Senate Republicans had gathered for one of their regular private lunches last Wednesday when Rand Paul commanded their attention. As Senators sipped diet sodas and grazed on sandwiches, the Kentucky lawmaker went through a slide deck with charts and statistics in service of a bold proposal: come out against President Trump’s tariffs. The arguments in Paul's presentation, which has not been previously reported, were not a surprise to his audience. One of the most prominent libertarians on Capitol Hill, he’s a fierce proponent of free trade. But his attempt to corral colleagues against the Trump trade agenda was seen as a provocation to the President’s close allies. “The public feels like free trade has sold us out,” Paul said, according to two Senators who were present, “but Americans are richer because of it.” Claiming that free trade agreements have spurred upward social mobility, one of his slides asserted that the middle class has shrunk in recent years only because more people had moved into the upper class. “Basically, he was saying that everyone was getting richer during Joe Biden’s presidency,” one Senator tells TIME. For some in the room, Paul’s rebellion reflected their deep unease over Trump’s protectionism, which has rattled stock markets, shaken consumer confidence, and strained America’s relationships with its allies. Economists now fear the U.S. is heading into a recession. But for many others, it was heresy. Tariffs are not only a Trumpian fixation, they were one of his core campaign pledges and a bedrock of his plan to reshore manufacturing jobs back to the United States. To that end, Paul was asking them to undermine the President, a political suicide mission given Trump's grip over the GOP base. Among Congressional Republicans, Paul has been more recalcitrant than most. He refused to endorse Trump in the 2024 election. He was the only GOP Senator to vote against the Trump-backed government funding bill last week. While tariffs are anathema to plenty of Republicans who preach the gospel of unfettered markets, Paul is one of the only members of Congress currently speaking out against them. “When the markets tumble like this, it pays to listen,” he recently wrote on social media. Behind the scenes, he’s been even more aggressive, courting members of Congress to join his renegade mission. This makes Paul an anomaly. At a time when most elected Republicans are either America First true-believers or traditional conservatives who have bent the knee, Paul has emerged as a thorn in Trump’s side. “They have very different ideologies,” says Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP strategist. “Rand Paul is a libertarian and Donald Trump is a populist, and they have very different views about appropriate policies given those two different ideologies.” Paul isn’t the only Republican to push back on Trump. His fellow Kentuckian Mitch McConnell has voted against some of the President’s cabinet picks, such as Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. But it’s easier for McConnell than the rest; he’s retiring at the end of this term. Other GOP Senators who have dipped their toes in the opposition have eventually acquiesced under pressure. Sen. Joni Ernst and Sen. Thom Tillis each expressed reservations about Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary. But after an onslaught of social media harassment and abuse—combined with the threat of a Trump-endorsed, Elon Musk-funded primary challenger—they both voted to send Hegseth to the Pentagon. In some ways, Paul has been less obstreperous than them. He voted to confirm nearly all of Trump’s cabinet nominees and rhetorically sought to smooth the waters last month. “A few people may have noticed that I resisted an enthusiastic endorsement of Donald Trump during the election,” Paul wrote on X. “But now, I’m amazed by the Trump cabinet (many of whom I would have picked). I love his message to the Ukrainian warmongers, and along with his DOGE initiative shows I was wrong to withhold my endorsement.” The detente didn’t last long. He has since become a vigorous antagonist of Trump’s stiff tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, which the President insists will galvanize an American industrial renaissance. Trump and Paul have a history of acrimony. When they each sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Trump opened one of the first debates by ridiculing his rival. “Rand Paul shouldn’t even be on this stage,” he said. “He’s got one percent in the polls and how he got up here—there’s far too many people up here anyway.” Paul dropped out five months later. The two also have ideological disagreements. Paul is an intellectual disciple of the so-called Chicago School of Economics, most associated with Milton Friedman, which argues for laissez-faire economic policy. Trump, for his part, has ushered in a wave of national populism, with protectionist policies as a pillar of his economic agenda. He has called tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Tariffs may not be as beloved by all Republicans, but Trump has cobbled a right-wing coalition together by tethering his trade posture to a classic business-friendly program of cutting taxes and regulations. The mass movement he leads has also effectively captured the GOP, which operates in service to him. In the other Capitol chamber, House Republicans recently relinquished their own authority when it comes to trade, voting earlier this month to block their ability to challenge levies imposed by the President. The Trump Administration’s trade war could hit Paul’s constituents hard. After Trump announced tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to the United States, EU nations threatened last week to slap a 50% tariff on American whiskey, putting Kentucky bourbon in the crosshairs of a global trade war. (Trump struck back hours later by threatening a 200% tariff on European alcohol.) While Paul has little influence on the President, he does have a connection in the White House. One of Trump’s top policy advisers, Sergio Gor, used to be a spokesman in Paul’s Senate office. Sources close to Trump expect Gor to serve as an intermediary if Paul’s vote becomes crucial to securing an extension of the 2017 tax cuts. Paul, along with a handful of other Senators, have expressed doubts about adding to the national debt. Paul’s misgivings haven’t yet resulted in an impasse. But with Republicans holding a slim 53-seat Senate majority, that remains a future possibility. And if the tax bill creates a confrontation between the two, it may not be the last. By resisting parts of the Trump agenda, Paul may be setting himself on a collision course for 2028, when he’s up for reelection. “The thing about Trump,” says a senior GOP Senate aide. “He has a very long memory.”

