Cygnus Loop

Wisps like this are all that remain visible of a Milky Way star. About 7,000 years ago that star exploded in a supernova, leaving the Veil Nebula. At the time, the expanding cloud was likely as bright as a crescent Moon, remaining visible for weeks to people living at the dawn of recorded history. Today, the resulting supernova remnant, also known as the Cygnus Loop, has faded and is now visible only through a small telescope directed toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus). The remaining Veil Nebula is physically huge, however, and even though it lies about 1,400 light-years distant, it covers over five times the size of the full Moon. The featured picture was taken in Kuwait in mid-2024 and features light emitted by hydrogen in red and oxygen in blue. In deep images of the complete Veil Nebula like this, even studious readers might not be able to identify the iconic filaments.

Gut American Science

Donald Trump’s Proposed Budget Would Gut American Science

It would slash cancer research, drug trials, space exploration, and so much more.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen

On Friday, the Trump administration released a detailed look at its proposed 2026 budget, including major cuts to federal science agencies that oversee research on everything from cancer to the cosmos.

While the broad strokes of Trump’s budget had been released in early May, the new proposal reveals more about what specific programs the president would like to see cut—and its impact on American science.

That includes a more than $30 billion cut to the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—agencies tasked with critical work like overseeing food safety, controlling disease outbreaks (see: measles), and supporting vaccine research. The Department of Education, as the New York Times tallied, would have its budget cut by about $12 billion—a blow to funding mechanisms like Pell grants that help promising future scientists afford college. And NASA’s budget, as Space.com reported, would shrink by $6 billion, a nearly 25 percent cut to the agency that oversees space exploration.

At NIH, which has already come under repeated scrutiny by the administration, the president proposed a budget cut of about $18 billion, the Times reports—around a 40 percent decrease of its current funds. Within NIH, the National Cancer Institute, responsible for supporting research on understanding and treating cancer, would see its funding cut from $7 billion to a little over $4.5 billion.

These cuts, experts say, will be detrimental to the national research landscape—and Americans’ health. As Harvard researchers noted in an op-ed published in JAMA Health Forum this week, more than 99 percent of new drugs approved between 2010 and 2019 had roots in NIH funding. Every dollar of NIH funding, in fact, returns more than 2.5 dollars in economic activity, a coalition of academic and industry scientists estimated in a widely cited report this year. In all, the Harvard researchers estimate, cutting $20 billion to NIH over 25 years may save $500 billion on paper, but it’d end up costing $8.2 trillion in lost human health.

And that’s just NIH. The National Science Foundation, along with NIH, is another major funder of American research. It would see more than half of its funding slashed under Trump’s budget, from nearly $9 billion in 2025 to $3.9 billion. This reduction, according to the administration, “reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment.” As science journalist Dan Garisto pointed out on Bluesky, it would mean the number of staff, students, and researchers involved in NSF-supported science would drop from more than 330,000 to about 90,000—a whopping 73 percent cut.

And at NASA, Trump’s proposed budget would mean “the biggest single-year cut to NASA in history,” Space.com reports, and the cancellation of several programs, including a project to collect material from Mars and explore the depths of the solar system, projects that would reportedly take billions to replace. In a statement Friday, the Planetary Society, a non-profit organization advocating for space exploration and research, called the president’s proposed cuts, if passed by Congress, an “extinction-level event” for science. “It will damage the agency’s highly skilled workforce, abandon national priorities, and gut STEM education and outreach.”

Handcuff Aide

Homeland Security Cops Invade NY Congressman’s Office, Handcuff Aide

“The administration is clearly trying to intimidate Democrats, in the same way that they’re trying to intimidate the country.”

Julianne McShane

Last month, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Newark, N.J., Mayor Ras Baraka outside an immigration detention facility, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said on CNN that there would “likely be more arrests coming.”

DHS police came close to delivering on that threat this past week when they invaded the Manhattan offices of Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and briefly handcuffed one of his staffers.

