President Donald Trump has placed the higher education system in a pressure cooker. A number of Ivy League and other elite universities have been forced to make a tough choice: either comply with his Administration’s agenda or lose critical federal funding. Harvard, the nation’s oldest and perhaps most prestigious university, was the latest target. Hours after the school announced it wouldn’t accede to the Trump Administration demands, the federal government on April 14 froze more than $2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts. Harvard is just one of several U.S. universities targeted by the Trump Administration to force compliance with its agenda. Pressure is being placed on these educational institutions not only through slashed budgets but also via government orders and probes into schools’ diversity-related practices. Trump has promised funding cuts to schools that pursue diversity initiatives since he was on the campaign trail last year; his Administration has also targeted universities that were involved in last year’s wave of campus protests against the war in Gaza. Experts have previously warned that such cuts to academic institutions pose a risk for the U.S., a global leader in research and innovation. The impact of taking away government grants—lifeblood for many of these research universities—could include hampering advancements in medicine and technology, and could cost the country economically as well by weakening American competitiveness. Harvard University On April 14, the Trump Administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced the freeze of $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The freeze came hours after Harvard rejected demands listed in April 3 and April 11 letters from representatives of the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Education and the General Services Administration (GSA) that sought broad reforms to the university’s operations, including curbing antisemitism and activism on campus and focusing on “merit-based” initiatives. Some of the demands include federal audits of admissions, hiring, and related data, as well as “reducing the power” held by students, faculty, and administrators who are “more committed to activism than scholarship.” The Trump Administration had previously criticized the university’s handling of protests related to the war in Gaza. University President Alan Garber said in an April 14 letter that such demands were “direct governmental regulation” of campus conditions, adding that Harvard will “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote. The Task Force, in its announcement of the freeze, said that Harvard’s response to the demands “reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation's most prestigious universities and colleges—that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws.” Cornell University The White House told the media on April 8 that more than $1 billion in federal funding to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have been frozen, amid investigations into alleged civil rights violations involving race and religion. The New York Times reported that the pause on funding to Cornell, as well as Northwestern University, involves grants and contracts mostly from the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, and HHS, according to two unnamed officials. Cornell officials issued a statement on April 8 that noted while the university hasn’t confirmed the total costs of cuts, it received more than 75 stop work orders from the Department of Defense related to research that is “profoundly significant to American national defense, cybersecurity, and health.” Read More: Why the Government Historically Has, and Still Should, Pay For University Research Costs Northwestern University Along with Cornell, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, was caught in the Trump Administration’s federal fund freezing spree with $790 million put on hold. Northwestern said on April 10 that it received “more than 100 stop work orders this week for projects funded by the government.” The affected grants, the university said, include “research into wearable devices, robotics, nanotechnology, foreign military training, Parkinson’s disease and many other critical research programs supporting our nation.” Brown University Right wing news website The Daily Caller first reported on April 3 that $510 million in federal contracts and grants awarded to Brown University are at risk, as the Trump Administration intends to freeze these over the campus’ response to antisemitism and potential diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. Brown is one of 60 schools being investigated for supposed Title VI violations. Last year, the University was also a hotbed of student protests against the war in Gaza. According to the Times, the impact of such a funding freeze on Brown would be “significant,” with $184 million coming from federal grants and contracts in 2024. The University has not provided any more information about the potential funding freeze. But on March 20, president Christina Paxson said in a letter responding to concerns over federal funding cuts that, “if Brown faced such actions directly impacting our ability to perform essential academic and operational functions, we would be compelled to vigorously exercise our legal rights to defend these freedoms, and true to our values, we would do so with integrity and respect.” Princeton University The Trump Administration on April 1 suspended $210 million worth of research grants to Princeton University as it probes the school’s anti-antisemitism efforts. The Associated Press reported that Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber said in a letter to the campus that the university received notifications from government agencies, including the Department of Energy, NASA, and the Defense Department, suspending several dozen research grants. “The full rationale for this action is not yet clear, but I want to be clear about the principles that will guide our response,” Eisgruber reportedly wrote in the letter. “Princeton University will comply with the law. We are committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination, and we will cooperate with the government in combating antisemitism. Princeton will also vigorously defend academic freedom and the due process rights of this university.” University of Pennsylvania On March 19, the White House announced it would pull $175 million in federal funding from the University of Pennsylvania. A White House social media account said the pause was over UPenn’s “policies forcing women to compete with men in