The week was dominated by news about President Trump and the continued struggle over the narrative around Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was illegally deported to El Salvador. But there was also continued concern around Trump’s tariffs — with the Federal Reserve chair saying they’re likely to lead to higher prices — and the tension between the scientific establishment and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who made some big pronouncements during his first news conference as health and human services secretary.
Here are five takeaways from week 13 in our continued look at President Trump’s first 100 days in office:
President Trump met with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele at the White House on Monday. The president’s inner circle and the Salvadoran president played a faux blame game on the deported Maryland man.
The Supreme Court said the Trump administration had to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return after the administration admitted the legal resident was mistakenly deported. Administration officials said during the meeting that they would facilitate it if Bukele wanted to return him. But Bukele told reporters he was not inclined to act.
“The question is preposterous: how can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
Round and round it goes with no resolution. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., flew to El Salvador in an attempt to check on the man. He was initially denied the ability to see or talk to him. Later, he posted a photo of him with Abrego Garcia. By mid week, the White House was saying definitively that Abrego Garcia would never be allowed back into the country.
The same federal judge, who has now bucked the Trump administration over its deportation policies multiple times, James Boasberg, this week said there was “probable cause” for contempt charges against the administration. He’s giving the Trump team, which he said has shown a “willful disregard” for his orders, until Wednesday to give some real answers about why they defied his court order to turn around a plane that brought migrants to the Salvadoran prison.
Otherwise, he said, he would recommend contempt charges, and if the Trump Justice Department didn’t pursue those charges, he’s open to appointing an outside prosecutor to do so. The judge presiding over the specific Abrego Garcia case, Paula Xinis, said she’s “gotten nothing” from the administration, which she ordered to show evidence of what it’s doing to bring the man back. An appeals court unanimously denied the government’s request for a stay of Xinis ordering sworn testimony from government officials about what they have or haven’t done to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
The three-judge panel said the administration’s refusal to bring the man back “should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.” It also accused the administration of “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.”
But the administration’s position is clear — it doesn’t believe it should have to listen to the courts.
“No court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters during that meeting in the Oval Office with Bukele. “I don’t understand what the confusion is. This individual is a citizen of El Salvador. He was illegally in the United States and was returned to his country.”
The Supreme Court said the administration had to “facilitate” the man’s return, but it also said the courts should show “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
So which one of those winds up weighing out? At the end of the day, a true constitutional crisis would come if the Trump administration exhausts its appeals and defies the Supreme Court, if it rules against the administration. Maybe that would come if Trump follows through on his musings about sending “homegrown” criminals, in other words, U.S. citizens, to El Salvador.
It’s worth remembering that so much of politics is about messaging — not facts, not nuance. And in the case of Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration is digging in hard to say he was a bad person. Trump and his team have alleged he’s a member of MS-13 and produced police reports that show police believed he was. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went so far as to say he was “engaged in human trafficking.”
On the other side, Abrego Garcia has legal status in the U.S.; his wife is an American citizen and has pleaded for his return; stories have noted that he is the father to a son on the autism spectrum; that he has no criminal record and that his family sent him to the United States in the first place as a teenager because a gang in El Salvador (not MS-13) was trying to coerce him to join.
In fact, an immigration court in 2019 found that he could face death or danger by being sent back to El Salvador. Xinis, the judge overseeing his case, called the evidence that he’s a gang member flimsy.
“Evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived,” she said in a ruling.
The head of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, said this week that Trump’s tariffs were larger than expected and that they’re “highly likely” to lead to higher inflation.
Translation: higher prices.
That prompted Trump to lash out against Powell on Thursday, saying the Fed chairman’s “termination cannot come fast enough.” Powell, backed by Supreme Court precedent, insists he cannot be fired by the president over policy disagreements.
Still, higher prices are something Americans have been expecting, polling shows.
Powell also said the tariffs could present a tension point for the Fed between keeping inflation low and keeping unemployment low.
So, for now, he said, the Fed will wait and watch. With how quickly Trump has been changing his mind, or, as he says, being “flexible,” it could be waiting and watching for a while.
For years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has cast doubt on the safety of vaccines and given credence to the contention that they might cause autism. That’s despite research thoroughly debunking the idea (and links to other, non-vaccine-related factors such as a father’s age). And despite decades of research and the difficulty in finding definitive answers, he’s now promising, as director of Health and Human Services under Trump, to unearth the true cause of autism by September — a timeline many experts find dubious.
He’s also contradicting his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which said this week that part of the increase in the number of children found to have autism is likely because of increased diagnoses and better diagnostic tools.
Could there be environmental causes (other than vaccines)? That’s Kennedy’s theory. But science is about dispassionately letting evidence dictate answers, not letting preconceived answers dictate science.
Here’s a day-by-day look at what happened in the past week:
Source: www.npr.org