“They’re behaving like fascists,” Nadler told the New York Times in an interview about the incident this weekend. On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), told host Dana Bash: “I think the administration is clearly trying to intimidate Democrats, in the same way that they’re trying to intimidate the country.”

The incident, first reported by the New York City news site Gothamist, occurred Wednesday after DHS agents accused staffers of “harboring rioters” in their offices, which is located in the same building as a federal immigration courthouse. A partial video of the incident obtained by Gothamist shows one officer handcuffing a crying woman while another Nadler staffer demands that agents provide a warrant before entering.

The confrontation comes amid news reports that ICE has been arresting undocumented immigrants as they leave courthouses around the country. According to Gothamist, ICE officers allegedly threatened to arrest two people who were monitoring their activity at the Manhattan courthouse, and a Nadler staffer invited the advocates into the congressional office. In a statement provided to Mother Jones, a senior DHS official claimed police tried to enter the office based on a belief that protesters were inside and accused the woman who was handcuffed of blocking their way, alleging she “became verbally confrontational.” The DHS official said the woman was detained “for the purpose of completing the security check” of the office and was subsequently released “without further incident.” The unnamed staffer told Gothamist that “everything resolved” and declined to comment further.

In a statement posted on X, Nadler said no arrests were made and that “the situation was quickly deescalated,” but added that he was “alarmed by the aggressive and heavy-handed tactics DHS is employing in New York City and across the country.”

“If this can happen in a Member of Congress’s office, it can happen to anyone—and it is happening,” Nadler said. Indeed, at President Donald Trump’s behest, federal officials have been detaining and seeking to deport people—including student protesters against the war in Gaza and undocumented immigrants without criminal records—without due process. Meanwhile, Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), one of three Democratic representatives present at the May 9 incident at the immigration detention facility where Baraka was arrested, is facing felony assault charges for allegedly shoving and grabbing a pair of DHS agents—charges she has denied and called politically motivated.

In his statement on X, Nadler also demanded that Trump and DHS “halt the use of these dangerous tactics and…abandon use of the expedited removal process which denies due process to immigrants and citizens alike.”

Both Nadler and Jeffries lambasted Republicans for staying mostly silent as federal officials seem to openly flout the Constitution. “The Trump administration is really using totalitarian or even authoritarian practices,” Nadler told the Times. “We have to fight them. We don’t want to be a fascist country.”

Kill a Critical Program

Team Trump is Poised to Kill a Critical Program It Likely Knows Nothing About

Apparently unbeknownst to the administration, the Ecosystems Mission Area protects key health and economic interests.

Benji Jones

Nearly two decades ago, scientists made an alarming discovery in upstate New York: Bats, the world’s only flying mammal, were becoming infected with a new, deadly fungal disease that, in some cases, could wipe out an entire colony in a matter of months.

Since then, the disease—later called white-nose syndrome—has spread across much of the country, utterly decimating North American bats that hibernate in caves and killing over 90 percent of three bat species. According to some scientists, WNS has caused “the most precipitous wildlife decline in the past century in North America.”

These declines have clear consequences for human populations—for you, even if you don’t like bats or visit caves.

“We have 10 years of momentum, and so to cut it off now sort of wastes all that investment. That feels like a tremendous loss.”

Bats eat insect pests, such as moths and beetles. And as they decline, farmers need to spray more pesticides. Scientists have linked the loss of bats in the US to an increase in insecticide use on farmland and, remarkably, to a rise in infant deaths. Insecticide chemicals are known to harm the health of newborns.

The only reason we know any of this is because of a somewhat obscure government program in the US Geological Survey (USGS), an agency nested within the Interior Department. That program, known as the Ecosystems Mission Area, is the biological research division of Interior. Among other functions, it monitors environmental contaminants, the spread of invasive species, and the health of the nation’s wildlife, including bees, birds, and bats.

The Ecosystems Mission Area, which has around 1,200 employees, produces the premier science revealing how animals and ecosystems that Americans rely on are changing and what we can do to keep them intact—or risk our own health and economy.

This program is now at an imminent risk of disappearing.