sports.” The social media post linked to a Fox Business clip that said that the funding came from the Departments of Defense and HHS, with a senior Trump official telling the cable network that “this is just a taste of what could be coming down the pipe.” The announcement came weeks after Trump issued an executive order on Feb. 5 denying funds to schools that allow transgender women to play in sports that correspond to their gender identity. The day after, the Education Department announced it would investigate UPenn, along with two other entities, for apparent Title IX violations due to transgender players’ involvement in student sports. In statements to the media on March 19, UPenn said it was aware of the reports but had not received any official details on the freeze. “It is important to note, however, that Penn has always followed NCAA and Ivy League policies regarding student participation on athletic teams,” the university said. “We have been in the past, and remain today, in full compliance with the regulations that apply not only to Penn, but all of our NCAA and Ivy League peer institutions.” Columbia University Columbia University is also in the Trump Administration’s crosshairs for the protests against the war in Gaza last year. One of its recent graduates, Palestinian Mahmoud Khalil, had been arrested in March by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, and is facing potential deportation. On March 3, agencies making up the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced they were considering stop work orders for $51.4 million in contracts between Columbia and the federal government. On March 7, the same task force announced the cancellation of some $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia, “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” According to the task force’s statement, the cancellation is just the first round of actions against the school. On March 12, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated around 400 grants to Columbia, including those related to biomedical research—for training and research projects, as well as larger awards to Columbia’s Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and cancer centers. The journal Science reported on April 9 that, based on internal documents, NIH is “freezing all remaining grant money owed to the university until further notice.” On March 13, representatives from the Departments of Education and HHS and the GSA sent a letter to Columbia outlining their demands, and by March 21, Columbia said it had taken additional actions in seeming compliance. It hired 36 “special officers” empowered to arrest or remove people from campus, limited the use of face masks which were once used to conceal protesters’ identities, and adopted a controversial formal definition of antisemitism. Explaining the actions, then-interim president Katrina Armstrong said in a letter published on March 21: “At all times, we are guided by our values, putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make.” Armstrong stepped down from her role a week later. Columbia’s apparent caving in had been met with backlash from some of its faculty members. Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, slammed the university’s accession, saying that “Columbia’s capitulation endangers academic freedom and campus expression nationwide.” In a statement on April 14, acting university president Claire Shipman said that while some of the Trump Administration’s demands “have aligned with policies and practices that we believe are important to advancing our mission,” the university would still “reject heavy-handed orchestration from the government”—particularly rebuffing agreements that threaten the university’s autonomy, including those that involve hiring and teaching decisions.

Whooping cough has been on the rise in the U.S. for years—and cases are continuing to soar in 2025. Meanwhile, fewer Americans are getting vaccinated against it. Here’s what to know about the ongoing surge in whooping cough cases. A bad year for whooping cough In 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 2,116 cases of whooping cough. In 2024, it reported 35,435 cases. So far this year, there have been 7,111 reported cases of whooping cough, according to an analysis by ProPublica. That’s more than double the number of cases reported by the same time in 2024.

Not all apologies are created equal. While a good one can’t always fully undo the damage that’s been done, apologies help people on the receiving end feel validated, emotionally heal, and even ease a desire for revenge, says Seiji Takaku, a professor of psychology at Soka University of America in Aliso Viejo, Calif., who has researched forgiveness. If you’re on the receiving end of a sorry attempt to make amends, on the other hand, it might feel just as offensive as the original transgression. How someone apologizes will determine how you respond. We asked experts what to say in a variety of situations—including when you want to accept the apology, when you definitely don’t, and when you simply need more time to forgive.

The National Weather Service is preparing for the probability that fewer forecast updates will be fine-tuned by specialists, among other cutbacks, because of “severe shortages” of meteorologists and other employees, according to an internal agency document. An agreement signed on April 10 between the service and the union representing its employees describes several measures that forecasting offices will take to manage the consequences of the Trump administration’s drive to reduce the size of the government. The document also says the service might reduce or suspend the launches of data-gathering weather balloons and eliminate the testing of new forecasting methods and technologies. More than 500 people this year have already left the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the National Weather Service. Nearly 200 of those departures were people who work in weather forecasting offices, which had already faced serious understaffing. About 300 additional people are expected to leave under the Trump administration’s latest resignation offer, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked for anonymity because the administration has not officially made agency departure numbers public. Union officials said the departures at NOAA since President Trump took office have far exceeded the typical turnover rate. The agreement indicates that field offices across the country could face vacancy rates as high as 35 percent, compared with current staffing levels, according to the union. Parts of the agency had already been