U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Friday shut the door on the Justice Department's bid to revive two grand jury subpoenas aimed at the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Jerome Powell, writing in a six-page ruling that prosecutors "did not come close" to persuading him he got it wrong the first time. The decision keeps the subpoenas dead, for now, and sets up what promises to be a bitter appellate fight over the reach of federal prosecutorial power and the independence of the central bank.
Boasberg, the chief judge of Washington's federal trial court, had quashed the subpoenas last month after finding "abundant evidence" they were part of a pressure campaign against Powell rather than a legitimate criminal inquiry. The Justice Department asked him to reconsider. He declined.
The ruling lands at the intersection of two questions that matter to every American with a paycheck, a mortgage, or a retirement account: Can the executive branch use a grand jury to lean on the Fed chairman over interest-rate policy? And does the judiciary have any business stepping in to stop it? Boasberg answered both, and the answers will not satisfy the prosecutors who brought the case.
The subpoenas grew out of a Justice Department investigation, launched earlier this year, into the Federal Reserve's renovation of its headquarters, specifically the Marriner S. Eccles and Federal Reserve Board East buildings in Washington. Powell had testified before the Senate Banking Committee in June about a critical need for updates to both structures. The project was initially estimated at $1.9 billion but swelled to $2.5 billion after design changes, rising costs, and what the Fed described as "unforeseen conditions."
Cost overruns on a government building project are hardly novel. But the timing of the investigation raised eyebrows. As The Hill reported, President Trump had attacked Powell and other members of the Fed's board for months, specifically for refusing to lower interest rates, before the Justice Department opened its probe. Two subpoenas were then served on the Fed's board of governors seeking records tied to the renovation.
Boasberg framed the legal question plainly: Was the "dominant purpose" of those subpoenas to pursue a legitimate investigation because the facts suggested wrongdoing, or to pressure Powell into cutting rates or stepping aside?
He chose the latter. And on Friday, he said nothing the government offered in its motion for reconsideration changed his mind.
The judge's language was pointed. In his original ruling, Boasberg wrote that the government had "produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime," as Breitbart reported. On reconsideration, Boasberg said the DOJ offered "no new evidence" and identified "no material error" that would justify reversing course.
In his six-page opinion, Boasberg drew a sharp line between two distinct issues, one the government kept raising, and one it kept ignoring:
"The Government has missed this distinction. It makes arguments and cites cases about its broad subpoena power and insists that it does not need evidence, but it ignores the fact that its total lack of a good-faith basis to suspect a crime is relevant to the second, separate question of the subpoenas' true purpose."
Put differently: prosecutors kept insisting they had wide authority to issue subpoenas. Boasberg did not dispute that general principle. What he disputed was whether that authority can be wielded when the evidence points not toward a crime but toward political coercion. "The subpoena power 'is not unlimited' and may not be abused," he wrote.
The AP reported that Boasberg found "abundant evidence that the subpoenas' dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will." That finding, left undisturbed by Friday's ruling, is the core of the case going forward.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who oversees the District of Columbia office that brought the investigation, did not take the ruling quietly the first time around. After Boasberg's initial decision last month, she held a press conference and called him an "activist judge" who had "neutered" her office's authority.
Friday brought a similar tone. Timothy Lauer, a spokesperson for Pirro, said the office "will absolutely appeal the judiciary's interference with our access to the grand jury." That appeal will move the fight to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a venue where the legal arguments over prosecutorial power and judicial oversight will be tested at a higher level.
The question of whether a federal judge can quash a grand jury subpoena on the grounds that it serves an improper purpose is not a trivial one. Grand jury proceedings are ordinarily secret, and courts have historically given prosecutors wide latitude. Boasberg's willingness to look behind the subpoenas and evaluate their motive is itself a contested legal move, one the appellate court will have to weigh carefully.
Pirro's critics, including some Republican senators, see the investigation differently. The Washington Times reported that Sen. Thom Tillis wrote on X that the ruling "confirms just how weak and frivolous the criminal investigation of Chairman Powell is, and it is nothing more than a failed attack on Fed independence." Tillis had previously said he would block the confirmation of Kevin Warsh, Trump's nominee to succeed Powell as Fed chair, until the probe was resolved.
That confirmation fight adds a practical dimension to the legal dispute. Powell's term as Fed chair is set to end, and Trump has nominated former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh to replace him. But as Fox News reported, the ongoing investigation has complicated the Senate math. Tillis indicated that continuing the appeal would only delay Warsh's path to the chairmanship, creating an odd dynamic in which the administration's own legal strategy may be undermining its preferred personnel outcome.
For conservatives who want a new direction at the Fed, this is worth pausing over. The investigation into a building renovation, one that has produced, in the judge's words, "essentially zero evidence" of a crime by Powell, has become a procedural roadblock to installing the very person the administration wants running monetary policy.
The broader legal landscape around the Fed is already volatile. The Supreme Court is currently weighing whether Trump had the authority to fire Fed board member Lisa Cook despite long-standing legal protections for governors, a decision expected by summer. That case could reshape the boundaries of presidential power over the central bank for a generation. Readers following that dispute will recall that the Supreme Court agreed to review Trump's authority over the Federal Reserve earlier this year.
The Cook case and the Powell subpoena fight are legally distinct, but they share a common thread: the tension between executive power and institutional independence at the Fed. How the courts resolve both will shape the relationship between the White House and the central bank for years to come.
Boasberg is no stranger to political crossfire. His name has appeared repeatedly in high-profile clashes between the judiciary and the executive branch. The "activist judge" label Pirro applied is one that has been leveled at other federal judges who have blocked administration policies, sometimes with more justification than others.