The Trump administration has asked Congress to slash USGS funding by $564 million in its preliminary 2026 budget request. And while the proposal doesn’t specify cuts to Ecosystems Mission Area, an email obtained by Vox indicates that his administration had proposed eliminating funding for the program. (The email was originally reported by Science.) Such cuts are also in line with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy roadmap, which calls for the government to “abolish” Interior’s Biological Research Division, an outdated name for the Ecosystems Mission Area.

USGS has requested that the White House maintain at least some funding for the program, according to a current senior Interior Department employee with knowledge of the Ecosystems Mission Area. Whether or not Trump officials heed that request will be made clear when the White House releases a more detailed budget proposal in the coming days. The employee spoke to Vox on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk with the press.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is also reportedly trying to fire government employees in the Ecosystems Mission Area, though a federal judge has so far blocked those efforts.

Eliminating biological research is not good. In fact, it’s very bad.

For a decade now, EMA’s North American Bat Monitoring Program, has been gathering and analyzing data on bats and the threats they face. NABat produces research using data from hundreds of partner organizations showing not only how white-nose syndrome is spreading—which scientists are using to develop and deploy vaccines—but also how bats are affected by wind turbines, another known threat.

Energy companies can and do use this research to develop safer technologies and avoid delays caused by wildlife regulations such as the Endangered Species Act.

The irony, another Interior Department employee told me, is that NABat makes wildlife management more efficient. It also helps reveal where declines are occurring before they become severe, potentially helping avoid the need to grant certain species federal protection—something the Trump administration would seem to want. The employee, who is familiar with Interior’s bat-monitoring efforts, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration.

“If they want to create efficiencies in the government, they should ask us,” yet another Interior employee told Vox. “The damage that can be done by one administration takes decades to rebuild.”

In response to a request for comment, an Interior Department spokesperson told Vox that “USGS remains committed to its congressional mandate as the science arm of the Department of the Interior.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment. In a Senate appropriations hearing last week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum refused to commit to maintaining funding for EMA.

“There’s no question that they don’t know what EMA does,” said the senior Interior employee.

Ultimately, it’s not clear why the administration has targeted Interior’s biological research. EMA does, however, do climate science, such as studying how plants and animals are responding to rising temperatures. That’s apparently a no-go for the Trump administration. It also gathers information that sometimes indicates that certain species need federal protections, which come with regulations (also a no-go for President Donald Trump’s agenda).

What’s especially frustrating for environmental advocates is that NABat, now 10 years old, is starting to hit its stride.

“We should be celebrating the 10-year anniversary of this very successful program that started from scratch and built this robust, vibrant community of people all collecting data,” said Winifred Frick, the chief scientist at Bat Conservation International, an environmental group. “We have 10 years of momentum, and so to cut it off now sort of wastes all that investment. That feels like a tremendous loss.”

Meanwhile, the cost of maintaining the program is less than 1 percent of Interior’s overall budget.

The government’s wildlife monitoring programs are “jewels of the country,” said Hollis Woodard, an associate professor of entomology at University of California Riverside who works with USGS on bee monitoring. “These birds and bats perform services for us that are important for our day-to-day lives. Literally everything I value, including food, comes down to keeping an eye on these populations. The idea that we’re just going to wipe them out is just terrifying.”

Drugged out musk gets ass kicked...

Elon Musk Says Goodbye With a Black Eye

The bruise appeared hours after a damning report on the billionaire’s alleged drug use.

Inae Oh

During an official Oval Office event marking the end of his time working at the federal government, Elon Musk on Friday emerged with apparent facial swelling and bruising around his right eye.

“I wasn’t anywhere near France,” Musk replied when asked about the black eye, an apparent joke about Emmanuel Macron’s marital shove.

“I was just horsing around with little X, and I said, ‘Go ahead and punch me in the face,’ and he did,” he continued. “It turns out even a 5-year-old punching you in the face actually…”

“That was X that did that?” Trump interrupted.

“Yeah,” Musk said while giggling.

