Inside the ACLU’s race to stop Venezuelans’ deportation to Salvadoran prison
ABC News
The American Civil Liberties Union’s lead attorney described to ABC News the rapid pace of legal action that led to the extraordinary ruling from the Supreme Court early Saturday morning that blocks the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador.
Lee Gelernt said the ACLU began to learn Thursday night that the migrants could be moved from a detention center in Texas as early as that night, so they filed in the middle of the night.
“We just kept pushing and ended up filing in multiple courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court, at 1 a.m. on Friday night, early Saturday morning, stopped the removals,” Gelernt said in an interview with ABC News. “But it was touch and go for a long time.”
The ACLU says migrants held in the Texas detention center received a notice and were told they’d be removed in 12 to 24 hours.
“Under the Alien Enemies Act, you have been determined to be an alien enemy subject to apprehension, restraint and removal from the United States,” the notice reads, which was filed in court by the ACLU.
The document is written in English and says migrants can make a phone call, although it does say the notice will be read to the individual in a language they understand. It did not include any method to contest the order.
“The government is providing only 12 to 24 hours with a notice that was served in English that does not explain that people have the right to contest, nor tell them how to do it or how much time they have to do it,” Gelernt said. “There is no argument whatsoever that these notice procedures comply with the Supreme Court’s directive.”
The girlfriend of one of the migrants held in the detention center told ABC News he received a document that appeared to be the same one that the ACLU filed in court. She says he told her it was hard to understand.
She added that he said he and a group of detainees were taken to an airport near the facility on Friday and they were about to be deported. Then, he told her, once they arrived, an officer informed the group they were being sent back to the center and would not board the plane.
Gelernt said the stakes couldn’t be any higher and that Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the Salvadoran native living Maryland who was deported in March to a mega-prison in his home country — isn’t the only person who was “erroneously” sent to the notorious CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador.
“They’re unilaterally claiming that people are members of a gang, but not giving them the opportunity to go into court and show they’re not. And we know that multiple, multiple people have been erroneously tagged as members of this gang, but once they get to the El Salvadoran prison, they may never get out for the rest of their life,” Gelernt said.
“It’s critical that we give them hearings before we take such an extraordinary action,” he added.
(WASHINGTON) — Pentagon investigators are looking into whether Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth personally wrote the text messages detailing the military’s plans to strike Houthi targets in Yemen or whether other staffers typed out those details, according to two people familiar with the ongoing probe.
The Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General has spent several weeks interviewing Hegseth’s current and former staff members to figure out how United States strike details taken from a classified system wound up in a commercial messaging app known as Signal.
“Because this is one of the DOD IG’s ongoing projects, in accordance with our policy we do not provide the scope or details to protect the integrity of the process and avoid compromising the evaluation,” DOD IG spokesperson Mollie Halperin told ABC News.
The details were relayed in two chat groups that included Hegseth – one with Vice President JD Vance and other high-ranking officials, and a second one that included Hegseth’s wife, who is not employed by the government.
It remains unclear how soon the findings will be released. Hegseth is scheduled to testify for the first time as defense secretary on Tuesday, where Democratic lawmakers are expected to question his handling of classified and sensitive information.
The sharing of the details reportedly occurred around the same time in mid-March when key members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including Hegseth, inadvertently shared details about the March 15 missile strike in Yemen with the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
Much of the same content was shared in the second encrypted chat with family members and others — a chat group that Hegseth had created on his personal phone during his confirmation process that included his wife, Jennifer Hegseth, the two officials told ABC News.
In addition to looking at whether the information was classified and who wrote it, investigators are also asking whether any staff members were asked by Hegseth or others to delete messages, according to one person familiar with the IG probe.
The government is required under law to retain federal communications as official records.
(WASHINGTON) — Employees at the Department of Health and Human Services began to receive notices of mass layoffs on Tuesday, days after HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that 10,000 people would lose their jobs, including employees working on tobacco use, mental health and workplace safety.