operating at lower-than-usual staffing levels well before the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts. The document outlines options for cutting back programs and allows the National Weather Service to offer “degraded” services as more meteorologists retire or resign. The cuts would significantly scale back the work of the 122 weather offices nationwide, which collect weather observations and issue warnings during severe weather events. Representative Zoe Lofgren, the senior Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, which oversees the Weather Service, said the Trump administration was endangering the agency’s lifesaving work. Democrats on the committee provided a copy of the document to The New York Times. “Chaotic and illegal firings, coercions to resign, reductions in force, and a general obsession with destroying the morale of dedicated public servants have left the National Weather Service’s work force so strained they cannot carry out their duties as they once did,” Ms. Lofgren said in a statement. Tom Fahy, the legislative counsel for the union, the National Weather Service Employees Organization, said the agreement had been developed to alleviate staff burnout. “In the last four months our losses are unprecedented, and our offices are struggling to maintain operations,” he said.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Department of Defense’s education agency on Tuesday, arguing that the removal of books in response to Trump administration orders infringed on the First Amendment rights of students. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, centers on a school system for children of military families run by the Defense Department. The school system has faced pushback and student walkouts in response to a number of changes under the Trump administration, including the pausing of student affinity clubs focused on race and gender and the removal of Pride decorations at some schools. The schools, which routinely produce some of the top reading and math scores in the country, educate more than 67,000 students in preschool through high school on military bases in the United States and abroad. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Because Defense Department schools are run by the federal government, they have been uniquely subject to President Trump’s executive orders on education, such as an order “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling” that criticized teaching about concepts like white privilege and rejected policies supporting transgender students’ preferred pronouns and bathrooms, for example. Mr. Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, also called for an end to cultural awareness months in the military, such as those for Black history or women’s history, a change that applied to its schools. “We think of the changes in these schools as the canary in the proverbial coal mine for the changes this administration would like to see throughout the country,” said Emerson Sykes, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U.Though military members give up certain rights while on the job, he said, their children are civilians. “These are American kids, like any other American kids, and these are public schools,” Mr. Sykes said. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of six families whose children attend schools in Virginia, Kentucky, Italy and Japan.It asserts that Defense Department schools removed books touching on race and gender identity not because of their educational value, but “simply because a new presidential administration finds certain viewpoints on those topics to be politically incorrect.” According to the lawsuit, removed books included the classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee; “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini; “Both Sides Now,” a book about a transgender teen participating in a national debate competition; and “A Queer History of the United States,” about L.G.B.T.Q. figures throughout American history. A spokesman for Department of Defense schools said he could not comment on the lawsuit. Officials have previously said that they were making changes in compliance with the orders from the Trump administration and Mr. Hegseth, who was also named in the lawsuit. The Pentagon declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation. The lawsuit also argues that students were denied the opportunity to learn about Black history and the contributions of Black Americans after the cancellation of Black History Month. And it contends that students are being denied access to certain topics that they need to learn to navigate the world and do well on future tests. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT According to the lawsuit, Department of Defense schools have removed certain chapters from health education textbooks, including those on sexually transmitted diseases, sexual harassment and the human reproductive system. And students enrolled in Advanced Placement psychology are no longer being taught certain material on gender and sex, which may appear on the Advanced Placement exam, the lawsuit said.

Matthew Meyers and Colin Williams became best friends over a semantic argument about the word “homicide” in a freshman history class. Three years later, the wiry-thin, floppy-haired seniors at Sprague High School in Salem, Ore., remained inseparable when they competed as a pair in Constitution Team, a debate-style contest where teams answer questions about constitutional law. In January, they won second place at the state-level competition, earning themselves a spot at the national finals. Occasionally, an undersize team of nine to 15 students reaches nationals, where the average team size is 21 students. But a team of two had never made it, much less won, according to the Center for Civic Education, which organizes the event, formally known as “We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution National Finals.