featured weapons manufacturers. As a result, the university had ordered him to study remotely for the spring semester.
Mr. Taal, a great-grandson of Gambia’s first president, Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara, is a citizen of both Gambia and the United Kingdom. According to court documents, Mr. Taal, who is here on a visa, said he feared deportation in part because his name had been circulated on social media and in media reports as a potential ICE target.
The move to detain Mr. Taal comes as the Trump administration tries to deport other pro-Palestinian students and academics.
About two weeks ago, Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident of Palestinian descent who recently obtained a master’s degree from Columbia University, was detained in New York. On Monday, the government detained Badar Kahn Suri, an Indian citizen who was studying and teaching at Georgetown University, claiming he had violated terms of his academic visa. Other students have also been targeted.
ICE did not immediately return a request for comment.
Last weekend, Mr. Taal filed a pre-emptive lawsuit to block possible action against him. A hearing had been scheduled in that case for Tuesday in Syracuse, N.Y. A lawyer for Mr. Taal, Eric T. Lee, argued in the lawsuit that his client was exercising his right to free speech and that there were no legitimate grounds for his deportation.
The lawsuit also challenged the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order to “combat antisemitism” that instructed federal agencies to deport immigrants whose actions could be regarded as “antisemitic or supportive of terrorism.”
Earlier this week, neighbors saw law enforcement agents near Mr. Taal’s apartment building by Cornell’s campus, according to affidavits filed in the lawsuit in the Northern District of New York.
“This does not happen in a democracy. We are outraged, and every American should be too,” Mr. Lee said in a statement.
Lawyers for Mr. Taal are asking the court to delay his surrender to ICE, pending the outcome of the litigation. On Thursday, hundreds of Cornell students and supporters held a rally in support of Mr. Taal, who is also the host of a podcast called “The Malcolm Effect.”
March 21, 2025
Tim Balk
The Alien Enemies Act, used by Trump to deport Venezuelans, has long been contentious.
The Alien Enemies Act was invoked during World War II to intern tens of thousands of immigrants.Credit...Library of Congress/Corbis, via Getty Images
The centuries-old wartime law invoked by President Trump to summarily deport Venezuelans accused of gang membership was contentious from the moment it was passed and has rarely been used in U.S. history.
Before this month, the law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, had been invoked just three times: in the War of 1812, World War I and, most memorably, in World War II, when it was used to justify the internment of Japanese, Italian and German immigrants. The extent of its considerable powers has not been reviewed by the Supreme Court in more than 70 years.
The law’s roots lie in an undeclared sea conflict between a young American nation and France.
President John Adams signed the Alien Enemies Act in July 1798 as the United States came to the brink of war with France.
One in a suite of four laws collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Alien Enemies Act was a response to concerns that French immigrants might rise up against the U.S. government. An early draft of the act, rejected by lawmakers, would have punished U.S. citizens who harbored immigrants.
The law empowers the U.S. government to detain and even expel immigrants age 14 or older without a court hearing. It applies in times of declared war and when the United States faces the risk of invasion by a foreign nation — the Adams administration feared France would invade the United States by land.
Another law, the Sedition Act of 1798, cracked down on the press, making it a crime for newspapers to publish “false, scandalous and malicious” stories about the government. The Ipswich Journal of Suffolk, England, reported at the time that the passage of the laws “virtually declared” a war between the United States and France.
But a full-blown conflict did not materialize — the series of naval battles between the United States and France in the late 18th century became known as the Quasi-War. And in the years that followed, the three other components of the Alien and Sedition Acts lapsed.
The Alien Enemies Act, however, lacked a clause setting its expiration and remained on the books. So 14 years after its creation, President James Madison’s administration was able to summon the law to target British immigrants as the United States fought the War of 1812, a nearly three-year conflict over maritime rights.
A group of Japanese Americans being marched under Army escort in Seattle in 1942.Credit...Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
In a declaration dated July 11, 1812, Mr. Madison’s secretary of state, James Monroe, decreed that “all the subjects of His Britannic Majesty, residing within the United States, have become alien enemies.” The federal government said British immigrants could be detained if they refused to move 40 miles from the coast, away from cities including Boston, New York and Washington.
