WASHINGTON (AP) — With the Trump administration expected to reverse a controversial 2023 decision on the permanent location of U.S. Space Command, a review by the Defense Department inspector general could not determine why Colorado was chosen over Alabama.

The inspector general’s report, issued Friday, said this was in part due to a lack of access to senior defense officials during the Biden administration, when the review began.

The location of U.S. Space Command has significant implications for the local economy, given the fast growth in national defense spending in space-based communications and defenses.

In 2021, the Air Force identified Army Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, as the preferred location for the new U.S. Space Command due to cost and other factors. But a temporary headquarters had already been established in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and after multiple delays President Joe Biden announced it as the permanent headquarters.

Alabama’s Republican congressional delegation accused the Biden administration of politicizing the decision. But Colorado, which has Republican and Democratic lawmakers, is home to many other Air Force and U.S. Space Force facilities.

As recently as last week, Rep. Mike Rogers House, an Alabama Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, told a panel at Auburn University he expects the decision to be reversed by the White House before the end of April.

The location of Space Command would be one of many decisions that have swung back and forth between Biden and President Donald Trump. For instance, Biden stopped the construction of the border wall that began during Trump’s first term, only to have Trump now vow to complete it. And Trump is again seeking to ban transgender troops from serving in the military, after Biden removed Trump’s first-term limitations.

The controversy over the basing decision began seven days before Trump’s first term expired, when his Air Force secretary announced Alabama would be home to Space Command, pending an environmental review.

That review was completed about six months into Biden’s term and found no significant impact with hosting the command in Alabama. But the new administration did not act on the decision.

Instead, a year later, the Biden White House said it was keeping the headquarters in Colorado Springs, citing the time that would be lost relocating staff and the headquarters to Huntsville.

The report said interviews has been requested with Biden’s Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to understand why Huntsville was not named, but the Biden White House would only allow the interviews if administration lawyers were present. The inspector general rejected that condition, saying it could affect its unfettered access to information.

NEW YORK (AP) — The latest government waste touted by billionaire Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency is hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment claims it purportedly uncovered.

One problem: Federal investigators already found what appears to be the same fraud, years earlier and on a far greater scale.

In a post last week on X, the social media site Musk owns, DOGE announced “an initial survey of unemployment insurance claims since 2020” found 24,500 people over the age of 115 had claimed $59 million in benefits; 28,000 people between the ages of 1 and 5 collected $254 million; and 9,700 people with birthdates more than 15 years in the future garnered $69 million from the government.

The tweet drew a predictable party-line reaction of either skepticism or cheers, including from Musk himself, who said what his team found was “so crazy” he re-read it several times before it sank in.

“Another incredible discovery,” marveled Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who repeated DOGE’s findings to President Donald Trump in a Cabinet meeting last week.

Chavez-DeRemer’s recounting of the alleged fraud, including claims of benefits filed by unborn children, drew laughter in the Cabinet room and a reaction from Trump himself.

“Those numbers are really bad,” he said.

But Chavez-DeRemer needn’t look further than her own department’s Office of the Inspector General to find such fraud had already been reported by the type of federal workers DOGE has demonized.

“They’re trying to spin this narrative of, ‘Oh, government is inefficient and government is stupid and they’re catching these things that the government didn’t catch,’” says Michele Evermore, who worked on unemployment issues at the U.S. Department of Labor during the administration of former President Joe Biden. “They’re finding fraud that was marked as fraud and saying they found out it was fraud.”

The Social Security Act of 1935 enshrined unemployment benefits in federal law but left it to individual states to set up systems to collect unemployment taxes, process applications and mete out support.

Though states have almost complete control over their own unemployment systems, special relief programs — most notably widely expanded benefits enacted by the first Trump administration at the outset of the COVID pandemic — inject more direct federal involvement and a flood of new beneficiaries into the system.

In regular times, state unemployment systems perform “very well, not so well and terribly,” according to Stephen Wandner, an economist at the National Academy of Social Insurance who authored the book “Unemployment Insurance Reform: Fixing a Broken System.” With COVID slamming the economy and creating a flood of new claims that states couldn’t handle, Wandner says many more were “quite terrible.”

Trump signed the COVID unemployment relief into law on March 27, 2020, and from the very start it became a magnet for fraud. In a memo to state officials about two weeks later, the Department of Labor warned that the expanded benefits had made unemployment programs “a target for fraud with significant numbers of imposter claims being filed with stolen or synthetic identities.”

That same memo offered an option for states trying to protect a person whose identity was stolen to fraudulently collect unemployment benefits. To preserve a record of the fraud but keep innocent people from being linked to it, states could create a “pseudo claim,” the memo advises.

Those “pseudo claims” led to records of toddlers and centenarians getting checks. The Labor Department’s inspector general tallied some 4,895 unemployment claims from people over the age of 100 between March 2020 and April 2022, but another departmental memo explained that the filings stemmed from states changing dates of birth to protect people whose identities were used.

“Many of the claims identified … were not payments to individuals over 100 years of age, but rather ‘pseudo records’ of previously identified fraudulent claims,” the 2023 memo says.

A Labor Department spokeswoman did not respond to questions about Musk’s findings and DOGE gave no details on how it came to find the supposed fraud or whether it duplicates what was already found.

Though DOGE ostensibly looked at longer timeframe than federal investigators previously had, it tallied just $382 million in fake unemployment claims, a tiny fraction of what investigators were already aware.