In the last two months, Elon Musk has inserted himself into a range of government functions on the grounds that he and his team, the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), have an urgent mandate to root out “government waste.” In the early rollout, Musk’s team claimed to see fraud everywhere: he reported that FEMA was sending migrants to “luxury hotels” and reposted a claim that USAID is “basically a form of money laundering.” And in a recent interview with the Fox Business Network, he announced, “The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — most of the federal spending is entitlements — that’s the big one to eliminate.” Entitlement spending includes Medicaid, Medicare, and, of course, Social Security. Musk has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” a direct accusation that support for the benefit is for chumps. He seems to be laying the groundwork for a full-scale assault on the most popular redistributive program in America with a line of thinking that society is, well, for suckers. Sharing, cooperating, promise-keeping, and helping—that kind of earnestness is for losers, not leaders. Musk purports to believe that many federal functions, especially within agencies like the EPA, the Department of Education, and even the FBI, harbor freeloaders at every turn. In February, he demanded that federal employees email DOGE with an accounting of what they had accomplished in the previous week, posting on X, “The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all! In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks. In other words, there is outright fraud.” He has made the same claim about deceased Social Security beneficiaries, apparently based on a misunderstanding of the underlying coding, according to reporting by WIRED. On the one hand, many of the boldest claims appear so easily refutable that the whole campaign may be destined to implode. But I have been thinking about and studying the social science of feeling scammed for almost two decades, and I know that the emotional efficacy of sucker rhetoric distorts our moral and political reasoning. Even when the accusations are unfounded, even when the risks are small, the mere possibility of being a sucker can be psychologically potent enough to undermine a rational preference for cooperation. It is all too easy to convince people that compassion and integrity are illusory—that, as historian Anne Applebaum wrote in 2018, in Trump’s America “morality is for losers.” Understanding the rhetorical power of warning Americans that they are being played for suckers, at a personal and visceral level, was part of the winning strategy of the 2016 Trump candidacy. He held himself out as the voice of reason who could see humane asylum policies and international cooperation for what they really were: traps for the unwary. Now the appeal of that rhetoric is being put to a new test. Psychologically, the fear of being a sucker is a distinctly aversive feeling. Most people are so acutely attuned to the threat of feeling duped that even minor scam risks can contaminate their decision-making, both in terms of everyday financial and social decision-making, and also at the level of their core values and deeper goals. Trust is risky, and there is ample evidence from social science that the risk of being conned sparks a special risk aversion. People will go way out of their way to avoid even the suggestion that they are about to play the fool. In a famous study from 2011, research participants shown a promising startup company were willing to gamble a lot when the 5% downside risk was due to overestimating market demand, but willing to invest much less if that same 5% downside risk was the small chance that the founders were “fraudsters.” Same risk, different psychological resonance, and perhaps why Trump and Musk’s deployment of that sort of language is so effective. Most of us recoil, or retaliate, at the first suggestion that we might be taken advantage of; as threats go, the warning that you’re a sucker works. Since he came into office last month, Trump has gone after a range of vulnerable targets. Whatever you think about the rightness or competence of the underlying missions, the human harm has been real and widespread. Patients have been turned away from lifesaving medical intervention abroad; American government and university workers are losing their jobs; visas are being revoked. Real people, with lives and obligations, are suffering. We might think, or hope, that Musk and Trump are overplaying their hands. Billionaires targeting workers, refugees, and SSI recipients—the optics ought to be terrible. But the relentless search for scammers coming from marginalized groups has a reliable psychological appeal. One of the core insights of Trump’s populism is that he seems to see how the sucker rhetoric is tied to status anxiety. There is an extra humiliation, and thus an extra threat, to being suckered by someone you think should be below you on the social ladder, behind you in the line for promotion or priority seating. (“If they can put one over on me, what does that make me?” the thinking goes.) Trump’s obsessive policing of who’s the sucker has given him political clout with a populace trained to be vigilant to the prospect of being scammed—even by the least plausible fraudsters. In the meantime, scammy behavior by rich men is routinely coded as “savvy” instead of grotesque. So it invites the question: who’s conning who right now? The line between the helper and the pawn is easily manipulated. All it takes is some vague warnings about government waste and suddenly paying your taxes means you’re a dupe; after a few headlines about 150-year-olds on Social Security, a modest retirement benefit looks like a reward for cheating the system. But that whole framework is wrong. It is tempting to respond to Musk’s numbers with direct refutation (no, DOGE has not saved taxpayers 115 billion dollars), but it’s better to refuse the premise altogether. We can support government efficiency and nonetheless insist that it is destructive to approach our most important cooperative ventures with rank suspicion. Living in a society requires trust, and with that trust comes some vulnerability. Alleviating human suffering is the right goal for a government to have. And Social Security, a self-funded program that keeps millions of American retirees out of poverty every year, achieves widespread good with remarkable efficiency. The fear of playing the sucker is often weaponized for political ends, but it can only cover so much real harm, and right now, real harm abounds. One laid-off IRS worker—a Trump supporter himself—described the juxtaposition to NBC10, the sucker’s stakes versus the human stakes. “You know, when he talks about government waste and all that, yes, I’m behind it. I believe there is a lot of stuff in the government that needs fixing.” So far, though, all he sees is a billionaire “coming in with a wrecking ball and destroying people’s lives for no reason.”