The scope of the law’s use against British immigrants during the War of 1812 is unclear, because of holes in the historical record, said Katherine Yon Ebright, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice and an expert on the Alien Enemies Act.
“In fact, a copy of the president’s public proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act cannot be found,” she said of the law’s use in the War of 1812.
But there is a record of a ruling, by Chief Justice John Marshall, acting as a lower court judge, that ordered the release of a British immigrant. The ruling said the law should not have applied to immigrants who had not been instructed to relocate.
A century passed before the law was used again, this time by President Woodrow Wilson.
The Wilson administration applied the law from the opening days of World War I, requiring German immigrants age 14 or older to be entered into a registry, photographed, fingerprinted and, in some cases, detained, said Prof. Christopher Capozzola, a history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on the war.
“It was a pretty dusty statute in 1917,” Professor Capozzola said, but its application was far-reaching, authorizing the detention of some 6,000 Germans. There were no substantial legal challenges.
The law’s most well-known invocation came about a quarter-century later, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt summoned it in the hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese warplanes, an attack that killed more than 2,300 Americans and drew the United States into World War II.
The Roosevelt administration, citing an “invasion” by Japan and the threat of invasions by Germany and Italy, began to round up Japanese, German and Italian immigrants.
Roosevelt did not only rely on the Alien Enemies Act to support the internment camps: He also issued an executive order to support interning U.S. citizens. That executive order was upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States, a notorious 1944 decision that was overturned in 2018.
All told, more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent were forcibly interned in military facilities, gyms, jails, fair grounds and racetracks. Another 10,000 or so Germans and a few thousand Italians were also interned.
Roosevelt contemplated interning every German immigrant without citizenship in the United States, but was discouraged by his advisers, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy organization. He was less concerned about Italians, calling them “a lot of opera singers,” Attorney General Francis Biddle later recalled.
In 1948, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to President Harry S. Truman’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel a German immigrant in 1946, after World War II had ended. The ruling in the case, Ludecke v. Watkins, was 5 to 4.
Justice Felix Frankfurter, writing for the majority, said that war “does not cease with a cease-fire order” and that a president’s power under the Alien Enemies Act “begins when war is declared but is not exhausted when the shooting stops.”
Writing in dissent, Justice Hugo L. Black countered that it was “nothing but a fiction to say” that the United States was still at war with Germany, which had surrendered in 1945.
“The 1798 act did not grant its extraordinary and dangerous powers,” Justice Black wrote, “to be used during the period of fictional wars.”
March 21, 2025, 2:40 p.m
March 21, 2025, 1:18 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Erica L. GreenKaroun Demirjian and Alan Blinder
Erica L. Green and Karoun Demirjian reported from Washington. Alan Blinder reported from Atlanta.
Gutting the Education Dept., Trump tasks other agencies with student loans and special education services.
A day after signing an executive order aimed at dismantling the Education Department, President Trump announced he would move student loan administration and special education services into agencies outside the department.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
President Trump announced Friday that the Education Department would no longer manage the nation’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio or supervise “special needs” programs in a major shake-up of an agency he has sought to eliminate.
Student loans will move under the Small Business Administration, while special education services, along with nutrition programs, will move under the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office that the moves would take place “immediately,” adding that he believed the restructuring — which critics swiftly vowed to challenge in court — would “work out very well.”
“They’ll be serviced much better than it has in the past. It’s been a mess,” he said of the loans. He added, “You’re going to have great education, much better than it is now, at half the cost.”
Mr. Trump laid the groundwork for his announcement on Thursday, with an executive order aimed at closing the Education Department. The department cannot be closed without the approval of Congress, which created it. But since Mr. Trump took office, his administration has slashed the department’s work force by more than half and eliminated $600 million in grants.