In 2022, the Labor Department said suspected COVID-era unemployment fraud totaled more than $45 billion. The Government Accountability Office later said it was far worse, likely $100 billion to $135 billion.

“I don’t think it’s news to anyone,” says Amy Traub, an expert on unemployment at the National Employment Law Project. “It’s been widely reported. There’ve been multiple congressional hearings.”

If DOGE’s newest allegations have an air of familiarity, it’s because they echo its prior findings of about Social Security payments to the dead and the unbelievably old. Those were false claims.

That makes DOGE an imperfect messenger even when fraud has occurred, as with unemployment claims.

Jessica Reidl, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute, is a fiscal conservative who so champions rooting out federal waste she has written 600 articles on the subject. Though she believes unemployment insurance fraud is rife, she has trouble accepting any findings from DOGE, which she says has acted ineffectively and possibly illegally.

“When DOGE says impossibly old dead people are collecting unemployment in huge numbers, I become skeptical,” Reidl says. “DOGE does not have a good track record in that area.”

Traub said the burst of pandemic-era unemployment fraud led states to implement new security measures. She questioned why Musk’s team was trumpeting old fraud as if it’s new.

“Business leaders and economists are warning about a national recession, so it’s natural to think about unemployment,” says Traub. “It’s an attack on the image of a critically important program and perhaps an attempt to undermine public support on unemployment insurance when it couldn’t be more important.”

Matt Sedensky can be reached at msedensky@ap.org and https://x.com/sedensky.

GREENBELT, Md. (AP) — A federal judge said Tuesday that she will order sworn testimony by Trump administration officials to determine if they complied with her orders to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to a notorious El Salvador prison.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland issued her order after Trump officials continually refused to retrieve Abrego Garcia, saying they defied a “clear” Supreme Court order.

She also disregarded Monday’s comments by White House officials and El Salvador’s president that they were unable to bring back Abrego Garcia, describing their statements as “two very misguided ships passing in the night.”

“The Supreme Court has spoken,” Xinis said, adding that what was said in the Oval Office on Monday “is not before the court.”

The hearing came a day after White House advisers repeated the claim that they lack the authority to bring back the Salvadoran national from his native country. The president of El Salvador also said Monday that he would not return Abrego Garcia, likening it to smuggling “a terrorist into the United States.”

Abrego Garcia’s deportation has become a national flashpoint as President Donald Trump follows up on campaign promises of mass deportations, including to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

An attorney for Abrego Garcia said contempt proceedings could be the logical next step after two weeks of discovery. “This is still a win, and this is still progress,” Rina Ghandi said. “We’re not done yet, though.”

Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, said shortly before Tuesday’s hearing that he was working hard to achieve the American dream for his family.

“That dream was shattered on March 12th when he was abducted and disappeared by the United States government in front of our 5-year-old-child,” she said. “Today is 34 days after his disappearance … I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive.”

Meanwhile, Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said he’ll travel to El Salvador on Wednesday.

“My hope is to visit Kilmar and check on his wellbeing and to hold constructive conversations with government officials around his release,” Van Hollen said.

Abrego Garcia, 29, lived in the U.S. for roughly 14 years, during which he worked construction, got married and was raising three children with disabilities, according to court records.

A U.S. immigration judge had shielded Abrego Garcia from deportation to El Salvador in 2019, ruling that he would likely face persecution there by local gangs that had terrorized his family. He also was given a federal permit to work in the United States, where he was a metal worker and union member, according to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers.

But the Trump administration expelled Abrego Garcia to El Salvador last month anyway. Administration officials later described the mistake as “an administrative error” but insisted that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 in the U.S.

Abrego Garcia was never charged with a crime and has denied the allegations, which include being a member of MS-13 in Long Island, New York, where he has never lived.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis had ordered the Trump administration in early April to bring Abrego Garcia back. And the U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Thursday that the U.S. government must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release.

But the White House has balked at trying to broker his return, arguing the courts can’t intrude on the president’s diplomacy powers.

Xinis ordered the U.S. on Friday to provide daily status updates on plans to return Abrego Garcia. The Trump administration responded Saturday that he was alive in the El Salvador prison. But it has only doubled down on its decision not to tell a federal court whether it has any plans to repatriate Abrego Garcia.

In its filing to the judge on Monday, the Trump administration repeated the statement made by El Salvador President Nayib Bukele.

“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous,” Bukele said.

In a filing with the U.S. District Court on Tuesday, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers cited Thursday’s order from the Supreme Court to facilitate his return.

“To give any meaning to the Supreme Court’s order, the Government should at least be required to request the release of Abrego Garcia,” the attorneys wrote. “To date, the Government has not done so.”

The attorneys also rejected the idea that the U.S. lacks the authority to retrieve him. They noted that the U.S. is paying El Salvador to hold prisoners, including Abrego Garcia, and “can exercise those same contractual rights to request their release.”

Bukele struck a deal under which the U.S. will pay about $6 million for El Salvador to imprison Venezuelan immigrants for a year. Trump has said openly that he would also favor El Salvador taking custody of American citizens who have committed violent crimes, which is likely illegal.

WASHINGTON (AP) — At first, the bar association for immigration attorneys began receiving inquiries from a couple students a day. These were foreigners studying in the U.S., and they’d discovered in early April their legal status had been terminated with little notice. To their knowledge, none of the students had committed a deportable offense.

