Trump Live Updates: Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Use of Alien Enemies Act for Deportations

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May 16, 2025, 9:12 p.m. ET

The Trump administration will not be allowed to deport a group of Venezuelan detainees accused of being members of a violent gang under a rarely invoked wartime law while the matter is litigated in the courts, the Supreme Court said on Friday.

The justices sent the case back to a federal appeals court, directing it to examine claims by the migrants that they could not be legally deported under the Alien Enemies Act, the centuries-old wartime law invoked by the Trump administration. The justices said the appeals court should also examine what kind of notice the government should be required to provide that would allow migrants the opportunity to challenge their deportations.

The court said its order would remain in place until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled and the Supreme Court considered any appeal from that ruling.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a dissent, arguing that the justices had no authority to hear the dispute at this stage. He was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

The ruling deals a sharp blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to deploy the wartime law to pursue swift, sweeping deportations of Venezuelan migrants accused of being members of the gang, Tren de Aragua.

It also suggests that a majority of the justices may be skeptical of whether the migrants have been afforded enough due process protections by the administration before being deported, potentially to a prison for terrorists in El Salvador.

The Supreme Court’s order keeps in place a freeze on deportations that the justices had first imposed in April, as the president’s power to use the wartime act is weighed further.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

In their order, the justices said that the stakes facing the detainees are “particularly weighty,” citing the case of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was “deported in error” to the El Salvador prison in March. So far, the Trump administration has said it is unable to bring him back, despite an order from the justices to “facilitate” his return.

Under such circumstances, the justices wrote, “notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster.”

President Trump reacted with fury to the ruling. “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!” he said on social media. In a subsequent post, he wrote, “The Supreme Court of the United States is not allowing me to do what I was elected to do,” and called it “a bad and dangerous day for America.”

Lawyers for the migrants responded with relief.

The decision “means that more individuals will not secretly be sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. He added that the administration’s use of the wartime law “during peacetime, without due process, raises issues of far-reaching importance.”

The Trump administration has attempted to use the law as a tool in its signature initiative to speed the deportation of millions of migrants, leading to a clash with a skeptical judiciary.

Several lower court judges have concluded that the administration has exceeded the scope of the law, which can be invoked only when the United States has been subject to “invasion” or “predatory incursion,” and have blocked the deportation of groups of Venezuelans.

The Supreme Court justices have been asked to weigh in on the Trump administration’s deportation plans a few times in recent months, and they had already stepped in to temporarily block the deportation of a group of Venezuelans held in northern Texas.

Friday’s order came after a high-stakes legal fight between the Trump administration and lawyers from the A.C.L.U. in one of those challenges. The lawyers rushed to the court on April 18 after getting word that Venezuelan migrants detained in Texas and accused of being members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, had received notices of imminent removal and were being loaded on buses, presumably to be taken to the airport.

The group quickly filed a lawsuit in a federal trial court in Abilene, Texas, on behalf of two of the Venezuelans held at the detention center. Justice Department lawyers responded, telling a trial court judge that they had no immediate plans to deport the detainees.

The judge, James W. Hendrix, who was appointed during the first Trump administration, declined to issue an order temporarily blocking the deportations.

The A.C.L.U. subsequently asked the Supreme Court to act instead.

After midnight on April 19, the justices temporarily paused the deportations, writing, “The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,” the order said.

The justices moved swiftly that night, and the emergency application had been pending before the court since.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer had urged the justices in a court filing to allow lower courts to weigh in before intervening further in the case. He did not address the specifics of the A.C.L.U. claims that the deportations had been imminent, with buses being loaded for the airport. Rather, he said the government had provided notice to detainees subject to imminent deportation and that they “have had adequate time to file” claims challenging their removal.

In a reply to the court, the A.C.L.U. disputed this, arguing that the Trump administration had taken “actions contrary to this court’s specific ruling” that the government provide notice and time to challenge deportations.

Instead of providing notice to allow detainees to challenge their removal, the group’s brief said, “the government gave detainees an English-only form, not provided to any attorney, which nowhere mentions the right to contest the designation or removal, much less explain how detainees could do so.”

Earlier this week, Mr. Sauer again nudged the justices to allow the deportations. In a filing, the administration contended that “serious difficulties have arisen” from the detention of the group of 176 migrants who had been shielded from removal by the court’s emergency overnight ruling last month.

The Trump administration claimed that on April 26, a group of 23 migrants had barricaded themselves inside a housing unit for several hours, threatened to take hostages and harm immigration officers, and tried to flood the unit by clogging the toilets.

“The government has a strong interest in promptly removing from the country” gang members “who pose a danger” to immigration officers, facility staff members and other detainees, Mr. Sauer wrote.

There have been few public glimpses into the conditions at the Texas facility. On April 28, Reuters captured aerial images of the men held there. In the dirt yard of the detention center, 31 men, some wearing red jumpsuits designating them as high-risk, formed the letters SOS.

May 16, 2025, 6:36 p.m. ET

The headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington earlier this year.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

A politically fraught investigation opened by the Trump administration into a Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency grant program has so far failed to find meaningful evidence of criminality by government officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The criminal investigation, initiated by Ed Martin, then the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, was cheered by Republicans, who have made unsubstantiated claims that the multibillion-dollar program, intended to fund climate and clean energy initiatives, was a political slush fund.

The program, part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, was one of President Biden’s most significant actions on the environment.

Internal disagreements over the merits of the investigation raised alarms among current and former Justice Department officials, who were concerned that the Trump administration was misusing the vast power of federal law enforcement to discredit people, policies and programs President Trump disliked, such as clean energy projects.

