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Hegseth Comes Under Fire Amid Reports of Sharing Sensitive Info in Another Signal Group Chat

“Another day, another old story,” said Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell in a statement. But while the news he was responding to on Sunday may have sounded familiar, it was in fact new. After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Cabinet officials were revealed last month to have discussed U.S. military strikes on Yemen in a Signal chat group that mistakenly included the Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, new reports suggest Hegseth may have shared similar attack details in another chat on the same commercial messaging platform—this time, with a group that reportedly included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer. The New York Times first reported on Hegseth’s second sensitive Signal chat, citing four unnamed sources with knowledge of the chat. CNN also reported on it, citing three unnamed sources familiar with the chat, while the Associated Press confirmed the Times’ reporting, citing an anonymous source familiar with the chat’s contents and participants. Hegseth and the Trump Administration faced heavy criticism about the implications for national security after the initial leak report last month, with some Congress members even calling on the Defense Secretary to step down. The Administration and GOP allies, however, downplayed the controversy, with President Trump himself accusing critics of making “a big deal” out of his Administration’s “only glitch in two months.” “The details keep coming out,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X after the latest reports. “We keep learning how Pete Hegseth put lives at risk. But Trump is still too weak to fire him. Pete Hegseth must be fired.” Parnell, the Pentagon spokesperson who was also reportedly a member of the second chat group, insisted there was “no classified information in any Signal chat” and that the reports are evidence that the “Trump-hating media continues to be obsessed with destroying anyone committed to President Trump’s agenda.” Here’s what to know. What information was in the second Signal chat? The Times reported that some of the information in the newly revealed Signal chat group, which was named “Defense | Team Huddle,” included flight schedules for F/A-18 Hornet combat aircraft targeting the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The report described it as “essentially the same attack plans” that Hegseth had shared in the Signal group chat called “Houthi PC small group” that included top national security officials as well as the Atlantic’s Goldberg. Hegseth reportedly accessed the chat on a private phone distinct from his government-issued device. He created it to discuss “routine administrative or scheduling information,” according to two of the Times’ sources, who noted that the Defense Secretary did not typically use the chat to discuss sensitive military operations. Who was in the second Signal chat? Besides Hegseth and Parnell, the “Defense | Team Huddle” chat also reportedly included Hegseth’s younger brother Phil, who works in the Pentagon as a Department of Homeland Security senior adviser and liaison. It also reportedly included Tim Parlatore, Hegseth’s personal lawyer, whom Hegseth commissioned last month as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. It’s unclear what level of security clearance Phil Hegseth or Parlatore may have, given their government roles, but Hegseth’s wife Jennifer, a former Fox News producer who was also reportedly a member of the chat, does not have an official government role. The Defense Secretary has been previously scrutinized for including his wife in sensitive meetings with foreign officials. The chat also reportedly included two former senior advisers to Hegseth: Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick. Caldwell and Selnick, along with former deputy defense secretary chief of staff Colin Carroll, were fired days earlier, ostensibly after an investigation into leaks. The three issued a statement