In recent days, the calls have begun flooding in. Hundreds of students have been calling to say they have lost legal status, seeking advice on what to do next.

“We thought it was going to be something that was unusual,” said Matthew Maiona, a Boston-based immigration attorney who is getting about six calls a day from panicked international students. “But it seems now like it’s coming pretty fast and furious.”

The speed and scope of the federal government’s efforts to terminate the legal status of international students have stunned colleges across the country. Few corners of higher education have been untouched, as schools ranging from prestigious private universities, large public research institutions and tiny liberal arts colleges discover status terminations one after another among their students.

At least 600 students at more than 90 colleges and universities have had their visas revoked or their legal status terminated in recent weeks, according to an Associated Press review of university statements and correspondence with school officials. Advocacy groups collecting reports from colleges say hundreds more students could be caught up in the crackdown.

Students apparently targeted over minor infractions

Around 1.1 million international students were in the United States last year — a source of essential revenue for tuition-driven colleges. International students are not eligible for federal financial aid, and their ability to pay tuition often factors into whether they will be admitted to American schools. Often, they pay full price.

Many of the students losing their legal status are from India and China, which together account for more than half the international students at American colleges. But the terminations have not been limited to those from any one part of the world, lawyers said.

Four students from two Michigan universities are suing Trump administration officials after their F-1 student status was terminated last week. Their attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, Ramis Wadood, said the students never received a clear reason why.

“We don’t know, and that’s the scary part,” he said.

The students were informed of the status terminations by their universities via email, which came as a shock, Wadood said. The reason given was that there was a “criminal records check and/or that their visa was revoked,” Wadood said, but none of them were charged or convicted of crimes. Some had either speeding or parking tickets, but one didn’t have any, he said. Only one of the students had known their entry visa was revoked, Wadood said.

Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department was revoking visas held by visitors who were acting counter to national interests, including some who protested Israel’s war in Gaza and those who face criminal charges.

But many students say they don’t fall under those categories. Students have filed lawsuits in several states, arguing they were denied due process.

In New Hampshire, a federal judge last week granted a temporary restraining order to restore the status of a Ph.D. student at Dartmouth College, Xiaotian Liu, while he challenges the revocation of his visa. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Wisconsin issued a similar order, ruling the government could not take steps to detain or revoke the visa of a University of Wisconsin-Madison gradate student.

In a break from past, feds cancel students’ status directly

At many colleges, officials learned the legal immigration status of some international students had been terminated when staff checked a database managed by the Department of Homeland Security. In the past, college officials say, legal statuses typically were updated after colleges told the government the students were no longer studying at the school.

The system to track enrollment and movements of international students came under the control of Immigration and Customs Enforcement after 9/11, said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA, an association of international educators. She said recent developments have left students fearful of how quickly they can be on the wrong side of enforcement.

“You don’t need more than a small number to create fear,” Aw said. “There’s no clarity of what are the reasons and how far the reach of this is.”

Her group says as many as 1,300 students have lost visas or had their status terminated, based on reports from colleges.

The Department of Homeland Security and State Department did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Foreigners who are subject to removal proceedings are usually sent a notice to appear in immigration court on a certain date, but lawyers say affected students have not received any notices, leaving them unsure of next steps to take.

Some schools have told students to leave the country to avoid the risk of being detained or deported. But some students have appealed the terminations and stayed in the United States while those are processed.

Still others caught in legal limbo aren’t students at all. They had remained in the U.S. post-graduation on “optional practical training,” a one-year period — or up to three for science and technology graduates — that allows employment in the U.S. after completing an academic degree. During that time, a graduate works in their field and waits to receive their H-1B or other employment visas if they wish to keep working in the U.S.

Around 242,000 foreigners in the U.S. are employed through this “optional practical training.” About 500,000 are pursuing graduate degrees, and another 342,000 are undergraduate students.

Among the students who have filed lawsuits is a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student who is supposed to graduate on May 5, with a job offer to join the faculty. His attorney Charles Kuck said the student was likely targeted for termination because of an unpaid traffic fine from when the student lent his car to a friend. Ultimately, the violation was dismissed.

“We have case after case after case exactly like that, where there is no underlying crime,” said Kuck, who is representing 17 students in the federal lawsuit. He said his law firm has heard from hundreds of students.

“These are kids who now, under the Trump administration, realize their position is fragile,” he said. “They’ve preyed on a very vulnerable population. These kids aren’t hiding. They’re in school.”

Some international students have been adapting their daily routines.

A Ph.D. student from China at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said she has begun carrying around her passport and immigration paperwork at the advice of the university’s international student office. The student, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted by authorities, said she has been distressed to see the terminations even for students like her without criminal records.

“That is the most scary part because you don’t know whether you’re going to be the next person,” she said.

Seminera reported from Raleigh, N.C., and Keller reported from Albuquerque, N.M.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

U.S. District Judge Charlotte Sweeney approved a temporary restraining order Monday night after the American Civil Liberties Union sued President Donald Trump and members of his administration on behalf of two Venezuelan men, referred to only by their initials, “and others similarly situated” who have been accused of being part of the Tren de Aragua gang.

For two weeks, the federal government is barred from using the Alien Enemies Act to remove plaintiffs D.B.U, R.M.M. and any other noncitizens accused of being members of the Venezuelan gang from both the state and the country.

