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Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- At least 26 tourists in Kashmir, India, were killed—and more than three dozen others were wounded—on Tuesday after militants opened fire on a crowd in what police have deemed a terrorist attack. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but separatists opposing Indian rule have killed tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians alike in the region since the 1990s. The Indian army and local police are actively searching for the perpetrators of the attack, which authorities said involved at least four gunmen. The attack took place at a popular tourist attraction near the town of Pahalgam that is only accessible on foot or horseback.
- Massive explosions occurred at a Russian military base about 80 miles northeast of Moscow on Tuesday, in what the country’s defense ministry has attributed to a “violation of safety requirements” that resulted in an ammunition warehouse catching fire. Three of the four total people injured in the blast were hospitalized, the regional governor said, and 450 residents of nearby towns have been evacuated. According to Andriy Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, the Russian base stored about 100,000 tons of weaponry, including artillery shells and missiles.
- Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday announced a “comprehensive reorganization plan” for the State Department, which he said would “increase functionality” while eliminating “redundant offices” and non-statutory programs that are “misaligned” with American interests. “These sweeping changes will empower our talented diplomats to put America and Americans first,” Rubio said in a statement. According to an internal State Department fact sheet reviewed by Politico, the plan involves eliminating the department’s Diversity and Inclusion Office and Office of Global Women’s Issues. Some 700 positions and 132 offices are expected to be cut in the overhaul.
- The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Monday sent notices of a “reduction in force” to 280 of its employees whose work related to environmental justice or diversity, equity, and inclusion, multiple outlets reported on Tuesday. Those employees are expected to be fired or reassigned to new positions elsewhere in the agency by July 31, when the workforce reduction goes into effect. Also on Monday, an additional 175 EPA employees were told they would be transitioning into new roles.
- Three federal prosecutors who worked on the criminal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams—and were subsequently placed on administrative leave—announced their resignation on Tuesday, accusing Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche of attempting to compel them to “confess wrongdoing” in the case. Earlier this month, a federal judge dismissed the charges against Adams following a request by Justice Department officials that the case be dropped. The prosecutors—Derek Wikstrom, Celia Cohen, and Andrew Rohrbach—opposed dropping the charges and were put on leave “ostensibly to review our … handling of the Adams case,” they wrote in a letter, but were later told that they “must express regret and admit some wrongdoing” to be reinstated. “We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none,” they added.
- After taking a tumble on Monday, all three stock indices rebounded on Tuesday following Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s remarks predicting a “de-escalation” in U.S.-China trade disputes. “Neither side thinks the status quo is sustainable,” he said. Also on Tuesday, President Donald Trump said he had “no intention” of firing Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell—an apparent reversal of his statement last week that the Fed chair’s “termination” could not “come fast enough.” The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 2.66 percent, the Nasdaq Composite jumped 2.71 percent, and the S&P 500 gained 2.51 percent.
‘We Do Not Trust You’
If you’ve been following the legal proceedings around President Donald Trump’s deportations to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), you’d be forgiven for thinking the administration was coming for retirees next. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed the latest lawsuit challenging the deportations on Friday. The case caption? A.A.R.P v. Trump.
The American Association of Retired People (AARP) is totally uninvolved in the case, but an individual going by the pseudonym A.A.R.P. is a plaintiff. The association AARP filed an unopposed motion on Monday requesting that the plaintiff’s pseudonym be changed to A.R.P. and the case caption be switched to include another pseudonymous plaintiff party to the suit: W.M.M. v. Trump.
The AARP cards are safe for now, but an unusual Supreme Court ruling over the weekend in the ACLU suit rebuked the administration and signaled a potential new phase in the president’s escalating clash with the judiciary.
The Trump administration’s first three months has witnessed a broad array of challenges to constitutional guardrails limiting the executive branch’s authority, including claims to an effectively unlimited tariff authority, the ability to supersede congressional control over the power of the purse by impounding funds, and the authority to summarily deport without due process people who are accused by the government of being terrorists and gang members. The claimed deportation authority, in particular, has sparked concern as it raises the harrowing image of the government permanently disappearing people. The AEA deportations—or more specifically, the administration’s treatment of court orders regarding the deportations—have also brought the executive and the judiciary into the starkest conflict thus far.
Last week, the ACLU got wind that the administration was preparing to imminently deport another group of Venezuelan migrants from a detention center in Texas to the mega prison in El Salvador known as the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). The pending removals seemed to directly conflict with the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this month in Trump v. J.G.G., which stated that individuals deported under the AEA must be given notice of their pending removal and the opportunity to challenge it via a habeas petition in federal court. “The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs,” the court ruled.
At the time, White House officials lauded the court’s decision as a victory because it vacated the temporary restraining orders (TROs) issued by a lower court in March that had blocked the administration from pursuing further AEA deportations. But as legal observers noted at the time, the decision was far from an unalloyed win for the White House—and this weekend’s ruling made that even clearer.
In a flurry of emergency filings in three separate courts on Friday, the ACLU sought an emergency injunction to stop two plaintiffs (A.R.P. and W.M.M) and others similarly situated from being deported (the ACLU had already filed a habeas petition challenging AEA removal earlier in the week). The group provided sworn statements from attorneys representing some of the detained individuals attesting that the government had informed their clients they would be removed with potentially less than 24 hours’ notice. “Removal without sufficient notice and time to seek habeas relief is in clear violation of the Supreme Court’s decision,” the ACLU argued in its Friday filing in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
A lot of chaotic legal wrangling ensued for a few hours across the jurisdictions the ACLU filed in, but ultimately the case made its way to the Supreme Court’s emergency—aka “shadow”—docket by late Friday night. Not long after midnight, the court issued a half-page ruling directing the government “not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court.”