asserting their innocence and claiming they’ve been “slandered” while maintaining that they “remain supportive of the Trump-Vance Administration’s mission to make the Pentagon great again.” The “Defense | Team Huddle” chat also reportedly included Joe Kasper, the Defense Secretary’s chief of staff who reportedly requested the leak investigation and is set to leave his post for a new role at the Pentagon amid the turmoil. Why is the Trump Administration blaming disgruntled ex-employees? Parnell, in his statement, criticized the Times “and all other Fake News that repeat their garbage” for “enthusiastically taking the grievances of disgruntled former employees as the sole sources for their article.” The Times as well as CNN and the AP did not name their sources. “They relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the Secretary and the President’s agenda,” Parnell claimed. White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly similarly dismissed the reports, saying in a statement to the AP: “No matter how many times the legacy media tries to resurrect the same non-story, they can’t change the fact that no classified information was shared.” Kelly also blamed disgruntled ex-employees, adding: “Recently-fired ‘leakers’ are continuing to misrepresent the truth to soothe their shattered egos and undermine the President’s agenda, but the administration will continue to hold them accountable.” Hours after the Times reported on the existence of the second sensitive Signal group chat, John Ullyot, who resigned as acting Defense Department press secretary last week, published a tell-all op-ed for Politico in which he painted a portrait of “total chaos” and “disarray” at the Pentagon under Hegseth. Ullyot described Hegseth’s recent firing of Caldwell, Selnick, and Carroll—“three of his most loyal senior staffers”—as “strange and baffling” and potentially just the beginning of a broader “purge.” He also suggested that the leak allegations against the three officials were unfounded. “Unfortunately, Hegseth’s team has developed a habit of spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleagues on their way out the door,” Ullyot wrote. “The dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president,” Ullyot asserted, warning that there may yet be “more shoes to drop in short order” and “even bigger bombshell stories coming this week.” Given Trump’s “strong record of holding his top officials to account,” he added, “it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.” What are the reactions so far? The fresh news of Hegseth potentially disclosing sensitive information in another Signal chat has already prompted sharp rebuke from some Democratic lawmakers. Sen. Jack Reed (D, R.I.), the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that Hegseth “must immediately explain” and urged the Defense Department’s Inspector General Office to include the latest allegations in its ongoing investigation of Hegseth’s mishandling of classified information. “If true, this incident is another troubling example of Secretary Hegseth’s reckless disregard for the laws and protocols that every other military servicemember is required to follow,” Reed said. Sen. Andy Kim. (D., N.J.) posted on X: “I’ll say it again—Hegseth needs to resign. There was more than enough from the last Signal leak to show he is not fit to lead our military.” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D, N.Y.) posted on X that Hegseth “recklessly used an unsecured app to discuss war plans with senior officials. Now we know he also shared those sensitive details with his family over Signal, even after being explicitly warned not to. Republicans must join me in calling on him to resign immediately.” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D, Ill.) also called on Hegseth to resign, posting on X: “How many times does Pete Hegseth need to leak classified intelligence before Donald Trump and Republicans understand that he isn’t only a f*cking liar, he is a threat to our national security? Every day he stays in his job is another day our troops’ lives are endangered by his singular stupidity.”