The layoffs are expected to impact 3,500 employees at the Food and Drug Administration and 2,400 employees from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — nearly one-fifth of the workforce at both public health divisions, which fall under HHS.
In total, and including roughly 10,000 people who have left over the last few months through early retirement or deferred resignation programs, the overall staff at HHS will fall from 82,000 to around 62,000 — or about a fourth of its workforce.
The sweeping changes drew criticism from Robert Califf, who served two stints as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
“The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed,” Califf wrote on LinkedIn on Tuesday.
“I believe that history will see this as a huge mistake,” he added. “I will be glad if I’m proven wrong, but even then there is no good reason to treat people this way.”
The layoffs also prompted a bipartisan request from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions for Kennedy to testify about the changes at a hearing next week, titled “An Update on the Restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services.”
Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the committee chairman, and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a ranking member, penned a letter to Kennedy on Tuesday as thousands of HHS workers were learning they had lost their jobs.
“We are following up on the commitment you made during the confirmation process that as Secretary you would come before the HELP Committee on a quarterly basis, upon request of the Chair,” Cassidy and Sanders wrote.
Cassidy, a physician who voiced grave concerns with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine rhetoric during his confirmation hearings, was a key vote in advancing Kennedy’s nomination to the Senate floor earlier this year — but did so on the condition that Kennedy would not make major changes to certain policies and would consult Cassidy regularly on his decisions.
As news of the cuts spread, employees stood in long lines outside of their offices in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Georgia, some waiting for hours as security determined whether they could be let in the building or not. In some cases, employees were turned around after being informed that they no longer had a job.
Kevin Caron, a health scientist within the Office on Smoking and Health at the CDC, said the majority of the office was laid off on Tuesday, including his own role in the branch that focused on epidemiology.
The timing is particularly stressful, he said, because his wife is 38 weeks pregnant with the couple’s first child — a girl — and he’ll no longer be able to take the 12 weeks of paternity leave he was approved to take beginning in April.
“It’s absolutely a loss in security, financial security, the ability to be around and be a parent, because I need to look for another job,” Caron said.
The Office on Smoking and Health is described on CDC’s website as “the lead federal agency for comprehensive tobacco prevention and control.” The office distributes money to every U.S. state to prevent and reduce smoking, vaping and using nicotine products, especially among young people.
The office sits within the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the CDC, which has been hard hit by layoffs at other divisions, too, multiple officials tell ABC News — a surprise to many, given Kennedy’s commitment to ending chronic disease.
“Tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. It’s a serious producer of chronic disease. And so I’m kind of shocked that even though that’s a stated priority, that they would get rid of that kind of work,” Caron said.
At the FDA, tobacco work was also heavily impacted — including the firing of top tobacco regulator Brian King, who had worked to decrease the rates of e-cigarette use by teens.
The impact on tobacco across HHS comes after President Donald Trump as a candidate pledged to “save vaping” and reverse efforts to ban it.
Mitch Zeller, King’s predecessor at the Center for Tobacco Products, told ABC News he learned of King’s exit via conversations with people within the FDA. Zeller said that King was given the option to relocate to a remote western office of the Indian Health Service.
Zeller said that two key offices in the center were “completely rift.”
“If you kneecap the operational function of the center as well as the ability of the center to do forward-looking policy, you’ve really just eviscerated the center and its ability to fulfill its public health mission,” he said.
King did not respond to a request for comment.
Jeff Nesbit, a former FDA official who was instrumental in the FDA’s efforts to begin regulating tobacco, said the cuts will “substantially help the tobacco companies maintain the status quo.”
“These staff cuts to FDA’s tobacco center will allow the industry to continue to sell deadly burned cigarettes for many more years than they would have otherwise; while continuing to talk in vague, general terms about whether vaping and e-cigarettes might some day replace burned cigarettes,” said Nesbit, who was also a senior HHS official under former President Joe Biden.
At the agency that focuses on drug use and mental health, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), an entire team overseeing a nationwide survey that has been in use since 1971 was cut, Jennifer Hoenig, director of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, wrote on LinkedIn.
