Category: Politics

(WASHINGTON) — Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency group has made swift work of the billionaire’s goal to scale back or dismantle much of the federal government, end diversity policies and otherwise further President Donald Trump’s agenda.

DOGE employees, many of whom have no government experience, have been going through data systems, shutting down DEI programs and in some cases, whole agencies.

The White House and Republicans have claimed, without citing details, that DOGE is accountable to the president and will be kept away from conflicts of interest. Musk, though, according to lawmakers and attorneys representing federal workers, has violated laws, union agreements and civil service protections.

Trump has repeatedly backed Musk.

“Elon is doing a great job, he’s finding tremendous fraud and corruption and waste,” he told reporters Friday.

One DOGE member, Marko Elez, resigned on Feb. 6 amid reports linking him to an account that allegedly posted racist comments.

The next day Musk sent a poll to his X followers asking if the employee should be reinstated and later claimed he would return but did not provide further details. Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance also attacked the female Wall Street Journal reporter who discovered the posts.

Congressional Democrats have staged protests outside affected agencies, tried to enter them but were prevented from doing so by DOGE and Trump officials, and attempted to issue a congressional subpoena for Musk but were blocked by Republicans.

At the same time, opponents have had success fighting Musk’s and DOGE’s moves in the courts, with judges stopping some of DOGE’s orders.

Here is some of what’s known about the DOGE efforts since Trump was sworn in, although there has been little transparency about Musk’s efforts.

Federal government wide

On Jan. 8, the administration sent out buyout offers to over 2 million federal workers, including employees in the CIA.

On Feb. 5, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. temporarily blocked the offer and extended the deadline to Feb. 10 following lawsuit filed by federal workers’ unions.

NOAA

At least one member of DOGE entered the Department of Commerce — the agency that houses NOAA, the federal agency responsible for forecasting the weather, researching and analyzing climate and weather data and monitoring and tracking extreme weather events like hurricanes. That person was granted access to NOAA’s IT systems, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said on Feb. 5.

DOGE members accessed computer systems to search for staff and data related to diversity programs.

USAID

Musk announced on Feb. 2 that he was going to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is responsible for humanitarian efforts around the globe.

The agency’s website was shut down prior to his announcement, leaving many aid groups and American aid workers abroad in the dark about their programs and future.

A lawsuit was filed on Feb. 6 to prevent the move a day before USAID workers were forced to face being forced from their jobs. A day later Judge Carl J. Nichols, a Trump-nominated federal judge, said announced a temporary restraining order that prevents Trump and the DOGE from placing 2,200 employees on administrative leave.

FAA

The Department of Transportation and Musk announced on Feb. 5 that he had access to Federal Aviation Administration technologies to make “rapid safety upgrades,” the billionaire said on X.

Treasury

The Treasury Department gave Musk and DOGE access to the vast federal payment system responsible for handling trillions of dollars in government expenditures.

However, after three federal unions filed a lawsuit against the move, a federal judge ordered on Feb. 5 that read-only data be given to two DOGE employees.

One of those employees was Elez, who resigned from his post a day later.

On Feb. 8, a New York federal judge granted the states suing over DOGE a temporary restraining order that blocked DOGE from accessing taxpayer records, including the Social Security numbers and bank account information of millions of Americans.

Department of Education

DOGE gained access to the Department of Education, which Trump has vowed to dismantle despite such an action needing congressional approval, according to Democratic leaders.

Senate Democrats said Friday they launched an investigation into reports that DOGE gained access to federal student loan data.

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(WASHINGTON) — Environmental nonprofits are gearing up to challenge some of the actions President Donald Trump has issued since taking office.

There is litigation coming for the majority of the executive orders Trump has signed so far that affect the environment, conservation and decarbonizing the economy, several nonprofits told ABC News.

Environmental lawyers are also on standby for any directives issued in the future that could violate existing environmental laws, according to several sources familiar with the lawsuits already being prepared against the Trump administration.

The White House did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.

