A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

The Stakes Could Hardly Be Higher

Yesterday’s Morning Memo asserted that the case of the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia had supplanted the Alien Enemies Act case at the nexus of the constitutional clash between a renegade executive branch and the federal judiciary. Within just of couple of hours that proved no longer to be true.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge in D.C., issued a blistering ruling against the Trump administration, finding probable cause that it had committed criminal contempt of court by violating his order blocking deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

Boasberg set in motion a process that gives the Trump administration a chance to correct its error by affirming that it has custody of the deportees currently being held in a Salvadoran prison or otherwise face a criminal contempt proceeding that could conclude with Boasberg appointing a lawyer to prosecute the case if the Justice Department, as expected, refuses to do so. He gave the administration an April 23 deadline.

It now looks like potential contempt proceedings in the Alien Enemies Act case and the Abrego Garcia case will be running in parallel, leapfrogging each other from time to time for the right to be the Supreme Court’s biggest test so far of the Trump II presidency.

The Trump administration moved yesterday to appeal both cases before the preliminaries of the contempt proceedings could even get under way. In a normal world, neither appeal would find any purchase. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’ revised order in the Abrego Garcia case contains precisely the language the Supreme Court already ratified. Boasberg’s order isn’t even appealable: He hasn’t found anyone in contempt yet. But the Trump administration is looking to gum up the works and delay any reckoning for itself so expect dubious procedural maneuvering from the Trump DOJ to avoid confronting the bad facts and bad law it has created for itself.

At the same time that the Trump Justice Department is frittering away in court the good will and presumption of fair dealing that it had earned over many decades, Attorney General Pam Bondi is personally participating in the White House-led scorched-earth propaganda campaign to smear Abrego Garcia. Bondi has publicly made allegations about him that she hasn’t dared make in court, and once again she’s done it from the White House proper, demonstrating the complete erosion of Justice Department independence in her few weeks on the job:

Bondi is escalating the rhetoric against Abrego Garcia, who she calls "one of the top MS-13 members" and "a terrorist"

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 16, 2025 at 9:15 PM

Your occasional reminder that both these cases – which grew out of the three hastily arranged flights of deportees from Texas to a Salvadoran prison on March 15 – have taken on the highest significance because they are poised to test whether President Trump will abide limitations imposed by the judicial branch and what the judiciary will do if he doesn’t. These cases tee up the broader constitutional issues not because of the underlying legal issues involved but because of the executive branch’s utter brazenness in defying, stonewalling, dismissing, and disregarding Article III judges. It’s not just what the administration is doing but how it’s doing it that is setting up a constitutional showdown.

With the Roberts Court having already blanketed the President with immunity from prosecution and the Justice Department firmly in his pocket, it is difficult to envision a scenario where the judicial branch is able to effectively enforce its orders in face of Trump’s defiance or to impose enforceable consequences for his failure to comply. For instance, while Judge Boasberg cited a rule of criminal procedure that explicitly mandates that he must appoint an attorney to prosecute criminal contempt if the Justice Department refuses to do so, Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck suggests there are constitutional infirmities with the rule itself that may foreclose this path to accountability.

Trump is acting as if he knows the judiciary is bringing a knife to a gunfight. He may not be wrong.

White House Defies Another Court Order

Despite a federal court order prohibiting the Trump White House from punishing the Associated Press for not using “Gulf of America” in its stories, it has continued to block the wire service from accessing events it has typically covered, the AP alleged in a new court filing.

Trump Moves To Revoke Harvard’s Tax-Exempt Status

As first reported by CNN, the IRS is making plans to rescind Harvard University’s tax-exempt status in a potentially existential threat to the Ivy League school. “Officials at the Treasury Department asked the IRS’s acting chief legal counsel, Andrew De Mello, to move ahead with a plan to revoke Harvard’s key status,” the WSJ reported.

Who Couldn’t See This Coming?

Having secured deals with several major U.S. law firms, President Trump is now turning the screws on those same firms further by suggesting the pro bono services they agreed to provide can now be used on a variety of Trump administration’s priorities and as a legal war chest he could tap himself.

This Is Nuts

I had to read this NYT story twice to fully get that acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin hasn’t just enlisted the help of uber-Trumpist Michael R. Caputo for his Senate confirmation battle but has actually hired Caputo within the U.S. attorney’s office.

DOGE Watch

• Politico: DOGE comes for AmeriCorps staff in Washington and across the country
• WaPo: ICE, DOGE seek sensitive Medicare data as immigration crackdown intensifies
• NYT: Musk’s Team Is Building a System to Sell ‘Gold Card’ Immigrant Visas

Rise Up

Organized labor has formed a pro bono legal network to assist federal workers who have been purged.

The Destruction: Medical Science Edition

• NYT: Leading Nutrition Scientist Departs N.I.H., Citing Censorship
• WSJ: Drug Development Is Slowing Down After Cuts at the FDA
• WaPo: Internal budget document reveals extent of Trump’s proposed health cuts

Trump Target: Maine

The Trump administration escalated its attack on the state of Maine by filing a lawsuit against the state’s Education Department for not banning transgender athletes from women’s sports.

Quote Of The Day

“I’m not screaming, ‘aliens!’ But I always reserve my right to scream ‘aliens!’”–Nikole Lewis, an exoplanetary scientist at Cornell University, on the discovery of a possible signature of extraterrestrial life on a planet 120 light-years from Earth

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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Why The Abrego Garcia Case Is ‘Extremely Important’

Morning Memo is keenly focused on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia because it has become a microcosm of the first three months of the second Trump presidency.