The Trump Administration appeared to openly defy multiple court orders over the weekend, deepening concerns among Democrats and legal experts that the constitutional crisis many feared when President Donald Trump was elected has now arrived. On Saturday, federal officials ignored an order from Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who had directed the government to turn around deportation flights carrying Venezuelan detainees. Instead, the planes continued on their course to El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally, boasted that the 238 detainees would be held for at least a year in the country’s Terrorism Confinement Center. “Oopsie … Too late,” Bukele wrote on social media, a post later amplified by White House officials. Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed gratitude to the Salvadoran president, pointedly ignoring the judge’s ruling. A day earlier, in Boston, a similar scenario played out. A federal judge had issued a restraining order to block the deportation of Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University medical professor with a valid visa returning from a family visit to Lebanon. Despite the order, she was deported anyway. Taken together, the incidents suggest that the Trump Administration is increasingly willing to brush aside judicial authority in pursuit of its policy goals. It follows a pattern in which Trump and his allies have sought to test the limits of judicial power, sometimes circumventing rulings, other times attacking judges outright. The country is “far beyond” a constitutional crisis, says Kim Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a former assistant U.S. attorney. “A constitutional crisis is the accumulation of unchecked power in one branch. We’ve seen now for weeks the Trump Administration ignoring acts of Congress,” says Wehle, noting that the President has ignored Congress’ constitutional power of the purse by withholding federal funds and by terminating federal employees and senior officials without cause. Other legal scholars, while alarmed, hesitate to label the administration’s actions as an outright crisis. Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, describes the administration as challenging the courts thus far up to a point. “I don’t want to call it a constitutional crisis because I’m waiting to see them say in their own words, ‘We will not comply with court orders anymore,’” says Frost, who is the director of UVA’s Immigration, Migration, and Human Rights Program. “They have yet to say that. And while they’ve done some things to violate corners of the margins, they have so far followed along.” She adds, “I’m very concerned and think they’re being very disingenuous…but I would not say that they have yet crossed the line of suggesting they no longer feel that they need to abide by the rule of law.” Yet signs of open defiance are emerging. White House officials have said the judge’s order came after planes carrying the Venezuelan migrants had already left the U.S. Tom Homan, Trump’s White House “border czar,” dismissed the weekend’s rulings, telling Fox News on Monday that the court orders had come too late to make a difference. “We’re not stopping,” Homan said. “I don’t care what the judges think.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, when asked to clarify those comments Monday afternoon, insisted that the Administration is complying with the court order, even though the planes with Venezuelan deportees landed in El Salvador hours after the judge gave verbal instructions to Justice Department attorneys that the flights must return to the U.S. “We are quite confident in that, and we are wholly confident that we are going to win this case in court,” Leavitt told reporters. She also said there are “questions about whether a verbal order carries the same weight as a … written order.” Federal judges are now weighing how to respond to cases that may end up before the Supreme Court. Judge Boasberg scheduled a Monday evening hearing to determine whether the administration defied his ruling. In Massachusetts, Judge Leo T. Sorokin has demanded an explanation from the government for why Dr. Alawieh was deported in apparent violation of his order. The Administration says it invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—a wartime law rarely used in modern history—to deport Venezuelans who the government say belong to the Tren de Aragua gang, without due process. Federal courts have repeatedly ruled against the administration’s use of emergency powers, including on immigration and border security, yet officials have continued to push forward in ways that some see as ignoring or undermining the judiciary’s authority. In the case of Dr. Alawieh, who is Lebanese, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that she “openly admitted” to CBP officers her support for a Hezbollah leader and attended their funeral. “A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied,” the statement said. “This is commonsense security.” The official White House account on X said: “Bye-bye, Rasha” with a hand waving emoji. Alawieh was sent back to Lebanon, even though the judge ordered on Friday that she be kept in the U.S. and brought to a court hearing on Monday. Legal scholars warn that if courts allow such defiance to go unpunished, the judiciary’s ability to serve as a check on executive power could be permanently weakened. “There is an accumulation of power in one place,” Wehle says. “That means Donald Trump becomes the law. The law is what he sees the law to be. He picks and chooses winners and losers.” The Trump Administration is working aggressively to shape public perception of both the deportations and its defiance of the courts as wins for the American people. Social media posts from administration officials and pro-Trump influencers have celebrated the deportations. One post showed a video of shackled men being led onto the planes, accompanied by Semisonic’s 1998 song “Closing Time.”

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 White House is trying to have it every way possible in a high-stakes dispute over its speedy deportation of hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador. It is unlikely to end tidily, which may very well have been the point all along. Witness Monday’s White House briefing, where Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had the unenviable task of simultaneously saying the administration was complying with a judge’s orders while arguing the same judge’s oral directives were not binding at all, all while also defending a senior White House aide saying on TV, when asked about those orders, “I don’t care what the judges think.” The whiplash of rhetoric seemed to carry just one commonality: the elasticity of facts and justifications. This Kafkaesque saga began late Friday, when President Donald Trump quietly signed an order availing himself of a wartime authority to carry out the mass deportations. According to the White House, 137 alleged gang members from Venezuela were sent to El Salvador, where military and law enforcement—and videographers—greeted them en route to a mega-prison that has been of major concern for human-rights advocates. Another 124 individuals were also shipped to San Salvador’s airfield under different federal laws. On Saturday, after word of the plan leaked, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg tried to block Trump from deporting the immigrants without hearings and told the administration to turn around planes carrying 261 migrants. When Boasberg told administration lawyers this, the planes were already out of U.S. airspace and, per some in the administration’s thinking, thus out of reach of the U.S. courts. By Sunday, the narrative fell into the predictable pattern of Trump allies arguing the legal merits of the exceptional executive powers remaining unchecked and the fecklessless of judges’ authorities. In the background, the nation’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reposted a social media message from Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele about the court’s attempts to intervene that boiled-down to raw schadenfreude: “Oopsie… Too late.” Trump lawyers are citing a 1798 law as the basis for booting the migrants from the country without a day in court, although in practice the law has not been used since World War II. Legal experts are divided on whether this is in bounds, but rather than keep the fight in the courts, Trump pals seem more than eager to throw multiple explanations into the ether to see which seems to gain the most traction. At Monday’s public press briefing, Leavitt seemed to be arguing on multiple planes of reality. Any of them may have merits, but cobbled together they came across like a desperate attempt to find justification. “This administration acted within the confines of the law,” Leavitt said. Left unsaid: the arbiter of the law, Boasberg, said those migrants needed to stay in the United States. “All of the planes subject to the written order of this judge departed U.S. soil,” Leavitt said, suggesting that planes traveling internationally were beyond the judge’s reach. Left unsaid: That argument may not fly and, regardless, a judge had signaled those planes should have stayed grounded. “There’s actually questions about whether a verbal order carries the same weight … as a written order, and our lawyers are determined to ask and answer those questions in court,” Leavitt said. Left unsaid: lawyers who ignore a judge seldom fare well. The timeline is a dramatic illustration of just how dynamic the state of play remained around all this. Boasberg, at 5 p.m. on Saturday, asked when the deportations would start. The court went into a recess so government lawyers could find out. The plane took off at 5:45 p.m. At 6:52 p.m., according to a must-clip timeline of the weekend from Just Security, Boasberg ordered the planes back to U.S. runways. The migrants landed at 8:02 p.m. All the while, Trump’s aides and allies are relishing this fight. Over the weekend, Trump’s White House was fairly brazen in boasting about how it outmaneuvered a judge, with even his top policy hand on border issues openly bragging about how the courts can’t stop the administration. “We’re not stopping,” border czar Tom Homan told Fox News. “I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.” All of which left Washington debating whether the Trump administration started all this Friday evening with the express goal of engineering a court showdown that could ultimately strengthen the executive branch’s power when it comes to immigration policy. It’s a playbook Americans may see repeatedly from this White House in the coming years: charge ahead too quickly for the courts to keep up, and trust that the administration’s lawyers and allies will keep the debate as muddy—and as disjointed—as possible.