While the investigation of some entities that received money through the program is continuing, agents and prosecutors see little evidence of any criminal conduct by E.P.A. officials who oversaw the funding. The vendor portion of the inquiry has yet to yield any strong evidence of criminal conduct, according to people with knowledge of the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Prosecutors and agents have shared their findings with senior political leaders at the Justice Department, according to people familiar with the matter.

A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last week, a senior prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office informed one vendor who received a contract through the E.P.A. program that it would no longer need to turn over documents and correspondence as required by a Feb. 20 subpoena obtained by Mr. Martin, a conservative Republican activist close to Mr. Trump.

The investigation has been a source of considerable frustration and consternation among federal prosecutors, as political appointees pressed for investigative steps, such as freezing bank accounts, that career officials believed were unwarranted. The conflict led to the abrupt departure of a senior career prosecutor in the office.

At issue was billions of dollars in federal “green bank” funding from the E.P.A.’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which received more than $20 billion under the Inflation Reduction Act. The fund, which disbursed grants to eight vendors, was a political target for the right.

Earlier this year, Trump administration officials claimed that they had evidence the funding had been improperly distributed — it had been “parked” at a major bank in the waning days of the Biden administration. They suggested they had uncovered extensive fraud, including the illicit transfer of gold bars, without providing evidence.

Trump administration officials referred to a video released last year by Project Veritas, a conservative group known for its sting operations aimed at news organizations, Democratic politicians and advocacy groups. The group’s tactics have prompted allegations of publishing deceptively edited videos.

The video, filmed in a social setting, showed Brent Efron, then an E.P.A. employee, talking about the departing Biden administration’s efforts to quickly spend federal money. He compared it to throwing “gold bars” off the Titanic before it sank. A lawyer for Mr. Efron has since said he was not referring to the grant program.

The E.P.A. used Citibank to transfer much of the money, which was frozen for part of the time the program was being investigated.

It is not clear whether a parallel administrative review by the E.P.A. inspector general, who had been working with prosecutors, is continuing.

Mark Zaid, a lawyer for Mr. Efron, said the inquiry was without merit. “There was absolutely never anything there to investigate,” he said.

The E.P.A., which has worked in recent months to block the nonprofits from gaining access to the money, is now being sued by several of the organizations for breach of contract.

During a hearing on the case in April, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the E.P.A. provided “different positions” to justify its actions, but not evidence of waste, fraud or abuse.

“Here we are, weeks in, and you’re still unable to proffer me any evidence with regard to malfeasance,” she told Justice Department officials.

From the start, experts in the distribution of government funds said Mr. Trump and his allies either misunderstood or mischaracterized how such payments work.

The issue came to a head in February at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, where a top prosecutor, Denise Cheung, abruptly resigned after refusing an order to open a criminal investigation into a government vendor and to freeze unspent assets kept in accounts with banks, including Citibank.

In her resignation letter, Ms. Cheung said she felt there was not sufficient evidence to justify cutting off the nonprofits’ access to the accounts.

After her resignation, the office pressed on with the case, but investigators who pored over account information and related evidence could not find reason to believe a crime had been committed by E.P.A. officials, according to people familiar with the case.

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

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May 16, 2025, 6:28 p.m. ET

Shawn McCreesh

Shawn McCreesh is a White House correspondent. He reported from Washington.

White House Memo

Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift were both targeted in social media posts from President Trump while flying back to Washington on Air Force One.Credit...New York Times photographs by Ruth Fremson and Sinna Nasseri

After spending much of the week touring the Middle East in the company of Gulf leaders not known for tolerating dissent, President Trump was reminded on Friday that in his own country, people are free to say whatever they would like about their president.

He did not seem terribly comforted by this reality.

While flying back to Washington on Air Force One, he had evidently become aware that Bruce Springsteen had slammed him on Wednesday while performing in England. Shortly after the plane took off from Abu Dhabi’s international airport, Mr. Trump posted on social media: “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

There were other posts aimed at other critics.

“Has anyone noticed,” Mr. Trump wrote in one of them, “that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’” Shortly after that one, he took a swipe at “grandstanders” in the Republican Party and “radical left losers” getting in the way of his agenda and the Supreme Court, which he said was “being played.”

It is not unusual for this president to be fighting on the internet with celebrities or political opponents or even the Supreme Court, but his posting spree read like a comedown of sorts after four days spent basking in the kind of opulent splendor and lavish praise he found in the Middle East, which so delight him.

And his vague threat on Friday about what may await Mr. Springsteen upon his return to the United States seemed ominous, since these days so many of his threats have turned out not to be empty ones.

Asked what exactly Mr. Trump was implying, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, would only send back a string of insults about Mr. Springsteen’s career.

“The America I love,” he said during his show in Manchester, “is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”

Mr. Springsteen went hard at the White House.

“They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that has led to a more just and plural society,” he said. “They’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands.”

The remarks by Mr. Springsteen, who campaigned for Kamala Harris, got a lot of attention at a time when many public figures in American life have avoided criticizing a president who campaigned on enacting retribution and has in many ways delivered on that promise.

A representative for Mr. Springsteen did not return requests for comment.

James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, has long been a target of President Trump’s ire, dating to early in Mr. Trump’s first presidency.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The Secret Service questioned James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, on Friday about a social media post he made that Mr. Trump’s cabinet officials and allies claimed amounted to a call for Mr. Trump’s assassination, according to a law enforcement official.

The Secret Service sought the interview after Mr. Comey posted a photo on Thursday of seashells on a beach forming the numbers “86 47,” a phrase used by Mr. Trump’s critics at protests, and on signs and clothing. “Eighty-six,” according to Merriam-Webster, is an old slang term meaning to dismiss or remove.