The black eye encapsulated another fresh round of intense chaos for Musk this week after the announcement that he was leaving the Trump administration. (The departure itself follows months of tumult for Musk as the head of DOGE.) Mere hours before the Oval Office appearance, the New York Times alleged rampant drug use by Musk—frequent ketamine, mushrooms, and ecstasy. It came amid speculation of dramatic feuding between Musk and Stephen Miller, whose wife, Katie Miller, is reportedly leaving the administration to work full-time with Musk.

Elsewhere in the Oval Office on Friday, Musk appeared distracted, at times bobbing his head or staring at the ceiling.

Fleeing DC

Elon Musk Sure Seems Happy to Be Fleeing DC

DOGE’s ex-doge told CBS he didn’t always agree with the Trump administration and was “disappointed” in the GOP-backed budget bill.

Julianne McShane

Elon Musk is leaving DC not with a bang but a whimper…and, it appears, with some new enemies in the White House.

In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS, days after he announced he was departing DOGE, Musk insisted he has never been in lockstep with the Trump administration, despite being President Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed “first buddy.”

“It’s not like I agree with everything the administration does,” Musk said on CBS News’ Sunday Morning. “So it’s like, I mean, I agree with much of what the administration does. But we have differences of opinion. You know, there are things that I don’t entirely agree with.”

“But it’s difficult for me to bring that up in an interview,” Musk continued, “because then it creates a bone of contention. So then, I’m a little stuck in a bind, where I’m like, well, I don’t wanna, you know, speak up against the administration, but I also don’t wanna take responsibility for everything this administration’s doing.”

So what, exactly, didn’t Musk like? DOGE becoming the boogeyman of the administration, for one thing: “DOGE became the whipping boy for everything,” the world’s richest man complained. “If there was some cut, real or imagined, everyone would blame DOGE.” (In fact, poll after poll showed most Americans disliked DOGE, at least in part due to its lack of accountability and its slash-and-burn approach to critical government functions and personnel. That included killing more than two dozen grants administered by the Department of Labor that supported getting more women into fields including construction and manufacturing; dismantling USAID, the international humanitarian aid agency; impeding scientific research; and firing scores of federal workers, just to name a few examples.)

Musk said he was also “disappointed” to see the “massive spending bill,” which was passed by the Republican House last month and is now being debated in the Senate. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the bill would add $3.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade—a figure that would essentially render DOGE’s purported government savings of $175 billion pointless. Musk alleged that the bill “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” adding, “I actually thought that, when this ‘big, beautiful bill’ came along, it’d be like, everything he’s done on DOGE gets wiped out in the first year.”

Trump’s allies scrambled to counter Musk’s critiques on the Sunday shows. On NBC’s Meet the Press, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told host Kristen Welker he “sent a long text message to my good friend, Elon Musk, after he made those comments the other day,” adding that Musk and others “are missing…the tremendous and historic level of spending cuts that are also in the same package.” (Those “cuts” include the largest-ever proposed cuts to Medicaid, which could lead to 8 million people losing coverage. The cuts would target women’s health services offered by Planned Parenthood, coverage for abortions in Affordable Care Act plans, and gender-affirming care for all Medicaid patients, including transgender adults.) On CNN’s State of the Union, White House Budget Director Russ Vought claimed: “I love Elon. This bill doesn’t increase the deficit or hurt the debt,” before critiquing the CBO’s estimate.

There have been signs of Musk’s discontent prior to the CBS interview: for example, the time that he went after Peter Navarro, Trump’s top tariff guy, saying, “He ain’t built shit,” as I previously wrote. (In the CBS interview, when asked if Trump’s tariffs would affect his businesses, Musk demurred, replying, “Tariffs always affect things a little bit.”) But Trump seems to think Musk wil be back before long: “Elon’s really not leaving,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, as Musk stood nearby with a black eye he claimed his son gave him. “He’s going to be back and forth, I think. I have a feeling.”