Louis DeJoy is letting DOGE into the Postal Service. On Thursday, the Postmaster General told congressional leaders that he signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s cost-cutting operation, allowing it to help the USPS save money and remove bureaucratic bottlenecks, according to a copy of the letter obtained by TIME. “This is an effort aligned with our efforts,” DeJoy wrote, “as while we have accomplished a great deal, there is much more to be done.” But America’s most beloved and beleaguered government agency won’t be subject to the same hostile takeover as other federal departments. The Trump Administration has spared the Postal Service, an independent body that funds itself and has roughly 640,000 employees, from DOGE-inflicted pressure to shrink its workforce. Instead, DeJoy essentially sicced the Department of Government Efficiency on Congress. He assigned Musk’s adjutants to review what he describes as structural problems created by legislation passed in the 1970s. Referring to the Postal Reorganization Act, DeJoy said the agency’s retirement assets and workers compensation program were “mismanaged” by other federal departments. He cited unfunded mandates imposed on the USPS that cost between $6 billion and $11 billion annually, such as offering six-day mail delivery and maintaining post offices in remote areas. Perhaps most controversially, he called the Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees the Postal Service and approves price increases, an "unnecessary agency” that has lost the agency more than $50 billion. “The DOGE team was gracious enough to ask for the big problems that they can help us with,” DeJoy wrote to legislators. There is a certain irony to the DeJoy-DOGE arrangement. Since taking the helm in 2020, DeJoy has embarked on a 10-year plan to make the agency profitable and more efficient. He renegotiated contracts for air and ground transportation, saving the USPS $10 billion annually. He reduced the headquarters workforce by 20 percent, saving more than $200 million annually. He built new processing centers and centralized the delivery network. On Capitol Hill, he collaborated with Democrats and Republicans to rescind a 2006 law that required the USPS to pre-pay the next 50 years of health and retirement benefits for all of its employees—a rule that no other federal agency was forced to follow. Those changes led to the Postal Service making a $144 million profit in the final quarter of 2024, its first profitable period in years. Since then, he has done more to trim the USPS budget. Through a voluntary early retirement program launched in January, the agency is expected to shed 10,000 workers next month. In other words: DeJoy has been doing the purported work of DOGE before DOGE came around. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. The Postal Service still lags with on-time delivery and meeting its own service standards. DeJoy remains a controversial figure on both sides of the aisle; in December, he covered his ears during a House Oversight Committee hearing when a Republican member criticized his leadership of the agency. Read more: Louis DeJoy’s Surprising Second Act While DeJoy once predicted the USPS would break even by 2023, it lost $9.5 billion last year. Postal Service leaders argue they are only halfway through a ten-year plan. DeJoy’s transformations, they say, have put the agency on a path toward profitability, beating out FedEx and UPS, and preserving its ability to reach every American in every corner of the country. But DeJoy won’t be overseeing the effort much longer. Last month, he told the USPS Board of Governors to start looking for a successor, ending a five-year tenure running the agency through the COVID-19 pandemic, three elections that relied heavily on mail voting, and the implementation of a dramatic restructuring. It’s not clear what will come next for one of the only government agencies enshrined in the Constitution. President Donald Trump has floated proposals such as privatization and folding the USPS into the Commerce Department. Musk, for his part, has also called for privatizing the Post Office. “I think logically we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized," he told a conference this month. That remains unlikely. Either of those moves would require congressional authorization, and there’s no indication that majorities in either chamber would support that kind of disruption to a popular government agency that delivers to more than 167 million addresses every day. A collaboration between DeJoy and DOGE could offer an alternative. As a logistics expert and major Trump donor before becoming Postmaster General, DeJoy has credibility with the Musk-led initiative that others don’t. Rather than work against them, he’s working with them. The endgame may be to convince Congress to save the USPS from alternatives that most would rather avoid. “Fixing a broken organization that had experienced close to $100 billion in losses and was projected to lose another $200 billion, without a bankruptcy proceeding, is a daunting task,” DeJoy wrote to lawmakers. “Fixing a heavily legislated and overly regulated organization as massive, important, cherished, misunderstood, and debated as the United States Postal Service, with such a broken business model, is even more difficult.”

