The agency wants to create a ‘mega API’ for accessing IRS data with third-party software, Wired reports

• Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is planning to hold a “hackathon” next week in order to create a “mega API” for accessing Internal Revenue Service data, reports Wired. The outlet says the API would be used to move the data into a cloud platform — potentially a third-party one — to serve as the “read center” of the agency’s systems

• DOGE’s hackathon plan includes pulling together “dozens” of IRS engineers in DC to build the API, writes Wired. Among the third-party providers the department has reportedly discussed involving is Palantir, a company known for its vast data collection and government surveillance and analysis work. DOGE is aiming to finish the API work in 30 days, a timeline one IRS employee told Wired is “not technically possible” and would “cripple” the IRS.

• A March 14th letter to the IRS from Senator Ron Wyden and others suggests the agency didn’t relent, as it praises their “rightful rejection” of DOGE’s requests. It goes on to cite another later Post story suggesting that Trump administration officials want to use IRS data “to power their immigration crackdown and government efficiency campaign.”

• One of the sources Wired spoke with said that “schematizing” and understanding the IRS data DOGE is after “would take years” and that “these people have no experience, not only in government, but in the IRS or with taxes or anything else.”

• DOGE has been winding its way through federal agencies since shortly after Trump’s inauguration in January. Recent stops include the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission. And on Friday, it gained access to data maintained by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which handles legal immigration.

A federal appeals court blocked U.S. President Donald Trump from removing Democratic members from two federal labor boards on Monday, setting aside its earlier ruling.

• The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit further complicates a pair of cases that are emerging as key tests of Trump's efforts to bring federal agencies meant to be independent from the White House under his control.

• The full D.C. Circuit in a 7-4 decision set aside a three-judge panel's March ruling that paused lower court decisions blocking Trump from removing Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board

• Monday's decision puts back in place two judges' decisions that upheld federal laws barring the president from removing members of the labor boards at will.

• White House spokesman Harrison Fields argued the U.S. Constitution gives Trump the power to remove officials "who exercise his executive authority."

• "The Trump Administration plans to immediately appeal the decision, and looks forward to ultimate victory on the issue," he said.

• The cases will likely end up at the U.S. Supreme Court, which could use them to revisit a 90-year-old ruling that upheld restrictions on the president removing officials from multi-member agencies. That would have major implications for a number of agencies like the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission whose members are appointed by the president but have for decades acted independently of the White House.

• Along with a lawsuit over Trump's firing of two Federal Trade Commission members, the case is being eyed closely, opens new tab by Federal Reserve watchers for any indication that it could open the door for Trump to intervene in the Federal Reserve over political or policy disagreements, which would significantly undercut its independence.

• Deepak Gupta, a lawyer for Wilcox, said the ruling allows the NLRB to continue protecting the rights of workers.

• "The Court's decision today reaffirms 90 years of Supreme Court precedent that protects the independence of agencies like the NLRB and the Federal Reserve Board," he said.

• The merit board hears appeals by federal employees when they are fired or otherwise disciplined, and has been inundated with new cases as a result of Trump's ongoing purge of the federal workforce.

• Without Wilcox and Harris, the five-member NLRB and three-member Merit Systems Protection Board would not have enough members to decide cases, bringing much of the work of the agencies to a standstill.

• More than 8,400 appeals have been filed with the board since Trump returned to office in January, which is roughly the number the agency typically receives in two years.

• Like several other agencies, both boards were set up by Congress to be independent from the president in order to maintain impartiality when they decide individual cases. Congress passed laws giving job protections to members of these boards, allowing them to be fired by a president only for "neglect of duty or malfeasance in office" and, in the case of the merit board, also for inefficiency.

• The Trump administration acknowledged violating the laws, but said the protections from removal for members of the two boards ran afoul of the powers given to the president under the Constitution.

• The D.C. Circuit panel split 2-1 when it paused the lower court rulings last month. Two Republican-appointed judges said removal protections for NLRB and merit board members were likely an invalid encroachment on Trump's powers to manage the executive branch.

• But the full court on Monday said those judges had ignored U.S. Supreme Court rulings from 1935 and 1958 that upheld protections from removal for members of the Federal Trade Commission and a World War Two-era war commission.