The Trump Administration Could Have Fought to Deport Abrego Garcia in 2019. It Passed on the Chance

During his first term, Donald Trump’s administration had a chance to challenge Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s protection from deportation, but didn’t take it, according to court documents reviewed by TIME. In October 2019, an immigration judge decided Abrego Garcia shouldn’t be removed because of violent gang threats he faced if he returned to El Salvador. Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement had 30 days to appeal that ruling. No appeal was filed, according to the court documents. The little-noticed episode was a key part of the long saga of Abrego Garcia, the Salvadorian sheet metal apprentice living in Maryland who was accused of being an MS-13 gang member and mistakenly sent in March by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. And it points to the main beef the courts have with Trump over his deportation actions: Trump can deport people from the country, but when he does, he has to follow the law. Abrego Garcia was marched into CECOT prison on March 15. On Thursday, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, met with Abrego Garcia in El Salvador. Van Hollen posted a photo on X of himself sitting at a table with coffee cups and glasses of water in front of them. Abrego Garcia is dressed in a short-sleeved plaid shirt and is wearing a white Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl championship hat. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele mocked the meeting on X and wrote that Abrego Garcia won’t be released, saying “he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” Trump officials have acknowledged that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error” but have refused to correct it. The Supreme Court ruled on April 10 that the Trump administration must “facilitate” his release from prison in El Salvador and ensure his case is “handled as it would have been” if he hadn’t been improperly sent to El Salvador. But so far, the Trump administration has done nothing. Instead, the Trump administration has worked overtime to convict Abrego Garcia in the court of public opinion. On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security published a temporary restraining order that Abrego Garcia’s wife had filed against him in 2021 that said he had “punched and scratched” and “grabbed and bruised” her, and police reports detailing his alleged gang affiliation under the headline: “THE REAL STORY: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 Gang member with a History of Violence.” What the Supreme Court has demanded, though, is not proof Abrego Garcia has never done anything wrong. The court demands that the Trump administration follow the procedures laid out in the law for removing someone from the country. The U.S. District Court Judge handling Abrego Garcia’s case, Paula Xinis, has ordered officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to sit for depositions by April 23 about how his removal was handled and allowed Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to demand documents about his case. When the Trump administration tried to quash those instructions at the Fourth Circuit court of appeals, three federal judges said Trump must comply. “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order," wrote conservative circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan. Even though the Trump administration asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13, the judge wrote, "he is still entitled to due process. If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order.” Abrego Garcia's deportation had been prohibited in 2019 because an immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal.” When the immigration judge considered his case, Abrego Garcia was being held in immigration detention after being arrested by Prince George's County police in a Home Depot parking lot. A “gang field interview” sheet released by the Justice Department on Wednesday describes him wearing "a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears, and mouth of the presidents." Police said the clothing was "indicative of the Hispanic gang culture." The immigration judge had looked at the information alleging Abrego Garcia’s gang ties provided by the Department of Homeland Security and determined it wasn’t sufficient to prove he was a member of the gang, according to court documents. Instead, the judge gave weight to testimony from his family that a separate gang called Barrio 18 in El Salvador had threatened Abrego Garcia with death because his family would not pay the gang protection money. The judge acknowledged that Abrego Garcia’s case wasn’t a slam dunk. “This case is a close call,” Judge David M. Jones wrote in his order. At the end of the order is a line that says “each party has the right to appeal this decision” within 30 days. That decision was still on the books when Abrego Garcia was placed on a plane to El Salvador last month. The Bureau of Immigration Appeals database logs the status of immigration cases by unique identifiers called “A-Numbers,” short for Alien Registration Numbers. Abrego Garcia’s entry shows his application for “withholding of removal” was granted on Oct. 10, 2019. Below that is the message: “No appeal was received for this case.” The White House, DHS and ICE did not reply to requests for comment. John Sandweg, who was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Obama administration, says that ICE attorneys would usually appeal such a decision if they thought that the person was a public safety threat. “I do think that’s indicative that they didn’t have serious concerns about this guy from a public safety perspective,” Sandweg says. “Otherwise, in cases where they do, they absolutely appeal.”