Reassigning such primary functions would further hollow out the agency, though education experts and union officials questioned Mr. Trump’s authority to do so unilaterally, particularly in the case of student loans. Many suggested that the result would not be better service — only more confusion for borrowers.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, insisted on Thursday that major programs like student loans would still be run out of the Education Department, albeit a much leaner one. Pressed Friday to clarify what functions would be moved, and what legal authority Mr. Trump had to transfer them, she invoked Congress.
“President Trump is doing everything within his executive authority to dismantle the Department of Education and return education back to the states while safeguarding critical functions for students and families such as student loans, special needs programs and nutrition programs,” she said. “The president has always said Congress has a role to play in this effort, and we expect them to help the president deliver.”
High ranking Republicans in Congress have already committed to introducing legislation to support Mr. Trump’s efforts to eliminate the Education Department.
Beth Maglione, the interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said it was “unclear” whether Mr. Trump could move aid programs away from the department. She suggested that a transition, even one authorized by Congress, would require time and careful planning.
“The administration would first need to articulate a definitive strategy outlining how the work of administering student aid programs would be allocated within the S.B.A., determine the necessary staffing and resources and build the requisite infrastructure to facilitate the transition of these programs to another federal agency,” she said. “In the absence of any comprehensive plan, a serious concern remains: How will this restructuring be executed without disruption to students and institutions?”
In the executive order, the president compared the size of the federal student loan portfolio with that of Wells Fargo, the bank — noting that Wells Fargo had over 200,000 employees, while only 1,500 people worked in the Education Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid.
“The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students,” the order stated.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump pledged that the legally mandated funding for students who attend high-poverty schools and who rely on federal Pell grants, as well as “resources for children with special disabilities and special needs,” would be preserved even as the department was gutted in accordance with his plans.
He indicated that this was important to Linda McMahon, Mr. Trump’s education secretary, who served as S.B.A. administrator during his first term.
The restructuring Mr. Trump announced on Friday would transfer some of the largest programs handled by the Education Department into agencies that have had minimal involvement with schools and are going through staffing reductions themselves.
The S.B.A., headed by Kelly Loeffler, announced Thursday that it would cut 43 percent of its roughly 6,500 workers, while H.H.S., led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has offered buyouts to most of its roughly 80,000 employees.
Representatives for the S.B.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a social media post, Ms. Loeffler said, “The SBA stands ready to take the lead on restoring accountability and integrity to America’s student loan portfolio.”
The acquisition of student loans would vastly expand the size of the portfolio the S.B.A. manages every year. In the 2024 fiscal year, the S.B.A. reported a portfolio of nearly $459 billion in outstanding loans. That is less than a third of what borrowers collectively owe in federal student loans.
The federal student loan program has been plagued with problems, including a botched rollout of a new application form that delayed its availability for the past two years.
Aaron Ament, a former Education Department official who is now the president of the National Student Legal Defense Network, said that while the programs might benefit from support from the Treasury Department or the S.B.A., moving them out of the Education Department entirely could lead to even more chaos for students, colleges and American taxpayers.
“There’s obviously decades of thinking that’s gone into why the oversight of these programs is housed at the agency,” Mr. Ament said.
He also doubted that Mr. Trump could transfer the programs himself, barring an explicit act of Congress.
“If they’re trying to do this through some sort of executive action, we will challenge it, and I’d expect it to be quickly blocked,” Mr. Ament said.
The student loan program was mired in legal battles for much of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s term after his administration sought to forgive billions in debt.
“The prior administration had the experience of doing things that challenged and pushed the legal boundaries of their authority around student lending,” said Matthew M. Chingos, a vice president at the Urban Institute who has written extensively about student loans. “That led to a lot of court battles and ultimately uncertainty for student borrowers. The current administration may have a similar experience.”
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is suing the Education Department for shutting down income-based loan repayment plans, also expressed doubts that the administration could effect the changes.
“First, a President doesn’t have the authority to change law- to do this- only Congress does,” she wrote in a social media post. “And second, why are either move a good idea? Student loans are not a small business & RFK Jr knows nothing about the IDEA,” referring to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a bedrock special education law.