Buried in the trove of Executive Orders signed by President Donald Trump in his first weeks in office was a directive linked to last year’s campus protests over the Israel-Gaza war. The order called for the revocation of student visas for individuals suspected of sympathizing with Hamas. “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said in a White House fact sheet announcing the move. On Saturday night, agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) followed through on Trump's threat, detaining Mahmoud Khalil, an activist and former student of New York City's Columbia University, where pro-Palestinian demonstrations last year became a national lightning rod amid a debate about the Middle East conflict. Khalil, who was raised in Syria and is of Palestinian descent, played a prominent role in the public demonstrations at the university and served as a negotiator between protesters and university officials last spring. He graduated from Columbia with a master’s degree in December. Khalil’s situation immediately drew international attention because of the reason he was detained, and because, according to his lawyer Amy Greer, he holds a green card, which allows individuals to live and work permanently in the United States. In his notice to appear in immigration court, first reported by The Washington Post, the government said Khalil is a citizen of Algeria and that he could be deported under section 237 (a)(4)(C) (i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives the Secretary of State the authority to deport non-citizens when they have "reasonable ground to believe that [their] presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” The notice did not mention any crimes that the federal government believes Khalil may have committed. Khalil is currently being held at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, La., roughly 1,300 miles away from his apartment, according to an ICE database. His wife, who is eight months pregnant, is a U.S. citizen and detailed the arrest in a statement shared with TIME, though she has declined to use her name. In the statement, she says the couple were followed and confronted by ICE agents as they were returning from an Iftar dinner. She said an agent threatened to arrest her too if she didn’t go upstairs to their apartment. "We were not shown any warrant and the ICE officers hung up the phone on our lawyer," read her statement. Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center of Constitutional Rights who is on Khalil’s legal team, told reporters Wednesday that Khalil was arrested for his viewpoints, which Azmy warned could set a dangerous precedent. “Mr. Khalil’s detention has nothing to do with security,” he said. “It is only about repression. The United States government has taken the position that it can arrest, detain and seek to deport a lawful permanent resident, exclusively because of his peaceful, constitutionally protected activism, in this case, activism in support of Palestinian human rights and an end to the genocide in Gaza.” In a statement, Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said “Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” and linked his arrest to Trump’s Executive Order. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ultimately made the decision to try to deport Khalil, told reporters on Wednesday that the case was not about free speech: “This is about people that don't have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card." Khalil’s lawyers said that he felt compelled to speak out about the conflict in Gaza, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed since Israel began a bombing and ground campaign in response to Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7, 2023 attack. “He is committed to calling on the rest of the world to protect the rights of Palestinians under international law and to stop enabling violence against Palestinians,” his lawyers said in a court filing Monday. Trump’s immigration officials have not provided evidence to support their accusations against Khalil or other students. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday alleged that Khalil distributed pro-Hamas flyers on Columbia’s campus, a claim that his lawyers rejected. “Whatever flyers the White House spokesperson may have been talking about, that is certainly not in the government's position in court,” said Ramzi Kassem, the founding director of CLEAR, a legal clinic, who is part of Khalil’s legal team. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside New York City’s City Hall and Washington Square Park on Monday and Tuesday decrying his arrest; at least 13 people were arrested in connection to the protests, according to CNN. Additional events demanding Khalil’s release have taken place across the country, including at UCLA and Stanford, with more scheduled this week. Can a green card holder be deported? While green card holders enjoy many of the same rights as U.S. citizens, they can still face deportation under certain conditions, typically for criminal behavior or violations of immigration law, says Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired immigration law professor at Cornell Law School. Foreign nationals can also lose their visas for endorsing or being associated with terrorist groups, but only if the government can provide material evidence. The Trump Administration has not provided any written evidence to support Khalil’s deportation beyond Rubio’s determination under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Khalil’s lawyers have said there is no indication that their client has committed any crime or violated the terms of his residency, and that the Trump Administration appears to be targeting him for his political activism and vocal opposition to Israeli policies. Immigration law experts note that deporting a green card holder solely for their political beliefs would likely violate the First Amendment, which protects free speech and the right to protest. Yale-Loehr pointed to a Ragbir v. Homan, a 2018 decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that held that a non-citizen with a final removal order could not be removed if the removal was only because they were retaliating against their free speech. Revoking a green card is also quite rare, and typically requires a hearing before an immigration judge. The process is generally lengthy and requires clear evidence of wrongdoing, and given the immense backlogs in immigration courts, it could take years before he gets a hearing before an immigration judge. If Khalil’s green card is ultimately revoked as a result of his activism, immigration experts say it would mark a disturbing shift in how the U.S. government interprets the scope of its power over lawful permanent residents. The burden of proof in deportation cases In any deportation case, the burden of proof rests with the government to demonstrate that the individual has violated U.S. immigration laws. Typically, this would involve criminal convictions or other serious legal violations. In Khalil’s case, the government would need to prove that his actions go beyond protected political speech and that his associations or activities pose a genuine national security threat. His legal team maintains that there is no legitimate grounds for revoking his green card or detaining him. “The government would need to prove that he’s done something more than just speaking out, like offering material support to Hamas,” Yale-Loehr says. “That would be a ground of deportability.” “They can't deport only for free speech advocacy,” he adds, “but if they were able to prove that he offered material support to Hamas by donating to their cause or something, then that's obviously concerning.” Tom Homan, the Trump Administration’s border czar, told Fox Business on Monday that federal authorities “absolutely can” deport someone who is in the country legally: “I mean, did he violate the terms of his visa? Did he violate the terms of his residency here, you know, committing crimes, attacking Israeli students, locking down buildings, destroying property? Absolutely, any resident alien who commits a crime is eligible for deportation,” Homan added. On Wednesday, Homan went a step further and called Khalil a “national security threat,” claiming that “free speech has limitations.” "Coming to this country either on a visa or becoming a resident alien is a great privilege, but there are rules associated with that. You might have been able to get away with that stuff in the last administration, but not this administration," Homan said. Trump’s expanding use of executive power The Khalil case is part of a broader trend in which the Trump Administration has sought to expand its use of immigration law to remove individuals deemed to be a threat to the United States. The effort is in line with Trump’s actions from his first term, which included creating a task force to review whether individuals had lied on their immigration forms. In 2020, Trump’s Justice Department also created a new “Denaturalization Section” in its immigration office to identify naturalized immigrants to strip of their citizenship rights. Of the 228 denaturalization cases the DOJ has filed since 2008, about 40% were brought during Trump's four years in office, the New York Times reported at the time. The Khalil case signals that the Trump Administration is willing to employ those powers far more aggressively than it did during Trump's first term, a shift that could have far-reaching implications for civil rights and free speech in America.