In this case, the charge carries a specific sting because Boasberg did not merely rule on a procedural technicality. He made a factual finding, that the subpoenas were pretextual, and then held firm when asked to revisit it. Whether that finding survives appeal will depend on the standard of review and the appellate panel's appetite for second-guessing a trial judge's assessment of prosecutorial motive.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court hearing on the Cook dispute continues to draw attention from Fed watchers and legal scholars alike, adding another layer of uncertainty to an already fraught institutional moment.
As Just The News reported, Boasberg wrote in his original ruling that "there is abundant evidence that the subpoenas' dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will." That sentence will be the battleground on appeal.
The appeal is coming. Pirro's office has made that clear. The D.C. Circuit will decide whether Boasberg overstepped by evaluating the government's motive behind otherwise facially valid subpoenas, or whether he correctly applied the principle that prosecutorial power has limits.
For the administration, the stakes extend beyond this one case. If the appellate court upholds Boasberg, it will establish a precedent that federal judges can look behind grand jury subpoenas and block them when the evidence suggests political rather than criminal intent. That would be a significant check on executive power, one that future administrations of either party would have to live with.
If the court reverses, prosecutors get their subpoenas back, and the investigation into the Fed's $2.5 billion renovation project moves forward. Powell would face the prospect of producing records in a probe that, at least so far, has not identified a specific crime he is suspected of committing.
The Supreme Court's posture on protecting Fed officials from executive removal adds yet another variable. A ruling in the Cook case that reinforces the independence of Fed board members could undercut the legal and political logic of an investigation that Boasberg has already called pretextual.
Either way, the central question remains: Was this investigation about a building, or about a chairman who wouldn't bend? Boasberg has answered twice now. The appeals court gets the next word.
Attorney General Pam Bondi is out, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is stepping up to lead the Department of Justice. President Trump announced the shakeup Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, praising Bondi's tenure while confirming she would be transitioning to a private-sector role.
The move came together quickly. Semafor's Shelby Talcott reported Thursday morning that Trump had informed Bondi the previous day that her time as attorney general was drawing to a close. Fox News's Peter Doocy confirmed the transition before the Truth Social post went live, noting during a phone call that "the president said he was preparing some remarks."
Just the day before, Trump and Bondi had sat side by side at the Supreme Court for oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara. Within hours, the president told her the chapter was ending.
Trump's post struck a tone of gratitude, not friction. He called Bondi "a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend" and credited her with overseeing results:
"Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900."
That framing matters. This wasn't a firing dressed up in diplomatic language. Trump went out of his way to commend Bondi's record, signal a continued relationship, and preview her next move. He noted she "will be transitioning to a much-needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future." No details on the role, the employer, or the timeline. But the signal is clear: Bondi leaves with the president's endorsement intact.
Trump's choice for acting attorney general is not a bureaucratic placeholder. Breitbart noted that Todd Blanche is the attorney who stood next to the president through one of the most politically charged legal battles in modern American history, representing Trump in the business records case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in April 2024.
Trump described Blanche as "a very talented and respected Legal Mind." That personal familiarity cuts both ways in Washington, but in this White House, loyalty forged in the courtroom carries weight. Blanche already holds the deputy attorney general title, making the transition legally straightforward and operationally seamless.
Before the announcement, multiple reports had floated Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin as a potential replacement. Trump chose differently, opting for continuity within the DOJ rather than pulling a high-profile appointee from another agency.
Bondi served as attorney general since February 5, 2025, a tenure of roughly a year by the time of her departure. In that window, the DOJ under Trump's direction pursued an aggressive law enforcement posture. Whether Blanche continues that trajectory or recalibrates will become clear soon enough, but the infrastructure Bondi helped build doesn't vanish with her exit.
The more interesting question is what this means for the administration's broader legal strategy. The birthright citizenship case is before the Supreme Court. Immigration enforcement remains a centerpiece of Trump's agenda. And the DOJ sits at the nexus of nearly every consequential policy fight the administration is waging. Blanche inherits all of it.
Personnel is policy, as the saying goes. And the president just installed a man who knows firsthand what it looks like when the justice system is weaponized against a political opponent. That perspective will shape how the Department of Justice operates going forward.
Washington will spend the next 48 hours speculating about what really happened. That's what Washington does. But the public facts tell a simple story: a president reshuffled his team, praised the departing member, and elevated someone he trusts. Bondi moves on. Blanche moves up. The DOJ keeps moving.
For an administration that has treated personnel decisions as strategic signals, this one is worth watching, not for what it disrupts, but for what it accelerates.
The Department of Homeland Security has lodged a third ICE detainer in Fairfax County, Virginia, after a 28-year-old illegal immigrant from Guatemala was charged with beating his three-month-old daughter to death. It marks the third murder charge against an illegal immigrant in the sanctuary county in roughly one month.
Fairfax County Police responded on March 27, shortly after 7:30 p.m., to a report of an unresponsive infant at the 3400 block of Lake Street in the Bailey's Crossroads community. Officers began administering CPR before Fire and Rescue personnel took over. The baby was transported to a local hospital, where she was later pronounced dead.
According to Breitbart, preliminary autopsy results from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined the cause of death was blunt force trauma. At the time of the call, the infant was in the care of her father, Misael Lopez-Gomez, according to Fairfax police.
Lopez-Gomez is now being held at the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center with no bond, facing charges of second-degree murder and felony child abuse. According to DHS, he admitted he illegally entered the United States along the southwest border with Mexico in July 2023 near Albuquerque, New Mexico.