“This ruling is a critical step toward restoring the rule of law in the face of a rogue administration that has shown utter disregard for the Constitution,” Raquel Lane-Arellano, the communications manager at the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, said Tuesday.

The judge’s order will remain in effect until a hearing is held in the case in Denver on April 21.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in March, proclaiming Venezuelans who are members of TdA and not lawful residents of the U.S. “are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed as Alien Enemies.” The administration has used the act to send immigrants — including at least one Venezuelan who had been detained in Colorado — to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador.

The act has been used only three other times in American history, most recently to intern Japanese-American citizens during World War II.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that anyone being deported under the declaration deserved a hearing in federal court first.

That led federal judges in New York and Texas to place temporary holds on deportations in those areas until Trump’s Republican administration presented a procedure for allowing such appeals. Sweeney’s order follows in their footsteps.

The Colorado order also comes as the ACLU warned, in an emergency filing, that the Trump administration as recently as Monday night may have been preparing Venezuelan men in custody in Aurora for another deportation flight.

The civil rights organization’s attorneys said they had received reports Monday that Venezuelan men being held at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s contract detention facility who were accused of being affiliated with the TdA gang “were rousted from bed and told that they would be leaving.”

The men repeatedly asked where they would be taken, and ICE  agents allegedly refused to answer, ACLU officials said in the document. The flight was later canceled and, as of Tuesday morning, the men remained in Colorado, the attorneys said.

Colorado immigrant advocacy groups applauded the ACLU’s legal challenge to the Alien Enemies Act and the judge’s order.

“The disappearance of our neighbors to a notorious prison without due process should be a wake-up call to the people of the United States,” said Jennifer Piper, the program director for the Colorado office of the American Friends Service Committee.

She added that the Trump administration is asking Congress to triple the budget for immigration detention from $25 billion to more than $60 billion — a request her group opposes.

“We hope that, as a country, we can do more than sending people to foreign prisons,” said Andrea Loya, the executive director of Aurora-based nonprofit Casa de Paz, on Tuesday. “We urge the federal government to make it right for the people they sent to El Salvador without due process.”

The Trump administration’s implementation of the Alien Enemies Act and the lawsuits that followed have become a flashpoint as more than 200 alleged TdA members have been sent from the U.S. to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in El Salvador, escalating tension between the White House and federal courts.

Inmates in El Salvadoran prisons face “life-threatening conditions, persecution and torture,” ACLU officials argued in court documents. That constitutes “irreparable harm,” they said.

D.B.U., a 31-year-old man who fled Venezuela after he was imprisoned for his political activity and protesting against the Venezuelan government, was arrested in January during a raid of what law enforcement and immigration officials have repeatedly called a “Tren de Aragua party” in Adams County.

The Drug Enforcement Administration said 41 people arrested that night were living in Colorado illegally and claimed dozens were connected to the TdA gang. None of those people were criminally charged.

According to the ACLU, D.B.U. was identified as a gang member based on a tattoo of his niece’s name — his only tattoo. He “vehemently denied” being a TdA member.

The second plaintiff in the lawsuit, 25-year-old R.M.M., fled Venezuela after two members of his family were killed by the TdA gang. ACLU officials said in the lawsuit he was afraid the gang would also kill him, his wife and his children.

R.M.M. was detained in March after federal agents saw him standing with other Hispanic men near their cars outside a Colorado residence that law enforcement believed was connected to the TdA gang, according to court records. Like D.B.U., R.M.M. was identified as a gang member based on his tattoos, including one of his birth year, one of his mother’s name, one of “religious significance” and a character from the Monopoly board game.

He is not and never has been a member of TdA, ACLU officials wrote in court documents.

The ACLU claims Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act is invalid because the TdA gang is not a “foreign nation or government,” and there has been no “invasion or predatory incursion” — both of which are required to invoke the act.

“Criminal activity does not meet the longstanding definitions of those statutory requirements,” ACLU officials said in the lawsuit. “Thus, the government’s attempt to summarily remove Venezuelan noncitizens exceeds the wartime authority that Congress delegated in the AEA.”

In addition to Trump, the Colorado lawsuit names U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of the Denver Field Office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Robert Gaudian and Denver Contract Detention Facility warden Dawn Ceja.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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President Donald Trump on Monday reiterated that he’d like to send U.S. citizens who commit violent crimes to prison in El Salvador, telling that country’s president, Nayib Bukele, that he’d “have to build five more places” to hold the potential new arrivals.

Trump’s administration has already deported immigrants to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison CECOT, known for its harsh conditions. The president has also said his administration is trying to find “legal” ways to ship U.S. citizens there, too.

Trump on Monday insisted these would just be “violent people,” implying they would be those already convicted of crimes in the United States, though he’s also floated it as a punishment for those who attack Tesla dealerships to protest his administration and its patron, billionaire Elon Musk. But it would likely be a violation of the U.S. Constitution for his administration to send any native-born citizen forcibly into an overseas prison. Indeed, it would likely even violate a provision of a law Trump himself signed during his first term.

Here’s a look at the notion of sending U.S. citizens to prison in a foreign country, why it’s likely not legal and some possible legal loopholes.

If it’s legal to do to immigrants, why not citizens?