RFK Jr. and the CDC Disagree on a Major Autism Study

On its face, the April 17 report issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was nothing short of alarming. According to a nationwide survey conducted in 2022 across 16 localities in the U.S., one in 31 children studied had been diagnosed with autism. That’s a significant increase from the one-in-36 reported in 2020, and a huge jump from the one-in-150 in 2000. “The autism epidemic is running rampant,” declared Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in a press release. “President Trump has tasked me with identifying the root causes of the childhood chronic disease epidemic—including autism. We are assembling teams of world-class scientists to focus research on the origins of the epidemic, and we expect to begin to have answers by September.” But Kennedy has it wrong, say critics—and even the CDC itself. The increases seen in various communities, says the report, “might be due to differences in availability of services for early detection and evaluation and diagnostic practices…Another reason for differences in prevalence could be whether children have insurance coverage or meet eligibility criteria for access to early intervention services.” That is in keeping with the position of experts, who have maintained for years that increases in autism cases are a mere function of better screening and a widening of the diagnostic criteria of what constitutes the condition. If you look for more autism—and, not insignificantly, have a better understanding of the signs—you’re going to find more. “Most of the rise in autism is not a true rise of autism, but an increase in diagnosis and because of changes in diagnostic criteria,” says Dr. Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, and co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital’s Center for Vaccine Development. “Also, starting in 2005, the American Academy of Pediatrics asked pediatricians to start doing autism screening at between one and two years of age. Additionally, we've provided access to autism services, so there's been incentive to get kids help.” Kennedy doesn’t agree with that explanation. “One of the things I think we need to move away from today is this ideology that this diagnosis, rather [than] the relentless increases, are simply artifacts of better diagnoses, better recognition," he said at a press conference following the release of the CDC report. “Doctors and therapists in the past weren't stupid, they weren't missing all these cases. The epidemic is real." He went on to condemn what he called “epidemic denial” on the part of the scientific community. “External factors, environmental exposures,” Kennedy said. “That's where we're going to find the answer." Among the sources of those exposures Kennedy has cited are environmental and industrial chemicals, food additives, and contaminants in the water supply. What he hasn’t mentioned much lately is the widely debunked idea that vaccines cause autism, though that is a drum he has banged repeatedly in the past. It’s that history that causes members of the autism advocacy community concern, worrying that Kennedy’s promise to begin having answers to the causes of autism by September is just a pretext to reach a predetermined conclusion. “It's become clear that the goal of the administration is to announce that they have found data proving that vaccines cause autism, but not to focus on finding the actual causes,” says Alison Singer, the founder of the Autism Science Foundation—which raises funds for autism research—and the mother of an adult daughter with what she describes as profound autism. “That question has been asked and answered. There is no link between autism and vaccines. [The risk is that] the administration announces vaccines cause autism and then declares the case closed and stops funding autism research that focuses on finding the actual causes.” Those causes begin with genetics. One 2020 study conducted by Harvard’s and MIT’s jointly run Broad Institute found 102 genes associated with an increased risk of developing autism. “I imagine that like me, the many leading companies and academic sites that are focusing on genetically guided treatments for causes of profound autism would find it disquieting that the head of HHS is unaware of the state of the field, in spite of having access to national and international leaders in the field,” says Dr. Joseph Buxbaum, Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and Genetics and Genomic Sciences at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. That’s not to say genes are entirely dispositive; having genes associated with the condition does not mean a child will inevitably develop it. Other factors can come into play. According to one 2022 study, exposure to chemicals such as pesticides and phthalates, as well as air pollution, may awaken sleeping autism genes, as can nutritional deficiencies. That is at least partly in keeping with Kennedy’s charge that environmental toxins play a role. Parental age may also be involved, with older mothers and fathers more likely to have an autistic child than younger parents. Hotez cites at least one medication—depakote, an anti-seizure drug—that may also have an autism link if taken by a mother when she is pregnant. Kennedy, Hotez says, made a “false statement” in claiming that the scientific community denies that there are any environmental factors at play. “I’ve said to RFK Jr. that there could be an environmental component, but not vaccines, because autism occurs in fetal brain development well before kids ever see vaccines.” Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, also believes that Kennedy’s stated goal to begin determining the roots of autism—a condition that has yielded its secrets only slowly over decades of research—by September is nonsense. Offit points to other claims Kennedy has made as illustrative of what he sees as a fast and loose relationship with scientific fact. “Where's the evidence, for example, that taking fluoride out of the drinking water is beneficial? Because the CDC lists that as one of its top 10 public health achievements,” says Offit. “Where's the evidence that says that not eating ultra processed foods makes you healthier? It certainly sounds right. I’d just like to see the data.” The Brookings Institute and others point to a 2021 statement Kennedy made in which he said Black people should be put on a different vaccination schedule from that of whites because their immune systems respond differently. During Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat from Maryland, called him out on this position. Kennedy stuck by it. All of this raises critics’ doubts that Kennedy could be anything like a fair and knowledgeable arbiter of the roots of autism—much less that an HHS under his direction could determine those roots in the next five months. “When he comes out and says we're going to find the cause of autism by September, it’s naive. It's almost childlike, because it's like saying we're going to know the cause of cancer by September,” says Hotez. “Everyone knows there are multiple different forms of cancer, there are multiple different forms of autism, multiple different forms of cancer genes, multiple different forms of autism genes. People like myself have spent hours trying to tutor him on all this, and he just doesn’t listen.”