But Musk seems more tepid about returning to the White House amid a myriad of business problems, including tanking Tesla sales and setbacks at his aerospace company Space X—not to mention Trump’s withdrawal of Musk ally Jared Isaacman’s nomination to head NASA, as well as leaked allegations about Musk’s drug use. “DOGE is gonna continue, just as a way of life,” he told CBS. “I will have some participation in that, but as I’ve said publicly, my focus has to be on the companies at this point.” Polling suggests that, for most Americans, that’s music to their ears.

BOOOOMMMM!!!!!!

Ukraine says it hit dozens of Russian bombers in daring drone attack

The assault came the day before Russia-Ukraine negotiations are set to take place in Istanbul.

By Veronika Melkozerova

The Security Service of Ukraine sent a barrage of drones to attack four military airfields in Russia on Sunday, hitting 41 of Moscow's strategic bombers, an official with the service told POLITICO.

The daring attack came the day before the next round of Russia-Ukraine negotiations is set to take place in Istanbul.

"Russia’s military planes are currently burning at the Belaya, Diaghilev, Olenya and Ivanovo airfields," said the official from the service, also known as the SBU.

SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk "personally curated the operation," the official told POLITICO, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.

"Thanks to Malyuk ... Russia has now understood the true meaning of the word demilitarization,” the official said.

The official showed a video of Russian bombers burning at one of the airfields that could not be independently verified.

“Today will later be called the dark day of Russia's long-range aviation,” Russian military aviation blogger Ilya Tumanov, known as Fighterbomber, said in a Telegram post. “And the day is not over yet.”

The SBU official said that to prepare for the operation, called "Pavutyna"(web), Ukrainian operatives delivered FPV drones to Russia territory along with mobile wooden housings.

"Later, in the Russian Federation, the drones were hidden under the roofs of housings, already placed on trucks. At the right moment, the roofs of the housings were opened remotely, and the drones flew to strike the Russian bombers," the official said.

The Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged the drone attacks on its airfields, but claimed that bombers were hit on only two airfields, in the Irkutsk and Murmansk regions. Attacks on military airfields in the Ivanovo, Ryazan and Amur regions were repelled, the ministry said in a statement on Telegram. No military  or civilian personnel were hurt, it said.

Russia has been using Olenya and other airfields to attack Ukraine with missiles and drones.

On Sunday, a Russian missile hit one of the training grounds of Ukraine’s Land Forces, killing 12 people and injuring more than 60 others, the Land Forces said in a statement. “A commission has been created and an internal investigation has been" launched regarding the attack, the statement said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed on Sunday that Kyiv is sending a delegation to ceasefire talks with Russia in Istanbul on Monday. The team will be led by Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, Zelenskyy said in a post on social media.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha‎ early Sunday said Kyiv was still waiting for a promised Russian memorandum on Moscow’s outline of a potential ceasefire framework, which Ukraine is expecting before the talks.

"While Russia claims to be preparing for meetings to discuss peace, what it actually does is attack, terrorize and destroy," Sybiha said in a post on X. "Russia has not so far sent us, Türkiye, the United States, or anyone else its so-called 'memorandum.' No one even knows what they are going to talk about," he said.

The Kremlin has said it would share its memorandum during Monday's talks.

Deported him 28 minutes later

A court halted his deportation. The Trump administration deported him 28 minutes later.

Officials blamed “administrative errors.” It’s the fourth known case of an improper deportation by the Trump administration.

By Kyle Cheney

The Trump administration has admitted that it improperly deported another immigrant in violation of a court order — the fourth known case in which the administration deported someone erroneously or in breach of specific legal requirements.

Jordin Melgar-Salmeron, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, had been in immigration detention since 2022 while deportation proceedings against him were pending. But on May 7, shortly after a federal appeals court ordered the government to keep him in the United States, immigration authorities deported him back to his native country.

Matthew Borowski, a lawyer for Melgar-Salmeron, told POLITICO that he intends to ask the court to order the government to return his client from El Salvador and to hold government officials in contempt.