Immigrants can be deported from the United States, while citizens cannot. Deportation is covered by immigration law, which does not apply to U.S. citizens. Part of being a citizen means you cannot be forcibly sent to another country.

Immigrants can be removed, and that’s what’s been happening in El Salvador. The country is taking both its own citizens that the United States is sending as well as those from Venezuela and potentially other countries that will not take their own citizens back from the U.S. The Venezuelans sent there last month had no opportunity to respond to evidence against them or appear before a judge.

That’s the deal the Trump administration signed with Bukele. The U.S. has sent people to El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama and elsewhere even when they are not citizens of those countries. But, under international agreements, people cannot be sent to countries where they are likely to be persecuted or tortured.

Why does the Trump administration want to send people to El Salvador?

Bukele calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator” and has cracked down on human rights during his administration. He’s also turned El Salvador from one of the world’s most violent countries into a fairly safe one. Trump has embraced that example, including during the Oval Office visit Monday.

Sending immigrants from countries like Venezuela to El Salvador sends a message to would-be migrants elsewhere about the risks of trying to make it to — or stay in — the United States.

There’s a second benefit to the administration: People sent to El Salvador are outside the jurisdiction of United States courts. Judges, the administration argues, can’t order someone sent to El Salvador to be released or shipped back to the U.S. because the U.S. government no longer has control of them.

It’s a potential legal loophole that led Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to issue a grim warning in her opinion in a 9-0 U.S. Supreme Court finding that the administration could not fly alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador with no court hearing, even after Trump invoked an 18th century law last used during World War II to claim wartime powers.

“The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress,” Sotomayor warned. She was writing to dissent from the majority taking the case from the federal judge who had initially barred the administration from any deportations and had ordered planes en route to El Salvador turned around — an order the administration apparently ignored.

A second case highlights the risks of sending people to El Salvador. The administration admits it sent a Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, erroneously to El Salvador. A Salvadoran immigrant, Abrego Garcia, who has not been charged with a crime, had an order against deportation but was shipped to CECOT anyway. On Monday Bukele and Trump scoffed at the idea of sending him back, even though the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return.

Wait, so can they send citizens to El Salvador?

Nothing like this has ever been contemplated in U.S. history, but it seems unlikely. There are other legal barriers besides the fact that you cannot deport U.S. citizens. The United States does have extradition treaties with several countries where it will send a citizen accused of a crime in that country to face trial there. That appears to be the only existing way a U.S. citizen can be forcibly removed from the country under current law.

The Constitution also prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment,” and one of CECOT’s selling points is that conditions there are far harsher than in prisons in the U.S. As noted above, federal courts have no jurisdiction there, and that may deprive people sent there of the constitutional guarantee of due process of law.

“It is illegal to expatriate U.S. citizens for a crime,” wrote Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center for Social Justice in New York.

She noted that even if the administration tries to transfer federal prisoners there, arguing they’re already incarcerated, it could run afoul of the First Step Act that Trump himself championed and signed in 2018. The provision requires that the government try to house federal inmates as close to their homes as possible so their families can visit them — and indeed transfer anyone housed farther than 500 miles from their home to a closer facility.

One last loophole?

There is one potential loophole that the administration could use to send a small group of citizens to El Salvador. They can try to strip the citizenship of people who earned it after immigrating to the United States.

People who were made U.S. citizens after birth can lose that status for a handful of offenses, like funding terrorist organizations or lying on naturalization forms. They would then revert to green card holders, and would be potentially eligible for deportation if convicted of other, serious crimes.

That’s a small, but real, pool of people. Perhaps the most significant thing about it is that it would require loss of citizenship first. In other words, there’s still likely no legal way to force a citizen out of the country. But a few could end up in legal jeopardy anyway.

BANGKOK (AP) — The Trump administration has taken its next steps toward imposing more tariffs on key imports, launching investigations into imports of computer chips, chip making equipment and pharmaceuticals.

The Department of Commerce posted notices about the probes late Monday on the Federal Register, seeking public comment within three weeks. It had not formally announced them earlier.

Although President Donald Trump paused most of his biggest tariff hikes last week for 90 days, apart from those for imports from China, he has said he still plans tariffs on pharmaceutical drugs, lumber, copper and computer chips.

The Commerce Department said it is investigating how imports of computer chips, equipment to make them and products that contain them — which include many daily necessities such as cars, refrigerators, smart phones and other items — affect national security. Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 permits the president to order tariffs for the sake of national security.

The probe includes assessing the potential for U.S. domestic production of computer chips to meet U.S. demand and the role of foreign manufacturing and assembly, testing and packaging in meeting those needs.

Among other aspects of the entire computer chip supply chain, the government intends to also study the risks of having computer chip production concentrated in other places and the impact on U.S. competitiveness from foreign government subsidies, “foreign unfair trade practices and state-sponsored overcapacity.”

After Trump said electronics would not be included in what his administration calls “reciprocal” tariffs of up to 50% on some nations, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explained in an interview on ABC News that pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and autos will be handled with “sector specific” tariffs.

“And those are not available for negotiation,” Lutnick said. “They are just going to be part of making sure we reshore the core national security items that need to be made in this country. We need to make medicine in this country,” he said. “We need to make semiconductors.”

The investigation into pharmaceutical imports includes ingredients used to make such drugs and touches on many of the same aspects of relying on imports to make them.