Aday after the Department of Education announced deep cuts expected to gut the agency, President Trump was dismissive of the fired workers, initially saying he felt “very badly” before suggesting many were of little use. “Many of them don’t work at all,” Trump said, sitting in the Oval Office next to the visiting Prime Minister of Ireland, Micheál Martin. “Many of them didn’t show up to work unfortunately.” The Department of Education announced Tuesday that it was cutting 1,300 workers, its latest move toward Trump’s plan to shrivel the federal government’s role in education. The agency’s workforce, which had 4,100 workers at the end of the Biden administration, has been cut roughly in half between recent layoffs and those who have taken buyout offers. The department is also cancelling leases in buildings in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York. The Education Department announced its headquarters building would be closed on Wednesday and reopen the following day. “When we cut, we want to cut the people who aren’t working,” Trump said. “We want to keep the best people.” Trump said the cuts are part of his “dream” to “move education to the states.” State officials already determine the education curriculum in public schools. The Department of Education is in charge of running the college loan programs, administering Pell grants, and dispersing some funds to states for certain education programs. The rapid downsizing at the Education Department is part of cuts across the federal government pushed by Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has recently targeted the Social Security Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs. Trump campaigned on eliminating the Education Department entirely. In a memo to the Education Department issued March 3, the same day she was confirmed by the Senate, Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote that Trump had “tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat.” Her memo was titled, “Our Department’s Final Mission.” William Bennett, who served as Education Secretary under Ronald Reagan, said on Fox News Wednesday that McMahon’s cuts should not be so sweeping and should have been more targeted and specific. “It’s hard for me to believe she knows who the best people are. It may be right you can probably get by with 20% of that staff, but you got to carefully do it by going through who’s working and who’s not.” While he was President, Reagan had promised to dismantle the Department of Education, but was blocked from doing so by a House of Representatives controlled by the Democratic Party.

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. For weeks, Senate Democrats have tried to have it both ways as they’ve faced a tricky choice: cast a vote that allows for a government shutdown in hopes of saving some federal jobs or give into Republicans’ spending regime in the name of keeping the lights on. To the dismay of the progressive wing of the party, it seems retreat remains a very real option. Already, some Democrats are suggesting the hardline opposition ultimately does more harm than good, with a shutdown fight unwinnable for a party in the minority against a unified GOP majority. Others are staying vague, hoping this sorts itself out without laying down hard markers. To put it mildly, the indignation is real but a remedy is missing. Lawmakers face a deadline at the end of the week to adopt a spending program or trigger a government shutdown. In normal times, the party in control of Congress and the White House would be stuck holding the bag. But the Republican majority in the Senate is insufficient to pass this on their own under the chamber’s rules, leaving Democrats as the deciding factor between keeping the lights on or not. No vote has been scheduled but the ambiguity emanating from senior Democrats in recent days is widely seen as giving cover to vulnerable lawmakers to begrudgingly support Republicans’ plans to cut topline, non-defense spending by about $13 billion and boost defense spending by about $6 billion, all while giving Trump even greater powers to reprogram money as he sees fit. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Republican framework does not have enough Democratic votes to clear the bar. Instead, he proposed a stopgap spending plan by way of a continuing resolution. “Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House C.R. Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11 C.R. that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass,” Schumer said. Democrats are also looking for an ability to offer amendments to the House version as a trade for support, a Hill aide said. The proposal, coming after Democrats had a second all-hands, closed-door meeting about in as many days, was instantaneously a non-starter among Republicans, who still expect Democrats to cave to dodge a shutdown. Democratic strategists are decidedly mixed on what the smart play here is. The party has yet to really pick itself up after the 2024 loss to Trump, leaving many in doubt that it’s ready to effectively defend a shutdown as Republicans’ fault. The Resistance has not materialized and a grand strategy to stop Trump has not manifested. A unified message has yet to show up. To that last point, just consider the misfires this week. On Tuesday, as Trump turned the South Lawn into a Tesla showroom, the Democratic National Committee’s main social media account skipped right past the President’s blatant promotion of Elon Musk’s embattled company and fed the troll: “Ugly ass truck.” Whereas the party was once quick to decry a White House official’s promotion of Ivanka Trump’s shoes at Nordstrom's, it was less prepared to harness the outrage over Trump personally pitching his top political patron’s electric vehicles. In the end, the President is in the driver’s seat of both Washington and, apparently, a Tesla he bought to help his buddy. Confident that almost every Republican in Congress will do what he wants, he pushed for both House Speaker Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune to stop playing footsie with Democrats in exchange for their votes to offset GOP defections. So far, that strategy has been proven right. House Republicans suffered just one defection on Tuesday despite very, very public complaints from GOP lawmakers about the package being pushed forward. (One Democrat who represents a district Trump carried, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, broke with his party’s instructions to be unified in opposition.) “It’s not like there’s a Plan B behind door number two,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise admonished on the House floor on Tuesday ahead of the vote, calling on his people to realize the stakes if the plan coming to a vote came up short. The GOP unity meant House Democrats had little power