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT It would be like a baseball team winning a game with four players. And yet, for four magical days, Mr. Williams and Mr. Meyers basked in the glow of that improbable achievement. On Friday night, after three days of dazzling the judges with their answers to penetrating questions about the Articles of Confederation and obscure Supreme Court decisions, the young men sat at the award ceremony with tempered expectations. They hoped for seventh place. When their names still had not been called as the fifth-, fourth- and third-place finishers were announced, they wondered if there had been a mistake. When the two were handed their championship medals, the hall erupted. “They are gods tonight,” a rival team’s coach said. But on Monday, the head coach of the third-place team was reviewing the score sheet from the event when he saw that something didn’t add up.The Road to Nationals On a brisk February evening, in a windowless classroom, Mr. Williams and Mr. Meyers, both 18, began preparing for nationals. Unable to out-memorize the much-larger teams they would face, the two delved deeper into the philosophies underpinning the Constitution. “We didn’t really have a huge evidence base,” Mr. Williams said. “But what we did have was a really strong conceptual understanding.” For instance, they argued over a Supreme Court decision that upheld an Oregon city’s ban on sleeping and camping in public spaces that critics said effectively punished people for being homeless. “If a burglar broke into someone’s house because they were hungry,” Mr. Williams asked, “does punishing them for that violate the Eighth Amendment?” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT No, the hungry burglar could be punished, Mr. Meyers said. He paused and then added, “Get ready to hear a really, really, really stupid response.” According to a theory from the philosopher John Locke, he said, it would be less wrong if the thief stole from a grocery store than someone’s house.On their way up the competition ladder, their insight about the nation’s founding documents made an impression. “My mind was kind of blown,” said Darin Sands, a lawyer and national champion coach who judged the pair at the Oregon state competition. “It was just clear that they had not only studied the material but engaged with it in a very deep level.” A Convincing Performance On April 9, the first day of the national competition at the National Conference Center in Lansdowne, Va., the teenagers were being grilled by judges when something unusual happened. “I just forgot my train of thought,” Mr. Meyers said. “I just knew we were talking about something related to judicial supremacy.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT He asked the judge to repeat the question — a rare slip. To be among the 10 teams to advance to the final round on Friday, Mr. Williams and Mr. Meyers needed a flawless Thursday. They delivered a convincing performance, and word quickly spread. “I can’t wait, we’ve heard so much about you,” a judge said before questioning the two. That the duo made it to the state-level competition was a huge accomplishment. Going to nationals? Unheard-of. And when they clinched a spot in the Top 10? Well, that made them legends. People even lined up to take their photograph.The final round on Friday in the National Union Building in Washington, D.C., brought the toughest, most combative line of questioning. Early in the day, one judge found a gap in their knowledge. “They were asked about a specific court case that the boys did not know,” said Jacqueline Pope Brothers, their coach and a social studies teacher at their high school. “That kind of shook them.” But the stumble only sharpened their focus. Sean McClelland, a judge who said he was “philosophically opposed to giving out perfect scores,” asked them whether judges find or make laws. The boys delivered an esoteric and deeply informed answer that earned them Mr. McClelland’s only perfect score. At the award ceremony that night, they watched as fourth place went to Denver East High School in Colorado and third place went to Lincoln High School in Portland, Ore. Fishers High School in Indiana took second. With championship medals draped around their necks, the boys savored a standing ovation from hundreds of admiring students and coaches. Finding an Error On Monday, Patrick Magee-Jenks, a social studies teacher and the head coach of the Lincoln High School team, was reviewing the scorecards when he noticed that Lincoln had been awarded 15 fewer points than it should have received. On Wednesday, the organizers announced that, after “a thorough audit,” mistakes had been discovered on Lincoln and Denver East’s scorecards. In issuing an apology to the students and teachers, the Center for Civic Education said that Sprague and Lincoln — the two Oregon schools — would share first place. The Colorado and Indiana schools would share second place. Mr. Magee-Jenks said in phone interview on Wednesday that he “felt really bad” for the Center for Civic Education but added that he was pleased with the fix. “Overall, the big winner is the state of Oregon,” he said. As Mr. Williams drove to school on Wednesday morning, he seemed unbothered by the scoring change, and perhaps even a little upbeat about it. “It’s really cool to be able to be co-champions with Lincoln,” he said. Long before nationals, Mr. Meyers had joked with rivals from the competing Oregon school about a fairy tale finish that seemed impossible: What if two Oregon schools tied for first?

As President Trump flexes his power over universities, law firms, media companies and more, some of the country’s most powerful institutions have faced a choice, to cut a deal with the White House or fight back. In recent weeks, an increasing number are choosing to do battle with the president. Harvard University refused this week to cave to what its president called “assertions of power, unmoored from the law.” More than 500 law firms have thrown their support behind some of their embattled peers as Mr. Trump seeks retribution against lawyers who represented or helped his political foes. The country’s oldest news wire fought Mr. Trump in court after it was banned from the Oval Office. The new face of resistance is not like the one of Mr. Trump’s first term, when officials who opposed his agenda from inside the government tried to establish guardrails to prevent some of the president’s more radical ideas. Now the fight is out in the open. The guardrails are gone, in large part because Mr. Trump demands loyalty from everyone around him. With almost no opposing voices inside the White House, the president’s campaign against the institutions of government, society and law have been more intense and have played out faster than they did during his first term. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT And while Mr. Trump has succeeded in wrenching enormous concessions through threats, lawsuits and coercion — and he has shown no signs of stopping — there are hints of a shift in strategy among some of his targets. Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, said a buzz began building among the faculty as Mr. Trump turned his focus to the university in recent weeks. “It was probably the main topic of conversation,” Mr. Tribe said. “When will the university finally stand up? When will the endowment, which is supposed to be there partly for extreme emergencies, be part of what Harvard looks to in order to basically reinforce its spine?” The initial response by some organizations to Mr. Trump’s political assault was to try to appease the president. Several elite law firms decided to settle with the White House in order to maintain their ability to do work with the government. Columbia University relented in the face of the president’s threat to cancel $400 million in federal support. The “flood the zone” strategy inside the White House has left many Democrats and others opposed to Mr. Trump’s policies resigned to the fact that they control few centers of power with which to fight back.Harvard’s decision to reject the Trump administration’s demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum could embolden other universities across the country to push back. The erstwhile leader of the Democratic Party, former President Barack Obama, called on other institutions to “follow suit” after Harvard. There were already some rumblings of resistance in recent weeks, with the mass “Hands Off” protests in cities across the country. Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, have also drawn significant crowds on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. “Those rallies have built momentum by just showing that there are lots of people who don’t like what he is doing,” said Nikolas Bowie, a Harvard law professor who has urged the university’s administration to resist the demands. “Even though Trump is kind of picking people and individuals and institutions off one by one, for everyone to just see, ‘Oh, we all think what’s happening is wrong,’ is important.” Leah Greenberg, a founder of the progressive group Indivisible, which helped organize the Hands Off rallies, said momentum had been building for months as outrage grew, from activists in the streets to the halls of elite institutions. Harvard’s stance is “crucial and important,” Ms. Greenberg said. “I say that as someone who doesn’t spend a ton of time praising Harvard,” she added. “There was a sense that American society is folding to Trump’s will. Saying, ‘Oh, hell no, we aren’t,’ it’s helpful for a lot of people.” At Harvard, hundreds, including Mr. Bowie, rallied to call on the school to stand up to the Trump administration’s demands, while hundreds of faculty members signed a letter urging Harvard to condemn Mr. Trump’s attempt to remake higher education. At Yale, nearly 1,000 faculty members signed a letter calling on their leaders to resist Mr. Trump’s demands. And the president of M.I.T. spoke out against the Trump administration’s treatment of its international students. The Trump administration has argued that its goal in going after elite universities is to crack down on antisemitism on college campuses. But its demands are much broader, including audits of staff members to prevent Harvard from considering racial diversity in hiring decisions and audits of the student body’s ideological views. The administration also demanded that the university reduce the “power” on campus held by certain students, faculty members and administrators. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that Harvard “has not taken the president or the administration’s demands seriously.” “Why are the American taxpayers subsidizing a university that has billions of dollars in the bank already?” she asked. “And we certainly should not be funding a place where such grave antisemitism exists.” Refusing the demands came with a cost. Within hours of Harvard’s decision, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, along with a $60 million contract. And then on Tuesday, Mr. Trump threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status, even though federal law prohibits the president from “directly or indirectly” telling the I.R.S. to conduct specific tax investigations. Much of federal funding for universities is for student aid and research. Harvard revamped its website to emphasize the importance of its research, highlighting its work aiding stroke survivors, treating sickle cell disease and combating chronic absenteeism in schools. Mr. Tribe said he had heard colleagues worry about how the funding cuts could affect their research, but not as much as they were concerned about the larger principle at stake. “I know people at the medical school and elsewhere who are cheering what Harvard did,” Mr. Tribe said, “although they are at the same time grieving for the likelihood that their clinics will end up being closed and that the lifesaving research they’re doing will either be discontinued or put on indefinite hold.”

The number of abortions provided in most of the U.S. increased slightly in 2024 from the year before, according to new data released on April 15. The research was conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, which studies and supports sexual and reproductive health and rights. The organization uses both a statistical model and survey responses from providers to estimate the number of abortions provided by clinicians in states without near-total bans for its Monthly Abortion Provision Study. The data released on April 15 show that nearly 1,038,100 abortions were provided in 2024 across all states without near-total bans—a less than 1% increase from 2023 to 2024. Advertisement While that number is relatively steady compared to the year before, researchers noted that the finding “masked substantial variability across individual states,” with some states experiencing significant decreases and others seeing notable increases. For instance, there were roughly 12,100 fewer abortions provided in Florida in 2024 than in 2023, which researchers attributed to the state implementing a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, a policy that went into effect in May 2024. Similarly, South Carolina provided about 3,500 fewer abortions in 2024 than in 2023. Researchers attributed this to the state’s six-week ban, which was upheld by the state Supreme Court in August 2023. At the same time, researchers found that the number of abortions provided in Wisconsin increased from about 1,300 in 2023 to about 6,100 in 2024—an increase of 388%. Abortion access in the state became largely unavailable after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 until late 2023, when a Wisconsin judge ruled that an 1849 law that had been interpreted as a ban didn’t make abortion illegal. Arizona, California, Kansas, Ohio, and Virginia also saw significant increases in the number of abortions provided in 2024 compared to the year before.