In court papers this week, officials blamed a “confluence of administrative errors,” including missed emails and an inaccurate roster of passengers on the May 7 deportation flight. The Justice Department declined to comment, and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

The deportation of Melgar-Salmeron was first reported by the Investigative Post, a nonprofit news outlet in western New York.

The episode is reminiscent of three other deportations that courts have declared illegal or improper in recent months:

• Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who was deported to El Salvador in violation of an immigration judge’s order.
• Daniel Lozano-Camargo, a Venezuelan man who was deported to El Salvador in violation of a court-approved settlement.
• A Guatemalan man, identified in court by the initials O.C.G., who was deported to Mexico in what the administration now acknowledges was an error because he was not given a chance to exercise his legal right to raise fears that he would be tortured there.

In each of those other three cases, judges have ordered the administration to try to bring the deportees back to the United States so that they can receive due process. The administration says it is working to return O.C.G. but has resisted the orders to return Abrego Garcia and Lozano-Camargo, claiming they are powerless because the men are in Salvadoran custody.

A court order followed by a deportation flight

Melgar-Salmeron, who spent years living in Virginia, had been in immigration detention since 2022 following a prison sentence for possessing an unregistered shotgun, according to court records. Though he had originally also been charged with entering the country illegally, he was allowed to plead guilty in 2021 to only the firearms charge. After his prison sentence ended, Melgar-Salmeron was detained by immigration authorities while deportation proceedings against him were ongoing. In January 2024, the Biden administration put Melgar-Salmeron’s proceedings on hold amid broader litigation over immigration policy.

But in April, the Trump administration moved to lift that hold, court documents show. Melgar-Salmeron had a longstanding appeal pending at the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. The administration asked the court to “expedite” the appeal and indicated that it wanted to deport him by May 9 “at the latest” — but told the court it would not act before May 8.

On the morning of May 7, a three-judge panel of the court ordered the government to keep Melgar-Salmeron in the United States while he pursued claims about fear of torture in his home country.

Despite the court’s order, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at a staging facility in Louisiana loaded Melgar-Salmeron onto a plane and deported him to El Salvador. The flight departed at 10:20 a.m. — 28 minutes after the court’s order. Melgar-Salmeron is now in a Salvadoran prison, Borowski says.

When the court learned about the deportation, it sent pointed questions to the administration about what had happened. The court demanded sworn declarations from ICE officials responsible for the man’s deportation and an explanation of why the court’s order to block his deportation was apparently not conveyed to the people who put him on the flight to El Salvador.

The judges noted that the administration had assured them that Melgar-Salmeron would not be deported until at least May 8. They demanded to know why his deportation was abruptly advanced to May 7 less than an hour after their order.

In a letter to the court on Wednesday, the administration acknowledged that the deportation was erroneous. Kitty Lees, a Justice Department attorney, said there had been a breakdown at multiple levels of the process.

“Several inadvertent administrative oversights led to Petitioner’s May 7, 2025 removal,” Lees wrote, “despite the express assurance made by the Government to this Court that it would forbear removing Petitioner until May 8, 2025.”

Among the errors:

• ICE Air Operations, which arranges deportation flights, had always planned to deport Melgar-Salmeron on May 7, when it had a long-scheduled deportation flight on the books. He was listed on the manifest for that May 7 flight weeks in advance. But the Buffalo-based ICE office responsible for Melgar-Salmeron’s case wrote a different date — May 9 — into his official file, a date that was relayed to the Justice Department and the court.
• On May 6 and May 7, ICE Air emailed a flight manifest that included Melgar-Salmeron to the Buffalo office responsible for his case. The spreadsheet was automatically forwarded to four Buffalo officers, but not the one assigned to Melgar-Salmeron’s case, who didn’t see it until the flight had departed. “Due to an oversight, and because of the volume of emails received pertaining to removal flights, the … Buffalo officers who received the emails did not forward them to Petitioner’s assigned … Buffalo officer,” Lees wrote.
• “For an unknown reason,” when ICE was boarding people onto the flight, Melgar-Salmeron did not appear and was stricken from the manifest as a “no-show,” Lees added. During a second sweep of the facility, they located him and “escorted him onto the airplane,” but the manifest was never updated to reflect that he had been found.