to shape the spending plan beyond a name-and-shame posture. That left Democrats as less-than-unified in their general messaging and again looking to voters like a scattershot collection of grievances rather than anything approaching a party with a central spine. Democrats’ impotence had no clearer moment of illustration than Republicans’ willingness to change the rules to avoid a tough vote in the next few weeks. Trump is running his trade war using emergency powers under a crisis, but Congress has the power to withdraw those powers by declaring an end to the emergency. Democrats had hoped they could avail themselves of a provision that requires a fast-track vote within 18 working days in the full House, but Republicans got wind of it and tucked a novel footnote into the spending plan: for the purposes of that law, everything between now and the start of 2026 will be considered just one day of legislation. No, really. We are about to be living the longest legislative day in history. Both parties in the House recognized the futility of dragging out the inevitability of the GOP-powered spending bill and were more than willing to evacuate Washington early to return to their districts, effectively shutting the door to any more work on this project. From the House’s perspective, the take-it-or-leave-it strategy absolves them of responsibility if things blow apart in the Senate. That now forces the hand of Senators from both parties, none of whom are big fans of having to accept the House’s work product without an opportunity to tweak it. Anything the Senate changes would require the House to accept them or negotiate fixes, and the House is simply not here to take up that task before the Friday deadline. Senate Republicans have spotted the political perils baked into the House version of this spending package. Yet with the lone exception of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the GOP conference seemed poised to be behind it. That means the measure needs eight Democratic votes to get over the 60-vote threshold needed in the Senate rules, and there are signs they could get there if taken to the brink. Many Senate Democrats have, to a tee, put off questions about their plans. The issue still seemed an open question on Tuesday after lawmakers met for two hours in private, where emotions ran hot but answers came up dry. Some pretended that Johnson might abandon an all-GOP plan and work with House Democrats to get their votes for—and ideas into—a revised plan. Others thought they’d be able to keep current spending levels in place with just a few tweaks, leaving Joe Biden-era contours in place. But, after Tuesday’s House vote, Senators returned to the Capitol on Wednesday without that offramp. They faced what more than one office described as a choice with just two bad options: surrender to the House GOP funding scheme or be blamed for the shutdown. For Senate Democrats, the GOP plan is painful to swallow. There were ready-made political hits aplenty in the outline. Some would make for great campaign dings next year, but it may be tough to savage Republicans for legislation Democrats helped deliver to Trump’s desk. While some will surely debate whether Democrats are really to blame if the government shuts down at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, many in the party fear they will lose that argument in the court of public opinion. After spending the past few weeks defending the broad sweep of government services as worthwhile and essential, a muddled Democratic Party is not likely to have an easy answer to the question of why, then, they allowed the whole thing to go dark.

As a disabled veteran, I have entrusted my life to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) since 1999. When an ovarian cyst ruptured, the VA was there. When my service-connected migraines made daily life unbearable, the VA was there. And when I suffered a stroke in 2019, the VA was there, managing my care, ensuring I had access to rehabilitation, and literally helping me get back on my feet. Now the Trump administration, with the full backing of the new VA Secretary Doug Collins, is planning to slash 83,000 jobs from the VA back to levels seen in 2019—stripping the very foundation of the care that veterans like me, and millions of others, rely on. This is not just reckless; it is a betrayal of every veteran who served this country. The VA’s mission, as enshrined in 2023, is "to fulfill President Lincoln's promise to care for those who have served in our nation's military and for their families, caregivers, and survivors." Cutting these jobs spits in the face of that promise. It is a violation of those who defended our nation—on a service that so many people depend upon. The numbers do not lie. In 2021, 52% of veterans relied on at least one VA benefit or service, and 6.2 million veterans used VA healthcare. And since the passing of the PACT Act in August 2022, nearly 740,000 new veterans have enrolled in VA’s benefits, including over 333,000 from the PACT Act population—veterans of Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Post-9/11 conflicts. In just over two years since the PACT Act was enacted, the VA has provided critical health care and benefits to millions of veterans and survivors affected by toxic exposure. In fact, the demand for VA healthcare is not decreasing; It is rising at an unprecedented rate. This is why cutting VA staffing to 2019 levels will be catastrophic. Since 2019, the veteran population seeking care has grown, with more veterans aging into the system and requiring specialized treatment for combat-related injuries, PTSD, and toxic exposure illnesses. Rolling back to pre-pandemic staffing levels ignores these realities and sets veterans up for longer wait times, reduced specialized care, and life-saving treatments will likely skyrocket. Veterans will suffer, and some of us will die waiting for care that they were promised. This is not just policy—it is negligence, plain and simple. But the betrayal does not stop there. Thousands of veterans work for the VA, dedicated to serving their fellow service members. These job cuts will not only hurt veterans who need care, but also those who have made it their mission to care for others. The VA was built to support those who have sacrificed for this country—why is this administration turning its back on us? I am not just concerned for myself—I am terrified for our senior veterans, those with severe combat injuries, survivors of military sexual trauma (MST), and those battling PTSD. They will bear the brunt of this cruel decision. As veterans already face alarming suicide rates—according to a 2024 VA report, an estimated 17 veterans die by suicide every day. Cutting off critical support will only worsen this crisis, leaving our most vulnerable without the care they desperately need and deserve.