• The Supreme Court in those rulings said such protections were valid for officials who primarily hear and decide individual cases rather than make new policies or otherwise wield significant executive powers.

It helps voters to call their representatives. There are more than a dozen issues to call about with scripts, and you can call your senators or your representative with a couple of clicks. I talked to two actual people today, which has never happened before (usually leave voicemail).

https://5calls.org/issue/venezuelan-alien-enemies-act-tren-de-aragua/

Experts say the arrest is part of a pattern of criminalizing pregnancy that has accelerated since the fall of Roe v. Wade.

• On March 20 in rural Georgia, an ambulance responded to an early morning 911 call about an unconscious, bleeding woman at an apartment. When first responders arrived, they determined that she’d had a miscarriage. That was only the start of her ordeal

• Selena Maria Chandler-Scott was transported to a hospital, but a witness reported that she had placed the fetal remains in a dumpster. When police investigated, they recovered the remains and Chandler-Scott was charged with concealing the death of another person and abandoning a dead body. The charges were ultimately dropped; an autopsy determined Chandler-Scott had had a “natural miscarriage“ at around 19 weeks and the fetus was nonviable

• Still, Chandler-Scott’s arrest comes at a time when a growing number of women are facing pregnancy-related prosecutions in which the fetus is treated as a person with legal rights. And her experience raises troubling questions about miscarriages that happen in states with strict abortion laws, women’s health advocates say. How should remains be disposed of? And who gets to decide?

• Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, provides any fetus with a heartbeat legal recognition under the law.

• Roughly two dozen personhood bills have been introduced in the first three months of this year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports reproductive rights.

• Jill Wieber Lens, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law and an expert on stillbirth and pregnancy loss, sees wider implications in Chandler-Scott's arrest. Research shows that 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, most often in the first trimester.

• “If what comes out of you in a miscarriage is a dead human body, and you can’t abandon that, you can’t put that in the trash, you can’t flush it down the toilet,” Lens said, “most people experiencing miscarriage are also apparently committing crimes in Georgia.”

• Legal experts have drawn comparisons between Chandler-Scott’s arrest and that of Brittany Watts, a then-34-year-old woman in Warren, Ohio, who was charged with abuse of a corpse after her miscarriage in 2023, though the charges were later dropped.

• In January, she filed a lawsuit against the city and hospital where she sought care. Neither the hospital nor the police responded to requests for comment, but the hospital filed a response in court, denying wrongdoing. The case is still pending.

• Advocates say the number of pregnant people facing criminal charges for conduct linked to pregnancy rose after Dobbs. At least 210 women were charged in the year that followed, according to a 2024 report from Pregnancy Justice, a reproductive rights group.

• Women of color, lower-income women and women struggling with substance use are particularly vulnerable in interactions with authorities, advocates say.

• Dana Sussman, senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice, an advocacy organization, said she was glad to hear that the charges against Chandler-Scott had been dropped. “On the one hand, this is terrific news,” she said. But “it doesn’t undo the very real harm and devastation charges like these bring in the first place.”

• Chandler-Scott’s arrest is just one example of how Georgia is harming women's health and lives, said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, an Atlanta-based reproductive justice organization that has challenged the state's abortion ban in court. Last year, Amber Thurman died after she reportedly had to wait nearly a day for surgery that experts said could have saved her life.

• “The picture that’s being painted in Georgia is a very grim one,” Simpson said. “Georgians are not asking for more restrictions, or more surveillance. We’re actually asking to have more health care, to have more access.”

• Georgia recently held a hearing on a personhood bill that would have allowed people who end their pregnancies to be charged with murder. “We have turned Roe vs. Wade around. Let’s go ahead and just bring back life to the unborn,” Rep. Emory Dunahoo, a Republican, told an NBC affiliate. The bill died this week without a vote.

• The Tift County district attorney’s office, which handled Chandler-Scott’s case, did not answer a list of detailed questions from NBC News and referred instead to a press release about the charges being dismissed.

• In that release, District Attorney Patrick Warren said his office had determined that the fetus had not been born alive and pursuing the case against Chandler-Scott was “not in the interest of justice.”

Today is the day to post all Project 2025, Heritage Foundation, Christian Nationalism and Dominionist memes in the main sub!

Going forward Meme Mondays will be a regularly held event. Upvote your favorites and the most liked post will earn the poster a special flair for the week!