Shortly after Mr. Comey made the post, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said the Secret Service, which falls under her department, was investigating it. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said on Fox News that Mr. Comey should be jailed.

The interview is said to have taken place at a Secret Service office in Washington. Mr. Comey is said to have voluntarily consented to the interview, the official said, and was driven to the interview by Secret Service agents.

Mr. Comey deleted the Instagram post after it generated heated criticism, saying, “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”

Critics of Mr. Trump’s administration have said that his officials have blown Mr. Comey’s post out of proportion and are using it as an excuse to harass one of Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies.

The Service Service investigates multiple threats a day to people it protects, but it is uncommon for senior administration officials like Ms. Noem and Ms. Gabbard to comment publicly.

Mr. Comey has long been a target of Mr. Trump’s ire, dating to early in the first Trump presidency. Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey as F.B.I. director in May 2017 as the bureau was investigating whether Mr. Trump’s advisers had colluded with the Russian government to steer the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

In an interview with Bret Baier of Fox News that was broadcast on Friday, Mr. Trump — the target of two assassination attempts last year — said he believed that Mr. Comey was calling for him to be killed.

“He knew exactly what that meant,” Mr. Trump said. “A child knows what that meant. If you’re the F.B.I. director and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear.”

Asked what should happen to Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump replied that it should be up to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“But I will say this, I think it’s a terrible thing,” Mr. Trump continued. “And when you add his history to that, if he had a clean history, he doesn’t. He’s a dirty cop, he’s a dirty cop. And if he had a clean history, I could understand if there was a leniency, but I’m going to let them make that decision.”

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May 16, 2025, 6:16 p.m. ET

Judson Jones and Amy Graff

Judson Jones is a meteorologist and reporter for The Times. Amy Graff is a reporter on The Times’s weather team.

Risk

Some

Moderate

High

A National Weather Service office in eastern Kentucky was scrambling to cover the overnight forecast on Friday as severe storms were moving through much of the eastern United States, according to the union that represents the department’s meteorologists.

Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents Weather Service employees, said the office in Jackson, Ky., was one of four that no longer had a permanent overnight forecaster after hundreds of people left the agency as a result of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk that is reshaping the federal bureaucracy.

Mr. Fahy said on Friday that because of the threat for flooding, hail and tornadoes facing eastern Kentucky, the Weather Service had to find forecasting help for the office.

A spokeswoman for the Weather Service said the Jackson office would be relying on nearby offices for support through the weekend.

Multiple rounds of storms passed through eastern Kentucky on Friday morning and afternoon, and the overnight hours were expected to be stormy. A line of thunderstorms was forecast to sweep the region overnight, whipping up damaging winds and large hail. There is also a chance for isolated supercells, long-lasting storms that can deliver even stronger winds and bigger hail than typical thunderstorms and also generate tornadoes.

Much of Kentucky, including a portion of the eastern section, is within the bull’s-eye of an area under what the Storm Prediction Center calls a “moderate” threat — a four out of five in its levels of risk — of severe thunderstorms.

“It’s very rare that we see a moderate risk in our area, so I think people are aware,” said Jane Marie Wix, a meteorologist at the Weather Service office in Jackson.

By late Saturday morning, quieter weather and drier conditions are expected and will most likely continue into Sunday morning, before a chance for additional storms arrives close to the borders of Virginia and Tennessee by the middle of the day.

It is not unusual for a forecasting office to rearrange staff members for extreme weather. But until recently, most would have at least two or three people scheduled around the clock.

Three other offices, in northwestern Kansas, Sacramento and Hanford, Calif., also no longer have forecasters overnight, Mr. Fahy said, and four more, in Cheyenne, Wyo., Marquette, Mich., Pendleton, Ore., and Fairbanks, Alaska, are days away from the same fate.

“For most of the last half century NWS has been a 24/7 operation — not anymore,” Mr. Fahy said.

Nearly 600 people have left the Weather Service in recent months, through a combination of layoffs and retirements, after the Trump administration demanded that it and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, make significant cuts. The Weather Service’s 122 forecasting offices have traditionally operated 24 hours a day, with each one responsible for monitoring the weather in its region.

Because of the staffing cuts, some offices have also curtailed the twice-daily launches of weather balloons that collect data that fuels daily forecasts and forecast models. An agreement last month between the Weather Service and its employees’ union warned of “degraded” services as more people leave, and five of the department’s former directors recently wrote an open letter saying they feared the cuts had been so deep that lives would soon be endangered.

Kim Doster, a spokeswoman for NOAA, confirmed this week that “several local NWS offices are temporarily operating below around-the-clock staffing.”

She said the Weather Service “does not anticipate a significant impact in services as we work to mitigate potential impacts and direct other regional offices to provide additional support.”

The Weather Service has scrambled recently to reorganize staffing, sending forecasters to the offices most deeply affected by the losses. Balloon launches resumed in Omaha after the Nebraska congressional delegation announced that it had persuaded the White House to restore some of the staffing that had been lost there.

May 16, 2025, 6:14 p.m. ET

Joe Kent, the acting chief of staff for Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, on Capitol Hill last month. Mr. Kent told a senior intelligence analyst to do a new assessment of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and the gang after the initial version countered a White House narrative, officials said.Credit...Rod Lamkey/Associated Press

A top adviser to the director of national intelligence ordered a senior analyst to redo an assessment of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and a gang after intelligence findings undercut the White House’s justification for deporting migrants, according to officials.

President Trump’s use of a wartime law to send Venezuelan migrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador without due process relies on a claim that U.S. intelligence agencies think is wrong. But behind the scenes, a political appointee told a career official to rework the assessment, a direction that allies of the intelligence analyst said amounted to pressure to change the findings.