How environmental groups are responding to Trump’s executive orders

Trump began his second term as president by signing a slew of executive actions, including an order that attempts to revoke action taken by President Joe Biden in the last weeks of his term to ban all future offshore oil and natural gas drilling on America’s East and West coasts, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s North Bering Sea.

While Trump immediately vowed to reverse the ban when it was signed on Jan. 6, that could prove difficult. The law Biden invoked, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, was written so a presidential action under its authority is permanent — providing legal precedent to ensure it stands, several environmental lawyers told ABC News, describing Trump’s move as illegal.

“We’ll see them in court at some point,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “I think we will prevail on this.”

Trump’s vow to revoke the ban is an attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to increase fossil fuel production, Sam Sankar, senior vice president at Earthjustice, the nation’s largest public interest environmental law firm, told ABC News.

In doing so, he is ignoring a large swath of U.S. coastline communities who would prefer for drilling to decrease, said Joanne Spalding, director of the environmental law program at the Sierra Club.

“People in Florida don’t want drilling. People in California don’t want drilling,” Spalding told ABC News. “There’s lots of places where people are not interested in having that activity on their coastlines.”

Existing environmental laws could also serve as roadblocks as Trump aims to increase the amount of federal land that will be subject to drilling, the experts said.

Separately, groups criticized Trump’s planned 10-to-1 deregulatory freeze, which would require the federal government to repeal 10 existing rules, regulations or guidance documents in order to adopt a new one, as “completely arbitrary,” Spalding said.

That order is “almost verbatim” to a two-for-one deregulatory freeze issued in 2017 that “never amounted to anything,” Hartl said.

“A lot of what we’ve seen, even in the first two weeks, have been almost just copy-and-paste activities from executive orders that we saw in the first Trump administration,” he said.

What worries conservation nonprofits the most

The potential dismantling of several federal agencies that conduct important work for conservation is a concern for environmental groups.

The Office of Management and Budget Office’s move to suspend federal financial aid programs could be a warning sign for federal agencies that conduct environmental work that does not align with Trump’s agenda, Hartl said.

“Right now, the biggest threat to the environment is Trump’s across-the-board attempt to simply dismantle the federal government,” he said.

In addition, the presence of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and DOGE head Elon Musk’s buyout offer to millions of federal employees could severely disrupt the conservation work of several agencies, he added.

“If you don’t have people working at the EPA, it’s pretty hard to keep the air clean, the water clean,” Hartl said. “If you don’t have folks working at the National Park Service, how are you going to run your national parks? How are you going to protect endangered wildlife?”

In addition, the potential defunding of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Act — both by enacted by Biden — poses serious setbacks for decarbonizing the country’s economy and moving toward a net-zero economy by 2050, environmental advocates said. Both are “the most important pieces of legislation ever in addressing global climate change,” Spalding said.

As part of his executive actions, Trump temporarily suspended the disbursement of funds from the IRA. Sankar said that has worried NGOs because the money is intended to advance the development of a clean energy economy as well as improve public health and support communities that bore the brunt of the impact of the fossil fuel economy.

“We are looking at and developing lawsuits aimed at ensuring that the money flows to the intended recipients,” he said.

Several lawsuits challenging the authority of DOGE are also being prepared, according to the groups.

Lessons learned from the 1st Trump administration

Many of Trump’s declarations are relatively symbolic or declare an intention but don’t necessarily constitute any actual action, environmental law experts said.

“Trump likes just holding up his signature, and that’s the main reason we we see him doing these flurry of executive orders,” Hartl said, adding that a lot of Trump’s actions were not effective during the first term.

Along with the executive orders comes rumor and speculation about what they actually can achieve, which makes it difficult for nonprofits to take immediate action, Sankar said.

Because of this, environmental groups may be more selective this time around about which executive actions they actually decide to take to court — especially since nonprofits don’t have endless resources to challenge every order, Spalding said.