My mother’s name is Usha, and for years, when I told non-South Asian people her name, I’d watch them squint, trying to picture the spelling. But these days, it clicks immediately: Usha, like Usha Chilukuri Vance, the Second Lady of the United States. When people make the connection, I want to add that my family and I have nothing in common with the “Other Usha," the lawyer-turned-enigmatic political wife who stands by her man—the vice president—as he denigrates immigrants and women alike. But, in fact, I share a great deal with the Other Usha, whose life is, in some ways, a doppelganger of mine. We both come from academically-oriented Indian American families; our paternal grandfathers were both scientist-professors, as are our fathers, who are both named Krish. We are both Yale-educated, ambitious millennial women: she graduated from Yale Law School the same year I finished undergrad; if I ever brushed past Vance on campus, we would not have taken note of one another—two among many hardworking desi women, living the immigrant dream, hoping to have it all. Our shared touchstones might seem superficial, but as the country increasingly seems split into two separate Americas, each one unable to speak to the other, I’ve found myself obsessing over the things I, a progressive, have in common with Vance and her conservative ilk. Because our similarities reveal an uncomfortable truth: The country that formed Usha Vance and her husband also formed me, and its mythologies are also mine. Specifically, Vance embodies twin figures in the American imagination of meritocracy: the high-achieving child of immigrants, and the high-achieving woman—both near-mythic creatures who appear to prove that anyone can make it here, if they work hard enough, and lean in far enough. For many years, both liberal and conservative Americans celebrated these “bootstrapper” characters. When I was younger, I bought into this story of America, too; I believed that my second-generation work ethic and fierce feminist ambition could grant me access to the American dream. As the leftist writer Naomi Klein has written about her own right-wing doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, we all have twins on the other side of the aisle. I consider Vance my mirror image—a crucial reminder that liberal and conservative America share a great deal. It may be uncomfortable for Democrats to admit what they have in common with their right-wing rivals, but it is worth trying to see ourselves in the Other Side’s world. Only then can we finally abandon the flawed mythologies that brought us to this place. Since she is the child of immigrants, Vance’s ascent into the highest echelons of American society—Yale, the Supreme Court, the inauguration stage, and perhaps, one day, the East Wing of the White House—might be read as confirmation that America is a true land of opportunity: If you work hard, you can make it here, identity be damned. Indeed, some political observers spun this story about her last year, when J.D. Vance was named the Republican vice-presidential nominee: an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal entitled “J.D. Vance and the Indian-American Dream” extolled Vance as an example of “breathtaking” achievements of Indian Americans; a piece in The Times of India declared, “Usha is living her parents’ American dream.” I recognize myself in this story. Many Indian Americans cast our community’s collective success as affirmation of American meritocracy. In doing so, we pit ourselves against other minorities who conservatives would have us believe are asking for handouts—affirmative action, asylum. This is a dishonest story of our diaspora: as the journalist Arun Venugopal has written in The Atlantic, the Indian American diaspora was formed through complex feats of “social engineering.” Like many desis whose families arrived in the U.S. after 1965, Vance and I are both dominant-caste Hindus, children of intellectually elite Indians—yes, our parents worked hard to get here and worked hard once they arrived, but we were also beneficiaries of generations of privilege well before we were admitted to the ranks of the American cultural elite. This more precise explanation of Indian America helps answer the questions I heard many liberals ask when Usha Vance shot into the national conversation last summer: “How did this daughter of immigrants justify her husband spreading lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets?” “Didn’t she instinctively sympathize with other newcomers to America?” “Surely she was secretly a liberal”—she voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016—"just keeping her opinions to herself?” (People asked similar questions of pro-choice immigrant Melania Trump.) But those questions feel naïve. A standard-issue conservative peeks through Vance’s demureness: In 2024, she described her parents’ immigration story to Fox and Friends, responding delicately to a question from anchor Ainsley Earhardt about how the Vances each exemplify distinct aspects of the American dream—JD climbing the class ladder; Usha the immigrant one. Vance described her parents as coming “from a different country”—never saying “India”—arriving “legally” and “with this intention of belonging.” It was the classic, selective story many Indian Americans have learned to tell about ourselves, and which we in turn train Americans to tell about us: We are the model minorities who promise to put our heads down and assimilate; others are the “bad” kind. Vance isn’t just an example of the immigrant dream. Just a few years ago, she exemplified the 2010s Sheryl Sandbergian dream: the woman who leaned into her career at all the right moments. When she became a mother, she did not take “her foot off the gas pedal,” as Sandberg warned women not to do: instead, Vance began clerking for Chief Justice John Roberts seven weeks after giving birth. The Vances were living apart at the time, so J.D.Vance—a man who, in October 2024, made the blunder of saying “my wife has three children”—did not step in as the primary caregiver. Even after resigning from her law firm in 2024 to become a full-time political wife, she remained conspicuously brainy, toting around The Iliad on the campaign trail and leaving her Goodreads page public. The charm offensive worked: the media fawned over her reading diet, her pink cashmere inauguration coat, her elegant gray hair. The knock-on effect is that Vance—who initially said she would stay out of the limelight on the campaign trail before taking on a more vocal role after J.D. Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies,” among other things—helps soften her husband’s image. This is where the American meritocracy too often leads women: to the top of corporate and political ladders, where we legitimize terrible people—often men. I recognize this version of Vance, too, because I am a variation on the theme: an ambitious millennial woman, raised to take herself seriously. Like some millennial women, I once considered the feminist battle generally won; our foremothers had gotten us the vote, our own credit cards, IUDs, all so we could be less hung up on our own womanhood. This attitude led me, at times, to a dangerously flexible politics, not unlike Vance’s. While she was clerking for conservative judges Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts, I was working for a man whose politics sometimes gave me pause. I took the job because it seemed prestigious, and because, like many Ivy Leaguers, I found power magnetic. In reality, I, like Vance, was settling into a world in which I could afford to treat political differences as superficial. I leaned in—right into complacency. Vance’s life proves that leaning in makes for a Pyrrhic feminist victory when not accompanied by substantive work on behalf of all women. Indeed, Vance is now actively facilitating a political agenda that will make it nearly impossible for people, including and especially working parents, to have it all, as she once did: Vance defended her husband after he mocked people without children, claiming that he was simply saying it was “hard to be a parent in this country,” never mind that he has called universal day care “class war against normal people.” Vance is a case study in what feminism of the Lean In era got wrong about the American dream: It promised access to the elite, to meritocracy. It has only delivered for a select few. Usha Vance scares and fascinates so many liberals, especially women and Indian Americans. How did she transform from one of us into one of them? But on closer inspection, there may not have been much of a transformation at all. So-called “model minorities” have a history of xenophobia, and individualistic, achievement-oriented women often teeter dangerously close to justifying societal misogyny. And the proximity between these worldviews matters, because many of us—including liberals—too easily accept the myths of American exceptionalism. If we want to challenge those people, we need to confront ourselves in the mirror first.