“We are the only national survey focusing specifically on drug use and mental health,” Hoenig wrote.
The office was also working on research about illegally made fentanyl and mental health treatment access, she said.
“I don’t know who will continue on with this work, or if it will,” she said, because so many staff across SAMHSA had been let go.
At a federal office that researches workplace safety, including for firefighters, mine workers, retail workers, truck drivers and factory workers, roughly 90% of the workforce was expected to be laid off, the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health said on a call with leadership on Monday, a source familiar with the situation said.
NIOSH’s research investigates and researches workplace issues that inform the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, an agency under the Department of Labor that enforces workplace safety and health.
“It does look like the majority or much of the agency is going to be wiped out,” said David Michaels, who led OSHA from 2009 to 2017 and is a professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. Michaels said he’d been speaking with many employees at both NIOSH and OSHA.
“It makes OSHA’s job tremendously more difficult if the research of NIOSH disappears,” Michaels said. “There’ll be fewer and less protective standards coming out of OSHA.”
(WASHINGTON) — Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Save Our Schools campaign is launching a comprehensive investigation into the Trump administration’s effort to close the Department of Education.
“I’m opening this investigation to hear directly from students, parents, teachers, and borrowers who are being hurt by Trump’s dangerous agenda,” Warren wrote in a statement obtained first by ABC News.
“Their stories matter — and they are why I’m in this fight,” she said.
Warren said since Trump’s move to effectively abolish the agency, Americans have told her how public education has shaped and strengthened their lives. She sent a letter to a dozen education and civil rights groups, seeking answers to how abolishing the department will impact millions of students and families.
The letters went out to the NAACP, NEA, AFT and several other groups. In them, Warren called Trump’s plan to close the department and ostensibly return education power and decision to the states a “reckless crusade.”
“I request your assistance in understanding whether the Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department will jeopardize students’ access to affordable, accessible, and high-quality public education,” Warren wrote in the series of letters.
Warren asks for details on how students and families will be affected by any cuts to funding or services if the Education Department is abolished or its functions are transferred to other federal agencies. The groups have until May 22 to respond.
The Massachusetts Democrat and former public school teacher outlines what she calls the Education Department’s key functions in each letter, including protecting the civil rights of students, providing funding for students with disabilities, funding research that helps educators and students, and distributing federal financial aid for students to attain higher education.
“School districts are already preparing for potential funding delays or cuts caused by the dismantling of the Department, with states sounding the alarm about the impact of these funding disruptions on programs like free school lunches for low-income students,” Warren wrote.
But Education Secretary Linda McMahon previously told ABC News “none of the funding will stop” for mandatory programs, arguing that more funding could go to the states if the department is eliminated. It would also take 60 “yes” votes in the Senate to overcome a Democratic filibuster and completely dismantle the agency Congress created.
National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues decried the president and McMahon’s mission to shutter the agency, calling it a “constitutional crisis on almost every front.”
NAACP President Derrick Johnson said the administration is “deliberately dismantling the basic functions of our democracy, one piece at a time.”
Warren’s comprehensive investigation also comes on the heels of roughly 2,000 employees at the education department officially being separated from the agency. The Education Department was slashed nearly in half, including hundreds of Federal Student Aid (FSA) employees whose jobs Warren stressed are critically important to students in need. In addition, Warren said downsizing the agency will have “dire consequences” for the country’s more than 40 million student loan borrowers.
Launched in April, her Save Our Schools campaign vowed to fight back against the administration’s executive order entitled improving education outcomes by empowering parents, states and communities.
Through a combination of federal investigations, oversight, storytelling, and lawsuits, Warren said she will work with the community, including lawmakers in Congress, to do everything she possibly can to defend public education.
“The federal government has invested in our public schools,” Warren said in an exclusive interview with ABC News.
“Taking that away from our kids so that a handful of billionaires can be even richer is just plain ugly and I will fight it with everything I’ve got.”