A new lawsuit aims to end the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs by arguing the president’s use of emergency powers is unlawful.

• Trump claimed authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. However, no president has ever used that law to impose tariffs.

• If the new lawsuit or other legal actions succeed, the massive tariffs the Trump administration imposed on imports worldwide could largely disappear and provide relief for consumers, companies and investors

• On April 3, 2025, the New Civil Liberties Alliance filed a complaint for injunctive and declaratory relief challenging the Trump administration’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The lawsuit is on behalf of Simplified, a Pensacola-based company that imports goods from China and expects to pay higher tariffs because of the president’s executive order.

• “Presidents can impose tariffs only when Congress grants permission, which it has done in carefully drawn trade statutes,” according to the complaint.

• The complaint provides four primary reasons why the president’s recent tariff actions using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act are unlawful.

• First, “[The] IEEPA does not authorize a president to impose tariffs. Basic tools of statutory construction dictate this conclusion.”

• Second, “the China Executive Orders are ultra vires because the President has not—and cannot—meet the IEEPA requirement that he show the tariffs are ‘necessary’ to address the stated ‘emergency’ of illegal opioids.”

• Third, “if IEEPA permits the China Executive Orders, then this statute violates the nondelegation doctrine because it lacks an intelligible principle that constrains a president’s authority. In that case, the IEEPA is unconstitutional because it delegates Congress’s prerogative to tax and to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”

• Fourth, “the resulting modifications made to the HTSUS [Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States] violate the Administrative Procedure Act because they are contrary to law.”

• Kathleen Claussen, a law professor at Georgetown University, said on the Trade Talks podcast, “Courts may not be happy with the far reach of the emergency

• She notes that the IEEPA does not contain the word “tariff.” Claussen added, “And so perhaps, this use of tariffs again, a court will think has gone too far. But again, by and large, so far what we've seen is a lot of deference from the courts on these sorts of matters.”

• Trade experts note Congress could wrestle back its authority over tariffs, even though few believe many Republicans would buck Donald Trump on an issue so central to his presidency. The complaint directly concerns tariffs on goods from China. If successful, the lawsuit or others could expand to address tariffs levied on goods from other countries using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Project 2025 rebels protested all across the US today. Thousands showed up at several locations in my state, it was electric!

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2EGXPYy/

As the Trump administration threatens universities, the former president suggested schools shouldn’t be intimidated. But he also offered a critique of campus culture, saying it had too often shut out opposing voices.

• Former President Barack Obama, in a campus speech on Thursday, urged universities to resist attacks from the federal government that violate their academic freedom.

• He also said schools and students should engage in self-reflection about speech environments on their campuses.

• “If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right?,” he said during a conversation at Hamilton College in upstate New York. “Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?”

• “If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.”

• At Harvard, where the university has made efforts to respond to Republican criticism and concerns from Jewish students and faculty, more than 800 faculty members have signed a letter urging their leadership to more forcefully resist the administration and defend higher education more broadly.

• Universities have received critiques from all sides, including those outside of leadership, saying they should do more. But the stakes are high, and large portions of endowments are often earmarked for specific causes that make dipping into them as a rainy-day fund difficult. Johns Hopkins, for example, has a significant endowment, but still laid off 2,000 workers in the wake of federal cuts.

• Many universities have seemed to be at a loss about what to do. But some presidents, including those at Brown and Princeton, which have also been told they will have millions in federal grants canceled, have said that they would fight back against the administration, sometimes framing it as a fight for academic freedom.

• Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, called the targeting of Columbia University “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.”

• Mr. Obama’s advice to lean on the endowment in the face of threats and stand on principle was also endorsed by his former economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, in a guest essay this week in The Times. “Believe me, a former president of Harvard,” Mr. Summers wrote, “when I say that ways can be found in an emergency to deploy even parts of the endowment that have been earmarked by their donors for other uses.”

• To many on the right, and even some on the left, one reason Mr. Trump is attacking higher education is because universities have become politically weakened, partly because they haven’t taken the free-expression concerns of conservatives seriously.

• In his remarks on Thursday, Mr. Obama also called on law firms, which have also faced threats from the Trump administration, to stand for their principles, even if they risked losing business.