Justice Samuel Alito dissented from the ruling and was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. Later on Saturday, Alito released his dissent, arguing that the Supreme Court had “issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order.” The government made similar arguments in its response.
Meanwhile, the ACLU hailed the high court’s ruling.“These men were in imminent danger of spending their lives in a horrific foreign prison without ever having had a chance to go to court,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead attorney on the case, said in a statement Saturday. “We are relieved that the Supreme Court has not permitted the administration to whisk them away the way others were just last month.”
Such a late-night ruling from the Supreme Court is highly unusual. But it followed another immigration case in which the Trump administration may have stretched the good faith of the courts: the removal of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. The administration deported Abrego Garcia to the El Salvador prison complex in March due to an administrative error, and, earlier this month, the Supreme Court ordered the government to “facilitate” his return according to clarified directives from the district court, noting that the administration “should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”
In response, the administration has attempted to argue that “facilitate” simply means “remov[ing] any domestic barriers” to Abrego Garcia’s return (both Trump and the president of El Salvador claimed to have no power to return Abrego Garcia from CECOT). A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government’s attempt at wordsmithing in a biting order. “The Supreme Court’s decision does not … allow the government to do essentially nothing,” Judge Harvie Wilkinson wrote in the panel’s order. “The plain and active meaning of the word cannot be diluted by its constriction, as the government would have it, to a narrow term of art.”
“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” he added.
On Tuesday, the government responded to the panel’s order and said it had since taken some affirmative steps to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. “After the Fourth Circuit’s clarification, the State Department has engaged in appropriate diplomatic discussions with El Salvador regarding Abrego Garcia,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in a Tuesday filing. “However, disclosing the details of any diplomatic discussions regarding Mr. Abrego Garcia at this time could negatively impact any outcome.”
But the district court judge overseeing the case also delivered a scathing order yesterday regarding the government’s lack of cooperation in the discovery process regarding the error that led to Abrego Garcia’s deportation. “Defendants have failed to respond in good faith, and their refusal to do so can only be viewed as willful and intentional noncompliance,” Judge Paula Xinis wrote, ordering the government to respond to all outstanding discovery requests by 6 p.m. today.
Our own Sarah Isgur and our friend David French don’t believe we’ve crossed the Rubicon into a constitutional crisis just yet. But as this weekend demonstrated, the Supreme Court may no longer trust the administration to follow its orders in good faith. “We’re in an environment where the court learned a lesson in response to its most recent rulings,” French said on Advisory Opinions. “This was blunt, ‘straight ahead, we do not trust you, and so therefore we’re issuing an order that is completely unambiguous,’” he said of the Supreme Court’s weekend ruling.
The executive and the judiciary may now be on a collision course, as Trump’s agenda continues to run up against legal pushback. As Judge Wilkinson wrote in his order last week: “Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both.”
Today’s Must-Read
Free Speech Crumbles in Europe
Germany’s past has given it an especially ambivalent relationship toward free speech. In the wake of the horrors of World War II, the country reinvented itself as a “militant democracy,” one that puts special emphasis on using the law to combat extremist forces. As a result, it was one of the first European democracies to explicitly outlaw a range of radical sentiments, from hate speech to the denial of the Holocaust. But today, Germany is no longer an outlier within Europe; on the contrary, even countries that have long prided themselves on their liberal traditions have followed the country’s lead, making it astonishingly easy for the police to arrest citizens who say things that shock or offend.
Toeing the Company Line
Worth Your Time
- For the Cato Institute’s Human Progress project, Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy measured the relationship between resource abundance and population over time. The results were uplifting. “All 50 commodities in the dataset were more abundant in 2024 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual growth rate of 4.22 percent, thus doubling every 17 years,” they wrote. “If resources were truly finite, as many people believe, an increase in population would be expected to lead to scarcity and higher prices. However, as [economist Julian] Simon discovered through exhaustive research spanning decades, the opposite was true. As the global population increased, resources tended to become more abundant. How is that possible? Simon recognized that atoms, without knowledge, have no economic value. Knowledge transforms atoms into resources—and the supply of undiscovered knowledge is limitless. He also understood that only humans can discover and create new knowledge. Therefore, resources can be effectively infinite, and humans are the ultimate resource.”
Business Insider: Elon Musk Says He’s Stepping Back From DOGE
“Starting next month, I will be allocating far more of my time to Tesla,” Musk said Tuesday during Tesla’s earnings call, noting that “the major work of establishing the Department of Government Efficiency” was done.
He said he’ll continue to spend a day or two a week on government matters, “as long as it is useful,” and the president wants him to do so.
BBC: Films Made With AI Can Win Oscars, Academy Says
In the Zeitgeist
Andor returned to Disney+ for its second and final season on Tuesday, but expect more than lightsaber duels and space battles from this Star Wars installment. “Andor isn’t just a ‘gritty’ take on Star Wars,” Vulture critic Nicholas Quah wrote. “It’s a novelistic beast that’s confident enough to spend a third of its second-season premiere on what is basically a long boardroom meeting where bureaucrats talk about an energy-independence campaign that’s actually a weapons program.”
In case you’re worried that sounds too similar to C-SPAN, this behind-the-scenes look at the first three episodes doesn’t quite have that same feel. (Warning: contains spoilers.)
Let Us Know
Do you expect the Supreme Court to serve as a meaningful check on Trump’s executive power going forward?