“We’re always very choosy about our litigation to make sure that we have the best claims with the clients who are most clearly affected,” Sankar said.

This time around, environmental lawyers will be more savvy about responses, Spalding said.

“We’ll continue to focus on those priorities and make sure that we’re engaged every step of the way during the regulatory rollback process,” she said.

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(WASHINGTON) — Seven people have filed a federal lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that the U.S. government would only recognize a person’s sex assigned at birth on government-issued documents.

The complaint, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, accuses the State Department of rejecting some applications from transgender citizens or issuing documents with their sex assigned at birth. The lawsuit also accused the department of holding some passports and other documents submitted by transgender and nonbinary people.

“I’ve lived virtually my entire adult life as a man. Everyone in my personal and professional life knows me as a man, and any stranger on the street who encountered me would view me as a man,” said Massachusetts resident and plaintiff Reid Solomon-Lane in a statement provided by the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit.

“I thought that 18 years after transitioning, I would be able to live my life in safety and ease,” Solomon-Lane added. “Now, as a married father of three, Trump’s executive order and the ensuing passport policy have threatened that life of safety and ease. If my passport were to reflect a sex designation that is inconsistent with who I am, I would be forcibly outed every time I used my passport for travel or identification, causing potential risk to my safety and my family’s safety.”

The lawsuit lists seven plaintiffs. In a news release, the ACLU said more than 1,500 transgender people or their family members have contacted the organization concerned about not being able to get passports that reflect their identity

ABC News has reached out to the State Department for comment on the lawsuit.

Trump’s executive order, signed his first day in office, legally declared that there are only “two sexes, male and female” and defined a “female” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” The order defined “male” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

The executive order stated: “Invalidating the true and biological category of ‘woman’ improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept.”

The move was criticized by some medical and legal advocates, who argued the executive order rejected the reality of sexual and gender diversity.

In 2021, the State Department relaxed its rules, allowing applicants to self-identify as either “M” or “F” without needing medical certification or additional documentation to do so. Shortly after, the agency began issuing “X” gender markers for intersex or nonbinary residents.

In states across the country, some residents are allowed to self-select or change the gender or sex on their birth certificates and driver’s licenses.

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(WASHINGTON) — Current and former U.S. Agency for International Development officials, speaking anonymously due to fear of retribution, blasted the Trump administration’s gutting of the aid agency, saying it has left critical partners in the lurch and much of its staff in limbo overseas.

In addition to the humanitarian work that has halted, scores of career USAID workers living abroad are also seeing their lives turned upside down. Several officials were very emotional describing their current situations and uncertainty.

All USAID humanitarian work around the world has effectively stopped, these current and former officials said, despite the State Department saying there are waivers for lifesaving programs.

“Right now, there is no USAID humanitarian assistance happening,” a current USAID official in the humanitarian division said. “There are waivers put in place by Secretary Rubio for emergency food assistance and a number of other sectors, but they are a fraud and a sham and intended to give the illusion of continuity, which is untrue.

The official also slammed the waiver as unclear and largely unactionable because staff has been furloughed, as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency seized control of the agency.

“There is no staff left anymore to actually process waiver requests or to move money or to make awards or to do anything,” that official added. “We’ve ceased to exist.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday pushed back on nongovernmental organizations saying aid programs remained paused despite the waiver.

“I issued a blanket waiver that said if this is lifesaving programs, OK — if it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” he said. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.

“And I would say if some organization is receiving funds from the United States and does not know how to apply a waiver, then I have real questions about the competence of that organization, or I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point,” Rubio added.

But the above USAID official pushed back, saying those sectors are “actually unable to access their lines of credit here in Washington, D.C., for money already obligated to, already contractually put forward by the U.S. government.”

“And this is meaning [a] lack of provision of assistance,” the official continued. “This is meaning staff layoffs, meaning absolute confusion and mayhem. Some may have some money to keep going for a little bit, but not for long.”