ICE lodged an arrest detainer on Lopez-Gomez and is requesting that he be handed over to federal agents in the event of his release. Acting Assistant DHS Secretary Lauen Bis did not mince words:
"This cold-blooded killer murdered his own three-month-old daughter. We are calling on Governor Spanberger to commit to not releasing this barbaric animal from jail into Virginia communities."
Bis added:
"This monster should have never been allowed in our country by the Biden administration. We need cooperation from sanctuary politicians to stop criminals from being released from jail to perpetrate more crimes and create more innocent victims."
The Lopez-Gomez case did not arrive in isolation. It landed on a county already reeling from two other murder charges against illegal immigrants in the span of weeks.
Just before 9:00 p.m. on a recent Sunday, 38-year-old Anibal Armando Chavarria-Muy, a criminal illegal immigrant from Guatemala, allegedly stabbed an unidentified man to death at a residence on the 6000 block of Bellview Drive in Bailey's Crossroads. Authorities believe Chavarria-Muy may have known the victim. He is charged with second-degree murder and is being held without bond at the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center. ICE lodged an arrest detainer on him as well.
In late February, DHS issued a detainer on Abdul Jalloh, a citizen of Sierra Leone, after his arrest in the fatal stabbing of 41-year-old U.S. citizen Stephanie Minter at a Fredericksburg bus stop. Fairfax County Police charged him with allegedly killing Minter.
Jalloh's history makes the other two cases look like bureaucratic hiccups by comparison. He was discovered to have a criminal record showing more than 30 prior arrests, with charges including:
Jalloh entered the United States illegally sometime in 2012. ICE previously lodged a detainer against him in 2020, and a judge granted a final order of removal, finding he could be removed to any country other than Sierra Leone. Despite that order, Jalloh found his way back onto Fairfax County streets until his arrest in the killing of Minter.
More than 30 arrests. A final order of removal. And he was still walking free in a Virginia community. A three-month-old girl, Stephanie Minter, and an unidentified man are now dead.
DHS is now asking Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger and Fairfax County sanctuary officials to honor all three ICE detainers. The fact that federal authorities have to ask is the problem.
Sanctuary policies rest on a theory: that shielding illegal immigrants from federal enforcement builds "community trust" and makes everyone safer. Fairfax County just produced three murder charges against illegal immigrants in roughly 30 days. The theory has collided with a three-month-old's autopsy report.
The Jalloh case is the most damning indictment of the entire framework. Here was a man with more than 30 prior arrests, a judge-ordered removal, and a prior ICE detainer. Every tool the system offers was deployed at some point. None of it mattered because the local jurisdiction treated cooperation with federal immigration enforcement as optional. The revolving door spun, and Stephanie Minter paid with her life.
This is not a story about immigration policy in the abstract. It is not about "root causes" or economic migration or the complexities of the asylum system. It is about three people who are dead in one Virginia county because individuals who should never have been in the country, or who had already been ordered removed, were walking free under the protection of local policy choices.
Governor Spanberger has not publicly responded to DHS's request, at least not in any statement included in available reporting. That silence carries its own weight. Three detainers. Three murder charges. One county. One month. And the governor of Virginia has offered nothing.
Sanctuary jurisdictions love to frame their policies as humane. They rarely hold press conferences when the cost of that humanity lands on a coroner's table. The political incentive structure is clear: take credit for compassion, avoid accountability for consequences.
Bis pointed the finger squarely at the Biden administration for allowing Lopez-Gomez into the country in the first place. That criticism lands. But the Biden administration is gone. The question now is whether state and local officials will continue to obstruct the enforcement mechanisms designed to prevent exactly this.
Fairfax County can honor these detainers today. Governor Spanberger can commit publicly to ensuring that illegal immigrants charged with murder are transferred to federal custody. These are not complex policy dilemmas. They are basic decisions about whether public safety outranks ideological commitment to sanctuary politics.
A three-month-old baby is dead from blunt force trauma. A woman was stabbed to death at a bus stop by a man with 30 prior arrests and a removal order. An unidentified man was killed in his own community. Three families are shattered in Fairfax County, and the officials who designed the policies that kept these men on local streets have said nothing at all.
Body camera footage from a Martin County, Fla., deputy captures Tiger Woods ending a phone call and telling the officer, "Yeah, I was just talking to the president," moments before his arrest on DUI charges following a March 27 rollover crash near his home on Jupiter Island.
The footage, obtained Thursday by multiple outlets, shows Woods wrapping up a call with the words, "Thank you so much. All right. You got it. Bye. Thank you," before the deputy asks him to stay put. It was unclear whether Woods was in fact speaking with President Trump, as audio from the other end of the call was unavailable. The White House did not return a request for comment.
What is clear: the 50-year-old golfer told authorities he was looking at his phone and changing the radio station when his Land Rover clipped the back end of a pickup truck and flipped. Deputies found two white pills at the scene, according to WFLA. After conducting a sobriety test, Martin County Deputy Sheriff Tatiana Levenar delivered the verdict:
"I do believe your normal faculties are impaired, and you're under an unknown substance, so at this time you're under arrest for DUI."
Woods has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
On Tuesday, Woods announced he was temporarily stepping away from golf. He had been expected to return to the Masters tournament in Augusta, Ga., this week. Instead, he issued a statement saying the break was necessary "to seek treatment and focus on my health," The Hill reported.
"This is necessary in order for me to prioritize my well-being and work toward lasting recovery."