Asked about his plans for more tariffs on pharmaceuticals, Trump said Monday, “Yeah, we’re going to be doing that.”

He said it would be in the “not too distant future.”

“We’re doing it because we want to make our own drugs,” he said.

More than 70% of the materials, or active pharmaceutical ingredients, used to make medicines made in the United States are produced in other countries, with India, the European Union and China leading suppliers. The U.S. produces about a fifth of all pharmaceuticals made worldwide, but consumes about 45%, far more than any other country.

The U.S. also is a major producer of semiconductors, but only in some areas. It relies heavily on imports from Taiwan and South Korea for certain kinds of advanced chips. In particular, Taiwan dominates advanced logic chip production at 92% of all fabrication capacity according to the International Trade Administration, with South Korea making 8%.

Products like laptops, smartphones and the components needed to make them accounted for nearly $174 billion in U.S. imports from China last year. The administration’s plans suggest that such electronics will still be taxed by previous (non-“reciprocal”) tariffs — and potentially under additional, sector-specific levies.

Although major computer chip makers like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. are investing heavily in U.S. manufacturing facilities, partly due to incentives put in place during former President Joe Biden’s time in office, the costly process of changing entire supply chains would take years.

Separately, the Commerce Department said Monday that it was withdrawing from a 2019 agreement that had suspended an antidumping investigation into imports of fresh tomatoes from Mexico, effective in 90 days. It said the current arrangement failed to protect U.S. growers from “unfairly priced” imports of tomatoes. Most tomatoes from Mexico will be subject to a 20.91% tariff, it said.

“I wanted to see my son’s birth,” Finol Marquez told The Denver Post in Spanish through a translator. But his detention made that impossible.

The Post interviewed Finol Marquez, 28, when he was detained at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Aurora and again after he was forcibly returned to Venezuela, seeking to understand the removal process from his perspective.

His account of his processing before deportation included an assertion that, under pressure, he unwittingly signed a document admitting to being a member of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, which he said wasn’t true.

When asked on April 3 — the day before he was deported — why Finol Marquez had been detained, ICE said it was because he was an “illegal alien” but declined to share information on where he was being deported to and when he was scheduled to be removed. Later, ICE did not directly respond to questions about the document cited by Finol Marquez.

Finol Marquez’s deportation means his wife Ariagnny, two daughters and one infant son are left in Lakewood, wondering what’s next. Ariagnny, 31, declined to use her last name out of a fear that she’ll be deported, too. She has applied for asylum in the U.S.

“I’m here with my three kids,” she said in Spanish. “I have no financial support.”

The exact numbers of recent detentions and deportations under President Donald Trump’s stepped-up enforcement operations remain unclear due to a lack of federal transparency. Confirmation of the whereabouts of deportees has been piecemeal, with advocacy groups, lawyers and news organizations sporadically releasing names and locations based on available information.

Recently, local immigration assistance organizations and a report by CBS News confirmed that Nixon Azuaje-Perez, a Venezuelan migrant teen living in Colorado, was sent to an El Salvadoran prison. More than 200 migrants — many of them Venezuelan — have been transported to a maximum-security prison in the Central American country.

Federal officials have said they’re criminals and members of Tren de Aragua, but advocates have challenged those claims and questioned authorities’ reliance on tattoos as signifiers of gang affiliation.

In the end, Finol Marquez was returned to Venezuela, which reached an agreement late last month to resume accepting repatriation flights from the U.S.

Arrested in driveway

Years before Finol Marquez’s detainment, he and Ariagnny met because they’re from the same neighborhood in Venezuela’s capital city of Caracas. They’ve been together for almost a decade and wed about two years ago.

After making the four-month journey from their home country to the United States, they arrived in September 2023 and were part of the wave of Venezuelan migrants who traveled to Denver after crossing the border. They spent a year and a half starting new lives in Colorado before Finol Marquez was detained.

He said immigrants had successfully come to the U.S. for college and job opportunities, so he felt welcomed under then-President Joe Biden’s administration.

Back then, “the country was different,” he said.

Ariagnny applied for asylum and submitted her work permit paperwork. Finol Marquez applied for asylum, too, but a judge denied it.

On the morning of March 20, several unmarked vehicles pulled up outside the family’s home, according to videos shared with The Post. Both uniformed and plainclothes ICE agents apprehended Finol Marquez in his driveway.

He said they asked him questions in English, which he didn’t understand, and indicated for him to lift his hooded sweatshirt to examine his tattoos. Finol Marquez said he has a tattoo dedicated to his daughter.

Then, with his car keys and cell phone confiscated, he was put in handcuffs and loaded into a white Jeep, video footage shows. Ariagnny, who was pregnant at the time, looked on.

Finol Marquez confirmed that he had an active deportation order from last year and said it was the result of an unpaid traffic ticket. Without a work permit, he said he didn’t have the money to settle the fine.

Finol Marquez said after he was detained, he was taken to the ICE field office in Centennial where officials asked him to sign paperwork in English. Finol Marquez initially refused, but he said he felt pressured and ultimately signed it.

Later, he received a copy of the documents in Spanish, he said. They included a confession that stated he was a member of Tren de Aragua, he said, adding that other detained Venezuelans had also signed that paperwork.

“I’m a little worried,” he told The Post from the facility.