How Abortion Access Could Change for Veterans

Abortion rights advocates are concerned that the Trump Administration will reinstate an abortion ban at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical facilities, rolling back the Biden Administration’s efforts to expand access for veterans and their beneficiaries. Before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the VA had banned abortion under any circumstances and prohibited its medical providers from counseling patients about abortion. But after the court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Biden Administration enacted a rule allowing VA medical facilities to offer abortion counseling and abortion care to veterans and their beneficiaries in certain situations, including if the health or life of the pregnant person is at risk or if the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest. Even if the VA facility is based in a state that has banned or restricted abortion, medical providers there can still provide abortion care in these limited instances. Last month, the Trump Administration’s VA submitted for review an interim final rule regarding reproductive health services, according to the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. There’s no further information or details on what the rule says. The VA did not respond to a request for comment, and the White House did not respond to a request for comment by press time. But abortion rights advocates fear that the rule will repeal the Biden-era policy, preventing veterans and their beneficiaries from obtaining abortion care at VA facilities across the country—both in states where abortion is legal and in those that have restricted it. “If they fully rescind the rule, we would be going back to a complete ban on abortion for veterans through the [VA] health care system,” says Freya Riedlin, senior federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “That was already bad before the Biden Administration, which added in these exceptions, but now we’re living in a completely different landscape.” Twelve states have banned abortion in nearly all situations, and four have banned it after six weeks of pregnancy (which is before many people even know they’re pregnant). According to National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonprofit and nonpartisan advocacy organization, more than 55% of women veterans of reproductive age live in states that have banned or are likely to ban abortion. “For some of those veterans in those states with bans, the VA is the only place where they are able to obtain abortion care in those states,” says Cassie Byard, a veteran and the communications manager for Minority Veterans of America. “If that current policy is rescinded, many who might need an abortion would be forced to travel to other states to reach a clinic.” That could lead to delays in care, or even force people to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, she says, since the logistics of traveling out of state—cost, taking time off work, arranging childcare—are insurmountable for some people. For veterans who use the VA as their primary form of health care, going to a medical provider outside the VA would also incur out-of-pocket costs that may not be affordable, Byard says. According to Riedlin, if the VA rescinds the Biden-era policy in its entirety, it would represent the tightest restriction on abortion in the country. “In states that have total bans on abortion, generally, at least in writing, there’s some kind of a life [of the pregnant person] exception, even if it’s narrow,” she says. “We’ve seen that the narrow exceptions do not work—exceptions to abortion bans still have resulted in refusals of care that have threatened the lives and health of pregnant people. But if this rule is rescinded, even the pretense of leaving exceptions for the life of a veteran would not be there.” The Biden Administration had also made efforts to help facilitate travel for active service members and their families to access reproductive health care services, including abortion. The policy allowed active service members and their families to take paid leave and get reimbursed for out-of-state travel to access abortion or other reproductive health care, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), that was not available through the military. But soon after Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense (DoD), was confirmed, the department struck down that policy. A DoD official said in a statement shared with TIME that it’s the department’s policy “that taxpayer dollars shall not be used to fund, promote, or reimburse Service members or dependents for non-covered abortion-related travel expenses” and that rescinding the Biden-era rule was “consistent with these principles.” The official added that the new policy doesn’t prohibit active service members from accessing certain reproductive health care services not covered by the military health care program, such as IVF. During Doug Collins’s confirmation hearing to be the VA Secretary, he was asked about the Biden-era VA policy on abortion. He claimed that a 1992 law bars the VA from providing abortion care, but said the VA would look at the Biden-era rule and “see if it complies with the law.” The Biden Administration had previously argued that a 1996 law allowing the VA to offer medical services determined to be “needed” can include abortion care. “If they decide to roll back abortion access, it’s a total slap in the face to anybody who has served,” says Jackii Wang, senior legislative analyst at the National Women’s Law Center. “I’ve talked to a lot of veterans who tell me that they fought for all of our fundamental freedoms just to turn around and find out that those freedoms are being taken away from them.” Byard calls the possible rollback a “cruel betrayal.” Fourteen years ago, when she gave birth to her son, she hemorrhaged. She says she also has an autoimmune disease that is not conducive to pregnancy, and so having more children could be dangerous for her health. While she says she was fortunate to have been able to get a tubal ligation outside of the VA to prevent her getting pregnant again (through employer-sponsored health care), that procedure is “not fool proof.” She now lives in Tennessee, which has banned abortion in nearly all circumstances. Byard says abortion is a “human right,” and fears that other veterans at risk of pregnancy complications who live in states with bans or restrictions may not be able to receive care. She worries that a VA abortion ban will disproportionately affect people of color, people with disabilities, people who come from low-income households, and people in the LGBTQ+ community. “Stripping away veterans’ access to reproductive health care is a betrayal of the sacrifice and service that folks have made to protect the rights and freedoms of everyone in this nation, and that is supposed to include them,” Byard says. “We should not be taking away rights from anyone.”

What to Know About Head Start, the Early Childhood Education Program the Trump Administration Is Proposing to Eliminate