Mr. Trump on March 15 invoked the law, the Alien Enemies Act, to summarily remove people accused of being members of the gang, Tren de Aragua. The rarely used act appears to require a link to a foreign state, and he claimed that Venezuela’s government had directed the gang to commit crimes inside the United States.

On March 20, The New York Times reported that an intelligence assessment in late February contradicted that claim. It detailed many reasons that the intelligence community as a whole concluded that the gang was not acting under the Venezuelan government’s control. The F.B.I. partly dissented, maintaining that the gang had some links to Venezuela’s government based on information all the other agencies did not find credible.

The administration was alarmed by the disclosure. The next day, a Friday, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, announced a criminal leak investigation, characterizing The Times’s detailed description of the intelligence assessment as “inaccurate” and “false” while insisting that Mr. Trump’s proclamation was “supported by fact, law, and common sense.”

The following Monday, Joe Kent, the acting chief of staff for Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, told a senior intelligence analyst to do a new assessment of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and the gang, the officials said. The analyst, Michael Collins, was serving as the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council at the time.

An official who has reviewed messages about the assessment said Mr. Kent made the request to Mr. Collins in an email, asking him to “rethink” the earlier analysis. The official said Mr. Kent was not politicizing the process, but giving his assessment and asking the intelligence officials to take into account the flows of migrants across the border during the Biden administration.

The National Intelligence Council is an elite internal think tank that reports to Ms. Gabbard and that policymakers can commission to undertake special analytical projects. The council canvasses spy agencies across the executive branch for its information.

While officials close to Ms. Gabbard said Mr. Kent’s request was entirely appropriate, other intelligence officials said they saw it as an effort to produce a torqued narrative that would support Mr. Trump’s agenda. But after re-examining the relevant evidence collected by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the council on April 7 reaffirmed the original findings.

Inside the administration, even some officials who do not think Mr. Kent injected politics into the intelligence report are angry for what they see as a blundering intervention. Little new information had been collected in the month after the original assessment and his request for a redo, so there was no reason to expect the council to come up with different findings.

From the beginning, politics surrounded the request for an intelligence assessment.

The original assessment stemmed from a White House request, according to former American officials.

It is not clear who specifically inside the White House made the request.

Inside the administration, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, spearheads immigration policy. He has developed numerous ways to leverage existing laws — sometimes via aggressive interpretations — to better seal the border and accelerate deportations. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act to avoid time-consuming asylum and deportation hearings is one of those innovations.

In response to the White House request, Mr. Kent asked the National Intelligence Council to produce its initial analysis. The resulting report was dated Feb. 26, according to officials familiar with it.

Stephen Miller, the homeland security adviser, has developed numerous ways to leverage existing laws, such as the Alien Enemies Act, to avoid time-consuming asylum and deportation hearings and accelerate deportations.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

Details remain unclear of the White House deliberations that led to Mr. Trump, two weeks later, signing a proclamation that made purportedly factual findings that contradicted the executive branch intelligence community’s understanding of what was true.

After the assessment came to light and Mr. Kent asked Mr. Collins to rethink that analysis, Mr. Collins agreed to produce an updated assessment, according to people briefed on the events.

Some intelligence officials took Mr. Kent’s intervention as an attempt to politicize the findings and push them in line with the Justice Department arguments and the Trump administration policy. Mr. Collins, according to those officials, worked to navigate the politics and to protect the analytic integrity of the National Intelligence Council’s work as he began drafting a “sense of the community memo.”

The officials who described the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. Intelligence officials declined to make Mr. Collins available for an interview.

Olivia C. Coleman, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said requesting the intelligence assessment on the gang’s ties to the Venezuelan government was “common practice.” She also defended Mr. Kent, saying, without detail, that the timeline presented in this article was “false and fabricated.”

“It is the deep state’s latest effort to attack this administration from within with an orchestrated op detached from reality,” Ms. Coleman said.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Trump’s policy on deporting Venezuelans to El Salvador had made America safer. “President Trump rightfully designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization based on intelligence assessments and, frankly, common sense,” she said.

After Mr. Trump sent planeloads of Venezuelans to El Salvador, a complex series of court fights have erupted and courts have blocked, for now, further use of the act for deportations. On Friday, the Supreme Court extended the freeze.

As the National Intelligence Council drafted the second analysis, multiple officials said, Mr. Collins and his colleagues tried to describe how most of the spy agencies had reached their consensus conclusion doubting any direct connection between the Venezuelan government and Tren de Aragua, and why the F.B.I. saw things partly differently.

The memo, dated April 7, concluded that the Venezuelan government “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with T.D.A. and is not directing T.D.A. movement to and operations in the United States.” It detailed why the intelligence community as a whole thought that, echoing accounts of the February assessment, like how the government treats Tren de Aragua as a threat and how the gang’s decentralized makeup would make it logistically challenging for it to carry out instructions.

The memo also went into greater detail about a partial dissent by the F.B.I. in a way that made clear why most of the intelligence community thought the bureau was wrong.

F.B.I. analysts largely agreed with the consensus assessment, the memo said, but they also thought that “some Venezuelan government officials” had helped gang members migrate to other countries, including the United States, and used them as proxies.

The basis of that conclusion came from law enforcement interviews of people who had been arrested in the United States — and “most” of the intelligence community judged those reports “not credible.”

The existence of the council’s memo and its bottom-line findings came to light in a Washington Post article on April 17. Publicly, the Trump administration and its supporters and influencers have reacted by vilifying Mr. Collins.