For a man who has defined American athletic greatness across three decades, that sentence carries enormous weight. Woods isn't some flash-in-the-pan celebrity spiraling on a reality show. He is a generational talent, a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, and someone whose struggles with injury and personal turmoil have played out on one of the most public stages in the world.
That doesn't excuse driving impaired. It does contextualize the stakes.
President Trump, an avid golfer who awarded Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom during his first term, spoke to Reuters on Wednesday about Woods's decision to seek treatment. His tone was one of loyalty and confidence.
"It's a good thing that he's doing, but he's going to end up being terrific. He's a great guy."
"He's one of the greatest people I've known. He's a great champion … he'll be fine."
Whatever the nature of the phone call captured on the body camera, Trump's public posture toward Woods has been consistent: support for the man, encouragement toward recovery. That kind of personal steadiness from a president matters more than the media's inevitable effort to turn a friendship into a scandal.
The body camera video is going to generate days of coverage, most of it fixated on the presidential name-drop. Cable news will loop the clip. Pundits will speculate about what was said on the other end of that call. Social media will do what social media does.
None of that changes the core facts:
The legal process will sort out the charges. The more interesting question is whether Woods can actually do what he says he's going to do. Recovery is not a press release. It's not a well-crafted statement from a PR team. It is daily, grinding, unglamorous work that most people never see.
There is a predictable pattern when famous people face moments like this. The left-leaning entertainment press will oscillate between performative sympathy and voyeuristic glee. The recovery industrial complex will offer Woods as a mascot. And somewhere in the noise, the actual human being at the center of it all will either do the work or he won't.
Conservatives have always understood that personal responsibility is not a slogan. It is the operating system. Woods broke the law. He is facing the legal consequences. He says he is seeking help. Those are the facts, and they deserve to be treated with the seriousness that any DUI warrants, regardless of the defendant's fame or friendships.
Trump called Woods "a great champion." Champions are defined not by the absence of failure but by what they do after it. The footage from Martin County is difficult to watch. What comes next will determine whether it's a chapter or a conclusion.
The last remaining criminal charge against pro-life journalist David Daleiden was dismissed Wednesday, closing the book on a nearly decade-long California prosecution that targeted the undercover reporters who exposed the abortion industry's trafficking in fetal body parts.
The case against Daleiden and fellow journalist Sandra Merritt, both affiliated with the Center for Medical Progress, has been fully expunged. No prison time. No fines. No penalties.
The state of California walked away with virtually nothing to show for ten years of legal warfare against two people whose actual offense was making powerful institutions uncomfortable.
Breitbart noted that Daleiden confirmed the dismissal on social media, noting that the expungement came after what he described as a last-ditch effort by Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation to reverse the state's agreement:
"As promised, the final charge has been DISMISSED and the case completely expunged — after a couple months' administrative delay, and a truly bizarre last-minute 'April Fool's' attempt by @PPFA and @NatAbortionFed to overturn the State's agreement."
The case originated from undercover recordings Daleiden and Merritt made of abortion industry officials discussing the sale and harvesting of fetal body parts. The recordings were explosive. Rather than investigate the practices the videos revealed, California's Department of Justice turned its sights on the journalists who captured them.
Steve Cooley, Daleiden's defense attorney and a former prosecutor with five decades of legal experience, did not mince words about what the case represented:
"In my five decades as an attorney, 40 years of which were as a prosecutor, I have never seen such a blatant exercise of selective investigation and vindictive prosecution."
Cooley went further, saying the California Attorneys General who initiated and sustained the prosecution for nearly ten years "should be ashamed for weaponizing their office to pursue people who were merely exposing illegality associated with the harvesting and sale of fetal body parts."
That framing matters. The undercover recordings didn't fabricate anything. They captured abortion industry figures, in their own words, discussing practices that shocked the conscience of millions of Americans. The state's response was not to hold the industry accountable. It was to prosecute the messengers.
Sandra Merritt's legal team at Liberty Counsel was equally direct. The organization said the resolution "ends an unjust criminal case by dropping these baseless criminal charges without any prison time, fines, or other penalties." Liberty Counsel also noted that California had never criminally prosecuted undercover journalists "for surreptitious recordings made in the public interest" before this case.
That fact alone tells you everything about the motivation behind the charges. Undercover journalism is a well-established tradition in American media. Hidden cameras have brought down corrupt politicians, exposed nursing home abuse, and revealed food safety violations. Journalists who do this work are typically celebrated. They win awards. They get book deals.
Unless they target the abortion industry.
Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, put a fine point on it:
"Sandra Merritt did nothing wrong. She did the right thing by exposing the depravity of the abortion industry. This plea agreement ends an unjust criminal case by dropping these baseless criminal charges without any prison time, fines or other penalties. Sandra deserves to be applauded and acclaimed for revealing these horrors and then enduring this selective and vindictive prosecution as a result."
Staver added that the state of California "deserves to walk away virtually empty-handed," which is precisely what happened.
If there were any remaining doubt about whether this prosecution was about law enforcement or politics, California Attorney General Rob Bonta erased it with his own statement. Rather than acknowledge the collapse of a case his office spent years pursuing, Bonta tried to reframe the outcome as a win:
"While the Trump Administration is issuing pardons to individuals convicted of harming reproductive health clinics and providers, my office is securing criminal convictions to ensure that Californians can exercise their constitutional rights to reproductive healthcare."
Read that again carefully. The final charge was dismissed. The case was expunged. There was no prison time and no fines. And Bonta is claiming he "secured criminal convictions." That is a remarkable spin on what amounts to total capitulation.