The Trump Administration, which has promised to dismantle the Department of Education, has come after higher education—freezing funding for elite universities and revoking international student visas. Now, it’s targeting early childhood education. As the White House prepares to send Congress its 2026 fiscal year budget request, a 64-page internal preliminary budget proposal obtained by the Washington Post, according to an April 16 report, revealed plans of deep financial cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), accounting for roughly a third of the department’s discretionary budget Among the programs targeted for cuts is Head Start, which has for 60 years provided comprehensive early childhood education and care for low-income families. “The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations and performance standards for any form of education,” the document reportedly explains. The plan to fully eliminate Head Start, which was among Project 2025’s controversial policy blueprint and first reported to be in the Trump Administration’s upcoming budget proposal earlier this month by USA Today, would impact about 750,000 children, according to the nonprofit National Head Start Association (NHSA), and has been met with strong backlash from Democrats. Here’s what to know about the program. Head Start’s history and effectiveness Since the program began in 1965 under President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” Head Start has promoted school readiness and development for over 40 million children from birth to age 5. Besides education, its free services also include meals, medical and dental screenings, and social assistance. Families eligible under federal poverty guidelines must apply to the program to receive the benefits. During its launch, Johnson called the program, which was then under the Office of Economic Opportunity, “one of the most constructive, and one of the most sensible, and also one of the most exciting.” Throughout the years, the program has increased in scope and funding under both Democratic and Republican administrations, and its budget exceeded $1 billion in 1984. For fiscal year 2025, Congress authorized a budget of about $12 billion for Head Start. But there’s been debate over how effective the program is at improving learning and health outcomes. In 1985, HHS conducted a meta-analysis of research on Head Start and concluded: In the long run, cognitive and socioemotional test scores of former Head Start students do not remain superior to those of disadvantaged children who did not attend Head Start,” which critics have long used to claim that the program is ineffective. A 2010 HHS Impact Study also found that “the advantages children gained during their time in Head Start and up to age 4 yielded only a few statistically significant differences in outcomes at the end of 1st grade,” which has been commonly referred to as a “fade out” effect. Former TIME columnist Joe Klein argued in 2011 for axing the entire program, writing: “In these straitened times, we need world-class education programs, from infancy on up. But we can no longer afford to be sloppy about dispensing cash—whether it’s subsidies for oil companies or Head Start—to programs that do not produce a return.” But advocates say Head Start is effective—a range of studies have shown positive long-term results from the program, such as reducing adult poverty and increasing the likelihood of higher educational attainments as well as even improving future parenting practices—but is hampered by underfunding and shortstaffing and needs to be bolstered rather than cut. The Associated Press reported on April 16 that some Head Start-backed preschools across the country have had to close this year due to delays in funding already appropriated by Congress. Reactions to the proposal to eliminate Head Start NHSA executive director Yasmina Vinci told USA Today that eliminating the program’s funding would be “catastrophic,” adding: “We urge every parent, every American, and every believer in the American dream to reach out to their elected officials to express their outrage about such a proposal.” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D, Conn.), a ranking member of the House Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee, dubbed the Trump budget proposal “Every Child Left Behind,” a play on the name of the George W. Bush Administration’s “No Child Left Behind” education policy, in an April 14 statement. “Head Start has had broad, bipartisan support since it was created—this is not a Republican or Democratic issue,” DeLauro said, adding that eliminating Head Start “to pay for tax cuts for billionaires would be an unrivaled and unthinkable betrayal of middle class, working class, and vulnerable families who need help with the cost of living.” Gov. Tony Evers (D, Wis.) posted on X on April 15 that the Trump Administration “is once again going back on their word, and now, HeadStart programs that more than 10,000 kids and their families across our state depend on are at risk. I will fight any action that messes with our kids and families.” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D, Minn.) posted on X on April 16 that the Trump Administration’s proposed elimination of Head Start “would be disastrous for hundreds of thousands of children and families, who would no longer have access to early education. We need to invest in our kids, not turn our backs on them.” And Sen. Patty Murray, (D, Wash.) said in an April 16 statement, “As he works to give more tax breaks to billionaires like himself, Donald Trump is doing everything he can to destroy Head Start.” Trump wants to “rip pre-K and essential support away from families nationwide,” Murray added, noting: “Democrats won’t let a proposal like that go anywhere in Congress—but make no mistake: Trump is already doing all he can to wreck the program on his own,” in reference to the recent withholding of already-appropriated federal funding. “I’m going to keep fighting back with all I’ve got,” Murray said, “because we’ve got to keep mobilizing and opposing this administration’s cruel agenda to help billionaires and hurt working families.”