On April 20, Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who successfully lobbied the administration to fire other security officials, attacked the National Intelligence Council on social media as “career anti-Trump bureaucrats” who “need to be replaced if they want to promote open borders.” In the same post, she pasted images of Mr. Collins’s LinkedIn profile and of an Associated Press article about the council’s memo.

Three days later, Ms. Gabbard and her deputy chief of staff revealed on social media that they had made a criminal leak referral about the Post article. And, as reported by Fox News this week, Ms. Gabbard also removed Mr. Collins and his deputy from leading the council.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and her circle have amplified posts portraying the National Intelligence Council, an elite internal think tank, as a hive of biased, deep-state bureaucrats.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

As discussion of the removals circulated, Ms. Gabbard and her circle have amplified posts portraying the council as a hive of biased, deep-state bureaucrats.

An official briefed on the matter has denied that Mr. Collins’s removal was connected to the Venezuela assessment or to Ms. Loomer. But other officials have said they believe Mr. Collins has been made a scapegoat.

When the council produced a draft memo, Mr. Kent insisted on several edits to its final form. The details of his changes remain unclear.

But his reaction to the final memo was surprising, the officials said: Mr. Kent was happy about it, and pushed to have it declassified so that it could be discussed publicly, the officials said.

Mr. Kent’s request for declassification set in motion a chain of events that led to the agency’s release of the report this month in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Because the memo directly contradicts what Mr. Trump claimed — and is now public as an officially acknowledged document — it is generally seen as a legal and public relations fiasco for the administration.

The official who had reviewed the messages about the assessment said Mr. Kent’s reaction, recorded in emails to Mr. Collins, is clear evidence that he was not politicizing the process but merely wanted a fuller discussion of what intelligence agencies knew and the F.B.I.’s take on the issue. But other current and former officials questioned that narrative. Why, they asked, if Mr. Kent was pleased with the redone assessment, was Mr. Collins fired?

It is not entirely clear why Mr. Kent seemed to believe that the memo supported Mr. Trump’s claim. But he and other officials who shared his view were focused on the section exploring the F.B.I.’s partial dissent.

A line says that reports generated by U.S. law enforcement agencies have “the most focus on T.D.A. and its activities in the United States” because, unlike purely foreign intelligence agencies like the C.I.A., they can interrogate domestic prisoners.

But the memo also stressed multiple reasons to be skeptical. Among other things, because of their legal troubles, detainees had an incentive to fabricate “valuable” information, the memo said. And, it said, agencies had not observed the Venezuelan government directing the gang, which would likely require extensive communications, coordination and funding between government officials and gang leaders “that we would collect.”

Mr. Kent has a history of embracing alternative versions of reality that align with his political views but are not supported by evidence. For example, as recently as his confirmation hearing in April, he promoted the conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. secretly instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by Trump supporters trying to block Congress from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory.

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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The Biden administration kept secret audio recordings of the president being interviewed by the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified information secret, asserting executive privilege.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

A four-minute audio clip of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2023 special counsel interview released Friday evening showed Mr. Biden speaking softly and haltingly as he struggled to recall key dates.

The audio was published by Axios as the Trump administration made plans to release the full interview recording. It offers a firsthand look at Mr. Biden’s much-debated interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel, as part of an investigation into Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents.

The clip showed Mr. Biden stumbling over the years his son died and Donald J. Trump was first elected, and when he left office as vice president.

A transcript of the interview was released in 2024, when Mr. Hur released his report and declined to recommend charges against Mr. Biden. The Biden administration blocked the release of the audio recordings, which show Mr. Biden’s verbal and memory struggles.

As early as next week, the Trump administration plans to release the audio recordings of the interview, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Biden was interviewed at the White House in October 2023 by Robert K. Hur, who had been appointed to investigate whether crimes had been committed related to classified documents found at Mr. Biden’s former office and home after he left the Obama administration.

In 2024, Mr. Hur announced he would not seek to file any charges in the case, in part because Mr. Biden would probably appear to be a sympathetic figure to a jury — an older man with a poor memory.

The emergence of the recording comes as Democrats are grappling with new revelations about Mr. Biden’s health while in office, and efforts at that time by his aides and other party leaders to quash concerns about his ability to run for re-election.

About a month after Mr. Hur’s announcement not to seek charges, officials released a transcript of his interview with Mr. Biden. But for more than a year, Republicans have been demanding that the government also release the audio recording, arguing that it might offer evidence of a decline in Mr. Biden’s mental acuity.

“The transcripts were released by the Biden administration more than a year ago,” said Kelly Scully, a spokeswoman for the former president. “The audio does nothing but confirm what is already public.”

The Biden administration did not release the audio, asserting executive privilege. Officials also said releasing such a recording could make it harder for prosecutors to get cooperation from witnesses in future investigations.

Officials at the Trump White House and Justice Department have disagreed with those Biden-era arguments and plan to release the audio, according to two people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a decision that has yet to be announced.

The Trump administration was facing a court deadline next week to take a position in a lawsuit over the recording.

Mr. Hur issued a 345-page report last year concluding that Mr. Biden had carelessly kept classified documents and notebooks at his home, but said that the evidence was not strong enough to charge the president with a crime.

The report’s most significant political impact, however, was its description of Mr. Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory,” prompting a backlash from Democrats and a flurry of demands from Republicans for more details about the Mr. Biden’s purported limitations.

One particularly explosive detail was Mr. Biden’s struggle to remember the year in which his son Beau died.

“How in the hell dare he raise that,” Mr. Biden said after the report’s release. “I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.”

May 16, 2025, 5:36 p.m. ET

The ratings downgrade amounted to a political and economic repudiation of Washington.Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times

The credit rating of the United States received a potentially costly downgrade on Friday, as the ratings firm Moody’s determined that the government’s rising debt levels stood to grow further if Republicans enact a package of new tax cuts.