A pattern of rushed deportations

The haphazard circumstances around Melgar-Salmeron’s case bear some of the same hallmarks of other high-profile deportations that judges have sought to reverse.

In March, the administration deported Abrego Garcia to El Salvador despite a 2019 immigration court order that barred the government from sending him there because he could be at risk of violence at the hands of a local gang. A Justice Department lawyer acknowledged in court that the deportation had been improper, and a federal judge ordered the administration to facilitate his release from El Salvador’s custody. The Supreme Court largely upheld that requirement and noted that the deportation had been “illegal.”

A different federal judge has also ordered the administration to facilitate the return of Lozano-Camargo, who was deported to El Salvador in violation of a court-approved settlement agreement that protected certain immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors. (He is referred to in court papers with a pseudonym, but POLITICO previously identified him as Lozano-Camargo.)

Abrego Garcia and Lozano-Camargo remain in Salvadoran prisons. The Trump administration has claimed in court that it has no ability to force the Salvadoran government to return them to United States custody.

The administration, however, says it has taken steps to arrange a flight to bring back O.C.G., the Guatemalan man who was deported to Mexico in February. The man claims he was raped and otherwise targeted for being gay during a previous stay in Mexico. Administration officials initially claimed in court that he was given a chance to raise fears about being sent back to Mexico, but they later retracted that assertion and admitted they have no evidence that he was ever asked about whether he feared violence there.

A federal judge ruled that O.C.G. had been deported without proper due process and ordered the government to facilitate his return.

Giving free rein

Chris Christie says Trump is giving free rein to white-collar criminals

“He’s saying it doesn’t exist, anything goes,” Christie said.

By David Cohen

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Sunday that President Donald Trump’s pardons are “eliminating” the idea that there is such a thing as white-collar crime.

“He’s saying it doesn’t exist, anything goes,” Christie said to host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”

Christie spoke in particular about the recent pardon of Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had been convicted of stealing millions from his employees. “Paul Walczak is an entrepreneur targeted by the Biden administration over his family’s conservative politics,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement to Axios about the pardon.

Christie said Sunday that Walczak’s mother “was a million-dollar donor/fundraiser for Trump. And this guy stole, George, 10 million dollars in payroll taxes. The money that his employees give to him to pay their payroll taxes, he stole that money.”

The former New Jersey governor is certainly not a fan of Trump, having run against him in the Republican presidential primaries in 2016 and 2024. But before he was elected governor in 2009, Christie served as a U.S. attorney. Among those he prosecuted during that time was Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and now Trump’s ambassador to France.

Many but by no means all of Trump’s recent pardons and commutations have been in cases of fraud. Speaking on ABC alongside “The Haves and Have-Yachts” author Evan Osnos, Christie divvied up Trump’s pardons into subgroups.

“You know, he’s got categories of pardons,” he said. “You know, you got the pay-to-play pardons. You’ve got the reality-TV-stars-turned-supporters. And then you’ve got the folks out there who are just victims of what he calls weaponization of the Justice Department.

“But all of them,” Christie added “have one thing in common, which is you’ve got to be whole hog for Donald Trump. Never before we have — have we seen a president who makes it a gate to getting to a pardon to be a political supporter of his, a vocal current political supporter.”

Trump’s other recent pardons and commutations include Todd and Julie Chrisley, whose daughter spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024; Jason Galanis and Devon Archer, who had testified in House GOP inquiries into the conduct of Hunter Biden; former Virginia sheriff Scott Jenkins; former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland; former Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.); and Larry Hoover, a Chicago drug kingpin who founded the Gangster Disciples.

Patriotic Americans???????

Trump administration to prioritize ‘patriotic Americans’ for federal jobs

Applicants for government jobs will be required to write essays explaining how they will advance President Donald Trump’s policy priorities.