Joe Biden Launches a Comeback No One Is Asking For

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. The speaker had an alarming warning for his audience: for the first time ever, Social Security benefits may not reach beneficiaries this month thanks to cuts to the government office that handles them. But if the message to the gathering of advocates for disabled persons on Tuesday night was urgent, the delivery was all-too-familiar. Folks, let’s put this in perspective,” former President Joe Biden intoned. “In the 90 years since Franklin Roosevelt created the Social Security system, people have always gotten their Social Security checks. They’ve gotten them during wartime. During recessions. During a pandemic. No matter what, they got them. Now, for the first time ever, that might change. It would be calamity for millions of families.” It was Biden’s first public speech since leaving the White House, and it brought it all back. There was the former President’s favorite feigned indifference to his 2020 rival, referring to “This Guy” as a stand-in for Trump. There were the cliches: “They’re shooting first and aiming later,” Biden said. And there were the awkward sentence constructions. “In fewer than 100 days, this new Administration has done so much damage and so much destruction. It’s kind of breathtaking it happened that soon.” It’s the comeback no one is asking for, starting just 85 days after Biden left the White House. There is a rhythm to most post-presidencies, with most Commanders-in-Chief stepping back for a period out of the spotlight. Trump, of course, defied trends, but Obama traveled the globe and palled around with his celebrity friends. George W. Bush retreated to Texas to take up oil painting and largely swore off politics. Bill Clinton took a (brief) minute to cede the spotlight to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who assumed office as New York’s junior Senator with 17 days left on her time as First Lady. All began work on their Presidential libraries, quietly raising money behind the scenes. Biden has taken a different path since stepping down. He has been back in Washington every couple of weeks for meetings about his post-presidential life. Last month he came to pick up a lifetime achievement award from one of his most loyal unions, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. He popped up at a Model UN event in New York and this weekend for a Passover seder with Delaware’s Governor. He appeared in black tie for opening night of Othello on Broadway, snubbing another star-studded play, Good Night and Good Luck led by George Clooney who penned a brutal op-ed urging Biden to leave the 2024 race, earning permanent exile from the Biden orbit. Closer to home, Biden has started on the outline for his memoirs. He has scaled-back his calls to pals on Capitol Hill, taking a breather from the day-to-day political brawl. To the bewilderment of even his best allies in the Senate, there has been no hard movement on a presidential library. And he has done zero fundraising in an environment where dollars get harder to raise the further the asking party is from the action. Some of Biden’s most excuse-prone donors say they are not even sure where Biden plans to build his library, whenever he does get around to it. If he's less interested in fundraising than in getting back in the public eye, it may be because he wants to draw the contrast with Trump's tumultuous start to his second term. Democratic faithful readily point to what they insist is Biden’s record of accomplishment: a tax credit that led to the lowest rate of childhood poverty in U.S. history; millions in spending to ease the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic; huge subsidies for U.S. businesses through investments in the clean-energy sector; and an economy that added more than 16 million jobs. And Biden clearly relished the opportunity to step back on stage, joining the Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled conference in Chicago Tuesday. His political instinct isn’t wrong that Social Security is a good re-entry point: 73 million Social Security recipients are older and disabled, and even if the checks do get out this month, Republicans are on a collision course over funding the program. Trump has repeatedly promised he would not cut it, but the math doesn’t add up in the spending plans he is pushing. Congress is pursuing a spending framework that makes deep but vague cuts, and there are really only a few piles of money big enough to cover them. The Senate framework sets a baseline of $4 billion in reductions, while the House is chasing at least $1.5 trillion in spending slashes. Meanwhile, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, helmed by billionaire Elon Musk, has already cut the Social Security Administration by 10% and shuttered dozens of regional offices, putting an unsustainable stress on the system. Musk has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and suggested cuts to automatic spending programs have to be on the table. White House officials insist that he’s merely talking about fraud, but Democrats don’t buy it. It’s why Democrats, in search of a coherent message in the post-Biden era, have rallied around threats to Social Security. House Democrats used Tuesday as a national day of action on the entitlement program. Senate Democrats launched their first ads of the cycle on Tuesday, targeting Republican incumbents in Maine and North Carolina. Republicans can hardly hold public events without confronting enthusiastic protests demanding no changes to the retirement safety net. Meanwhile huge audiences have turned out for Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even deep-red places like Utah, while Sen. Cory Booker’s record-breaking marathon speech on the floor drew rapturous reactions. But Biden's Tuesday evening event reminded everyone why the former President hadn’t been able to generate the same enthusiasm. Biden joked about his half-century in public service, pointing to legislation he championed as a lawmaker, “as a United States Senator 400 years ago.” At another point, he mocked Musk’s obsession with zombie beneficiaries. “By the way, those 300-year-old folks getting that Social Security, I want to meet them,” Biden said. “Hell of a thing, man. I’m looking at longevity. Because it’s hell when you turn 40 years old.” The 27-minute speech Tuesday gave no one nostalgia for Biden. Even fewer think him sticking around is going to fix any of the long-term, structural problems facing Democrats. Biden may want a comeback, but if he pushes his luck, he could find himself in a lonely camp.