The downgrade, to one notch below the highest triple-A rating, amounted to a repudiation of Washington, where President Trump only hours earlier had pushed his party to adopt a legislative package that might add trillions of dollars to the nation’s fiscal imbalance.

The downgrade from Moody’s means that each of the three major credit rating agencies no longer gives the United States its best rating. Fitch downgraded the United States in 2023, citing fiscal concerns, and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country in 2011.

The new rating decrease could send ripple effects throughout the economy if it prompts investors to demand higher payments on bonds, which in turn could raise consumers’ borrowing costs. So far, though, past downgrades have proved largely symbolic, as the American government’s debt remains the bedrock of the global financial system.

Moody’s pointed to decades of gridlock and dysfunction in the nation’s capital. It found that Democrats and Republicans alike had failed to meaningfully curtail U.S. debt, which now towers above $36 trillion.

Nor had the U.S. government addressed myriad well-known, and long-term, financial challenges, Moody’s said, especially the rising costs and persistent underfunding of programs like Social Security and Medicare.

While Moody’s described the U.S. financial system as stable, and found the dollar to be strong and reliable, it also acknowledged the vast policy uncertainty — and it obliquely referred to the ways in which political stability and constitutional order can be “tested at times.”

“Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs,” the report from Moody’s said. “We do not believe that material multiyear reductions in mandatory spending and deficits will result from current fiscal proposals under consideration.”

Moody’s specifically referred to the push to renew the expensive tax cuts adopted under Mr. Trump in 2017, a task that Republicans are now struggling with on Capitol Hill.

The party is trying to offset some of the roughly $3.8 trillion cost of lowering taxes with cuts to spending on health care, clean energy incentives and food stamps. But the scope and the approach of the package have divided Republican lawmakers, with hard-right conservatives demanding steeper cuts as some moderates caution against taking benefits away from too many Americans.

On Friday, some conservatives seized on the Moody’s downgrade to call for deeper spending cuts as part of their party’s imperiled domestic policy bill.

“Moody’s downgrade of America’s debt is a signal that we can wait no longer to address the debt crisis,” said Representative Andy Harris, Republican of Maryland, in a post on social media. He added that he was “not supporting” the tax package without substantial changes.

Even with its existing spending cuts, the Republican package is expected to add significantly to the debt. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that the current version of the bill overall would cost $2.7 trillion over a decade, before counting additional borrowing costs.

That number could easily grow if Congress later extends measures like no tax on tips, which under this piece of legislation would last only four years.

Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, sought to blame the Moody’s downgrade on the administration of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“The Trump administration and Republicans are focused on fixing Biden’s mess by slashing the waste, fraud and abuse in government and passing the One, Big, Beautiful Bill to get our house back in order,” he said in a statement.

The prospect of much more government borrowing — when interest rates are already elevated — has made some bond investors nervous. So-called vigilantes in the bond market have been selling the government’s debt as the Republican tax package has wound its way through Congress, contributing to higher yields, which in turn translate to higher interest rates on consumer borrowing.

The 10-year Treasury bond yield has risen roughly 0.3 percentage points this month to around 4.5 percent. The 30-year Treasury yield briefly crossed 5 percent this week; the last time it did that, during some of the worst tariff fears, Mr. Trump cited the bond market among reasons he pared back his tariff proposals.

It’s a sign that the government could end up paying a higher interest rate on its debt if it can’t soothe investors’ concerns over its mounting debt, a development that could snowball into a full-blown debt crisis for the world’s largest economy.

Moody’s announced the downgrade just before bond markets closed on Friday, so investors will have to wait until Sunday to respond.

“We have warned that the bond vigilantes were teeing up for an event to move against Treasuries,” said Andrew Brenner, head of international fixed income at NatAlliance Securities. “This would qualify as a catalyst to move rates markets Sunday night.”

Still, the downgrade is unlikely to deter Republicans in their quest to slash taxes, even though party lawmakers previously griped about similar backslides in ratings. After previous downgrades, lawmakers in both parties did not raise taxes or cut spending enough to improve the country’s fiscal outlook, instead repeatedly passing legislation that, overall, reduced taxes and increased spending.

“Years of dysfunction, debt ceiling debacles and fiscal imprudence have brought us to this outcome,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the accounting firm RSM. He warned that “anything financed in both the public and private sector will now be more expensive.”

Colby Smith contributed reporting.

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May 16, 2025, 5:36 p.m. ET

The Trump administration is pulling back awards that the Biden White House had given to projects in six states through the Tech Hubs Program, the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, said in a statement. Lutnick said that the previous administration had used a “rushed, opaque and unfair” process to select recipients and that there would be a new competition for the funds. Among the projects losing their grants are a biotechnology hub in Birmingham, Ala.; a critical minerals project in Missouri; an aerospace technology hub in Spokane, Wash.; and a project focused on forest-based biomaterials in Maine. They are welcome to compete again, Lutnick said.

Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

May 16, 2025, 5:23 p.m. ET

A federal appeals court in Boston has declined to put on hold a lower court’s order ensuring that immigrants have a chance to contest their deportations to countries other than their own if they have reason to fear being sent there. The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit meant that, for now, the Trump administration cannot send immigrants to places like El Salvador or Libya without first giving them at least 15 days to challenge their expulsions.

May 16, 2025, 5:02 p.m. ET

Moody’s has downgraded the credit rating of the United States, saying that it did not expect that the Republican fiscal agenda would meaningfully improve the country’s fiscal outlook. The rating went from the highest, Aaa, to the second highest, Aa1. Moody’s downgrade means that none of the three major credit rating agencies give the United States their best rating. Fitch downgraded the United States in 2023, citing fiscal concerns, and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country in 2011.