In a social media post, Mr. Kennedy wrote that his agency was “fully prepared to take on the responsibility of supporting individuals with special needs and overseeing nutrition programs,” that were run by the Education Department, and would “make the care of our most vulnerable citizens our highest national priority.”
Ms. McMahon, who has given full-throated support for Mr. Trump’s plan to eliminate the department and her job, also struggled in an interview earlier this month to explain the acronym IDEA.
“I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what it stands for, except that it’s the programs for disabled and needs,” she told Fox News.
Advocates for students with disabilities expressed alarm at Mr. Trump’s planned changes.
“Throwing out the Department of Education accomplishes nothing but chaos and confusion,” Denise S. Marshall, the chief executive of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, said in a written statement, noting that millions benefited from the unique in-house expertise of the Education Department. “We would not send our children to the doctors to be educated, and we will not agree to send functions to H.H.S.”
When Mr. Trump promised to transfer “special needs and all of the nutrition programs and everything else” to H.H.S., he did not detail what “special needs” included. The Education Department doles out billions annually to states to pay for special education services, and has a designated Office of Special Education.
The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.
It is also not entirely clear what the scope of the “nutrition” programs are that H.H.S. would inherit. Mr. Kennedy, its secretary, has campaigned for improving nutrition and removing ultra-processed food from school lunches.
School lunches, however, are currently under the purview of the Department of Agriculture, which recently ended a program that provided minimally processed foods from local producers directly to schools.
Mr. Kennedy has made a number of polarizing statements blaming environmental toxins and a broken food system for the “epidemic” of chronic disease that has left America’s children among the sickest in the developed world.
He has also espoused fringe theories about the role that diet can play in preventing diseases such as measles, while casting doubt on the efficacy and safety of proven vaccines.
Tyler Pager
Reporting on the White House
Trump defended his executive orders stripping prominent law firms of security clearances, which would in effect cripple their businesses. He contended the firms “did bad things” and attacked him “ruthlessly, violently, illegally.”
Trump said the law firms now “want to make deals,” after he struck a deal with one of the firms, Paul, Weiss.
“They’re not babies,” he said. “They’re very sophisticated people.”
March 21, 2025,
David E. Sanger
Reporting on the White House
Trump is back at making the case for making Canada a state, saying the United States should not be protecting the country; both are part of NATO. “They trade very tough,″ he said, and would have lower taxes if they were part of the United States.
March 21, 2025, 12:04 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Erica L. Green
Reporting on the White House
Trump, asked whether he believed he had the authority to round up people and detain them without providing evidence against them to the courts, said he believed he did. “Well, that’s what the law says, and that’s what our country needs.”
He then pivoted to former President Biden, asking if he had the authority to allow millions of people to come into the country unvetted.
March 21, 2025, 12:03 p.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
David E. Sanger
Reporting on the White House
Both Trump and Hegseth denied the report in The New York Times, and confirmed by The Wall Street Journal, that the meeting at the Pentagon was intended to show Musk the war plan for potential conflicts with China. He called the Times report “such a fake story.”
Image
Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
March 21, 2025, 11:45 a.m. ETMarch 21, 2025
Matthew GoldsteinJessica Silver-Greenberg and Ben Protess
Paul Weiss chair says deal with Trump adheres to firm’s principles.
Image
Brad Karp, chairman of Paul Weiss, detailed the firm’s agreement with President Trump in an email to employees on Thursday.Credit...Carly Zavala for The New York Times
The chairman of Paul Weiss sought to reassure employees at the giant law firm that the deal it had reached with President Trump was consistent with principles that the 150-year-old firm has long stood by.
On Thursday evening, the chairman, Brad Karp, sent a firmwide email detailing the agreement he had reached with Mr. Trump, which allowed the firm to escape an executive order that could have cost it significant business.
The order, part of a broader retribution campaign against law firms, threatened to suspend the law firm’s security clearances and bar its lawyers from federal buildings, which would have made it virtually impossible for Paul Weiss to represent clients in some cases involving the federal government.
Within the firm, some top partners were concerned that the details of the executive order were less important than the message it sent to Paul Weiss’s clients, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The order, they said, sent the strong message that Paul Weiss was out of favor.