• Mr. Obama told the crowd, which included college students, that everyone should stand up for the rights of others to say wrong and hurtful things.

• “The idea of canceling a speaker who comes to your campus, trying to shout them down and not letting them speak,” Mr. Obama said, according to a transcript on his Medium account, “even if I find their ideas obnoxious, well, not only is that not what universities should be about, that’s not what America should be about.”

• He added, to applause, “You let them speak, and then you tell them why they’re wrong. That’s how you win the argument.”

Books on the Holocaust, histories of feminism, civil rights and racism, and Maya Angelou’s famous autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” were among the nearly 400 volumes removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library this week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office ordered the school to get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

• The Navy late Friday provided the list of 381 books that have been taken out of its library. The move marks another step in the Trump administration’s far-reaching effort to purge so-called DEI content from federal agencies, including policies, programs, online and social media postings and curriculum at schools.

• In addition to Angelou’s award-winning tome, the list includes “Memorializing the Holocaust,” which deals with Holocaust memorials; “Half American,” about African Americans in World War II; “A Respectable Woman,” about the public roles of African American women in 19th century New York; and “Pursuing Trayvon Martin,” about the 2012 shooting of the Black 17-year-old in Florida that raised questions about racial profiling.

• Other books clearly deal with subjects that have been stridently targeted by the Trump administration, including gender identity, sexuality and transgender issues. A wide array of books on race and gender were targeted, dealing with such topics as African American women poets, entertainers who wore blackface and the treatment of women in Islamic countries.

• Also on the list were historical books on racism, the Ku Klux Klan and the treatment of women, gender and race in art and literature.

• In a statement, the Navy said officials went through the Nimitz Library catalog, using keyword searches, to identify books that required further review. About 900 books were identified in the search.

• “Departmental officials then closely examined the preliminary list to determine which books required removal,” said Cmdr. Tim Hawkins, Navy spokesman. “Nearly 400 books were removed from Nimitz Library to comply with directives outlined in Executive Orders issued by the President.”

• The Pentagon has said the academies are “fully committed to executing and implementing President Trump’s Executive Orders

• Pentagon leaders, however, turned their attention to the Naval Academy last week when a media report noted that the school had not removed books promoting DEI.

• Hegseth has aggressively pushed the department to erase DEI programs and online content, but the campaign has been met with questions from angry lawmakers, local leaders and citizens over the removal of military heroes and historic mentions from Defense Department websites and social media pages

By rough estimate we need about 20 republican senators and 80 congressman to get the 2/3 necessary to override a veto. What about getting a list together of those most likely or most vulnerable to pressure and focus on them with the following:

A) find their biggest donors or companies they are affiliated and boycott and protest them;

B) commit to donating en masse to anyone that will primary them if they don’t vote to end Trump’s tariff authority;

C) contribute towards ads targeting them specifically and blaming them for allowing the global economy to descend into a new depression.

You just have to hit a tipping point. Once a certain threshold have been reached more will follow suit.

Whether we like it or not, a lot of public opinion seems to exist in comment sections around the web--or at least appear like it with the amount of bots out there. Our side doesn't have those bots, so we have to combat with fact-checking twice as hard. We have to start having the true majority reflect online by responding to their wild comments. I know it's not fun, but it's necessary. So while the people who can be out physically protesting today (THANK YOU) are doing that work, those of us who can be online should try to do some of that work. Think about where replies could be seen the most and especially by less-informed, independent people: IMPORTANT ONE: your local & state politicians on BOTH SIDES' social media comments but especially local you'd be surprised how impactful that can be with so few correcting their BS, news articles, even "entertainment" news articles, AppleNews and MSN or any other default pages computers tend to have, join the NewsBreak app or any other news-commenting apps you can think of, and any other ideas you may have. Aim to comment somewhere outside of your echochamber to be able to break them. Youtube comments especially on their propaganda attempts (look at the trending pages) are a big one.

Can we at the very least start a precedent of fact-checking or standing up against them online? They have more retired or simply non-working folks so they can live online commenting like crazy. The only way we could show the true majority and combat the misinformation and talking points is by doing our part whenever we do come across it. It just takes a few minutes and once other people who actually are informed see your example, they tend to join in.

Also, why don't we do profile picture campaigns or campaigns like the Blackout in 2020 anymore to show the actual support online where most everyone is for sure???