May 16, 2025, 4:35 p.m. ET

D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, argued that a pause of the administration’s plans for mass layoffs would prevent “almost the entire executive branch from formulating and implementing plans to reduce the size of the federal work force.”Credit...Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Trump administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to block a judge’s ruling that had temporarily paused plans for mass layoffs and program closures at federal agencies.

Last week, Judge Susan Illston of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California called for a two-week pause on the administration’s actions, which she said were illegal without congressional authorization. Her order barred two dozen federal agencies from moving ahead with the largest phase of President Trump’s efforts to downsize the government.

In the emergency application filed on Friday, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, argued that the lower court's “far-reaching order” would prevent “almost the entire executive branch from formulating and implementing plans to reduce the size of the federal work force.”

That decision was “based on the extraordinary view” that the president lacked the authority to direct executive agencies on how to conduct large-scale downsizing plans, Mr. Sauer said.

Judge Illston’s ruling would prevent the Department of Housing and Urban Development from carrying out layoffs it had planned for Sunday.

The request to the justices was the 15th emergency application that the administration filed to the Supreme Court since Mr. Trump returned to office in January. The applications have included asking the justices to lift a nationwide pause on Mr. Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship, to freeze more than $1 billion in foreign aid and to permit the deportation of Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador without due process.

In February, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing officials to draft plans for “large-scale” cuts to the federal work force. Several labor unions, advocacy groups and local governments sued, seeking to block the order.

Judge Illston held an emergency hearing in the case last Friday and issued her ruling just hours later.

In the 42-page ruling, Judge Illston determined that the government’s attempt to lay off workers and shut down offices and programs created an urgent threat to scores of critical services. She also noted that the process required consultation with Congress on any plan to abolish or transfer part of a federal agency.

On Monday, the Trump administration filed an emergency request to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, asking it to pause Judge Illston’s order pending appeal. But the administration told the Supreme Court that such a ruling would not come quickly enough.

Of the many lawsuits filed in response to Mr. Trump’s efforts to reshape the federal government, the mass layoffs case is poised to have the broadest effect. Many agencies have not yet announced downsizing plans, but employees throughout the government have been anxiously awaiting announcements.

Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.

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May 16, 2025, 4:24 p.m. ET

Lynsey Chutel and Matej Leskovsek

Matej Leskovsek reported from Sevnica, Slovenia, the hometown he shares with the first lady, and Lynsey Chutel reported from London.

The disappearance of a statue of Melania Trump near her hometown, Sevnica, Slovenia, has prompted a police investigation.Credit...Matej Leskovsek/The New York Times

Where is Melania Trump?

No, not the rarely seen first lady, but the statue made in her likeness that watched over her nearby hometown, Sevnica, Slovenia.

The life-size bronze statue, 15 minutes outside Sevnica, disappeared from its perch this week. The theft was reported on Tuesday, the police said. But it’s not clear when, exactly, it was taken, Alenka Drenik, a spokeswoman for the police, said by phone on Friday.

“Police are still assessing the theft, and an investigation is still ongoing,” Ms. Drenik added.

Residents of Sevnica have their suspicions. Some in the town of about 5,000 people in eastern Slovenia say it could have been an act of vandalism; others say it was probably melted down for cash. None of the people interviewed thought, however, that the statue’s disappearance had been in any way political.

“Melania is rarely seen in the spotlight or anywhere else, and even when she does do something, it’s so bizarre, so I don’t even want to think about her that much,” said Igor Pavkovic, who has lived in Sevnica all his life and recalled laughing when he first saw the statue.

The expressionless sculpture, its arm raised in a tight wave, never quite captured the heart of Sevnica’s residents. Originally made of wood, it was hacked from a linden tree and unveiled in 2019 by an artist who used a chain saw to create a very, very rough likeness of the first lady.

Ms. Trump left Sevnica in 1985 and has not been spotted in town since.Credit...Matej Leskovsek/The New York Times

Painted powder blue to reflect the cashmere dress and gloves that Ms. Trump wore to her husband’s first inauguration, in 2017, the statue stood nine feet tall. But it was derided as resembling a scarecrow or a Smurf. Anonymous arsonists set the statue on fire on July 4, 2020.

A bronze replacement was erected later that year. Now, only the statue’s heavy Cubist feet, hacked off at the ankles, remain on the tree trunk that had served as the statue’s plinth. It had stood in a lonely field, far away from the municipal apartment block where Ms. Trump grew up and the school she attended. The privately owned field overlooks the Sava River and a verdant valley, but only runners and cyclists would have regularly crossed paths with the statue.

Both the wood and metal iterations had been commissioned by an American artist, Brad Downey, who worked with local artisans to create the sculptures. Mr. Downey said at the time that he saw it as an interrogation of President Trump’s harsh stance on immigration.

“The idea to commission the first monument to Melania has some cheekiness to it, but I wanted to do a serious investigation there,” Mr. Downey said.

The statue that replaced a wooden one set on fire in 2020.Credit...Jure Makovec/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

While no one has claimed responsibility for the statue’s disappearance, it vanished at a time when public dissatisfaction with Mr. Trump’s second-term policies have been expressed globally through vandalism of vehicles made by Tesla, the electric car company owned by Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s adviser. Satirical advertisements mocking both men have also popped up around London in recent weeks.

Few in Sevnica said they would miss the statue.

“I only saw it in pictures, and I thought it was very unesthetic,” said Nena Bedek, an art teacher who said she had gone to school with Ms. Trump. “I had the feeling someone was making fun.”