The Post has spoken with several immigration organizations about the alleged documents, but it was unable to obtain a copy and independently verify the claim. ABC News has also reported claims from detained Venezuelan men that they were compelled to sign confessions about being gang members.

When asked about the allegation, a local ICE spokesperson, who has declined to be quoted by name, did not directly respond. In a statement, the agency said it takes very seriously its commitment to promoting safe, secure, humane environments for those in its custody, and the allegation was not in keeping with ICE policies, practices and standards of care.

The agency previously shared the same statement for another Post story about detainees in Aurora.

At that detention facility, Finol Marquez said Mexicans, Guatemalans and other Venezuelans were among the people held there. He recalled one officer who spoke Spanish and helped him, but he also remembers arguing with another officer over whether he actually came to the U.S. to work.

“In reality, there was a lot of racist officials that treated us badly,” Finol Marquez said in a follow-up interview.

A statement sent by the GEO Group, a private contractor that runs the Aurora facility, said the company strongly rejected allegations of racism, pointing to its zero-tolerance policy with respect to staff misconduct or discrimination.

The statement said that, as a service provider to ICE, the GEO Group is required to follow performance-based national detention standards set by the Department of Homeland Security, including those governing the treatment of people in ICE custody.

The removal process

Finol Marquez’s removal left him and his loved ones with questions throughout the process.

Once he was moved from the Aurora facility, Ariagnny said she went days without hearing from him, and her biggest fear was “that he was taken to El Salvador.”

Finol Marquez said that possibility was also top of mind for him.

Before leaving Colorado, he said he asked an official where they were taking him, and that person responded that he’d find out in Texas.

Finol Marquez said he spent the entire day traveling on a plane — from Colorado to Washington state to Utah to Nevada to Arizona. There, he was given a cot, a pillow, a sandwich and water, he said.

The next morning, officers put Finol Marquez in metal handcuffs, leg irons and a belly chain, he said. Finol Marquez said another Venezuelan who spoke English asked an officer where they were going and was told to Florida, then Texas.

After another day of plane travel, Finol Marquez said he rode in a van for hours through Texas. At the final destination, other buses full of people arrived.

“What’s going to happen to us?” Finol Marquez remembered thinking. “Are they going to send us to El Salvador?”

He said he asked officers and didn’t receive responses. The detainees began boarding a plane: first women, then children, then men, Finol Marquez said. He estimates that more than 300 people were loaded onto the aircraft.

“It was scary because I didn’t know where they were going to take me,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to a request for comment about Finol Marquez’s claims of government pressure to sign a Tren de Aragua confession and its lack of communication about what country he was being deported to during the removal process.

On the plane, Finol Marquez said he received a cookie, an apple and water, but his access to a restroom was limited.

After hours in flight, passengers recognized Venezuelan terrain below and started to cheer, Finol Marquez said. American officers removed his chains before landing, he said. He was then processed by Venezuelan officials.

Now that he’s returned to his motherland and been reunited with relatives, Finol Marquez said he’s feeling “good, thanks to God.”

He said his plan was to return to Venezuela eventually. But he didn’t want to do it so soon — or leave his family alone in the process.

“In reality, I didn’t think they would treat me like this,” he said, referring to the U.S. government representatives.

He said he wants his wife and children to come back to Venezuela. Ariagnny is also considering that option.

“To tell the truth, I have a lot of fear,” she said, “and I have thought about going back myself.”

On Tuesday, the Thornton Democrat announced her candidacy for the 8th Congressional District race in 2026. She’s seeking a return to the post she held for the first two years of the district’s existence, from 2023 until her loss by a whisker to Republican U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans in November.

Caraveo spoke to The Denver Post ahead of her announcement, the culmination of a decision she has been mulling for several weeks.

“I think that the district is always going to be incredibly competitive, right?” Caraveo said. “So I know this is going to be a tough race. But I think that that very narrow margin of loss is a testament to the fact that people saw that I was taking a moderate and middle-of-the-road path, really keeping in mind what the district wanted me to do.”

The 44-year-old pediatrician and daughter of Mexican immigrants acknowledged that her loss last year came in what “was not an ideal year for Democrats.” She’s staking hope on the likelihood that the political dynamic will be significantly different next year during midterm elections that historically have favored the party out of power.

Her main focus is on potential cuts to Medicaid that could come as part of a budget that President Donald Trump has made clear he wants to see slimmed down. At her former Thornton medical practice, 65% of her patients relied on the program.

“I know that those difficult conversations are taking place and that Gabe Evans doesn’t seem to have an interest in how deeply this is going to affect families,” Caraveo said.

But Caraveo won’t just have Evans to worry about next year.

She will first have to defeat at least one fellow Democrat, state Rep. Manny Rutinel, of Commerce City, in the primary election in June 2026. Rutinel, who launched his campaign in January, announced last week that he had raised more than $1 million since the beginning of the year.

Evans’ campaign responded to Caraveo’s announcement Tuesday morning by pointing to the contested primary.

“Democrats officially have a base problem and are in an all-out primary battle to the left,” spokeswoman Delanie Bomar said. “Meanwhile, Congressman Gabe Evans hit the ground running as he’s working to fix Colorado’s crime, immigration, and energy crises that Manny, Yadira, and their liberal friends created.”

The district has the heaviest concentration of Latinos among Colorado’s eight congressional districts. On immigration — where Caraveo’s position evolved from being heavily critical of federal immigration agencies when she was a state lawmaker to, last summer, lambasting the Biden administration for mismanaging the border — she says the Trump administration’s approach to the issue is wrong.