If the government can deport an immigrant without due process by claiming he’s a gang member, what’s stopping it from doing the same to a U.S. citizen? That’s the question legal experts were grappling with Monday, after President Donald Trump said he was exploring whether U.S. citizens convicted of violent crimes could be deported to El Salvador. “We also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters,” Trump told reporters inside the Oval Office while hosting El Salvador President Nayib Bukele. “I’d like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country.” Trump offered no specifics about how his Administration would deport "homegrown" criminals, or if he was only referring to naturalized citizens who were born outside the U.S. But he said that Attorney General Pam Bondi was studying the legality of such a proposal. Deporting U.S. citizens would mark a dramatic escalation of the Trump Administration’s already aggressive approach to immigration and criminal justice, and has raised immediate legal and ethical questions from constitutional experts, who tell TIME that even suggesting the removal of U.S. citizens crosses a line long considered inviolable. “It’s constitutionally very problematic, if not illegal,” says Amanda Frost, an immigration law expert and University of Virginia law professor. “It's a baseline right of citizenship that you can remain in the country.” Trump’s suggestion appears to build on a deal struck earlier this year between Washington and San Salvador that allowed for the transfer of more than 200 Venezuelan nationals—many of them asylum seekers or convicted criminals—from U.S. detention facilities to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, a sprawling prison complex that has been condemned by human rights organizations for its harsh conditions. Bukele, a populist leader with close ties to Trump, has embraced the idea of taking in foreign detainees in exchange for compensation, calling it a chance to “outsource part of [America’s] prison system.” The prison, designed to house alleged gang members under extreme surveillance, has become both a symbol of Bukele’s crackdown and a flashpoint for global human rights groups. “We’re studying the laws right now,” Trump said of sending U.S. citizens convicted of violent crimes to El Salvadoran prisons. “If we can do that, that’s good. And I’m talking about violent people. Really bad people. Every bit as bad as the ones coming in.” He also suggested that Bukele should build “five more” prisons to make room for Americans. Legal experts say such comments risk normalizing the idea that U.S. citizenship can be revoked through executive action—an idea with little basis in law and potentially dangerous precedent. Courts may also find it cruel and unusual punishment to send Americans to prisons in El Salvador, where human rights groups say around 350 people have died since Bukele began his “war on gangs” in early 2022. Critics of the Salvadoran prison system say inmates are often held without charge, denied medical care, and subjected to overcrowded, inhumane conditions. Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law expert and retired Cornell Law School professor, called the proposal an attempt to “sow chaos and fear even if the Administration’s actions are not legal.” He warned that forcibly transferring U.S. citizens to foreign custody could be unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. “When U.S. citizens get convicted of a crime, they serve time in either a state or federal jail, and then they get released,” Yale-Loehr notes. “They're not supposed to be deported.” Legal scholars say there is no constitutional or statutory authority for deporting U.S.-born citizens under any circumstances. While federal law does allow for denaturalization—the revocation of citizenship—it can only be pursued in rare cases, typically involving fraud during the naturalization process. Simply committing a crime, no matter how serious, is not grounds for stripping someone of their citizenship. Frost pointed to the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Afroyim v. Rusk, which held that the government cannot revoke someone’s citizenship without their consent. The ruling came in response to efforts to strip Americans of their citizenship during the Cold War for engaging in certain political activities, like voting in foreign elections or joining the Communist Party. If Trump were to attempt to strip citizenship from people who were naturalized lawfully, legal experts say it would almost certainly be struck down as unconstitutional. And deporting someone who retains their citizenship, whether naturalized or born in the United States, is plainly forbidden under existing law. “You can imprison U.S. citizens, you can even execute them—but you cannot remove them from the country,” Frost said. “That’s the foundational right of citizenship.” While the Trump Administration has not released any legal memo outlining how such deportations might work, rights advocates say even floating the idea could have a chilling effect, particularly among immigrant communities and naturalized citizens who may fear arbitrary detention or removal. “I think people should be alarmed,” Yale-Loehr says. “I think before people were saying, ‘well, I'm not an immigrant, so I don't have to worry.’ And now with this proposal, if he goes forward with it, we all have to worry.” Trump’s idea has landed with a thud among Democrats on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers warned it could set a dangerous precedent for abusing presidential power. “Donald Trump is a convicted criminal—can he be deported?” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, asks TIME. “We're talking about millions of people who have criminal convictions,” adds Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. “A criminal conviction is not a license to destroy the rights and dignity of a person. And one would think that Donald Trump, of all people, understands that, or should understand that.” Since returning to office, Trump has authorized a series of moves that expand scrutiny to naturalized citizens, green card holders, legal visa holders, and even U.S. citizens suspected of speech or behavior deemed threatening to national security. Federal agents have detained pro-Palestinian protesters, arrested legal residents on suspicion of spreading “Hamas propaganda,” and turned away foreign scientists at airports for expressing views critical of Trump Administration policies. In one instance, a French scientist was denied entry to the U.S. after officials reviewed his private messages criticizing Trump’s science agenda. In another case, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney specialist and professor at Brown University, was deported despite holding a valid visa and a court order blocking her removal. Federal agents cited social media posts and funeral attendance as evidence of ties to Hezbollah. The Administration has defended these actions as national security measures. “Those who violate these laws will be processed, detained and removed as required,” said Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin. But to many legal scholars, the cumulative effect of these actions is a calculated effort to redefine who belongs—and who doesn’t—within America’s legal and political framework. Both Yale-Loehr and Frost say that Trump’s comments, taken collectively, suggest an effort to redefine citizenship as a conditional status—revocable for those deemed undesirable. “First Trump came out with an executive order trying to restrict birthright citizenship,” Yale-Loehr says, “and now, if he goes ahead and deports U.S. citizens to foreign countries, that's another way of stripping someone of their citizenship.” It’s a pattern, Raskin says, that reveals a broader authoritarian impulse: expanding the boundaries of presidential power by testing legal norms. “Everybody can see where this is going,” Raskin says. “First he violates the rights of undocumented people, then he violates the rights of documented legal residents, and then he attacks the rights of citizens. So this is a sliding scale of constitutional injury, and Trump is seeing how far he can go before he’s stopped”

A“Make America Strong Again” banner hangs on the wall as rows upon rows of overweight workers assemble Nike sneakers; one lifts a burger up to his mouth as he eats while working, another rests his head on the sewing machine in front of him, barely able to keep his eyes open. It’s a caricature of U.S. manufacturing that Chinese netizens have been laughing at over the past week, as social media platforms have seen a wave of AI-generated videos portraying what some think it would look like for Americans to work in sweatshop-like textile factories and iPhone assembly lines more commonly associated with China. As U.S. President Donald Trump escalates a trade war with China that he began in his first term—seeing tariffs, which are taxes on imports, as a path to restore a U.S. manufacturing sector that has steadily declined over decades—China’s government has made its opposition clear: After Trump’s “Liberation Day” on April 2, when he hiked tariffs on all global trade partners, Chinese state media produced AI-generated parody videos slamming Trump’s approach as costly, divisive, and dangerous. After Trump announced a 90-day pause for other countries but further hiked tariffs on China, which now stand at 145%, China’s finance ministry raised its retaliatory tariff on U.S. goods to 125% but said that it wouldn’t continue to respond with tit-for-tat increases, arguing that doing so amounts to nothing more than a “numbers game” as the current rate already makes imports from the U.S. prohibitively expensive. “It would be a joke,” the ministry said, promising other unspecified countermeasures if its interests continue to be infringed. But while a trade war between the world’s two biggest economies is certainly not funny for Beijing, the AI-generated videos gone viral among Chinese social media users satirizing fictitious American manufacturing workers do get at a more serious truth. “The joke is Americans don’t want to do those jobs,” Mark Cogan, associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Japan’s Kansai Gaidai University and a U.S. national, tells TIME. “We’re the punch line.” The economic reality Trump has promised that his tariffs will usher in a “new golden age” for American workers, harkening back to an industrial past that has been lost to decades of globalization. The logic goes that by raising the price of foreign goods, businesses and consumers will be discouraged from importing and instead invest in U.S.-based manufacturing and American-made goods. But the irony, economists say, is that the trade deficits that he seeks to reverse are a sign of the U.S. economy’s relative dominance, not weakness. “The U.S. is at a state of development where it has moved beyond manufacturing,” Jayant Menon, a research fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, previously told TIME. “This is what manufacturing countries are trying to aspire to, and this guy is trying to go the other way.” What is more likely to happen, economists say, is that as the goods that Americans are accustomed to being able to buy relatively cheaply rise dramatically in price, consumers will simply buy fewer things. And more U.S.