Remember the context: As best we can tell, Abrego Garcia was on the third deportation flight from Texas to El Salvador on March 15. The other two flights contained people deported under the Alien Enemies Act without any judicial review. The AEA deportations were the first to be challenged in court, which led to the big blow up in U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s court about whether the Trump administration had willfully violated his order blocking them.

In the midst of that legal battle that the case of Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation emerged, an error the Trump administration admitted, serving as the perfect signifier for why due process is so essential. If Abrego Garcia could be deported in error – and in violation of an existing order by an immigration judge – isn’t that precisely why the law offers procedural protections that all of the deportees that day were entitled to at some level?

It was within that context that the Abrego Garcia case has unspooled and has come to supplant the AEA cases at the nexus of the constitutional battle between the executive and judicial branches. That more than anything else – even the humanitarian concerns about Abrego Garcia himself – is what makes this case “extremely important,” as the federal judge overseeing it said yesterday in court.

Within the case, we’ve had numerous vignettes that serve to highlight the repeat offenses of the Trump II presidency:

• The DOJ lawyer who was candid in open court about the government’s mistaken deportation and subsequent stonewalling of him was promptly fired and his supervisor suspended. Retaliation for perceived disloyalty, the severe erosion of Justice Department independence, and the purging of government professionals: check, check, and check.
• The replacement legal team for the administration has been willing to be a useful pawn in the government’s stonewalling, going into court without sufficient factual information to make its case and making bad faith legal arguments along the way – a pattern that has emerged in many of the cases the Trump administration is defending against.
• The Trump administration’s brazen defiance had confounded U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, as it has so many federal judges in other cases. In pushing the envelope so aggressively, the Trump administration has forced the judiciary to confront the limits of its own powers and whether it’s willing to push back even if it means a constitutional clash. Xinis seemed to find her sea legs yesterday in the hearing I covered in person, as Josh Kovensky and I report here. But even with Xinis moving things along more quickly, I’d feel remiss in not pointing out that Abrego Garcia will still remain wrongfully imprisoned as this legal drama plays out.
• The Trump administration’s positions inside the courtroom have often been at odds with its public statements, as it has gone from admitting the deportation was in error to launching a full-scale propaganda campaign from the White House on down, sowing misinformation, inventing facts, smearing Abrego Garcia with falsehoods, and furiously trying to muddy the waters to obscure its own malfeasance. Sound familiar?
• The propaganda campaign culminated with a chummy Oval Office set piece this week with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele that mirrored February’s ugly Oval Office ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. For his own short-term gains, Trump aligns himself with foreign leaders whose interests are adverse to the United States while disparaging longtime friends and allies.

In theory the Abrego Case should enter a quiet public phase now while the parties furiously engage in expedited discovery, but I have low confidence that the Trump administration will abide by the order Judge Xinis issued yesterday. If it continues to stonewall her, it could lead to another round of hearings or premature attempts by the administration to appeal and to try to get the Supreme Court involved again sooner than later. Either way, this continues to be THE case to watch right now.

Another Dire Warning In A Growing List Of Them

Timothy Snyder:

The president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man who was mistakenly sent to a gulag in another country, celebrated the suffering of this innocent person, and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps.

This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped.

The Dubious Case Against Mahmoud Khalil

NBC News: Government’s case against Mahmoud Khalil is reliant on tabloid accounts, review of evidence shows

Federal Courts Hold The Line In Key Cases

• U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan of DC blocked key provisions of President Trump’s executive order against the law firm Susman Godfrey.
• U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from clawing back $20 billion in EPA funding – a move that had led to the forced resignation of at least one federal prosecutor who balked at acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin turning it into a criminal investigation.
• The Trump administration must unfreeze billions in climate funding, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy of Rhode Island ruled.
• U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of Boston temporarily blocked the Trump administration from ending the Biden-era program that gave temporary legal status to migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti.

Meanwhile, On The National Security Front …

• Sputnik Ed: Acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin appeared on Russian state TV more than 150 times but did not disclose those appearances to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering his nomination to be the permanent U.S. attorney, the WaPo reports.
• Signal Fiasco: CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s Signal messages from the notorious Yemen attack group chat that mistakenly included The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, were deleted, the agency conceded in a court filing.
• Pentagon Leaks: Two top Pentagon officials – Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick – have been placed on leave after a probe into potential leaks of sensitive information.

The Trump II Clown Show

• WSJ: The Little-Known Bureaucrats Tearing Through American Universities
• WaPo: Pete Marocco, the official who oversaw the dismantling of USAID, leaves State Department.
• WSJ: Trump Picks Investigator Behind Hunter Biden Tax Case as IRS Acting Leader

DOGE Watch

• WaPo: DOGE is collecting federal data to remove immigrants from housing, jobs
• NYT: Inside Trump’s Plan to Halt Hundreds of Regulations
• WaPo: Some DOGE staffers hold high-powered jobs at multiple federal agencies

The Destruction

• NYT: Trump Administration Memo Proposes Cutting State Department Funding by Nearly Half
• Wired: HHS Systems Are in Danger of Collapsing, Workers Say
• NYT: The White House wants Congress to rescind more than $1 billion from public broadcasting, which could effectively eliminate almost all federal support for NPR and PBS.

‘This Is About Much More Than Justice Riggs’

TPM’s Khaya Himmelman has the latest on the GOP’s attempt to overturn the result of the North Carolina Supreme Court race.

Today’s Must Read … If You Can Bear It

Via the WSJ:

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