“They are not focusing on comprehensive reform,” she said. “They are looking at fear mongering and mass deportations, including of people who are here legally.”

During her 100 days out of office, Caraveo traveled to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. She also grappled with how mental health challenges might play among voters in a new bid for Congress.

Those challenges led to several dark episodes last year in which Caraveo almost took her life with a near-overdose of sleeping pills and pain medication. She spoke publicly about her struggles last summer in an attempt to destigmatize the issue of mental health, but she has provided more details in recent interviews.

After a stint at Walter Reed Army Medical Center early last year to get treatment, Caraveo said she is feeling much better and on track to devote herself to public service again.

“Now that I’m getting that proper treatment and that I’m on the right medications — that I’ve really taken care of issues that I had been ignoring for a long time because I was putting other people ahead of myself — I’m in an even better position to represent this district,” she said.

She also said: “As long as you seek help, you can get better — you can still do hard things. It shouldn’t be held against you that you have these struggles.”

The 8th District, which stretches from Denver’s northern suburbs to Berthoud and Greeley in the north, was drawn by the state’s redistricting commission after the 2020 census to be the most politically competitive in Colorado. In 2022, Caraveo barely edged out Republican state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer by fewer than 2,000 votes out of more than 236,000 cast.

Fast-forward two years, and Evans took the contest against Caraveo by fewer than 2,500 votes out of more than 333,000 cast.

The Cook Political Report once again positions the 8th District race as a toss-up in 2026 — one of only 18 races nationwide with such a ranking — while the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia includes the race among 19 with toss-up status in its rankings.

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BOSTON (AP) — The federal government says it’s freezing more than $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard University, after the institution said it would defy the Trump administration’s demands to limit activism on campus.

The hold on Harvard’s funding marks the seventh time President Donald Trump’s administration has taken the step at one of the nation’s most elite colleges, in an attempt to force compliance with Trump’s political agenda. Six of the seven schools are in the Ivy League.

It sets the stage for a showdown between the federal government and America’s oldest and wealthiest university. With an endowment of more than $50 billion, Harvard is perhaps the best positioned university to push back on the administration’s pressure campaign.

In a letter to Harvard Friday, Trump’s administration had called for broad government and leadership reforms at the university, as well as changes to its admissions policies. It also demanded the university audit views of diversity on campus, and stop recognizing some student clubs.

The federal government said almost $9 billion in grants and contracts in total were at risk if Harvard did not comply.

On Monday, Harvard President Alan Garber said the university would not bend to the government’s demands.

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber said in a letter to the Harvard community. “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.”

Hours later, the government froze billions in Harvard’s federal funding.

The first university targeted by the Trump administration was Columbia, which acquiesced to the government’s demands under the threat of billions of dollars in cuts. The administration also has paused federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Princeton, Cornell and Northwestern.

Trump’s administration has normalized the extraordinary step of withholding federal money to pressure major academic institutions to comply with the president’s political agenda and to influence campus policy. The administration has argued universities allowed antisemitism to go unchecked at campus protests last year against Israel’s war in Gaza.

Harvard, Garber said, already has made extensive reforms to address antisemitism. He said many of the government’s demands don’t relate to antisemitism, but instead are an attempt to regulate the “intellectual conditions” at Harvard.

Withholding federal funding from Harvard, one of the nation’s top research universities in science and medicine, “risks not only the health and well-being of millions of individuals but also the economic security and vitality of our nation.” It also violates the university’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the government’s authority under Title VI, which prohibits discrimination against students based on their race, color or national origin, Garber said.

The government’s demands included that Harvard institute what it called “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies and conduct an audit of the study body, faculty and leadership on their views about diversity. The administration also called for a ban on face masks at Harvard — an apparent target of pro-Palestinian campus protesters — and pressured the university to stop recognizing or funding “any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment.”

Harvard’s defiance, the federal antisemitism task force said Monday, “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.

“The disruption of learning that has plagued campuses in recent years is unacceptable. The harassment of Jewish students is intolerable.”

Trump has promised a more aggressive approach against antisemitism on campus, accusing former President Joe Biden of letting schools off the hook. Trump’s administration has opened new investigations at colleges and detained and deported several foreign students with ties to pro-Palestinian protests.

The demands from the Trump administration had prompted a group of Harvard alumni to write to university leaders calling for it to “legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance.”

“Harvard stood up today for the integrity, values, and freedoms that serve as the foundation of higher education,” said Anurima Bhargava, one of the alumni behind the letter. “Harvard reminded the world that learning, innovation and transformative growth will not yield to bullying and authoritarian whims.”

The government’s pressure on Harvard also sparked a protest over the weekend from the campus community and residents of Cambridge and a lawsuit from the American Association of University Professors on Friday challenging the cuts.

In their lawsuit, plaintiffs argue that the Trump administration has failed to follow steps required under Title VI before it starts cutting funds, including giving notice of the cuts to both the university and Congress.

“These sweeping yet indeterminate demands are not remedies targeting the causes of any determination of noncompliance with federal law. Instead, they overtly seek to impose on Harvard University political views and policy preferences advanced by the Trump administration and commit the University to punishing disfavored speech,” plaintiffs wrote.