Bonta then added a warning that his office "will not hesitate to continue taking action against those who threaten access to abortion care — whether by recording confidential conversations or other means." The quiet part is now fully audible: in California, filming abortion industry officials discussing the sale of baby body parts is treated as a threat to "abortion care." The recordings are the crime. The practices they revealed are not.
This case was never really about California's recording consent laws. It was about deterrence. The message was clear from the beginning: investigate the abortion industry, and the state will come after you with everything it has. It doesn't matter if it takes a decade. It doesn't matter if the charges ultimately collapse. The process itself is the punishment.
Daleiden and Merritt spent years of their lives under indictment. They spent untold sums on legal defense. They endured the weight of a state apparatus aligned against them, backed by some of the most powerful and well-funded political organizations in the country. Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation were apparently still trying to keep the case alive even as the state was ready to let it go.
Consider what that reveals about institutional priorities. The videos showed senior abortion industry officials casually discussing the procurement of fetal organs over lunch. They discussed pricing. They discussed logistics. The public reaction was revulsion. Congressional investigations followed. But in California, the only people who faced criminal consequences were the ones who held up the mirror.
The dismissal is a victory, and Daleiden deserves credit for enduring a prosecution designed to break him. His defense team at Steve Cooley & Associates earned this outcome against, as Daleiden put it, "powerful, government-funded special interests." But the broader system that allowed this to happen remains intact. California's attorney general is openly promising more of the same.
Daleiden hinted that the Center for Medical Progress "has been quietly working on a big new project to release soon." Whatever it is, the abortion industry and its allies in state government now know that ten years of prosecution, millions in legal costs, and the full weight of California's justice system were not enough to silence him.
That should worry them far more than any undercover recording.
A federal judge in Boston ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration unlawfully terminated the parole status of migrants who entered the country through the CBP One app, ordering the government to reverse its revocation of their legal status. U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs found that the Department of Homeland Security failed to follow its own regulations when it moved to strip parole from thousands of migrants last year.
DHS called the ruling "blatant judicial activism."
The case centers on a mobile application expanded by the Biden administration starting in 2023, which allowed migrants to schedule appointments at the border and, in many cases, receive parole into the United States for up to two years. When President Donald Trump returned to the White House, he moved to shut down the app. In April of last year, DHS sent mass emails to many of the roughly 900,000 people who had entered the country using it, informing them it was "time for you to leave the United States."
A class-action lawsuit followed in August, filed by three individuals from Venezuela, Cuba, and Haiti, along with the Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts and the legal group Democracy Forward.
According to Fox News, Judge Burroughs's ruling hinged on procedural grounds, finding that DHS exceeded its statutory authority and contradicted its own regulatory framework when it terminated parole en masse. In her opinion, she wrote:
"The regulations do not give the agency unfettered discretion to terminate parole."
She further found that the termination notices failed to comply with the requirements outlined in both statute and DHS's own regulations:
"When Defendants terminated the impacted noncitizens' parole without observing the process mandated by statute and by their own regulations, they took action that was 'not in accordance with law.'"
This is where conservatives should pay close attention, not to the outcome, but to the architecture of the problem. The Biden administration used parole authority, a tool designed for case-by-case humanitarian exceptions, and scaled it into a de facto admissions program for nearly a million people. That decision created a legal structure that now constrains what the current administration can do to unwind it. You build a bureaucratic edifice, and suddenly a judge tells you the demolition permit wasn't filed correctly.
The Trump administration argued, correctly, that Biden overstepped parole authority by broadly awarding the status instead of granting it on a case-by-case basis, which is what the law actually requires. That argument didn't carry the day in this courtroom, but it remains the central issue.
Parole was never meant to be an assembly line. The Immigration and Nationality Act envisions it as a narrow, individualized tool. The Biden administration turned it into a conveyor belt, processing hundreds of thousands of migrants through an app and paroling them into the country with minimal scrutiny. That was the original lawlessness. The fact that a federal judge is now protecting the fruits of that lawlessness on procedural grounds doesn't make the underlying program any less of a perversion of statutory intent.
Consider the sequence:
The pattern is familiar. A Democratic administration uses executive authority to create facts on the ground, embedding hundreds of thousands of people into the immigration system. Then, when a Republican administration attempts to course-correct, the judiciary steps in to police the process of the correction while having shown no similar interest in policing the process of the original overreach.
Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, the progressive legal group behind the lawsuit, framed the ruling in sweeping terms:
"Today's ruling is a clear rejection of an administration that has tried to erase lawful status for hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a button."
The irony is thick enough to cut. The "lawful status" Perryman celebrates was itself created with something very close to the click of a button: a mobile app that transformed parole from a narrow exception into a mass-entry program. If clicking a button to grant parole to 900,000 people is legitimate governance, clicking a button to revoke it is just the next administration using the same tools.
The Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts said the ruling "brings long-awaited relief after months of fear and uncertainty." That human dimension is real. People made decisions based on the status the government granted them. But the appropriate target for frustration is the administration that handed out a temporary status it lacked clear authority to grant at that scale, not the one trying to restore the law's actual boundaries.
DHS made clear it views the ruling as an overreach, with a spokesperson insisting that canceling the paroles "is a promise kept to the American people to secure our borders and protect our national security." The spokesperson also argued the ruling interfered with the president's authority to determine who remains in the country.
An appeal is the obvious next step. The procedural nature of the ruling suggests the administration could also attempt to re-terminate the paroles through a process that satisfies the court's requirements, providing individualized determinations rather than mass revocations.
But the broader lesson is one conservatives have been shouting about for years. When an administration uses executive power to create massive, quasi-legal immigration programs outside the normal legislative process, unwinding them becomes a legal minefield. Every person paroled becomes a plaintiff. Every mass action becomes a procedural vulnerability. The bureaucracy that was built to let people in becomes a fortress against letting the next president enforce the actual law.