What to Know About the Universities That Have Had Their Funding Targeted by the Trump Administration

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.

Can a U.S. Citizen Be Deported? Trump’s Comments Raise Legal Alarms

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”

Why China Laughs at the Idea of Americans Taking Their Manufacturing Jobs

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.”

Trump Escalates Fight Over Deportees in El Salvador, is ‘All For’ Sending Americans There Next

It didn't take long for the Oval Office meeting Monday between President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele to turn ominous. In his opening remarks, the El Salvadoran strongman offered to assist the U.S. with what he said were its crime problems. “We know you have a crime problem and a terrorism problem we can help with,” Bukele said. By the end of the ad hoc press conference 40 minutes later, Trump and his aides had taken him up on the offer by suggesting their own harsh and potentially illegal moves. First, Trump’s aides made clear they wouldn’t comply with a Supreme Court order to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego García, whom the administration has admitted was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March and locked up in that country’s Terrorist Confinement Center, known as CECOT. Then Trump proposed sending U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to El Salvador, where prisoners are allegedly held incommunicado and face physical and mental abuse. It was a striking example of Trump’s approach to his second term in office: when faced with challenges to his authority, even over basic civil liberties, he has reached for even more power. Asked by a reporter whether he was open to deporting U.S. citizens to El Salvador, Trump said, “You think there’s a special category of person? They’re as bad as anybody that comes in. We have bad ones too. I’m all for it.” Observers went into the press conference expecting the two leaders to discuss the Abrego García case. After the Trump administration admitted to mistakenly deporting the Maryland man, a district court had instructed officials on April 4 to “facilitate and effectuate” his release from CECOT and return him to the U.S. The Supreme Court noted on April 10 that the Trump administration had admitted to violating “a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador” and unanimously ordered the government to “facilitate” his release. The Court acknowledged the President's powers to conduct foreign affairs and instructed the district court to clarify its order that the Trump administration must “effectuate” Abrego García’s return to the U.S. Asked whether the administration was going to comply with the court’s order, Trump asked his Attorney General Pam Bondi to respond. “First and foremost, he was illegally in our country,” Bondi said. She said that in 2019 an immigration court and a board of appeals had both ruled that he was a member of the criminal gang MS-13, which Trump has declared a terrorist organization. “That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us,” she said, adding that if they did, the U.S. would provide a plane. When a reporter asked Bukele whether he would send Abrego García back to the U.S., he said, “Of course I’m not going to do it.” Trump was then asked whether he would consider sending U.S. citizens to be imprisoned in El Salvador if they committed violent crimes. Trump welcomed the idea and said that Bondi, who sat on one of the Oval Office couches near him, is “studying” the laws. “If we can do that, that’s good,” Trump said. “I’m talking about violent people.” El Salvador's prisons have been called out by Human Rights Watch for "cases of torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention, severe violations of due process and inhumane conditions, such as lack of access to adequate healthcare and food." Sending U.S. citizens there could cross the 8th Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and violate restrictions against imprisoning people more than 500 miles from home that Trump signed into law in 2018 as part of the First Step Act. Bukele relishes being called the “coolest dictator” and has brushed aside civil rights in El Salvador as part of his crackdown on gang violence. Abrego García had been living in Maryland with his wife and three children—all U.S. citizens. In 2019, immigration officials said he was a member of MS-13 and began removal proceedings. One immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals agreed, but those decisions were overridden when another immigration judge determined that Abrego García and his family had shown the gang in El Salvador threatened and harassed his family. Abrego García was arrested in March and mistakenly added to one of the flights, the Trump administration has said. In the April 4 ruling, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego García’s release from prison in El Salvador to ensure his deportation case is handled correctly and instructed officials to report on what actions were being taken. She called into question whether Abrego García had a gang affiliation at all, writing that the evidence the government produced “consisted of nothing more” than a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and a “vague, uncorroborated allegation” from a confidential informant that Abrego García belonged to an MS-13 clique in New York, “a place he has never lived.” Abrego García’s case raises questions about whether the Trump administration has erroneously accused some people held in El Salvador of being gang members and then refused to correct their mistake. “As Americans, we should all be concerned by reports that 75 percent of the migrants the Trump Administration has sent to CECOT have no criminal record,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Since Trump came to office on Jan. 20, his administration has flown more than 200 people from the U.S. to El Salvador to be imprisoned in CECOT.