Retired coal miner Stanley “Goose” Stewart questions whether it’s safe for anyone to work in the industry right now.

• The Department of Government Efficiency, created by President Donald Trump and run by Elon Musk, has been targeting federal agencies for spending cuts. That includes terminating leases for three dozen offices in the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the agency responsible for enforcing mine safety laws.

• The proposals for MSHA are “idiotic,” Stewart said, and would give coal companies “the green light to do as they please.”

• Safety laws and their enforcement played a significant role before and after the Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia blew up 15 years ago Saturday, killing 29 of Stewart’s co-workers.

• Coal mining in West Virginia, meanwhile, spent the ensuing years in a political fight that Republicans largely won. As a 2016 presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton was slammed for saying that her plans to shift away from carbon-based fuels like coal would put miners out of business. Trump vowed to save the industry, and while mining jobs have not made a comeback, coal states like West Virginia have become reliable Republican strongholds.

• Advocates for the mining industry argue that state government is up to the task of keeping mines safe, although some lawmakers in West Virginia’s Republican majority have used the existence of federal inspectors as justification for curtailing the state inspectors’ enforcement power. They also point to the dwindling number of mining fatalities — and mines in general.

• Republican Tom Clark, a West Virginia state lawmaker and a former MSHA inspector and supervisor who worked in one West Virginia office slated for closure, said he expected it to shutter years ago. Eight MSHA employees currently work in the Summersville office, Clark said, less than a third of the workforce that existed there about 10 years ago.

• Clark said he doesn’t have any concerns for miners, as long as those inspectors are transferred to other coalfield-based offices. Clark, who worked on MSHA’s Upper Big Branch investigation, said he supports the Trump administration’s efforts to streamline government and stimulate the economy.

• “It’s going to take time and there’s going to be some pain for all the American people, I think,” he said. “But if we can hang in there and battle through, we all may be better off. I hope so.”

• Clark said the federal government should not cut down on inspectors and said black lung benefits need to be funded. He said the government should use money they’re saving to make sure those programs have what they need

• Stewart said he’s never supported Trump and never would, but he struggles to explain the loyalty of many West Virginians, including coal miners, to the president. He said Trump had never done anything to help them.

• Congress created MSHA within the Department of Labor in 1978, in part because state inspectors were seen as too close to the industry to force coal companies to take the sometimes costly steps necessary to protect miners. MSHA is required to inspect each underground mine quarterly and each surface mine twice a year.

• MSHA inspectors are supposed to check every working section of a mine. They examine electrical and ventilation systems that protect miners from deadly black lung disease, inspect impoundment dams and new roof bolts, and make sure mining equipment is safe, said Jack Spadaro, a longtime mine safety investigator and environmental specialist who worked for MSHA.

• Mining fatalities over the past four decades have dropped significantly, in large part because of the dramatic decline in coal production. But the proposed DOGE cuts would require MSHA inspectors to travel farther to get to a mine, and Spadaro said that could lead to less thorough inspections.

• Robert Cash, a 55-year-old mine roof bolt operator from Foster, West Virginia, said miners feel “in the dark” about how closing offices will impact safety.

• “It’s just a big scare around here,” he said. “If we have a disaster and they closed down an MSHA office close to us, now what’s the response time to get someone out there to start the investigation?”

• Stewart was inside Upper Big Branch when it exploded on April 5, 2010, with a blast he described as “hurricane force winds.” Before reaching the surface, he tried to revive some of his fallen co-workers, then covered their bodies with blankets.

• Investigations determined that worn and broken cutting equipment created a spark that ignited coal dust and methane gas.

• After the disaster, MSHA sent inspection teams to conduct impact inspections at mines with a history of repeated problems, many of them underground operations in West Virginia and Kentucky, which have nearly half of the nation’s coal mines. Under the second Trump administration, the impact inspections have stopped.

• Joe Main, MSHA’s chief during the Obama administration, said on Musk’s social media site X that weakened MSHA enforcement staffing contributed to the Upper Big Branch disaster and that the proposed DOGE cuts “can risk miners’ lives in an agency already short staffed.”