Biden's DHS built the trap. The courts are now enforcing their walls.
A majority of Supreme Court justices signaled deep skepticism toward the Trump administration's effort to end birthright citizenship during oral arguments Wednesday, with Chief Justice John Roberts and at least three other conservative-appointed justices pushing back hard on the government's constitutional reasoning.
The case, Trump v. Barbara, represents the most significant challenge to the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause in over a century. President Trump signed the executive order on his first day back in office, seeking to end automatic citizenship for nearly all persons born in the United States to illegal immigrant parents or parents holding temporary non-immigrant visas. He campaigned on the issue during his successful 2024 reelection bid.
But the oral arguments made clear that even a court with six Republican-appointed justices is not prepared to rewrite settled constitutional law by executive decree.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer carried the administration's case, arguing that the Citizenship Clause has been misinterpreted for more than 100 years and that modern realities demand a new reading. According to Fox News, his core pitch was blunt:
"We're in a new world now. 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who's a U.S. citizen."
Roberts was unmoved. He called one of Sauer's arguments "quirky," then delivered the line that may define this case's narrative:
"It's a new world, but it's the same constitution."
The Chief Justice pressed further on the administration's attempt to extrapolate a broad restriction from narrow historical examples, telling Sauer he wasn't "quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples."
That is a devastating framing for the government's position. Roberts wasn't questioning the policy goal. He was questioning whether the legal architecture could bear its weight. There is a significant difference, and it matters for what comes next.
Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch also appeared skeptical of the administration's arguments. Justice Brett Kavanaugh may have been the most pointed. He cited the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act and noted that Congress had every opportunity to narrow birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court's 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. It didn't.
"One might have expected Congress to use a different phrase if it wanted to try to disagree with Wong Kim Ark on what the scope of birthright citizenship, or the scope of citizenship, should be."
Kavanaugh also told Sauer flatly that if the Court agreed with the administration's reading of Wong Kim Ark, "that could be just a short opinion." In other words, the argument is thin enough that disposing of it wouldn't require much ink.
Only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito appeared sympathetic to the administration's position. Thomas questioned how much the original debates around the 14th Amendment actually concerned immigration, a line of inquiry that tracks with the administration's originalist argument. Alito invoked a classic analogy from the late Justice Antonin Scalia about applying old laws to new facts:
"There's a general rule there, and you apply it to future applications."
The Scalia analogy involved an old theft statute written before microwave ovens existed. Someone steals a microwave and argues they can't be convicted because the law predates the appliance. The point: general principles don't expire when circumstances change. It's a reasonable framework, but Alito and Thomas appear to be in a clear minority on this bench.
Here is where conservatives need to be honest with themselves about what this case actually reveals. The frustration driving this executive order is entirely legitimate. The idea that illegal immigrants can cross the border, give birth, and secure American citizenship for their children is a policy outcome that most Americans find indefensible. An estimated 150,000 children are born annually in the United States to noncitizens. The incentive structure is obvious, and the exploitation of it is real.
But the mechanism matters. The 14th Amendment says what it says. Wong Kim Ark has stood since 1898. If conservatives want to change birthright citizenship, the honest path runs through Congress or a constitutional amendment, not an executive order asking the Supreme Court to reverse more than a century of settled law.
This is the same principle conservatives invoke when the left tries to govern by executive fiat. Presidential power has limits. Those limits don't evaporate because the policy goal is popular with our side.
The ACLU's legal director, Cecillia Wang, argued the case on behalf of the challengers, calling birthright citizenship a "fixed, bright-line rule" that "has contributed to the growth and thriving of our nation." She also argued:
"It comes from text and history. It is workable, and it prevents manipulation."
The ACLU framing is, of course, self-serving. The organization has spent decades fighting every meaningful immigration enforcement measure. Their concern for constitutional text is situational at best. But Wang's core legal point, that the 14th Amendment's plain language creates a clear rule, is the same point Roberts and Kavanaugh were making from the bench. When you've lost the textualists, you've lost the case.
The President attended the oral arguments in person, marking the first time in U.S. history that a sitting president has appeared before the high court during arguments. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick joined him. Trump was quiet throughout, did not comment publicly as he departed, and left shortly after Sauer presented the government's case.
The gesture itself carried weight. Whatever the legal outcome, Trump forced this question onto the national stage and into the marble halls of the Court. Birthright citizenship had been a third-rail issue for decades. No president had been willing to challenge the consensus. Trump did, and now the country is having the debate that the political class spent years avoiding.
A decision is expected by late June.
If the Court rules against the executive order, as Wednesday's arguments strongly suggest it will, the question moves to where it probably belonged from the start: Congress. Legislation redefining the scope of the Citizenship Clause would face its own constitutional challenges, but it would stand on far stronger institutional footing than a unilateral executive action.
The harder question is whether Congress has the political will. Republicans have spent years talking about ending birthright citizenship. Translating that rhetoric into legislation, with the kind of specificity that survives judicial review, is a different exercise entirely. It requires drafting, debate, coalition-building, and the willingness to defend the vote in a general election. That's harder than signing an executive order on day one. It's also how the system is supposed to work.
The Constitution doesn't bend to frustration, no matter how justified. Conservatives know this. It's time to act like it.
Lindsey Buckingham, the 76-year-old rock guitarist best known for his decades with Fleetwood Mac, was attacked while arriving for an appointment in Santa Monica on Wednesday. A woman hurled an unidentified substance at Buckingham as he entered the building, then fled the scene.