Another former official who spoke with numerous USAID humanitarian partner organizations said, “Not one has received any funding since the stop-work order to continue work, even if theoretically that work is allowed to continue.”

One current USAID official based in Asia is pregnant.

She broke down in tears on the call, explaining how she doesn’t know what is going to happen to her family, worried that the administration is going to “abandon” her overseas or back in the U.S.

“I am among more than a dozen American families that are either on or planning obstetric medevac to deliver our babies. We have a nursery painted with a crib ready for our baby that has taken us three years of fertility treatments to conceive,” the official based in Asia said, her voice cracking with emotion. “Instead of nesting and planning for their arrival, we are unsure if Secretary Rubio and President Trump are going to abandon us overseas or abandon us when we land on American soil. We have been told there is no money to assist USAID families that are awaiting the arrival of our infants with resettlement in the U.S.”

“We have been using refugee resources from our churches and community groups that we usually use to help refugees from places like Syria and Afghanistan,” the official added. “We are using these resources to figure out how to land as close to on our feet as possible. Unless the tide of public opinion shifts, each of these families are going to arrive homeless, jobless and insurance-less within a matter of days, or possibly even hours, of stepping foot on American soil.”

The spouse of a current official in the Latin America region said their family does not have a home to return to in the U.S.

“My spouse has served in a war zone. We have school-aged children with typical challenges you would face in the U.S., but with not the resources you would have in the U.S., that we’ve had to manage, and we’ve been willing to move wherever is best for the agency,” this official explained.

“We worked across administrations with programs changing, growing, shrinking, and it’s a circumstance right now where we literally have focused our life on this USAID mission, and we do not have a home to go back to, which is quite typical of Foreign Service families, and we don’t know how we’re supposed to pick up and just leave,” the official added.

“How do you leave when you have not just family, not just school-age kids — you have pets, you have things, you don’t have a home to go back to, and you have a mission that you believe in and that you’ve supported for decades?” the official said. “And it’s just the rug pulled under you.”

Rubio said this week it is “not our intention” to uproot USAID families abroad despite the agency issuing a 30-day mandate for their return.

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(WASHINGTON) — As President Donald Trump works at a breakneck speed to implement his second-term agenda , including wholesale firings and sweeping policy changes, he and his advisers assert his power over the executive branch is complete and can’t be questioned.

Still, his flurry of executive actions and orders spark a critical question: Does he have the power he claims to have?

Multiple court challenges are underway trying to stop his attempts to end birthright citizenship and temporarily freeze federal loans and grants.

More legal pushback will unfold amid Trump’s unprecedented purge of the executive workforce and reshaping of what Congress set up as independent agencies, the dismantling of which is largely being carried out by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Trump quickly fired 17 independent watchdogs and the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Longtime Democratic Federal Election Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said Trump sent a letter removing her from the commission. His administration has directed all federal DEI staff be put on leave. The Justice Department fired more than a dozen of prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases. Millions of employees were offered buyouts, with tens of thousands of people accepting them.

His administration has touted the moves as long-overdue cutting of waste in favor of a merit-based system. His critics slam them as a radical restructuring of the federal government aimed at consolidating presidential power — and placing loyalty to Trump over regulatory agency expertise designed to be insulated from political influence.

The ‘unitary executive theory’

Driving Trump’s strategy is a legal framework championed by conservatives, perhaps most notably by Trump’s newly-confirmed director of White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025. (Democrats held an all-night protest of Vought’s nomination on the Senate floor Wednesday into Thursday, though his nomination was later approved by Republicans.)

The so-called “unitary executive theory” has various iterations but centers on the idea that the Constitution gives the president sole control over the executive branch of government.

Its advocates point to Article II, which reads in part: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

“I think that means he has the power to control subordinates throughout the executive branch, including in the independent agencies and how they exercise power. And as a corollary to that, he has the power to remove or fire subordinates in the executive branch,” said Steven Calabresi, a Northwestern University law professor and former Reagan administration official who co-authored a book on the unitary executive theory.

