Trump Administration Live Updates: F.B.I. Arrests Wisconsin Judge in Immigration Dispute
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F.B.I. agents arrested a county judge in Milwaukee on Friday on charges of obstructing immigration agents by steering an undocumented immigrant through a side door in her courtroom while the agents waited in a public hallway to apprehend him.
The arrest of a sitting state court judge is a major escalation in the Trump administration’s battle with local authorities over deportations. The administration has demanded, under threat of investigation or prosecution, that local officials not impede federal efforts to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
Pam Bondi, the attorney general, described a county judge in Milwaukee who was arrested by the F.B.I. on Friday as “deranged,” and defended her arrest by saying it was “sending a very strong message.” Judge Hannah Dugan was charged on Friday with obstructing immigration enforcement; the government has accused her of steering an undocumented immigrant through a side door in her courtroom to evade federal agents.
“They’re deranged is all I can think of,” Bondi said on Fox News of Judge Dugan and another case involving a former judge in New Mexico who was arrested on Thursday in a different immigration case. “Some of these judges think they’re above the law. They are not.”
The Trump administration on Friday abruptly walked back its cancellation of more than 1,500 student visas held by international students, announcing a dramatic shift by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during a court hearing in Washington.
Joseph F. Carilli, a Justice Department lawyer, said that immigration officials had begun work on a new system for reviewing and terminating visas for international students and that until the process was complete, agencies would not make additional changes or further revocations.
The Trump administration, which has made clear that it aims to slash government spending, is preparing to unveil a budget proposal as soon as next week that includes draconian cuts that would entirely eliminate some federal programs and fray the nation’s social safety net.
The proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year would cut billions of dollars from programs that support child care, health research, education, housing assistance, community development and the elderly, according to preliminary documents reviewed by The New York Times. The proposal, which is being finalized by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, also targets longstanding initiatives that have been prized by Democrats and that Republicans view as “woke” or wasteful spending.
In a new legal filing stemming from a fight with a federal judge in Washington, the Justice Department has affirmed the fundamental notion that the White House has to follow instructions from the courts. “The executive must abide by judicial orders,” department lawyers wrote. While that idea might seem obvious, the Trump administration has repeatedly sidestepped and flouted orders from judges in an array of cases.
In the filing, the lawyers asked a federal appeals court to preemptively stop Judge James E. Boasberg from opening a contempt investigation into whether the White House violated an order he issued last month pausing the use of a wartime statute to deport Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members to El Salvador.
A Justice Department lawyer said during a hearing in Washington on Friday that the administration was poised to reverse course on its mass cancellation of student visas held by international students and academics. The abrupt shift came after the administration has revoked more than 1,000 visas in recent weeks, spawning an avalanche of lawsuits.
The opioid overdose reversal medication commercially known as Narcan saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is routinely praised by public health experts for contributing to the continuing drop in opioid-related deaths. But the Trump administration plans to terminate a $56 million annual grant program that distributes doses and trains emergency responders in communities across the country to administer them, according to a draft budget proposal.
In the document, which outlines details of the drastic reorganization and shrinkingplanned for the Department of Health and Human Services, the grant is among many addiction prevention and treatment programs to be zeroed out.
On March 11, about 50 judges gathered in Washington for the biannual meeting of the Judicial Conference, which oversees the administration of the federal courts. It was the first time the conference met since President Trump retook the White House.
In the midst of discussions of staffing levels and long-range planning, the judges’ conversations were focused, to an unusual degree, on rising threats against judges and their security, said several people who attended the gathering.
President Trump, whose trade war with China has rattled financial markets and threatened to disrupt huge swaths of trade, suggested on Friday that he had been in touch with Xi Jinping, China’s president, even as Chinese officials insisted that no negotiations were occurring.
In an interview with Time on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said Mr. Xi had called him, though he declined to say when, and asserted that his team was in active talks with China on a trade deal. Asked about the interview outside the White House on Friday morning, the president reiterated that he had spoken with the Chinese president “numerous times,” but he refused to answer when pressed on whether any call had happened after he imposed tariffs this month.
Rachel Reeves, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, is set to meet Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury secretary, today in Washington in their first one-on-one, in-person meeting. Last night at a reception at the British Embassy, Reeves said she planned to discuss building stronger trade and investment ties between the U.S. and Britain. Reeves also took a sharper tone in criticizing China, saying that while its economic rise had brought huge benefits, it was a problem that some countries had large, persistent trade surpluses.
“The challenges that Donald Trump’s administration has spoken about — about global trade imbalances — are very real and we should address them,” she said.
As he left the White House for his trip to Rome for the pope’s funeral, President Trump was pressed on his claim to Time magazine that President Xi Jinping of China had called him to talk about tariffs. According to a pool report, when asked if he had talked with Xi, Trump said he had spoken to him “numerous times,” but would not say whether they had talked since he imposed the new tariffs. Chinese officials said today that the two countries are not negotiating on tariffs, indicating that Trump is trying to create the impression that more is going on behind the scenes to resolve the trade war than actually is.
If an agreement with Iran to limit its nuclear program proves elusive, the United States could spearhead military action against it, President Trump said in an interview published on Friday.
Mr. Trump’s comments, in an interview with Time magazine marking his first three months in office, came as American and Iranian officials were set to meet for the third consecutive Saturday in an effort to reach an agreement that would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, who is known as an outspoken defender of Ukraine on Capitol Hill, says he is “very resistant” to a deal that would reward Russia “by giving it any Ukrainian land.” The Trump administration is seeking to pressure Ukraine to accept a U.S. proposed peace plan that would cede territory to Russia along the current front lines of the conflict. The deal would also permanently restrict Ukraine’s ability to join NATO, though Bacon says if Ukraine forfeits the land, it should be “allowed into NATO to gain much needed security guarantees.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s personal phone number, the one used in a recent Signal chat, was easily accessible on the internet and public apps as recently as March, potentially exposing national security secrets to foreign adversaries.
The phone number could be found in a variety of places, including WhatsApp, Facebook and a fantasy sports site. It was the same number through which the defense secretary, using the Signal commercial messaging app, disclosed flight data for American strikes on the Houthi militia in Yemen.
Over the past two weeks, immigration lawyers, scrambling from courthouse to courthouse, have secured provisional orders in five states stopping the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law, to deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a terrorism prison in El Salvador.
Judges have been harsh in appraising how the White House has used the powerful statute. “Cows have better treatment now under the law,” a federal judge in Manhattan said on Tuesday.
Roger J. Stone Jr., the longtime associate of President Trump’s, has been lobbying for a pioneering cryptocurrency investor known as “Bitcoin Jesus” who is facing federal fraud and criminal tax charges, according to congressional filings.
Mr. Stone filed paperwork last month indicating that he had been retained by Roger Ver, an early Bitcoin investor who was charged last year and accused of shielding his cryptocurrency holdings from $48 million in taxes.
On April 7, the Supreme Court ruled that the government must give Venezuelan migrants notice “within a reasonable time” and the chance to legally challenge their removal before being deported to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
Exactly how much notice the Trump administration considered appropriate in response to the Supreme Court’s edict was revealed in a document unsealed during a hearing on Thursday in Federal District Court in Brownsville, Texas."
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