-based manufacturing wouldn’t necessarily result in lower prices because it would still involve higher labor and operational costs. Many overseas manufacturers may calculate that paying tariffs would still be less costly than relocating to the U.S. The main reasons why China and not the U.S. has come to be the world’s “sole manufacturing superpower,” or “the world’s factory,” are its greater labor supply and thus lower wages, more efficient domestic business and supply-chain ecosystem, and relatively lax regulatory environment. Tariffs alone won’t change these underlying factors for the U.S. “If you think about producing a laptop in China vs. the U.S.,” says Yuan Mei, assistant professor in the School of Economics at Singapore Management University, “in China a lot of parts and components of the laptop are produced within China, so shipping those components within the country is pretty cheap.” Many other components, like chips, are produced in other Asian nations, like Japan and South Korea, which also means relatively cheaper shipping to China than to the U.S. But the mismatch between America’s workforce and China’s is perhaps the biggest obstacle to shifting a significant amount of manufacturing from China to the U.S. In the U.S., as of March 2025, just under 13 million workers are employed in the manufacturing sector, while just over 7 million of some 340 million Americans are unemployed. China’s manufacturing sector, meanwhile, employs more than 100 million people, while higher unemployment in the nation of 1.4 billion alongside lax regulations have helped to suppress wages and labor conditions. While many Americans—80% of respondents to a CATO Institute survey—agree in principle with the idea that the U.S. would be better off if more Americans worked in manufacturing, far fewer would actually want to take such a job themselves: only 25% of the CATO survey’s respondents said they believed they would be better off in a manufacturing job. Moreover, economists have noted that much of the manufacturing work that could be transplanted to the U.S. may actually be more efficient if automated, or done by machines instead of humans, while many of the human jobs that would be needed may require skills that the U.S. is short on. The manufacturing sector relies heavily on engineers, Mei says, and engineering is among China’s most popular college majors. In the U.S., on the other hand, a large proportion of engineering and tech talent comes from abroad—and with the Trump Administration’s crackdowns on immigrants and international students, there might eventually be, Mei says, a “gap in the supply” of engineers that the U.S. needs to boost its domestic manufacturing. From mocking to hawking Mei tells TIME he noticed the memes of American factory workers started to spread in recent weeks amid the escalating U.S.-China trade war, when Chinese social media users began wondering what American products may become more expensive due to Chinese retaliatory tariffs. That morphed into conversations about the difference between a brand being American, of which there are many cases, and its manufacturing being U.S.-based, which is much rarer. “Many netizens realized that there are few examples of daily products that are produced in the U.S.,” says Mei, noting the exceptions of very expensive high tech instruments, aircraft, and pharmaceutical products. Rather, the U.S.’s comparative advantage is in the services sector, Mei says: “Think Silicon Valley.” (Some observers believe that in the trade war, Beijing will next target U.S. services exports, leveling tariffs and ramping up other restrictions on American professional, legal, technological, telecommunications, education, health, entertainment, and other services, many of which have already been heavily scrutinized in China.) The AI-generated videos depicting Americans taking factory jobs, says Ashley Dudarenok, who runs a China and Hong Kong-based consumer-research consultancy, relied on subverting a “long-standing stereotype about global labor dynamics.” And quickly, she tells TIME, the image was “absolutely everywhere, and it’s still trending.” “There was the trade war, there was the tariff war, and now there is the meme war,” Dudarenok says. Even among the Chinese workforce, more and more aspire to work in sectors other than manufacturing. Dudarenok says across Chinese social media she’s seen comments saying, “Chinese people don’t want to do these jobs, why would Americans want to do these jobs?” or “Chinese manufacturers are moving into Vietnam, into Africa—now we have another option: America.” Still, the tariffs are no joke to those in China whose livelihoods depend on manufacturing goods for export. Some have also taken to social media to respond to the tariffs: by explaining how cheaply they actually manufacture goods and how much of the price consumers paid pre-tariffs came from brand markups. Some have even appealed to Americans to buy directly from them. “They want to get rid of the middleman,” says Mei. But consumers should beware that claiming to manufacture for big brands while actually producing knock-offs is a common scam, and some scammers could be exploiting consumer panic about potential price hikes. While China produces more than half of the world’s clothing and textiles, Dudarenok says manufacturers that are “trusted partners” with big brands don’t typically sell their partners out so easily. A messaging win for Beijing If social media sentiment is anything to go off of, Mei says that there’s a lot of support among Chinese citizens for the government’s policy decisions related to Trump’s trade war. “It’s seen as a good thing that they are imposing retaliatory tariffs. A small share of Chinese netizens are still worried, and say that maybe we should just yield to the U.S., but the majority agree with the stance of the Chinese government.” The government’s message is clear, Dudarenok says: “China is prepared to fight for its right to be in the room and to be at the table.” Mei has even seen memes depicting China protecting other countries from U.S. bullying or suggesting China is the one country brave enough to stand up for itself. But the sentiment isn’t just popular on Chinese social media. Reshares of posts popular on Chinese social media to X and TikTok, which are blocked within mainland China though still accessed by many users via VPNs, have garnered millions of views and tens of thousands of likes. Although it’s not clear who is generating and sharing the original videos, Cogan, the peace and conflict studies professor in Japan, says it’s nevertheless a “huge win for China.” “I think that the Chinese understand quite well the fact that American society is quite divided, and at this particular stage of our political polarization, Americans really don’t care whose propaganda they are spreading or where the meme actually comes from—so they’re willing to spread whatever … as long as it furthers their own political messaging.”