Buckingham is said not to have been injured in the attack. The LAPD's Threat Management Unit confirmed it is investigating, and law enforcement sources indicate an arrest is expected soon, with a suspect already identified.
The incident is alarming on its own. It becomes something else entirely when you learn what Buckingham has been dealing with for years.
More than a year before Wednesday's attack, Buckingham was granted a five-year permanent restraining order against a 53-year-old woman identified only as Michelle. A judge extended a previous temporary order, requiring Michelle to remain at least 100 yards away from Buckingham, his wife Kristen, and their son William, and to refrain from threatening, harassing, or contacting the musician in any way.
According to Buckingham's court testimony, the harassment began around 2021, when Michelle allegedly acquired the business phone number of his wife, Kristen, and began calling her. The messages escalated. Buckingham told the court Michelle was "leaving long drawn-out messages that included the claim that she was my child and threats to kill my family and me."
Buckingham insisted in his testimony that he was not Michelle's father and that she was not known to him personally at all. He said Michelle blamed him for facial deformities she apparently suffered as a child and demanded money.
Police instructed Michelle to cease contacting the Buckingham family in 2022. She reportedly returned in 2024, leaving a collage outside his house. At a hearing in December 2024, Buckingham showed the judge a picture Michelle had taken outside his home and played an unmarked audio clip.
The stalking campaign allegedly included a fabricated emergency. Buckingham testified that police arrived at his home, woke him, and handcuffed him after a 911 call warned that his son William "was at the house intending to hurt himself." Officers reportedly searched the property for 20 minutes before uncuffing Buckingham.
Buckingham told the court the call was a weapon aimed at his family:
"I now know that the 911 call was traced to [Michelle's] phone and was the latest in an unabated pattern of harassment and threatening acts against my family and me."
The court apparently agreed. The permanent restraining order was granted. And yet, here we are.
There has been no public indication from authorities that Michelle was the woman who assaulted Buckingham on Wednesday. The LAPD stated it "is working with the Santa Monica Police Department to investigate this incident" and declined further comment to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation.
But the broader picture is hard to ignore. A man obtained a restraining order. A court set clear boundaries. Law enforcement was involved at multiple stages. And someone still walked up to Buckingham and doused him with an unknown substance in broad daylight.
This is the reality that restraining orders, by their nature, cannot fully solve. They are pieces of paper that rely on compliance from people who have already demonstrated they will not comply. Courts issue them. Judges sign them. And the person on the receiving end is left hoping the document carries more weight than obsession.
Celebrity stalking cases get attention. Buckingham does because of his stature as one of rock's most recognizable guitarists, the man who joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975 and enlisted his then-lover Stevie Nicks to the band, helping propel them into one of the best-selling acts in music history. But the dynamic he describes, escalating contact, false claims of kinship, threats against family members, weaponized emergency calls, plays out in courtrooms across the country for people who will never make a headline.
Law enforcement sources say an arrest is expected soon. That would be welcome, and overdue if the suspect turns out to be someone already bound by a court order to stay away.
Buckingham, born in California's Bay Area in 1949, has navigated a career defined by turbulence: his split with Nicks in 1976, his departure from Fleetwood Mac in 1987, his return a decade later, and his firing in 2018. He has survived all of it. He survived Wednesday, too, physically unharmed.
But no one should have to survive an appointment in Santa Monica.
A former Florida middle school teacher stands accused of one of the more calculated predatory schemes in recent memory: dating a student's mother for the sole purpose of gaining access to her 13-year-old daughter.
Daniel Le Lievre, 41, was arrested Monday at his home on multiple charges, including custodial sexual battery and sex offense by an authority figure soliciting a romantic relationship with a student. He is being held without bond.
Police say Le Lievre, who taught at Tuskawilla Middle School in Oviedo, Florida, groomed the teenager for months while carrying on a romantic relationship with her mother. He allegedly had sex with the student during the 2023-2024 holiday break at his home while she was 13 years old.
The timeline police have assembled paints a picture of deliberate, methodical predation.
Le Lievre began dating the victim's mother in October 2023. The relationship gave him proximity to the child, which, according to the allegations, was the entire point. During the holiday break, the student told police she went to the bathroom in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve and was followed by Le Lievre. He allegedly told her to strip her clothes and had sex with her, then told her not to tell anyone.
By January 2024, Le Lievre and the mother split up. That's when he allegedly told her he had only dated her to "get closer" to her daughter.
Let that sink in. A man entrusted with the education of children allegedly weaponized a romantic relationship with a mother as nothing more than a delivery mechanism for sexual abuse.
The alleged abuse didn't begin and end in his home. According to the complaint, Le Lievre ran what amounted to a grooming operation inside his own classroom. The details are specific and damning:
Every item on that list is an act of premeditation. This was not a lapse in judgment. It was a campaign.
Here is where the institutional failure compounds the horror. Seminole County Public Schools investigated Le Lievre in 2024 for violating policies related to "student abuse, abandonment, and neglect" and his relationship with students. The school district apparently found enough to act: Le Lievre resigned before he could be fired and was flagged as ineligible for rehire.
But the criminal system didn't catch up until much later. The mother and daughter didn't report the sexual assault to police until February 2026, more than two years after the alleged abuse took place. His arrest followed.
The school district released a statement after the arrest:
"The safety of our students and staff is our highest priority, and any type of behavior that undermines that safety will not be tolerated at Seminole County Public Schools."