In the email to the firm, which was viewed by The New York Times, Mr. Karp said that in reaching an agreement with Mr. Trump, he had really just “reaffirmed” the firm’s statement of principles outlined in 1963 by one of Paul Weiss’s original named partners, Judge Simon H. Rifkind.
“The commitments reaffirmed today are consistent with Judge Simon H. Rifkind’s 1963 Statement of Firm Principles,” which states, among other things, that “we believe in maintaining, by affirmative efforts, a membership of partners and associates reflecting a wide variety of religious, political, ethnic and social backgrounds,” Mr. Karp wrote in the email.
Despite Mr. Karp’s assurances, the deal that he had reached with Mr. Trump during a meeting at the White House was causing concern among the broader legal community that large law firms were capitulating to Mr. Trump’s demands instead of fighting them in court.
Under the deal, the firm agreed to do $40 million worth of pro bono work on causes supported by the Trump administration, such as working with veterans and fighting antisemitism.
“Thank you all for your patience during this time,” Mr. Karp told the roughly 2,000 lawyers and support staff at the firm. “With this behind us, we can devote our complete focus — as we always do — to our clients, our work, our colleagues and our firm.”
The message was also shared with some of the firm’s clients.
Paul Weiss, formally known as Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison L.L.P., is one of three big law firms that Mr. Trump has targeted with executive orders that essentially restricted their security clearance — something that is often needed to review government contracts for corporate clients — and barred lawyers from federal buildings. The three firms represented either lawyers or prosecutors in the criminal cases that had been brought against him before the 2024 election.
Paul Weiss, based in New York, is one of the nation’s biggest law firms; it has offices around the world and represents some of the biggest corporations.
In the email, Mr. Karp included an attachment that outlined the five main points of the agreement with Mr. Trump. At the top of the list was an understanding that “the bedrock principle of American justice is that it must be fair and nonpartisan for all, including my representing clients across the political spectrum.”
Under the agreement, Paul Weiss reiterated its commitment to “merits-based hiring, promotion and retention” and said it would hire an outside expert, within 14 days, to conduct “a comprehensive audit of all its employment practices.”
The agreement also outlined that Paul Weiss would contribute “$40 million in pro bono legal services over the course of President Trump’s term.” That sum is a small fraction of the roughly $200 million that the firm spends annually on pro bono work, according to a partner familiar with the matter.
Mr. Trump’s executive order had already begun rattling the law firm’s clients. Lawyers for Paul Weiss told a federal judge in New Jersey that Steven Schwartz, a former corporate general counsel whom the firm was representing in a foreign corrupt practices case, had terminated Paul Weiss as defense counsel.
Paul Weiss had considered mounting a legal challenge to the executive order but felt the risk to its business were too great, a person briefed on the matter said.
At the White House on Friday, Mr. Trump defended the executive orders against law firms, which have already cost some of them critical business. He said the firms “did bad things” and attacked him “ruthlessly, violently, illegally.”
Mr. Trump said law firms now “want to make deals,” an apparent reference to his deal with Paul Weiss. “They’re not babies,” he said. “They’re very sophisticated people.”
The copy of the agreement that Mr. Karp shared with Paul Weiss differed in some ways from Mr. Trump’s characterization of the deal in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Mr. Trump said the law firm had specifically agreed to not follow any D.E.I., or diversity, equity and inclusion, policies in its hiring practices. But there is no reference to D.E.I. in the agreement that Mr. Karp shared. Mr. Trump has mounted an aggressive campaign against D.E.I. in the federal government, labeling it a form of workplace discrimination.
Mr. Trump also said that during their meeting Mr. Karp had “acknowledged the wrongdoing of former Paul Weiss partner Mark Pomerantz.” Mr. Pomerantz had tried to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump several years ago while working at the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
There was no mention of Mr. Pomerantz in the copy of the agreement circulated by Mr. Karp.
In a statement issued Thursday evening, Mr. Pomerantz denied that he had done anything wrong as a prosecutor.
Tyler Pager contributed reporting.