Trump in 2019 said: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Setting up Supreme Court test cases?

Some of Trump’s firings, especially those that seem to fly in the face of statutory protections for civil service workers from being removed without cause, are likely to result in lawsuits that put that theory in front of the courts.

“I think they are setting up test cases, and this Supreme Court is very likely to expand the theory and overrule other cases that are in tension with it,” said David Driesen, a law professor at Syracuse University.

In 2020, the Supreme Court found a provision from Congress limiting the president’s authority to remove the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau violated the Constitution — a departure from precedent. The Trump White House has pointed to that ruling as justification for some of its firings.

Trump pushing limits on executive authority

But some say Trump is leaning on the theory to go even further, blatantly trying to take over powers the Constitution gives to other branches of government, namely Congress, violating the separation of powers and the concept of checks and balances.

“This is where the debate is: at what point does the kind of power that Trump wants and the way he exercises his power cross over from a constitutional vision about presidential power to an a-constitutional vision,” said Bob Bauer, a law professor at New York University and former White House counsel under President Barack Obama.

“The unitary executive theory has a history that isn’t nearly, in my judgment, what is claimed for it and now put into effect by Trump and his allies,” Bauer added.

Trump has sought to sidestep Congress and take control of federal spending, trying to freeze money already appropriated by lawmakers. His OMB pick, Vought, told senators during his confirmation hearing that the Trump administration would seek to impound funds it believes are being misspent.

Even bolder, Trump’s pledging to dismantle entire agencies. Turmoil is roiling USAID as its being taken over by the State Department and its staff reduced from 14,000 people to fewer than 300 staff, sources said. Trump is expected to move soon on his proposal to cripple the Department of Education just short of eliminating it.

Many of this will play out in the courts in the months ahead. But experts said, in the meantime, harm will be immediate and possibly felt for years to come.

“He’s going to do an enormous amount of damage that the courts can’t in all cases readily remediate,” Bauer said. “By the time he’s finished emptying out some of these agencies and in some cases closing them, putting all that back together again is going to be very challenging.”

“It will take years to rebuild some of these institutions. So, Trump and his team will accomplish much of what they want before the courts can fully and effectively respond. He will have created new facts on the ground.”

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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba in a high-stakes visit for a key ally that depends on the United States for security and trade.

At the top of the agenda is military cooperation to deter threats, foreign investment in the U.S., opportunities to develop technology and American energy exports, according to senior Trump administration officials.

Japan’s prime minister will be looking to strike a personal connection with Trump and get reassurance that Trump won’t hit Japan with tariffs or abandon its security guarantees. Ishiba faces the challenge of navigating Trump’s long-held views that allies take advantage of the U.S. while not paying enough for the cost of American military assistance.

He will likely look to former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in 2022 after he left office. Abe used his personal relationship with Trump to push for Japanese interests and avoid a trade war during Trump’s first administration.

The senior administration officials hinted they’ll be looking for concessions and commitments from Japan in the form of investments in the U.S.

“We all know that Trump pays a lot of attention to deficits,” a senior administration official said. “We welcome Japanese investments in the United States, including in the U.S. manufacturing sector.”

“There will be a lot of discussion about that, as well as exports from the U.S., most likely in the energy sector,” the official added.

The CEO of SoftBank, one of Japan’s largest companies, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago during the transition period and recently came to the White House, promising to invest $100 billion in U.S. projects over the next four years, creating 100,000 jobs.

“The United States is proud of our long and close alliance with Japan, and it’s time for a new age of U.S.-Japan relations to bring peace and prosperity to the Indo-Pacific. Our two nations will continue to work together to ensure we deter threats in the region through our full range of military capabilities. Today, you should expect President Trump and Prime Minister Ishiba to discuss realistic training exercises and increase our cooperation on defense equipment and technology,” the senior administration official said.