That language is boilerplate, and it raises an obvious question. If the district investigated Le Lievre in 2024 for policy violations involving students, what was communicated to law enforcement at that time? A man who grooms a child inside a public school building, who rearranges class schedules to maintain access, and who hides a student's personal belongings in his desk should warrant an investigation and a forced resignation. The gap between that moment and the criminal arrest is where accountability needs to be examined.
Le Lievre has two daughters of his own. He previously served in the Peace Corps and taught overseas in Samoa and South Korea before returning to South Florida to raise his family. His biography reads like the résumé of a community pillar: service abroad, public education at home, raising kids.
None of that insulated a 13-year-old girl from what police describe as a sophisticated, premeditated assault on her childhood. It rarely does. The most dangerous predators are often the ones who look least like what people expect. That's what makes them effective.
Conservatives have long argued that the public school system has a transparency problem when it comes to protecting children. Too often, problem employees are allowed to resign quietly, their records sanitized by bureaucratic process, their misconduct sealed behind HR walls. The phrase "resigned before he could be fired" has become a recurring feature in these cases for a reason. It is the system's preferred off-ramp: clean enough for the district, quiet enough for the union, and catastrophic for the next child who crosses paths with the same adult.
Parents send their children to school and trust that the adults in those buildings have been vetted, monitored, and held to account. When a teacher can groom a student inside his own classroom, complete with secret codes and hidden personal items, the institution has failed at its most basic function. Not its educational function. It's a custodial one.
Le Lievre is behind bars without bond. The charges are serious, and the facts alleged are specific enough that a jury will eventually weigh them. But the criminal case is only half the story. The other half is how a school system can investigate a teacher for conduct involving students, watch him walk out the door, and leave it at that.
A girl was 13. The man in charge of her classroom allegedly turned Christmas Eve into a crime scene. The system that was supposed to stand between them didn't hold.
Francis J. Kearse III, a 43-year-old emergency medicine specialist in Ohio, was found dead from a suspected self-inflicted gunshot wound just before 6 p.m. on March 27 in the 5400 block of Howe Road in Trenton, a rural city halfway between Dayton and Cincinnati. He was due in court for his arraignment in Hamilton County on Tuesday.
He never made it. The charges he was facing tell you why.
The doctor had been indicted by a grand jury on charges including compelling prostitution, compelling prostitution involving a minor, trafficking in persons, and importuning. The accusations centered on his alleged exploitation of a 16-year-old girl, whom he reportedly paid with two vape pens and $15 in exchange for sex.
According to the investigation reported by the New York Post, Kearse used Snapchat to talk to young girls, marketing himself as a "sugar daddy." He sent gift cards to at least one 16-year-old before urging "some kinda payback," leading to the two meeting up in October in what officials called "sexual activity for hire."
Let that sit for a moment. A licensed physician, entrusted with emergency medical care, allegedly spent his off-hours trolling social media for minors. The currency of the transaction tells its own story. Vape pens. Fifteen dollars. Gift cards. This wasn't some ambiguous situation. It was a grown man leveraging the most trivial goods imaginable to exploit a child.
The age of consent in Ohio is 16, but the charges Kearse faced went well beyond the question of statutory age. Compelling prostitution, trafficking in persons: these are among the most serious offenses in Ohio's criminal code, and they exist precisely because the law recognizes that exchanging money or goods for sex with a minor is predatory regardless of consent thresholds.
Kearse was arrested on March 11 but released on his own recognizance bond. He was ordered to stay off social media as part of his bond conditions, and he remained free up to his death.
A man indicted on human trafficking and prostitution charges involving a minor walked out of custody without posting a dime. Hamilton County Common Pleas Court Judge Christopher McDowell, upon learning of the cashless bond, ordered Kearse to be re-arrested. By then, it was too late.
McDowell addressed the court Tuesday morning after Kearse's death was announced:
"(He) escaped justice the hard way."
That is one way to describe it. Another is that the system gave a man accused of trafficking a teenager every opportunity to avoid accountability, and he took the most permanent one available.
The decision to release Kearse on his own recognizance deserves real scrutiny. This was not a low-level offense. The charges included trafficking in persons. The victim was a child. And the mechanism of the alleged crime, social media, meant the defendant's access to future victims was as close as his phone.
Ordering him off social media while releasing him without bail is the judicial equivalent of telling a bank robber to please avoid banks. The restriction only works if someone enforces it, and between March 11 and March 27, no one did in any way that mattered.
Butler County Prosecutor Mike Gmoser confirmed the timeline was razor-thin:
"We had just received the investigation from law enforcement to proceed and were almost immediately notified of the death."
Kearse was also facing charges in Butler County at the time of his death, meaning multiple jurisdictions were closing in simultaneously. The walls were coming in. He chose not to face them.
There is no satisfying ending here. The victim, a 16-year-old girl whose name has been kept out of public reporting, will never see her alleged abuser answer for what he did. There will be no trial, no verdict, no sentence. Whatever closure the legal process might have offered has been erased.
That absence matters. It matters for the victim. It matters for any other girls Kearse may have contacted through Snapchat whose stories haven't surfaced yet. And it matters for a justice system that, at the critical moment, chose leniency for a man accused of buying a child's body for the price of a gas station transaction.
Judges across the country continue to treat bond decisions as administrative formalities rather than public safety determinations. The default posture of release, even for defendants facing trafficking charges, reflects a system more concerned with appearing fair to the accused than with protecting the people they are accused of harming.
Francis Kearse is beyond the reach of any courtroom now. The question worth asking isn't about him anymore. It's about the next defendant facing charges this serious who walks out on a handshake. And whether anyone will fix the gap before it costs someone else.