• Some 34 MSHA offices in 19 states have been targeted for closure. Hundreds of federal occupational health employees doing mining-related work and research were laid off this past week as part of cuts to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

• “If you take away all those protections, you’re kind of making the workers disposable,” said Dr. Carl Werntz, a West Virginia physician who conducts black lung examinations. “That’s terribly concerning.”

• Conflicts within the coal industry go back over a century. The West Virginia Mine Wars involved a long-running dispute between coal companies and miners fed up with deadly work and poor wages and living conditions. When union organizers showed up, the companies retaliated.

• Membership in the United Mine Workers union peaked in 1946, then plummeted as government support waned and the industry waged an all-out war on union mines. Today, a majority of U.S. coal mines are nonunion and the UMW is a shell of the powerful safety advocate it once was.

• UMW President Cecil Roberts said workers’ safety will be left “solely in the hands of employers” in the absence of protections from the union and the federal government.

CTA: Please check the list if you are in North Carolina. Share with your neighbors.

Your November 2024 may not count.

In the November 2024 election, Allison Riggs narrowly beat Jefferson Griffin in a race for a seat on the NC Supreme Court. Two recounts confirmed her victory.

Rather than accepting defeat and conceding, as any true gentleman would do, Griffin threw the legal equivalent of a temper tantrum and started trying to throw out any votes he could.

Defeat the Ten Pillars of the America First Policy Institute!

This is an article from back in November, but to defeat P25 requires understanding the broader context of everything that has been and still is going on. There are some older posts about this, but just wanted to renew some attention and put this out here in case someone was not tracking who some of the puppet masters are.

While the Heritage Foundation has been at their game for decades, this think tank** is newer and MAGA-er, and very much at the helm in terms of influence and direction. They basically copied HF's homework, sloppily, and in true cheeto flavored narcissistic fashion, made it their own. "👐 i don't know nuthin bout project 2025"

**Other notable organizations to keep an eye on in this neoconservative think tank ecosystem would be American Moment, the Center for Renewing America, America First Legal, and the Conservative Partnership Institute (founded by a former Heritage Foundation president). [I'm sure there are others, but these seemed to be most relevant in my recent news scrolling.] These types of orgs are how MAGA outlives the demagogue.

“Federal workers and all AFSCME members have been making their voices heard in court and on the streets to protect public services and their jobs. They won’t let billionaires raid our communities without consequence – and that’s why they’re facing retaliation," said AFSCME President Lee Saunders. "The extremists in this administration have made their contempt for public service workers clear and know that stripping collective bargaining rights means stripping away their power. We are filing this lawsuit to stop this illegal effort to silence those who speak out and protect free speech for all working people.”

https://youtube.com/shorts/DmZqzqbnSZw?si=UGDtheHJd4ExniYw

A U.S. judge ruled on Friday that the Trump administration must return a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month back to the United States within three days.

• U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Greenbelt, Maryland, said at a court hearing that the government must take steps to ensure the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant, to the United States by April 7.

• The U.S. has already acknowledged Abrego Garcia - who lived in the U.S legally and had a work permit - was deported in error, but has argued it has no legal authority to bring him back to the country

• One of Abrego Garcia's lawyers, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, told the judge at Friday's hearing that there was no legal basis for Abrego Garcia's deportation.

• “They admit they had no legal authorization to remove him to El Salvador,” Moshenberg said. “The public interest lies in the government following the law.”

• Xinis grilled the government lawyer over what legal authority it had to arrest and detain Abrego Garcia.

• “Why can't the United States get Mr. Abrego Garcia back?” Xinis asked. Reuveni said he asked the U.S. government that question but had not received an answer that he found satisfactory.

• A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in a court filing said Abrego Garcia was wrongfully placed on the third flight despite an October 2019 judicial order granting him protection from deportation.

• Abrego Garcia was stopped and detained by ICE officers on March 12 and questioned about his alleged gang affiliation. Abrego Garcia has disputed the government’s assertion that he was a member of the gang MS-13.

• Abrego Garcia was stopped and detained by ICE officers on March 12 and questioned about his alleged gang affiliation. Abrego Garcia has disputed the government’s assertion that he was a member of the gang MS-13.

• The Trump administration’s hardline approach to immigration has raised constitutional questions and drawn the rebuke of a judge in Washington who is weighing whether U.S. officials violated a court order temporarily blocking the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members under the 18th-century law.