“They will also discuss foreign investment into the United States to create high-quality American jobs. President Trump and the prime minister will also discuss ways to improve our cybersecurity capabilities, increase space cooperation and promote joint business opportunities to develop critical technologies like AI and semiconductors, and lastly, as President Trump aims to unleash American energy exports to the rest of the world,” the senior administration official added.

One senior official also noted the administration supports efforts to hold trilateral meetings with Japan and South Korea and that there will see continuity there.

When asked about whether Trump will ask Japan to raise its defense spending, an issue that Trump has raised with allies across the globe, the officials declined to “get ahead” of discussions.

But one official added, “There are negotiations that go on constantly, quite frankly, about the status of facilities and weapons and deployments and training areas, and so they’re always constantly being adjusted to ensure the strongest possible deployment of the alliance, you know, the capabilities between the two of us and the investment that both countries are making in our shared security.”

One senior administration official added that the visit will be a chance to “continue to develop the long-standing friendship and relationship between our two nations.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gifted President Donald Trump a golden pager during their meeting at the White House this week, Netanyahu’s office said.

Netanyahu’s office released a photo of the gift Thursday, which references Israel’s deadly explosive attacks in Lebanon and Syria in September that killed dozens of people and injured thousands more.

A plaque presented with the golden pager praised Trump as “our greatest friend and greatest ally.”

Netanyahu also gifted Trump a regular pager during the visit.

After receiving the gift, Trump replied, “that was a great operation,” an Israeli official told ABC News about the gift.

Amid the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria on Sept. 17.

The covert Israeli military operation killed at least 37 people in Lebanon, including at least 12 civilians, and wounded over 2,900 people, according to Lebanese authorities.

The civilian deaths included an 8-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy, according to Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad.

At least 14 were also injured in targeted attacks on Hezbollah members in Syria, according to the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression, which also targeted civilians and led to the deaths of a number of martyrs and the injury of a large number with various wounds,” Hezbollah said in a statement.

The United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon at the time called the operation an “extremely concerning escalation in what is an already unacceptably volatile context,” in a statement released by the U.N. Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary General.

In a release about the gift, Netanyahu’s office said the golden pager “symbolizes the Prime Minister’s decision that led to a turnaround in the war and the starting point for breaking the spirit” of Hezbollah.

“This strategic operation expresses the power, technological superiority and cunning of the State of Israel against its enemies,” the statement added.

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(WASHINGTON) — Lambda Legal and Human Rights Campaign, two leading LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday challenging the Trump administration over the president’s executive order banning transgender people from serving in the military.

The lawsuit, which was obtained by ABC News, was filed in the U.S. District Court-Western District of Washington on behalf of six active duty transgender service members, a transgender person seeking to enlist in the military, as well as Seattle human rights organization Gender Justice League.

“By categorically excluding transgender people, the 2025 Military Ban and related federal policy and directives violate the equal protection and due process guarantees of the Fifth Amendment and the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment,” the lawsuit said. “They lack any legitimate or rational justification, let alone the compelling and exceedingly persuasive ones required. Accordingly, Plaintiffs seek declaratory, and preliminary and permanent injunctive, relief.”

U.S. Navy Commander Emily “Hawking” Shilling, who according to the lawsuit has been serving in the military for 19 years, criticized the ban in a statement, saying that the measure is “not about readiness or cohesion, and it is certainly not about merit.”

“It is about exclusion and betrayal, purposely targeting those of us who volunteered to serve, simply for having the courage and integrity to live our truth,” Shilling said.

The lawsuit comes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 28, rescinding Biden administration policies that permitted transgender service members to serve openly in the military based on their gender identity.

The order directed the Department of Defense to revise the Pentagon’s policy on transgender service members and stated that “expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.”

The order further argued that receiving gender-affirming medical care is one of the conditions that is physically and mentally “incompatible with active duty.”

“Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” the order continued.

The executive order banning transgender service members in the military came one week after Trump signed a related order on Jan. 20, declaring that the U.S. government will only recognize a person’s gender assigned at birth.