“We were all ashamed of the statue when it was first unveiled, especially Melania and the Knavs family,” Bruno Vidmar, a hotelier whose business has thrived off the factory town’s tenuous claim to the White House. Ms. Trump’s businessman father, Victor Knavs, has been known to stop by Mr. Vidmar’s hotel for dinner when he’s in town.

Ms. Trump was born in Novo Mesto, and her family later moved to Sevnica. She left in 1985 and has not been seen there since. That hasn’t stopped the town from capitalizing on its most famous ambassador. Ms. Trump has inspired coffee, chocolate and comfy slippers, all cleverly branded to avoid copyright claims.

The Melania cake at a patisserie in Sevnica.Credit...Matej Leskovsek/The New York Times

In a gift shop hangs an amateur painting that merges the facade of the White House with Sevnica’s other famous attraction — a 12th-century castle. A patisserie in Mr. Vidmar’s hotel serves a slice of Melania: a white chocolate, cream and mascarpone sponge cake, drizzled with walnuts, pistachios and sesame seeds. Mr. Vidmar’s wife came up with the recipe during Mr. Trump’s first term, the hotelier said.

Locals say it’s fresh and elegant — like Ms. Trump.

“We can be proud of her that she is the first lady now for the second time,” said Meri Kelemina, who lives in a village near where the statue once stood.

She added that the statue and its location had done little for the town and had not flattered Sevnica’s most famous former resident.

“I think she deserves a nice landmark,” she said.

James B. Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, has a long and contentious history with President Trump, who fired him in 2017.Credit...Monica Jorge for The New York Times

In promising to investigate James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, Trump administration officials pointed to his apparent reference to a slang term on Instagram, describing it as a call for the president’s assassination.

Mr. Comey’s photo showed shells on a beach arranged to spell “86 47” with the caption: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” The “47” was presumed to refer to President Trump, the United States’ 47th president, and “86” is a term commonly used by restaurants to signify when they are out of a menu item, or by bars and in military and intelligence circles to throw something — or someone — out.

But in some contexts, the term has evolved to mean something more sinister: to eliminate or kill.

According to lexicologists, the term “86” began as diner shorthand in the early 20th century.

“In the ’30s and ’40s, there were numerical codes used in diners,” said Jesse Sheidlower, an adjunct professor at Columbia University whose specialty is slang. “Eighty-one is a glass of water, 82 is two glasses of water, 89 is a pretty girl, and 86 means you’re out of something.”

Even today, it is not unusual to see the number 86 on a menu chalkboards in the dining room and white boards in kitchens.

Slang definitions tend to slide around, though, and terms can mean different things depending on who is using them.

The most common modern usage of “86” is as a verb, meaning to throw out, dismiss or eject. Customers who are tossed out of an establishment for being too drunk, having a history of walking out on the check or generally acting obnoxious, for example, are said to be 86’d.

And like many slang terms having to do with disappearance, “86” has evolved in some contexts to refer to deliberate elimination. This is the sense the noir crime writer James Ellroy meant when he wrote, in his 2021 novel “Widespread Panic,” “it all got tangled up, and poor Janey got 86’d’.”

“Yes, it can mean ‘to murder,’” Mr. Sheidlower added. “But without any very specific indication that that’s the intended meaning, you’d never assume that. The notion that Comey was suggesting this is completely preposterous.”

Still, Mr. Trump and his top advisers interpreted Mr. Comey’s post in that light, even though he subsequently asserted that he “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence” and took down the initial photo.

The pair have a tangled history, dating to Mr. Comey’s decision in 2017 to announce that the F.B.I. was investigating the 2016 Trump campaign and whether it had colluded with Russia to influence the election. Mr. Trump fired him months later.

An inspector general’s report later found Mr. Comey had violated department policies with how he handled memos he took of his conversations with Mr. Trump before his firing, but he was never charged. Mr. Trump also accused Mr. Comey of treason.

When Mr. Trump learned in 2019 that the Justice Department would not file charges against Mr. Comey, he called one aide after another, asking if they agreed with him that Mr. Comey should have been prosecuted. Mr. Trump became so enraged over that decision, as well as other matters, that he took the TV remote control in his private dining room and threw it at a credenza along a wall, according to reporting in the book “Confidence Man.”

In a Fox News interview on Friday, Mr. Trump still appeared to harbor ill will toward Mr. Comey. Criticizing him as a “dirty cop,” the president accused Mr. Comey of having called for his offing.

“He wasn’t very competent but he was competent enough to know what that meant,” Mr. Trump said in an excerpt of a Fox News interview that was to be broadcast on Friday night. He added: “He’s calling for the assassination of the president.”

In his second Instagram post, Mr. Comey said he had assumed the shells spelled out “a political message.” But Mr. Trump’s officials doubled down. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, pointed out during a Fox News interview late Thursday that Mr. Comey had spent his entire career prosecuting the kind of mobsters and gangsters who would commonly use “86” in its most deadly sense, as she accused him of “issuing a hit on President Trump.”

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, wrote on social media that Mr. Comey had “just called for the assassination” of the president, and said that her department and the Secret Service had launched an investigation. In a separate post, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, said his agency would “provide all necessary support.”

“Green’s Dictionary of Slang” cites the first definition of “86” as the restaurant usage, and gives “to kill, murder; to execute judicially” as the second meaning.

“It broadly means unavailability and thus ending,” Mr. Sheidlower said, noting that murderous connotations can attach to almost any slang term having to do with disappearance. “‘End’ itself can be used to mean ‘to kill.’ ”

Slippery meanings are an inherent danger of slang, which can mean different things depending on who’s using it.

“There can be ambiguity because what other people think and what you think don’t have to match,” Mr. Sheidlower said. “That’s the problem with language.”

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

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