By Robin Bravender

As President Donald Trump moves to slash the size of the federal workforce, his administration unveiled a plan to ensure that any new hires are “patriotic Americans” who vow to advance the president’s policy priorities.

The White House and the agency that serves as the government’s human resources arm Thursday released directives for departments to use when recruiting employees in a memo that represents a dramatic shift in federal hiring procedures.

The administration’s “merit hiring plan” comes after Trump ordered a revamp to the federal hiring process on his first day in office. The resulting plan issued this week says it aims to ensure that “only the most talented, capable and patriotic Americans” are hired by the government.

The “overly complex Federal hiring system overemphasized discriminatory ‘equity’ quotas and too often resulted in the hiring of unfit, unskilled bureaucrats,” says the memo authored by Vince Haley, assistant to the president for domestic policy, and Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management.

Trump and his allies have railed against civil servants, accusing them of working to undermine the president’s policy priorities. The new hiring plan will require job applicants to write short essays describing how they plan to advance Trump’s priorities.

Under the plan, all federal job vacancy announcements starting at the GS-5 pay grade or above will require short essay responses to questions about their commitment to the Constitution, how they plan to improve government efficiency, how they plan to advance Trump’s executive orders and policy priorities, and about their work ethic.

Critics called the requirements a loyalty test for the administration, while saying they could make future recruiting even harder.

“I think it’s foolish,” said Paul Light, professor emeritus of public service at New York University. “It’s hard enough to get talent these days.” Putting additional hurdles in the way of recruiting for government jobs at this point “ain’t a good thing,” he said.

It’s important to hire federal workers based on their skills, said Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service. But “asking every federal applicant to demonstrate work toward presidential policy priorities should not be part of the criteria.”

“Many federal employees are air traffic controllers, national park rangers, food safety inspectors and firefighters who carry out the missions of agencies that are authorized by Congress,” she said. “These public servants, who deliver services directly to the public, should not be forced to answer politicized questions that fail to evaluate the skills they need to do their jobs effectively.”

The Trump plan also says it aims to limit the government’s focus on recruiting from “elite universities.”

The memo says hiring has focused too much on “elite universities and credentials” and says it will target new recruits from “state and land-grant universities, religious colleges and universities, community colleges, high schools, trade and technical schools, homeschooling groups, faith-based groups, American Legion, 4-H youth programs, and the military, veterans, and law enforcement communities.”

The administration also bars agency heads from using racial quotas and preferences in federal hiring, recruitment and promotion.

The memo directs agencies to “cease using statistics on race, sex, ethnicity or national origin, or the broader concept of ‘underrepresentation’ of certain groups” in decisions about hiring or promotions. It orders agencies to stop disseminating information about the composition of agencies’ workers based on their race, sex, color, religion or national origin.

The hiring plan also aims to speed up the federal hiring process in response to Trump’s order directing governmentwide hiring to be reduced to under 80 days.

Hiring senior executives

Also on Thursday, the administration issued a memo detailing hiring and talent development plans for leaders within the federal government’s career employee ranks known as the Senior Executive Service, or SES.

Trump issued a memo on the first day of his administration saying that because those officials “wield significant governmental authority, they must serve at the pleasure of the President.”

The new hiring memo criticizes SES hiring as a “broken, insular” process that has “resulted in the hiring of executives who engage in unauthorized disclosure of Executive Branch deliberations, violate the constitutional rights of Americans, refuse to implement policy priorities, or perform their duties inefficiently or negligently.”

Previous qualifications for SES hiring “included unlawful ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI) criteria for hiring Federal executives,” the memo says. The administration says it’s eliminating DEI factors in hiring for the service, and will focus on candidates’ efficiency, merit and competence, ability to lead, and ability to achieve results.

To build a pipeline of potential executive leaders, the memo says, OPM will provide an 80-hour intensive “fee-based aspiring executive development program” that’s “grounded in the Constitution, laws, and Founding ideals of our government, and will provide training on President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

That program is “designed to equip aspiring leaders with the skills, knowledge, technical expertise, and strategic mindset necessary to excel in senior leadership roles,” the memo says.