“The assertion that transgender service members like myself are inherently untrustworthy or lack honor is an insult to all who have dedicated their lives to defending this country,” Shilling said in the statement.

Trump issued a similar order during his first term in office that was challenged in the courts and now HRC and Lambda Legal have joined other leading advocacy groups in challenging the order in the courts.

GLAD Law and The National Center for Lesbian Rights also filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on behalf of six transgender service members on Jan. 28.

ABC News has reached out to the Trump administration but a request for comment was not immediately returned.

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(WASHINGTON) — “Border czar” Tom Homan said President Donald Trump won’t hesitate to use the U.S. military if Mexican cartels target American troops on the southern border.

“I think the cartels would be foolish to take on the military, but we know they’ve taken on the Mexican military before, but now we have the United States military,” he told ABC News Live on Thursday.

“Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely, because the cartels are making record amounts of money,” Homan said, going on to say that they continue to secure the border, “We’re taking money out of their pocket.”

Homan said the troops “need to protect themselves” and that he would send a warning to the cartels if any U.S. soldiers are harmed: “The wrath of President Trump’s going to come down.”

“He has the ability to wipe them off the face of the Earth,” he said.

On his first day in office, Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border, allowing the Department of Defense to deploy armed forces to the region.

He also signed an executive order to designate drug cartels and other criminal organizations as foreign terrorist organizations or specifically designated global terrorists.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has also been conducting raids across the nation to round up undocumented migrants for deportation as part of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies.

The administration has said the first priority in these raids is to target violent criminals.

About three-quarters — 76% — of the 14,000 migrants who have been arrested so far are criminals, Homan told ABC News Live on Thursday.

“Where do the collaterals come? The collateral arrests happen when we’re looking for the bad guy and we find others with them,” he said.

Homan said he doesn’t have a daily quota on arrests of undocumented migrants, saying, “I want to arrest as many as we can arrest.”

“If you’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table, but you’re not going to be a priority,” he said.

Asked how the administration contends with deporting families back to dangerous countries, Homan responded, “What country is dangerous?”

Many migrants entering the U.S. come from countries such as Haiti and Venezuela, which have the strictest “do not travel” warnings from the State Department due to violence.

“People need to understand what is asylum. Asylum is, you’re escaping fear and persecution from your home government because of race, religion, political affiliation and participation in a specific social group,” he said.

Homan argued there are many “fraudulent” asylum claims that have overwhelmed the system and legitimate asylum-seekers are “sitting in the back seat.”

“What you don’t do to claim asylum is enter the country illegally,” he said. “You go to a port of entry.”

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(SEATTLE, Wash.) — A federal judge in Seattle has issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship — one day after a judge in Maryland also issued a temporary block on the order.

“It has become ever more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals,” Judge John Coughenour said.

“The constitution is not something with which the government may play policy games,” Coughenour added. “The preliminary injunction is granted on a nationwide basis.”

During the hearing, which lasted less than 20 minutes, an attorney representing the state attorneys general argued the preliminary injunction is necessary to protect the plaintiffs in the case.

“When we ratified the 14th Amendment, we rendered a collective judgment and a promise that would guide our nation into the future,” the attorney for the state attorneys general said. “It was a promise that citizenship at birth is beyond the power of the government to take away or destroy. The president and the executive branch cannot alone undo that judgment or that promise.”

Drew Ensign, an attorney for the Department of Justice, called the interpretation of the citizenship clause by the plaintiff “demonstrably and unequivocally incorrect” and argued the citizenship clause applies only “to those in the allegiance and under the protection of the country.” The DOJ has argued that a child born in the United States to a mother without legal status cannot receive citizenship unless his or her father is a citizen or green card holder.

When giving his ruling, Coughenour called birthright citizenship “a fundamental constitutional right.”

“There are moments in the world’s history when people look back and ask, ‘Where were the lawyers, where were the judges?'” Coughenour said. “In these moments, the rule of law becomes especially vulnerable. I refuse to let that beacon go dark today.”

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